Getting Prospects to Take Action: The IMPACT Show Ep.4 [Show Notes]

Struggling to get buy in from your prospects?  

This week, Bob and Nick took to Facebook Live to discuss digital marketing skills, IMPACT Live, and how marketers can challenge the status quo and get prospects to take action.

Just in case you missed us live (or if you want to relive the magic), you’ll find the episode’s show notes below as well as the recording.

Enjoy and make sure to share with your peers!

Join us for IMPACT Live:

• A two-day event in Hartford, CT on August 1-2nd, 2017.
• An intimate group of experienced, dedicated marketing and sales leaders.
• NEW LOWER PRICING: We want you to go and, we don't want pricing to be the hurdle stopping you so now you can get your general admission ticket for just $999 or VIP access for $1399.
• Speakers include: Marcus Sheridan, Tara Robertson, Mike Volpe, Mark Roberge, George B Thomas, Paul Roetzer, and more.
• Get your ticket here now.

In-Demand Digital Marketing Skills

• The top 5 digital marketing skills in demand:
  1. SEO Specialist: Might not be the top on our list, but it’s important to optimize and create the type of content people want, that gets ranked in search engines. Also through Website Throwdown, we’ve noticed that a lot of business’ miss a lot of basic SEO techniques - and it’s something that adds value to your organization over time.
  2. Video: Golden ticket for engaging and converting visitors. People love video because it’s easy to digest and easier for most to engage with rather than reading a post.
  3. Managing IT systems: With so many marketing and SaaS platforms out there, knowing how to utilize CRM, HubSpot or Infusionsoft or HootSuite and knowing how to integrate them and get them to talk to each other. Project management aspect and risk of integrating them and understanding how information flows and managing security
  4. Community Management: Ability to create a positive community on behalf of a brand. At IMPACT, we’re putting a bigger focus on Facebook and knowing who our loyal followers are. How do you better engage with your loyal followers?
  5. Analytics: Having someone who knows how to use google analytics to being a data scientist.
• This list of skills is necessary a list of skills you should find in a single person but rather hard to find in one person, but rather spread out amongst members of your organization. You don’t want to a jack of all trades but a master of none.

• Read the full article from Bangor Daily News

Lowering the Bar

• Marketers or product owners are designing products for mass acceptance, something companies have historically done.
• Due to the horizontal flow of information flow, it’s easy to make big bold promises and go for a niche and be able to reach people there.

• Read the article from Seth Godin

Behavioral Economics

• Taking things we're trying and implementing in marketing (social proof) to help enact people to take action (example in government and doctors) and convincing people to make changes.

• Watch the podcast from Freakonomics

Last Week's Retro:

• How does something like agile help solve for the customer? How does it incorporate customer feedback and ensure you’re doing the right thing for the customer?
  • Agile and Scrum are processes to help get work done. The process is to do twice the amount of work in half the time. Last week's podcast was about preventing your team from burning out and making sure they’re working on the most important things.
  • In terms of solving for the customer, it’s important to identify if you’re doing the right things for the client. That’s the role of the product owner. They’re a proxy for the client and should be researching and understanding the most important items the team should be working on.
  • If you’re trying to solve for the customer, it starts with understanding the customer, and a high priority item might be collecting user feedback and re-prioritizing the backlog to best solve for the customer.
  • It’s also important to be flexible - allowing your team to re-prioritize and shift focus.

Main Topic: “Getting Prospects to Take Action”

• We are in a world where everyone is overwhelmed with marketing messages, a bunch of people trying to capture your attention.
  • Marketing teams are frustrated, and having trouble getting prospects to take action, and cutting through the noise to deliver their message. Even if they do get that message through, they have the challenge of the prospect stopping and not taking the full action.
  • Prospects are inundated with noise and don’t know what options they should be looking at.
• There is a solution to a problem a prospect might have, but as marketers what we don’t always think about is that what we’re battling is status quo.
• Status quo is what they’re currently doing, it’s comfortable and what they know. But, the prospect might not be connected - they have a problem, pain but they’re still comfortable with what they’re doing even though they’re not achieving their desired outcomes.
• How to overcome the battle with status quo:
  • Understand what’s happening in the mind of your prospects.
    • As marketers, you need to put yourself in your prospects shoes.
    • What are their pain points and hesitations
    • What will trigger them to change
    • What is more important to them / better value… family, etc
  • Understanding status quo and positioning your offering so that it’s 10X more attractive than status quo.
  • Belief. What are you doing to get your prospects to believe that it’s better? And, If they don’t believe it, they will never take action.
    • If you’re following all of the steps, you’ve done the research and you understand where your prospects are coming from, you can create an offering that they’ll believe in.

Books/Resources:

• Start with Why by Simon Sinek
• Value Proposition Design by Alex Osterwalder
• Email Us: show@impactplus.com

Next Steps:

Get your tickets to IMPACT Live 2017 to meet David Meerman Scott, Mark Roberge, Marcus Sheridan, and dozens of other experts in-person this August!

We would love your comments! Feel free to send us an email or comment on the facebook thread. Did you know that people who attend live broadcasts and actually comment and engage are more likely to retain more information from that broadcast thus getting a better return for your time.

Join Us Next Week! Topic: Converting Inbound Leads to Opportunities

We'll be back again next Thursday, June 8th at 1:00 PM ET. Want to get reminded? Drop us your name and email address below and we’ll make sure you’re notified before the broadcast every Thursday!