For some businesses, the buyer journey is fairly simple – people decide they want your product, they find your website, they buy it. If you sell ‘widgets’ , if you sell products to the general public, this is great – but what if you are a manufacturer, an engineer, a consultant, an accountant or a professional services business? In other words, what if you provide more complex products or services to other businesses or to the public sector?
In these industries, sales take longer – you need to created detailed specifications and quotations, and often need to build relationships for a long time before you even get to that point.
To understand how to attract customers, let me talk about the journey they go on when they buy from you – in fact the journey that everyone goes on when they buy anything. We call it the buying funnel, and it looks like this:
Awareness
Most people don’t just suddenly wake up one morning and decide they need your services – you start by becoming aware of a need or a problem. For example, when toothpaste was introduced in the 1950’s, they had to make people aware of the problem they had – and toothpaste manufacturers had to advertise heavily to explain why bad breath was a problem, and why teeth needed a protective coating. So awareness is the first stage of any buying journey – becoming aware of a company, or aware of a need or a problem that needs solving.. Awareness is why big brands spend millions on sponsoring the world cup, festivals, on TV advertising, on radio and more – they don’t expect people to buy products directly as a result of the ads but they know that when you go into the supermarket you are far more likely to buy s product you have heard of and trust rather than one you don’t.
However, that's fine for breakfast cereal or chocolate bar companies with billions in their advertising budgets, but you probably don’t have those budgets, plus your customers don’t just pick you from a supermarket shelf – your products and services are more complex, and people need longer to research these decisions.
Consideration
The internet has meant that we can do more and more research than ever before on potential suppliers and on products and services that we are considering, and potential customers of yours will take full advantage of that – they’ll want to do as much research as they can before they start talking to your sales people –this next stage is known as consideration – where your buyer is trying to consider everything they need to think about to fully understand the solution.
Decision
It’s only then that they will move on to the next stage, which is called ‘decision’ – now our buyer has understood everything they wanted to and it’s time for them to decide who they buy it from.
If you put those stages together it creates a funnel, the buying funnel – and our goal as a marketer is to get as many people in to the top of this funnel as we can, so we get as many enquiries and sales coming out of the bottom end as possible.
Why Your Website Is Not Converting (As Well As It Could)
Now you probably have Google Analytics installed on your website, right? So that tells you how many people have visited your site each day, week and month, right?
So you can see how man people have visited your site – now let me ask another question – how many of those people made an enquiry? If you have 1000 people on your website, how many website enquiries did you get in that time? 10? 20?
If you get more than 5% of your website visitors making enquiries, then you are doing well - with many websites it is around 1 or 2% or even less. So that means for every 100 people that find you on Google or see you on social media or click on your website from an email, 98 of them look round and then just leave!
It’s not like they are not interested – they have gone to your website for a reason. So why don’t they get in touch?
The reason is simple: they are just not ready yet! They have only just become aware of you, or they are still researching – they are not yet at the decision stage!
In fact, the point at which people will make an enquiry has become later and later in the buying process as buyers are able to get more and more information for themselves online – a study showed that B2B buyers are 57% through their decision making process already by the time they want to talk to a salesperson.
Now think back to your website… which stage of the buying process does your website appeal to? The chances are, it is people in decision stage only.
Why Your Emails Are Not Working (As Well As They Could)
Think about the emails you send – I’ll bet the majority are pushing your products or services, in other words they are targeting people in decision stage only. Anyone still in awareness or in consideration stage will just ignore them! That explains your low open rates and low click through rates!
What about your SEO and PPC (if you are doing them)? Same thing, you are targeting the people in decision stage only – the people who want more information as they do their research are simply ignored, and as a result, they leave your site and go elsewhere!
What you are doing is a bit like asking someone to marry you… on a first date! They need more time to get to know, like and trust you first before engaging with your sales people, committing to a meeting or requesting a quotation.
What if...
What if from the 100 people visiting your website, you were able to tell who they were? Not just from their IP address, I mean their first and last name, their phone number, their job role, their company name… everything?
What if you were able to create a database of the people visiting your website that just grew and grew over time – how much would that be worth?
And what if you had a way of helping those people with their research, building a relationship, building trust and nurturing them so that when they WERE in decision stage, you were the guys they wanted to deal with?
Can you imagine how much easier it would be to convert THESE types of enquiries into paying customers?
And what if this was fed through to your salespeople, so that with every enquiry you knew which pages they’d visited on the website, how they found you, how long they’ve been aware of you and they were qualified?
And what if that could happen AUTOMATICALLY, without doing any additional work?
FREE Guide: How To Get Customers Coming To You (Qualified, And Ready To Buy)
This free guide shows you not only how to do this, but also how to radically grow the amount of people coming to your website and becoming aware of you without having to spend the millions of pounds that the big brands do.
We’re also going to show you how to go beyond just the initial marketing funnel – but how to take the people who are customers, and increase their loyalty, give them a better experience so that they spend more with you and refer you to more other similar customers– and that’s where the real money is made!
We have put together an entire system for this, a structured, step by step process that thousands of businesses have used already and that we’ve experienced ourselves - so this is not just theory, and it’s not just an idea – this is a reliable, predictable way to grow your business and achieve more with less from your marketing and get off the hamster wheel of day to day tactics that are only working to a fraction of their potential.
So download your FREE Guide using the link below:
Article by Will Williamson
