Step 2: Overview of this Course

The biggest shift I've seen most small business owners have to adapt to, is moving off the spreadsheet, whiteboard or yellow pad and to finally accept the fact that they need to create a marketing system.

Another major issue I see is committing what I call “Random Acts of Marketing”, which means they turn on and off their marketing in sporadic rhythms. They turn it on, get leads and then stop. I understand and there are lots of reasons for this. Seasonality of their business, production capabilities or company bandwidth.

Here's the truth, the single most powerful action a local business owner can take is committing to advertising all year long.

Why? Because when you leverage paid advertising your reaching tire kickers, researchers and potential buyers that may not be ready for an appointment, but could ready to enter at the Top, Middle or Bottom of your marketing funnels.

When you develop a monthly content publishing cycle you can actually fortify and create an active growing list of prospects you will nurture into buyers using marketing automation.

You can also answer many of the questions that the non-committed “tire kickers” (the group of non-buyers just doing research) and give them opportunities to actively engage in your content.

Once we understand the dynamics of this, we found that we could still market in the slow months, when sales actually fell off and still benefit from the folks in “research mode” who would search out our solutions and then opt-in to our content offers which gave us a way to stay connected with them.

Over time I began to see the true value of developing “Marketing Systems” rather than looking at my marketing as just paying for and buying leads. A prospect, custom branded to Heavenly Greens, thru our content was much more than a lead. Properly nurtured, a high percentage of these folks would eventually become buyers.

The shift came when we started to look at these efforts from the perspective of a true marketing funnel and started developing our first few pieces of content. We took a step back and strategically developed our content for one purpose, for opt-in emails in exchange for Free downloads.

This is how we created our first set of free guides.

By free guides, (pre-written downloadable content or opt-in video) I'm talking about content that is relevant to your target buyer groups in artifical grass. We started with just two: “The 8 Facts You Should Know Before Investing In”… and “The 22-Questions You Should Ask Yourself Before”…. both of these guides focused on common questions our prospects wanted answers to.

Yes, these opt-in strategies are still working, why? Because the content will always be relevant to new buyers and researchers. However, with the new technology of today you can set up SMS/Text opt-ins and send these prospects directly to a video of you... answering common questions.

Why send a salesperson out to answer questions… we want them going out and closing deals, right? When you can answer questions for your prospects within your marketing channels and deliver that content as a strategy, the barrier to closing the sale shrinks and you begin to create more qualified buyers.

We performed research around the keywords and phrases our prospects were searching for and began to optimize blog posts and create content around those topics. We knew what people were looking for when they were doing searches for the products and services we offered. So we just created free guides, and blog content around those terms and added those prospects to our monthly newsletter that repurposed our blog content and showcased our latest projects.

We then expanded to where we are today, with a total of 27 across all buyer types. The content we created would ultimately lead prospects to opt-in landing pages. These pages were connected to specific marketing funnels and designed to segment prospects into 5 distinctly different buyer groups.

From there our marketing automation and lead nurturing systems provided a steady drip of content.

For artificial grass we have 5 distinctly different marketing messages. We wrote content for a specific Avatar or persona around that specific product. Not only did our prospects benefit from the content we were creating, the business and local brand benefited as well.

Over time our brand was perceived as the expert or the authority in the market, simply because we were becoming the “go to” destination locally, for answering prospects questions in the form of free guides and blog content.

All by simply giving away our best content for FREE.

This info-marketing process began to address common questions that normally would bog down our call center. Since our guides addressed these common questions, over time we had positioned our brand on value... rather than price which in turn allowed us to demand premium prices.

Once we focused on marketing this way, the other massive upside was discovering that our marketing Automation and follow-up systems began to literally create more qualified buyers.

For example, this process has lead to our call center converting inbound prospect calls to in-home appointments at an incredibly consistent ~70% conversion rate. These appointments are with people who have been Pre-qualified and are ready to make a buying decision.

As this process unfolded the other obvious upside was seeing an increasing closing percentage with our sales reps. The data on aggregate saw a nearly 100% increase with average closing rates over time moving from mid 20’s to 40+%. Today we have reps close at 50+% closing.

The activities that drive leads, phone calls, appointments and sales all begin at the top of the funnel. How your company first engages with a prospect, the opt-in phase and the follow up process are all part of the Middle of the funnel. The Bottom is all about the conversion step to the Sale.

By far the biggest outcome of adopting this process was the ability to take control of the marketing data with true visibility instead of letting the business control us. We were no longer just buying leads and hoping for the best.

By control I mean, this process and system took the guesswork out of determining ROI by adoutlet. It gave me a new outlook instead of looking for ways to just “buy leads” as a result of marketing.

It was now a data driven system.

What are your thoughts? Share below in the comments.

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A community to support Business Owners with Educational Content, Operational Support and Marketing Strategies to grow their Artificial Grass business.