We’ve been told Branding and Awareness creation is expensive. Advertising is expensive. Digital Marketing (email, SEO etc.) is not. We look for quick fixes, and the internet is crawling with so called experts touting advice and quick lists – 5 things to do, 7 things to avoid.
They will be quick to tell you things you must do:
- SEO – stay in touch with Google’s new ever changing algorithms. SEO consultants and vendors will scare you to death about how your site is being penalized for using outdated methods, back links and so on.
- Social Media marketing – the new way. If you are not ‘doing’ Social marketing, you’re Stone Age. There are hundreds of thousands of online articles showing you best practices and how to generate leads with social marketing.
- Content Marketing – blogging, articles, case studies. If you ain’t doing that, you ain’t doing nothin’.
· … the list goes on.
Merely, islands of automation and islands of tools I say.
Falling Sales
I guarantee you have dabbled in anything and everything above, but your lead generation seems to be going nowhere. Actually it may even be falling.
To make matters worse, even your conversion is decreasing resulting in a double whammy. Sales are falling exponentially. Cost of customer acquisition is rising exponentially.
What is going on?
It is easy to blame two things:
- ‘Market Conditions’
- Competition
Is it that complicated? Are there no answers?
Go back to Fundamentals.
Sales and Marketing are intertwined but unfortunately we tend to departmentalize them. We want a competitive edge, but we fail to look into our prospects’ minds. We fail to look at the psychology of why people buy and why they don’t. Marketers and sellers don’t try to understand the innermost thought processes and desires of the prospect; providers and practices in our case. We often use lovely and fancy words extolling what we think are virtues of our product and/or service without understanding the buyer.
Marketing’s job is not just to structure, and follow the process of implementing technologies for lead generation, it is to take a journey inside the step-by-step thinking of the buyer. Marketing’s job is to snag the prospect’s interest and lead him/her to an urgent thrust to purchase.
Marketing’s job is to realize the prospect’s intimate evaluation procedures so you can turn them into sales motivations, and hold their hand to fill out your form.
Selling technology to physicians, providers and clinics requires you to learn what influences their mind, what motivates them to buy and what influences their buying decisions.
Do that first - before you explore the tools of marketing; apply the psychology of buying into those techniques, I guarantee you will see completely different results.