How to Get Visible and Get More Clients (Ep 39)

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Made Easy Podcast. Dawn McGruer brings you actionable digital marketing lessons every other week. Whether you are an aspiring or experienced marketer, learn the latest SEO, content marketing, social media, email marketing, and online marketing tactics that are working today.

Dawn:

Welcome to episode 39 of Digital Marketing Made Easy with myself, Dawn McGruer, founder of Business Consort – Digital & Social Media Academy. I’m proud to have welcomed 30,000 clients to our academy who we’ve trained and certified to date. Now, this is an epic achievement and we have built up to, I think it’s over 5 million subscribers now. And we have huge, huge networks on social media and we have great reach and visibility. Now, this did not happen overnight. And this brings me onto absolutely the number one topic of the moment, because we’re going to be talking about how to get visible to get more clients.

My clients all have one thing in common…

Generally, when I meet clients, they have these amazing products and services, amazing visions, innovations, and just truly inspirational in their journey. Now, the type of people I talk to every day are entrepreneurs, marketers, corporate leaders, you name it, such a mix, such an industry, and these people are based worldwide. But one thing they all have in common is they all absolutely want to get visible to get more clients. I have never met a business to date that doesn’t want to be scaling and growing. Now, generally, this comes down to getting more customers through the door and ultimately driving more revenue to become obviously sustainable, profitable. And it’s not about employing teams when we talk about scaling. It’s not about massive offices. It’s about building a business in the way that you want it.

Now, when we look at getting visible and getting more clients, there is such a vast arena when it comes digital marketing. Now, in my book, Dynamic Digital Marketing, I cover eight powerful ways to market your business online. Now, eight doesn’t sound a lot, but imagine trying to get all of those channels into your working day as a digital marketer and actually push the business forward. It is impossible. Now, I am not an advocate of channel marketing. And what I mean here is is not using channels, but actually waking up every day and thinking, “Right, today I’m going to do my social media. I’m going to do my email marketing. I’m going to do my SEO.” If you work like that, you’re going to be in a cycle of just completely burnt out, exhausted. And you are just cluttering your digital to-do list up to the point where you are never going to achieve it.

Now, a better way to focus is to look at the business goals, right, and to really align the marketing activities to drive that forward, to take one step closer each and every day. Now, when I speak to potential clients, people on my courses, my programs, even on the mentorship, I’m always faced with the dilemma that they always want things like more followers, more visitors, more people in their email list. But the problem is there that if you have those wants and wishes, are they the things that actually get you visible and get more clients?

We’re in a field of acquisition

Now, ultimately, you’d be thinking, “Well, look, if I got more people in my network, I got more followers, then more people will buy.” But it’s not true. You can have a small but mighty network or a small but mighty list and have a really good quality and actually convert. Why? Because if you spend all day just building your network, okay, we’re in a kind of a field of acquisition. And all we’re doing is we’re acquiring people. We’re popping them in. But who are these people? Are you fact-finding, are you building a relationship, are you nurturing this person through? Or are you just building people into your network?

Now, if someone chooses to follow you on Instagram, or Facebook, connect with you on LinkedIn, whichever social network, are they saying, “I am ready to buy and inquire.” Well, no, they’re not. So when you think about web visitors, another common goal that many marketers want, is it the right goal? Again, I’m not sure it is. Because getting visitors onto your website, only 97% of people are ready to actually buy and inquire. So what does that mean? Well, it means that if those people aren’t ready to buy and inquire, that means 3%, just 3% of people visiting a landing page, visiting a site, are ready to inquire or buy. That’s a very small proportion. So you think, “Well, okay, by getting more visitors that will solve the problem, that will push the ratio up.” But does it?

Now, I personally think that there are other ways. Now, even when I am told that the main motivation in business is to build an email list, to get people on there, I see clients burning themselves out, pushing money into ads, pulling people in through free lead magnets all day long. Now, that’s fine if there is a nurture sequence, if there is a journey or a way of speeding up that sales cycle. But if someone is saying, “Yes, I’d like a free checklist,” are they saying, “I’m ready to buy and inquire.” Now, the problem I have with all three of these goals, followers, visitors, list building, is the motivation. The purchase intent isn’t that. So when I see many businesses not maximizing efforts through all of the digital marketing they’re doing, not reaping the results that they absolutely deserve, it’s because they’re focused on the wrong thing.

Getting more of the people you already have

Now, to me, I always like to focus on getting more leads, getting more conversion, and getting more clients. Those are the goals I know will drive money. So when I think about getting visible and getting more clients, my ultimate goal or that of my clients would be around how do we get more of the people we have already to convert. That could be people in your network. It could be people visiting your website. It could be people in your list.

