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Move prospects to preference—a best practice for conversion

Focus your limited sales and marketing resources on the primary objective

Do you know where your next customer will come from? By understanding what stage in the buying process your audience occupies at any given time you can convert more of them to customers more efficiently. This is market segmentation 101. A primer for any industrial business offering niche products and services including metal working and prep; surface treatment and coatings; and chemical specialties. I bring this to you precisely because you have few dollars to spend on marketing. But ignoring these simple concepts sets you up for the perception of commodity and the pricing that goes along with it.

Consider your absolute total potential audiences then divide (segment) it into groups measured by how close (or how far) they are from doing business with you. Now begin the narrowing process by not concerning yourself with increasing the awareness group.

Everyone begins at “unawareness” even if it’s for a brief moment. And every single potential prospect must traverse the same path, through each stage before they will ever be sending you a purchase order. But focus limited resources and target the ones within reach and you will begin to raise your marketing ROI. Print the graphic below, discuss it with your staff and use it to guide your brand, marketing, sales and CRM efforts for growth and success.

Here’s the thing though, as much as this idea simplifies your market strategy, there are still no shortcuts to building preference and engagement (the action level). It’s like football, the end zone gets harder to attain as you move closer to the goal. Of course the best strategy is to keep focused on the objective. Your primary objective is to move prospects to prefer your stuff, to the competitions—as swiftly as you can. So work on creating preference, not awareness. When you beat commoditization and build preference for your stuff, awareness will fall in and engagement will be just a step away. There’s more: When you sustain preference with your customers and prospects they will be naturally predisposed to choose “You” the next time they have an order. And this same conviction for your stuff will also ward off nearly all competitive overtures aimed at them (as long as they perceive it to be for the same products or services—a topic worthy of a Bastard post coming soon).

In a snapshot of each segment, here’s what you need to grasp:

Unawareness Group—by far the largest group, where everybody inherently starts—even if it is for a brief time. But it is too easy to waste marketing dollars attempting to locate valid prospects.

Awareness Group—a significantly smaller, more manageable group. And in a business environment, when prospects become aware of you they usually understand your potential Relevance to their business. The downside is that it requires more sophisticated marketing segmentation efforts to efficiently target likely prospects.

Relevance Group—these guys know why you exist and you will probably remain on their radar. They comprehend (most of the time they just guess) what you offer. The challenge here is that in an increasingly competitive marketplace another company’s innovation or even the perception of innovation can render your product a commodity and therefore irrelevant. Move back one space to mere Awareness.

Adoption Group—if you’re driving a Ford you’ve traveled the above course and arrived at a decision to at least try one. You’re buying what they’re selling for the moment anyway. You may even have past customers that live here (in this segment group) so you have to do what any successful car company had to learn the hard way. Understand that the work has only begun to truly convert these customers to the loyalty reserved for preference.

Preference—not so long ago this stage was believed to be the holy grail of marketing achievement, even though it also requires much work to sustain the relationship that came before the mindset. A much tougher level to hang onto, customers can move back to adoption by experiencing a mere typo on an invoice from you.

Action—and, not so long ago, this stage was thought of as a transactional stage. In other words, customers that preferred your stuff would move into this segment only for the duration of the sale. And then happily move back to the Preference group until they had another order. These days competition is driving continuous engagement with their customers. No one likes to be a number and feel like they have just been transacted. Don’t you expect more? Soon, Engagement will replace Action on the preference scale (the graphic).

I hope you gained some insight and will at least have more appreciation for your customers—and the long trip they’ve taken to get to your door. Let me know about your own experiences. I will be happy to answer specific questions.

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