In this post – 5 Steps to Restart, Recharge and Revive Your Marketing Right Now! – I introduced an aggressive initiative to help any business owner struggling to stay on plan with their marketing for the year. The idea is to take the midpoint of the year and get a fresh restart.

In post #4 of 5, I introduced –  How to Perfect Your Lead Generation Follow-up

Today we tackle Step #5 – How to Turn Leads Into Customers with an Amazing Customer Experience

Why Customer Experience (CX) is in everything

So many people are focused on the changes in marketing and all the new things we have to master and pay attention to.

The fact is the most significant driver of change today isn’t the way marketing is changing, it’s the way buying is changing.

If the customer is indeed now in charge of their buying journey, and I believe this is true, then the most important marketing element still left in our control is the customer experience (Cx) – the way in which prospects and customers experience every aspect of our business.

May I be as bold as to suggest that Customer Experience is everything today.

Now, I realize if I’m going to suggest something so far reaching and universal I’m also going to have to help you expand your vision of what customer service is.

See, for me, the customer is experiencing your business long before you are even aware of their need or interest. The question is, have you considered the impact of every marketing decision in this light?

Even Google rewards you

Many people ask me how to get better rankings in Google, and while I may give more technical answers at times, the simple answer is to create a better customer experience.

Google’s objective, when it comes to search is and always has been to reward businesses that create the best, most relevant, and useful content and make it easy for people to find and consume that content. The only thing that’s changed is Google’s ability to understand what content does just that.

With the introduction of the Knowledge Graph, they’ve taken a pretty big leap towards achieving this objective. (Of course, I know their real objective is to get you and keep you in search results so that you might eventually click on an ad.)

So, producing a better experience with your content is customer experience, but so is paying attention to LSI keywords and writing better meta descriptions. (All of which leads to better search rankings and higher click through in the SERPs)

Heck, you can, and I do make the case, that backlinks are CX. If you think about it, the internal links you create should be focused on creating a better reading experience, not a better link structure. The external resources you link to should be focused on creating a better reading experience, and the backlinks you acquire should come from sites that demonstrate a more valuable customer experience rather than as a way to build domain authority – and Google now rewards for all of this

Guide the journey

It’s time to let go of the notion that your website is simply a tool to inform potential buyers on the products and services you offer – or worse a place to get your phone number.

Your website today is the hub or at the very least, the jumping in point of the customer journey. The job of your website is to lead and guide prospects into an ever deepening journey of awareness, trust, knowledge, insight and eventually conversion.

So your website has to accomplish a great deal, but it’s also one very big piece of the customer experience.

Today, the number one thing a prospect wants from your website is a frictionless path to the information or action they’ve come their to find and take.

Website design should be renamed customer experience design and anyone calling themselves a web designer should possess certifications in SEO and content. (Self-serving comment alert: That’s why it makes so much sense to find and hire a marketing consultant who preaches strategy before tactics.)

Floss with your customers

Okay, so far I’ve been focused on the online elements of the customer experience, but in the end, many businesses make or break their customer relationships through a combination of online and offline touchpoints.

• Think about the hair salon, here’s how this might go.
• I’m looking for a new stylist
• I search and find several nearby
• I click around and like the photos and vibe of one
• Great I can schedule online
• I get calendar invite and reminder day of
• I arrive and am offered beverage (a little early for a beer, but okay!)
• Stylist asks a few questions and notes them in iPad
• Haircut proceeds
• I’m shown a few hair care products right for me
• I’m given a “new customer kit” with coupons and samples
• Upon paying they offer to set up next appointment
• Stylist escorts me to the door and gives me referral and review card
• About three weeks later I get my next appointment reminder

Sounds like a pretty good experience right? Well, it was, and it was obvious someone gave it plenty of thought.

Oh, I almost forget – what’s with the floss heading?

I was working with a group of orthodontists, and I asked them to tell me the most important thing their patients must do to get a great result with their braces – they all said they must floss!

The follow-up question then was – what stops your patients from getting a great result – and the obvious – “they hate to floss.”

So I started urging them and now anyone who will listen to choose a customer about once a quarter and make them a customer experience guinea pig of sorts. Give them an awesome deal of some special treatment in return for their feedback on every element of your business.

• Watch them visit your website
• Ask them to find or do something specific
• Have them keep a journal and respond to every email
• Walk them through the process of becoming a customer in slow motion
• Run everything you do in the name of marketing by them

The first 90

The most tenuous point of any relationship is the beginning. See, when someone becomes a customer, the relationship immediately changes. Before everything was sweet and promising but now they’ve exchanged money for something in return, and this is when things can start downhill.

