Episode 4
Why Is SEO A Waste Of Resources When Your Current Need Is To Sell More?
At the sell phase of the Pro Growthmap, focus on getting more of your ideal customers in the door, and save SEO for later. Here is why.
At the sell phase of the Pro Growthmap, focus on getting more of your ideal customers in the door, and save SEO for later. Here is why.
The sell phase is the second component of our Pro growthmap, with say, between -$100k – $300k in sales depending on your type of business.
And your goal at this phase will be to get more of your ideal customers in the door.
So what’s the problem?
Your cash flows are still pretty lumpy and frankly, so is your service delivery which may be consistently between 3½ and 4½ out of 5-star service, at this moment, and that’s okay.
But you need more people in the door to be able to make payroll and continue to grow your business.
Bringing us to why SEO is a terrible idea at The Sell Phase of The Pro Growthmap
Unless you are an affiliate marketer, or you’re maybe doing e-commerce, SEO is probably not going to be the right fit for you right now.
Why?
SEO is a great strategy for driving down the long-term cost of customer acquisition or customer attraction, but it takes a lot of time and money that you don’t have now to do it well.
What should you do if your business is at this stage?
Direct Response Marketing or Advertising
The goal at the sell phase of the Pro Growthmap is to figure out how to get a predictable sales process and get comfortable with execution.
So, direct response advertising, either online or offline is going to be your best bet for getting to the next stage and give you a quick payday too.
How does it work?
It’s all about creating sales collateral or advertising collateral designed to get someone to take action right away. Now there are a lot of different tactics you can try, depending on the industry.
But first, figure out your attractive message, and which channels to deliver it through.
Channels are ways to access customers, for instance, DoorDash, GrubHub, pay-per-click advertising, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and Bing.
Channels bridge the gap between you and the customer and they’re your shortest path to the money and the customer as well since they will be directly searching for you through these channels, as opposed to SEO.
Aren’t channels too costly though?
Think of them for what they are, an advertising expense, and NO, they will not be costly.
How?
Quickly do the next thing, which is to get somebody off of that channel, and into your email list, or get them off of that channel and into one of your properties.
Which could be your website, your store, your restaurant, or whatever it is.
And then it’ll be like, you just paid okay money for a really hot lead or better yet for a customer, right?
Key takeaway notes about the sales phase of the Pro growthmap
By the time you get to this second phase of the Pro growthmap, you should have already figured out who your ideal customers are because that is something you do in the first phase.
At this point in your business, you’re trying to figure out which channels and messaging resonate most so that way you’re able to find at least one and hopefully maybe two predictable reliable sales.
It’s also at the sell phase that you start to get a little bit more sophisticated. Take your simple brochure website, and start to add what are called landing pages on the back end, that are optimized for getting that ideal customer into your email list, giving away a resource or a discount, etc, as an incentive.
So you need to be comfortable paying a little bit of a premium to attract the customer, but you need to be smart about it too.
Then bring that customer into a property that you own, whether that’s your mailing list or your store, or your restaurant, or whatever it is, and then make sure that you capture that information in your emailing list regardless of whether you bring them into the store or not.
Why?
Because having that information will let you continue to market directly to those customers.
At this point, you can also now predict what it’s going to cost you to attract a new customer, and at the same time, you’ll be getting paid for doing it.
Is this going to be the most profitable traffic you’re going to get?
No, because at this stage, your goal is not necessarily to maximize the profit. Your goal is to build the foundation for a sustainable business and you need cash and customers to do that.
And over time, you can start to maximize profit, but profit maximization comes with practice, routine, and systematization.
The ultimate way to practice maximization of profit is to build systems, right? But at this stage, you don’t have systems. This brings us to the third phase of our Pro growthmap.
