Adding Value Through This Big Shift In Your Marketing Approach
Customers are the lifeblood of your business and the key to how fast your business and your bottom line grow. In marketing, leads are the prospects that have expressed an interest in what you have to offer. Keeping your funnel full of qualified leads is important in today’s challenging and competitive times. In fact, it’s so important that your business must consistently generate leads in order to survive.
Before starting any lead generation plan, specific, quantitative goals must be set. Those goals should be kept in line with your business strategic objectives.
Your new leads can come in one of three ways: you can buy them, you can generate them through different lead channels, or your leads can be referred to you.
Your choice of getting your leads is determined by your desired speed of growth and your marketing budget.
Leads referred to you by your customers, friends, word-of-mouth, or associates are the least costly but will take time to get as long as you’re adding value in the marketplace. Buying your leads can be the fastest way to get new leads but it’s the most costly. There are companies out there that will sell you qualified leads you can market to.
On average , when buying leads, you can expect to pay several hundred dollars or several thousands of dollars depending on your industry. If you’re ready to increase your marketing efforts and you have the budget to get your leads this way, you stand a good chance to convert some of those leads into paying customers. But the majority of those leads will not be qualified for your offers.
The other way is to target prospects through lead generation strategies via digital or online marketing. Such lead generation strategies include pay-per-click advertising, social media marketing, video marketing, banner ads, and so on. The good thing about online lead generation is that not only will your leads be targeted if done the right way, but they will also offer a high return on your marketing dollar.
Why Market Your Business Online?
The reason for marketing your business online is to get new leads and customers. Online marketing includes your Website and the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Other parts include podcasts, pay per click (PPC), pay per view (PPV), banner ads, video marketing, mobile marketing and more.
Along with all of the tactics mentioned above, when it comes to online marketing, you will need to establish and leverage your authority in order for you to succeed. You will need to focus your efforts on strategies like branding, search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), authority sites, etc.
If you’re new to online marketing or have a little experience online, you can easily become confused. But instead of focusing on all the online terms, the focus should be on two simple things: promoting your business online and building value-added relationships with your leads and customers.
The Value of Marketing Online
Technology has changed things to the point where things are moving faster and faster. People are on the go and technology continues to move forward at break-neck speed where the Internet continues to change on a daily basis.
The Internet has become an extension of our modern life to the point where almost everyone in the western part of the world is connected to some extent.
Why is it important for you know this? Because if you’re not visible online, you miss the opportunity of having your potential customers becoming aware of your business and what you have to offer.
Consumers are used to shopping online on a regular basis and the more often we buy online, the more we get used to the process and we’re willing to frequently spend. As a result your target prospect is already online waiting for you to remedy their pain points.
However, due to people becoming savvy shoppers online, you will be judged against every online marketer that can meet their needs and solve their problems. This increase in competition from other online marketers means that your marketing must be stronger to get customers to find you and pick you over the competition.
Therefore, your marketing must be executed well, with the right message at the right time to the right consumer. For all these reasons, we need to provide great targeted advertisements and customer service in order to make our businesses successful and keep our customers happy.
When marketing online, it’s essential to have a marketing funnel that reaches your ideal prospects and add value to them in the process. Your Lead Generation-Profit Maximizing Funnel will:
· Help you find the right marketing methods to solve customers’ problems.
· Help you understand them better.
· Help you put the right message in front of your target audience.
Through this model you have the opportunity to create a real competitive advantage for your business. If your competition is already great at listening to their customer and planning the best marketing strategy, then having a lead generation-profit maximizing funnel will help you quickly catch up and even surpass the competition.
How To Reach Your Customers
These days customers demand and expect more and more. Increased competition from other online marketers has placed even more demand on online marketers to tailor their marketing to put the right offers in front of the right people.
Marketing is about offering things a certain section of people want, then finding the best ways to let those people know those things are available, priced fairly for them. It shouldn’t be complicated, brilliant, sleazy, deceptive, win-lose, tricky, difficult, or anything else. It’s about presenting offers to those people most likely to respond.
As a Marketer you must cut through all the competitive noise in order to attract new customers and keep them coming back time and time again. In order to succeed your message must speak to your customers’ wants and needs. This is what will make them happy and at the same time grow your business and bottom line.
As entrepreneurs, getting the right outcome for our business and customers means always finding the right message to put in front of them. Therefore, to successfully serve them you will need to:
· Know at what stage leads and customers are in their relationship with your business.
· Put the right message in front of them that will get them to respond.
· Keep an ear out and find out what’s important and give them what they want.
· Develop messages that will have the biggest impact on your prospects, leads, and customers.
Customer Expectations Should Be Considered at Every Stage of Your Business
Why do some businesses get a constant flow of prospects and leads while others struggle to get any? It all comes down to setting up a marketing powerhouse.
Building a marketing powerhouse that constantly brings in new leads, follows up on them, nurtures them and converts them into raving fans and customers. When it comes to your marketing, the money is in the follow-up and the value-added relationships you build as a result.
Immediately after capturing a lead into your funnel, they should receive repeated contacts over time. These contacts shouldn’t be ones where you try to pester your leads into buying. It’s all about building a relationship, giving them value in advance of them buying anything from you and in the process building trust and showing authority in your field of expertise.
Most leads wouldn’t be ready to buy right away. This is why it’s essential to stay in touch with them and SERVE them.
Listen to your prospects, leads and customers and they’ll tell you exactly how they want you to market to them. To satisfy customers everything you do must be built around them. This is due to customer expectations that continue to increase and becomes challenging to keep them happy and buying from you.
When you put the customer at the heart of your business, you find out their wants and build solid solutions for them. THE CUSTOMER IS KING!
You need to know how to harness the power of your customers and use greater understanding of the right marketing message that will progress them through each stage of the Lead Generation-Profit Maximizing Funnel.
It’s all in well executing (not perfecting as there’s always room for improvement) your marketing methods. To have an effective lead generation-profit maximizing machine, you need to continue discovering the right marketing option and stick to it. It’s a constant discovery that will take time when testing and optimizing what will work for your business.
But when testing and optimizing are done correctly, your business and bottom line grow accordingly.
