Unfortunately not every business has a bottomless budget when it comes to marketing their services and products. In Reality it’s a well known fact that many smaller and start-up companies don’t have a marketing budget at all. But whatever your organisations size or budget there are some simple, purse-friendly activities you can do to generate quality leads.
Business Marketing typically has one objective and three goals:
The Marketing Objective:
To get the phone ringing, with enquiries from interested potential customers eager to move forward.
The Marketing Goals:
- Build, manage and maintain a “Business Reputation”
- A Business Reputation is not what you say about your business it’s actually what customers say about you.
- Build manage and maintain a brand for your business
- A brand is what you sell, its what you say about your business and what customers are looking for.
- Generate Enquiries
- You need to engage customers and make it easy and attractive for potential customers to contact you.
Do you know your ideal customer?
Today people have issues, wants and needs potential buyers are looking for solutions to their issues, wants and needs. Here they use the internet to research and engage, that’s why its important you have a reputation, brand and a easy process for prospects to engage.
Start by profiling the issues, wants and needs your product and service provides an effective solution for. Then define the problem.
Once you know the problem your product and service fixes, try to identify the traits of a person looking for that solution and where they may look.
Once you know these details you can focus on getting key information to your ideal customers much more effectively and provide them with the answers they are looking for.
Are you being social?
According to Wikipedia the world population in 2016 in 7.4 billion, it is estimated that 2.75 billion people are regular social media users, many of these have more than one social media account.
Facebook appears to be the most popular Social media globally with over 1.6 billion registered users globally.
Many companies, and perhaps your competitors are using Social media based engagement activities. Some of these firms are getting people to engage with their brand and building their reputation.
According to a study carried out by LinkedIn, 82% of SMBs find social media an effective activity for generating leads, why? Because It’s cheap, if not free, you can effectively reach hundreds if not thousands of your ideal and potential customers and if you’re generating timely, interesting content you’ll get regular followers.
Timely is the key here – don’t fall into the trap of bombarding people or they’ll easily switch off, no matter how compelling the subject. Likewise, don’t post for the sake of it and always make sure that any questions or feedback received through social media are responded to professionally and in a timely manner.
Today, social media should be a part of every company’s marketing strategy as a key part of client engagement, no matter what their industry or product.
Collect real data then work out how best to use it!
Analyzing the customers on-line journey to making the enquiry can improve the customers experience. Once the prospect has contacted you then you should have a system in place that can capture the enquiry, identifying where they found your contact details.
So simple and yet so many company’s still don’t put in place steps to gather and record this information. However, as more people become internet savvy don’t forget to ensure you have a simple, robust and easily accessible privacy policy in place, ask yourself this question “if you felt a company was unable to protect your privacy, would you still deal with them?”
Once you’ve got them, don’t lose them!
Gaining a tight control over your client journey and ensuring every touch point is fine tuned is a fabulous way to ensure you are retaining as many customers to purchase as possible. This is a bit of a spring cleaning activity to assess every aspect of the journey – where are people coming to your website from? What pages of your site are they visiting? How long are they spending on each page? Are they repeat visitors? How are your incoming calls answered? How quickly are the calls answered? Bear in mind, the more touch points you have, the more likely you are to lose people in the funnel so try and keep the journey as simple as possible.
For many organisations, Google Analytics will provide a great insight into how people access and navigate your website and at what point they’re dropping out of the funnel.
Always request feedback
When the customer nears the end of the sales joiurney it’s a good chance to request feedback, be prepared to take the good with the bad as more unhappy customers are ikely to respond then unhappy customers.
Take the honest feedback and work with it, share the comments with the senior management team and show them what’s actually been said about your brand, this will assist the management team to better understand what’s actually happening in the business and asses’ customer comments.
Start Selling Today
Marketing is the activity that gets the phone ringing, sales starts when you answer the phone, feel free to comment below we will try to answer your questions quickly.
If you prefer to chat please email hello@webleandspro.co.uk or call us on 01332 497496
