Today I want to share with you some really cool information that Eric Rockefeller shared on one of my webinars. If you do any sort of community/list-building – or you want to – then lean in and take look at this…
A community manager by the name of Carmen popped on the webinar to ask how she could get more people onto her mailing list.
The whole “if you build it, they will come” really wasn’t working out (not that she expected it to).
Now Carmen is an ace at what she does. She basically helps business owners figure out what their community wants and how that aligns with what the business wants. She’s all about diving into a community’s psyche to find out what inspires them, what they need, and what they want … this is all designed to help the business owner provide value and better engage the community members.
Here’s where Carmen, like so many other business owners, gets stuck…
She’s struggling to get her awesome skills in front of people who need to learn more about the value of community and engaging an audience.
Carmen smartly created an essential checklist for business owners to download in exchange for an email address. She has her first few leads – which feels totally magical! – but she wants more.
How to grow community organically? Read on.
That’s where Eric jumped in with some really cool advice for Carmen – and you can swipe it too…
Eric has a formula called ACT2 (ACT squared). Let me break it down:
- A… Attention (get your audience’s attention)
- C… Connection (connect with them based on something relevant)
- T… Transition (to your promotional offer)
The squared part of this formula looks like this:
- A… in order to get Attention, you need to understand your audience’s stage of Awareness. Where are they in the buying cycle?
- C… in order to get Connection, you need to offer Content based on the audience’s awareness.
- T… in order to Transition, you’ll want to Transform the prospect into a customer by delivering value and results.
This is what you need to do for every cold lead – take them from attention to conversion.
One of the best ways to do this is through networking in relevant communities.
A lot of people spend entirely way too much time and money trying to build communities, find a targeted audience and so on. There’s an easier, free way to do that…
Join other relevant communities where your clientele hangs out, and siphon off their members to join YOUR group.
You don’t need to do this with smaller competitors. Instead, join the Facebook groups and other communities from the biggest marketers and businesses in your niche.
For example – if you were in a dog training niche, you might check out what sort of communities Cesar “The Dog Whisper” Millan has on Facebook and elsewhere.
You then go through the group and friend the members. You’ll need to do this part manually.
Then you send your new connections a message telling them about your group. (You can use a tool like PhantomBuster to automate this step.)
You can say something along the lines of, “This is a really cool group we’re in, but there’s another one that I think you’ll really like – check this out.” You can add a few benefits and reasons why they should check it out, such as touting high-value live trainings.
Once these new members join the group, you want to hit them with a LOT of value. Here’s where the “Content” part of the formula comes in: offer live trainings, post a lot of really good tips and tutorials, and interact one-on-one with the members to answer questions and provide even more value.
Your goal: impress the heck out of your prospects and show them you’re the best person on the planet to help them solve their problem. If you do this, then you can bet they’ll perk up with interest when you start pitching offers.
If you’re selling a high-ticket item, the next step is to get them on the phone and pitch your offer directly.
If you’re not selling high-ticket offers, then send these group members to your mailing list, continue providing value, and start pitching your offers.
In Sum…
If you want to take your audience from “Attention” to “Transformation” (conversion), then building a community is one of the best ways to do this. It gives you a chance to provide value, establish your expertise, and warm up your audience. If you want to build your audience fast, then go to where they’re already congregating – other relevant groups! – and persuade those members to join your group too. Then provide a lot of value and start pitching offers.
Simple? Yep.
Effective? Hell yeah!
Speaking of groups – if you’re not already a part of the bad ass Wildfire Concepts list-building, marketing and motivation group, then join us right now by clicking here:
