It's time to talk to people

In the Kevin Costner movie ‘Field of Dreams’ the catchphrase is “Build it, and they will come”, but this is reality and building a better mousetrap will not help if you don’t attract or drive the mice to your trap.

How can you use your website to reduce the friction from your sales process?

The core of marketing activities we recommend to clients consists of the following.

• Mass Communication
  
• Individual Communication
  
• Anonymous Communication

These three represent three ways of communicating with current (1 & 2) and future customers (3).

Mass Communication

You need to formulate a system to commit to regular, but fairly general communication. Currently, you will have a mixture of two types of people you do business with.

Transactional Customers– these are customers who buy from you and do not have a need for ongoing support. For example, people buying a TV, people getting a house valued or people buying a new car. Though the value of the transaction is variable, the ongoing commitment expected by the customer is low, due to the one-off nature of the transaction.

Relationship Clients – These clients are regular customers. They may need support with the product or service they bought from you, or it might be they need updates in software to keep them working effectively.

Your aim should be to move the Transactional Customers to become Relationship Clients. Even if they have made their one-off purchase you need to show them that you care and you are here should they wish to repurchase, or recommend you to a friend.

With mass communication, your aim should be not always to sell directly to clients, but to keep your company, products and services in the back of their mind, ready to be recalled when they have a need.

Methods used to facilitate Mass Communication include

• Newsletters
• Email Newsletters
• Social Media activity
• Press advertising.

One of the core activities you need to be conducting is a regular mass communication with clients. The frequency of your communication will vary with your industry, but you need to build the habit.

In order to do this, you will need to collect their preferred means of communication and get their permission for you to contact them. Notice I didn’t say email address. You need to find out if people prefer to get emails or real-world communications.

This might take the form of a mass email sign up, a warranty system, support and assistance programme, anything that allows you to get permission to communicate with the client.

Individual Communication

In the days before the internet, we used to get personal letters and phone calls from companies to make sure that we were happy with their products and services. Guess what, you are still allowed to do this!

The frequency of your personal communication will vary with your industry and the nature of your product or service. It might range from once a year to every 4-8 weeks; you will need to set up your own system.

These Individual Communications need to be just that, individual. I am not talking about a standard letter that has been mail merged to add the client's name and address to the top. I mean take the time to speak to them one on one, take the time to care.

We have one client who contacts every customer personally by either phone or calling in to see them every 8 weeks. This is due to the competitive nature of their business and the ease with which current clients can find someone else to do what they do. It takes time, but by keeping the lines of communication open, they benefit from lower client defection rates, a healthy level of repeat business and a good level of referrals from clients to other businesses.

Individual communication, like all your marketing activity, is time-consuming and needs to be planned and executed as a part of your business activity, not just something you do if you have time.

Anonymous Communication

This is talking to clients who are not yet clients and getting people to make the decision to trust you to help them and solve their issues and needs.

This is using AdWords, Facebook Boosting and pretty much nothing else.

This is where I get shot down and shouted at by people. They love to cling to the ideas they have held dear to for years that things like radio adverts, tv adverts, cinema adverts, billboards and newspaper adverts bring them in customers.

I say they may, but in nowhere near the numbers, they used to and without the flexibility and control of targeting that Facebook and especially Google give you to talk to clients with needs.

There are two distinctions between Facebook and Google marketing.

Facebook is talking to people who don’t have a specific need but have shown interest in an area, and they are unaware of your existence, while Google is focused on delivering your message when people are searching for a specific need. Each has a role to play in your marketing activity, but I would suggest that Google AdWords should receive a higher proportion of your money as it is more focused and more likely to give you a return if done correctly.

Communication Methods and Your Website

The various forms of communication you can utilise with your clients/potential clients should all be focused on driving them to your website to find out a little more information, to move the buying process on.

Now you have improved the content (and effectiveness) of your site, when they get to it, potential customers will be more likely to take the next step and contact you directly to complete the sales process.

With whichever communication method you use, you need to direct people to specific pages of your site. Not just to the main opening page. If it is a mass email, put a link to the product page, if it is a phone call, explain to the person how to get to that support page, drive the people to where they need to be and most importantly in AdWords, send them to the product or service page if it is exactly what they are looking for.

An additional thing to do is that if you are using a specific page of your website in any type of campaign, please make sure you review it and fine tune the content, so the page is Sharpe and ready. Also, make sure you use the correct link in your mass emails, Facebook posts & boosts and AdWords. We get countless calls from panicking clients who have made errors and need our help to create bounce pages on their site when they have sent out broken links.

You need to slow down, test and check before you release your campaigns to the world. In this fast moving digital age, you really do only get one chance to make a good first impression.

Final thought – My Dad told me that whenever I used a chisel in the workshop, I should sharpen it before I put it away. In this way, it was instantly ready to use when I needed it. It is the same with your website, keep it sharp, after all, you never know when someone is going to be using it.