When Dean Jackson took the stage at the Copy Chief Live conference last year,  everyone there knew that some heavy-weight value bombs were about to be dropped.

In fact, the first thing he shared inspired me to write an article about it. 

And this may really change the way that you look at your business going forward.

So what he said was that “There’s five times more money in the long game than the short game.”

What does that mean? 

He brought up a study carried out by a company called The Inquiry Handling Service that analyzed how potential clients turn into actual clients.  And how long it takes for that to happen. 

Their research was based on millions of case studies and across different industries. The results turned out to be quite similar (and staggering) no matter the industry.

The pattern across the board showed that only 15% of prospects would become buyers in the first 90 days after the original interaction or inquiry about the product. 

99 out of 100 businesses at that stage are ready to deem such prospects “bad leads”.  

So, they focus on generating new leads leaving a boatload of money on the table.

And as the study showed, over half of the people who signed up on a list, or enquired about a product would buy one somewhen in the next 18 months.  

Slow and steady wins the race, huh?

But as online marketing dominated the marketing stage, we started to worship quick results and immediate feedback.

Forgetting the old good patience. 

And forgetting that some people are not ready to buy right away even if your offer, targeting and copy are spot-on aligned with their values. 

And that’s completely fine. Those are uncharted territories, an area for massive growth — if you play it smart. 

So the way to play the long game of marketing is to give your audience tons of value in small, repetitive doses — expecting nothing in return. 

Every (successful) modern business is 100% customer relationship-oriented.

So it’s all about overdelivering and going above and beyond to ‘treat your prospects like best customers until they prove not to be them. 

You can listen to the Dean’s entire speech here in the Copy Chief Podcast 

Now, in the next article, we’ll continue feasting on Dean Jackson’s insights from the very same speech. Stay tuned for that and I’ll show you a shockingly simple method to revive your ‘dead leads’. 

This dead simple approach to writing your emails allows you to bring your leads back from the graveyard—right to the order page. 

Await the next piece and in the meantime…