You must look at your customer’s first 90 days as your customer as a trial period where your entire goal is to construct the type of experience that can only turn them into a raving fan. (90 is an arbitrary number, but you get it.)

It’s not that hard because few do it, but it certainly takes thought and commitment to processes and a culture of accountability.

• What happens when they say yes?
• How are they oriented?
• What do they need to know?
• How can you over communicate?
• How will you surprise them?
• What do all your packages look like? (a package can be physical or conceptual)
• How will you communicate progress or results?
• How will you deliver bad news?

Continuous optimization

Creating a great experience is more of a guess than science – but what it does have in common with science is you need to build your experience as an experiment, with a hypothesis, and a plan to test and revise based on results.

A great customer experience comes from a commitment to continuously optimizing every element of the journey – this takes paying close attention, measuring, asking for feedback and applying what you see and hear – but more than anything else this takes care or maybe caring.

Organizations that deliver the best customer experience do so because they care about helping the people they serve. (I don’t know yet how to teach that one)

Turn it to 11

There’s a scene from a Rob Reiner’s classic mockumentary This is Spinal Tap in which guitarist Nigel explains his amp goes up to 11 so they have the little extra when they need it

That’s how I would like you to think about the entire process and journey we’ve gone on these last five days – ReStart Your Marketing and let’s turn it up to 11.

In this post – 5 Steps to Restart, Recharge and Revive Your Marketing Right Now! – I introduced an aggressive initiative to help any business owner struggling to stay on plan with their marketing for the year. The idea is to take the midpoint of the year and get a fresh restart.

In post #3 of 5, I introduced – How to Use Content to Generate a Steady Flow of Leads

Today we tackle Step #4 – How to Perfect Your Lead Generation Follow-up

The current infatuation of the internet marketing set is complex automated lead funnels. Go on Facebook, and you’ll likely be hit with ads offering to show you how to make it rain thousands of leads on autopilot.

While I’m not opposed to teaching lead generation techniques, I do think there is an issue with just thinking about the lead funnel as a standalone. After all, you don’t just want leads—you want new and returning customers on a consistent basis.

What you need is a client generation system.

I work with a lot of independent marketing consultants and service professionals, and most of them simply want to work with about ten of the right clients at any given time.

So let’s do some math. Let’s say you have four clients right now, and you would like to get six more. The typical consultant acquires new client by attracting a lead that wants to meet and learn about how you might help them. Let’s say one in four of those meetings turns into a client. (That’s terribly low for the approach we teach, but I’ll use it be conservative.)

With the math above it will take you 24 sales meetings to get the additional six clients needed to fill your practice and meet your revenue objectives. So, in building a lead generation and conversion system, there are two primary questions.

What does it take to get a consistent flow of appointments and how can you convert more appointments to clients. Build a system that does that, and you won’t need to worry about all of the lever pulling elements and moving parts in most lead funnels today.

If you need six clients, build a system that gets you in front of 10-12 qualified prospects, and you’ll land six clients in a matter of weeks, it’s that simple.

Below you’ll find the ten steps involved in creating a customer generation system for your consulting business.

Set a goal for meetings

The very first step is to determine your revenue goal for the year and go backward to determine how many clients you need to reach that goal. Then break it down to determine how many meetings, proposals, and pitches you need to make to hit that goal.

Example:

Goal – $250,000 in revenue in 12 months means that if you sell a $500, $3000, or $5,000 service, you will need either 42, 7, or 4 clients respectively to reach that goal.

$500               $3000                        $5000

X 42 clients    X 7 clients                  X 4

X 12 months X 12 month                X 12 months

From this point, you simply need to factor how many appointments it will take to land one new client, and you’ll have your primary metric – X meeting per month. (You may not know how many meetings, but it’s a number you need to watch and reduce as much as possible – lowering this number is the key to success.)

Narrowly define your ideal client

Back on day one of this little restart adventure I asked you to describe your ideal client.

Of course, it’s my hope that you have a pretty good idea of who makes an ideal client for your business but if not keep this in mind. At first target the group you can help the most, the fastest. The reason I advise focusing on this group is that you’ll probably be able to demonstrate how you can help them easily and by getting quick results, build some raving fans.

For example, as a marketing consultant, I can use a set of tools that can show me how badly a business needs marketing help. It’s a matter of auditing their online presence and matching it with a few other bits of data such as industry and even local reputation or groups they might belong to.

