Selling. DrivenByQ Style

Suppose you’re watching the nail biting concluding episode of a gripping drama series. You’re about to learn if the main character lives or dies as fireworks explode in the epic final climax. Your door-bell rings. You curse but go to see who it is. A double glazing sales agent is in your area and has a fantastic offer. Are you excited?

In the last couple of blogs I wrote about my enthusiasm for a new idea which could revolutionise the promotion of DrivenByQ. I’m really keen on the concept of attraction marketing as a strategy and how it could help introduce new customers using a very subtle approach - hopefully removing the days of cold-calling for good!

The plan is to remove chauffeur services from our marketing and instead, deliver a new (totally free) ‘value-add’ service for our existing customers. If we understand their needs accurately enough, I also believe we can fuel substantial growth in promoting this to new customers.

Over time it would be nice to let new prospects experience DrivenByQ without employing our core service and recognise we don’t need the hard sell. After all, who really wants to be disturbed by a salesman when they are already happy doing what they are doing?

A Marketing Epiphany

Last time I wrote about all the pieces of a jigsaw falling in to place and finding the theoretical solution to the big issue that has stalled the growth of DrivenByQ. We’ve captured our local market, found our niche and developed software to ensure we stay way ahead of our competition but the question has always been how do we get more people to use our service?

Well, a couple of weeks ago I was researching some information for the education slot at my weekly network club when I suddenly had an epiphany. For as long as I care to remember, I have been looking at ways to introduce our company directly to new customers using some kind of scientific methodology that a marketing guru has created - but it just has not happened! Then as I was reading about the basics of social media, suddenly everything made complete sense.

Rule number one ‘never, ever self-promote’ – this fits particularly well for a chauffeur service because we rely on personal recommendation rather than our own opinion. Rule two ‘give something away for free’ is in our nature (just look at what we did at Christmas, or even November 2009). Rule three ‘engage’ is something we are just great at with our customers. Finally rule number four ‘enchant’ has always been the key to keeping our customers loyal.

So what next now we’ve realised the basic rules of social media work better offline than they do online? Well, how about using another rule and finding a way of ‘nurturing the relationship’ not just with existing customers but with new ones as well? Apparently, it is a new style of marketing that some gurus have been documenting for the last few years and its name is ‘attraction marketing’. Great eh?