I was recently reading a book called Sticky Branding.
In it, there was a stat that caught my attention:
Only 3% of your target audience are ready to buy at any one time.
This means that a whopping 97% of your audience just aren’t quite there yet.
So, we ignore them and focus on the 3%, right? No!
That 97% may not be ready to buy from you right now, but you need to be right at the front of the queue once they decide that actually, they are ready to buy.
What’s the secret?
While there is no single secret per se, there are overarching strategies that are perfect for ensuring you’re tailoring your approach to both the 3%, and 97%.
For the 3%
Assess how you’re communicating your offering – are the benefits of choosing you irresistible? Consider:
Are your product/service pages benefit led?
An objective opinion on your main product/service pages can be incredibly valuable.
You want to ensure that you’re leading with benefits; at the end of the day, your customers/clients don’t really care about your business, but they do care about the tangible benefits you present to them.
Quantify it if you can – prominently feature what your product or service will specifically do for them. If they’re ready to buy, you want to ensure that your offering is absolutely irresistible.
How well optimised are your comms?
When you’re talking to engaged prospects who you suspect are close to a purchase, are you carefully considering how you’re communicating your message?
Ensure that you’re providing them ample opportunities to convert – whether that’s a link to book a meeting with sales, or a link to your product page. You’ll also want to provide them with reasoning as to why they should convert. Consider a sign-up bonus or other incentive to help get the prospect over the line.
Where appropriate, you may also choose to share the finer details of your offering – push customer reviews, customer service commitments, demo/meeting availability, delivery times, returns policies; anything to help shine your business and product/service in the strongest possible light.
Have you got an automated process to ensure no prospect falls through the cracks?
Picture the scene:
You’ve had a great conversation with a prospect, but they’re heading off to ‘talk’ with the rest of the team. What’s your strategy here? There are two options:
- Leave it to sales to manually follow up, adding significantly more to their workload
- Create an automated email follow-up series, ensuring that you continue to gently nurture a prospect and remain front of mind while they make their decision
Automating this process ensures that you’ll never forget a follow up, and no prospects disappear from the face of the Earth without you adequately communicating with them.
This can also work if you operate an ecommerce business. Automatically following up on abandoned baskets is an incredibly powerful way of drawing people back to your site and can dramatically improve conversion rates – anywhere from a 12-20% increase!
For the 97% (the importance of nurturing)
Here’s where the bulk of your work should be done.
Everyone in the 97% can and will eventually be ready to convert – you need to ensure that, when they’re ready, you’re the first business they think of.
It shouldn’t be a choice – you should be undeniable.
Here’s the four most important nurturing tactics you absolutely must be doing right now:
Content
Your content strategy should be engaging, consistent and, most importantly, genuinely informative.
For all nurturing content, your focus is being useful, not converting a lead. If you can answer questions your target audience are asking, or provide entertaining insights into your industry, you’ll effectively build trust with the reader.
As their trusted source of information, who do you think they’ll turn to once they’re ready to convert in the future?
That’s right – you.
Build your content strategy around:
- Blogs
- Guides
- Webinars
- Podcasts
- Informative videos
Automated workflows
Gone are the days of manually sending out your emails. If you’re not creating awesome workflows and automating them, you’re wasting a lot of time and resources.
Nurturing workflows are especially powerful – send out interesting content, unique insights, offers, updates on any charity work/events you’re hosting and more.
This isn’t going to necessarily result in a direct sale, but it does keep you front of mind and ensures you’ve got regular (non-invasive) contact with prospective clients.
Monitor your workflows to see your most engaged prospects. As they get more and more engaged, they can eventually be moved onto ‘warm’ workflows, which focus more on conversion.
Organic social & social ads
Many of our clients ask us whether they should bother with social.
Our answer is always a resounding ‘Yes!’.
Why? Because customers are 78% more likely to purchase from a business after a positive experience on social.
This can be anything from seeing a fun post about your work night out, or finding an informative article that you shared.
Again, this might not directly lead to a sale, but your social channels work hard to validate your business, helping to move sales through your funnel.
Social ads, on the other hand, can be highly targeted, using the vast amounts of data that social media platforms gather to allow you to target very specific people for very specific things – very valuable!
Remarketing
Remarketing is incredibly important.
Imagine someone visits your website. They click off for some reason, but not before accepting cookies.
Now you know that someone’s visited your site, you know what pages they were interested in, and you’re this close to securing a sale.
Remarketing allows you to target individuals like this with highly specific ads in an attempt to bring them back in, ready to purchase.
That’s 100% of your target audience addressed!
Creating a strategy that focuses on nurturing and converting 100% of your audience may seem like a daunting task, but it’s doable.
There’s a lot of moving parts to consider, which can be hard, especially for SMEs looking to grow.
That’s why we recommend partnering with a digital marketing agency.
Fortunately, you’re in the right place! At Catalyst, we partner with SMEs across the UK, helping them to dramatically improve digital marketing and lead nurturing/generation processes.
We’ll become your digital marketing team – an entire team of digital marketing experts with decades of experience, all for a fraction of the price of hiring internally. Lovely.
