Tuesday 21 August 2012

3 Laws of Customer Attraction


According to the Law of Attraction, the phrase "I need more money" allows the subject to continue to "need more money". If the subject wants to change this, they would focus their thoughts on the goal (having more money) rather than the problem (needing more money). This might take the form of phrases such as "I have as much money as I need" or "I have a job that pays very well". The same is true for attracting new customers.  Instead of just saying I want more leads you need to have a switch in mindset. In order to attract more customers, you need to change from a outbound push strategy into an inbound attraction strategy.

Law #1: Get Found by Potential Customers

Getting found means your best prospects find you. It's all about the top of your sales pipeline and how you fill it with qualified traffic.  It means that you have identified who your ideal prospects are and where they spend their time online.  That way when your prospects do research on Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or elsewhere in the blogosphere, they find you. Whether they are looking for information, advice, entertainment, thought leadership, analysis, predictions, tools, data or conversation, they find your content, your people, your brand, your products, and your company.
There are 3 steps to getting found:
  1. Create 
    First, you create remarkable content. That's the core of inbound marketing. This means blog articles, web pages, videos, photos, webinars, whitepapers, and tools that are useful, interesting, thought-provoking, controversial, and entertaining. This is no small feat, and it's the most critical step if you're serious about generating more traffic and leads. You need to determine your content creation strategy and schedule and then stick to it.
  2. Optimize
    Next, you optimize your content for search engines (SEO) and other audiences.  To ensure you give your valuable content the best chance possible of drawing traffic from the web, you need it to be optimized. In essence, this section is about maximizing your ROC - return on content. This includes On-page SEO, Off-Page SEO and optimizing for other channels.
  3. Promote
    Finally, you promote your remarkable content in the social media-sphere through email marketing, and other channels. You'll be promoting content on social media sites, on Google (through PPC), via email marketing to your marketing database (your contacts), and via offline events (like tradeshows).

Law #2: Convert More Visitors into Leads & Customers

Getting found is great. You're writing articles and producing videos (creating remarkable content), you have SEO optimize your content, and you're using all the social media sites and running email and PPC campaigns to promote your content. At the end of the day, however, we aren't in this for fun. We're also not in this for traffic. The goal is acquiring quality sales leads and customers, so let's focus now on converting as much of your traffic as possible to leads and customers.
Note that there is potentially huge value if you can increase your conversion rate and generate more leads from existing traffic. If you only get a few hundred visits per week, increasing your conversion rate by 1% can generate 10-15 more leads per month. If you get a few thousand visits a week, you stand to increase your lead flow by 100-150 leads per month.
In order to convert visitors into leads you need to follow the following steps:
  1. Convert visitors into leads
    1. Targeted Traffic  - Landing Pages
      Targeted traffic refers to a known audience that you draw to a specific page. For instance, if you email everyone you met at a trade show and offer them a free trial of your product, that is a "targeted" traffic source because all the visitors have something in common - they are all from your trade show. Converting a targeted stream of traffic requires two things:
      1. A well-crafted offer on a landing page that is designed specifically for the audience you will be driving to the page, and
      2. A stream of targeted traffic that you drive to the page.
    2. Organic Traffic - Website & Blog
      The inherent challenge here is that when someone hits a page on your site or your blog, you don't actually know where that visitor came from or what is on his/her mind. Hence it's hard to design an offer specifically for that person. Thus, you need to think about the following:
      1. What are the range of conversion paths on your site? Where might people land, and what paths through your content might they take?
      2. How do you put offers and calls to action along the most common paths so that you have the maximum chance of getting the "right" offer in front of a given visitor to maximize the chance of converting them into a leads.
  2. Convert leads to customers
    50 to 80 percent of all leads are potentially wasted if not managed properly.  Industry surveys indicate that only 10 to 25 percent of all leads are interested and ready to buy. A similar percentage of leads are not qualified at all. The problem is how you get those leads from a “blind date” to happily “married with children”? You need to have a defined lead nurture strategy.  (To learn more check out this free guide The 6 Steps to Lead Management: From Blind Date to Married with Children). Done right, proper lead nurturing creates more educated buyers, helps you better understand their needs, and ultimately translates into more revenue. According to Aberdeen research, companies that are Best-in-Class in the lead management see a 90% improvement in companywide annual revenue growth, and on average a 59% performance increase.

Law 3: Analyze

One of the most important parts of any successful attraction strategy is continually measuring the progress of your efforts and optimizing accordingly. Each day, you will want to monitor how much traffic your site is getting, as well as where that traffic is coming from. Hopefully, a solid chunk of traffic is clicking through to you after searching on a keyword relevant to your site. You'll want to check each keyword that people are using to find you. If there are specific keywords that are generating more leads than others, it would be a solid/good idea to create more content around them. You can do this through blog posts or even a Web Voter of content on the subject.
Continually monitor the conversion rates of your landing pages. If your conversion rates aren't as high as you'd like, make sure that you've implemented applicable best practices -- or build a new landing page to try something different! Most importantly, use the shifts you see in your analytics to drive the next steps of your inbound marketing strategy!
As your work ebbs and flows and your priorities shift, you may choose to do more or less inbound marketing every day. Basically, every day we want you to (1) analyze, (2) publish, and (3) be social. By following 3 laws of customer attraction, you can achieve growth in traffic and leads of 10-30% per month.  The techniques in this methodology work.  But it isn’t magic.  It only works if you make it work.
Want to learn more about how to build a lead generation engine that will attract your ideal prospects? Check out this free guide.

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