Ever had a hard time finding new clients? Even if you’ve been running your business for years, it can be hard to find work sometimes. Many people start looking for new markets to target when times are lean, but the truth is that many times most of your existing market doesn’t know your name. We’ll go over the bullseye method of marketing and how it can effectively solve this issue.
Sure, some of the people in a market have considered you (and even rejected you). But most of the people in the market have never even heard of you. The market doesn’t have just one mind. Different people in the market are seeking different things.”
Seth Godin – The Dip
Today we’re going to look at some of the methods you can use to reach that overwhelming portion of your market that doesn’t know you yet, including the bullseye method.
Table of Contents
Brand Management Refers To Finding Your Brand’s Unique Personality and Showing It
When many businesses first open, they default to bland marketing speak. Even solo business owners fall into this trap as they try to sound bigger and more serious than they are. Unfortunately, this type of marketing language makes you sound like a cardboard cutout, and few people are going to be willing to hire you. Instead, focus on more engaging strategies, like using social proof to your advantage. For example, you can buy Instagram engagement to quickly enhance your online presence and attract more genuine followers.
Stamatic re branded their website and design to create a more niche look and feel.
In an entertaining retrospective, Jack McDade founder of Statamic talked about the impact that adding personality to the branding for his product had in 2017. From 2013- 2017, Stamatic had a slow climb in popularity. Once he added his 80’s branding aesthetic to the website’s design, it stood out from all the flat designs out there.
This re-branding translated into more sales and brand recognition. Remember, your clients are hiring you, not an agency where people may change throughout the project.
Enjoy New Pitches From Potential Clients and Build a Long-Term Relationship With Them
When you start adding personality to your work, you will also start getting hilarious pitches from potential customers. This inclusion of personality means that years after you’ve worked with some clients you’ll still be emailing a few times a year to check up on each other. These are the long-term connections that continue to bring in referrals.
We know that you’re wondering if too much personality can scare off some clients; yes it will. Remember, that you should be working with your ideal clients, so this filters out some of the people that aren’t the best fit with the way you work.
Your goal should never be to win every prospect that comes in the door, but to play the long game of having a business that you still enjoy running in a decade. That means you work with the customers that fit with your long-term vision best.
Establish Your Single Metric That Matters
Before we can dig into the act of bullsye method marketing, we need to determine what the single metric that matters for us is.
Start With Website Traffic
Image SourceL Guilherme Stecanella
When you’re starting, it’s likely simple traffic to your site because it’s a decent starting measure for how much of the existing market knows you. It’s also true that without some type of traffic you won’t be able to start to test any of the other types of metrics that can be used.
To track traffic you can use pretty much any analytics package such as Google Analytics or WordPress Stats. The key is for you to be able to identify when a marketing effort is yielding more traffic to your site, and what types of content are yielding the best retention on your site.
One caution here is that you don’t just want any traffic. For example, some websites are a huge driver of traffic to sites and you could see lots of requests from clients to make sure that they could get that traffic.
The problem is that these websites are random traffic to your site. Sure there was some filters for preference, but most of the traffic wasn’t looking for your product. They were simply bored and clicked a button to take them to a random website.
This isn’t quality traffic that would create new business. The likelihood of getting a decent lead out of those thousands of visits in a day is unlikely. All it does is cost you money in hosting as you use up valuable server resources on people that don’t care about you or what you have to offer.
Look At Conversions: Actual Interested People Willing To Buy Your Product
Once you have some traffic from the bullseye method, it’s time to start looking at conversions. You don’t only want traffic. Ultimately, you want people that are interested in your products or services. Prospects signal that they are interested by signing up for your email lists, joining your forums, or leaving comments on your site.
The king of these types of metrics is the email list subscription, because despite so many people talking about the demise of email, it’s by far the best medium for conversion of people into paying customers.
When you have a steady stream of minor conversions, it’s time to start looking at a major conversions, which is turning users into paying customers. Here you need to know what your current rate of leads is and then focus in on the methods that help increase this number (which requires analytics).
Remember, your goal is to build a system that allows you to hit your goals in a repeatable fashion.
If you’re focusing on traffic, knowing how to use ads or content regularly to get people to view your site is key.
For conversions, focus on downloadable content or other things that consistently entice people to raise their hand to say they’re interested in what you have to offer. When it’s time to focus on getting paying customers, try refining your email sequences to increase the number of people that purchase.
Ultimately, all of these metrics are a cycle.
At some point you’ll hit a plateau in your traffic, and you can then move to getting more conversions until you hit a plateau there. Then you can start to look at turning your existing leads into clients. Once that seems to have plateaued and you’ve got process to consistently convert people into paying customers, you’ll head back to traffic and try some of the different methods listed below to optimize from the top down once more.
Focus Your Marketing Efforts For Better Results From Your Campaigns
For each type of marketing metric you’re currently focusing on, you can use the same method to figure out which marketing method is going to be the best option for you to use currently.
Maybe you’ll start with content marketing for traffic, but then need to move to PR as your business grows because PR does a better job at converting people to your email list. You start by testing all the ways that you can market your business and see which one moves the metric you’re currently targeting. Next, try these two steps to really dial in your efforts:
- Once you can say that two or three are doing the best job at hitting your goals, you focus on those few until you have a clear marketing tool that is performing best.
- Once you have that single focus, take your other top items and get them to feed into your main one so that they work together.
Bullseye Marketing for Traffic
Bullseye marketing is a great way to optimize your lead generation for your agency one metric at a time. When we’re trying to generate traffic (awareness of our work) content is often king. That is writing content, or doing videos, that speak well to your target market.
That means you’re entering the world of content marketing. Let’s assume that in your initial tests, blog content was indeed the best option for bringing more traffic to your site. Ultimately your goal is to be able to continuously produce content that drives views to your site.
If that means starting with blog content, then maybe you’d use Facebook Ads to drive extra traffic to content that starts to catch on. You may also add YouTube videos about parts of the same content (recycle content in different mediums to add value quickly) to entice people and drive them to your email list and site for more information.
Bullseye for Conversions
Image Source: Samuel Regan Asante
As you transition to focusing on conversions you may still keep your content as a key component, but focus more on any extras that can be provided with the content in exchange for an email address. You’ll need to ask yourself which traffic channels are converting best for what types of extra content.
Maybe Twitter does best if you present infographics, but Google Search yields lots of email subscriptions if you provide an email course to go with some content. Again, your goal is to focus on your single metric and figure out exactly what type of offer or combination of offers takes the traffic you’ve built and turns it into more conversions. Often, that will come in the form of email subscribers.
Bullseye for Customers
Once you’ve moved to focusing on customers, you’re likely focusing on your email marketing sequences or the sales funnel on your site.
If you’re focused on your email marketing sequences, then you’ll need to look at A/B testing different headings and wording in your emails to see which ones get people to click to start becoming a customer.
If you’re focusing on your site based conversions, then you’re looking at A/B testing your checkout and every interaction that your prospects have on their way to becoming a customer. Even if you’ve spent time on this before, looking back at every interaction every few months or once a year is what it will take to maximize your conversion of prospects into customers.
Starting Using Bullseye Marketing Today
If you can start now to figure out what your brand voice is, find your single metric that matters, and then focus your marketing on the best channels, you can build a sustainable pipeline of incoming leads. With a bit of effort, you’ll be increasing the awareness that your market has of you and what you offer, bringing you more business.
Accelerate Your Digital Agency Growth
With a fully managed hosting service handling your web infrastructure, you can focus on getting more clients and improving your onboarding process.