The overwhelming majority of business owners, and ordinary people alike, misunderstand what an offer is.

Understanding “the offer”, the different types, and how you can use them to build a list of prospects who are interested in your product or service can turbocharge your marketing and immensely increase your sales.

The day I learned about this stuff, my approach to generating clients changed completely, and after reading this I’m sure yours will too.

Grab your popcorn, notes, and pet flamingo - in the next few minutes you are going to master the art of the offer.

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The Mistake Everyone Makes

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Firstly, an offer is the request for action from yourself to your audience. In simple terms, it’s when you ask someone to do something.

They are crucial, without them, ads and arguably entire businesses fail. 

Picture this - you run an ad… It's the best ad ever, instantly captures the audience and retains their attention the whole way through, and once it's over… nothing!

That’s what’s called - burning your money. 

You’ve spent money on advertising but haven’t even attempted to get a return on your investment.

So, lesson one, always include an offer in your ads in order to prompt action and make sure they are measurable so that you can measure the success of your ad.

People typically think that an offer means “buy one get one free” or giving limited time discounts, but that's only one type of offer - a purchase offer.

I’m not the biggest fan of purchase offers, while there is a time and place for them, they are overvalued by many business owners and when overused can have unforeseen detrimental consequences to your business.
I say that for a couple reasons:

1. It invites price shopping.
2. You only target people who are prepared to buy now, whilst ignoring the vast majority of people who are in the market but not prepared to buy right now.
3. It trains your audience to wait for another offer.

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The Secret Sauce

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The second type of offer however, when used strategically, can be used to both capture the people prepared to buy now (buy-now-buyers) as well as construct a list of people interested in your product or service which you can sell to for the rest of time.

These are called lead generation offers. 

There are super technical ways to do this, an example of a simple way you can implement this today would be to exchange some information (a report, or cheat sheet, or guide, etc…) that a potential client really wants for their email address…

This, of course, shouldn’t be framed as “Give me this for that” rather you should frame it in a way so that they feel they are getting something they want for free, all they need to do is enter their email into a form and you will send it to them right away.

Once they have entered their email, there is nothing stopping you from presenting your product or service right away thus capturing the buy-now-buyers.

As for everyone else who doesn’t want to buy now… 

You have their emails!

And you have begun building rapport with them via your free information, you can continue to send them informative emails and sell to them until they buy or die (or opt out - which is arguably worse).

As a result, you will position yourself within your market as a credible and knowledgeable figure, opening up more sales opportunities, and leading to long-term customer relationships.

Have a think if this strategy could work for you, or how you could tweak it to fit your business.  Give it a go and I look forward to hearing how you get on.

If you need a hand, or would like to know how I would go about implementing this strategy for your business, feel free to get in touch… Good luck!