You’ve heard of that poser who manages to get all the girls by lying, cheating, and hitting on everything with a skirt. You may even laugh at his antics, when you see them portrayed by the character named Barnie on “How I Met Your Mother.” Other times he makes you cringe at his calculating and impersonal techniques to improve his conquest numbers. Whether you love him or hate him, he has some valuable lessons to offer online marketers. Today’s social marketing world depends on authenticity and personal branding, but it also can make use of some techniques that players have used for centuries to reel in the goods.

It’s all about the Numbers

Players, like Barnie, know that rejection is inevitable in dating as well as in business. You may have to struggle a while to get your first “yes.” But, you definitely increase your chances if you market as many people as possible while trying to make each contact as personal as possible. It’s considered uncouth to solicit every woman in a bar to see who will bite, but the same approach in business is exactly what you need to get results. Persistence in your online marketing venture is bound to reap success even if it can get monotonous or repetitive. The wider you cast your net, the more likely you’ll bring in a big haul.

Create an Attractive Hook

Some days Barnie is a pilot and other days he is a doctor. He has no qualms about making up a story to gain the confidence or sympathy of his intended target. This type of antic can be successful in dating and in business, with the exception that creating enticing stories better be based on some modicum of truth in business or you could end up sued. The technique is still valid, however, in that you want to find the hook that appeals to your target audience and then use that to get them to connect with you on a personal level. This can encompass something as simple as indicating that you love pets and donate money to shelters from every purchase made or that your business was founded to solve some personal problem in your life. The key is to have a story that you can go to when someone wants to know who you are and why they should buy from you.

Get Contact Information

Internet marketers spend a lot of time creating social profiles, tweeting, posting images, and writing blog articles. All of that is great for exposure, but if you don’t focus on the final goal like Barnie, you’ll just end up with a lot of goodnight kisses and little else to show for it. Like Barnie, you got to start with the phone number – in this case, the email address. Email marketing is the first step to close the deal and without it, you’re wasting your time. If you don’t have an email program set up to market all your contacts and you aren’t automating it to be able to service multiple clients at a time, you’re only sabotaging yourself.

Close the Deal

Decide how many contacts it takes to close the deal. A real player might hang around for three dates and if nothing happens, moves on. Likewise, if you’re not getting responses from your email list after a set number of contacts, you need to review your entire game plan. You should be reaping results. You want to build an audience, but the audience needs to be a paying audience otherwise your business will inevitably fold.

If you’re not getting people to buy your services then you need to look at where there might be a mismatch in who you’ve targeted and what you are selling. You might find you need to create a couple of different deals – one for low-income people and another for more high-end customers. It could be that no one is interested in your product or service and it needs to be tweaked. Maybe you are not asking for the sale outright and that is also a factor. If you have a full-blown email responder system in place, you can view which emails get the most attention and click-through rates and that can help you customize your message so that people buy more often. In the end, you will find that you can maintain your authenticity and sell a good product even as you use some of the techniques that have made players like Barnie successful with less noble intentions.