How To Generate Sales Using Online Booking Campaigns
“Differentiating yourself in the marketplace is never easy. When you add new services others add new services. When you change your business model, others adapt. Getting from behind the eight ball requires higher levels of expertise and a brand that outshines anyone else.”
Being a marketer is extremely challenging in today’s market. Competition is crazy and it seems like every marketing agency is offering the same things. Most are category agnostic, most offer everything under the sun, and competing against low pricing is rampant.
Not only this, but keeping up with the latest in technology is a full time job and your clients expect you to be experts in every new platform the minute it becomes the hot new thing. And if you don’t get the results? They are gone. Client churn is one of the most difficult and frustrating parts of running an agency.
“Customers stay with you when you make them money.”
The bottom line is that your clients want results and if you can generate high intent leads straight to your clients calendar there is no question that you will have a life long customer who follows your guidance.
But how do you stay on the cutting edge of marketing innovation and set yourself apart as a marketer?
“With LinkedIn finally locking in its usefulness, the question now becomes, how do I produce something original?”
Well, it’s pretty tough. There is so much information disseminated across social channels with new tips and ideas that marketers are testing and in places like linked in, sometimes it feels like it’s just a bunch of marketers marketing about marketing to other marketers. Not only are you competing against other agencies but realistically you are competing against your own customers who think they know better and they fight you to do things their way even though you know it will lead to poor results that they’ll blame on you.
That point aside, it’s difficult to set yourself apart when your message seems to sound the same, and your products and services are the same, and anything new that comes out is just one more thing keeping you behind the eight ball. If everyone is now an expert because of the abundance of information, how will you set yourself apart as your client’s expert that they trust?
“Marketers must stay ahead of every business because that is the purpose of using outside help. To stay ahead of the pack, you can’t be an agency that lags behind. It’s a never ending race.”
What options do you have? This is your vocation and you have a team to train and keep busy. The furloughs brought on by the pandemic were devistating and for many of you the hardest decision you ever had to make. If you didn’t experience that you are one of the few lucky ones. If you don’t figure out how to stay ahead of the curve and set yourself apart from your competition your win rates will be low and you’ll start losing clients for companies that claim to know how to make money with the latest and greatest platform.
“Creativity and innovation will always win because those two things are the compounds of success.”
At Periodic, we are seeing this hard truth play out with our agency friends and customers and we know just how hard it is to survive as an agency. But of the customers we have who are doing tremendously well, we are coaching them through a few key things that are helping them grow and flourish as an agency.
Innovate with high intent booking campaigns.
Creativity and innovation are at the soul of Periodic and we are continually testing and iterating on processes and technologies that get the job done of booking meaningful meetings that are revenue generating and are making an impact on time and profit. Our latest innovation comes in the form of what we call Booking Campaigns.
Generate awareness content that is directly connected to high intent channels.
No matter what the changing medium is or changing platform, the principle is by producing media, which is anything written, visual or audible, you will be able to reach a target audience and give them a message that calls them to action.
The game is producing as much content as possible and getting comfortable with individuals being on camera, taking pictures and writing articles that inspire or make people laugh enough to pay attention to you and make the determination that your advice is worth considering which would lead them to take some kind of action.
We know this as marketers but we either fail to execute or we aren’t calculated enough and the next step ends up being a little lazy and therefore less effective.
But before we talk about the next step, I want to address the fact that the social media landscape is ever changing. But it’s really easy to understand because it’s very much supply and demand economics.
It works like this, you have to think of social media users as the product of the social media companies. Anytime you are using something for free that means that somehow, you are being bought and sold. That is, your attention is being bought and sold. Your attention has value so businesses are willing to pay for it through ad spend.
When businesses flock to a social media platform and it reaches maturation the cost of attention goes up. And so you jump to another platform where attention is free or costs cents on the dollar. The hard truth is that you will always be adjusting and testing to make your offer still resonate. So don’t shy away from new technology’s but perhaps ear mark some funds for future experimentation on the latest and greatest platform.
The platforms change. The nuances of how you mechanically format content changes. But what doesn’t change, and has never changed since the Stone Age is that written language, pictures, and stories told verbally move culture forward. Your job as a marketer is to keep up with where you can get the most relevant attention at the lowest cost to the client.
Having great content is one thing. The customer has to resonate with the message enough to want to click through. This is where doing in-depth research into who the target customer is comes into play. However, the reality is that so many companies are really bad at knowing this.
They aren’t looking at their past customers and picking out their most profitable, easiest, and most fun to work with and creating buyer profiles around them. They aren’t doing market research to understand the underlying problems that they can solve with their product. In fact, what most are doing is they are turning their solution into a problem. They are saying we sell hammers and the problem is that people can’t find good hammers. That’s not a problem. That’s an obstacle. Then they dig deeper and they say “well, maybe they need to pound a nail.” Wrong again. “They need to frame a wall?” Getting warmer. “They want their home to look nice?” Warmer. “They want a home that suits them?” Getting hot. “They want a home where they feel belonging and a true sense of identity.” That’s it!
