Content Marketing: When Do You Make The Hard Sell?

You are pumped up about educating folks around some topic, let’s say it’s brevity. What’s brevity? It’s concise and exact use of words in writing or speech, usually saying little but meaning a lot.

You set up a webinar or meetup and begin to prepare the content for your attendees. You work hard to market the event and get several signups, let’s say 100 signups.

Awesome!

Once your webinar begins, you teach your lesson and wrap up, now because your event was free, your goal is to grab the attention of many folks as possible who could become potential customers and a part of your target market.

BUT, do you push the hard sell now (during the event), wait until the follow up email OR continue to educate your attendees for the next three days, giving you four solid examples of education.

The answer is? There is no wrong answer, it just depends on how credible your attendees find you and how much of what your are hard selling is what they want.

For this post, we are going to assume that your readers/viewers will not bite at the hard sell early.

You cannot make the assumption that just but hosting an event that this is your target customer. Why?

1. I just want to get out of the office
2. Free lunch
3. Networking opportunities
4. I was just being nice when I signed up

You can only truly define and confirm your target customer once they have completed the sale.

Think of a free webinar or meetup as the top of the sales funnel. You are going after the largest group of potential customers and through each step or tier you add education and a barrier to entry. Typically in the form of money.

Each layer that you continue to educate you add a layer for the attendee to buy.

For example, each week I organize a coffee event for anyone and everyone to attend. There is not a topic of choice, rather free flowing and the group dictates how it goes. I also host a monthly startup event, Startup Night, which allows burgeoning entrepreneurs to present what they are developing. Let’s consider this the highest form of targeting customers. This blog post could also be at the top of the sales funnel.

Next, be sure to collect a piece of information from attendees so you can continue to followup and educate through.

Next up, we begin to educate folks more through giving them access to a curated calendar of events that we host and/or approve of. Specifically in and around the entrepreneurship and innovation space.

Those who sign up to receive the list every month will also have the opportunity to join our marquee event, Start Norfolk, which is a paid event. By adding the paid barrier, we now (likely) have moved closer to our target customer:

1. a project/business
2. napkin stage to 2 years old
3. looking to bootstrap
4. looking for guidance in starting and growing their project/company

Once the event is over, we send out a follow-up email to all of the attendees wrapping up the event. In the email, we have a strong call to action for those to signup for our membership program, 1000 Four.

Each event that we put on free or paid, the goal is to funnel each attendee down through each tier until we find those who are committed to our premium membership.

It may be a longer approach, but what we’ve found is that it is far easier to make this sale once our targeted customers feel comfortable with us.

The above could also be done through online webinar steps would be:

1. host webinar
2. follow-up and break down your webinar
3. next day send an email with additional educational material
4. same as step three, more material
5. wrap everything up, break down what you have provided and hard sell

In the hard sell you will need to provide:

1. give a short time to buy
2. make it only for those who attended the webinar
3. discount if needed
4. make it as simple as possible to buy buy

To wrap this up, educate as much as possible to funnel down your initial customer list into a strong targeted customer, once you have provided them with enough data, push the button and send over the hard sell!