You’ve built your founding team, developed your minimum viable product, and proven on a small scale that customers will buy it. Congrats! Now, how exactly do you get people lining up at your door? If you bring in customers by making in-person or phone sales, click here. Otherwise, read on:
For a solid guide to marketing in the digital age, read Inbound Marketing
1) Use your website as a hub, not a brochure. Don’t use your website as an online version of a brochure, with static messages about your features and benefits. Instead, make it interactive. Incorporate a blog. Let readers subscribe via RSS and email. Write blog posts at least once per week. Focus on what customers care about (not how great you are), and encourage them to share comments. Give away bits of your advice, demonstrate your capacity to be a thought leader, and business will flow in.
2) Focus on where they action is. Spend 75% of your efforts where customers go to find solutions to their problems — on Google, industry blogs, and social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. Syndicate your posts on blogs your customers read, and on groups they belong to in LinkedIn. Keep running searches via Twitter and Google Alerts on topics relevant to your business, and contribute to the conversations (don’t just promote your products). Follow people on Twitter who care about your subject matter, and tweet links to your blog posts. Create
3) Be the world’s best. People want advice, products and services from the world’s best providers. Don’t you? If you aren’t the world’s best at what you do (or have a reasonable claim to that effect), shrink your focus until your status as # 1 is no longer a stretch.
4) Get found on Google. Customers find what they need via Google, and they do it often, conducting over 30 billion searches per month. When customers search for your type of products on Google, you’ll get much more attention if you come up on the first page of their results. How do you do that? Create content good enough so that other high-ranking sites link to it. Find out which keywords lead customers to you with a small pay-per-click test, and then build those into your page title tags and page meta descriptions.
5) Conversion is King. Once you’ve gone through the trouble of getting people to visit your site, you’ll want to do your best to turn them into customers. Keep in mind that all visitors aren’t created equal – some may be just curious, others willing to share information, and still others ready to plunk down a credit card. So, you’ll want to have a range of products. For example, free articles, more in depth offerings that require visitors to register (e.g. an email newsletter or free trial), and products for sale.
Also, remember that many customers won’t come in through your home page – they’ll often follow a link or search result that takes them to a blog post or to a specific area of your site. So each part of your site should have features that drive visitors to engage or buy. Most of all, give each visitor compelling calls to action on every page – forms with big buttons, and clear, simple directions for taking a next step (e.g. “Get your business plan evaluated”) – as opposed to generic “contact us” requests or just email addresses. Finally, track your results to see what’s working best, isolating your marketing efforts and measuring visitors, sign ups, purchases, and conversion rates.
Got a great marketing book to recommend? Please add a comment.
