Two-Step Cold to Warm Online Marketing Strategy to Attract Qualified Leads and Prospects
Have you changed how you’re communicating with new prospective customers and clients? …
I hope you have because the way consumers want to be communicated with has definitely changed and continues to do so every year.
Those businesses that are getting it right are reaping the rewards in the form of new customers, clients, and patients. Those that haven’t changed are struggling to understand why their same old marketing methods and techniques are not generating the results they did just six months to a year ago.
What is this change?
Prospects want to be educated and talked to and NOT SOLD TO!
For you, this means you need to provide value before you ask for something.
Most business owners don’t think of their marketing and advertising as asking for something, but it is.
Every ad you put out whether it be online or offline is asking for a prospective new customer or client to:
You get the point. You’re asking them for something, quite possibly before they even know you or your brand.
So what can you do about this?
How can you provide value first and then ask for something second?
That’s what the rest of this article is going to teach you. We call this the “Two-Step COLD to WARM” strategy.
Here’s the 30,000-foot overview of this strategy.
#1 You provide value in the form of content, could be a blog post, article or white paper.
#2 You amplify the reach (number of people that see this content) using an advertising platform like Facebook, YouTube, etc. (you can use Google Adwords or Facebook Ads for this)
#3 You keep track of people who engage with the content (this is your group of warm prospects)
#4 You show a second ad with an ask to this group of warm prospects
Let’s get into this process in a little more detail.
How you Give Value First
Above I said provide value in the form of content, but what should that content be about?
The best place to start is to think of all the questions your prospective customer or clients ask before doing business with you.
Questions like:
Make a list of all the questions your prospective customers or clients ask you. If you’re struggling to come up with them, engage your team, support staff, sales staff, etc. Often these are topics that business owners don’t want to discuss on their website, but guess what, that’s the EXACT place you should be talking about them.
WHY?
Because your new potential customers want answers and if you don’t give it to them someone else will. We’re at a point right now where the majority of the public doesn’t like calling into businesses anymore. Whether it’s because we’re obsessed with the digital realm or people are nervous to be sold. Either way, they don’t want to call and ask questions, they want to self-serve.
Make that self-service easy for them and answer their questions.
How should you answer these questions?
Personally, I LOVE video, but not everyone is comfortable on camera. If you don’t like video, a blog post/article will work as well.
The key is to just do it. Don’t worry about the video being perfect or the article being a masterpiece. Just take action, get it done and get it up on your website.
Get an Audience for Your Content
You have your piece of content now what do you do with it?
You amplify it so that people in your target market have the opportunity to digest it. My #1 preferred platform for this right now is Facebook. The majority of people in your surrounding area, ideally your target market, are on Facebook.
Take your video or blog post, create a Facebook ad for it and run that ad to everyone that fits your target audience profile in terms of age, gender and if it makes sense to do so more specific targeting such as married, children etc. and show it to everyone in your serviceable area.
The goal of this ad is three-fold.
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To attract the people in this larger audience to engage with your content
To softly introduce your brand to these people and provide value
To create a separate audience of those people who engage with the content to remarket to later
Here are a two examples of content ads that give value first.
The above ad focussed solely on sending people to a blog post educating them on how long a heat pump can potentially last. The goal of this ad was to determine who in the local area had some interest in heat pumps while at the same time giving them educational content and value while introducing them to the company’s brand. It worked extremely well and attracted qualified visitors at an average of 50-60 clicks a day at an average cost of only $0.08 per click.
The above video ad from 360 Fitness Studio targeted people within 10-15 miles of their gym and focussed on attracting people who were already into fitness but felt like they weren’t improving with their current exercise routine. While the video was only a little more than 1 minute long, it still crushed it attracting over 1,000 people who viewed the entire clip for less than $35.00.
Neither of these examples sells anything to the viewer. Instead, they focus on giving value to the reader/watcher and building good will.
The final key component here is what’s called audience building.
This part of the discussion gets a bit geeky, so try to stay with me.
Platforms like Facebook make it possible to track who visits your website or views your videos and connect those views or visits to that person’s Facebook account. Now before you think “Geese doesn’t that violate privacy policy?” don’t worry it doesn’t literally give you the names and contacts of people, it simply groups all of them into what is called an Audience.
You do need to install a small snippet of code on your website to get this to work so I would advise connecting with your web or tech person to make this happen.
How you Ask For Something Second
Hopefully, you’re getting an idea of where we’re going with this process. We’ve put a quality and valuable piece of content out to the market. Some people, ideally those that are interested in your products and services, have engaged with the content. Using Facebook, or whatever platform you’re advertising with, you’ve created an audience of people who are engaging with the content. This audience is your warm leads.
It’s now time to make your ask or offer to that audience
This is going to vary by business, so I’ll give a couple of examples, but think about how you can apply this to your business.
Chiropractor: 30 Minute Back and Posture Consultation
Dentist: Free Teeth Whitening or Discount/Gift Certificate on New Patient Appointment and X-rays
Home Services Business: Free In-Home Consultation and Estimate
Fitness Studio: 7 Day Free Trial to Classes or Free Personal Training Session
Once someone has engaged with your content they’ve let you know they’re interested in whatever it is you have to offer. They’ve also been exposed to your brand. So it won’t seem out of left field if and when they see another ad for your business with an offer to engage your products or services.
To keep with the examples I gave above for the valuable content ads above, here are a couple of offer ad examples from the same businesses.
The above ad was shown to people who visited and read the blog post about how long heat pumps last. Of course, people who visited this company’s website and read the blog post would be familiar with this company and the offer to book a 30-minute consultation isn’t intrusive.
This ad was shown to people who watched at least 75% of the video we posted about above. We chose the 75% level because someone who watched 5-10 seconds of the video isn’t going to be as “warm” to the business and brand as someone who watched almost the whole thing.
What happens when someone clicks on one of the ads above? They’re taken to a landing page with a form and phone number to connect with the business and take the next step.
So that’s the Two-Step Strategy to go from a COLD to WARM audience of people online. We use Facebook as the example for this post; however, it’s possible to follow something similar to this using YouTube, Google Search and Display Network, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and even Twitter.
Some of the best and highest converting campaigns utilize more than one platform to market to prospects. This cross-platform marketing process is a key strategy that we help clients setup.
So what’s the next step for your business?
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