Digital Marketing For Dummies. Ryan Deiss
Читать онлайн книгу.
The way in which you make your offers — and perhaps more important, the sequence in which you make them — will make or break your ability to convert your prospects.
You should think of creating and nurturing relationships with your customers in the same way that you develop relationships with your friends and family. Your business might sell business to business (B2B) or business to consumer (B2C), but all businesses sell human to human (H2H). Real, individual people are buying your products and services.
Consider how perfect strangers become a married couple. The marriage proposal is an offer that is made after a sequence of other offers are made and deemed successful by both parties. Sure, the occasional marriage proposal on the first date occurs, but most relationships begin with a series of positive interactions over a period of time.
Although most people aren’t likely to propose marriage on a first date, many businesses do the equivalent of that with their prospects. They ask cold prospects to buy high-ticket, complex, and otherwise risky products and services before the relationship is ready for that offer. On the other hand, a customer who has received tremendous value from your company over a period of time is much more likely to make a high-dollar, complex, or otherwise risky purchase.
In this chapter, we unpack the different types of offers you can make, the goals of those offers, and the order in which you should present them to prospective, new, and loyal customers. The offers explained in this chapter focus on acquisition and monetization campaigns (discussed in Chapter 2).
Offering Value in Advance
Doing business online is different from doing business in person or even over the phone. In many cases, the prospective customer has no further information about your business than what is presented to her online. To acquire new leads and customers, you need to build trust and lead with value to build a relationship with your prospects or customers.
A successful relationship is a two-way street. Both sides of the relationship must benefit from the relationship, and because your company wants to begin this new relationship with a prospect, it makes sense for you to provide value first. Prospects won’t become loyal customers if you don’t first provide some value that builds trust in advance of asking them to buy. The good news is that you can provide this value with something as simple as an insightful, informative blog post or podcast that helps them solve a problem. You offer this value for free and with no strings attached to begin a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship.
We call acquisition offers that lead with value entry point offers, or EPOs. An EPO in a dating relationship equates to offering to buy someone a cup of coffee. This coffee offer, which has begun many healthy dating relationships, is a relatively risk-free proposition that provides value upfront. When your goal is to acquire a customer (and not a spouse), the EPO is a way of allowing large amounts of prospective customers to get to know, like, and trust your business without much risk.
There are three types of EPOs:
Ungated: You usually present this type of offer in the form of a blog post, video, or podcast, and it does not require contact information or a purchase to get value.
Gated: A gated offer requires contact information (name, email address, and so on) to get value.
Deep discount: This offer requires a purchase but at an extreme discount, usually 50 percent or greater.
Designing an Ungated Offer
Offers that require no risk on the part of prospective customers are the most powerful way to begin to cultivate strong relationships with customers. An ungated offer such as an informative article, video, or podcast gives value without asking for contact information or a purchase. That said, these are still offers. You are offering value to prospects in exchange for their time. And for many people, no other resource is more precious than time.
The value provided by the business is generally made available to prospects using content such as blog posts, social media updates, or videos. Successful digital marketers make free content available that provides one of the following values:
Entertainment: People pay a lot of money to be entertained, and content that makes a person laugh is content that is likely to be remembered. It’s why commercials try to make you laugh (think the gecko from Geico or Flo from Progressive); they have only 30 to 60 seconds to cut through all the noise and get you to remember their product or service. Video advertisements from Poo-Pourri and Old Spice on YouTube are prime examples of marketers providing entertaining content that gets their message across.
Inspiration: People are highly moved by content that makes them feel something. The sports and fitness industry taps into this sentiment with taglines like “Just do it,” by Nike, or Fitbit campaigns showing everyday people (as opposed to celebrities and professional athletes) achieving their goals using Fitbit. Weight-loss businesses also use inspirational content by using successful customer testimonials and “before” and “after” images.
Education: Ever go to YouTube to watch a how-to video? From DIY projects to “how to rebuild a car engine,” you can easily find educational content online. People want knowledge, and providing it helps build trust. Entire blogs, sites, YouTube channels, and businesses are built around educating people, to great success. That’s why Wikipedia gets over 9 billion page views a month.
The first two value propositions (entertainment and inspiration) can be difficult to execute. But the third is within the grasp of every company. In Chapters 4 and 5, we go into more detail about the form and function of the various types of ungated content that can be produced.
Designing a Gated Offer
To graduate someone from the stage of prospect to lead, you need a gated offer that requires prospects to submit their contact information to receive value. A gated offer provides a small chunk of value that solves a specific problem for a specific market and is offered in exchange for the prospects’ contact information. That contact information is typically an email address, at a minimum. Returning to the dating relationship analogy earlier in the chapter, a gated offer is the equivalent of a first date. A gated offer might take the form of a white paper, a case study, or a webinar. For example, Figure 3-1 shows how HubSpot makes valuable information available in the form of a white paper that requires contact information such as name, email address, and a phone number.