Run a business?  You’re probably familiar with these sorts of headlines, strewn all over your feed of choice:

“Cold traffic into high-paying clients”

“Email templates built to convert”

“Get 100+ new customers every week, guaranteed”

“Proven system to generate ready-to-buy leads”

I’m sure you’ll agree that they all sound appealing, but there is one teensy little problem:

Most of them are – at best – misleading, suggesting that there’s some sort of universal alchemy that can be tapped into and used to generate leads and make sales at will in any industry. 

At worst, they’re downright lies.

Because here’s the truth: unless you sell something that’s low cost, trivial or transient, getting people who don’t know who you are to buy quickly is very difficult to achieve.

And there are at least two reasons why:

#1 Most of your market aren’t ‘in the market’.

The proportion of people within your market who are actively looking for your solution (or at least open to buying) obviously depends on what you sell, and who you sell it to. 

Nevertheless, the world wide web suggests that on average, only 3% of any given market is “in the market” at a specific time.

The other 97% are either disinterested, or at an earlier stage in the customer journey, requiring more nurture, more touches and more cajoling to get to the point where they’re ready to transact.

And on that note…

#2 The people who ARE in the market are unlikely to buy from a business they’ve only just come across.

Again, it depends what you sell – most of us will happily pop into any old corner shop for a pint of milk, but for purchases of note, prospects are likely to go through a longer process before deciding to buy.

It was Google that coined the 7-11-4 formula, which suggests that prospects need 7 hours of interaction and 11 touchpoints in 4 different locations with a brand before buying, and while those precise figures clearly aren’t gospel for every business, it does illustrate the point.

And if you need a real-life example, you’ll almost certainly find it in your own life, and the way you buy things.  Sure, there are impulsive buyers in every market, but most of us follow the Google blueprint, at least to some extent.

What’s my point?  Here are three for now:

POINT #1 – Many, many businesses are disappointed by the results they get from the marketing they try, and believe that ‘if only’ their marketing was better, they’d get better and faster results.  This belief is exacerbated by the multitude of hypey ads promising the marketing equivalent of alchemy.

POINT #2 – While improving the quality and direction of your marketing should probably be on your list, the two most underrated elements of successful marketing activity are persistence and patience. 

The best email campaign or Facebook Ad in the world isn’t going to change the fundamental way that people buy stuff, and bearing this in mind will help you create a more effective long-term strategy.

POINT #3 – If you’re serious about successfully marketing your business (and not falling foul of the get-rich-quick gurus) being realistic about the way your market buys is the fundamental first step.

If you know that most of your market aren’t looking for your solution AND that the ones that are looking still require a certain level of interaction with your business before buying, that allows you to be much more conscious about the marketing you do and why you do it.

(It also promotes a healthy level of wariness of anyone who promises you something that seems too good to be true and/or doesn’t align with your understanding and experience of your market.)

Too few businesses really think through the process their prospects go through on the way to becoming a customer, and ensure that their marketing is designed to cater for them throughout that process – doing this properly will take serious time, effort and application, but it’ll pay dividends on the backend.

Want some help to get started? Book a free Business Growth Call below:

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During your Business Growth Call, we’ll:

• Take a look at the marketing you’re doing, and give you our two cents on how to improve it
• Tell you what we’d be doing if we were in your shoes
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