So how can you focus on that outcome and tell the consumer, “The first step is picking out a hammer that can get you there”?
Without that deep dive, what happens is the client comes in and starts to tell you who they think their customer is and what they think their customer wants without really knowing. They are selling hammers and everything looks like a nail to them. And they send the agency down a misguided path which ultimately leads to a lot of tug-o-war with process, and rescoping, reselling, and restarting because the client is controlling the engagement.
Smart agencies know they have to start with the science. They have to start with the research to understand where there is product fit in the market and only then can they start to conceptualize the messaging that will work for captivating content. What are their real problems? What do they really want? Can your product help solve that? Can you reframe your product in the context of solving that particular problem? Too many customers can’t see how they are taking their solution and turning it into the problem and it takes that outside perspective coming from the agency to provide that pushback to say “that’s not the problem, that’s your solution masked as the problem.”
So once you have the problem understood, then you can speak to it through content and you can give the promise that you know how to solve that problem through your call to action to take the next step and go to the landing page.
Stop sending people to your homepage with broad language. Start sending people to direct landing pages with specific language.
Here’s where people get their websites wrong. They design them as an online product brochure with a contact form that allows you to send an email notification and that’s what we think web design is.
That’s not enough anymore. It’s not enough to generate lead information or to lure people in with an ebook download. The expectation of the website today is to generate the sale and in some cases go all the way through to fulfillment. Brad Wisler, the CEO of Periodic recently said that “companies are expecting marketing to break through the wall between sales and operations and have the capacity to complete fulfillment and invoicing all in one fail swoop.”
We know this is possible in e-commerce but with professional services or high ticket sales, that process is lagging behind. And yet, the conventions of what is expected in a website experience are changing and shifting to the extent that e-commerce for services or high ticket sales can’t wait any longer.
But getting there requires a lot of technology and finding the best integrations to support the ecosystem you’re creating through your website experience.
The bottom line is that it just requires more effort. Which will be more expensive to your clients but if you can prove the sales and not just quantity of leads, you will be in a position to charge what you need to charge.
What we like doing in our booking campaigns is instead of throwing out content and sending them to the home page, we are designing very calculated booking site landing pages, that have messaging above the fold that mirrors the messaging of the content we published. This one thing has cut our bounce rates in half. They have gotten so low that we actually have to check to make sure there isn’t a tracking or code installation error.
But the heading matching the advertisement isn’t all we’re doing. You actually have to deliver on the promise of the ad. Provided you’re targeting the right audience to begin with and you are peaking their curiosity with a problem they actually have, you have to provide them with a deep dive of content that actually gives them the solution. Or at least the concept of how to solve it. Showing a person how to frame a wall with a hammer doesn’t solve the full problem. They still need a hammer if they don’t have one. What showing them the process does is it tells them that the next time they are in the hardware store and they are ready to purchase a hammer when they are staring at all the options and they see yours in the line up, they are going to have greater affinity to your brand because you gave them the knowledge.
You have to understand that not everyone is ready to buy when the get on a landing page. You can’t only run conversion ads because there just won’t be enough people at the bottom of the funnel who are landing on your site. You have to spread your ad spend across awareness, consideration and conversion goals. You have to run traffic ads and conversion ads knowing that the traffic may be an introduction to your brand but because those impressions and click will come at a lower cost, you want to be able to spark that interest.
However, if your landing page doesn’t have any extra content or value for the top of funnel or middle of funnel visitor they will bounce and your marketing dollar will be wasted. The landing page has to provide options above the fold that will encourage the site visitor to get and explore the information that will help them solve their problem.
They may like video, or a download, an article, or help from a person.
What creative ways can you come up with to allow the visitor to control the pace of the interaction?
If they would like to take advantage of interacting with a person what does that experience look like? Is the draw to interact with a well known person? Is it to listen in on a virtual conference or workshop from a popular thought leader? Or is it to get a one on one consultation from a company expert? If you know you’ve done the work of building a ton of top and middle of funnel awareness, then you maybe your call to action needs to be more direct and transactional.
Stop using static contact forms. Start using functional CTAs that facilitate real action.
Whatever your call to action event is, consumers expect it to be functional. It isn’t enough to have a lead form anymore. People see through it. They know they are going to get into an endless email campaign and unless there is a really good reason to join the email list, they will resist.
The remedy is to come up with an event that is worth attending.
Depending on where they are at in the funnel and depending on the demand you generate, the event may be with a big audience or it may be one on one.
The more top of funnel they are the more it needs to feel like an information session which will plant the seed for future conversations that are transactional. The more bottom of the funnel the more transactional the conversation will be.
Top of funnel doesn’t always mean that there will be a ton of people. I’ve been invited to webinars where no one shows up. I’ve been to bottom of funnel direct sales calls that are an entire group.
You have to plan for the reality of the company you’re working with. If the idea of a webinar is new and they don’t have a huge audience, you’ll have to either word it differently like a free one on one workshop or small group workshop, or even a free consultation or audit and keep in mind that you will be talking to people who are more top of funnel.
