The Most Important Thing in Offline Marketing

I hear people talk back and forth about the most important thing in offline marketing. Some people say it is leads. Other say it is your sales presentation, and yet others say it's your product or service. I think they are ALL wrong!

In my opinion, the most important thing is trust. Let's face it, if an offline business owner doesn't trust you, he won't believe your promises to deliver and all the leads, the best sales pitch and the best product and/or service offering in the world won't convince him to buy from you.

So how do you get the business owner to trust you? You start buy building rapport and through this you build a relationship. I've always had success in giving the business owner something easy and fast for me to do for free. Hey, it might be fast and easy for me, but to most offline business owners, they don't have a clue on how to do it themselves.

An example is QR codes. They're popping up everywhere and trust me, business owners see them. How easy would it by for you to get your targeted business owner's company info from their website and create a free QR code for them? There are tons of free QR code creators on the Internet. You could create ths code, put it on a simple document with your contact information printed out (something like "Marketing Provided by "your company info here") and walk it in to the business owner. I did this with one of my favorite restaurants here in town and now they're an SEO client of mine.

It's not that hard to build up trust if you're willing to give something first. Giving something freely triggers feelings of reciprocity and it's amazing what you can accomplish when the business owner feel that you are looking out for them.