Lead Generation, Customer Acquisition, And Customer Retention

Hi guys. This is Monique, and you're listening to episode three of the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. In today's episode, I'm answering another audience question. When you also want to ask me a question and get it answered right here on the show, go to dragon-digital-marketing.com and just reach out. This question is from Prakash and you can go check him out on Twitter, that's @DigitalDairy. His question is: "How can I attract more clients to my business?" Lead Generation and successfully guiding leads through your marketing funnel and make them customers is a super requested topic, and I think that this episode is going to be tremendously useful. So let's get straight to it. The most important thing is to know your ideal customer. Let me tell you why. You have to know who you're looking for and who you want to attract. Without a crystal clear picture of your ideal customer, you probably wouldn't even know where to start looking. Think about their industry. Think about what their goals are, what their key performance indicators or KPI's are. Know their business inside and out. What's their main struggle? What size does their organization have? Where do they live? What kind of education do they have? Which social networks through they use? What are the hobbies and the interests of your ideal customers? What makes them happy, sad, scared, or relieved? How can you make their lives easier? What is the value that you can provide? You got to position yourself as the answer. When you have a crystal clear picture of who your ideal customer is, you can talk to them like you talk to a human being. You can target them much more specifically. Your language and all of your marketing efforts get more precise, and it's like you're talking to one specific person. That's when your marketing becomes much more effective, because now it's appealing and it's getting to the heart of your potential customers. We live in an age where everything has to be personalized. You can design and order you very own unique sneakers with Nike ID, have your initials engraved in your Longchamp purse, and you can create your own playlists on Spotify, to name a few examples. You can see that successful companies all address the specific wants and needs and desires of a specific type of person. Marketing messages that only list product features and no values and address people in a generic manner simply don't work anymore. People no longer have to accept being just a number. They know the power that they have. They are the market. They control the demand and thus to supply. And they are who marketers have to accommodate and respond to. Now, you may wonder: "How can I do this, How can I get started? And how can I find out all of those things?" You have to create a buyer persona. A buyer persona as a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It allows you to create more targeted content that resonates much better with your target audience and thus increases the conversions from leads to customers. We have a free buyer persona template available for download on our website. The link to the show notes is down below, so you can go and grab your copy. The template contains all the right questions you need to ask to get all the information that you need to make your marketing stronger and attract great customer relationships to your business. It is fully customizable, like a worksheet, and you don't want to miss out on this because you'll end up with beautiful, well-formatted buyer personas that you can share with your entire company. You don't have to do everything alone. You can partner up with people who are not your competitors and have clients they can refer to you. Watch out for opportunities to partner up with people around you. If you're in B2B, your accountant may be able to refer you to business clients that he or she has, who could need some help with something that you provide. If you're in B2C, maybe your hairdresser has clients who he or she can refer to you. Know what you have to bring to the table. Know your strengths and your weaknesses. Find someone who is not your competitor and whose strengths are your weaknesses and vice versa. Define what you want out of the partnership and also consider making a contract. You want to consider offering the person a commission for every customer that they refer to you as well. Make sure that your goals align and then reach out. I'm sure you know someone you can offer the opportunity to be your partner today. You can get more customers by leveraging your existing customers, too. Word of mouth and referrals from customers are extremely powerful. A satisfied customer is one of the most effective marketing and advertising tools a small business can ever have. Your goal should always be to make your customers advocates of your brand by keeping on delighting them after they purchase something from you. Give your customers a reason to advertise and market your business. Starbucks does an amazing job at this by writing their customers names on the cups, which makes the customers want to share it and post pictures online. Don't show your customers the cold shoulder after you got the sale and won the deal. Keep in touch, keep on sending them emails, ask how things are going and how you can be of further help, offer them special offers and make them offers based on their last purchase, and have upselling and cross-selling options ready. Also, online reviews function as personal recommendations. In today's world, it is easy to underestimate them. However, you can strategically use your online customer reviews and ratings to get new customers. Chances are people check out your reviews before they even consider buying from you. Embed good reviews and testimonials on your site in the right places and also interact with your customers who left you reviews. Make sure to reply to every review, even the bad ones, and try to make things right, and kindly remind your customers to leave you reviews and rate every single customer experience they have with you. You can also use this info to tweak your customer journey and boost your customer experience. We have a very comprehensive and super actionable blog post about leveraging customer reviews on our blog. I'll leave the link below in the show notes. You can go and check that out. Here's another opportunity. Get better at upselling, down selling, and cross selling. Upselling is the practice of encouraging customers to purchase a comparable higher-end product. When the cashier at Starbucks asks you if you want almond milk or soy milk in your coffee, that's upselling. McDonald's offering you to supersize your meal, that's upselling too. Cross-selling invites customers to buy related or complimentary items. Cross selling is when you order just a burger at McDonald's and they ask you if you'd like a drink with that. Or when you want to purchase a camera at Best Buy and they ask you if you want a memory card with that, that is cross selling. Down selling is what you do when a potential customer is trying to back down from a purchase, and then you offer him or her something with similar features, that is cheaper than what you've suggested before. Car dealers down-sell all the time. The suggestions that go like "people also like" or "frequently bought together" on Amazon product pages, for example, they do all three of those tactics. They try to upsell, cross sell, and down sell to you at the same time, or even within the same click slider. When you master those three practices, you'll see your revenue multiply without even attracting more customers. You can also attract more customers to your business by giving something away for free. Why am I saying free and not discounted? Well, because free is better. Multiple studies show that consumers