Are you attractive enough to pull?

21 Jan 2013

Attraction Marketing is a term used to describe the creation of desire in your prospect to act upon. The ‘pull’ model of consumerism, which I touched on in my last post, recognises that the customer of today will search, and find more alternative solutions than ever before, including your competitors, and with so many options to allaying a particular problem the customer will decide based on a number of factors geared around the infamous phrase “What’s in it for me?”. If you can’t answer those, you won’t be shortlisted as an “attractive” option.

You know your customers pain points better than anyone. You developed your business or product to allay those pressure pangs, and yet like a holistic practitioner, you can spend more time convincing prospects that those pains aren’t merely hypochondria than you do talking about how your product or service can relieve them. Offering Case Studies and FAQ’s is a great way to show potential customers how others who suffer the same concerns have benefitted from your product/service.

Knowing who your target audience is and where they frequent, both on and offline, can really make the difference between the relentless pursuit of new business and a drip feed of qualified leads.  Having your customers come to you is a really difficult activity to seal up. So, just how do you become ‘attractive’ to your target audience?

Putting your message out there used to mean a series of impersonal, one-size-fits-all messages thrown at the wall to see what sticks. In a perfect world your customers wouldn’t need search engines, or advertising, they would simply arrive at your website but you will need to do some serious analysis of your prospects and really target hard those demographics that are most likely to open dialogue with you in order to faithfully target only those of interest. Once you know the “who” you can focus on where – there are ways to focus on segmented advertising online and of course you should back it all up with some outbound email campaigns from OpenCRM.

Question and answer sites offer a good place to assess the pains and remedies of your target audience, as are more business driven social networks and forums.

But, if they do arrive at your website and you’re promoting “Buy It Now” buttons to first time visitors from the homepage without offering a way to assess the “what’s in it for me?” of your product or service then there is no relationship, no understanding, no empathy … and probably no sale.

It’s the equivalent of speed dating and handing every potential suitor a breakfast menu – the deals a long way from being sealed, you’ve just met, and yet you’re already half undressed and waving neon signs.

Think of three of the biggest pains your customers have and focus using blog, news, whitepapers & case studies, on the results achieved when you supply the solution. If you’re not sure, use social media to ask your customers where their biggest pains come from, listen and respond by producing quality content that answers the specific points raised. At worst you’ll have a go-to response for other customers with similar concerns, and at best you’ll have made yourself very attractive to all the Leads whose radar you’re on.

Try one instance of attracting customers based on their concerns and matching to your product or service benefits this week and see if you can improve your inbound response rate. If you need more friendly “Contact Us” forms and your data automatically brought into CRM, speak to us about our integrated webforms.