Dripping on Your Pipeline

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

by Shauna Trainor, The Covenant Group

Have you ever seen the impact a leaky faucet can make on a bar of soap? After a while, the small drops of water can leave a sig­nif­i­cant dent in the soap bar. That same effect can be seen when mar­ket­ing to prospec­tive clients through a slow but steady flow of email com­mu­ni­ca­tions, phone calls, arti­cles and other pro­mo­tional efforts.

It’s likely you have quite a few prospects in your sales pipeline, some of which are close to becom­ing clients and a few who may need to be worked on for the next two or three years. Estab­lish­ing your­self as someone’s trusted finan­cial advi­sor involves a more com­pli­cated, infre­quent cycle than other sales ini­tia­tives. Because of this, sea­sonal mar­ket­ing cam­paigns or those that are auto­mated and imper­sonal will not net the same results that can be seen in a per­son­al­ized, ongo­ing mar­ket­ing push.

Rebecca Gill explains some of the intri­ca­cies of run­ning an effec­tive drip cam­paign — which she defines as hav­ing reg­u­lar con­tact with prospects who are not quite ready to buy - in a piece for Sys-Con Media. How do you keep your name at the top of their minds in the months and years before they are ready to make a deci­sion? What are the means for estab­lish­ing trust and prov­ing your reli­a­bil­ity when you haven’t had the chance to demon­strate your skills by pro­vid­ing service?

One of the best ways to stay in con­tact and drip on your pipeline is by send­ing out peri­odic emails or newslet­ters that fea­ture inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion, show­ing prospects the value of your knowl­edge. But a blan­ket email will not be effective.

Seg­ment­ing your tar­get mar­kets and iden­ti­fy­ing what moti­vates each kind of ideal client will allow you to mar­ket to spe­cific char­ac­ter­is­tics, Gill says. Del­e­gat­ing this task to tech­nol­ogy may also free you up to spend more time think­ing about the con­tent of the email than wor­ry­ing about when you have to send them out, she notes.

“I believe drip mar­ket­ing should be a mul­ti­fac­eted approach,” Gill says. “With the advent of social media, drip mar­ket­ing can refer to vir­tu­ally any dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and includes blog­ging, emails, newslet­ters, tweets and posts.”

Writ­ing a blog, shar­ing quick tips on web­sites such as Twit­ter, and estab­lish­ing rela­tion­ships with local pub­li­ca­tions and radio sta­tions are more great ways to spread aware­ness of your business.

Norm Trainor also dis­cusses the seg­men­ta­tion con­cept and slowly build­ing your cred­i­bil­ity in The 8 Best Prac­tices of High-Performing Sales­peo­ple. Pro­mote your­self by writ­ing high-quality arti­cles for news­pa­pers and invite your ideal clients to sem­i­nars geared toward their val­ues and con­cerns. A com­bi­na­tion of dig­i­tal con­tent and real-world pro­mo­tional events will grad­u­ally estab­lish your brand.

Shauna Trainor is The Covenant Group’s Mar­ket­ing Man­ager. She focuses on The Covenant Group’s own mar­ket­ing strat­egy and also helps entre­pre­neurs through finan­cial advi­sor train­ing to lever­age social media and other tech­nol­ogy to spread the word about their ser­vices and prac­tices and build relationships.

Fol­low The Covenant Group

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Tags: Covenant Group, Drip, Drops Of Water, Email Communications, Establishing Trust, Intricacies, Leaky Faucet, Marketing Campaigns, Multifaceted Approach, Periodic Emails, Phone Calls, Prospective Clients, Prospects, Rebecca, Sales Initiatives, Sales Pipeline, Shauna, Soap Bar, Steady Flow, Target Markets
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