Your Dream 100 is a list of 100 places your Dream Customers congregate online to find information and discuss things relevant to them and their career.
If you haven’t done so already, read this article here on it and create your own Dream 100 for your business.
Once you have your list, there’s two ways you can use your Dream 100 to turn your Dream Customers into paying customers. You can either ‘work your way in’, or you can ‘buy your way in’.
Work Your Way In
If you choose to “work your way in” with your Dream 100 to get your Dream Customers, this is the cheapest option and will often cost you very little other than time. So what does this mean and how does it work?
‘Working your way in’ means going to your Dream 100 (i.e. the places your Dream Customers congregate online), and building a relationship with the members of your Dream 100.
You build trust with that audience, and then one day when you want to share a solution to one of their problems that your company offers, they will be far more receptive to it. This is far more effective than just entering an existing community, and trying to sell straight away.
So what’s the best way of building a relationship? Just like life – show up regularly, and be helpful.
You should have a wealth of knowledge to share in your Dream 100, given it’s where your Dream Customers are congregating. If you’re a manufacturer of fishing rods for example, and your end goal is to sell them to retailers, we need to find out where the buyers are for retailers are congregating online, and do as much as you can to help them within your field of expertise.
Let’s say many of the buyers of retailers follow Facebook Groups hosted by some of the top fishing influencers in the country. They join these groups because they like to keep their finger on the pulse of what products people are interested in, but also many of them are keen fishermen themselves.
It’s a Facebook Group, so there’s a lot of Q&A with people discussing everything from what type of rod is suitable for trawling, to what the best hook is for deep sea fishing, to how to reel in a big fish without damaging your shoulder.
Ding ding ding – you should be able to answer these questions! Jump in, write a few lines, and be helpful!
Spend 30 minutes a day in total going to each of your Dream 100 communities, and offering genuine help and value. Then one day when you want to promote something of your own, you’ll be astounded with how positive the response is to help you back.
Buy Your Way In
If you need results faster, the alternative is to ‘buy your way in’. This means paying your Dream 100 for their audience’s eyeballs. It’s not quite as efficient, as you need to spend advertising dollars and you don’t already have the trust with the audience from building a relationship with them.
Nevertheless it can help get your company in front of your Dream 100 audience fast.
Using our fishing rod manufacturer, there’s a number of ways to try to purchase the eyeballs of your Dream 100.
If your Dream 100 includes:
- Fishing Industry specific websites – can you purchase a display ad using GDN or run a paid article through Native? Can you pay to be featured in their next email newsletter?
- Google Searchers – can you run paid search campaigns targeting keywords that retailers may be searching, like “fishing rod manufacturers”
- YouTube or Instagram influencers – can you run an ad targeting the top fishing influencers? Sure, a lot of people in this audience will be consumers rather than retailers, but they’re the ones who are going to be asking the retailers if they stock your product.
- LinkedIn Members – can you make a list of your top 100 retailers, and target the buyers in them with paid ads that educate the buyers on what your product is, how it solves a problem them or their customers are having, and the fantastic results and reviews that have come from people purchasing your product?
There’s an endless number of creative ways and platforms that allow you to “buy your way in”.
While the results can be fantastic and enable your business to grow quickly, we generally recommend ‘working your way in’ first, as we find it helps you truly understand who your Dream Customer is, how to talk to them, and earn their trust.
This often results in a much lower cost-per-acquisition or cost-per-lead when you turn on the paid marketing tap, as you know exactly where to spend your advertising dollars.
