In part one we outlined the goal of building an online community. While it may be easy to understand that you need to be online (duh), it may not be so simple to know where to spend that time online. Not to mention how to integrate those online efforts into your offline efforts.
We are going to spend some time in this post explaining the details of the #gather, #warm and #close principles mentioned in part one. I learned these from Justin Lukasavige a good friend and mentor of mine over the past few years. He doesn?t do his online podcast anymore but all of his episodes are still available. I wanted to find a post from him that summed up the gather, warm, and close principles, but I couldn?t find one. Instead I found a post that I recommend you read, as it relates to this idea. You can find that here.
In the mean time let?s break down these marketing principles.
How to Find People For Your Community (Gather)
Gather is about going to where the people are and making them aware of what you are doing, and where they can find you. It?s a combination of engaging with and asking a large audience who is primarily focused on something else to notice what you are doing.
Strategies that include gather locations:
- Social Media
- Podcasting
- Interviews on other shows
- Local news appearances
- Conferences
- Workshops
- Print Material
- Directories
- Social Book Marketing
- Networking
The key is identifying what you think will work for you and begin. In the future we will talk about mining that data to see what is actually working. In the meantime our next step is to get them to do one of two things in order to keep them warm.
How To Deliver Value To You Customers Consistently (Warm)
Keeping your clients warm is a term for keeping you in the top of their mind. Most people spend money for things they want on their time schedule not yours. The key here is to keep engaged with them by providing high quality information via a platform that you own. And my suggestion to deliver that content is through a combination of ways. ?One example would be via email marketing and distributing to your contacts through a 3rd party software other than Gmail or Outlook.
Here are a few email services that deliver emails automatically:
- Aweber
- Active Campaign
- MailChimp
- Infusionsoft
There are many others to choose from but it depends on what you need and what you have for a budget.
Now earlier in the post I said that we need to get your clients to do two things.
- Visit Your Website
- Then fill out an email opt-in form on the site, or call a phone number (In which you will eventually collect an email address.)
So from the gather stage you will want to create a ?call to action?. A call to action is literally asking people to go somewhere or do something that you want them to do. In this case it would be visit the website, then their would be a well placed form with a call to action.
From here you would want to have a series of pre-written emails that keeps you top of mind. Make sure these emails are high enough quality to keep them reading.
At Some Point You Have to Make A Sale or An Offer (Close)
In any sales process (and this is a sales process), there needs to be a close. The close is where you sell a product, or create an event that will eventually lead to a sale.
We will cover this in more detail as time goes on, and I will even create tutorials on how to do this specifically for different industries.
Rinse and Repeat
Once you have a process down, you remain consistent and do it over and over. You look at the data, find out what?s working, and do more of what?s working.
Do you have questions? Are you curious how to make this work for your business? Let me know in the comments below. Also if you want to make sure to get these tutorials as they are made fill out the form below.
