Asking Prospects to Pay

How valuable is your marketing content? Do you think your prospects would pay for a subscription to continuously receive your latest and greatest publishing efforts?

Well, that's precisely what we ask our prospects to do.

We ask them to pay by:

• Giving us their attention
• Taking us up on our calls to action
• Sharing our content with others
• Spending an hour in our webinars
• Following us on social media
• Participating in discussions
• Contributing to interactive, online dialogues
• Commenting on our blogs
• Filling out forms
• Downloading our white papers
• Watching our videos
• Listening to our podcasts
• Visiting with us at trade shows

We ask them to up the ante by:

• Talking to our sales reps
• Answering questions
• Attending demos and presentations

We ask them to go ALL-IN by:

• Buying - the ultimate subscription!

Each time we ask them to pay, we're asking for more. Are we living up to the value expectations that motivate our prospects to renew their subscriptions to our content repeatedly?

Go review your content offers and ask yourself what you can do to improve the odds that your prospects will keep on shelling out their attention, information and interactions to pay for your content.

One of the things marketers often forget is that the value exchange has to be as beneficial to our prospects as we expect it to be for our companies.

Is your marketing based on Win-Win?

Comments

[Tom Hitchner]

Will you pay me to read your blog ?

[Ardath Albee]

Hi Tom,

Sorry, but no. But if you don't keep reading because the posts provide information that's a valuable exchange for your time and attention, then you're either not my target audience or I'm not doing my job :)

[scott]

I love your question - would "your prospects pay for a subscription" to your content? An effective simple way to assess the value of ones content.

[Advertising Directory]

@ Ardath Albee
You Are doing a great job, keep on it. The main thing is to make your prospect pay attention. It doesn’t matter how incredible your product is or how amazing your copy reads, if you don’t make an offer that gives your prospects what they want for the price they are willing to pay then you simply won’t make as many sales as you deserve.

[Ardath Albee]

Thanks, Scott!

Thanks, Advertising Directory/pmarketing!

[Andrew Spoeth]

Great post title! And you're absolutely right. One of the most valuable things that our busy customers possess, is time. Attention is a new kind of currency, and marketers are trying to outbid each other for even a small piece of it.

Data driven marketers naturally begin to ask, how can we quantify and measure this? At the individual level, lead score is probably the best concept we have. Lead score is first and foremost a measure of readiness to buy. But it's closely related to the prospect's attention investment in your brand. Would you agree?

[foredi gel apotik]

Thanks for taking the time to discuss this,would you mind updating your blog with more information? It is extremely helpful for me.

[Ardath Albee]

Hi Andrew,

Thanks very much for sharing your thoughts! I do agree that lead score is the best measure now available, but how effective it is depends on what you construct it to measure and how you choose to weight (score) specific behaviors.

This said, what about all the attention possible from those not in your database? Or who pay with their attention outside of your web properties? It's a tough nut to crack, but lead score is definitely a great place to start. And you guys are doing some really inventive work in that area.

[Eric Wittlake]

Ardath, this is interesting, particularly with the trend towards more bite-size pieces of content (blog posts and newsletters instead of white papers, for instance). As our attention becomes scarce, the price marketers can ask hasn't increased, and content by necessity becomes shorter. As a one-time budding economist, this is an interesting perspective.

Marketers need to stop thinking their content is free, acknowledge the price, and think as if they have to SELL their content. I just wrote about this from the perspective of asking for contact information, I like your perspective here on payment in the form of time and attention as well.

(My post): http://digitalb2b.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/selling-your-lead-generation-content/

-- @wittlake