Is Your Business A Fire Hose Or A Dripping Faucet?
July 15th, 2013 by Diane Conklin under Marketing. No Comments.
Are you and your business more like a fire hose or a dripping faucet? As marketers and business owners, we sometimes want to give everything we know to our clients, as soon as they come to us. That’s being the fire hose.
You have all this information in your head, that you have accumulated over the years and you open up the fire hose and try to give all that information to your clients and prospects in the first ten minutes they know you. And, you want to give them everything you know, every time you talk to them.
It’s overwhelming and people are literally blown back by the force and the amount of information in your fire hose. It’s simply too much too fast.
For example, you can’t build your website, build your free offer, write a sales letter and develop your first product all at the same time. Every business owner needs all those things. Just not all at the same time.
Talk to your prospects first about their free offer, how they structure theirs, and why they need one. Give them a little bit at a time. Then talk to them about how to get the free offer online, starting with a simple squeeze page to start to build traffic.
You get excited and feed people the fire hose because you’re so excited about what you do. You’re so excited to help them you want to give it all to them and you end up overwhelming them instead. Many times, when you overwhelm people, they go away.
Instead think of your marketing and your content distribution as a dripping faucet. Constantly be there. Constantly give people something new and fresh. Give them another new tip, another new video or another new piece of information. Constantly be there dripping, dripping, dripping.
You don’t want a drippy faucet in your home, but in your marketing and your business that’s what you want to be like. You want to give a little bit of information at a time, over time.
Dripping makes everything more doable…in chunks. When you chunk something and give it to somebody, they feel like they can do this piece. Maybe it’s three steps. Maybe its three things you ask them to do in that piece. Then you take them to the next chunk, then the next chunk and then the next. Instead of giving them the entire piece all at one time, you just give them a little chunk at a time. Eventually they will have everything, but they didn’t get it all at one time.
Again, instead of the fire hose, you want to be the constantly dripping faucet. It’s all about constantly being in front of them and constantly giving them great information and constantly being top-of-mind all the time.
One of the reasons micro-distribution, continuity and membership programs are so great is because they chunk and distribute information a little bit at a time. Again, you’re going to want to throw everything on your membership site so people will have access to it. It will be too much. Instead, give them new stuff every week or every month so they can go check it out as opposed to having it there and they have to go find it.
Chunks…Drip Marketing…not a fire hose.