Businesses spend thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of dollars to market themselves by looking to outside avenues like social media, ad platforms, email marketing and search engine optimization. A far more effective investment is creating a well-equipped internal marketing team — a team of satisfied, educated staff members who are happy to share information about your business.
According to SiriusDecisions vice president, Marisa Kopec, up to 80 percent of the content made available by marketing agencies isn’t viewed or downloaded. The problem isn’t the content being produced. It’s a lack of understanding about how individuals make decisions when purchasing. For instance, in my business, that means understanding the details of the patient’s life that led to them to seek physical therapy in the first place.
The good news is that when your prospects talk freely with staff, they share information that can help you remove the obstacles that are preventing them from making a commitment to your business. Here’s how to remove those obstacles and increase sales in the process.
Understand the Client Journey
Understanding the client’s journey is an important factor in marketing. Your client may have a limited view of your business for several reasons. There are times when prospects simply don’t understand the full range of services offered by your business and how they can benefit. Your staff can help dispel misconceptions and fallacies, educate and share success stories.
As a founder, it’s also important to understand the problems and limitations that clients face every day. Everyone utilizes their own unique internal emotional value system when choosing how to spend their money. Successful client-engagement mechanisms marketing must address those emotional factors. A meaningful exchange between client and staff helps create a blueprint to educate and empower individuals. This leads to more confidence and eventually more buyers for your product or service.
Sell Benefits and Value, Not Products
Focus on communicating the benefits and value to your prospects and how it can alleviate their specific issues. You’re still selling a product/service, but you should be selling how that product/service benefits the patient or customer.
When selling value, begin with the goal the client wants to achieve and tie it to a specific benefit a particular feature creates. For our business, an example would be therapeutic massage. Pain relief is the patient’s goal. The benefit is less pain and easier movement, and the “feature” is therapeutic massage. This is a very important distinction. Potential patients must know how a specific service will meet their needs.
Create and Distribute Powerful, Personalized Content
Next, meet with your employees and ensure they understand this distinction and are able to communicate it clearly when they are speaking with potential new clients. Beware of being too technical when providing information.
Beware of being too technical; clients want information that’s easy to understand and can be quickly assimilated. Business owners should ensure that all staff members have quick and easy access to the content they’re providing. Staff should have printable take-and-go customizable handouts that they can give to potential clients.
Measure, Monitor and Improve
Using analytics is essential for understanding which strategies produce results. They provide valuable insight into the impact that content is having, where potential clients are accessing it, and which staff members are generating the greatest number of new clients. Business owners can see what content is most often viewed and downloaded, providing a better understanding of the content that resonates best with potential clients.
Invest in a content creation strategy and empower your staff to use that content to grow your business. Businesses that provide content that addresses specific client needs and makes that content available to staff are effectively creating a powerful engine for referrals. They are better able to understand the client or customer’s journey.
