Roger Abramson: Who Teaches The Best Marketing For Offline Clients? (Part I)

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A friend asked for my advice the other day:

Who teaches the best marketing stuff for my offline business clients?

Here is Part I of my response…

My biz is different, eh? Those silly brick and mortars, eh? What to do. What to do. What knowledge can we lovingly shove down their throats and lovingly force-feed them in order to make their offline business better? Gee, whiz.

It is a pickle. Offline mentality. Am I right? Oh, boy.

Many experts DO teach a lot of info-marketing stuff! Probably because that’s where the data ultimately leads.

An ongoing “info component” of some sort works better if you have an offline prospect. You’ve got offline prospects and clients, right? Okay.

If your offline prospects or clients happen to have a living human brain rattling around somewhere inside their skull, then we’re in business.

Now, if you’re recommending some tactics THEY can use on THEIR customers, you’ll need to know a few things about their customers in order to help them.

Do your clients have human prospects? Human? Good. Do these humans and prospects have skulls which may contain a brain? Brains? Good.

Then your clients aren’t selling to alien robots who’ve excised all mammalian tendencies on their magical future fish planet? Not alien? Good.

So certain tactics are gonna work better if you have clients with human prospects they’re trying to reach. You want them to buy something, or spend, or invest, I assume.

Because in that case, dude, you’re gonna love these resources we got here… Check this out:

The reason for the referrals, the newsletters, the tactics, the strategies is because we’re orchestrating and choreographing human behavior. We’re not making pigeons hop counter clockwise on one leg. We’re getting humans to spend their money.

If you wanna attract some cats, you can use a string. Want humans to spend dollars? Use a sequence.

If you’re offline, you use a newsletter. A phone call. A postcard. An e-zine. A YouTube channel. Drive them all toward something and fence them in.

Starts with a sequence. Because without constant, nagging reminders, human beings would forget to clip their own toenails.

Remind your humans every week or two for ten years, and then your humans will buy and buy and spend until spending with you becomes a reinforced habit and they don’t know how to do anything but spend their money the ONLY way they know how.

Sound like a plan? Good.

Off-hand, I can’t think of any offline non-info, non-consulting business that would benefit from sequences because in order to benefit from a sequence, they’d have to be going after humans. Humans that forget things. What kind of things?

Like what day it is. On their wife’s wedding anniversary day. Ouch. Yes, humans will forget. And why does the wife want to celebrate the wedding anniversary? It’s an annual reminder of the life-long commitment he made to stick around, even if she gained or lost five pounds or got a year older this year.

And if they’ll forget the fact they’ve been married for 24 years, they’ll definitely forget your client’s insurance offer or accounting practice. Like I say, sequences of reminders and info-marketing only work if you’re dealing with humans.

Can’t help ya there. See, all the offline businesses I know dangle strings because they’re just after cats. No humans involved anywhere. Wait. No. Only humans, I mean. In which case you want to pummel people with constant reminders until they buy.

Which you can always afford to do, as long as they’re the right people.

Yeah, your clients will make excuses. And cats will hide in corners when it’s time for a bath. Pigs and sheep will sorta wiggle around and dart off in all directions when you try to fence them in someplace.

Pigeons fly away when you chase after them with a loaf of bread. They come to you when you throw them crumbs from the SAME loaf of bread. Pigeons are so weird.

What works on them…works on humans.

Your client’s excuses can’t be your excuses, as we all know.

Not exactly what you asked, but what good would I be to you, if I didn’t come out of left field and throw loaves of bread at you?

And it’s a GREAT question, by the way. Not the optimal question, but it’s still great. Especially since you asked it. Most people won’t even do that much.

And people who don’t ask will all die broke, forgotten, fat and ugly in a dusty, dark apartment strewn with open cans of generic dog food, a pile of bills piled up under the mail slot, topped with a cute card from a nagging niece a now-rotting, prematurely dead corpse for a little senior prom money so she can wear a rental dress to the government school prom.

That little image motivates me a little. Probably because I’ve got a niece and she’s already in kindergarten, and someday she’ll want to go to prom.

Come back next week for Part II of my response.