Why is My Online Marketing Strategy Failing & How Can I Fix It?
You’re running an online marketing campaign with an agency that has great reviews, what seems like a logical approach to generate you leads, you’re getting flash reports with green arrows and numbers however, in reality the Return On Investment just isn’t there right?
You have a great product and service, you’ve built your company from the ground up and you know that if you invest into your online presence, you can create a large new stream of permanent revenue that could really make a substantial difference to your business and lifestyle.
But there are a few things you should be well aware of before you invest and implement an online marketing strategy for your business. This article will explain why your current online marketing strategy is failing and why a relationship funnel is your best option to fix and help your online presence drive an abundance of wallet ready leads through to your inbox.
You’re Asking Your Customers To Jump Into Bed With You On The First Date.
Quite simply, this is the “matter of fact” for about 90% of all the failing digital marketing strategies I’ve seen and been employed to fix. Business owners not just on Social Media, but on their websites and ad campaigns are literally acting like that “19-Year-Old Douchebag” as Gary Vee likes to explain it.
See 1 min video explanation here where an audience member at one of Gary’s conferences stands up and tries to pitch him a product
You’re jumping out at prospects and asking them to buy your services and products, without any context.
Look into your websites Google Analytics for a minute. If you check your audience overview stats I’ll take an estimated guess that 80 plus per cent of all your websites traffic from within Australia was from “New Users” am I right?
Now, look at the average time spent on your website….. About 2-3 minutes? That’s the industry standard for a good “average time spent on a website”. Now I bet your bounce rate is somewhere between 45-70%. (Bounce rate being the percentage of web-visitors who don’t go further than your homepage).
Now driving traffic to your website through paid ads, SEO, social media is great however if you’re asking a stranger to buy or enquire with you from the word go, you’re only going to attract a small amount of your market.
It doesn’t matter whether or not they were actively looking for your service/product in the first place, if you’re asking people to make a transaction with you within a 2-3 minute span, your website and social media presence is basically acting like that 19-year-old guy in high school and walking up to the pretty girl and asking her out on a date, without even knowing her.
Your asking strangers to buy on impulse, without any context or without properly explaining why your product or service suits their needs and what your competitive advantages are.
Quite simply an inner page within your website explaining how good you are just isn’t enough. You only have to spend 30 seconds in your Google Analytics to understand that…
This should be your lightbulb moment right here.
When business owners hear and think about Digital Marketing, they typically think about driving traffic to their websites through the likes of SEO, AdWords or Social Media and leaving it there.
It’s not just your fault… I typed in “Digital Marketing…” and each capital city in Australia and found about 70% of the companies who appeared on the first page only offer SEO, AdWords and maybe some FB Ads.
So the “experts” are telling you to drive traffic to your website and hope for the best.
In reality, what’s actually happening is you’re ranking for SEO, you’re getting paid clicks to your professional looking website and your conversion rate is probably about 2-5% with a whopping 95-98% of people leaving your website within 2 minutes never to return.
Ironically, that’s probably the same conversion rate the “19 Year Old Kid” has at highschool approaching pretty girls at will.
Now, if you’re investing $1000 – $10,000+ dollars into your website, you’re literally wasting 95% of that money. It’s like going into a supermarket buying a cooked chicken, eating a wing and throwing the rest in the garbage.
Your Leads Are Weak
Now if your business is the type where your website or social ad’s can close some impulse strangers, you’re probably going to find this.
Without educating your prospects on your service, the value you can bring to them, why your business over your competitors, you are leaving your prospects no choice but to ask for pricing.
And I don’t blame them…Your website may look professional, but without any context as to the value you bring, your understanding about their particular needs, the only choice these “impulse prospects” have to ask is the price point for your services and products.
It’s not the leads that are weak…. Your current online strategy is weak. Jumping out at hundreds of people per day saying “umm hey, you want to come over?
You Need To Open, Nurture, Close.
Now, I want you to think about any time you’ve made a transaction. Whether it be buying your current smartphone to the time you went into the local butcher and purchased some sausages.
I want you to think for a moment and break down exactly what happened. Because that exact process needs to happen if your online presence is going to attract buyers rather than tyre kickers and window shoppers.
Let’s think about your latest phone purchase.
How did you find out about it? Through a friend? Billboard? Reviews Online?
Probably through multiple channels right?
What was your thought process behind buying an iPhone, Samsung, Huawei or Oppo?
Did you want it to take good photos? Were you thinking about your business and how it could help you to run things when your not in the office? You were probably thinking about your own specific needs.
Did you walk into the shop, pick it up and buy it outright straight away? I bet you probably conducted some research first, walked in one time had a look around, did some window shopping, maybe picked up a pamphlet first before the need to buy and had a general look around some different stores.
When you were ready and pre-sold on the type of phone you wanted, I bet you probably still talked to the salesman about your needs and got a second opinion from them about the functionality of the phone and how it could help you right?
After first walking into the shop, picking up a pamphlet, then talking to some friends, then coming back to the shop talking to the salesperson, only then did you make a logical decision to purchase right?
What happened here is a “buying process”. Depending on the cost and value of a product and the person, the “buying process” can take a split second to a few months before someone is convinced and they make either an enquiry with you or a transaction.
This is the process that your online presence needs to undertake if it’s going to be successful.
You’ve probably seen some rival companies websites and social pages and although you don’t see their books, you just KNOW they’re doing well from their online presence. That’s because they are taking their prospects through their buyer’s journey and nurturing them from strangers to prospects to customers.
If your online strategy is failing the next paragraph will resonate with you and give you a clear understanding of why it’s not working.
