How many times have you researched a product or service online? It may have been to get the best price for something you wanted or to find a solution for that tricky kitchen DIY job, or even to get an idea of where to go on holiday.
We all do it; it's how we’ve shopped for years. The things we buy, even impulse ones are all influenced by prior research, recommendations from friends or advice from trusted sources. Before the web, if you wanted a specific product you would have gone and seen it in store, you’d have asked a recommended tradesman for advice on that tricky kitchen repair and for holidays well there was Ceefax or your local travel agent not todays website chat solutions.
As business has moved online much of the personal interaction that traditionally occurred during the early stages of the sales process have gone. The web has depersonalised the sales process and consequently many businesses have forgotten how to sell. To effectively market your business online, you need to become that helpful tradesman again, that corner shop owner or the travel agent from yesteryear.
Help Your Business Grow
Buying behaviour hasn't changed; businesses have just lost sight of it and forgotten how the traditional sales journey works. Inbound marketing remedies this and helps businesses to recognise their buyers once again and helps them to nurture potential clients through to a sale.
Inbound is a proven marketing method for doing business online
Inbound is about identifying how your buyers make a purchase, what potential queries or problems they may be seeking answers for and using this information to take them along the buyers journey up until the point where they make a purchase. Traditionally this would have been done by the shopkeeper or a salesman and would have been a skill built upon generations of experience.
Open all hours, but have you
forgotten how to sell?
Here’s how to start selling again
There are four keys steps in the buyers journey. For each step I’ll show you what you should be doing online and how this compares to the role of the traditional shopkeeper. In each step I want you to picture Arkwright from the sitcom ‘Open all hours’. He wasn’t the best salesman by any stretch but he characterised a generation of brown coated shopkeepers who knew how to sell, and it’s a humorous way of visualising each stage.
Attract
KEY TOOLS: BLOGGING . SEO . WEB PAGE . SOCIAL PUBLISHING
The first step in the buyers journey is to ‘Attract’ visitors to your website. We don’t want just any visitors; we want the visitors that are most likely to become leads and ultimately customers. To do this we need to map out our ideal customer, we call this a persona.
A persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer, it contains all the information you could possibly want to know about that customer, including their age, sex, job, marital status, income, where they live, what they typically buy, how much they spend, their goals, challenges, difficulties, and common objections to products and services.
In Arkwright’s day this was much easier, as he could see his potential customers as they walked down the street and got to know their personas through social contact with other customers, their friends and the community. Online we’re one step removed from our customers, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t find out who they are and what drives them.
Once you’ve created personas for each of your customers you need to use this information to start attracting them to your website. The best way to do this is to create educational blog content that answers/solves their problems or challenges. It may sound strange but it is the single most effective way of attracting visitors.
But how do you get your potential
customers to see this content?
There are three ways to get this content in front of potential customers,
1. Write it to include the key search terms potential customers use to find products or services like yours.
2. Promote your content in the social spaces where your clients hang out (in Arkwright’s day it would have been at the laundrette or the street corner).
3. Optimise your website for these key terms and make your digital store front as enticing as possible.
Arkwright at work, attracting and converting customers
Convert
KEY TOOLS: FORMS . CALLS TO ACTION . LANDING PAGES . CONTACTS
If you ever saw Open all hours you’ll know that Arkwright was a master at converting any visitor that entered his shop into a customer, even if he didn’t have what they wanted he’d sell them something else.
Online, conversion isn’t so aggressive but to convert those visitors into leads you need to start collecting their contact information. Now site visitors aren’t going to give you their contact information without a reason, why would they? So the best way to collect this data is to offer something in return, something that adds value to their experience on your website, and something that helps them in their research. ‘How to guides’, ‘whitepapers’, ‘eBooks’ and ‘checklists’ are great digital currency that you can offer in return for contact information.
Close
KEY TOOLS: CRM . EMAILS . WORKFLOWS
Now that you’ve got some leads from potential customers the next step in the journey is to turn that lead into a sale. This is about identifying when that lead is most ready to make a purchase.
Arkwright had the edge on us here as he had the potential customer in front of him and could judge their reactions to his questions and suggestions.
We have to be a bit more scientific about it and monitor the number of times a lead visits our site, how many times they’ve downloaded our content or read our blog. This intelligence can then be used to instruct the sales team to make that call at the most opportune time. And if leads aren’t ready to buy just yet, use their contact details to send them an email with content you know they’ll love that pushes them a little further along the buyers journey.
Delight
KEY TOOLS: SURVEYS . SMART TEXT . SOCIAL MONITORING
Inbound marketing doesn’t just end when you’ve converted that lead into a client, it’s about delighting that client not only with the service you provide but with on going remarkable content.
You never know when that client will come back for more or who he or she will talk to. Converted happy clients are potentially your best advocates. Use surveys to find out what your customers thought of your product or service and ask them for reviews or testimonials. This data can be used to not only improve your offering but to attract the next new client.
Back in the day, Arkwright would never settle on just one sale, he would actively up sell his other products and use existing customers as referrers to new ones.
Final thought
So while inbound is a relatively new approach to doing business online, it is based on the very buying behaviour that worked so well off line. As online marketers inbound offers us the opportunity to get that online sales process right and empowers us to attract visitors, convert leads, close customers, and delight promoters for business growth. You don’t have to be a salesman like Arkwright you just need to know your customers, identify where they are in the Sales process and apply the steps detailed above.
To help you with inbound marketing we’ve created a handy checklist, which details the activity you should take in each of the four stages above. The guide is FREE just click on the link below to grab your copy
PHOTO CREDIT: Arkwright illustration - Arts Complex, www.solihullartscomplex.co.uk
