Last week we pondered on marketing to people that aren’t in the market for your services right now. Reminder: that’s most of the people that read your content.
And to some readers it felt a bit passive. Content without the offer. Too patient.
But sending your offer to people that don’t want it is too spammy and ineffective.
Buying triggers are something you can bring into play to have the best of both worlds.
What a buying signal actually is
Way back when I started my first business (not my agency), the moment we became a limited company, we immediately received piles of letters from accountants offering accountancy, business card printers offering business cards, and the people that put your logo on pens had some pens to put our logo on just for us.
These people were watching the records at Companies House (which keeps a record of every company in the UK) and when a new one appeared they sent their offers to the registered address.
The creation of a company was a buying signal.
Now we had a company we had accountancy obligations to fulfil, people to give business cards to, and we had the urge to feel the rush of life’s ultimate ego trip: your logo on the side of a pen.
A buying signal is something you can see from the outside that increases the chances that the business might be ready to buy.
No silver bullets though
Your job is to consider what signals would mean someone was in the market for an agency. Specifically your agency. The more specific, the better the signal.
Because if you don’t make them specific, you’re just going to come up with the ones that everyone else did.
Like the accountants when I started my first business. It’s just going to be a load of noise.
And I can’t tell you them, because if I could then, again, everyone else would have thought of them.
A business getting investment might well be looking to spend some of that money. But if you think you’re the only person who’s thought that, you’re going to have to try harder. An update to website accessibility laws means people will probably be in the market for an audit, and you and several hundred other businesses will simultaneously be offering that.
Combine with your niche
If you know your ICP, then you should know their buying triggers. If you know exactly how they’ll respond to something like investment, then you can offer the right thing.
And if you can combine it with what keeps them up at night.
Ours was to know who their competition are (which is already of interest to them) and when a new business entered the market, or got a newsworthy piece of investment, we got in touch and suggested they take action.
This was useful information anyway and tapped into quite a specific trigger for them.
This is just part of the system
Buying triggers aren’t shortcuts.
They aren’t going to magically scale things.
But they’re an interesting layer to experiment with in your new business machine. If you can find one or two that work, it’s worth it.
And the process of creating them might mean you learn a bit more about your ICP.