:: New businesses often succumb to the temptation to go for marketing policies that will generate the most visible presence possible. But that counts for little if you can’t turn them into customers.
When reviewing the marketing activities of new businesses, it is interesting to see what motivates business owners to perform certain actions. If you are a new business, before you do anything, it may be worth stepping back and working out a strategy first. For growing businesses, there are three marketing strategies you should consider implementing:
• Visibility strategies for new products or services
• Lead-generation strategies for new business
• Customer-nurturing strategies for business growth
Although the logical order appears to be visibility, then lead-generation, then customer-nurturing, it is essential that new businesses actually do the reverse as without a customer-nurturing strategy, you will lose your customers as fast as you get them; without a lead-generation strategy, you will fail to get enquiries from your visitors.
••• Customer-nurturing
You should layer your products and services by the level of trust you have established with your customers.
For prospects, if you work out what results they are looking for and provide a simple solution for them; this will demonstrate your grasp of their needs and bring clarity to your message. For returning customers, they will have seen what you can do and will be ready to accept a higher value product. You can offer upgrade paths, additional services or even bespoke solutions. The key to your customer-nurturing strategy is to only present the selected range of products or services appropriate to the layer of trust you have with the buyer.
••• Lead-generation
The key to your lead-generation strategy is to constantly test compelling offers to your target customer types. You can then measure the successes of these campaigns and repeat the ones that work best. On your website, you can present these offers that will appeal to the customers at each trust layer. This will ensure your customers regularly return and make a sale enquiry when it appeals to them.
••• Visibility
Once you are confident in your lead-generation strategy and your customer-nurturing strategy locks in your customers, your visibility strategy will come down to budget. When targeting specific customer types, you can create a special page for each product or service - called landing pages. Again, this can be tested and measured to determine the best page to increase your level of enquiries.
Although very appealing, visibility strategies alone will fail. Only when you plan and implement these strategies will your website begin to work. By creating a site that is tuned to trust layers, you can run offers to attract specific customers and build your business. Once you have a large customer base, who needs visibility anyway? |
