Starting and running a business is hard work. Let’s be honest: it can often feel like an uphill battle with new challenges arising daily – sometimes, you don’t even have the time to head to the restroom for a quick dump.
Whether you’re just starting or trying to scale up your existing business, tackling the day-to-day issues of owning a company can be difficult. The good news is that you are not alone in this struggle; plenty of entrepreneurs have faced the same problems and found solutions that work for them. To help ease your burden, we’ve compiled six common marketing obstacles business owners face – from leads generation, sales, and conversion, to keeping customer relationships – along with suggestions (solutions) on tackling each one.
Okay, so let’s get into it.
1. Tackling Lack of traffic and leads.
Leads are genuine enquiries about your services and products.
Every business will experience seasonal fluctuation in business inquiries and a downturn in calls from time to time. Unless your company has zero competition and is positioned to be the absolute market leader in your industry, you will likely experience low inquiries about your services periodically.
Solutions:
The first thing to do is to get traffic to your business, either to your website or have a prospect reaches out to you by phone. There are three ways to get traffic: free, paid, and strategic partner.
1.1 Free Traffic
Visitors coming to your site or contacting your business without you having to spend a cent on Advertising are deemed as free (Organic) traffic.
For example, they may find your business through search engines (Google My Business, Bing Business, Yahoo. Etc), blogging, referrals, word of mouth, podcasts, Facebook, LinkedIn profile, YouTube Videos, or other social media posts.
To do this, you must develop creative content, write engaging posts, optimise your website with buyers’ keywords, and utilise free social media platforms to reach your target market.
1.2 Paid Traffic
Paid traffic is when prospects reach out to your business after seeing your Advertisement.
Examples of paid traffic are visitors clicking on your Google Ads, Facebook Ads, BING and LinkedIn Ads, and other social media ad platforms.
The benefit of paid traffic is instant exposure if you craft your ads correctly. And to do this well, ensure you set the right marketing filters to attract your target market.
1.3 Reaching Out to Strategic Partners
Ask yourself which complementary service providers come before your service.
Before your prospect thinks about your service, who do they contact first?
Identify them and work out an arrangement with these service providers so that they refer businesses to your company or reciprocate. For instance, a home builder seeking a home designer (draftsman) to design their home would require the services of engineers (soil, structural, service) and a town planner, followed by a builder. If you were one of these professionals, who would you reach out to as your strategic partner (or referrer)?
2. Managing Poor conversion rate.
Suppose you have no problems with leads and getting enquiries, but your company might be experiencing a poor conversation rate – unable to close sales via phone calls and email. It is sad to think that money and resources were spent in generating enquiries but you don’t have a system to convert Leads into Sales. To tackle this problem, here are 2 Solutions: –
2.1 Qualify your leads
There are two reasons for the poor conversion ratio
- Is that they are not your ideal customers.
- Your rep and marketing failed to justify the value: pricing benefits.
Not all leads are equal: some are curious individuals checking you out and enjoying the window shopping experience, and some are genuinely serious and eager to buy right now.
And to find the latter, your mission is to segment them in terms of age, gender, income level, lifestyle, interest, and the whole nine yards of market segmentation: demographic, psychographic, behavioural, and geographic, and then pinpoint their pain, frustration, challenges, needs, and wants to draw them in.
And talk to them in your Copy, your Ad, and your website. You are not attracting everyone, just a handful of qualified buyers.
2.2 Build a lead generation system
A lead generation system is a marketing process of attracting prospects to your business and converting them into customers.
To develop a lead generation system, the first step is to have a bait to motivate your prospects to take action; examples of how to use it successfully in the service industry are as follows: –
- Free 1 hr assessment (chiropractors love this idea)
- 30-60 mins free consultation/ strategy call (works well for lawyers and consultants)
- Free giveaway of intellectual properties: eBooks, templates, Video training, Cheatsheet, Software trial access, etc.
- Lowball Offers: $49 teeth cleaning service performed by a dentist.
If they are the wrong audience for you, they won’t be bothered to click on anything unless they are your competitors. Those who claim the giveaways are real prospects.
Second, create an Opt-in form for your prospect to fill out their email, phone, and addresses. As soon as they enter the details, they have demonstrated a genuine interest in your offer, and all you need is to give value, address their concerns, and convert them into a sale. And that leaves us to no 3.
