By Shalize Nicholas, Founder & Creative Director, Marketing Mill Studios
Small businesses are often told they need more marketing: more social media, more website traffic, more SEO, more content and more leads.
Sometimes that is true. But sometimes the problem is not that too few people are finding the business. It is that potential customers are getting lost somewhere between finding you and actually buying from you.
Before spending more money attracting new people, it is worth looking at what happens to the people who are already showing an interest. Here are five places I regularly see enquiries disappear.
1. Can people easily take the next step?
A customer lands on your website, finds you through Google or sees something you have posted on social media. They are interested. What do you want them to do next?
It sounds obvious, but this is one of the easiest places to lose someone. The phone number is hard to find. The contact form asks for too much. The button says something vague. A social profile sends people to a homepage where they have to work out where to go next.
People are busy, distracted and often looking at several businesses at once. If they have to hunt for the next step, some of them simply will not take it.
Look at your business through the eyes of somebody who has never seen it before. Can they quickly understand what you do, whether it is relevant to them and how to contact you?
You do not need dozens of calls to action. You need a clear next step that makes sense.
2. What happens when somebody actually enquires?
An enquiry coming in is not the end of the marketing journey. It is the point where the business has to pick it up.
Where do your enquiries arrive? Email? Instagram? Facebook? A website form? WhatsApp? Telephone calls? If they are coming into several different places, who is responsible for checking them?
A potential customer can go from interested to elsewhere surprisingly quickly if they do not hear back, particularly when they are asking several businesses for the same thing.
That does not mean you have to answer every message instantly. It means having a simple process so enquiries are seen, acknowledged and moved to the right next step.
Even a short reply saying you have received the message and will come back to them properly can make a difference.
3. What happens after you’ve sent the quote?
You’ve spoken to someone, worked out the job, spent time putting together the quote and sent it over.
Then you hear nothing.
Do you go back and talk to them?
It’s easy to think they’ve decided not to go ahead, particularly when you’re busy and another job has already taken your attention.
But we all do it. We open an email when we’re in the middle of something, think we’ll reply later and then forget.
The person you’ve quoted might be waiting for payday. They might need to talk to their partner. They might be comparing a couple of options. Or your email might simply be sitting halfway down their inbox.
Following up doesn’t need to be a big sales exercise.
A quick, friendly message asking whether they’ve had a chance to look at the quote and whether they have any questions can reopen that conversation.
You can also set things up so you’re reminded to do it.
You shouldn’t have to remember that Sarah wanted a garden quote two weeks ago while you’re trying to remember everything else involved in running the business.
4. Are you talking to the customers you already have?
We spend so much time thinking about finding the next customer that it’s easy to forget about the people who already know us.
I saw how much difference this could make when I was working with a previous ecommerce furniture business.
I was managing the CRM and we were sending four email campaigns every week. At the time, one email campaign was bringing in around £7,000 in revenue.
We could have looked at that and decided to send more emails.
We didn’t.
Instead, we looked at what customers were actually doing.
What were they interested in? What were they clicking on? Which products were getting a response? Where were we taking people after they clicked? What happened when they got to the website? Were we making it easy enough for them to buy?
We kept looking at what worked, what didn’t and what customers were telling us through their behaviour. We changed the campaigns around what we were learning.
Six months later, an individual email campaign was bringing in more than £20,000 in revenue.
And we were still sending four emails a week.
Obviously, those numbers are going to be very different for a small local business, but the thinking behind it is exactly the same.
If you’re a gardener, when did you last talk to the customers you’ve already worked for? They might need seasonal work, or have another part of the garden they’ve been thinking about.
If you’re a carpenter, someone you made a dining table for might now be thinking about fitted storage.
If you have a shop, there will be people who’ve bought from you before who would genuinely like to hear that you’ve got something new in that you think they’ll love.
You don’t need thousands of names on an email list to start looking after the people who already know your business.
5. Do you know which bit of your marketing is actually bringing you work?
This is where businesses can end up spending money on lots of different things without really knowing which ones are helping.
You might be paying for SEO. You’re posting on Instagram. You’ve got a website. Perhaps you’ve got an email list somewhere. You’re getting enquiries from Google and recommendations as well.
But which of those enquiries actually become good customers?
If twenty people get in touch this month, do you know where they came from?
If lots of people are finding you on Google but hardly anybody gets in touch once they reach the website, I’d want to know why before spending more money getting even more people onto it.
If customers keep asking you the same question before they’ll buy something, I’d want to know whether we could answer that question earlier.
You don’t need to track absolutely everything.
You just need enough information to start seeing what’s working and where people are disappearing.
Because those are all marketing problems, but they don’t all need the same marketing solution.
Before you spend more money on marketing
Go back and look at your last ten enquiries.
You don’t need a complicated report. Just have a look at what actually happened.
How did they find you? What did they want? How quickly did you get back to them? Did you send a quote? Did you talk to them again afterwards? Which ones became customers?
Then look at the ones that didn’t.
Do you know what happened to them?
You might find that you’re getting plenty of enquiries but some are being missed. You might be sending lots of quotes and not following them up. Your website might be getting visitors who aren’t taking the next step.
Or you could have a list of customers you’ve spent years building and haven’t spoken to for a very long time.
Once you can see where the problem is, you can decide what you actually need.
That might be SEO. It might be email marketing, a better website, a CRM or simply a better way of following up enquiries.
You might even discover that you don’t need more people finding you at the moment.
You need to do more with the people who are already there.
Where are you losing your next customer?
At Marketing Mill Studios, we work with different types of businesses, from independent shops and ecommerce brands to carpenters, gardeners and other service businesses.
We don’t start by assuming you need a particular type of marketing. We look at what’s happening now, how people are finding you, what happens when they get in touch and how you’re keeping in contact with the people who’ve already bought from you.
Then we can see where the gaps are and what is actually worth fixing.
If people are finding your business, asking for quotes, visiting your website or showing interest but you’re not sure how much of that is turning into work, come and talk to us.
Sometimes you don’t need more marketing. You just need the marketing you’ve already got to work harder.
