6 Ways To Improve Your Marketing Now

1. Improve Your Core Messages

Customer messages, the messages you use to describe your product or service can make or break how customers engage with you. Good messages quickly and easily clarify how your business can solve a problem for your prospect. When your message is not clear or consistent it can lead to confusion and lost sales opportunities.

Problem

How well does your core message address the problem the majority of your customers are trying to solve?

Solution

How well does your message convey how you can solve your prospect’s primary problem?

Benefit

How well does your message convey how your prospect’s business benefits by working with your company?  

SELF-ASSESSMENT

Use your company’s elevator pitch to help determine how well your core message passes the basic problem, solution, benefit test. Describe your business with these three elements in simple terms and you’ll win more customers.

2. Nurture Sales Leads

Not every person is ready to buy from you the first time they visit your website. Some people need time to process information while others need to feel like they can trust you. Still others need questions answered. Keep visitors interested in your business by giving away useful content in exchange for their name and email address. Nurture your new leads with relevant and useful content demonstrating how you can solve their problem and why they should work with you.

Recommendation

1. Create relevant and useful content that helps them better understand your service. Offer the content as a free download from your website.

2. Collect names and email addresses when leads download your content.

3. Send emails to build trust in your company and help prospects learn how you can solve their problems. Include reviews from customers that have used your product or service and success stories from your customers.

4. Follow up with an email sales campaign describing a specific offer and a clear call to action.

3. Strengthen Calls to Action

Using weak website calls-to-action (CTA) are common mistakes preventing you from getting more leads. Avoid CTAs like “Learn more” or “Read more”. CTAs with this type of sales language are weak and can delay the action you want a visitor to take. Instead, your site should provide a logical progression of content leading to a specific choice they can make to buy your product or service.

Recommendation

Fix this problem with specific actions you want a visitor to take. Ask for the sale with “Buy Now”, “Schedule a Meeting” or other action-oriented sales CTAs. Adding a direct CTA helps create a subtle sense of urgency and boldly leads the customer to you.

4. Improve Your Content Relevance and SEO

Your search engine ranking determines where your site shows up when a person searches for products or services to help them solve a problem. You want to rank as high as possible to capture the attention of your prospects when they are researching solutions for their most pressing problems. In fact, the top result on page one gets 31.7% of all clicks, and the number of clicks drop steeply the lower you rank. Competition is fierce for the top placement, which makes it even more important to know how to optimize your site for the best search engine performance.

Recommendation

Conduct a comprehensive optimization test at least once a year (more frequently when possible) to help ensure your keywords and content match your customer’s latest interests and search terms.

5. Make It Easier For Customers to Find Information

Not every person is ready to buy from you the first time they visit your website. Some people need time to process information while others need to feel like they can trust you. Still others need questions answered.

Keep visitors interested in your business by giving away useful content in exchange for their name and email address. Nurture your new leads with relevant and useful content demonstrating how you can solve their problem and why they should work with you.

When your website lacks purpose, your customers won’t know where to start or what information to read first. Placing lots of options in the navigation or giving your visitors too many choices can make a visitor abandon your site.

Remember you have about 5 seconds to grab their attention and help a visitor understand if your company can solve their problem. Load the most important and singular piece of information above the fold.

Additional information can be positioned lower down on your page. Trim down your list of options and choices and focus on delivering a clear message about the problem your customer can solve when they buy your product or service and you’ll convert more visitors to leads and customers.

6. Convert more messages from “We” to “You”

When your marketing copy focuses too much on your business, your people or your history, you’re more likely to turn people away. Too many “We” messages cause visitors to think you care more about yourself than you do their problem.

The harsh reality is most people don’t care much about when your company was founded or how long you have been in business. Visitors to your website care more about whether you can solve a problem they have or how you can make their future life better.

SELF-ASSESSMENT

Count and record below how many times you use the word “We” or “I” on your website and compare it to the number of times the word “You” is used. You’ll be surprised at the results. If you have more instances of “We” messages than “You” messages it’s time for some changes.

To correct this, reduce the number of “We” and “I” statements and focus more on developing customer-centric statements using the word “You” and how your product or service can solve their problem.

CONCLUSION
If you are struggling with marketing and want to learn how your can create better messages to win more customers, then it’s time to ask for some help. Here’s how to get started.