Your Ideal Customers are hiding from you.
Google, Yahoo, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook—you name it. Your future, possible Customers look you up before they call you up…or don’t.
While I think statistics are boring—particularly in these conversations we have, because I demand that I am witty, droll, and unbearably clever—some demand to be shared.
- DemandGen 2012 reports 77% of prospective Customers indicate they research you online.
- The same report states that over half of those buyers claim they develop a short list of folks to contact before picking up the phone to call anyone.
- A study from Corporate Executive Board found that buyers are 57% of the way through the buying cycle before they reach out to companies they are considering.
- And only 3-to-5% of all your Ideal Customers have decoded that the thing you do is what they require.
Why should all of this matter to you? It adds up to this: you must put time and effort into marketing, and marketing the problems you solve, not your products or services.
Based on the statistics above, the vast majority of people who could find your products and services valuable don’t know that you solve their problem, and won’t raise their heads upward so you can see them.
Marketing the right way in the right places with the right message changes all of this.
The “right” marketing looks like this:
- You must know your Ideal Customer, know what type of problems they have and are in action to solve (driven…see last week).
- You must know the likely words they Google, videos they look for, information sources they prefer to use to help them decode what will solve their problem.
- You must know their buying motivators (the good news—there are only two) and use those motivators in your marketing.
Let’s do some math together.
You have 100 possible prospects out there, invisible, not in your database. 77 of them will check you out online. What does your website talk about? Them or you? What are you talking about on LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube? Their problems or your products?
Then 50% will make a short list of who they want to contact. Did you make the short list or were you one of the 50% cut because you talked about the wrong thing—the thing that doesn’t motivate them?
Now 3-to-5 of them will actually figure out that you sound pretty good and will contact you. Let’s hope you sell them all.
You could have 100 prospects. Instead, you have 5.
Your Ideal Customer has all kinds of ways to stay hidden from you, to keep you out of the sales mode until they are ready.
Make marketing—the right marketing—your “super power” and the invisible becomes very visible.
Go forth and do great things,
Martha and Chris