When you get a new customer, no doubt your service will be excellent, you will deliver according to your promises and this customer will continue to buy from you for many years.
But when you market your services, the promises you offer are also being made by many other companies. If only you could get more prospects to experience your excellent and reliable service, then they would realise that you are one of the few businesses that actually do deliver the value and results you promise.
The investment you put into marketing to find new prospects brings poor returns because the material you use is mostly ignored and at best read with scepticism. Since your competitors are making the same promises as you, the prospect has no basis to believe your claims above anyone else’s. Unless you can develop a relationship with them, or they can experience the delivery of what you have promised before they buy, they will see the risk as too high.
A simple, yet powerful, solution is to create two different marketing strategies; one to acquire new customers - your front end strategy - and one to nurture and develop your relationship with your existing customers - your back end strategy.
If most of your business comes from your existing customers, then your back-end marketing strategy must be all about clarifying or refining your services and aiming to deliver the highest possible quality and value you can achieve with any consistency. By ensuring your customers know exactly what is available and only promising what you can deliver, you will always fulfil their expectations and they will implicitly trust you and continue to buy from you.
Calculating the lifetime value of a typical customer, based on a new, back-end marketing strategy like this, you no longer need to focus on the percentage income from the first sale, since you are aiming to develop a relationship with each customer and make your profits over time.
Now you can afford make your prospects some very attractive offers – offers which return less income to you initially but which will let you demonstrate to your new customers just how good your company is. You will also make it easy for them to stay as customers by showing them, with minimal risk, what they will be missing if they go elsewhere.
When you have fine-tuned your front-end marketing strategies, you can begin to achieve the successes you have always sought, by introducing your targeted prospects to such irresistible first-time buyer offers they will find it impossible to pass by.
To make a start on your front end strategy, explore what offers you could use to attract new customers and look at the offers you already make to prospects. Are there any parts or aspects you could make available for a reduced price or, possibly, even for free?
When you have devised your new sales incentives, test them! Approach your prospects to see which offers generate the most interest or appeal. Gradually, you can build up a strong portfolio of offers to make your investment in customer acquisition pay for itself many times over and produce an extremely successful and powerful front-end marketing strategy.
You can add even more power to your killer offers if you establish yourself or your business as an expert in your field, sharing information which will be helpful to your potential customers. If your site is a useful resource they will keep returning. Meanwhile you will be building a rapport with them and gaining their trust so that when the time does come for them to buy, you are the natural choice.
In a nutshell, to keep ahead of the competition, you should aim to establish long-term relationships with your customers and invest in strong, targeted offers to attract new ones. By changing your attitude to the first sale, you can increase your investment in customer acquisition and consider new strategies to make it really easy for prospects to become customers. Used properly, your website can become an invaluable marketing aid, playing a crucial part in both back and front end marketing strategies.
If you have the passion, commitment and time to put into planning a sound marketing strategy for your business and building a website to go with it, then all the information you need is right here on BusinessWebFactory. All you have to do is begin...
If you want to build your website on solid foundations which actually deliver results, you need to implement the powerful marketing strategies described in this article.
Only then will your website attract strong leads and only through strong leads, followed up with information your prospects will value, can you win their trust and their business.