Why you want fast results from marketing, but won’t get them
Businesses often want fast results and turn to marketing to get them. However, marketing isn’t the right tool for the job. There are a lot of companies out there who will happily take your money to help you get these fast results, and they will often get you a lot of traffic, people or ‘engagement’. But how does this translate to cash in the bank? If marketing isn’t the right tool for the job so what is?
Marketing isn’t the right tool for quick results
Marketing is the process of nurturing strangers into ideal customers. It’s about bringing your business customers who are ready to buy, they don’t need to be sold to, they just want to know ‘how soon can you start?’ or ‘how quickly can you get them to me?’.
Advertising, in the broad sense of showing Ads to total strangers, can bring you these fast results, but the people who they bring are not fully ready to buy you still need to sell to them. So Ads only really works with low consideration or impulse purchase. You can’t use a Facebook Ad to sell a stranger a £50,000 car, but you can sell them a £35 water bottle from an Instagram Ad.
If you don’t have an impulse purchase then using Ads on their own to bring strangers to your business isn’t going to work very well. Bombarding them with offers, options and information as soon as they get to your website just isn’t effective. If you have a consideration purchase then you need to give the customer consideration time. This ‘time’ does not lend itself to ‘quick’ sales, but it is essential if you want long term business results.
Put the time in
You need to give your ideal customer a number of ways to learn about your business, what you offer, your story and how you can help them overcome the problem they have. You can’t do this all in one Facebook Ad, you need webpages, downloads, videos, blogs and social posts that people can digest before they decide to start the process of becoming a customer.
This takes time for you to make this content and time for them to digest it. But this investment from you, and them, means that when they do want to become a customer they already know that you can help them and now it’s just a case of when.
How to get results
If you’re not able to sell what you do it’s because people either don’t understand it or don’t see the value in it. So you need to add more content that helps them understand more about how it will help or demonstrate how you help get them to the outcome they want.
In order to nurture a customer who is ready to buy you need to make sure your offer is designed to give them what they really want. Not what you want to sell. So make sure when you talk about your offer it’s focused around the outcome that the customer gets and how it helps them. They don’t care about anything else.
Structure your content and marketing messages in a way that attracts strangers in and nurtures them, this is called a marketing funnel. It allows you to educate strangers through your content and educate them along with them the way. See our guide on the marketing funnel and how to get it working.
Plant a tree
Think of this process like planting a tree. Once you plant it you need to let it grow, you don’t dig it up and move it every day because it’s not a tree yet. You have to give it some time to grow.
You need to invest in making the content now and then give it the time to work. If you don’t see results after 2 days don’t delete it all and start again, you need to give this time to work. If you plan it out properly and keep working on your content and posting it will work. The only 3 reasons it doesn’t work are:
- You’re selling the wrong thing — people don’t understand your offer
- You’re talking about it in the wrong way — people don’t see the value in your offer
- You stop talking about it — you give up creating content
Getting it working
To get started you need to do these things before you throw a load of money at Ads:
- Review your offer to make sure it’s focused on the customer want’s and desired outcome
- Make sure you’re not talking about what you do
- Read our Marketing Funnel guide and set up your marketing funnel
- Make sure you can measure conversions
You can learn more about the marketing process, the marketing funnel and what it takes to grow your business on our website.
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