Four Step Marketing

Four Steps to Growing You Sales

Using a systematized Four Step Marketing System we can dramatically increase your sales. Most businesses fail miserably at lead nurturing and moving along prospective buyers through the marketing and sales funnel.  After one, two three or maybe four unsuccessful follow-ups the prospective buyer falls off the salesperson’s radar.  Because the buyer wasn’t ready to buy according to the salesperson’s schedule they are deemed a low priority lead and may never be contacted by your salesperson again.  

The Four Step Marketing System implements a marketing strategy that attracts prospective customers, converts them to leads, allows you to close them and then delight them to create raving fans.   The four steps include defining your Unique Selling Points, Determining your Platform and Offers, Selecting the weapons you will use from your Marketing Arsenal and finally Automating the Process.  This process develops, nurtures and moves prospective buyers through your marketing and sales funnel.    

1. Unique Selling Point

Can you list three reasons why a customer should buy from you in the next minute.  If you said:

• Where great at customer service; w
• here a family owned business; o
• ur clients love us, our company was founded on honesty and integrity and treating customers fairly,  th

en you don’t have a strong Unique Selling Point (USP)!  In fact many of these selling points are a turn off.  

How often do we here companies trot out these same old cliches?  How many of us really believe them?  Don’t we just expect these?  After all would we really deal with a company that is not honest or a company of integrity? A company that is not going to treat us fairly? Or a company that does not deliver good customer service?

Your USP should make you stand above all your competitors.  It should position yourself in such a way that your prospective client say “that is an awesome, company, I really want to do business with them.”  A USP adds value to the customers buying experience in such a way that price becomes secondary to the buying decision.

Developing a strong USP is about innovating and delivering a much greater perceived value and buying experience than your competitors. To create a strong USP look at:

What makes you, your products or services unique to your prospective and existing clients Some examples of these are:

• Additional services  your competitors don’t provide
• Measurable customer service metrics that blow away your competition
• Return policy that goes above and beyond industry standard

These are just a few examples of USPs that can set you apart from your competition.  If there is nothing that truly distinguishes you from your competitors you may have to go back and brainstorm with your team to innovate and create added value for your customers.  Work to come up with at least three solid USPs.  If you can articulate at least three strong USPs you will face an endless battle of competing on price only.  

2. Platform and Offers

Have you visited a web site, received a survey, taken a phone call and the company at the other end or you who you just did business with wants information from you but offers nothing of value in return.  Why would I want to spend my valuable time filling out a contact form if I am not going to receive anything of value or worse yet be contacted to be sold to.  When I was younger I would be enticed into filling out a contact form for a chance to win something cool, only to be contacted later for a hard sell of a timeshare, windows and siding, etc.  Most of us have been there at some point in our life and we learn quickly to protect our contact information.

So how do you create an offer so you can grow your database of prospective buyers if they are protective of their contact information.  Here are some tips:

• It has to be the right offer that connects with your visitor.  To accomplish this you need to truly understand your buyer and create an offer that solves a problem they are seeking a solution for, provide information they want to learn more about or anything else that is of interest to them. 
• The value off must be greater than the contact information being provided.  
• Make them feel comfortable and reassure them that the contact information they provide to you will be kept private.

The offers are presented to your visitors on any Platform where there is an opportunity for an exchange of information.   The appropriate platforms that you use is dependent on where you come in contact with your clients ,  It can be a phone inquiry, your website, a trade show or any other place your prospective clients go to seek information where you can setup a process for exchanging of information – your free offer in return for their contact information.

3. The Marketing Arsenal

The marketing arsenal are the tools that you use to communicate and educate your clients on solutions to their problems.  It is how they are moved along in the marketing and sales process. Most importantly, whatever tools are used from the marketing arsenal, the marketing is measured.  What is the click through rates? What are the conversion rates?  How much new revenue is the campaign generating?  Is client acquisition cost increasing or decreasing?

Today’s tools provide businesses the opportunity  to measure all phases of its marketing and each form of marketing.  While, you may think that one form of marketing will work well for your buyer personas, that may not be the case.  The latest fads  are social media and mobile marketing. Maybe you are are using both Linked In and some form of mobile marketing.  After a month or two, because you are measuring the effectiveness of each, you find your ROI is much lower with mobile marketing than Linked In.  Since you measured and know the effectiveness of each, you can reallocate your resources from mobile marketing to Linked In, since your ROI is greater on Linked In.

4. Marketing Automation

You developed a solid USP, are attracting visitors and growing your database and have identified some tools from you marketing arsenal that are appropriate for your prospective buyers.  The key now is to automate the whole process incorporating your USP into each marketing message.

In today’s age of technology, all phases of the marketing process can be automated whether its email messages, text messaging, social media, direct mail or a combination of all of them.

• Automating the process will:

• Minimize leakage and lost sales opportunities
• Allows you to map out the marketing message at each phase so that each message builds on the previous. moving the customer along step by step in the marketing and sales process
• Provides opportunity to measure the effectiveness of each message so that adjustments can be made on the fly to improve the performance of the process and improve the ROI of the marketing campaign.