It took me 6 years, 5 months and 4 days to learn this.
1. Isolated Email Marketing won’t take you anywhere. (Said before also).
2. Starting with a newsletter (Email or Linkedin) helps more with the demand generation than cold emailing these days. Tons of reasons and benefits of it.
To summarize – you get to learn to write the right content, you get encouraged by responses to non-sales driven content.
3. Not everyone is your audience/customer. Let me extend it to next level. Your universe of customers is limited. This universe does not change over years in a region/segment. This audience will buy from you in their life time. If they have high intent, they will buy now. Otherwise, they will buy later.
4. People buy from people. No one is going to buy without building trust or relationship. You cannot eliminate this step. What you can reduce is the time to build trust. The entire game is about building trust. Buyer wants more time/content to build trust. Vendor wants to reduce the time.
5. If your product/content does not build trust by itself, then you have to sell in developing markets or to people with relationships. You still have to build trust using content or your credibility.
6. Trust is built over time. Prospects do follow you for a long time. Many prospects read your linkedin content and like you. Hence, build trust over channels where your audience is. Build a dataset of these prospects and update them regularly.
7. I call it Life Bound. These customers are to be tracked during their career. They will buy from you more than once. When and how – depends on triggers but also when you have built trust.
8. Data on customers is changing as well in this life bound approach. You need to know when your customers joined a new job or got promoted or bought a new technology. Life Bound nurturing will lay the foundation for life cycle marketing.