Create your workhorse piece of content

Remember back on day three we talked about producing one piece of content per month, but make it awesome.

Now it’s time to create a valuable piece of content that will resonate with your target audience. Most likely this will come out in the form of a blog post.

You may have some ideas about the kind of content that will attract your target audience if you want to make sure this one piece of content is the workhorse you need for your system, spend some time researching the questions and problems your target audience experiences the most.

You can start with a tool such as keywordtool.io to identify the most frequently asked questions around a subject. Then move to a forum search by typing forum+your keyword topic (this can be an industry, i.e., forum+chiropractor), and you’ll find forums where your target audience hangs out to ask questions and get advice. The data from both of these sources may prove invaluable as you search for hot topics for your blog post.

Finally, when you think you have a couple of solid ideas, take your topics to BuzzSumo, and you’ll discover a list of the most shared content for each theme. You can often use this information to determine a very hot topic and ideas for how you could create an even hotter post on the topic.

Build or buy a list of ideal clients

Once you know who you want to target you can usually buy or rent a list based on demographics and location if you don’t already have a list you’ve collected. You could also append this list with some other elements such as members of an association or community group if want to refine it further. If properly targeted this list doesn’t have to be very large either.

Use this list to build a custom Facebook audience and further create an expanded lookalike audience to increase the number of potential targeted prospects.

Advertise the content and upgrade

Now that you have an audience ready to target you can create Facebook ads driving people to your workhorse piece of content. In fact, if you don’t even want to go to the trouble of creating ads you can simply point to your blog post in a status update and “boost” your post to the custom or lookalike audience you created.

This means the post will show in your timeline and show up as sponsored post in the timelines of those you’ve targeted. It’s standard practice for any content, but make sure your post has a large image that pertains to the topic. This will help it stand out.

The key to making this kind of promotion work as the first step in customer generation is to add what is called a “content upgrade” to the post. (Also covered in great detail on day 3.)

A content upgrade is simply an offer for related, but perhaps a different form of, content made inside the blog post that entices those that visit to exchange an email address to receive the upgraded version of the content as well.

The reason this is such an effective form of list building is that the person responded to your ad in the first place because the specific topic appealed to them. Once they visited and found the content was solid, they are much more inclined to trust you to deliver something even greater.

Your content upgrade can be in the form of a checklist, ebook, or even a video. As you can see this post has a form of content upgrade offer above, but in this case, I’m not asking for any sign-up. Your content upgrade should come with an ask for an email address so that you can respond with more information.

We use the Thrive Leads plugin to create all of our content upgrade and subscriber boxes in our content.

Offer value to those who respond

Once someone responds to your content upgrade offer, simply reach out and offer to provide a valuable service for no charge as a way to demonstrate how great it might be to work with you.

For example, as a marketing consultant, I might use a few tools to run an audit on their online presence and quickly show them a few glaring weaknesses or places where a competitor has apparently invested and is benefitting.

I could even spin up a nice looking report and offer to simply mail this to them with a further offer to sit down with them and go over a plan of action for improving their current marketing situation.

If you’ve targeted and educated your prospect in this manner, then you are no longer creating demand and selling your harvesting demand and teaching.

An example offer might go something like this:

“would you like me to show you why your competitors outrank you and what you can do about it?” –  I’m happy to show you free ranking factors and create a custom plan for you – no cost or obligation.”

Qualify and set appointments

As you deliver value and move to an appointment, you want to make sure that your prospect is fully qualified to move forward with what you are going to propose.

We use a series of “Discovery” forms that help us understand the prospect’s objectives, goals, and potential challenges. This tool not only helps us learn more so we can deliver more, but it also places a hurdle that might not be approached and scaled by someone that’s not serious.

You can do a lot of free consulting if you don’t target and educate properly.

This doesn’t mean you only help those who are ready to buy; it means you only expend the precious time and specific knowledge you have with those who need and appreciate what you have to offer.

As part of this discussion I might add something like:

“Let me warn you,  I can’t help everyone – I can only help people who already have a solid service/product, are looking to increase their online presence and are willing to work hard at getting a return on what I ask them to do.”

Do the research and deliver the value

Once you’ve established a need and qualified for fit, do the research required to over deliver on what you promised as you set the appointment.

Run your reports on their online presence, use one of the many research tools to teach them about trends in their industry, give them a full rundown on their competitors, and map out the priority initiatives you see them needing to address right now.

For me there are two very significant ways to help our clients get more business immediately – increase the number of leads they are converting and do more business with existing customers.

