- Do Market Intelligence:
I’ve learned the importance of listening to what my customers and fans’ pain points are and what they are struggling with.
I do this by creating polls via my Facebook Group, asking my website visitors to tell me what their challenges are, and people who register for my Digital Marketing Training.
This strategy has helped me a lot in generating blog posts that answer their questions, writing better sales pages, and creating engaging social media updates across my channels. I also find out what my ideal client’s pain points are using Nairaland & Quora for my research.
I also use Nairaland & Quora for my research.
- Generate Blog Topics That Educates & Converts Visitors Into Leads:
I usually brainstorm blog topics that my audience would love to read and solve their problems. Also, each article designed to convert them into either email subscribers or buyers of my courses and services.
Therefore, I make sure that every blog post works hard to land more clients and leads.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization):
I spend a sizable amount of time optimising my new and older blog posts for search engines.
I mean what’s the point of writing a blog post that doesn’t eventually rank high on Google search for my target buyer’s intent keywords.
Every quarter, I go through my older blog posts that are ranking high on Google and flesh them out with quality content and link them to my latest blog posts or important sales pages on my website.
This method helps my newest articles to rank high very quickly, increase sales, and my older blog posts are used to convert visitors into leads. It’s a win-win.
- Social Media Content Promotion:
I spend 80% of my time promoting my old and new articles on social media and to my email list, thanks to Buffer, MailChimp, and Recur Post.
Also, I repurpose this blog posts into various formats for Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp, SlideShare, LinkedIn Groups, YouTube, Soundcloud, Snapchat, Google+, etc.
- Lead Generation & Email Marketing Automation:
If you are not building your email list, you should start right now. I have an opt-in landing page and pop-up form that advertises a free toolkit or ebook that entices blog readers to opt-in to my newsletter and download.
You can sign up to download my Sales Toolkit for automating your online business.
I also build a series of emails to nurture and convert them into customers. (If you don’t know what to say in your emails, I suggest you get my email series templates – it works for every industry).
Lastly, whenever customers try to purchase e-books or online courses on my website and abandon their shopping carts, have a WordPress plugin that sends a series of email reminders to come back and complete their purchase.
- Social Media Groups’ Participation:
I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve landed clients by participating in LinkedIn Groups and Nairaland Forum discussions. I also invite people to join my Facebook Group so I can keep engaging them until they are ready to buy. You can read more on how I built and manage my Facebook and Whatsapp groups.
- Document and Automate My Entire Business Process:
With the increase in new clients, I discovered that I didn’t have a solid system for managing client’s expectations.
Client’s inquiries and jobs started slipping my mind. My clients became angry when I couldn’t meet up with deadlines. Emails were left unanswered. Sometimes I was afraid to answer my phone calls.
Suddenly, my online reputation was at stake.
I became the typical Nigerian freelancer who made promises and never fulfilled them. I was a total mess and fell ill due to uncompleted projects!
Until one day, I decided to put everything on hold and learn from the best freelancers and gurus in the industry on how they managed to keep everything under control and still had time to blog and engage their fans on social media.
Here are what I learned:
- They documented their workflow/tasks for each client projects using Asana or Trello. So whenever they had a new client, all they needed to do was create a duplicate template and share with the client to monitor their work progress.
- They have a Sales Process for pre-qualifying prospects.
- They have sales email templates for answering similar questions from potential leads. No more thinking about an appropriate response to give a potential customer. All I did was to automate my email response via an autoresponder attached to my online form.
- They set aside certain days in the week called ‘Batch Days’ for doing all of their weekly tasks in bulk. Such tasks include blogging, social media updates & scheduling, prospecting, email newsletters, sales copy, graphics design, etc.
- They have a process for writing blog posts, social media updates, sales copy, email newsletters, designing graphics, etc.
- They have a daily and weekly to-do list with reminders via Google Calendar.
- They set up client boundaries. No more answering calls or emails on weekends or during off business hours. Every client inquiry must be done via the website contact form and not on social media. Client meetings are scheduled using Calendly. No more angry clients. Communication was clear.
- Welcome Packages & Contracts with Strict Deadlines: No more waiting for days or weeks just to get that important information from a client. Client expectations are clearly understood by both parties. Everything must be assembled before the project starts.
- Get help and help others:
I saw the value in hiring a virtual assistant this year when a young man who just finished his University degree sent me a direct message on Twitter, requesting to become my mentee and in return handle some of my business tasks for free.
I didn’t know whether to take him up on his offer or to simply ignore him like I did others.
My reason was because I didn’t have any projects that needed a third-party to assist at the time. I was perfectly fine doing things by myself and so I didn’t need anyone’s help (the Lone Ranger attitude).
But he never gave up and I was impressed with his follow up introduction emails and phone calls.
So I decided to become his mentor. I’ve never done this before and never saw myself as one.
I’m glad I did because he became very useful to my small business and saved me a lot of stress this year.
Eventually, I started trusting him with clients’ jobs. He learned pretty quickly and I was so impressed that I decided to hire him as a virtual assistant and pay him a small token every month.
He lives in far away Plateau State while I’m based in Lagos, but thanks to the internet, we collaborate daily via phone call, WhatsApp, Skype, and TeamViewer.
I now noticed that I can spend time with my son on weekends and take on more clients and prospects.
My business process has improved and clients are happy!
- Remind myself that the sales process takes time & never stop nurturing my prospects:
Sometimes, I tend to worry and feel depressed whenever my target audience doesn’t convert into customers, even though I’ve tried my best to convince them.
Not until I told myself to relax and keep on useful information with them consistently.
I also remind myself that if they don’t buy now, it does not mean they won’t buy in the nearest future.
I found that this logic is true because some of these long-forgotten prospects call me out of the blues to tell me that they are ready to hire my services and make payment.
- Invest in my education and Online Marketing Tools:
This is one thing you must take very seriously. Read a lot, learn, enroll for free and paid online courses, practice what you’ve learned, and profit from it.
It has helped me a lot in my business. I am an eternal learner and avid reader.
I also believe in using tools like Zapier to automate some repetitive tasks such as; scheduling social media updates, email courses, invoicing, lead generation, monitoring my keyword rankings, and automatically pinning my blog post images on Pinterest. You can read up on the top online marketing tools I can’t do without.
I hope you learned a lot from this article? So tell me, what other strategies do you use to increase sales, make clients happy and influence people online?
By caroline wabara