Everybody wants great marketing tips, but it all starts with learning how to connect with prospects.
Here’s a simple marketing formula to remember:
Bad results = Company that is unsuccessful attracting new clients / prospects.
Good results = Company that successfully attracts new clients and prospects.
Great results = Company that excels at acquiring new clients, growing their value, and converting them into ambassadors for your brand.
Nowadays, customers are more powerful than ever. The internet gives them infinite access to resources about the products and services they wish to buy (reviews, specs, alternatives, etc).
Social media allows them to share their experiences, and these opinions are very persuasive!
As a result, you MUST think of marketing outside of the traditional office/showroom/trade shows/etc.
People are forming impressions about your business BEFORE they ever interact with you! Many are making decisions simply by what they see and read online.
The most successful marketing today involves BUILDING A BOND WITH CUSTOMERS WHEREVER THEY ARE.
This entails embracing customers on social media, your website, review sites, and any other industry related platform.
You might think this is easier said than done, but it really just takes a commitment to follow a successful strategy.
In this series of articles, we will outline several steps to helping you connect better with prospects.
Lesson 1 – Add Personalization to Your Marketing
Just adding your prospects name to marketing material won’t cut it anymore. You have to personalize your efforts such that you speak directly to the individuals needs and wants. This requires more data and analytics about your customers, so make sure you hire the right firm to help you target the RIGHT prospects.
Here’s an example with Facebook advertising:
NFL teams want to convert individual game ticket holder into season ticket holders. Thus, the a great marketing firm will spend extensive efforts on learning which teams an individual follows on Facebook…which players they “like”…what games they have checked-in at…etc.
This information is extremely valuable in targeting the RIGHT marketing message to the RIGHT individual.
A good firm will also use Google search patterns to provide a specific message directly to an individual looking for this information.
Are you using Google Analytics and other stats in your marketing and website efforts?
If not, you are probably missing out on critical data that could be leveraged to connect better with your prospects.
Think about a healthcare provider like a hospital.
Typically, a hospital will run nebulous online (and offline) ads about how great their hospital is and target these ads based on little more than the location of the prospect.
Better hospitals will run ads that focus specifically on patients that have conditions related to their specialty and are the most profitable.
For example…
If a patient is searching for breast cancer keywords on Google, they will create an ad to appear that would be SPECIFICALLY related to breast cancer instead of just general, nebulous information about the hospital.
In part II of this article series, we will focus on a second aspect of how to connect with prospects…
Connect with prospects based on their OCCUPATION
Leverage
