A spectrum of people to be targeted

lead generation, Marketing, single target market

Once you have chosen a Single Target Market to focus on, you need to find ways of addressing that market.

In any market there will be a spectrum of customers- At one end you will have people who are reactive, they are in pain and they need a solution now. At the other end of the spectrum you will have people who are progressive and proactive and want to take measures before a problem occurs. And in between are people at various degrees between getting into pain and getting to become progressive after observing something.

Generally its a good idea to target the people who are in pain first, because they can give an order immediately. Immediately is a relative term – depending on the sales cycle of what you are selling. If you were caught in a hurricane or cyclone and your roof has blown away, then you need to get the roof fixed immediately as in yesterday. On the other hand if you are in B2B , immediately could mean a roll out in 3 months.

But how do you identify someone who is in pain in your market. Most people who want an instantaneous answer would always search on Google. So if you can advertise on Google with the exact same terms that the customer would think when in pain, then they could come on top of Google search and get business.

As I had in my post yesterday however, you have got someone to raise their hand by clicking on the link but if you don’t capture their email address, that advertisement will go waste the person visits your website without giving their email. You need to figure out a way to address this.

Similarly for the other end of the spectrum – the progressive or proactive folks. They will also go on Google or in case of B2B, they will ask their subordinates to find out things. Those subordinates will also first go to Google. So what will they those folks think when they have to do some thing proactive in their category. Again put out the paid advertisements with respect to that.

But first focus on the people in pain, because you can get business faster. Once you delight the customer, then you can do even more business with referrals and other things.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Lead magnets…..different medium….different possibilities

campaign, digital, lead generation, Marketing, Sales

Marketing is applied psychology. So you need to figure out the strengths of each medium and blend it with human psychology to help you get leads.

In my earlier posts I have written about different physical and electronic media for generating leads. Today we will limit to seeing how you can utilize electronic media.

One of the key things about Google (including YouTube) paid search and to some extent Facebook paid search is the fact that if you can master them, you can can have the equivalent of thousands of sales people working for you, whenever someone is searching for something similar to what you offer.

So while you might show up because of the PPC, how do you ensure that people click on your advertisement first and then leave their email id, so that you can keep marketing to them in the future.

This is where the challenge starts. With PPC, if you have some smart people, you can get your advertisement to show up at a reasonable cost. But there’s no point if they come to your site and leave without giving you their email address. Then your advertisement has been wasted.

One simple way which I have tested after listening to Joe Polish and Dean Jackson on thir Ilovemarketing.com podcast is offering relevant reports. Why this works is that human beings are gatherers/ collectors. So when you are offering something which the person can collect right now and consume whenever they want, they tend to give their email ids.

Right now I have seen that offering this lead magnet using this psychology has worked on getting about 10 email ids a week. I am now working on seeing how to scale it up to see if I can take it to a about a hundred a week….Will keep you posted.

I would suggest mean time if you’ll can also try and give me feedback, in the comments section below, on your success or failure with this.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

The Value of a Lead

B2B, follow-up, lead generation, life time value, Marketing, Risks, Trust

Have you analysed the time it takes for someone who enquires something that you offer and eventually buys. And what is the Life Time Value of a client.

Not all leads will buy anything at all, some will buy, but not buy from you. But those who do buy from you, do you have an estimate of the amount of time it could take at an extreme for a lead to close.

About 10 – 12 years back, there was an MNC , who was into selling CPU chips, had come to us. Their sales team had a clear mandate from their management, if a lead was not closed in 3 months, it had to be pulled out of the funnel and dropped. Like us, they were also dealing in B2B.

Since we deal in considerably large value deals, it sometimes takes us even 24 months of effort to keep the lead live, to eventually come to us.

The timeline is an important aspect in deciding when a lead needs to be stopped from being targeted. One argument is never. To a certain degree, I agree with this argument. At the other extreme is an argument that if someone doesn’t buy in 3-6 months, then they will not buy. With companies running their sales and revenue targets from one quarter to another following a lead for more than 6 months is tough, because after 6 months the sales person may change.

Generating a lead is tough enough and losing it because you have an ad-hoc timeline to decide when to dump a lead can be devastating for the business. Depending on the kind of offerings you have, the more expensive the offering, the more people take time to think through their decision because, in the B2B segment, people can’t afford to Not Have Things Work. And because they still don’t trust you or the technology, they don’t want to take a decision. That’s where all the inertia and indecision comes-up.

You need to patiently nurture leads by educating them and motivating them to try you out (if they are engaging you for the first time) by doing POCs ( if its a complex technology) and eliminate all the possible risk from the buyer.

Once you have analysed the timeline of closing leads, then they will become an asset which will I’ve you annuity kind of business.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

The best companies who could use my marketing advice

B2B, Business, Customers, ideal customer, lead generation, Marketing, Riding the elephant, single target market

I keep talking about a lot on the way you should identify the market, how you should target a segment and niche it . I talk about the challenges that come up when targeting the B2B space for a complex sale and how you can go about addressing them.

While most of whatever I talk about is overall good marketing practice, this is specially useful to people who own, run or work for companies who are less than $50 million in revenue, sell mid to high value products in the B2B space.

If you sell low dollar value items, then maybe a few things – especially about mapping different people in the organisation or structuring a value proposition or identifying the ecosystem may not completely be of value to you.

If you have already crossed the revenue of $50 million then chances are that you already are doing things and putting up systems which have helped you reach such a large turnover.

Its the companies, who are reaching about half a million dollars and want to break into the million dollar league and build processes which bring regular leads, who can benefit most from what I write. These would be my Ideal Customers.

All the concepts whether its the Single Target Market or the “Riding the Elephant” can provide immense leverage to companies who want to grow dramatically.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!