Valuable material alert!

You’ve almost certainly landed on a squeeze page at some point if you use your computer or mobile device to research information or learn.

What’s a squeeze page? One of those web pages that offers you a free download – or sometimes a video – in return for your name and email address.  Usually the download has a compelling title like:

• 27 marketing mistakes business owners make
• Your top ten strategies for getting great staff
• Your business health and safety checklist

There’s nothing wrong with this – in fact, it’s something I recommend my clients offer to build their marketing lists – but it does have to deliver value.

In marketing terms it’s known as an ‘ethical bribe’.  You deliver valuable information and the recipient gives you their contact information in order to access it.

Generally a squeeze page is the first stop in a marketing funnel.  You offer something free to establish a relationship.

Leveraging your marketing funnel

The next step is to communicate with the people who have ‘signed up’ something at low cost – a book, a low cost webinar, a small product (it depends whether you sell products or services – or both), a short course.  People who buy are now moving down your funnel.

Now you can offer them something at a higher cost and, although fewer people will buy at each stage, some will and a handful will eventually become premium clients who buy your high cost services/products.

While you may need to get a few hundred people downloading your free ethical bribe to sell one low cost item and probably a few thousand to convert one into a premium client, it’s still worth doing.  This is lead generation almost on autopilot.

The key to open the door to converting people from free to customers is to deliver really good value in that initial document.  Now video is so popular many people recommend that the free item is now a video rather than a pdf download, but you need to know your audience to decide what will work best.  The challenge with videos is that they take time to ‘consume’ and, if someone is busy they may not want to or have time to watch right now, whereas the download process for a written document only takes a few seconds.

Setting it up

• If you’re struggling to come up with material that will interest potential clients – think about the questions that your existing clients often ask you.  The information you give them – usually free of charge – because you’re knowledgeable about it and they need to know – is a great place to start.
• Give it a compelling title – what problem does it solve for the reader?  What pitfalls will it help them avoid?
• Don’t ramble – a short, punchy one pager is better than a vague, rambling two pager.  The value is in the content, not the length.
• Put it on your website linked to a data capture system, promote it on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – and then you’ve opened your funnel for business!

Winners!

You don’t have to be famous to be up for an award – your business may not qualify for the Oscars, but there are almost certainly awards that you can enter.

Why bother?  It adds credibility to your business if either the organisation or its leader has won a business, industry or personal award.  It tells people that you’ve been assessed and found to be top of the tree.

Don’t be put off by awards that talk about ‘nominations’ – you don’t need someone else to nominate you, most awards allow companies, businesses and individuals to nominate themselves.

Where to find award opportunities

The easiest ones to find are your local business awards – ask at your nearest Chamber of Commerce – they usually know about what’s coming up, either by town or county.

Check out the industry press and see what awards may be available.  Journals and magazines relating to your area of specialism will often run awards or promote sponsored awards.

Keep an eye on the local press – award organisers are always looking for press opportunities and local press are keen to get connected with local business (i.e. potential advertisers).

If you have a particular skill or one of your team is particularly good at their job look for opportunities around that.  For instance, there are sales awards and direct sales awards; all businesses have to carry out sales – do you have a brilliant sales person who might qualify?

Check out professional bodies – they sometimes sponsor awards.  Associations and Institutions find them a good way to improve awareness and bring in members.  You may have to be a member to qualify though.

Ask Google!  Enter Awards + your industry and see what comes up.  You might also want to add your country, state or county to identify relevant awards for your business location, but there are digital awards for companies who work virtually.

Before you enter check out the organisers and previous winners to ensure it’s not just a commercial organisation that has created ‘awards’ to make some money by offering advertising for the winners – at a price.

However, don’t confuse this with entry fees – some awards do require a submission fee (they have to pay their judges)!

Not ready to enter for an award yet?

If your business doesn’t fit any of your local award categories yet – you could consider becoming one of the sponsors.  This doesn’t necessarily mean investing big bucks, there are usually a range of sponsorship options that get your business associated with the awards.

What could Autoresponders do for you?

The simple answer is ‘build relationships’, but as with all simple answers, there’s a lot more to it than that.

Here are some of the uses that autoresponders work for:

Building your reputation:  When someone joins your list they are likely to forget you quite quickly, unless you remind them about you.  A series of messages that include advice, tips, how-to information, links to useful articles, websites, blogs, products and services all enhance your reputation as someone with their very knowledgeable finger on the pulse.

Preventing shelf-development:  After attending a training course – whether that’s online or offline it’s easy to put your notes to one side to look at ‘later’.  The longer they’re in the Pending tray, the less likely you are to get around to doing anything with them.  So – if you’ve run any kind of learning event – create a series of reminders for your delegates. They don’t have to be long – it might be a small task to do each day for the first week to get them started and then reminders of key learning points every 6-8-10 days or so over the next 3-6 months.

Converting interested to buyers:  When someone has downloaded your free giveaway they’ve raised their hands as ‘interested’.  They may not be ready to buy today – but if you don’t remind them of what else is out there they will forget how interested they were and you’ll have to start all over again.  A series of messages asking how they’re doing with what they’ve already downloaded, asking for feedback, offering them additional low cost items, etc. will keep you in their sights.

