Selling digital products is no easy task. The thing with digital services is that people have come to expect them for free. There is a substantial mental model barrier to overcome before a customer is willing to pay.
The following are the fundamental reality of marketing most business owners are not aware of.
- Marketing takes as much effort as product development – Yes, read that again. One year of product development and one month of marketing effort will not produce results.
- Most business owners and companies do not realize the painstaking effort it takes before marketing will pay you.
- There are no shortcuts. Every word, every image, and every sentence matters. Get even a sentence wrong, and your results will disappear.
- Ultimately the key to your success is your product. Marketing alone cannot give you long-lasting success.
- If your product is not good, you will not be able to invest in the marketing confidently – marketing draws strength from your product, not the other way around.
- Artificially created growth through massive advertisement/sales, and the promotional cost is clearly visible on the balance sheet and will prohibit you from raising funds. Also, such businesses do not survive.
Staring at an empty funnel with no leads while spending thousands of dollars on online marketing?
With large online platforms, search engines, and other digital marketing options available, it does feel like getting customers could just be a matter of advertising on these platforms. But sadly, that is not the truth. Millions of businesses fail to get a return on their investments from these platforms. The question is, why?
What can be done to ensure a steady flow of customers?
Marketing success stands on four pillars. First is building the right product, second is constructing the right message, third is delivering it to the right people, and fourth is staying in the conversation for extended periods. If you do these four things accurately, you will feel the pleasure of customers rolling in.
But then again, these four things are monumentally more complicated than it appears and needs as much skill as engineering or finance, which is why the CTR and conversion rates are abysmally low across all industries, especially digital solutions.
GateZero brings the needed transformation to your marketing.
Marketing: 1st Pillar – Your product
The right product is the most important of the four pillars. GateZero through its opportunity score, and the execution score shows you if the product concept, idea, and business model are correct and if you can execute it successfully. If the framework shows low scores here, nothing else you do will matter. You will have to fix the issues before moving on. GateZero also teaches you how to correct such issues.
Crux-rectangle is one of the GateZero tools that allows you to build this foundational strength and shows you weaknesses and ways to improve it, and build fundamental strength in your product to carry it through the noisy marketplace.
Marketing: 2nd Pillar – The message
GateZero’s marketing message framework helps you architect the right message for your audience. Notice that we are using the word “architect” here, and that is what it is. Marketing success is all about creating that distilled message that resonates with your audience in a way that positions your solution as the only logical choice for them and compels them to act. GateZero provides a profound and thorough framework for creating these messages. This covers the second pillar of success.
Marketing: 3rd Pillar – Right prospects
8-Dimentional problem definition tool shows you minute alignment details and helps you pinpoint your customers. This is where you develop insights for the right audience – the third pillar of successful advertisement.
Marketing: 4th Pillar – Staying in the conversation
And the last pillar of success is staying in the conversation for extended periods. This is done through 360-degree marketing and content diversity. Your customers need time to go through the funnel. Giving up too soon is a significant reason for low conversions and is especially true when selling any SaaS, compliance, or security solutions. These kinds of solutions are purchased with deliberation and research from the client side, and multiple groups and stakeholders are involved. This is very different from selling a $30 course online.
Most companies make the mistake of going through the sales touch point too soon and then giving up. A large enterprise may take as much as a year to close the deal. So your content strategy needs to be carved out for an extended engagement. You need to use different mediums of engagement with different types of content and keep the momentum going. You need to make your prospects feel they are missing the boat by delaying, and you have to do it credibly and without sounding like a sales pitch. And your targeting needs to be personalized. As your product awareness increases for a particular prospect, your content needs to take them deeper into the conversion funnel and move with them.
Ok, take a break. If all that sound like too much work – it is. Remember we told you in the beginning – marketing is as much work as product development.
It’s time for your marketing to deliver, and the cost is just two hours of your time.
Accessing all the benefits and turning around your specific situation is simple. Register for a free power user workshop to learn how to use GateZero’s simple tools, and transcend from uncertain failure to informed success.. Feel the pleasure of customers rolling in.
