Why do your clients purchase your product or service? Ultimately, people with whom you do business come to understand, at a detailed level, exactly how you can help them. Additionally, anyone who pays you for what you sell must trust the quality of your product or service. They also must perceive that what you have to offer is more valuable than what your competitors offer. And of course your prospects must be asked to become clients. However, before you can have the opportunity to take any of the above steps to close a sale you must first get your prospects attention. Grabbing your prospects attention is the first step of the sales process. Without plenty of awareness and interest for your products or services you cant realistically expect to achieve the steady sales you need to help you reach your goals. If youre like most small business owners you may run ads (online and off), have send sales letters, and have a web site, among other techniques, to generate interest in what you do. If your marketing efforts generate only a trickle of response you can expect a trickle of business. On the other hand, you can flood yourself with business when you generate a ton of response with your marketing material. So, how can you increase the number of people who respond to your marketing? The answer to this question lies in the answer to the opening question of this article, Why do your clients purchase your product or service? Answer: In your own unique way, you solve your clients problems and meet their needs. Its a simple, yet powerful, concept you can use to reliably boost response to your marketing collateral across the board. When people experience marketing material they either pass right by or stop in their tracks to learn more. It is the latter result you seek. When you market with words that describe the problems your prospects have they take notice because your marketing material strikes a personal chord. We all want our problems to go away and are eager to learn more about ways to get rid of them. When your prospects read your marketing material that describes their problems they recognize and respond to something familiar. You can leverage this phenomenon to improve response to your ads, web site and sales letters by taking the following steps. Develop a List Take some time to better understand the problems your product or service solves by asking and writing down your answers to the following questions. What problems do I solve?What are the underlying reasons for why people need what I sell?What results do my clients seek?Though it takes more effort, its also a very good idea to get as much feedback as you can from your clients. Once you have your answers you can begin to improve the quality of and response to your marketing. Increase Response to Your Ads Once you have your list of answers, take some time to review your most recent ads and check to see if their copy reflects the list of problems youve developed. If your ads arent sharply focused on the problems you solve take some time to rewrite them. When you run your new versions you might be quite surprised at how much more additional response they generate compared to their previous versions. Generate More Inquiries with Your Sales Letters Sales letters are essentially highly focused ads. When you send a batch of sales letters you want your recipients to respond by asking for more information. Before anyone will respond to a sales letter it must first be read. How can you get people to read your sales letters? Tell them you solve their problem, in terms uniquely specific to their needs. Unlike an advertisement, when you write a sales letter, you have the chance to research your potential client to develop very specific information about what is negatively affecting their business. You can get people to call you simply by demonstrating that youve taken some time to understand what they need. Your conscientiousness will help establish the trust you need to move to the next step of the sales process, information gathering. When you backup your understanding of a prospective clients needs with a solid plan for filling them you further increase the odds of having your prospect contact you for more information. Do More Business with Your Web Site When people visit your web site, you want those whom you can help to browse through your site and take one of two actions. If youre selling products online, your primary goal for your web site is to have your visitors buy from you. A secondary goal for product based business, and a primary goal for service companies, is to have your web site visitors provide their contact information, so you may continue marketing to them, or pick up the phone and call for more information so you may take the next step on the path to a new sale. How can you get more people to buy from you, contact you or provide their contact information? You guessed it! Focus your web sites copy on the problems you solve. To generate more business with your web site take steps similar to the ones suggested for improving response to your ads. The sooner you do, the more you will sell. Move Your Marketing Forward What are some other questions you can use to develop a better picture of the reasons your prospects become clients? The more information you can gather, the more insight you will gain about how to generate ever-increasing interest in what you do. Copyright 2005, Better Marketing Results and Jeremy Cohen This article may be reprinted, free of charge, in newsletters, ezines, web sites, and other electronic and print media, as long as credit is given to the author and the accompanying resource box is clearly included with the article, with the live web link for electronic media and a printed link otherwise. |
