Take your prospects out to dinner
Engaging with you clients or prospects is critical. But how is it best done?
From a young age we have stories read to us because they help us understand and engage with complex concepts, or simply entertain us. This ability to absorb information so effectively through storytelling is hard-wired into our brains.
Using storytelling in your business
Using storytelling concepts in your business, for example by publishing a book telling your story or business philosophy, will lift your levels of engagement with your clients and add to your marketing and communication.
Think of your communications mix as the process of meeting someone:
Your advertisement is the attention-seeking shout ‘hello’
Your brochures are the handshake, and
Your book is the dinner conversation over a glass of wine.
Five Benefits of a Book
A book for your business will help you get more time with your clients and form an integral part of your marketing.
Your business story becomes a book to be read in the recipients’ leisure-time, without the distraction of email, Internet and marketing flyers that so often become lost in inboxes or in piles of papers on a desk.
People do not throw books away.
Books provide a warm tangible engagement; but they also provide you with plenty of content to work with in other areas of your communications strategy: for example, release the work as an ebook, extract chapters on your website, and Tweet key points.
Importantly, a book gives you time. Time to tell your corporate story and it is this that elevates your message to a level where the reader remembers because you have engaged with them. They feel that they understand you; and that you understand them.
How might your book be used?
For the price of a few mass media print advertisements, you can have hundreds of copies of your own branded corporate book, which can be used in a great variety of ways:
As a welcome for new clients
As a loyalty gift and reminder of your services to current clients
To help position you as the authority in your specialty
To give away or to sell, when your in-house experts appear at speaking events.
So think about your corporate story or the philosophy of your business and how telling it in a book may help create a deeper, longer-lasting relationship with your clients and prospects.
With your story presented in the right way, they might just enjoy having dinner with you.
