You can work hard to convince prospects that you have the right solution to meet their needs. But you can work smarter by nurturing demand for your service instead.
Nurturing demand requires a commitment on your end to developing and, more importantly, maintaining high end content. It requires you to step up and become a thought leader in your industry. And it means avoiding some of the most common mistakes that drive prospects away and reduce demand for your service.
Nurturing Demand with Quality Content
The basic concept of supply and demand are at work in any market. Nurturing demand for your product starts by assessing the needs of your prospects to determine what you can supply to them. At the awareness stage of your sales funnel, you meet a prospect’s demands by supplying content.
Content takes many forms. You can supply content through:
- A company blog;
- Downloadable ebooks or white papers;
- Guest articles in trade magazines and websites;
- Videos or webinars;
- And social media content.
Not all content is created equal though. Your content should provide something of value, meeting a need or proposing a solution to prospects based on what your research tells you they need. You must also update and maintain content to keep up with trends, provide new perspectives and demonstrate to prospects your commitment to finding fresh, new ideas to solve problems.
Become a Thought Leader
In some ways, the world of marketing mirrors the politics of high school. We all just want to hang out with the cool kids. In the business world, we still want to hang out with the cool kids, now defined as thought leaders in an industry.
When you become a thought leader, you become the cool kid everyone turns to for advice, to find out about upcoming trends and to hear the latest news. You start by staying on top of the happenings in your industry and related industries. Comment on trends and news in your content, making connections between trends and actions companies can take to make the most of those trends.
By associating your brand with the latest trends, you generate demand for your leadership and ultimately, your services.
Avoiding Pitfalls
Sometimes nurturing demand simply requires learning from the mistakes of others. Most of these mistakes fall into the category of cutting off your nose to spite your face. Where you could create demand, simple mistakes stop the process before it can even begin.
- Go mobile. It’s the wave of the future that has already crested and yet a recent analysis from vSplash found 94 percent of small business websites do not render on mobile devices. Make the mobile change and differentiate yourself from your competitor.
- Use social media and provide links to your social media channels on your home page. This makes it easy for customers to engage with you and become part of your community.
- Include your contact information. Nothing is more frustrating to a potential client than having to hunt for contact information. In fact, lacking contact information, a prospect will likely move on to your competitor. Make an email link clear and visible on your website along with a local or toll-free phone number.
- Include an information request form on your website to collect prospect information. And then do something with the info you get. Connect it to a CRM or email system and reach out to those prospects who have shown an interest in you and your services.
- If you build keywords into your site, they will come. Use SEO to your advantage and include keyword information in your website. Seems logical, and yet more than half of small business websites fail to do so.
Work smarter by nurturing demand for your products and services through content, leadership and simple solutions.
