The “old school” teaching and views on marketing are considered by some to be relics, gone for good. Ladies and gentlemen, we have been in the “information age” for a number of years. If you haven’t embraced it, then you could be losing considerable sales opportunities to your more savvy, internet-friendly, marketing driven competitors.
Traditional marketing doesn’t have the same power it used to. Some of the big agency marketing has never really worked, but will continue to be used by those corporations who have shareholders to appease, and they like to be represented and seen in the “right” magazines and newspapers. This “awareness” marketing is unmeasurable and that’s how some like it to be.
Unless you have money to burn, you need a more robust, method of attracting prospects into your marketing funnel. Before you do this, you first need to understand that the traditional marketing funnel is no longer a strong model to ensure conversion into sales.
Why?
We are bombarded by marketing messages every day. Some estimate the number we receive now exceeds 30,000 per day!
Think about it…We label or brand so many objects these days, from the cars we drive to the phones we cannot do without. So where do these messages come from. As an example, let’s look at your drive to work…
You are reminded every day of the brand of car you drive. Turn on the radio and most stations have advert breaks. Stop behind a bus and it is plastered with adverts. Then, there’s the shop signage, billboards, electric rotation billboards, truck sides, van signage. That’s a lot of traffic and advertising.
Let’s say you work from a desk. So we add in tele-sales, internet adverts, emails, text messages. The list goes on…
The Marketing Funnel Has To Evolve
With so many marketing messages bombarding us, which includes your prospects too, the traditional “straight line” funnel is no long valid. FYI, the traditional funnel is basically:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Preference
- Action
The new funnel is a zig zag of paths that lead to a sale. The information age ensures the IT literate prospect has a greater awareness of the competition, they are open to reading the information available on the product or service they are considering purchasing.
Because of the information online, whilst the buying process may not have changed, it is easier for your prospect to get distracted by competitors, easily diverting their gaze into another direction. It becomes a hard task to re-attract them back to your business.
Coupled with this, we are becoming an attention-deficit society. We are more intolerant, and it takes a lot more effort to retain a prospects’ energy, to move them closer to a purchase. As well as the distraction of new information on products they are interested in, it is all too easy to be diverted to other unrelated products, which could jump to the front of the queue, thus potentially reducing their budget to spend with your business.
So what’s the answer?
Content is king! If you wish to retain the attention of a prospect, then you need to be providing regular, updated information about your products or service. The more you present to your prospect, in bite-size pieces, the more likely they are to keep your business in mind as a potentially preferred choice.
You must write good content. You can’t write any old rubbish and expect the prospect to like it. Your content must hold their attention, provide something of value and keep them interested enough to want to hear from you again. If your marketing is not doing this, then you are missing the point completely.
You need to play a completely different strategic game if you want to build a robust marketing funnel and feed this into a sales funnel. The strategic game takes a lot more thought and consideration. This is a bigger subject and therefore I will cover this in the next part of this article. I will also expand on the topic of content is king. See you in part 2!
[bctt tweet=”How To Build An Effective Marketing Engine For Your Business – Part 1″]
