It’s a classic entrepreneurial problem: We nail our client experience and we know we can really serve our audience exceptionally well--but we don't have enough ideal customers coming in.
What we need is a steady stream of pre-qualified, pre-endorsed clients or customers who essentially “raise their hands” and ask to work with us. But how?
I know of few experts out there today better at helping us with this than Josh Greene. The founder of digital marketing firm The Mather Group, Greene has managed online and direct response television programs for Discovery Channel, Time Warner Cable and other industry leaders.
He recently shared with me three online marketing strategies that he says all entrepreneurs should be focusing on as they try to pull in new business.
1. Analytics. It's surprising how many people will set up a pay-per-click campaign and not be able to track the results they're getting. At that point, says Greene, you've essentially recreated the old newspaper paradigm: “You're spending a bunch of money and you're trying to figure out if you're getting any results, which is not ideal given all the tools to track things that now exist,” he says.
The good news: You don’t have to spend a lot of money to set up a marketing campaign and test it. It could cost you as little as $50 or $100 to determine if a campaign is doing what you want it to do. If not, tweak or replace it. If so, scale it up. The marketplace will give you an answer quickly—but you’ve got to be set up to listen.
2. Retargeting. Ever notice how that pair of shoes you looked at on Amazon keeps following you around online? That’s retargeting—and you don’t need to be an e-commerce juggernaut to use it. “You can put some code on your site and then you can start showing your message to people all those same places as they browse the Internet, using Google's network or Facebook's network,” says Greene. “I've got some B to B clients who spend maybe $10 a day and they’re constantly hearing ‘hey—I see you everywhere!’ from clients and prospects, which is exactly what they want.
Retargeting is smart because it enables you to stay “top of mind” among ideal prospects who checked out your website or your offering but didn’t immediately take action. It, in essence, let’s you follow them around as they surf online and burrow into their brains bit by bit.
Greene says there are a few ways to maximize your retargeting efforts, including:
- Testing: Try out different images and text to see what resonates most with ideal prospects.
- Retargeting based on specific needs or offers: You might retarget only around a product you want prospects to buy, or around the employment section of your site (if you’re looking to hire). “That level of deeper focus is powerful because it gets the exact message to the exact people you want to receive it,” says Greene.
3. Email campaigns. Don’t forget about the basics. It's sometimes easy to overlook the care and feeding of your list or making sure that your website is optimized to get new people onto the list. But in every case, it's the lowest-cost channel for acquisitions—so keep up with it! Anything you can do to reduce the cost of new client acquisition is key. “Your email list gives you the opportunity to reach out and talk to people on a weekly or a monthly basis. Before you start spending much money in terms of driving traffic, you want to make sure that you're going to capture as many people onto that list as you can,” notes Greene.
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