I have discussed traditional advertising; it’s like catching small fish with a net designed for hippos. That’s not all the bad news; when a traditional small business advertiser eventually catches a client he doesn’t know what to do with the client. Yes. He will take his money but that’s it. He will not try and cultivate long term relationships because he does not know how this can be done. (I am not saying that this is true for all small business people……)
Unfortunately the small businesses have to continue wasting money on expensive advertising. But when they start incorporating a cultivation stage then they find that advertising becomes the net catching clients in their cultivation pool. In this pool potential clients are fed with gifts and education until the clients are ready to pull out their purses and spend money.
Like in the traditional small business advertising post we have the same stages but we have included the cultivation stage; consisting out of a ‘gifts and committer’ stage. I will discuss these two stages today and then in a follow up article I’ll illustrate how to implement the cultivation pool.
Let’s consider the diagram above;
We get the target audience that we want to advertise to, as soon as they read the ad some of them will become wanters. A very small number of the wanters are hot prospects and may become payers (willing to take out their purses and pay for the goods). However most of the wanters are only lukewarm and not convinced yet; they may not have the money to pay today, they may not feel comfortable with the advertiser yet, they may not know if what’s advertised is what they want. Now is the time to educate and create relationships with them……… in the cultivation pool.
What Happens The Cultivation Pool?
We provide the lukewarm wanters with gifts until they are ready to commit and then buy. Therefore the intention is to keep them with in our sphere of influence and not send them back to the target population. Because when they are sent back to the target population we need to use expensive advertising to get them back. So lets rather keep them in the pool.
While they are in the pool we give them gifts.
What are these gifts? We provide them with:
- Testimonials from happy customers
- Information on the products and services
- How to use the products
- Elaborate write-ups on guarantees
- Education
Basically we are creating a trusting relationship so that our lukewarm wanters can take out their purses and buy our products.
You’ll also notice that we can send our post-payers (people who have paid) back to the cultivation pool until they are ready to buy something else.
- With the cultivation pool we never have to let anyone, who has seen our advertisement, back to the target population.
- With the cultivation pool we can increase our advertising conversion rate by more than a 100% and reduce the cost to get a new client by a factor of more than a 100.
Please note: I am not suggesting that small businesses should spend less money on advertising. All I am saying is that traditional advertising is expensive because it makes the same mistake over and over again.
When you advertise with the idea to catch lukewarm wanters for your cultivation pool your advertising becomes effective and cheap.
As I have mentioned; the next article will look at how you create a cultivation pool. Then we will look at how you adopt your advertisements to get more lukewarm wanters in the pool.
Good luck
This is really a great resource of info. Thanks for giving the heads up!