Prospecting vs. Attraction Marketing: Which is More Powerful?

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There are essentially two types of ways to grow your business: prospecting and attraction marketing. Which one is more powerful? Let’s take a look.

But before we do, the purpose of this isn’t to pick one of the other. I regularly do both for my business, but my skills lean more toward attraction marketing. They both have their pros and cons, which we will cover. And the people who do it correctly are the ones using both. You might focus more on one or the other, but the key to to find which is more powerful for your business and your skills.

The Case for Prospecting

Prospecting involves going out there and talking to people. This could be people you know, people you do business with, or just complete strangers you run into. Prospecting activities could include thing such as:

Cold calls
Sampling products
Inviting people to look at your business
Networking
Handing out flyers or brochures

You might use different types of tools for prospecting, such as a brochure, product sample or video. The upside is that you are taking consistent action to find customers, clients and business partners. You can also qualify these prospects, choosing which ones you want to talk to. There may be some type of people you just don’t want in your business.

Have a Specific Prospecting Plan

It always helps to create a list of prospects so that you have a specific plan. Prospecting can be done in person or online. If you’re prospecting random strangers, such as a waiter at a restaurant, it’s kind of a shot in the dark. Now, you might like a waiter’s service and personality, and think he might make a great client or business partner. In that sense, you are qualifying him. But a downside of prospecting in person is that you can prospect some real duds.

Using the Internet to prospect, as long as you’re doing it the right way, can be powerful. Facebook, for example, has a great Audience Insights tool in its Facebook Ads service. You don’t have to be running ads to use this feature. You do need a Facebook Ads account, which is free. You can search certain demographics settings that match your target market and see what pages they follow. This is awesome!

For example, you might be targeting moms in their 30s and 40s who want to lose weight. You can search interests such as parenting, health, weight loss and fitness. This Facebook tool will pull up results showing you pages and interests where this target market interacts. You can then go into these pages and groups to interact with them, answering their questions and providing value and your expertise.

That’s just one example of how you you can use the internet to find specific, targeted prospects. The point of prospecting is you finding people who might be a fit for your business. Attraction marketing is the reverse.

The Case for Attraction Marketing

The purpose of attraction marketing is the same as the purpose for prospecting: to find the right clients, customers and business partners. But the approach is very different.

Attraction marketing is where the leads and prospects come to you. It’s the difference between fishing with a pole and the fish jumping into your boat. With this approach, you are creating content, such as blog posts (like this one!), articles, videos and audio clips. This content provides value to your target market, answering their questions, solving their problems, and offing free advice.

Basically, you are creating online portals that people find and lead them back to your website. Attraction marketing also sets you up as the expert and authority.

Attraction Marketing Works 24 Hours a Day

The obvious benefit of this is that when you publish a piece of content, it can work for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s incredibly powerful. Think of it as little soldiers across the Internet working for you all the time.

One of the  biggest attraction marketing tips to keep in mind is that it serves your market with value and helpful information. This creates a trustworthiness and an appreciation that leads to a loyal following. And once you have that, you can create different ways to monetize that following depending on your particular business. Check out Gary Vaynerchuk’s Jab, Jab, Jab Right Hook, which you can find in my Recommended Resources section. It does an awesome job of covering this concept of giving value before asking for a sale.

A downside is that attraction marketing takes more time to develop. Just because you publish a blog post doesn’t mean people are automatically going to start blowing up your phone, rushing to buy your product or use your service. However, once you develop a loyal following with your content, you certainly can have some immediate action once you put out a new piece of content.

Facebook_Attraction_MarketingAnother potential downside is having people find you who might not be the idea client or business partner. However, if you create your content geared toward a targeted market, you will have a much better chance of attracting the right people. A great way to do this is to pay attention to the questions they’re asking and the problems they have. Create content answering those questions and solving those problems.

You can use the Facebook tool I mentioned earlier. Or go to other online communities in line with your business, such as message boards or forums. Plus, once you see that someone has a question about something that you have already created a blog post or video around, you can ask them if they would like the link to your post or video that answers their question. So, you can see how this begins setting up an attraction marketing system for you to create that helps you find and come up with content ideas, and how to serve your market with value.

See the screenshot here of a lady I helped on Facebook. She had a need that I identified, so I simply offered some help to serve that need.

You can also find some great attraction marketing tips on this site. Here is another good post on LinkedIn about how attraction marketing works with network marketing.

So, prospecting and attraction marketing definitively have their benefits. If you’re not sure where to get started–or how to grow–with either one, I would certainly love to see how I could help. Always feel free to contact me here.

P.S. Did this post help you? If you got value from it or know someone who would, please share it and leave a comment below with your suggestions. And don't forget to enroll in my free training How to Stand Out Online and Land Your Dream Customers for tips you can start doing right now to attract your dream customers online.

Coach David Lee Sig

David Lee
Call Me: 469.207.1595
Email Me: DreamAgain@verizon.net
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