The leads you bring in and the customers you attract are the lifeblood of your business, and it’s no longer enough to create a single marketing funnel and expect a return on your investment.
Today, there are more opportunities to create leads then ever before. The tricky part is converting those leads to loyal customers. Many blogs and articles make it sound so simple – just build trust and intimacy with your audience, and show them you’re the most relevant choice. – But building trust, staying relevant, and developing real relationships with your customers takes strategy, endurance, and a lot of patience. Below we want to introduce six digital marketing approaches that can support your efforts in engaging with your audience to move them from lead to loyalty.
1. Relevancy wins the war.
Those with the biggest email list used to dominate their niche, but this will not work today as people begin to crave greater intimacy and relevance.
In today’s strategy approach, relevancy will win the war. If you want to increase your profit this year, focus on building greater intimacy and relevance with the leads you have with a goal to provide the right solution, to the right people, at the right time.
2. Attention is the new currency.
If you’re not capturing the right audience, you lose your ability to compete organically. The goal is not to gain the highest number of followers but rather to gain the attention of followers who really want what you have to offer to avoid having to spend massive amounts of money on advertising and other online marketing.
Gaining attention is getting more and more expensive as digital marketing gets more and more saturated. This means it’s more important than ever to make the most of the attention you capture. People are overwhelmed with content so if your content offers no value or significance, they will delete, opt out, or scroll by without reading. Providing rich content that offers real information your customers need is where your opportunity lies in reaching, engaging, and building real trust with them.
It’s no longer about spreading your marketing further and further for the sake of it. You have to spread it to the right people at the right time, and make the most of their attention the moment you capture it.
3. Be Gary Vaynerchuk (kind of).
Love or loathe him, Gary has mastered a specific skill: He appears to be everywhere.
His ability to reach the masses is an incredible feat, and defines what it means to be omnipresent to your audience. I am not saying appearing everywhere to everyone, should be your goal.
No, the point of becoming omnipresent is to appear in front of those leads most relevant to you, and who you are most relevant to in return. This combination of omnipresence and relevance leads you to be top of mind, which in turn ensures your audience will think of you when the times comes that they need your service.
4. One platform is not enough.
If you think dominating a single platform is enough, think again.
Your leads on Facebook are not necessarily on YouTube, and those on YouTube are likely different from those reading Entrepreneur.com. As such, the key to your success is to repurpose your content across multiple (relevant) platforms.
In the past this was expensive and time-consuming, but these days it’s easy to take a single video and repurpose it into a blog post, an in-depth article, a podcast episode and additional resources. In turn, you can repurpose this content into an email series, social media posts and micro videos.
5. Your marketing funnel has evolved.
You cannot build a single marketing funnel that takes your audience through a predefined step-by-step process and expect a high conversion. They are onto you. They have been in dozens of marketing funnels like this already. You need to stand out; you need to turn your marketing funnel into an experience, and build real, significant engagement.
Consider incorporating online quizzes at the beginning of your automation to really uncover where your customer is and what they are really looking for. This will help you to place them into the right string of content, increasing your chance of conversion. Offer interactive videos, landing pages with relevant white papers, data, and research that matters to them. The more you can answer their questions or solve their problems, the more likely they are to stick with you.
6. Don’t forget about the invisible ROI.
It used to be enough to focus your ad spend on lead generation and sales, but not anymore. Our clients, who see the greatest success, are those who split their invest between lead generation and brand awareness.
Lead generation is important, but, you must also nurture your audience through showing them who you are as a company.
You build brand equity through relationship, not by forcing one sales message after another. It takes time to build trust and become the “go-to” expert they need. If you only focus on sales, you’ll continue to see your ad spend rise while your conversions go down.
So what are your key take-aways?
• Offer resourceful and relevant content to maximize your audience views.
• Understand what your customers want to continue to attract the right kind of audience.
• Stay in front of your audience with a consistent presence to stay top-of-mind.
• Understand the platforms your customers engage with and utilize those platforms to share resourceful content.
• When utilizing automation offer a variety of resources (videos, infographics, white papers, etc) to engage and educate.
• Highlight your company brand along with your sales. Understand that your customers want more than just discounts. They want to know who you are as a company, they want to feel trust with you, and they want to resonate with your company mission.
