2018-06-08 | 3318 Print PDF
Every business is built on good customer relationship which in turn enable more growth in sales. When starting from scratch trying to target your audience via advertising mediums either online advertisement or offline promotions most small medium size businesses tends to forget about building their prospect list.
Placing an advert online for sales or awareness is not the final phase of a business promotion or marketing, simply look at it as the first stage for acquiring data. When placing adverts you should be able to leverage the avenue or medium you are using to acquire enough data to make decisive decisions that are data driven. However, to ensure that you have a properly targeted prospect list that offers a high rate of sales conversion, you will need to do a little extra work.
For ease and demonstration purpose I will assume you have created an advert on another platform to majorly send traffic to your landing page or website, now using Google analytics to read the data and website performance towards your advert placement on the mediums chosen by you.
1.) Identify your target audience
This is the first major task you need to find from the data you must have gotten from your advertising outlet. Most data driven platform like Google Analytic are best suitable for website performance integrations, setting up goals and counting visits to your website from your advertising outlet.
From the Google analytic dashboard you will find some metrics that are in tune with your own proposed target audience research, for most it is businesses Location, Gender, Age group, Income, Country/state, Preference, Status etc all this are metrics used to profile a target audience which are gladly available on Google Analytic dashboard.
With these information you can easily rephrase or rethink who your real customers are and focus your energy on building your next target campaign around these metric performance on your website.
2.) Obtain Visitors List
Another thing to look at apart from placing adverts, is to make sure you can do your own personal follow up or one on one communication with your targeted audience. One of the essential rule is to have an optin form for this, you simply request your web visitors information in parts or in whole for them to get access to the rest of the website information.
Although we have retarget marketing platforms like adroll I still believe in doing a one on one communication with my prospects. This is where a live chat widget or button is majorly useful, most first time web visitors actually don't spend much time on your website because they simply don't know how to get around it and lose interest, but when you have a live chat plugin on your website you can easily get them engaged on your website there are many widgets and plugin you can utilize for different purposes, eg whatshelp.io is a tool that I find better than most live chats out there which are expensive and those that are free eat up resources on your server, this plugin directly connects your Facebook page messenger, telegram, twitter to your website live chat for you to easily connect in real time via mobile or desktop. I will also recommend useproof.com and repuso.com as a conversion tool to help get your web visitors to engage.
Why you will need this is quite simple, as some website prospects don't find it convenient to drop their data on foreign sites they are not accustom with, so a bit of hello from your end should pacify their curiosity.
3.) Segment your Prospect List
Now you must have gathered all the information required for you to filter your data, you need to segment them, not all prospect equal same value eg a prospect age bracket of 18-25 and 34-45 are definitely not in the same league of leads depending on your market value and product/service targets.
You need to know what appeals to each segment of your product/service this is why you need to create a segmented market for your product to target your segmented prospects. One the easiest methods to do this will be via email marketing, when you send out follow up emails to your subscribers you could include segmented newsletters or signups for them to click on, better yet provide an array of offers for them to choose from via their email. This can be a link to your other services, it is based on their respective performance that you can decide how many emails subscribers visited a certain link/page on your website.
Analyze the website performance via Google analytic and define who your segmented prospects are, then try to connect with them using their own language. These process can be very tasking and do need some serious diligence process in other to achieve your results. You can also create segmentation via A/B split advert testing offering different offers on a same advert placement and monitoring the performance of each, this will allow you to know which advert appeals to a certain demography or target audience.
Your segmentation decisions should be aimed at creating a list that conforms to your ideal customer.
4.) Verify Your Prospect list
Most prospect list are staled or are sent to a non existing account, why? because we mostly fail to verify our leads. You can verify leads by letting them verify their data submitted or simply confirming a text code. For instance if you have a landing page and you send website traffic to this page, you need a form to capture data, with this data submitted they can either visit next page or get further information. But you need to verify their data submission is authentic or else you are likely to get gamed.
These is where you need to set your priority straight with what aspect of data from your prospect is of high value to you, eg full name, email address, phone, address, gender, age, etc are all metrics you can try to get validation from prospects. In most cases it's either a prospect full name and email address or phon number or both that are usually important for communication while other preferences will be collected gradually between communication.
We have email verification , SMS code, social media plugins etc which can be utilize to import, verify or confirm an input data by a prospect on websites, simply to avoid being gamed by the web visitors.
5.) Build Business Strategy
Next step is to use the data gotten and analytic studies to build a business strategy that works. Most small and medium sized firms lack the patience and the intellectual requirements to collate and interpret the data they have. Using data in this age is to ensure that a business follows the trend of its customers in terms of their respective preferences.
One of the reasons why majority of sales people receive rejections is because they failed to plan. They thought every sales lies in just their ability to communicate the importance of their products to people. They missed this one important step in network marketing: planning.
Are you selling the product to the right people? Are you selling it in the right place, time and circumstances? These are some of the details you need to know before facing the sales battlefield.
When you have a prospect list, you can easily identify who is most likely your target market and you will know how to appropriately approach that person without being awkward and pushy. People are different so you can try different strategy and see what works and what doesn’t.
Having insight on your business performance versus what you have on paper is actually an optimum way to address your business performance in terms of sales, customer retention, advertising and business offers. With useful insight you will be able to improve your current performance and weigh your past as well, easily make data driven decisions that are measurable.
6.) Build on Your Prospect List
You can build on your prospect list simply by focusing on growing your list by adding new opportunities, segmenting, and targeting them. Always execute an A/B testing to see how they perform keep on inviting them to know more about the business.
Another viable approach will be to organize some sort of event or workshop presentation to aid you showcase your product/service, you can make it a free offer for the few people that are potential leads, education is another key success to building on your prospect and this provides the perspective or illusion of you being an expert in your field. Success is sweeter because of the challenges and even sweeter when you’ve managed to overcome these obstacles!
Referral prospects and converted ones are simply the end results of a good workshop or seminar, when you are able to highlight the issues on ground and how your service/product can handle them, you have a higher chance of conversion ration and even getting more prospects via referrals.
With all the information gathered here, I am rest assured you will find the steps useful in actually building your next prospect and converting them into leads. All are part of your sales funnel and lead management aspect of your business. Failure to see the treasure prospecting entails is the beginning of a business demise, as you will not be able to sustain your profit in time when you are busy spending every dollar on acquiring other prospects rather than retaining the converted leads.
We can assist your company to save cost and help in grooming your current clientele data base for optimum performance, segmentation is a task oriented work, but it does come with meaningful insights that can aid in management making cognitive decisions based on data driven insights.
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