More and more business owners and marketers are using the internet to grow their businesses...or at least they are trying to!
They are attracting new leads from people stumbling across their websites at one end of the scale and at the other end, they are winning through sophisticated strategies involving SEO, paid visitors through banner ads and pay per click ads (PPC), Social Media, online events, JV's, affiliate marketing among others. All of these strategies or mumbo-jumbo to many, are designed to drive traffic to your website. A good website will then have various Calls To Action in place to try and convert some of this traffic or visitors into clients. This can be a great strategy, but on the surface, it fails in one of the most basic of marketing realities. People do business with people. People they trust and have built a relationship with. So if you rely solely on your website for your new leads you are going to be burning a huge number of visitors to find the ones who will act spontaneously...and they do exist. But you go to all this effort and lose out on the opportunity to convert the others, in fact the majority, who are not spontaneous.
Build An Irresistible Customer Contact Strategy
Did you know it can take 7-9 contacts with someone to build what marketers like to call "top of mind awareness?" Up until then, the contact doesn't know you, much less trust you. So how are you going to do business? Traditional marketing involves advertising, but smart marketers and business owners soon learnt that if you built a list and crafted sales letters with offers in them to mail to the people on this list, that they could generate more sales and repeat sales.
They could create a customer for life. And this had a big impact on creating long term sustainable, profitable and valuable businesses. Well why not take this thinking into the digital or internet world also?
Email Marketing
Make an interesting and valuable offer to your website visitors in exchange for their email address (and let them know that you intend emailing them from time to time) and start building your Digital Mailing List. Do exactly the same stuff that traditional marketers have done forever, just in a digital environment.
To many of you this will be obvious, but the vast majority of websites don't have any mechanism for showing interest. In effect those websites are just billboards that people are driving past without slowing down to have a look.
So think about your web strategy, are you building a list of prospects; of future clients? What if the traffic to your website stopped tomorrow? With a list...so what! You can still market to a group of prospects and make new sales. Its insurance for your business, let alone a damn good business growth strategy. So what are you waiting for?
John Mason
ULB Global
www.unlockingbusiness.com
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