Find. Get. Keep. (Part 3 of 3)

KEEPing Customers Loyal to your Business

You’ve found your prospects. You’ve gotten them to become customers. Now what? Remember the old adage about the 80/20 rule? It says that 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. There is also a saying about how it is cheaper to keep your existing customers then to find new ones.

If all of that is true – wouldn’t it make sense to have a strategy to stay in contact with these people? I’m positive that anyone reading this probably reads other blogs, they probably subscribe to several email newsletters, and I’m pretty sure they are probably members of social network sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, etc.

As consumers (or better yet – someone else’s prospects) we must remember that we WANT information, we WANT to be communicated with about topics that interest us, and we WANT to better understand. So, as a consumer if you know this is true, why then when you switch hats to play the role of business owner, or marketing manager do you NOT think YOUR customers want to hear from you?

Find. Get. Keep. (Part 2 of 3)

GETting Prospects to become Customers

In Part 1 of this series I mentioned a phrase, “It’s not about you.” Guess what – that still hold true in the ‘Get’ portion of the cycle as well. You could have the best looking site in the world (in your opinion), but if it does not DO what you want it to do (in most cases convert prospects into customers) is it really that good?

When a prospect comes to your website there used to be an old statistic that said you had seven seconds to capture their attention in order for them to stay on your site. Today – you’re LUCKY if you get seven seconds. Prospects want information. However, they want it in ways that make sense to them. You might be thinking to yourself – “fine, we’ll figure out how they want it, and give to them that way.” That would be great if there were only one type of prospect. Unfortunately, you will have some that want to watch a video, some that will want to see an animated demonstration, others will want to read about your service.

Kind of makes things a little more complicated doesn’t it? Your website must be engaging. It should be clear and focused and provide as much information as a prospect would desire in a means that makes the most sense… to THEM.

Find. Get. Keep. (Part 1 of 3)

FINDing Prospects Online

So you have webpage. For some reason you go to Google (or Yahoo)… type in your company name and… BAM you don’t come up anywhere. Why is that? Why would you not be able to type your own name into a search engine and find your site? In August of 2005 there were 19.2 Billion (with a B) web pages indexed by Yahoo. Is there any surprise that it is more challenging than ever to be indexed by the search engines under relevant keywords?

Prospects ARE out there looking for your services, but if they can’t find them, that website you just paid $25K for is going to be pretty useless. In order to find your prospects online, you have to know (or at least try to figure out) what they are searching for. Let’s pretend you are a Professional Business Advice Consultant for example. How many people would type that phrase exactly into a search engine?

If you guessed zero – you win. Some may give up right there claiming “but that IS what I AM!” Have you ever heard the phrase, “It’s not about you?” It couldn’t be more true in this example. It is clearly NOT about you! There is a HUGE market for “Professional Business Advice Consultants,” but your prospects are searching for business coaching, business advice, small business consulting, starting a business, etc.

The key to being found online is to be relevant to what your prospects are searching for and then implementing a strategy to cut through the clutter known as ‘competition’ and get them to YOUR site.