These are the two areas I’ll address to show them how they could get more business now as we go to work on building a steady stream of new leads and clients.

Close the deal

Now you’ve done the research, and so you assume you have all the answers and the entire plan and you’re simply going to “show up and throw up” as I’ve heard more than one sales trainer describe it.

The key to engagement in this form of lead harvesting is to help the prospect tell you in their words what’s wrong and what not fixing it costs them. Get them to dream a bit about where they want to go and what they think it might take to get there before you prescribe anything.

Once you have them engaged in their story, you can start to talk about quick wins they could they could realize if they did one or more of the things you have in your plan – remember now it’s solely based on what they are telling you.

Then you can stretch and talk about more things that could be done long term to get the solid gains over time. This near-term vs. long-term vision is important to help your prospect see the road ahead and how they get both immediate and lasting change from working with you.

If done properly you simply need to ask them if they would like to achieve these kinds of gains from working with you.

While there are a few things you need to get in place initially and few moving parts you’ll want to test and tweak as you go, a customer generating system doesn’t have to be that complex, it simply needs to be based on your overall growth needs and goals.

That’s it for day 4 of Restart – tomorrow I’ll be back to close the entire loop and talk about how to turn those new clients into raving fans by creating an awesome customer experience.

Need more tips on how to grow your business? Check out our entire Guide to Marketing Professional Services.

In this post – 5 Steps to Restart, Recharge and Revive Your Marketing Right Now! – I introduced an aggressive initiative to help any business owner struggling to stay on plan with their marketing for the year. The idea is to take the midpoint of the year and get a fresh restart.

In post #2 of 5, I introduced – 7 Must Have Elements of Every Small Business Website

Today we tackle Step #3 – How to Use Content to Generate a Steady Flow of Leads

If you are tired of hearing you must produce content to compete in the world of marketing today, I have good news and bad news.

First the bad news 

As content continues to grow in importance in the marketing mix, it must take on an elevated place in your strategy and planning. The use of high quality, education based content has become an essential ingredient in creating awareness, building trust, converting leads, serving customers and generating referrals.

I’ve said this many times over the last few years, but marketers these days have a lot in common with publishers and it’s time to embrace this reality fully – content is air

Now for the good news – you don’t need as much content as you think.

The days of pumping out thin blog posts day after day are over.

For your ReStart program, here’s all you need to do. Consider writing just six blog posts for the rest of this year, but put a month’s worth of blood, sweat, and tears into each one. Deal?

Below the complete system for turning content into leads.

Here’s the system in 3 steps

1. Create a list of just 6 of the most useful content ideas for your ideal customer
2. Build a lead generating content upgrade for each piece
3. Start promoting each piece in advertising and social media (We’ll cover this tomorrow)

That’s it – execute on this over the next six months, and you’ll start generating leads.

Step 1 – What content should you produce?

For a few years, I’ve been promoting something I call the Total Content System^TM This is simply an approach that allows you to plan, delegate, curate, create, collaborate, repurpose and get far more out of every piece of content you produce. Once your system is in place, it will build momentum with each passing month and begin to multiply in value to your organization.

This is the approach we are going to take to develop your key content.

Through your knowledge and by using keyword tools like Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker, develop a list of core content topics and assign one to each month for the next six months. (I’ve written a great deal about how to do keyword research, and you can even get an ebook on it below.)

Each theme should be a substantial topic related to your business or industry and represent an important keyword search term. It might be helpful to think about it as a book. Each month might represent a chapter in what will ultimately make up an important body of work by the end of this year.

You can also designate terms that you know you would like to rank higher for, but currently, have little or no content that leads people online or off to you.

Check out my complete guide to keyword research here

Step 2: Create Some Content Upgrades

The notion of getting someone to your website, landing page or content of some sort and enticing them to exchange their email address and other contact information to get something they are looking for is pretty much standard marketing fare these days.

The idea of bait for lead capture has certainly evolved, though. There was a time when all you needed was a lead capture form and message that asked people to sign up to capture an email, but then people got very tired of all the email this generated.

Smart marketers realized that they needed to offer something valuable in exchange – an ebook, webinar or free trial of some sort.

Even so, visitors started getting harder to convert as more and more sites featured pop-up, slide in and scrolling calls to sign up and download.

Today, and who knows how long really, marketers have tapped the seemingly insatiable hunger for useful, actionable, educational content and are employing highly targeted “content upgrades” to effectively convert visiting traffic to lead funnels like never before.

