Traffic is critical to generating leads and making sales both in the real world and online.
After all, there is no point in having the flashest storefront if no one passes by to then be enticed to enter.
By the same token, there’s little point in having lots of traffic if you have no way of engaging that traffic.
Chicken and egg situation? Not really. Any effort and cost in getting traffic is wasted if visitors pass by without stopping and looking for something of real interest to them.
In this series of Back to Basics I am revisiting the essentials of engaging with visitors to identify and build a relationship with prospective buyers.
Go to your website.
For the moment, ignore what it visually looks like. Instead look at how you try to engage people. By engage I mean get them to interact with you.
Contact page? Sign up for a newsletter? Ask for a free consultation?
Good. How’s that working for you? How many responses to those ‘offers’ are you getting each day? How targeted are those leads?
Those type of offers worked okay ten years ago but these days there are too many distractions and a lack of trust in giving contact information for many people.
Any invitations to interact with you need to be compelling.
For an offer to be compelling it needs to be targeted at your typical prospective buyer and their issues, concerns, questions or problems.
So your first objective is to be very clear and specific on who your target market is.
When I taught start-up business owners one of the biggest issues they faced was that they usually could not define who would be likely to buy their product or service.
The less clear you are on this, the more fuzzy and ineffective your marketing becomes.
Nail this and you create a conduit to your customers.
Stop thinking from the perspective of what you sell and think in terms of what and why people buy.
Seriously, don’t skimp on this exercise or gloss it over. It really is fundamental to your success.
Two questions:
- Who specifically is likely to buy from me?
- What questions, issues or concerns might they have that a product or service like mine would solve for them?
Example:
- Parents, usually first-timers, in their 20’s to 40’s who have a child who won’t sleep easily and are becoming increasingly frustrated
- What are safe (physically and psychologically) methods for getting a baby or toddler to develop better sleeping habits? Why won’t my child sleep? Am I a bad parent? Am I doing something wrong? Do other parents have this issue?
There’s no right or wrong answer to these questions. Just levels of detail. The more detail the better.
Think about airlines. They all have the same objective – to provide air transport for anyone who wants to travel from A to B. But their target market varies. Qantas targets travellers who want quality and safety whereas Jetstar target younger travellers who want cheap fares and will live with some inconvenience. Emirates focus on customers who want luxury and comfort.
Each have a clear picture of their ideal customer.
By having a clear idea of your ideal customer you don’t exclude other buyers who might identify with your marketing. But your marketing is targeted to specific people. Shoot buckshot in a field and you might hit the occasional target: use a 303 then take aim and you’ll increase your chances of hitting the target more often.
Go grab a coffee, carve out an hour from your day and sketch out the clearest picture you can of your ideal prospect. Give him/her a name. What do they look like? Where do they live? How much do they earn? What are their values? Get as much detail down as you can.
Do the work. It will pay off.