In a rapidly changing environment spotting and capitalizing on trends can become more and more difficult. Especially if you are a bootstrapping entrepreneur, the idea of “trends” or “forecasting” becomes laughable.
Yet, regardless of the shifting “trends” something that will never go out of style (if you’re building a real business) is relationship marketing, and in a way that still makes you money!
So despite your current level in your business, let us capitalize on the atmosphere of reflection, and take a step back to see the life-blood of your business: your consumers. More specifically we will focus on the relationship between you.
The aim: higher conversion rates and cultivating better clients.
Clients that actually help you build your business with repeat sales, referrals, and glowing social media reviews rather than burying you with support issues, refunds, and scathing complaints in the social sphere for all to see! It can be much easier than you think when you have a good framework. So today I am going to reveal to you the “Three Critical Phases of The Consumer Lifecycle”.
If you have any one reason to give your Consumers Lifecycle serious attention, it is this:
“If you don’t have a process for what you are doing, you don’t know what you are doing.” – W. Edwards Deming
A path that ensures you make the most of every opportunity, while giving you accurate information with which you can refine a water-tight funnel; building your business with efficiency and scalability!
Each one of these stages has a number of stages within them that I have identified in the complete cycle, but it is important for YOU to build out according to your unique business model.
1. Generation to Conversion
Do you sometimes feel as though you have the best product in the world? If only more people could find out about it, then you’d be set! I think everyone goes through this “phase”, until they start generating serious traffic that is!
It doesn’t matter if you’re in a strip mall, a business complex, or online; you will always need traffic in one form or another. The more the better, however, it is not just the amount that matters, but also the quality of the visitors (how closely what they want is aligned with what you have). Bottom line: traffic is great, but leads are better!
When put into a choreographed process, leads can “move along” a pipeline toward becoming actual customers!
During this phase it’s important to educate your leads and, while educating them you can watch their behavior and find out towards which they gravitate. By focusing on relationships, their behavior, in addition to surveys and market testing, you will find that getting sales conversions become natural and easy! You will get more than just buyers; you will get the Right buyers! Buyers who actually use your product or service enough to get value!
2. Adoption to Causation
Basically, it doesn’t matter how great your product is, unless people actually DO something with it, they will most likely not be coming back to you for more products, let alone give you a referral, a testimonial, or positive review online. And why should they?
It is through better adoption of your product that your consumers naturally become a causative force for you in the marketplace. This leads to more natural repeat sales, upsells, referrals and testimonials.
As more and more business are struggling with diminishing e-mail open rates, lower quality leads, and diminishing sales, you will find more and more businesses realize the value of each and every lead and customer. So DO NOT make the mistake of thinking that just because the deal is ‘closed’ that the relationship has ended!
3. Affiliation to Ascension
Entire empires have been made from affiliates and affiliate marketing, but despite the vast opportunity many business owners still struggle with how to 1) Get affiliates on board and 2) get them to actually DO something! But while there is nothing wrong from going straight to affiliate networks, it would be reckless to ignore the greatest affiliate goldmine you may have: your happy customers!
As you can see, the third stage relies heavily on the efficiency of the second stage, much like the second relies on the first. Thus, if you get the right traffic (which generally comes from good affiliates, which you can grow inside your own organization) you will easily get higher-quality leads.
Higher quality leads makes getting sales much easier. With the right clients on board, they will naturally use more of what you sold making it easier on your support team. When people see actual realized value, it makes it MUCH easier to get authentic testimonials. Likewise, it is now much easier to get a referral from someone who gave you a testimonial. At this point it is surprisingly easy to turn your referral sources into full-blown affiliates!
Finally, with the right kind of motivated affiliates on board, they will see their traffic turned into a goldmine. It soon becomes easy for them to become super-affiliates who flood your sites with the perfect visitors for your products! It is actually quite easy and takes relatively very little effort to take someone to this level of ascension when you plan and act deliberately with a holistic process in mind!
It may seem complicated, but it also seems complicated to have to date a person before asking them to marry you. Thus you build a relationship, which is exactly what you need!
Tips for a Strong Consumer Lifestyle
- Have a process for what you are doing
- Remember Relationships
- Generate traffic and convert them into buyers
- Get buyers to adopt your products (this is part of your relationship)
Extracted from StomperNet SEO Intelligence Report, November 4, 2011.
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