3. Dealing with Lack of sales
Some business owners are afraid of selling; hopefully, you are not one of them.
Ideally, the person who picks up the phone should know how to close the sale with just one call without the customer waiting for an expert to call back.
Ideally, No #2, you should have a salesperson in your team, but if that luxury is unavailable, give your team a sales training. They should know how to close a sale with just one call, upsell them, or sustain the buyers’ interest until an experienced closer attends the call.
Now, here are 2 Solutions to deal with this problem.
3.1 Develop a sales process
A sales process is synonymous with a sales funnel. A sales funnel is a customer buying journey that can range from a prospect taking action to reach out to your business to buying your services online.
And if that’s not successful, you build your database to capture the emails because not all leads are convertible during the first contact.
3.2 Get key people trained up to close a simple sales enquiry
Teach them basic sales skills to close a simple order. You can create a training video or engage a company to do it for you.
Sales skills are essential as it helps your company convert leads into customers. Do not make the mistake of buying Ads to get traffics to your business but you don’t have any sales process/ funnel to convert them into sales. That’s just money down the drain.
4. Difficulty in getting prospects to buy on the spot
You need to surpass their trust level to win more sales and convert more leads into customers.
Customers buy from people (or businesses) they trust because it gives them a sense of certainty, familiarity, and significance. And this could be due to several factors: a brand that exudes quality and status, the empathy of the service provider, being seen as the expert, being likeable, professional proposal/ website/ contracts, raving testimonials, and reviews.
But sometimes, customers’ trust level can be compromised by the pricing model and how well you explain the value of your services, for example. If you communicated your Value so well, but your fee or selling price appeared to be below their price expectation (aka. Value for money), it would increase the likelihood of purchasing your service.
Here are three solutions to establish customers’ trust.
4.1 Develop content that speaks to them
You can develop written (blog) or Video (YouTube videos) content, which can be informational, entertaining, or educational blogs and videos showcasing your expert knowledge. This strategy will help build trust because people are initially sceptical about you until they get to know who you are as a person.
4.2 Provide sufficient information about your service and product
Display your product and services’ features and benefits on the website. Showcase your pricing model and value propositions. Use a copywriter to develop your landing page.
4.3 Use Google and Facebook Ads to raise your profile.
For the time being, if you are seen in Google and Facebook ads, it may positively impact your professional profile. And this may establish customer trust.
When prospects start seeing your ads popping up everywhere, from Google searches to YouTube videos to Facebook pages, you establish some level of credibility. And the more they see you or your brand, E.g., 16 or 17 times, the more they become familiar with you. As a result, you are gradually building trust.
Lastly, don’t forget to use and put tracking pixels and conversion Tags on your pages for those re-marketing tactics.
5. Forgetting your past customers
Business owners are so busy chasing new leads, sales/ clients that they have forgotten their past customers/ clients. Here’s a solution.
5.1 Pluck them out before they drop to the ground.
Past customers/ clients are your low-hanging fruits and are more receptible to repeat business, sales, or referrals.
Depending on what you’re selling, past customers may not need a lot of convincing. And often, when they reach out to you and enquire about your services, it’s almost a guaranteed sale.
The other strategy is to ask them to refer business to you or make them a referral partner and give them a small commission for successful sales.
Otherwise, ask them to write a fantastic testimonial for your business. ‘
Overall your past customers and clients are your assets.
6. Failed to set up an affiliated/ Partner program.
Affiliated or partner programs are commission-based sales agents. You sign up for the program, and they help you sell on your behalf and any successful sales they will take 10-15-25% commission out of it.
Hotels, motels, and tour groups use 3rd party agents such as booking.com, hotel.com, and wotif.com to help sell their rooms and services.
You must think about who else, or which group of companies, can help you promote or sell your services on your behalf on a commission basis.
The primary benefit of this arrangement is that it will increase your revenue because affiliated agents have their network/ followers and database and will often send promotional marketing material to their database to incite their customers to buy.
Action Plan.
It is time to implement the above strategies into your business model.
Expect that the resources, money, and time invested into developing your systems can be time-consuming, but it is a worthwhile exercise that gives you an ongoing stream of sales.
Think of it as an investment into business growth.
We hope the top 6 marketing solutions will help ease your way to success.
If you need help implementing these strategies into your business, click here.
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