Say you walked past the phone shop and there were salesman at the front of the store holding phones in front of your face and begging you to come in and buy their phones because their phones are the “best thing since sliced bread”.
You and most people wouldn’t buy…..
However, on the other hand, let’s say you walked in, looked at a few phones BEFORE you actually needed one, and then a few weeks later at the time when you needed the phone, walked into the shop, read the product descriptions, talked to an agent and then purchased.
We can probably agree that 98% of people would buy from the latter scenario.
What’s happened here, is one way or another, the phone company has made you aware of their product, developed a relationship with you, and nurtured you into a customer.
You need to turn your online presence and your website into a professional salesman, that understands your audience and can open, nurture and close people on automation.
Now that sounds expensive and complex, but with today’s technology, it’s actually quite simple. You just need to re-frame from what SEO & AdWords agencies are telling you and implement the following.
Simple Steps To A Successful Relationship Funnel
If you implement these 5 steps today to your online marketing strategy, you will start to notice an influx of ready to buy prospects flooding your inbox.
It’s simple. It’s easy, it works. Not just online, but in every successful business, organisation and franchise either online or offline
Step 1: Awareness
Utilise multiple channels at which you can attract people into your funnel.
Using only one or two channels of traffic generation and leaving that to autopilot is the ultimate mistake and accounts for 90% of failed digital marketing strategies.
Step 2: Conversion
Turn strangers into leads. Good content on the website followed by strategically placed Call To Actions will help you get more impulse leads. If you want more than enough ready to buy prospects, give them something of value in exchange for their contact details. Perhaps give them a guide, some examples of your work, e-book, checklist, brochure, discount coupon etc..
The trick here is, (especially for high ticket services) to give them something that will help them before using your service. Make sure the content resonates with how they are feeling now and how they will feel after using your service.
Give them information they may not have known about your service. Light bulb moments = hungry to buy prospects, so give them that light bulb moment. Also, remember to ensure easy access to your social media pages and get people to engage with your social accounts.
Step 3: Nurturing
This is where the magic happens, this is what separates the people who were just window shopping and asking for prices and turns them into “ready to buy” leads.
This is where we’re “tuning” and developing a relationship with your prospects before going to the close.
Earlier in the relationship funnel, we gave them something of value in exchange for their details. We can now start to email them.
There is a right way and of course many wrong ways of doing this (which I’ll explain in my next blog post so stay tuned) however segment prospects depending on what they downloaded and automate emails that follow up, remind and give out more information about your services and products is a technique used by EVERY business that utilises a successful relationship funnel.
Populate your social media pages, not just with your suite of services but with content that stands to educate your audience and helps people to engage with your business and gets them to ask questions.
With Facebook Pixel and Google Remarketing Code, we can develop very specific remarketing ads depending on what product or service they were initially engaging with on your website and use those remarketing ads to bring prospects back to your landing pages, opt-in funnels, website etc when they’re ready to buy.
Develop blogs and articles about your services & re-target people to them.
Say you’re a lawyer who specialises in Criminal Law, Family Law and Wills & Estates. However you want to generate extra Wills & Estates enquiries, develop insightful blogs that educate people with “did you know” style content about wills and estates and simply re-target prospects who viewed the will and estates inner page of your website to the specific blog post. This strategy alone has been proven to significantly boost leads.
So within your typical turnaround time, most of your visitors have now come to your website, landing page or opt-in funnel, received something valuable from you, are now aware of your competitive advantages and the value your product serves, they’ve seen interesting social posts, received emails from you about the service they engaged with and when they are actually ready to buy they are now receiving specific remarketing ads to your blogs or sales pages depending where they are in your pipeline.
Step 4: Decision Time
For most businesses that run generic “cookie-cutter” traffic based strategies, getting people to make a decision to use your business or even enquire is the hardest part. When the enquiries do come through, they’re often thin and trying to get a price out of you as quick as possible so they can compare with whoever else was on Google Page 1.
If you have step 1,2 & 3 into place, the decision stage is the easiest stage of your relationship funnel.
We need to make it easy for your prospects to get to a quote form or number. Developing a specific sales page on a specific offering you have and re-targeting people directly to it smash open your conversion rates.
Develop an irresistible offer, one that you’re competitors don’t. Make it so that there is literally no point to even receive a quote from another competitor and you will claim the lion share of your market and both conversion rates and close rates will go through the roof.
If you don’t know how, speak to one of the consultants at Entelech. Developing irresistible offers for our customers is something we love. We’ll give you a few ideas and we’ve got quite the track record when they get implemented.
You Can Do It!
The cool thing about this is it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in or how long it takes for your prospects to become customers, you can automate this process to take 2 days, you can automate this process to take 2 years.
I want you to think about the biggest companies in the world and what they have done to turn a large proportion of the world’s population into repeat customers.
Let’s think about the big airlines, Virgin, Qantas etc. Think about fast-food chains, McDonald’s, KFC for example. Even the big FinTech companies, PayPal, Dropbox, … One thing they all have in common is that they utilise an automated relationship funnel to do their client acquisition for them.
Now all you need to do is customise this to your business online and it will turn your $1,000 into $50,000.
Entelech have done this for well over 200+ Australian & NZ businesses and growing. Although a relationship funnel at its core is pretty simple, it takes time and there are some technical requirements from your end and best practice online techniques you need to know in order to get the most out of your relationship funnel.
The first place to start when building a relationship funnel is a funnel wireframe. Which is a visual representation on how your online presence will look like when it’s completely built. If you’ve taken the time to read this article and you want to turn your online marketing campaign into one that generates you an inbox full of ready to buy prospects, I commend you to take us up on a Free Funnel Wireframe as shown below, and we’ll map one out for you free of obligation.