The basic idea behind a content upgrade is this – Write a really great, useful blog post and then when people show up to read it offer them an “upgrade” to the content in the form of a checklist, video, or case study relevant to the topic in exchange for  content details.

Less content, more value

Brian Dean of Backlinko told me that when he discovered the power of the content upgrade, he started producing content less frequently while focusing on creating posts so full of great content they couldn’t be ignored. He then married these posts with a content upgrade that ensured a large percentage of the traffic these posts received (sometimes from the thousands of shares and links from other sites) also turned into leads for his various SEO offerings. (Listen to Brian on a recent Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.)

In this post on Dean’s site Google’s 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List you’ll find a link to download a handy checklist of the top factors. Dean claims that the addition of this checklist increased conversion on this post by 785%. Not too shabby.

Precisely segmented visitors

Another important factor to the content upgrade is that it helps you segment visitor interest.

Very few people are interested in the generic ebook or report you wrote several years ago, but they are terribly interested in how to do that one specific thing they searched for – all the better that you now have the ability to know what they are looking for and tailor your response to that specific need.

Think about the implications for this when it comes to email marketing follow-up. You now have a much more focused idea about what your subscribers care most about and can tailor your follow-up with this knowledge and even use it to create more complete products and courses based on this interest.

Better automation and follow-up

One of the drivers of this form of lead capture is better automation technology. The days of one size fits all pop-up boxes are over. My current favorite toolset Thrive Leads offers WordPress users what amounts to a Swiss Army Knife of various form creation options. (The opt-in box above for keyword research uses this tool)

The Thrive Leads plugin allows you to create up to a dozen variations of inline forms, light boxes, welcome mats, and slide in two-step sign up forms. Every form can be executed on a single page or post, and every type of capture campaign can be tested against variations.

This type of powerful form creation coupled with lead nurturing campaigns using a tool like Infusionsoft makes the content upgrade an almost unfair competitive advantage.

Developing content upgrades

I wrote a post some time ago on something called 8 Alternatives to the Google Keyword Tool. Google smiled on this post and shows it whenever someone goes out there searching for this trending topic.

If I happened to have a course or ebook on SEO, I could easily capture highly targeted leads by adding a content upgrade to that page. (Hint: When you visit this page you’ll see my content upgrade there.)

One of the quickest ways to identify great candidates for immediate content upgrade opportunities is to look through your analytics and find your most popular content today and consider ways to personalize a content upgrade for these posts.

You can find your most popular pages in Google Analytics by going to Behavior –> Site Content –> Landing Pages

Another great ploy is to use a tool like BuzzSumo to identify some of the most shared content online based on the keyword phrases that relate to your business or ideal client.

My guess is you can easily identify a post that is getting tons of shares that you might be able to both up the game on and create a content upgrade for.

My guess is that in the example above for Backlinko Brian found a post for the top 100 factors and created the top 200 post that kicked that already great post in the rear – add a content upgrade and watch your list explode!

Landing page pioneer Lead Pages has long been a promoter of the simple content upgrade for conversion. Here’s a great post with 21 examples of content upgrades to get your mind humming. (Pay close attention to the content upgrade offer you’ll get on this page too.)

What’s a good upgrade?

You don’t have to overthink the package for a content upgrade. In many cases what you’re looking to do is simplify information not make it more complex. People want relevant snacks more than the full manual.

• One of the easiest content upgrades is a checklist based on a how to post. People like checklists and they are easy to create.
• Take a 100 factors kind of post and reveal the top 10 in detail in an upgrade. (Similar to Backlinko post above)
• Create a list of tools related to a particular type of advice – I could easily add the top 10 tools to use in creating content upgrades to this post on content upgrades
• Compile a list of links from around the web telling people how to do something based on the tool they use – set up lead nurturing in Infusionsoft, Act-On, Aweber, etc. – the best part is you don’t have to create all of the tutorials you just have to find them.
• Create or compile a swipe file – if you are telling people how to get influencers to write about their business, share exact scripts and emails they might use as an upgrade.
• Offer a screencast showing readers exactly how to do what you’ve written about in your post.
  Partner with a tool provider – write a post talking about how to do something and contact one or more provider of a tool for actually doing it and let people enter for a chance to get this tool for free.
• People love templates – if you write a post giving advice offer to share a template, completed example or form they can use to do what you’ve suggested.

I think it’s time to make content upgrades a big part of your content marketing and lead capture game plan.

Okay, there you have it – you’re ready to start generating solid leads using your content.

