Twenty years ago, there were really only three ways to get eyeballs and ears focusing on your business; rent commercials on television, buy ads in magazines, newspapers or billboards, and reach ears through paid spots on radio. That was it. And guess what this meant?
It meant that the companies with the highest advertising budgets could reach the most people, making it an uneven playing field for the rest of us. But then the world changed. The internet came along, and suddenly, we were able to speak to people at scale – provided that we had something valuable to share. As a result, the entire landscape of how we market and communicate dramatically shifted.
No longer were we using interruption-marketing, which is “Stop! Listen to me. Buy from me.” We are now in an era of relationship-based marketing, which is “Let me add value to you. Let me demonstrate that I understand you. Let me show you that I understand your problems, and let me prove to you that I have the solutions.” We stopped talking ‘at’ our audience, and we started talking ‘with’ our audience.
Now, the question that has arisen in this era of relationship marketing is: how do you become the most visible brand in your industry, making you the obvious choice for consumers? The answer: build relationships with our audience in a way that is scalable.
The best and most efficient way to build relationships with your consumers is through emanating and disseminating high-quality content that speaks to their hearts and minds, such that you are building relationships at scale. Here’s the process that can enable you to do so.
Step One: Build an Attraction Model
As mentioned above, gone are the days of ‘Buy this now!’ interruption marketing. If you want to become a market leader, then your focus has to be on creating and continuously strengthening relationships with your audience. We do this using one powerful principle… Recency and frequency.
The Recency And Frequency Principle say that when a consumer makes a buying decision, the brand that is front of mind is the one that has communicated with them the most recently and the most frequently.
Everything we do as human beings are motivated by two forces:
- The need and desire to avoid pain or anticipated pain – i.e. something that may cause physical or emotional pain now or in the future.
- The need and desire to obtain pleasure, or anticipated pleasure – i.e. something that will bring you pleasure now or in the future.
From what time you set your alarm this morning, to what clothes you decided to wear today, to why you started your own business, to why you decided to have or not have a family is your way of either moving away from pain or moving towards pleasure or both. There is no macro or micro decision that is not motivated by these two forces.
The same is true of your customer.
These forces are the key to speaking meaningfully to your customers, as they encompass your audience’s deepest frustrations, fears, wants and dreams.
You want to be the business that is not only speaking to their customers’ wants but also speaking meaningfully to their frustrations, fears, and dreams. If you do that, the size of your audience, and the relationship you have with that audience, will grow exponentially.
Step Two: Lower buyers’ resistance and increase buyers’ intent through a structured marketing sequence
In between finding your perfect prospect and getting them to buy from you, there is a canyon of events that needs to occur to get them from point A to point B. What you need is a marketing system that elegantly and effortlessly moves prospects through a journey which lowers buyers’ resistance and increases buyers’ intent. We are all in the business of building relationships at scale. And this doesn’t happen instantaneously.
To achieve this, follow each of these three steps.
#1 Embed elegant call-to-actions (CTA’s)
Imagine a situation where you’ve come across someone you admire, and you feel an attraction towards them, but when it comes to building upon that initial connection with them, they come on too quickly and too strong. If you have experienced this situation before, you’ll know that when someone is too forthright in their approach, it changes the dynamic of the connection straight away. It can ultimately deter you from pursuing the connection further.
The same is true for marketing. You need to focus on building the relationship authentically and not ask too much, too soon.
Once you have attracted an audience, nurtured them, and moved them to your own land (usually, this is email), you have permission to talk to them, but you don’t want to abuse this. It is crucial when contacting your audience through email, text, social media or any channel that, when you ask them to take action, you do so in a way that is authentic.
The worst thing you can become in your customer’s eyes is a commodity. When your customer wants to stop spending or reduce costs, if they simply view you as a commodity rather than a genuine relationship, you’re out.
#2 Optimise your landing page
A lot of marketers will spend significant amounts of time developing content, capturing an audience, nurturing them and then sending them onto their landing page, only to find that they are not converting the traffic. Why? Because the landing page isn’t speaking to the hearts and minds of the customer.
There are two ways for you to optimise your landing page:
- Use the principle of Green Brain: Start by ‘green braining’ the wording, imagery, and offer. Using green brain language, imagery and offers means speaking to the emotional and creative side of your consumer’s brain, rather than solely the logical and rational side of the brain (the red brain side).
Green Braining is so effective when it comes to accelerating decision-making because human beings make decisions emotionally and justify them logically.
- Always be testing:
Growing a business is not rocket science. Growing a business is about looking at what matters.
Start by A/B testing two landing pages with different headlines. If B converts at a higher rate than A, get rid of A and create a new version to continue testing. This applies to every element of your landing page; headings, sub-headings, imagery, CTA language, and length of the page. Test one element at a time, and whichever version converts better stays, and the alternative goes.
Please make a note of this: You should always, always be A/B testing.
#3 Reassure your customers
The biggest roadblock your prospect encounters at this point in their journey is that when they get close to buying (or giving you their name and email for service businesses), there’s a question that comes up in their head. And that question is this, “what happens on the other side?”.
When you first started out in business, you didn’t have any customers. And as such, you got in the habit of marketing in a way that didn’t incorporate success stories and testimonials from happy purchasers. Well, it’s now years later, you’ve got happy customers, and if you’re still in the habit of marketing without leveraging these case studies, this is killing your conversions. In order to help lower buyers’ resistance and reassure your customers, show them examples of people who have bought successfully from you previously. They are your walking, talking, breathing demonstrations of what happens to people when they buy from you, giving your prospect visibility of what happens ‘on the other side’.
Reassurance may be case studies, success stories, testimonials, product reviews or Google star ratings – anything that shows your prospects that what you’re promising is being delivered.
About Jack Delosa:
Jack Delosa builds businesses.
He is a 5X AFR Young Rich Lister, 2X best-selling author and the founder of Australia’s largest business coaching and training provider for entrepreneurs, The Entourage, which has a community of 650,000 members. Since 2010, The Entourage has helped its members add over $2 billion in value to their businesses. Under his leadership, The Entourage was previously awarded the 4th Best Place to Work in Australia, and the Top 50 in Australasia, by Best Places To Work.
Prior to The Entourage, Jack was the co-founder and CEO of MBE Group, a company that assisted SMEs in raising money from investors. MBE Group became one of Australia’s fastest-growing companies and enabled its clients to raise over $300 million in capital.
Visit The Entourage
Keep up to date with our stories on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
