The challenge of converting prospects into clients is an issue that has faced businesses since the dawn of commerce.

Although there are many ways to approach this problem, the simplest approach involves three easy steps: understanding your audience, defining desired outcomes for them, and establishing a plan to apply consistent action strategically. This article will give you some ideas on how to do just that.

1. Understand Your Audience

Most businesses focus their marketing activity and messaging in the wrong places. They tend to talk about themselves, their products or services, and the features of those products or services. This is seldom the right way to go about it, especially when you are trying to get prospects to take action and be interested in your business

To start, you should define a target audience for your company. Unless you have a very small organization with no real specialization, there is an entire group of people who will benefit from what your business has to offer. Defining that group and knowing exactly who you are talking to is essential for proper marketing efforts.

What do they want? Not just the stuff that you sell, but what is behind their desire to buy from you? What are their challenges? What questions do they have that your business can answer for them? Sometimes identifying the answers to these questions is difficult, but there is almost always a way to determine what potential clients want in their lives. Once you know that, you can more easily figure out what they want from your products and services.

2. Define Desired Outcomes

As you learn more about the desires of your audience and connect your products or services to addressing those desires, you can now more clearly articulate desired outcomes that would appeal to your audience.  All business endeavors should be looking toward desired outcomes, and you can use this method to help make your marketing more effective.

Specifically, you can use the desired outcomes in your messaging to attract prospects, as well as in your descriptions of what you sell. The point is to always be spelling out the connection between what you have to offer and how it can help your potential clients achieve their desired outcomes.

But how do you determine their desired outcomes?  There are many methods for getting to the bottom of this, but one very effective way is through the use of surveys. Another is to conduct some informal interviews with existing clients and others who represent your ideal client, asking about things that they really want in their lives.

Once you have a good sense of what people want, it’s easy to start customizing your marketing message and desired outcomes into something unique and interesting for your specific audience. This will help One final step in setting your marketing strategy involves asking your audience about what they want, and then using that information to tailor your messaging and targeting toward their desires.

3. Create A Marketing Strategy

This step is so often overlooked, or to shortcut. In reality, it’s critical to your business success. By defining a marketing strategy, you’ll know exactly where your efforts should be focused and how you’re going to get the highest conversion rates possible on what’s important for your audience.

Before setting out on any kind of marketing effort, it’s vital that you understand the results that are most meaningful to your business (target audience), and then determine the best marketing activities to achieve those results.  Your business shouldn’t get involved in any tactics that don’t fit in with your overall marketing strategy. It’s far too easy to get distracted and forget about what matters most.

There are many different ways to develop a strategy, but they usually involve brainstorming and testing ideas before you settle on the best approach for your specific business. And keeping your audience and their desired outcome in mind all along the way will better inform your ultimate strategy.

Here is a quick guide to establishing your marketing strategy:

• Find Your Customers – Research and identify your target audience.
• Identify Your Marketing Goals – Set the specific results that you want from your marketing activities, and rank them in order of importance.
• Choose The Best Conversion Path (for your audience) – Determine what is most likely to convert into sales for your business with a reasonable amount of effort.
• Choose Marketing Tactics That Work – You need to define what tactics you should use, and which ones you will ignore for now. Don’t do everything at once! (Wait until your marketing strategy is well-established and then see if you have the time or need to implement other ideas.)
• Discover New Business Opportunities – After all of your work is done, it’s likely that you will also find some new opportunities along the way. These are usually related to things discovered during research and evaluation, as well as from identifying new desires in your audience. These might be marketed products or services that could generate substantial revenue for your business. But this is not where you want to start. Focus on your existing business first, and then build from there. Save the new opportunities for later.

The three core steps for turning more prospects into clients may sound simple, but they take some time and effort to really get right. One of the most challenging things about marketing and selling is to stay focused. As marketers ourselves, we know firsthand how easy it is to get sidetracked from what matters most – our clients’ desires!

We hope this guide helps you to create a marketing strategy that’s right for your business. Keep in mind that finding out what your audience really wants is just the start of a long-term process. It takes regular review and testing to stay on track, but it can be more than worth the time and effort.  Just keep focused on your goals, and you’ll get there!

If you would like help with implementing upselling practices in your business, please reach out to us for a 45 minute strategy call.