Here’s the system in 3 steps

1. Create a list of just 6 of the most useful content ideas for your ideal customer
2. Build a lead generating content upgrade for each piece
3. Start promoting each piece in advertising and social media (We’ll cover this tomorrow)

The remaining step – promoting each piece using advertising and social media is up next – stay tuned.

Need more tips on how to grow your business? Check out our entire Guide to Marketing Professional Services.

In this post – 5 Steps to Restart, Recharge and Revive Your Marketing Right Now! – I introduced an aggressive initiative to help any business owner struggling to stay on plan with their marketing for the year. The idea is to take the midpoint of the year and get a fresh restart.

In post #1 of 5, I introduced – Why You Must Refocus Your Message On Problems Not Solutions

Today we tackle Step #2 – Getting the “must-have elements” on your website.

The purpose of your website

Before I can talk about the necessary elements of your website specifically, I need to address the purpose of a website.

Gone are the days of your websites just being a digital brochure for your company. A website now has many jobs including:

• Get found – The website should be optimized for search to help you get found online.
• Build trust – Your website is a key element to building trust. Once a person arrives on your website, it needs to validate their challenges. Your website needs to function the way your customers need it to and expect it to.
• Educate – Your website should teach people how to recognize what their problems and challenges are.
• Inform – Once a person has found you and trusts you, you need to inform them on how you can solve their problems.
• Nurture – Often people need to come back to your website numerous times before making a purchase. Capture their email address and continue to create valuable content that is relevant to their stage in the customer journey to nurture them through to the sale.
• Convert – A conversion can be many things from subscribing to a newsletter, to calling you, to making a purchase on your website. Conversion opportunities need to be an element of the design of your homepage to help guide the journey.

In today’s world, your customer’s journey starts by researching online. People are coming to a conclusion on their own as to whether or not they are interested in buying from you far before you even realize you are being looked at. You need to make sure you have a presence in these early research stages, and completing each of the jobs above will help you do that.

Tell a story

The main goal your website should achieve is to be able to immediately tell a story. What you may get wrong about storytelling on your website is that the story is not about YOU.  The story must be the story your customers and prospects are telling themselves. They need to see themselves in the story which starts with their challenges, problems, and issues that they don’t know how to solve. You have to immediately let your website visitors see that you know what they’re struggling with and that there’s a good chance that you know how to solve it.

Guide a journey

Your website must guide your prospects through the buying process and help them decide how they should move forward. You don’t need to cover everything on your homepage, but you need to help guide your visitor to the next steps. Ask yourself what you want your visitor to do when they’re on your homepage. What actions and next steps should they take to find the solutions they’re looking for?

When you think of guiding people through your website, the design is a natural element to consider, but remember, SEO, content, and strategy need to be done in parallel with the design. In fact, many believe web design should revolve around SEO rather than the other way around.

Must have website elements

It’s time for the moment you’ve been waiting for: must have website elements. The homepage is often a prospect’s first impression of your website. Long, scrolling pages are the expectation these days so think of your homepage elements as a bit of journey. Don’t try to cram it all above the fold, let people get further and further as they scroll.

To get the most out of their visit, consider implementing the elements below.

1. The promise 

This is what we worked on in the previous post. If you haven’t completed that assignment, don’t pass go here – go back and get your promise-laden headline created.

The purpose of the promise headline, above the fold on your homepage, is to show the visitor that you understand the challenges they face. You need to make them a promise that will solve their problems.

This is the promise from an SEO company – SEO is confusing to most, so the promise that we make the phone ring is a strong start.

2. Call to action

A call to action (CTA) is an image or text that prompts visitors, leads, or customers to take a specific action. CTAs help to guide people through the customer journey and advise them on next steps.

Your call to action can be to request more information, schedule a consultation, or download a free report. Make sure it’s relevant and useful – the days when people simply signed up to receive an email from you are over, but people still want to be led to useful activities and resources that get them closer to solving their problems.

3. Video

Many companies are beginning to feature video on their homepage, and for a good reason! Video allows you to give people a real sense of who you are, what you stand for, and let people hear your story. It’s also a great way to produce content to engage your audience.

Some put this in the nice to have category, but I think it’s a must these days for small business websites.

4. Trust elements

You need to have elements that build trust on your homepage, whether they be logos of current customers or testimonials for your audience to glance over. Have reviews or accolades you want your audience to see? Make them easy to find and place them on the homepage.

This is almost a content category for many businesses as things like reviews, case studies, and testimonials should be part of your ongoing content building efforts, but once you collect them use them to build trust and social proof.