think a freebie is more valuable than a discounted product. In one study, with the purchase of a jar of organic tomato sauce for $8.95, participants were offered either a free package of spaghetti with the tomato sauce. or a discounted one for only 50 cents. Then both groups were asked how much they would pay for the spaghetti individually. People offered free spaghetti were willing to pay an average of $2.95 for it, but those offered the spaghetti for 50 cents were only willing to pay an average of $1.83. Consumers believe the value of a free product is likely to be consistent with the value of the purchased product. "Pairing a free product with a high-end product may very well increase the perception of its value." That's what Mauricio M. Palmeira from Monash University and Joydeep Srivastava from the University of Maryland say. When a free product is paired with an expensive product, consumers assume that it is worth more than if it was offered at a low discounted price. For example, if a luxury jeweler offers you a free bottle of wine with a purchase, you will assume it isn't cheap, right? You would assume the same wine is cheaper if the jeweler offers it for $1, wouldn't you? Yeah, me too. Promotions with low discounted prices devalue products more than free offers. That's why Mercedes offers a free GPS system with a required purchase. And high-end cosmetics companies like Lancome and Clinique offer free gifts with the purchase of a full price product. You can make use of this effect for yourself too, and you can make it even more powerful when you bring scarcity into play. Free haircuts for the first 20 people only. Purchase today and get a two year extended warranty. How does that sound to you? Leave a comment below. Free does wonders. And that is why so many companies do it. Like Dale Carnegie already said in his book "How to Win Friends and Influence People", "Everybody loves to win". Why not try throwing down a challenge to attract more leads and customers? It is important that the challenge is only about winning though, not about money or something. That changes the mentality people approach the challenge with in a way that doesn't benefit you. Another thing you can do to attract more customers is improve your profiles in business directories. Google My Business, Yahoo, Yelp, Bing Places, and other business directories are still used by thousands and thousands of people every day. When was the last time you checked your listings there? Are your pictures up to date? Did you even sign up and get listed in the major business directories and claimed your listings? This is an opportunity as well, and it's part of your online presence, too. You can get more leads into your marketing funnel by leveraging social media. An episode number two, I talk about how to leverage social media marketing in more detail. So go check that one out, too, if you haven't already. Optimize your website for organic search and particularly for buy keywords. A fancy term for buy keywords is transactional keywords. Buy keywords are keywords that indicate that a person is in buying mode. They're ready to buy. When someone googles "buy jackets online" and you sell jackets, that's a search term you wanna rank for, right? You're much more likely to make sales and get customers when you target buy keywords than when you target the other types of keywords. Know keywords, the fancy term is informational keywords, are keywords like "how to wrap a gift" that people Google to get information about a topic. And visit keywords, the fancy term is navigational keywords, like "YouTube" are search terms that people Google just to navigate somewhere, in this example to YouTube. Keep that in mind when doing search engine optimization or SEO. You can use the Cost Per Click or CPC of a keyword as an indicator for whether a keyword is likely to make you sales or not. The people who want to buy ads are willing to pay more money per click on their ads, when a keyword is likely to generate them more sales. Makes sense, right? That way you can identify buy keywords. The higher the CPC or Cost Per Click, the more likely a keyword is going to make you money. And then, of course, in addition to SEO and trying to rank for keywords organically, you can buy ads, too. All of the things that I've mentioned so far to help you generate more leads and attract more customers are free. That's right, they're free. There are so many opportunities to attract more customers to your business for free, huh? Go ahead and leave us a good review if there are more free ways to attract customers than you thought there would be. I'd appreciate it. So now, if you're willing to invest some money, you can buy ads. You can drive your ad traffic to optimized landing pages and guide your prospects through your buyer journey like that. You don't have to only run ads to make sales directly. You can also drive traffic to your informational content on your site and then guide your visitors towards becoming customers from there by convincing them to trust you and to make them like you with high-quality content, that is also personal. How do you get content like that? The answer again is buyer personas. Go to events, fares, conferences, and host meetings. Those are possibilities, too. Summing up. Here's what I want you to take away from this episode. There are a variety of ways to attract new customers to your business. In order for customers to become customers, you have to generate leads and convert them into prospects and finally into customers. Let me recap the 11 ways you can attract more customers. I just explained. Number one. Know your ideal customers and create by your personas. Number two. Build partnerships. Number three. Leverage your existing customers. Number four. Get better at upselling, down selling and cross selling. Number five. Give something away for free. Number six. Start a contest. Number seven. Improve your profiles on business directories. Number eight. Leverage Social Media Marketing. Number nine. Optimize your website for organic search, and particularly for buy keywords. Number ten. Buy ads. Number eleven. Go to events, fares, conferences, or host meetings. There are a multitude of ways to generate leads for free and a few paid options, too. The free options take more time, and you really need to get to know your target audience and care for them, which has to be reflected in your content. Content includes everything from your buyer personas, to the resources you use to get partnerships, to the customer reviews and testimonials (that count is user-generated content), to the freebies that you create to give away for free, to your social media posts, your blog articles, etc etc. Once you've set up a nice system and do a little bit of everything and also leverage the amazing technology that lies at our feet, you can create yourself an automated lead generation process that brings new customers to you while you can lay back and relax. For small business owners, this can be a lengthy process and is often perceived as a difficult challenge. I recommend you to make a plan, make a digital marketing strategy and a follow your plan step by step until you reach your goal. You can then prioritize the single steps you've got to take and execute them one step at a time. I know it sounds like a lot and you probably feel super overwhelmed right now. Let me tell you, it is so worth it once you reach that next level. Rome wasn't built in a day. The great Chinese Wall wasn't built in a date. Everything, no matter how big and impressive, has been built one brick at a time, one step at a time. So keep going. If you need help with your digital marketing, check out the Dragon Digital Marketing Agency. We're happy to help you map out your digital marketing strategy and make you reach your goals. That's all I got for you, until next time.