A key issue for people setting up a business is how to build a reputation that will attract customers.
When your reputation is good enough, people will ask you to contact them.
Why is reputation so important? Because as owner-managers, we are all really short of time and we really need to make our prospecting time count. What we need is a steady trickle of enquiries and referrals that will allow us to spend time with good prospects and so maximize our selling time. A good strategy is to drive traffic to our web-site which is set up so as to maximize the amount of exposure we get and convert interest into a live enquiry using effective language that results in an easy to follow call to action.
Reputation is a complex animal. It has something to do with expertise and competence, something to do with likeability and something to do with how many people have been exposed to you, your ideas, your personality, your company's goods and services.
It depends on how many people trust you. Trust is developed by a combination of
• Knowing your subject
• Delivering what you say you will when you say you will
• Being easy to work with
Reputation is based on quality x quantity (leverage). Once you have a reputation you have to roll it out.
The story you have to tell depends on how you think and what your values are, how your team thinks and what their values are and what your customers think and what their values are.
And it's what drives pull marketing. For a small business that's the way to start to build the marketing machinery that will allow you to generate the referrals and warm leads that you need. So we need to become skilled at pull rather than push in our promotion so we can generate the referrals that we need.
Traditional mechanisms of push marketing don't seem to work – mainly because of overuse by companies who don't understand that free doesn't mean free and that people don't like having their time and attention hi-jacked in crude and obvious ways.
So telesales, direct sales, and email marketing are all less effective than they once were.
Today's marketing strategies involve attracting attention, developing interest, getting the customer to contact you and getting their permission to follow up.
Identifying and using permission marketing / pull methodologies are the secret of generating a stream of qualified leads. That's why reputation is so important. But fortunately the most effective way of becoming attractive is to be yourself – be who you are – develop a story and tell it.
So what are the 7 things you should do to attract customers to you.
1) Really understand how search engines work. Find keywords that people are searching for but not many sites have. Work them into your pages.
2) Really understand how people take in information on the internet
• Concise, bullet pointed information is easily taken in and remembered.
• good writing and pictures say quality
• factual information that does what it says on the tin delivers attention in a way that sales puffery does not
• above all don't waste your prospects' time with slow loading graphics, clever videos, poor site navigation and LINKS THAT DON'T WORK ANYMORE
3) Drive traffic to your site by judicious use of Google Ad-Words or Overture. This need not be expensive – and in fact it's cheap market research. As well as telling you which phrases are pulling from your ads, the ones that don't convert still tell you what phrases people are searching for – so that you can work these into signatures and content of blogs (see below).
You can change the text of the offer at will and qualify the prospect by making the offer specific and being clear that you are selling rather than giving things away. Do make sure, however, that you have a strong landing page with a clear and easy to execute call to action – otherwise all the good work will be wasted.
4) Blog! What does this mean – in English? Basically its short for web-log – it means that if you write an article in a place that's picked up by the search engines, you will boost the attention that's given to your site. Good places to go are sites with high rankings themselves. Places like Ecademy or Silicon.Com. If you have good content, ask questions so that other people respond and work your keywords into the text, you will be surprised at the effect that this will have on the placing for you, your company and your products in a relatively short space of time.
5) Give something away free. Write up 10 tips that people who might want to use your service would like to know and have it available as a download on your site. Use the pay per click route to drive people to it
6) Use PR – an under-rated tool by small business. If you identify key journalists in your local or trade press and provide them with well-written, easy to sub-edit copy, the chances are good that they'll use it. If they've written it, then it must be true and if there's a link to your site and the site works – more enquiries.
7) Network – go and meet people – ask for referrals. Give referrals – connect people. Tell them who you would like to meet and ask them who they want to meet. And have literature with you – it doesn't have to be amazing but it does need to be clear, to the point, have an offer and a call to action and a link to your website.
All of these routes should involve a stage where you explicitly ask for permission to contact them with further information from time to time. Because that will form the basis of Part 2 of this article – how to keep your customers. In the meantime if you follow the advice given here – you should greatly boost the number of enquiries you get because all of the suggested approaches will enhance your reputation in one way or another.
7 Proven ways to keep your customers' can also be found under this category or visit http://www.howtodobusiness.com for more information on Alan's workshops, e-books and free factsheets. |
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