On the other hand, if you are getting insane demand and you are getting more sales calls than your team can handle, you will have to turn your demos or your discovery calls into a broadcast live discussion.
That sounds crazy but it may be more familiar than you think. Ron Popeil started his company Ronco in 1964. Depending on your age you’ll recognize products such as the Ronco food dehydrator or the Ronco rotisserie cooker. You may remember the late night infomercials with audience repeated catch phrases like “set it and forget it!”
Not too many people realize this but Ron Popeil invented the infomercial. And it was nearly an accident as to how he got started. Popeil’s first well known product he sold was called the Veg-o-matic. A little kitchen device that chopped vegitables. As an independent salesman Popeil would go to live consumer shows and venues setting up a booth where he could demonstrate how well the product worked in front of a localized audience. Before the Veg-o-matic he was demonstrating kitchen knives, showing how well they sliced and displaying beautiful cuts of tomatoes and carrots.
Well, with the knives, he would bring with him a big bag of vegetables and when people would come along he would pull from the bag of vegetables and chop them up and then toss out the ones he chopped when a new audience arrived. With the knives he could carry along enough vegetables to last him the entire day. But when he started using the Veg-o-matic the vegetables that would last him a day, now lasted less than an hour. The product was effective. It sold itself. But the window he had to sell was now cut into an eighth.
He thought to himself there has to be a way to demonstrate this product to a large audience, in a short amount of time without needing to buy an endless supply of vegetables.
Then a light bulb turned on. He learned that airtime on tv was really cheap on some of the cable channels that just turn off after their entertainment programming was over. But that people stay up and being glued to their TVs would watch just about anything if there was nothing else on.
So he recreated his live demonstration, brought in a live studio audience, recorded it once, and began selling to the masses. He scaled himself by understanding where his audience was at and understanding the game of attention and replication.
Today, you can see popular marketers like Gary Vee and Chris Do who use zoom to bring on groups of people to ask questions one at a time for sixty minutes. During that time they offer feedback and free advice and every now and then, you’ll see them hear a problem that they are interested in solving and they’ll say I think we can help you with that. Let’s connect after this call and I’ll have so and so make sure we set that up.
What’s happening, is everyone on the call and all of the subsequent video viewers are getting value from the advice and the willing buyers are revealing themselves and moving into discovery.
This is what I mean when I say that the event that you invite site visitors to is critical and it has to be adapted to the size of audience you have. You just can’t come out with a webinar if you know no one will show up, but all of your one to one events can’t be pitches either. You have to match the level of intent with the size of the audience and the substance of the event itself.
And if you turn low intent meetings into recorded sessions that you turn into future content, you have no disadvantage to meeting with anyone, provided they are in your target audience.
Stop generating leads. Start generating sales.
Let’s talk about bottom of the funnel people and high intent bookings. The two most important metrics you can care about as a marketing agency are high intent bookings and revenue. One leads to the other and that’s the bottom line. If you can’t generate high intent bookings, you will lose clients. They will wait out their contract and that will be that.
Most marketing agencies want to put distance between themselves and pipeline because there isn’t very much control after the lead is passed on to the sales team. They get the lead in their CRM and then it’s up to them to follow up and close the sale. The marketing agency is also usually pretty reluctant to engage with their clients customers. I don’t really know why, to be 100% honest. I don’t know how you can be a good marketer without understanding your client’s target audience intimately and that just takes interaction. You have to talk to them and most agencies won’t do it.
But when you do talk to them and interview them and go through the process of selling them, you will gain better insight into how to market to them than any other way. Be in the CRM. Look at the pipeline. Evaluate intent and lead score.
Be in the follow up sequence. Give your clients the language and the collateral to nurture those bottom of the funnel leads. Help them facilitate automation and personalization of messaging so that when they deliver the event that they hit it out of the park.
For some of you reading, you may not want to touch the sales processes. But more and more companies are recognizing the need and advantage of bringing marketing and sales together under the hood of revenue. When we look at it like this, we can see the whole process as being about revenue generating and sales generating and if your work is going to be judged by high intent bookings and revenue, then you actually need to have at least a little bit of influence over the key factor that gets the revenue which is the sale.
Torlando Hakes, is the author of the book Sprint and host of such podcasts as The CTA Podcast, The PaintED Show, and No Trade Secrets. Torlando is open to meeting new friends and building a community of like-minded peers. You can jump on his calendar for a 1–1 anytime for advice, to share networks, for podcast interviews, and for help getting more bookings.
This article is syndicated from the Periodic Knowledge Base, which is a repository of articles and videos created for Marketing Agencies who are certified Periodic Agency Partners. As Agency Partners, they have a license to sell the Periodic white label booking platform to their clients helping them increase conversions through their website. Advanced features such as complex booking, dynamic forms, and automated email/text messages add to their agency tech stack and help them set themselves apart from other agencies and get better results for their clients.
Check out the Periodic Agency Partner Program at Periodic.is to set yourself apart from the competition, book more appointments for your clients, and retain them for longer.
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