Quicker Selling On Smaller Budgets

Since most small businesses have small budgets – and I’m betting that includes you – effective targeting becomes even more critical. A form of targeting that I use often is targeting based on trigger events. This helps speed up the sales process by reaching prospects at the time they are most likely to make a purchase.

Trigger event marketing is targeting prospects that are highly likely to respond to your offer based on certain personal events. I’m sure you’ve seen this before – for instance, my straight-A, college student daughter is inundated with credit card offers on a daily basis. The credit card offers are triggered by Stevie’s name being published on the Dean’s list.

However, in my experience, most small businesses are not using trigger event marketing – mostly because they don’t realize they can. Usually, when I bring this up to a new client, I get the same reaction: the client rolls his eyes, groans a little, then says “I can’t afford that.”

But this process does not need to be expensive or complicated. You don’t need a complex relational database with multiple tables and multipart queries. In fact, you often don’t need anything more than your local newspaper.

You can find tons of trigger events hidden in the stories of your local newspaper, your trade journals, even public records. All you need to do is think outside of the box and relate the events to your prospects’ need for your product or service.

Let me give you a few examples of how I’ve implemented trigger event marketing for my clients, to get you thinking:

• I created a direct mail campaign for a realtor, helping her market to families who recently had new babies. New babies often lead to the purchase of a bigger home, and, since the baby announcements were prominently listed in the local paper, it was easy to get prospects’ names.
• For an automotive service center, I sent letters to the parents of 16 year olds who recently got their driver’s licenses, urging the parents to bring their family cars in for a safety inspection. We purchased the contact information from local driving schools, but depending on your state, this info might be available through public records.
• I have a direct mail campaign running for a client who rents office furniture. We regularly get information on local companies that are planning to expand – this information is readily available through almost any newspaper, chamber of commerce, economic development board – and we educate them on the value of renting versus purchasing.

I use trigger event marketing in my own led generation process on a regular basis. For instance, I scan my local business journal for new businesses that have just opened. I send them a congratulations card and invite them to visit my website for a free report.

I pay attention to which companies have hired new personnel in their marketing departments. This often means that their marketing budgets have increased, and now might be a good time to see if they are in need of my services.

I watch for companies that have recently rolled out a new product or announced a new service. Often, small businesses are so engrossed in the development of a new product or service that they don’t even think of the marketing aspect until the product is ready. Product and service roll outs are great events to trigger a contact from me.

What events can trigger contacts from you?

In order to use trigger event marketing for your own business, you must first identify what your trigger events actually are. Here are a few questions that might spur some thought:

• What happens within a business, a family or a person’s life immediately prior to their needing your product or service?
• Who do your prospects often learn about you from? How is that conversation initiated?
• Who is the main decision maker in purchasing your product or service and what causes this person to finally decide to buy?
• Are there others involved in the buying decision and what would cause them to support your product over other choices?
• What causes a business or individual to want to buy now?

Action Item – Brainstorm a list of trigger events for your own product or service. Next, compile a list of resources that can act as notifiers of these events. Consider using press releases, websites, news wires, blogs, rss aggregators, google alerts, yahoo news, etc.

You might also want to consult with a professional list broker who can customize a mailing list to meet your exact needs. Brokers get paid by the list owner, not the list renter, so you can usually get access to their knowledge and services for free. And, believe it or not, there is a list out there of everything and everyone imaginable.

Now, go find some more clients!

You might also be interested in:

• What Does White Day Have To Do With Your Business?
• Marketing Your Business with a Media Release
• Using Press Releases in Your Small Business Marketing Plan
• Using PR Effectively in Your Small Business Marketing
• Unexpected Ways To Stay In Touch With Your Clients, Customers and Prospects

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Small Business Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.