Online marketers love to talk about converting cold audiences. You see their ads in your social media feed, highlighting their conversion rates and offering to teach you their tricks and tactics. But before you get sucked into their funnel, let me share a better way to convert a cold audience.

Most entrepreneurs know that it’s exponentially easier to sell to a hot or warm audience than a cold audience. But it takes time and effort to build a warm audience. And a lot of people aren’t willing to put in the work. They want a shortcut so they can make more money faster.

Now what I’m gonna tell you is that if you want to be an entrepreneur who puts people first, selling to a cold audience using tactics and gimmicks to make them buy now isn’t the serve-first way. So, let’s talk about how a warm versus a cold audience plays into thinking about serve-first entrepreneurship.

Warm Audience Vs Cold Audience

Let’s step back and clarify what the difference is between a warm and cold audience.

A warm audience is people who already know you, know what you offer, and who have been following you for a while. 

(Yup, that means people who have only watched a few minutes of your Facebook Live don’t count as warm.)

A cold audience is everyone else. They don’t know who you are, you’re not connected with them, and they aren’t aware of your message yet… which means they’re not exactly primed to buy.

When you’re selling, your messaging, copy, headline, and so on, need to match the level of audience awareness. If you’re trying to sell to someone who’s aware of their problem but doesn’t know what your product is, there’s a mismatch. 

This mismatch means that trying to sell to a cold audience is gonna be tough.

Since marketing is about presenting the right offer to the right person at the right time with the right message, how are you going to do this with a cold audience? All of those things are very specific.

Why Most Cold Selling Strategies Flop

If you’ve been in business for a while you’ve likely got a sense of what kind of audience you attract. You can come up with the right offer for them. You know your ideal customer, their problems, what they need and what they want, and you create that offer.

But if you’re trying to sell to cold people, getting that right offer in front of them at the right time with the right message is gonna be hard.

You could do it, but you’re gonna need a large number of cold prospects to find people who will resonate with your messaging. That’s why sending a cold audience directly to a sales page and actually making sales is hard, and not many people make it work.

Does it ever work? Sure. Sometimes you make sales, but it’s hard. And the way people tend to make sales using cold selling strategies isn’t a serve-first way. They do a launch, advertise to people who don’t know them yet, get them into the launch funnel… and most of them fail to convert.

You need to be an expert at messaging to be able to get cold people to come in and buy from you over a short and condensed time. It involves agitating the pain, creating a false sense of urgency and scarcity, and exerting pressure.

Now a lot of entrepreneurs don’t wanna admit that’s what it is. It’s using psychological leavers to ratchet up pressure and force people to make a decision.

So people struggle and fail to sell to a cold audience. Then they think, “I’ve got to get better at these strategies.” But what happens is that they find some other gimmicks to layer on top of the other strategy to make it more effective in increasing conversions. That’s the traditional mantra in online marketing, but it’s not the way to serve your people.

A Better Option: Warm Up Your Cold Audience BEFORE You Sell

Trying to sell to a cold audience using gimmicks is not the way to be an entrepreneur who serves people. The serve-first way is to pause for a minute and ask, “Is this stuff serving my audience? Is putting pressure on people to buy on my timeline serving them?”

I’m simply gonna say, if you’re layering these tactics on because you want to increase your conversion and you want to launch at this particular time and get people to buy… that isn’t about serving.

The serve-first way is to grow your warm audience by bringing cold people in and nurturing them. It’s about building a connection with them so that they get to know you and make the right decision at the right time for them, not for you.

Instead of selling from the beginning, take them on a journey so that they understand all the things you offer. Educate and serve them so that they know what they need and how you can help them if they want it.

The serve-first way is about figuring out what serves people and giving them time to make a decision. It isn’t about putting maximum pressure on them to serve your agenda.

Some people might say, well, sometimes we need to help them make a decision. But I say: if you have to create urgency and a false reason to  make them decide now, there’s a problem with your offer. If you’re addressing a real demand in the market, you don’t have to do that crap.

Instead of figuring out a way to agitate the pain, figure out a way to create the right offer that meets an actual demand so there’s actual urgency when people are ready to buy.

That’s how selling to a warm audience fits here. When you focus on a warm audience, you engage and connect with them. You take them on a journey and trust that they’re gonna purchase when it’s right for them.

Beyond Gimmicks

Talking to a cold audience is different from talking to a warm audience. Hopefully, you see how the serve-first approach isn’t about selling to a cold audience. Instead, bring people into your world, serve them for free during the connection phase, and when it’s right for them, they’ll convert.

That’s the BADA$$ Online Marketing University framework: commit to lead an audience, connect with your audience, and convert your audience to buyers. If you wanna learn more about how you can turn your cold audience into warm people who will convert when it’s the right time for them, then sign up today—it’s FREE (no gimmicks).

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