Marketing Online Businesses to Offline People

Recently I had the opportunity to visit a local home business job fair coordinated by Gwen Cleck of Country Bunny Bath & Body. As direct sales coaches quite a few of the questions we see often are about holding offline events. The questions vary from both coordinating one and being a vendor. I thought interviewing the coordinator herself and some of the vendors would be a wonderful way to share how to coordinate your own event and/or attend as a vendor.

Attending this event and interviewing everyone gave me to opportunity to meet so many wonderful and talented women who were more than willing to share their business experience with me. Here’s the scoop…

One important lesson I picked up at this event is to be very careful when you’re marketing your online business to “offline people”. First and foremost, those ads you’re sending out … they aren’t working! Wait a minute, let me back up and explain here. Let’s look at this for example:

“How would you like to earn $500 a night? What if I told you that you could do it in your own home? No selling! The products sell themselves...”

Okay, I could go on here but I’m sure you get the point. These ads don’t work! Do you know what that ad says? SCAM! Sure, I wouldn’t doubt for a minute that you earn $500 in one night at a home party. And I’m sure your products sell themselves. I’m not saying that it’s not true … I’m saying the ad doesn’t work. If you’re marketing to folks offline with these types of ads, they have scam written all over them and you’re not getting your message across.

If you’re pushing the “online sales” and “online recruiting” to the “offline network” be careful of how you approach your market. Let me explain how I set this whole project up in the first place. I searched online at www.CraftLister.com, found out about this HBJF and contacted the coordinator. I told her who I was what my intentions were. Now keep in mind, people hold their email addresses near and dear to their heart. With all the spam that’s roaming around the internet you have to be super-careful about how you approach some via email. So, I asked Gwen if she could personally pass on my email to her vendors explaining what I was interested in doing and then had each of them email me personally if they were interested in participating. This way Gwen wasn’t just handing out email addresses without their permission. The response was fantastic.

So, much to my surprise, when I arrived at the HBJF there were quite a few more people there than those who replied to me. My initial thoughts were that these ladies just weren’t interested in what I was doing which of course was absolutely fine by me. I worked the room with my list of those who were interested and started speaking with each one. I of course didn’t want to be rude so I did at least try to stop and visit each vendor. Eventually I’m sure I started to be the “talk of the show” because here I was this woman walking around with a notebook, attaché case and to top it off I was taking pictures also. So unsurprisingly the questions started coming to me first. Can you believe even though my email was forwarded to them from the coordinator of the event they were attending that there were still some that had simply deleted the email. There were even a few who had replied which I believe strictly out of curiosity that still weren’t exactly sure what I was doing. These women weren’t accustomed someone online actually doing something like this. Not to mention I had to get it across that I was a “real person” behind a website. Of course once I explained who I was and what I did … my list of participating vendors grew.

Oh, and I almost forgot, guess what one of my most asked questions were? “How much does this cost?” I really hadn’t thought about that. Well, let me explain, I had absolutely no intentions what-so-ever to charge these ladies to place their info in our newsletter and blog. Folks nowadays are on “lookout”. And really if you think about it … what do we get for free anymore? This really was a valid question … just one I hadn’t expected to be asked so many times.

So, lesson learned … Is your message getting across or are your emails getting simply deleted?

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Anita DeFrank & Kara Kelso, authors of The Direct Sales Success Kit, specialize in coaching direct sales representatives to reach their goal of becoming successful in their field. Visit http://www.DirectSalesHelpers.com for free weekly tips.