Then when we think about clients, how can we get more of the leads that you have in the business, the opportunities, the partnerships, the potential collaborations, how could you reach more people to ultimately get more leads and convert? So often it comes down to the actual marketing process, the way that you pull people in and what you do with them when you meet. Now, I often talk about engaging at the point of connection. And this is one strategy that increased our conversion and engagement by hundreds. Our engagement went up by 373% on LinkedIn by just focusing on this strategy, by being really conscious about who we wanted in our network. Not sitting there and waiting to be followed, but choosing people aligned to our commercial goals, aligned to scaling and growing our businesses. Now, that could be potential collaborations. It could be people who I wanted to appear as a guest expert and pull through their audience. It could be potential ideal clients, avatars, whoever.

Now, within this, if you start thinking about your strategy, about how you can reach more of the right people and draw them in, you have to think about how you’re going to warm that person up, how you’re going to literally push that person from being a suspect, which is really what a follower is, what a web visitor is and someone in your list who signs up for a free lead magnet is, to become a prospect. And then look at how you can push that person from a prospect through to a paying customer. So this is all about a subtle twist and a switch from looking at followers, visitors, and list building to getting more conversion, to getting more clients from getting more leads, and looking at the marketing activities that actually drive those actions.

So one of the ideas that I have, or a great activity to do is to actually look at where are your leads coming from right now. Which sources, which activities are having impact and actually converting into paying customers? And lose the rest of it. Simplify your world, draw everything back to baseline and start thinking about what’s moving the needle in your business right now. And that’s where the big change is. It’s where the sweet spot lies. It’s where your efforts will start to reap results. And you start to get better return on investment and you’ll spend less time, less money, and less effort on your marketing. But you’ll be getting even better results. Because your focus is on the goals, your focus is orientated on where the money is.

The value of cross-selling and upselling

You’ll be looking at, right, okay, if we get a hundred visitors on our site, how do we get more people converting? How do we get more people buying and inquiring? If we have leads coming into the business, how do we nurture those people and get more of those leads converting? Now, even on the client side, how do we increase the purchase value, the average order value, the frequency of that person? And often using things like incremental selling, which is looking at the current customers, the amazing people that spend on average 33% more with a business because the trust is there. The proof is there. They love you already. There’s no acquisition cost, right? So looking at the opportunities of upgrading them, upselling them, cross-selling them, looking at how you can expand that relationship and get better results for them and also for yourself. Looking at customer campaigns before trying to constantly pull new people in. Now, this is all about increasing reach and visibility and doing the right things to actually show up online to get people taking action.

Now, one of the things I absolutely love doing is emulating the process that works best offline. And what is that? It’s all about people meeting people, building that personal relationship. And how do we do that? Well, we use things like live discovery sessions, live round tables, live master classes, where people are showing up, interacting. You are building a relationship. You are talking to these people. You’re attracting your ideal client. And you’re creating a forum as good as you can online and emulating what works in the offline space. Now, for hundreds and thousands, millions of years, word of mouth has worked in the best way.

Now when we do a weekly round table, people often will bring in other people they’re referring because it’s something that happens all the time. It brings value. There’s no selling on it. But we’re showcasing our skills. We’re adding value and bringing tips. And people often struggle with are we giving away too much? You can never, ever give away too much because your skills, your expertise, whatever you do, your products or your services, people invest in them because they want them. They see the value. All you’re doing is front loading that and showcasing to them, “Well, look, if I’m getting this for free, imagine what the experience would be like if I pay for it.”

Where are your leads coming from right now?

So if you are looking to get visible and you are looking to get more clients, think about what your goals are. Think about your motivations. Think about your digital to-do list. And most importantly, think about where your leads are coming from right now. Drill down onto those channels that are converting the most profitable paying clients and do more of that. And think about emulating what works offline and bring that online. Because in the world of digital marketing, we’re not looking to lose traditional marketing. We’re looking to blend the two so that they’re working constantly together. Because let’s face it. Someone might go onto your website and then pick up the phone and speak to you. That’s the perfect example of online and offline.

So think about ways that if word of mouth is a powerful medium for you to get leads and get results, how do you get more of that? Could you set up an affiliate partnership, a referral scheme, a customer loyalty scheme, a way of getting your amazing customers to maybe stay with you longer and increase that retention, but also to refer people to you. Now really think about your journey as a customer. Think about how you pull people in, the client attraction, and the client conversion, and look at all of those success factors that you’re currently reaping results from. And then really make your life easier by simplifying this process and just honing in and being laser-focused on what’s working right now.

So I hope you enjoyed this episode. And don’t forget, you can get loads of free resources on the website. Just go to Google, type in business consort. And you will see at the top of the search engine, digitalandsocialmediaacademy.com. Click the link and then head on over to resources. We have got guides, we’ve got videos, we’ve got podcast episodes, we’ve got loads of master classes and workshops that can really help you master the world of online marketing to scale and grow your business.

So don’t forget, follow me, Dawn McGruer. And also you can follow the Academy. Just search for business consort. And we look forward to seeing you shine online. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review if you have found these episodes helpful. Thank you so much for listening.

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