“Mum, can I have it?”
I was in Tesco’s with my 7-year-old daughter, D, when she spotted her new object of desire: A Darth Vader toothbrush, with a lightsabre-shaped handle that lights up.
“No.”
“But can I have it?”
“No.”
….And so on and so forth, ad nauseam, until I exited the supermarket with a very sulky daughter.
Later that afternoon:
“So are you buying me the toothbrush?”
“Maybe next week.”
“Great! So will you buy it for me this afternoon?”
…And so on and so forth, for the rest of the day. Needless to say, there is now a Darth Vader toothbrush in our bathroom. Resistance was futile (….or is that from another movie?).
On the bright side, my daughter clearly has a fabulous future – as an online marketer.
Because what I call “nagging” is what marketers call “persistence”.
Now, just to be clear: I am not advocating annoying people, or badgering them in any way.
However, if you want people to buy from you, you have to talk to them… and talk to them…. And talk to them about what you do.
You have to be a very regular presence in their lives – so it’s hard for them to ignore you.
When it comes to email marketing, I regularly get people telling me that they’re worried about emailing their contacts more than once a month, because they think it will annoy people. (I think this is an English disease 🙂 )
The problem is that if you’re only speaking to your prospects once a month, you can’t build a proper relationship with them, make any kind of case to them, or even really catch their attention.
You need to email your prospects at least every couple of weeks – even better, once a week – and there are many marketers out there who email daily.
Similarly, many businesspeople cringe at the idea of remarketing (those ads that follow you around the Internet, after you visited a business’s website). They find it creepy that the Internet seems to ‘remember’ which websites you’ve visited, and shows you their ads again and again.
But there’s a reason that it’s a marketer’s dream. The more often people see your ads, the more comfortable with you they get, and the more open they are to what you have to say – and sell.
Ultimately, this is one of the main problems with other tactics like PR, word-of-mouth and any social media account that is only updated sporadically.
Every newspaper article, every recommendation, every post can be absolutely wonderful. But if they don’t hear about you again for weeks or months, you’re never going to gain traction.
So don’t worry too much about ‘annoying’ people. Be ubiquitous. Be persistent.
Take it from my 7-year-old. It works.
