Marketing Strategy…Are You Connecting the Dots?

A Great Marketing Strategy Leads Prospects to Connect the Dots

If there is one thing I’ve seen consistently over the last 4 ½ years of working with small-to-mid sized business owners, it’s the absence of a real marketing strategy. There is often no real plan of attack. From one week to the next, it’s one random activity after another. Small business owners hope this approach will lead to more clients, but end up dissappointed. Sales are up one week and down the next.

Putting a winning marketing strategy together should give the prospect an experience similar to playing Connect the Dots.

What do I mean?

When a child follows the ordered sequence of connecting the dots, they end up looking at a picture that has two characteristics. One, the finished product is usually something they recognize. (I trust that you can see the banana in the current unfinished example to your left). Any school age child who is old enough to follow the numbered dots and complete the drawing would immediately recognize a banana upon completion.

The second thing is…they helped complete the picture. The actual process they went through involved some thinking and active participation. Active participation is important because it increases the learning. The active participation needs to have meaning from the perspective of the prospect. Great marketing speaks to the conversation that’s already going on inside the mind of your prospect.

That’s what good marketing does. It requires the prospect to get involved in the process. A good marketing strategy will often cause the prospect to ask themselves questions and make evaluations that guides their thinking process. One thing I want to make clear. Ethical marketing is about guiding the thinking process – NOT manipulating it.

A suspect is someone who doesn’t have any awareness of who you are, or what value you bring to the marketplace. However, they have a pressing need. Their need causes them to seek out a solution provider.

As an example, if you’re in B2B sales, the prospect may be another business owner looking for ways to minimize their tax liability with Uncle Sam. Thus, the services of an accountant or bookkeeper would be in order. Keep this in mind. They’re not really looking for an accountant. They’re looking to decrease tax liability. Make sure you speak to the need. Where a lot of advertisers go wrong is in promoting ‘accounting services’.

A wise move for an accountant would be to provide a free report that speaks to the need of the suspect. Write a free report or whitepaper entitled, ‘The Small Business Owners Guide to Legally Cut Your Taxes by 15-25% Without Being Audited’. A title like that is attention getting.

That guide would be the first ‘dot’ in a series of steps designed to create awareness and build relationship. This guide needs to be positioned in a place that the prospect can find it when looking for an answer to their most pressing issue.

At the end of the guide, there should be another ‘dot’ to move them through your sales process. The next dot might be a free consultation that allows them to get their personal questions answered without having to risk anything.

Here’s what the process might look like:

• Dot # 1 – a relevant advertisement (online or offline) for the free report that promises to deliver a benefit that fits what the prospect is looking for
• Dot # 2 – a free report or whitepaper that establishes the accountant or bookkeeper as the professional/expert who has valuable insight that will add value to the business owner and provide the needed solution
• Dot # 3 – an offer at the end of the report for a free/paid consultation that allows the prospect to get additional questions answered and continue the relationship building process. This is where the accountant or bookkeeper gets to qualify the prospect with well-developed questions that reveal if they are a qualified lead
• Dot # 4 – if the prospect is a qualified lead, the accountant can make an offer to meet the need of the prospect and ask for the business. The objective at this stage is to make a sale.

This is a proven marketing strategy that has worked for decades and will continue to work when employed properly.

Hopefully, this outline has given you a few ideas of how you can begin to fill your sales funnel with qualified leads. Above all, make the commitment to develop a marketing strategy that gets your suspects and prospects actively involved in a process where they can get to know you, like you, and trust you.

If you are interested in developing a similar process within your enterprise, you may want to consider attending our marketing strategies teleseminar.