Giving superb customer service:  So someone has bought your product – the money is in your bank – now what?  Create a series of messages that help the customer to get the best from their product – advice and tips.  Reminders that it’s there to give them real benefit.  At some point ask them to give you feedback too – ideally with a link to an online form rather than relying on them to reply to your email.  If you maintain the relationship post-sale you’ll get far more recommendations.

Delivering a course:  If you are selling your knowledge autoresponders are an excellent way to deliver an e-course.  Once your customer has paid up front they will immediately get a thank-you email with the link to the first module.  Then you can deliver reminders and further modules on auto-pilot so you don’t have to remember who to send what to.

These are just a few of the many uses of autoresponders.  If you’re not using them to improve your business – you’re missing an opportunity.

Email marketing or SPAM?

People are often worried about running email marketing campaigns – “I don’t want to spam the people on my list” they say.  And they’re right – we’ve all been on the receiving end of spam sales pitches from people who we don’t know or may have given us a business card some time ago.  So how do you create something that walks that line between blatant sales and relationship building?

Who’s on your list?

The first step is to identify who is in your list and how they got there.  There are many ways people get on your list, these are the main routes:

1. People you’ve met networking and have given permission for you to send them your newsletter.  If they’re happy to get your newsletter, that doesn’t automatically mean they will also be pleased to get your marketing emails.
2. People who have given you their contact details in a form on your website for a specific reason.  Getting further information about your products or services is part of the deal here.
3. People who have already bought something from you online and ticked the box that said ‘I’m happy to receive other information’ or DIDN’T tick the box that said ‘Don’t send me anything else’.  They’ve opted in!
4. People who have already bought something from you offline.  BUT – existing clients don’t appreciate spam either and you should not add them to a list without their permission.  They will almost certainly prefer to have a direct 1-2-1 contact with you – and this applies to former clients too.

Each of your lists may need different types of message.

What does each list want?

Networking contacts: will respond best to reading a newsletter that delivers value and useful information.  If you want to sell more directly use your newsletter to remind them they can get your free report/tips sheet/how to document and send them to the website to sign up and download it.  They’ll then move to your marketing list with different expectations.

People who have completed a web form: are usually more open to marketing messages – BUT if you are too in-their-face may simply unsubscribe.  I recommend you develop a friendly, chatty style (it’s more interesting to read) and pitch your message as part of a helpful email, maybe a short tip that relates to your product or service.  So – lead with value and then sell.

People who have already bought online: have already shown an interest in your product/services.  They may have bought a product, a webinar, a training programme, an e-learning document – but they are clearly hungry for that particular type of information.  Make sure your email messages refer to what they’ve already had and present the new item as a follow on that build on the knowledge they already have.

Don’t send email campaigns to existing offline clients – and, if you think former clients might be interested, take the opportunity to give them a call personally.  You might be surprised at how many are ready to engage you again or buy more products – they just needed a timely reminder.

Footnote:  You are legally obliged to check the email Preference Service to ensure you’re not sending email to anyone who has listed their email. This article is a useful reference regarding what is spam and how to avoid substantial fines if you are investigated.

Does your Facebook page work?

You’ve probably come across Facebook pages with thousands of likes and an active community and wondered why yours only gets a couple of likes a week and hardly any engagement.

It’s all to do with the amount of time, money and effort you’re prepared to invest.

Facebook filters who sees your posts so, just because you have 100 likes, doesn’t mean that 100 people are shown your posts.  It’s much, much lower – more like 15 people.  Then you have to take into account whether those people are all looking at their Facebook feed when your posts are presented.  If they only log in every other day they may never see your post.

Money

You can pay to sponsor or promote a post and then more people see it.

You can pay to run a ‘Likes’ campaign and be very specific about who you want to see it – by gender, age, interests, geographic location and more.

These cost money and you need to get your message right.  You might want to engage someone who does this as a service and has excellent results.  They know what works and what doesn’t and how to create a post or an ad that really gets a good response.

Time

Your Page needs you to manage it – so be prepared to put in some time.  When you’re trying to grow the page you should be present daily with something that your audience will find interesting and/or useful.

Bear in mind that people pay more attention to posts with images – so you need to have access to suitable images (or be good with your camera/smartphone) that you have the right to use.

People are even more inclined to engage with video content so you may need to invest time in creating short videos both for your ads and for your page.

Effort

Videos don’t have to be professionally produced – but they do need to be easy for people to follow – so no rambling incoherently!  It’s worth doing some planning and creating a script or at least some bullet points to follow.  Ensure you have an uncluttered background (if you have a pop up display stand with your brand, but without too much text on it – that might be a good background).

You’re trying to build a community – and it won’t happen without your input.  This means that you will need to plan the content you want to post, find images that work for your business and decide on a tone or style for your posts.

What can you offer people that will make them want to come back?

Posting a few random comments or the occasional tip or product image won’t be enough to get engagement.

It doesn’t have to be a long post (although the occasional one is fine), but you do need to post consistently.

Don’t post anything unrelated to your business – no matter how cute; that’s for your personal page.

The plus side is that a plan will make it much easier as you’ll know what you’re writing about each day rather than being faced with a blank comment box.