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Marketing

Building Customer Relations Through Simple Marketing Strategies

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Every business owner wants to sell more of their products and services. Before this can happen, it is important to understand a few simple but powerful marketing strategies for building trust and desire among your prospects

This article gives three important strategies for understanding your customers and building their trust and confidence.

Strategy #1: Define Your Buyer Personas

Buyer Personas are simple customer biographies based on real-life data. They help you understand the wants and needs of your specific customer types.

Two very popular personas are the NASCAR Dad and the Soccer Mom. These personas were actually created and used by both the Democratic and Republican parties in past elections.

The first step in defining a particular persona is to look at your current customer database and find similar buying patterns. This might seem a difficult proposition at first, but you’ll be surprised by how very simple patterns can emerge once you’re looking for them.

Buyer persona profiles can contain age, gender, income level, occupation, education level, hobbies, and anything else that is meaningful to your business.

Strategy #2: The UVP

Before you can successfully sell to prospects and customers, it is important to first define your UVP – otherwise known as your Unique Value Proposition. Defining and offering something unique will also help you stand apart from your competition.

Don’t have anything that makes you unique? Then it’s time to create something from scratch. Take your time and be prepared to alter some of your services in order to support your unique way of standing out from the crowd.

Take a look at your competitors. What do they excel at? Can you find a way to improve upon what they are offering or to include a compelling guarantee that instantly sets you apart from what everyone else is doing?

Here are some ideas for better understanding your competitors.

1. Buy from them. This is one of the best ways to determine how well your competition performs from start to finish.

2. Register for their online newsletter. Is the newsletter helpful? Does it provide helpful information or does it simply try to sell?

3. Register for competitor brochures, fliers and catalogs. This will give you a good idea of how often they mail as well as the offers and unique selling points they are communicating to potential customers.

Defining your Unique Value Proposition helps set you apart from the competition and communicates your compelling value to prospects and customers.

Strategy #3: The MarCom Folder

When someone contacts you for information, what do you give them?

Hopefully, you give them a complete marketing communications folder that further helps educate them as to your capabilities. A simple two-pocket folder is all you need to begin!

Here’s what I recommend you include in your folder.

1. The Compelling Story: Every small business owner should be able to tell a compelling story about their passions and why they started their business. A great story about why you started your business can create instant trust. Try and craft your story so that it appeals to the emotions, is fun to read, and provides a sense of passion.

2. Your Company Advantage Why should anyone do business with you? Write up a few paragraphs to convince new prospects why they need to work with you or purchase your products. You must convince them of your ability to solve their unique problems.

3. Solving Customer Problems: This insert should explain how you have solved past customer problems. Try and summarize 3-4 different customer issues.

4. The Product Summary Page: On this page, list out the many benefits of your products and/or services. Bullet point the benefits so that it is easy for prospects to skim.

5. The Testimonial Page: This is the page that summarizes your best customer testimonials. A testimonial is proof that you have a track record of delivering what you promise. Make sure each testimonial focuses on the specific result that was achieved to help the customer with their problem.

Feel free to add other things into your marketing communications folder, but the above items are mandatory.

These strategies will go a long way to helping you convert prospects into customers. Make sure sure you spend quality time with them.

Corte Swearingen has been helping business owners grow their profits for almost twenty years and is the founder of the SmallBiz Marketing Tips website. For more information on attracting and converting new prospects, read Creating an Effective Marketing Communication Strategy.

Marketing

Converting Prospects Into Customers

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by Corte Swearingen

Help Your Customer Achieve Their Goals

Each time you make contact with a potential client, think of what you can do to help them achieve their goals. Hard selling tactics do nothing to build your prospect’s level of trust. With the Web, people have the ability to control what they view and which marketing messages they choose to engage.

Demonstrating how your products can help meet your prospect’s goals may require you alter your current core marketing message. Stop focusing on selling and start thinking of how you might educate your prospects. This can be done by offering free downloadable product guides, tips sheets, problem-solving case studies, and periodic newsletters.

What’s wrong with placing the focus on selling? Absolutely nothing! As a business owner, your ultimate goal is to sell. But you can’t sell unless you first warm up the prospect by showing them directly how they will benefit from your offering. If you want to meet your business goals, you simply MUST focus on your customer’s goals first.

It’s Not the Features, It’s the Benefits

One big mistake is to talk about your product’s features as opposed to the benefits. When talking with prospects or creating your marketing brochures, make sure you bullet point the benefits of the product right at the very beginning. Show them how your product or service will solve their pressing problems.

Give Away Free Helpful Items

One of the best preselling strategies is to simply give away relevant and compelling information that helps your prospects solve a difficult business issue. Think of what you can create to help presell. Examples include short ebooks, product selection guides and relevant industry information.

Some companies are afraid of giving away their expertise. But if you don’t educate your prospects by providing them with free relevant content, how can you expect them to really understand and invest in your products and services?

My personal recommendation is to give away information in the form of ebooks, tip sheets or white papers. On the very last page of your download, you can add a little commercial about your products and services as well as your website URL and complete contact info.

In addition, you should require web visitors to enter their name and email so that you can start building an online list of interested contacts. Be careful to not ask for too much information at this stage. Most people will not fill out long forms even if the information is free.

Develop a Compelling Guarantee

If you are having difficulty differentiating yourself from the competition, think of how you might create a compelling guarantee. A rock-solid guarantee can do a lot to remove the barrier for purchase.

So what constitutes a compelling guarantee? How about a lifetime guarantee or a double your money back guarantee? Sure, you may get a few people to take you up on it, but you’ve now greatly reduced the friction to purchase as the prospect has nothing to lose.

These 4 simple strategies have the power to greatly increase the conversion from prospect to paying customer. Start implementing them today.

About the Author:
Corte Swearingen is the founder of the SmallBiz Marketing Strategies website and the author of the Integral Marketing System Course. He has been a professional strategic marketer for eighteen years.