How To Be Found
Traffic is the lifeblood of any business.
Whether it’s online traffic or traffic through the door of a store, enough people need to see what you have to offer.
You could reach out to people by cold calling, direct messaging, or emailing them and risk being labelled as spam.
Or you could get them to find you and contact you.
In all our years working online, we’ve only found three ways to be found online.
As you go through the three options, think about how applicable they are to your business and whether you should have a strategy for each one.
1. Someone searches for you or your product by name
This is the smallest volume, but the highest quality.
If someone searches for your name, your business name, or your product, will they find you?
If they find you, there is a good chance that they will become a customer if you don’t mess things up.
2. Someone searches for a solution
Everybody who buys something has a problem to solve.
Whether it’s for pizza on a Friday night, a restaurant for dinner, or cricket equipment.
Google has become a multi-billion dollar company off the back of people searching for solutions.
So, if you can rank high in Google search results, you have a good chance of getting the attention of the right people.
The problem is that there can only be one top spot.
And it probably won’t be you for profitable search terms, despite what the Search Engine Optimisation Experts tell you.
The top spots are already taken, mostly by big brands.
3. Someone is consuming content and comes across your business
This could be while scrolling through their social media feeds, reading an article or watching a video.
This is the biggest volume of people.
Facebook alone has three billion active people monthly.
The problems with this are the same as traditional mass media, with the few having millions of followers and the long tail dwindling to almost zero.
But there is an option that doesn’t rely on millions of fans.
Organic Versus Paid Traffic
Whether targeting the search engines or social media, most businesses rely on organic traffic as it’s free.
But this is just as an illusion.
We’ve already established that your content probably won’t go viral.
So you have to produce a lot of great quality content to get traction.
It can be done, which we have shown.
But it costs a lot of time and effort, which may be too high a price to pay.
But, if we paid for traffic we can have the three things we want in our businesses:
- Less Risk
- More Control
- Faster Results
1. Less Risk
Business is inherently risky.
This risk is measured in money, time and effort.
We need to reduce this risk to acceptable levels.
Only you can determine what those levels are for you.
But the guiding principle is less money, time and effort.
Often, spending money is the least risky, even though it may not feel that way.
Money can be replenished, time and effort not.
2. More Control
We want control over the results we get. Simply put, we want to be in the driver’s seat.
Let’s look at two examples – one with less control and one with more control.
Example 1:
Imagine your business being solely dependent on word of mouth, or someone discovering you via a Google search.
Some weeks you are overloaded with prospects and customers.
And other weeks you are wondering where your next customer will come from.
There are no levers to pull if you want more customers.
You are subject to whatever happens on the day.
This is a recipe for disappointment and disaster, yet so many small and medium-sized businesses rely on word of mouth, or other methods they have no control of.
Example 2:
Compare this to a business that pays for traffic and has a positive return on investment.
Every month, the money that they make is more than the money that they put into their traffic sources.
Or compare this to a business that has a ton of loyal customers that they constantly nurture and treat well so that they get repeat business.
Or you have affiliate relationships that constantly send customers your way.
You get the idea.
More control is better.
As businesses, we want to be able to affect the outcomes in our businesses.
As humans, we want to do the same.
Imagine knowing that next month will be better than this month.
Imagine knowing that you could thrive month after month, year after year.
What does that feel like?
3. Faster Results
We all agree that the faster we get to the money, the better.
But, in our zeal, we often make a fundamental marketing mistake.
Let’s consider some examples to illustrate the point.
Scenario 1:
We have an idea for a new product.
We spend money, time and effort creating the product.
If it’s a physical product, it may require research, licensing and setting up a manufacturing process.
Then we have to set up the logistics of getting the product into the customer’s hands, whether it be via an online store, a physical store, or keeping stock in our garage and delivering it in person, or via courier, when an order is received.
All our money goes into creating, packaging, housing and distributing the product.
All this gets done without really knowing whether people would want it.
All we have is the belief that our product will sell like hotcakes.
Only then, do we think about marketing our product.
We contact everyone we know, and start getting some sales.
We are super excited! It’s going to be a great success!
But soon, word of mouth no longer brings in new business.
We sit with lots of inventory and start getting a bit desperate.
What if we try online marketing?
We set up a website, a Facebook and an Instagram Page, and started promoting our product.
But, traction is very slow.
So we add some special offers or discounts.
Still no traction.
So we shout louder and more often.
Still no traction.
As a last resort, we buy some Ads.
But we are still not getting sales.
Maybe TikTok, or YouTube will work…
And on and on it goes…
Now, let’s consider scenario 2.
We have the same idea for a product.
We have no audience and no infrastructure.
However, before we create our product, we do the work to understand who may be interested in our product, and why they may be interested.
Then we start building and interacting with that audience, assessing their interest along the way.
How responsive are they to our questions?
Are they willing to connect with us?
What language do they use to describe their problems, their needs and their desires?
What matters most to them?
We will know within days, or weeks, whether that audience is a match for our product.
If the audience doesn’t match, we can tweak our offer.
We can see progress in real-time as we are constantly adjusting our offer based on real interactions, not wishful thinking, which ends up just being hopes and dreams.
Only when we feel that our audience and potential offer are a good match, and our audience is large enough (a few hundred, not millions), do we try to sell.
We could even sell a product that doesn’t exist yet. There are many ways to do this. I will leave that to your imagination for now.
We can even tell our audience what we plan to create and get their feedback.
Co-creating our product will enable us to create a product that suits their needs.
Our first customers can actually pay us to create the product.
And once the product is created, we know there is an audience for it.
And we’ll have social proof and results from our initial customers.
See the difference?
With digital products, training, courses, consulting, or any other service, it’s even easier to do.
Scenario 2 is fast and it reduces the risk.
We get feedback early and react to that feedback every step of the way – before we’ve invested lots of money, time and effort in something that may not work.
Life is too short to create something nobody wants!
These are just two ways to optimise for less risk, more control and faster results.
There are many more ways to do this with a little imagination.
Traffic That You Own
It would be remiss of me not to include traffic that you own as an option, as this is the best traffic of all.
We encourage every business to own a list of prospects and customers who have given them permission to communicate with them directly.
This can be via email, sms, WhatsApp, or any other direct messaging channel.
It cost virtually nothing to reach this audience.
And if you do things right, you can build a relationship with them that lasts a lifetime.
They become your best customers as they buy many times over a long period and they refer others.
To do this, you need a modern digital marketing system that takes the South African landscape into consideration.