In a perfect world, your business sells on autopilot.
People recognize your name and love what you do, so they refer other customers to you and the cycle continues. But what if nobody knows about your business? Finding customers is simpler than you might think. There are many tools at your disposal. You just need a detailed strategy that gets your business in front of qualified potential buyers efficiently and cost effectively.
Here’s a three step process—from the Denver Metro Small Business Development Center’s recent Six Steps to Sales Success webinar series, presented by Kendra Lee of KLA Group—to help you build a connected lead-generation campaign that will help you find new customers.
Step 1: Determine your target market
I know you’ve heard this before. But the backbone of any successful campaign is identifying the right segment and knowing your customers’ needs. You can segment your customers into distinct groups based on needs, behaviors and other traits that they share. A customer segment may also be defined through demographics (such as age, ethnicity, profession or gender) or on their psychographic factors (such as spending behavior, interests and motivations). You can choose to target a single group or multiple groups whose needs would be met with your products and services.
Start by writing down two customer segments and the characteristics of each segment. What issues does your product or service address for each segment?
Step 2: Choose attraction strategies
Attraction strategies are all about getting in front of your potential customers before they realize they have a need. The idea is to proactively educate your prospects about the issues your product or service addresses, even if they don’t even recognize they’re dealing with them yet. That way, when they do realize the issue, you’re top of mind. When these 14 attraction strategies – which are part of the Prospect Attraction Trifecta – are executed together, their impact is amplified.
Choose the attractions strategies that best fit your budget and schedule from. How many times you will execute these strategies? What other resources will you need to help you execute?
Step 3: Create a lead-generation campaign
Once you’ve chosen your attraction strategies, the key is to link them together. Using a combination of strategies over a six month period, or even a year or longer, you’ll be able to touch your potential buyers multiple times before they realize the problem—or trigger—that your product or service addresses. When building your campaign, keep your business objective in mind. What will the campaign do for you? To turn the campaign into results, you need to know what you want your prospects to buy—and then center your campaigns on those offerings.
Choose just one of the customer segments you identified in the first step and identify what product or service you want your prospects in this segment to buy. To build your integrated lead-generation campaign, pick attraction strategies from the list you made and identify the trigger you’ll use with each activity. Estimate the number of leads you can get from that activity.
Want more information like this?
The Denver Metro Small Business Development Center (SBDC) hosts regular workshops and training on sales and marketing. Click here to watch our recent webinar series, Six Steps to Sales Success, with Kendra Lee of KLA Group. Click here to get a connected lead generation strategy infographic and bonus planner to help you outline the steps listed above.
Alea Kilgore is the assistant director for the Denver Metro Small Business Development Center.