The Shift From Interruption Marketing to Attraction Marketing
There’s been a shift away from marketing that interrupts and toward marketing that attracts.
Some refer to this as ‘inbound vs. outbound’ marketing or ‘prospect-initiated’ vs. ‘seller-initiated’ marketing.
Why? In a word, “Google”.
As Wayne Gretsky once said, “I go to where the puck is going to be . . . not where it is now”.
Similarly, owners and CEOs of small businesses want to be found by prospects when they are ready to buy or are seriously looking for information to help them do so in the fairly near future.
A couple of elements come into play when seeking to attract ideal prospects:
Knowing Who To Attract More Of
In marketing spending time on the WHO and WHAT is the way to get to the HOW!
Great websites, emails, social media posts, and materials won’t fix trying to sell to everyone, feeling like your business is a commodity, or attracting the wrong types of clients.
Fixing those things starts with strategy and the way you start with strategy is to decide who matters and what matters.
You must spend time narrowly defining WHO your ideal clients are and finding WHAT unique proposition these ideal clients value before proposing any tactics (the HOW) aimed at lifting sales.
Solving The Right Problem
Sometimes you’ve got to go back to the basics of marketing and that’s what I want to talk to you about for the best way to attract clients.
The thing about attracting clients is that is it hasn’t changed.
You have to have a service that a segment of the market needs or wants, and that solves a major problem in their life or business.
I know that sounds basic but a lot of times owners and CEOs of small businesses think it’s all about telling the world about what they do and how their service has all these great features.
But figuring out how to solve a problem that your ideal client values and demonstrating how your service solves that problem is what needs to done.
I hate to say it, but no client is attracted to what you sell. They are attracted to what they believe they will get, achieve, relieve, dodge, or acquire based on buying what you sell. Read More…
Now obviously you’ve got to narrowly define who these people are, and you’ve got to hang out where they hang out so they can hear that message.
It’s not more basic than this for the best way to attract clients.
Turn That Problem Into Your Message
People make most of their purchase decisions to either avoid pain or experience some gain. If you can tap into these emotions, you can grow your business.
The surest way to discover this pain or gain is to ask. Survey your best clients.
Identifying and creating messages around this gain or pain will allow you to stand out among the many other businesses that claim to do the same thing as you.
For example, we were working with a landscaping maintenance service that attracted busy professionals. After interviewing their customers we spotted the following in several summaries — “I just love coming home on maintenance day.”
Their ideal customer experienced a moment of joy in that the yard was taken care of (all year) and it freed up their weekends.
While most of their competitors messaging focused on how they were award-winning and top companies, they began to focus on — “You’ll love coming home on maintenance day” — begging prospects to wonder if that’s true for them with their current service.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The reason most local small business websites aren’t found on the first page of search results on Google, Bing, or Yahoo is that they are BUILT but not OPTIMIZED.
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Truthfully speaking, if your website (let’s just say your business) doesn’t show up on the first page of search results, your potential customers might not even know you exist, especially if you’re trying to attract nearby customers.⠀
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What does optimizing your website look like? ⠀
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It starts with keyword research (https://buff.ly/3hZ5zy2) and ends with on-page and off-page SEO implementation. ⠀
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A great search engine optimization strategy is focused on getting your entire website to rank well. Rather than using generic keywords across all of your pages, you can tailor your SEO page-by-page, giving each individual webpage the best shot at performing well in SERPs. ⠀
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What elements need to be optimized on your website? Here are a few basics: ⠀
- website URL ⠀
- internal linking structure⠀
- page titles⠀
- page headings⠀
- descriptions ⠀
- tags⠀
