Many agency new business directors or owners believe that there is so much competition in their market that they should try to open up new markets as opposed to preaching to the converted; whilst laudable, in our opinion this strategy can take far too long and is a path littered with potential hurdles.
As you may know by now if you’ve been reading our blog for a while, here at Manifest love our analogies, so we have another for you on this subject.
Think of your discipline as a religion and your agency as a church. You have two ways to increase the size of your congregation (clients). You can either:
- Become an evangelist and try to convert those people who are currently either not spending any money on marketing or ARE doing so, but spending it on another discipline. These people are people of another faith in our analogy and may well be very happy with their existing religion.
- Preach to the converted; Find out where people of your own religion congregate who may well be unsettled with their current church or whose preacher may be a little ‘fuddy duddy’ or otherwise not to their personal taste, even though the fundamentals of what she may be preaching are in line with their faith.
Whilst option 1) may appeal, it can be a very long-term objective to change an existing faith pattern and the world is littered with the remains of evangelists (or missionaries) whose over-zealous attempts to convert other religions has led to, er, unsavoury endings.
Option 2) meanwhile, makes targeting far easier and you can concentrate on selling the advantages of your church as opposed to your entire religion.
How many times have you gone the option 1) route to hear when you thought you had converted the prospect to the cause, them say to you ‘OK, you’ve convinced me that this is the route to take. I’ll now find another couple of agencies who ALSO provide what you do so that I can benchmark you all and put the work out to pitch. Thanks’? So maybe preaching to the converted (clients who already use a competitor) is better after all.
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