What if online marketing wasn’t about the sales? We find that business owners (South African ones) focus too heavily on the first sale and forget about all the other value online marketing brings to business already!
Yes – money in the bank is great – but let’s look at this differently…
An example:
“If you could have 10 people filling in forms every morning, contacting your company for services… that’s 50 per week and 200 per month.
Over a space of a year, you could potentially build a list of 4800 people, people that know your brand, that may refer you to other people, that got a great experience (whether they bought from you or not.)”
In this moment, you have an engine that helps you gauge where your community/market is. You can find what people want next, and you can build from there.
This will bring questions up, like:
- Does my market consist only of 4,800 people?
- How many, of these 4,800 people, will buy a bigger, better option?
- Do these guys like to be communicated regularly?
- On what platforms do they prefer to be reached?
- How will these guys differ to the customers of next year?
The list goes on and on… But when you focus purely on the first sale from online advertising, it’ll inevitably end the lines of questions.
And end your desire to understand your market.
If all you’re thinking about is “what’s the next thing I can sell for a better buck next month?” – you won’t be looking at your list of customers (4800) and thinking what they want.
You’ll only be thinking about what you want to sell (and therein lies the big difference.)
Things To Think About When Building Your “Community Engine”
Focus on the first sale, and you might get the first sale. But focus on building your own space amongst your own crowd in the marketplace, and sales won’t be a problem.
See the difference?
1. Sharing Concepts and New Projects Online
Imagine if you could announce every new venture your business takes. For example, opening up a new branch of your coffee shop and inviting literally ALL your followers for a free cuppa!
Wouldn’t it be amazing if 300 people showed up, from your list? Yes – it would be insanely busy – and you’d spend a lot on those free cuppas… But imagine the support, enthusiasm and joy all of you would share together, if you looked at “sales” in a different way?
Not simply as a transaction, but a transformative experience, for everybody involved.
2. Ongoing Advertising (But in a Cool Way)
It’s actually refreshing to watch an advert from a company you like. Think Nandos. Believe it or not – if you can entertain somebody along the sales journey –even if they don’t buy, you’ve “sold” them on your company.
Instead, what we find too much, too often, is that the ads are too transactional, boring (aside from the heart-rushing discount you’re getting) and motivating, only in the sense that you’ll pay now to get the discount.
You can have a lot more fun listening to your followers reactions via comments, the mails they send through and the products/services they choose to invest in – then you will purely selling them stuff all the time.
3. Finally, Using Online Marketing To Build Relationships
If you treat online advertising as a means to generate R200,000 in sales – you may get the R200,000 in sales. Consider that this is your key focus, you may see each “missed sale” as a total and utter failure, in relation to your initial goals.
But what if your goal was to understand your customer? By any means necessary? So, for example, you interest somebody with a Facebook advert, with a lekker offer, that sends them through to a landing page – they fill their details in and voila!
Your salesperson phones, with the intent to sell the offer (of course) but also with the understanding that even if they don’t say yes after the call, they can just as easily say yes to sign on for more information and greater service in future… See, despite their lack of an initial purchase, there can still be that investment into your company.
And from this, you can build a network of people who you can visualize “why” they wouldn’t buy from you – and get to work on that.
Everything you do online (FB ads, websites, email marketing) then becomes an act of service towards building a relationship with your customers.
What can you do with 2,000 “yeses” and 2,800 “no’s?”
We believe from there, you can understand your market so much better – and form deeper, more meaningful connections with your customers.