There is a certain beauty and symetry to the latest best-practices of online marketing. The front door of your business (your website) is also a perfect platform for keeping in continuous contact with your prospects, offering opt-in enticements, and providing content marketing that will keep bringing your warm leads back to your website where you can seal the deal with smoothly structured order devices, lead generators, or online catalogs.
If your online marketing efforts aren’t bringing your prospects full-circle back to your web … phone … or mail order devices that close the sale, then you may need THE FULL-CIRCLE PLAN. If you already have a plan in place, then that’s great! You may just need one or two more components to heat things up.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to the plan:
- Your Marketing Goals: There are no marketing silver bullets, and you can waste a lot of time and money if you don’t have a clear goal for what you want your marketing to do for your business. Your marketing goal can be as simple as “25% increase in business by next year” or as specific as “get 155 new cyclists to try our new product in the 3rd Quarter.” Whether you need to come up with a new marketing goal or you just want a specific autoresponder project to meet an existing goal, my FREE HALF-HOUR CONSULTATION can help make the marketing path clearer and easier for you to follow.
- Web-Traffic Driver: Too many Outdoor Industry companies rely too heavily on SEO to drive traffic to their websites. You need good tinder and kindling to light a fire under your online marketing efforts. Instead of just waiting for prospects to come and find you … go out there and get them with advertorials in outdoor-niche magazines, more intensive social networking, and even good-old fashioned direct mail. And more unique visitors to your website can only mean better rankings with the Search Engines.
- Opt-In Enticements: To separate the casual web visitors from real potential prospects, you should be offering a simple enticement that lets web visitors opt-in (or choose to hear more from you), so that you can capture a name and email address for additional communication with that unique visitor. The FREE Report that is really just a glorified sales brochure has been done to death in the online marketing world, and you probably can’t afford to mail a free carabiner key chain to everybody who gives you their email. Instead, you should focus on useful content that any of your potential customers would love to get. And in the Outdoors Industry, you are already sitting on a gold-mine of engaging stories and tips from your area of expertise.
- Email Autoresponders: These are a great way to “continue the discussion” after a prospect leaves your website. With their opt-in approval, you begin to send a series of automatic emails that you can space out as frequently or as far apart as you like. Autoresponders are a soft-sell way to keep your company name on the minds of prospects. Sending a series of 5-7 emails that tell great stories or provide free, useful advice, helps build trust with your prospects and every email includes links back to your website where you can make the sale.
- Ongoing Content Marketing: At the same time as the emails start going out, you can link your prospects to updates on the content marketing you provide on your website. For example, a flyfishing shop in Boise, Idaho can provide weekly updates of hatches and river conditions online that prospects can learn about through email alerts every time there is new content. A touring bike manufacturer can send out a few bike tours a year and provide photos, YouTube video, and blog posts as the adventure unfolds.
- Web – Phone – Mail Order Devices: And all of the above should take your prospects by the hand and lead them gently and enjoyably right back to the method you use to make the sale, generate the hot lead, or raise the money.
- Increased Sales: Put these steps all together, and you’ve got a sure-fire way to increase sales and/or contributions that will help you meet and exceed your marketing goals. This isn’t just a one-time process, though. Even if you get good results, it’s time to TEST, TEST, and re-TEST the copy and marketing stratagies to find out what works even better — yet another “full-circle” aspect of this plan.