What is Attraction Marketing

Attraction marketing, sometimes called reverse marketing starts from an extremely old-fashioned principle. That principle is that it is better to give than to receive. In other words you give away your content first and then expect afterwards people will buy your services.

Many people may find this counterintuitive. After all, if you give away a lot of your content, then you have less for people to buy. Won’t you make less money?

The rationale behind this concept however is simple. If you give away great content to your website visitors, people will come to you. People will be attracted to return to your website because of what you have given them.

Instead of telling people that your products are great and that they should buy from you, you give them quite a lot of that content away for free. People can then read it and enjoy it. Such people are psychologically much more likely to buy from you in the future then if you had not given them this content. Why is that?

The answer is simple. If people have had a chance to consume your information product for instance in the main for free, then they might buy for instance the video package that goes with it. If you have given people great content over your newsletter for months, and then you recommend to them to buy something, they have learned to trust you.

Ultimately, attraction marketing turns on the question of trust. Trust is a commodity that is sadly lacking in the modern digital economy as so many people have been ripped off. That's why companies now give away their content first.

People can see the kind of content and the kind of services that are offered at the outset. They can see that they are being offered valuable free content and this speaks well for the quality of the information they may choose to buy. Also, psychologically, if you are choosing between two companies and one has already given you a lot of great free content and the other hasn't, which one would you trust more? The one that has given you the stuff or the one that is merely telling you they can deliver you great content?

In the online digital economy, as Chris Anderson defines it in his book Free, reputation is all. With online marketing, attraction marketing can be easier because it focuses first on building trust with your customers which works tremendously well.