Moving buyers up the

One way or another I think we all do that.

So you want to foster relationships and let them know you exist. Feed them a little, help them out a little, and when they want more, sell them your services. Like a drug dealer but in a good way.

You'd want to find out what they need, want and intentionally offer it to them instead of waiting to be asked.

In my offline biz - a recording studio - we do a lot of education and it quite often leads to sales.
We get feedback that the talks people had with us were much more informative than with other studios for instance. This can go a long way.

I am interested, how would you set about it? I thought about setting up a blog, but never seem to find the time. And a talk or email conversation seems more effective to me too.

My business has always been in the education and relationship building area because there is a long buying cycle for my clients.

My traditional business is custom picture framing and over the years I always ran training courses for do it yourself people and also training for people entering the industry.

This way my expert status was enhanced.

The perception from my competitors was I was undermining the industry by providing open and honest training.

The reality was my business soon became the place to go because everyone referred their friends and family and even the DIY crowd often started to become custom clients.

The other interesting thing was the number of large corporate contracts I picked up over the years by offering training.

One do it yourself was Singapore Airlines marketing manager in our region and surprise surprise they were big sponsors of art events - framing followed.

Another was head of art department of an aggressively growing private school. We soon were doing over 20K annually with the school as it grew. - That has continued over 16 years now.

The issue today is how to leverage the knowledge you have and also produce it into content that can be consumed either for free or as paid tutorials.

Here are two examples of how I used Youtube to produce content and create traffic to my businesses.

I couldn't really get any major traction with my business youtube channel although I still added content there.

Where I did get traction was I had trademarked a brand that I wanted to sell a service into the framing industry and so I started putting content on that brand's youtube channel.

Even though my focus was originally to send the traffic to my brand page what ended up happening was I started to get enquiries for training and then also from my local area for the services I was demonstrating on the channel.

It is easy to multi-purpose or re-purpose the video content into written content - Use REV for transcriptions - and add to web pages etc.

Examples of the type of content can be found on the channel here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/Endurart

One of my other businesses supplies a range of cardboard products and other materials and when I was kicking that one off I made a few tutorial videos just to showcase the product and what it could do.

I never expected the growth in viewership and the side benefits that spun off from a series of seven simple videos uploaded to youtube

One of those videos is pushing 800K views and it is not a viral video. The subscribers will soon pass 10K mark.

This is one of them here.


The content is always getting re-purposed and there is a whole behind the scenes thing going on with the business generated.

I would suggest you start making useful tutorials and brand them.

Do one simple one at a time and build from there.

Best regards,

Ozi

Thanks for responses!

I plan on emailing prospects that say they use a vendor similar to mine and just talking to them about subjects relating to our industry. The ones that respond will be added to a list that hopefully will convert to prospects over time. The uncertainty to this method is the cost in terms of time/loss of focus and payout (customers that will actually convert) but that's while I'll have to keep it to small consistent experimentation.