5. Changing content

It’s a good idea to feature frequently changing content from your website on your homepage. For example, place a blog or social feed on the homepage that shows recent activity. It’s a great way to show your company is active and to keep content fresh on the homepage.

6. Content upgrades

I’ve written about this numerous times, and we will cover it in the next post because it’s that important!  A content upgrade gives people the ability to download premium content in exchange for an email address or capturing a lead. This is an essential element for conversion on your website. If they download this content, this expresses interest in what you do. Take this opportunity to give them more valuable content moving forward to nurture them through to the sale.

The key is to make the upgrade, a checklist or eBook for example, highly relevant to the blog post or content where it is featured.

For example, I wrote a blog post titled the 16 point checklist for the perfect blog post and created a downloadable PDF that people interested in the post could get in exchange for their email address.

7. Core services

Create boxes that feature your core products or services and include about 100 words of content with each. Since these are your core services, you’ll likely have full pages or sections of your site related to each, but by placing them on your homepage accompanied by descriptive content, you’ll also get some additional SEO value.

There you have it, my comprehensive list of website must-haves.

Today’s assignment: Use this to make an assessment of the missing elements on your homepage right now and create a plan to fix this!

Tomorrow we tackle your content plan – it’s how you generate leads today, but don’t worry, I’m going to make it super easy for you!

Need more tips on how to grow your business? Check out our entire Guide to Marketing Professional Services.

In this post – 5 Steps to Restart, Recharge and Revive Your Marketing Right Now! – I introduced an aggressive initiative to help any business owner struggling to stay on plan with their marketing for the year. The idea is to take the midpoint of the year and get a fresh restart.

While the previous post kicked off the idea today’s post 1 of 5 Summer Restart is meant to get us down to business.

Ready to cover the five steps to restart your marketing plan for the year?

Oh, side note – I love summer – I embrace the heat and here in the Midwest the humidity – so since we are talking about restarting your plan as Summer kicks in I thought I would give this entire series a Summer motif. Thus the watermelon in the image above.

Step one – Refocus your message

Matching your message to your ideal client is pretty much everything when it comes to marketing these days. Think about you – you’ve got about five seconds to get and keep someone’s attention and you can’t waste that precious time with a message that doesn’t connect.

A message that connects is one that clearly talks about what your ideal client wants more than anything else in the world – and what is that?

They want to solve their problems.

In many ways, they will never care about your awesome plan to do XY and Z if you don’t first and foremost let them know that you understand what they really, really want.

Hint: Nobody really, really wants what you sell – they want their problems solved – period.

So, for today, here’s your assignment.

Make a list of the problems you solve for the clients you help the most.

If you’re having trouble thinking about your client’s problems, think a bit about the things they tell you. (Some might call it the things they whine about – I would never, but some might.)

For example, a lot my prospective clients might say things like – I just want the phone to ring more.

So I don’t sell marketing services or SEO or even consulting – all you need to know about what I do is that I make the phone ring – end of story.

Another example, a tree service: They might have the best equipment and most highly skilled crews but all their customers seem to care about is that they show up when they say they will and clean up when they are done.

So that’s the promise they need to promote. The rest is an expectation – I mean doesn’t everyone in the tree business have highly skilled technicians.

That’s it – that’s how you refocus your message so it’s no longer about you and your amazing products and services and it’s all about your amazing clients and the problems they want to be solved.

Creating trigger phrases

In the past, I’ve referred to these kinds of statements as trigger phrases.

Your customers don’t know how to solve their problems, but they usually know what their problems are. If you can get really good at demonstrating that what you sell is the answer to their problem they really won’t care what you call it, they’ll just buy it to make the pain go away.

Take some time and break down every solution you sell, every benefit you attribute to what you do, and map it back to a handful of “trigger phrases.”

These phrases can be questions or statements or even anecdotes, but they must come from the point of view of the customer.

What headline will grab their attention?

Start writing headlines for your website. What I mean by this is write a big, bold statement that might be the first thing anyone who visits your website will see. (We’ll talk more about this on day 2.)

Now ask yourself – would this statement get your ideal client’s attention more than something like “welcome to our website”

For illustration purposes, I’ll outline a few of the common problems phrases we hear. If you’re a marketing consultant, then these will make total sense to you, and you should probably look into becoming a member of the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network.

