Strategic Authority Marketing
One of the major problems that makes the typical marketing approach ineffective is that it is too short and tries to achieve too much too soon, much like a guy at a party walking up to a girl he has never met before and asking to marry her. It is very rarely likely to work unless the girl, or customer, is desperate.
For most marketers, there are only two phases: get a lead, then sell. Each marketing piece, whether it is an ad or a website or an ebook, or anything else, is typically created to promote and sell a service.
The intention of the ad is frequently to get people to make an enquiry that is effectively going to put them into a situation where they will be sold to. For most people, unless they already know you or your business, there is not enough trust in place to willingly enter into a sales situation.
Even if you are the most caring person in the world, or your sales consultants are trained to be caring and consultative rather than pushy and pressuring, your potential client is in no position to be aware of that.
What this means is that most ads that are meant to attract clients who need the advertised services, are going to set off a fear reaction in the client, that fight or flight response when we are put in a potentially threatening situation.
The result of that is that your ads, if they have generated any interest at all, are more often than not going to set your potential client on a search for more information rather than trigger an immediate response to call you.
People need to have a high level of trust before they will buy, so unless you are doing something to increase that trust, you are mostly going to have sales calls or meetings with people who are resistant to being sold.
The model I am going to present to you, shows you a strategy to avoid that.
To achieve a consistent and high level of attraction and trust in our sales interactions, we need to develop a process that overcomes the fear factor mentioned above.
Selling professional services is not a two-step event, even though you can sell products this way. With professional services, you need to create a process to court your clients first, by making your business attractive and your products or service desirable. Then you need to develop trust elements in your marketing to build credibility and enable your prospects and clients to grow into knowing, liking and trusting you and your business.
If you can do all this in your marketing processes, you will find that the sales process is a breeze. When your clients come to you pre-sold, you don’t have to do much selling to get them to buy. They come, already predisposed to buy, rather than skeptical and resistant.
To create this level of trust and attraction, you need to build what I call a Strategic Authority Marketing SystemTM.
One of the major elements of influence and persuasion is the element of authority. The Strategic Authority Marketing SystemTM first creates authority positioning so that you or your firm are perceived as the authority in your market. The problem with so much of the typical marketing I see from professional service firms is that it positions the firm as a commodity where you look the same as any other professional in your market.
If you question my judgement on this, just take a few minutes to Google the name of your profession and check out the websites of your competitors. I’ll bet that what you find is a set of websites that are nearly identical except for the business name. Everyone promotes their list of services, their qualifications and expertise and maybe a list of the high profile clients they have worked for. They may offer platitudes about the quality of service or level of care they have for clients. But the reality is that these websites make it hard for prospective clients to judge the value of one firm against another. There is no differentiation and little authority.
Being the authority in the market means two things; (1) being very clear and targeted on which problems you solve for whom and (2) having a focused specialization that gives you a competitive advantage in the way you work with clients.
The Strategic Authority Marketing SystemTM builds on that authority positioning with a systematic attraction marketing process that resembles courtship rather than seduction. The process requires three separate stages to develop trust and attraction, so that clients are nurtured through a relationship building process so that they fully understand why the services you offer are the most appropriate way to solve their problems or deal with their specific challenges and see you as the authority, really the only option for them to choose.
Only when this system is in place should any thought be given to lead generation. This system effectively converts interested people into clients. Without a system like this, as we have seen, most marketing falls flat and is a waste of money. However, with this system we can create cost effective advertising to create ROI driven lead generation. Each ad is accountable for generating revenue rather than a stab in the dark, or a gamble to get clients.
Where to From Here?
If you have found the information in these pages helpful and would like to learn more about how to create reliable, predictable marketing systems that generate all the sales and clients you will ever want, I invite you to view a free 30 minute video training, called “The Strategic Authority Marketing System – The clever three phase system my clients are using to double their practice profits in twelve months or less by attracting premium clients consistently and predictably.”
In this video, you will discover how I struggled for years to attract clients consistently and predictably, but when I did, you’ll see how it changed my fortunes and how I am now using the same system with my clients to change their fortunes as well.
To view this free training video, please go to https://businessflightpath.com/training and I know you will be on the path to attracting the clients you want consistently and predictably.
Click here to view the free video training: https://businessflightpath.com/training