WHY YOUR BUSINESS IS STRUGGLING TO CONVERT CUSTOMERS

If your business is struggling to convert customers, the reasoning may actually begins at the root. Your customers should be the reason for the development, marketing, and sales of your product or service. Instead, many businesses treat them like an afterthought only when they begin promotions. However, by doing so, they essentially create their own bottleneck and hinder their business from thriving like it should.

You should be qualifying leads well before you promote.  Qualifying leads helps your team determine which people would be more likely to convert to customers before they are handed off to your sales reps, saving them valuable time, energy, and money. Qualifying leads from the start will also allows your marketing team to create a much more effective campaign to attract them.

Map Out Your Customer

Before you seek out your customer, you need to leave any assumptions at the door. You need to know who they are, what they want, and what attracts them to your business versus your competitors. Developing various buyer personas, or similar groupings of your customer base, will help you lay out how to best connect with your potential customers.

Buyer personas don’t rely on assumptions and guesses, but research into your customers with interviews, observation, and results that are data driven, making your information more accurate. People respond best to seeing their own story and hearing their own words relayed back to them when connecting to a business.

Don’t just guess who your customers are. Go to your customers to get true feedback. See what they do in their daily lives. See what they struggle with while engaging with your product or service. It’s impossible to serve each and every customer, so listen for the commonalities and address those. Use this information when developing your campaign to meet demand that is established in your industry and demand that has shown to be emerging through your research.

Qualify Your Leads

Now that you’ve identified who your customers are, it’s time to narrow them down to the best fit for your business. Qualify leads before you pass them off to a sales rep. Do they meet your criteria? Do they have the right level of revenue? How much and how often are they willing to spend? Who would get the most value out of business?

This process includes combing through all the people your business attracts and you current customers to determine who matches your criteria and would be more likely to become your customer. These leads should simultaneously help your business reach its goals, like revenue or growth goals. This way, your sales reps will be given leads that are more likely to become customers, saving your company time, generating more revenue, and filling the business with excitement and motivation.

There’s no point in wasting these leads’ time if you cannot serve them properly. There’s no point in wasting your own if the work into acquiring them wouldn’t be worth the ROI. Also be aware of inconsistent answers and short, flippant responses as a potential sign your prospect is not ready to commit. Direct your mismatches off to competitors or partner businesses that better suit their needs.

Plot Out Your Campaign

Now that you’ve defined who your very best customers are, use this information to plot out a campaign that sparks their interest and guides them into becoming your customer, eventually matching them with the right product or service at a time when they need it most.

Treat your campaign like you’re addressing a type of person. Speak directly to that accounting CEO or that tech savvy millennial in a way that resonates with them deeply, using the language they used in your interviews and observations. Address their issues with solutions, speak to their experience, and help them reach their goals. This will build trust in your business, which will come to extend to the belief that your offerings are top class as well.

Be consistent in your social media posts, videos, emails and other forms of content marketing to each buyer persona. Create content that attract them to your business, offers that make them want to convert into leads (strive for free content that is better than you competitors' paid content), and nurture those qualified leads into becoming customers for life through helpful emails or other contact a few times a week and your team will see the difference qualified leads can bring to your business.