Local presence problems (examples of a prospect’s needs expressed as a problem)

• I feel like I’m getting left behind in the ever-changing online world
• My website just isn’t performing as I had hoped?
• Every one of my competitors shows up for local searches and my business does not?
• I’m getting constant pitches from SEO companies?
• I find the need to produce content and participate in every social network exhausting?

So, a few of my best headline ideas might come from some combination of these frustrations.

Want some help creating your new message? Pick out a handful of your ideal clients and go ask them – what problem did we solve for you? Test your headlines with them. Ask them to describe what you do better than anyone else.

Pro tip: If your business receives online reviews study them carefully. While it’s awesome to get 5-star reviews pay close attention to the words and common phrases your happiest customers are using – they will write your promise for you in some cases.

Here’s a real-life example: Remodeling Contractor

Review 1: They meet their commitments. They show up when they say they are going to and do very high-quality work.

Review 2: They are easy to work with and always have the best interest of the client at hand

Review 3: The attention to detail; the communication with the team members; the follow up on any issue….it’s all been great!

Review 4: All projects were completed on time or before scheduled end date

See any themes in these review snippets? Often when we receive praise the person giving the praise because we’ve done something they hadn’t experienced previously.

Who is your ideal client? (Who are you solving this problem for?)

This means many things – who can you deliver the greatest value to, who do you enjoy working with, who needs what you do most. Write a detailed description of your ideal client and include as much about them as possible including the problems they are trying to solve. Give some thought to how you might reach them and appeal to them. Use your best clients today to help you think about what makes them ideal for you. (Hint: they are profitable and perhaps they refer other to you right now.)

How to narrowly define your ideal client

Step 1: What are the must haves to be a client – this is stuff that naturally narrows your list – must be 18 years or older, must own a home – that kind of thing.

Step 2: What are the generally looked for attributes – no required, but preferred – perhaps it’s an age range, geographic location, or special interest.

Step 3: What makes them ideal – what are the attributes that make them your best prospects – perhaps they have a certain business model, unique problem, at a certain point in life or business.

Step 4: What behavior do they exhibit that allows you to identify them. Do they belong to industry associations, tend to sponsor charitable events, read certain publications?

To sum up today’s assignment you have two tasks

1. Narrowly define and document the answer to this question: How would I spot your ideal client?
2. Create one strong promise statement that addresses a common problem your ideal clients face. Answer this question: What problem do you solve for your ideal clients?

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post where we will take the “must have” elements for every website (Hint: You’re going to want to know the answers to the two questions just above in your assignment.)

Need more tips on how to grow your business? Check out our entire Guide to Marketing Professional Services.

Let me ask you a rather blunt question – Are you on track to meet your goals this year?

If you are reading this on a Sunday, you might be wondering why I chose to post today. (If you didn’t get to this until Monday then let’s get the week started!)

I’m writing this today because of a conversation I had over the weekend with a friend who owns a business.

The conversation started with her frustrated realization that the year is nearly half over. See, I had spoken with her towards the end of last year and she was pretty excited about her new marketing plan for the year.

Now, at the half-way point, she was realizing that she was never going to meet her objectives for the year and it was making her pretty stressed out.

So I told her all she needed to do was restart her plan. If what she was doing wasn’t working she didn’t have to wait until the end of the year to create a new path.

I think we all fall into that trap. We start every year with great new intentions and then life and the next new great idea get in the way.

She asked. “So how do I restart now?”

Simple, I replied – do these 5 things

1. Refocus your marketing message
2. Put the “must haves” on your website
3. Create a lead generation content plan
4. Perfect your follow-up approach
5. Focus on turning leads into paying customers

Stop playing around with the “idea of the week” and go create and execute a new plan! I think we tend to overcomplicate this stuff.

She got very excited and thanked me for giving her some renewed hope.

Shortly after that conversion, I got an idea. I’m guessing there are countless business owners out there with this very same feeling – how am I going to make this year different?

So here’s my idea.

For the next 5 days, I’m going to write a post that explains in some detail how to attack each of the five steps above and at the end, I’ll collect it all in an ebook for you. Then the following week I’ll conduct a live training session where you can ask me anything you want about each of these five topics.

Oh, side note – I love summer – I embrace the heat and here in the Midwest the humidity – so since we are talking about restarting your plan as Summer kicks in I thought I would give this entire series a Summer motif. Thus the sunflowers in the image above.

Together we’ll “Restart, Recharge and Revive” your marketing right now instead of waiting until another year rolls around.

You in? If so, just make it a point to come back here every day this week and take in the new lesson.

I believe there’s still plenty of time to make 2017 your best year yet and what better time to start than right now.