4 Things Your Competitors Secretly Hope You'll Keep Doing
Right now, your competitors may be happily enjoying your website.They may be envious of your beautiful design, but what really makes them giddy is seeing how hard you are working to generate new leads. In fact, they’d love it if you worked harder.Why is that?Because they like seeing you expend effort needlessly.A content marketing strategy that generates quality leads doesn't just rely on producing and distributing valuable content.If you use your resources inefficiently or fail to think about what you are trying to learn in exchange for all of that content, you'll continue to work harder and harder with little hope of achieving your goals.Not enough leads. Happy competitors.Below is a short list of four things your competitors are delighted to see you doing.Here is the good news. Each of these challenges is not only easy to fix, but the solution is easier than what you are doing now. When you stop doing these things your competitor loves, you'll generate more leads that are better qualified with less effort.The underlying problem is focusing on short term goals instead of taking the time to plan the few vital elements that will make a significant difference in the long run.
- Customize each of your communications down to the last detail
Instead of using well-defined templates for email and landing pages, you customize everything.If you are struggling to create content or generate enough leads, this is not where you should be spending your time. These may seem like small tasks, but over time they become a continuous source of interruptions, eating up bandwidth better spent on achieving your bigger goals.How to annoy your competitors: Don’t get fancy. Use a few simple templates really well. Measure the results and continuously improve. Save your design talent to layout unique evergreen content that you will use over and over to generate leads instead of email headers that make everyone feel good but contribute little to the bottom line.
- Give your visitors lots of options on your landing pages
Because you never know what will get their attention. Download this. Sign up for that. Oh, and by the way have you seen...?Your savvy competitors love this because it kills your response rate. When faced with too many choices, the easiest response is to do nothing at all.Again, you are working harder than necessary and achieving below average results.Disappoint the competition. Optimize your landing pages. Remove all navigation. When you focus on promoting your single offer as effectively as possible, conversions will skyrocket.If you want to make an additional offer, put it on the "Thank you" page. Prospects who have just said “yes” to one good offer are more likely to say “yes” to another right away.
- Ask your prospects for the same information on every landing page
While you are busy sending out content and hoping prospects qualify themselves as "sales ready" on every form, your clever competitors are collecting data they can use to segment their prospects and send more relevant information to both the prospect and the sales team.Outwit your competition with this: Make a list of every piece of information you need to qualify a prospect: company size, challenge, decision role, etc. Progressively profile your visitors each time they fill out a form.A little planning and an inbound marketing tool like HubSpot make this easy. If you aren't taking advantage of this, you are missing opportunities that could save you and your sales team a lot of wasted effort.When you start doing this, your competitors better be rethinking their own marketing efforts.
- Measure only the final result
Pass or fail. Here's an example. Let’s say you, like many life science marketers, are focused on lead generation. Your latest campaign generated 257 leads. If your goal was 280, what should you do next? The answer to that is “No one knows.”The number of leads tells you nothing about what failed. Wouldn't you like to know what offers worked best, what emails get opened and clicked the most, what calls to action are most effective?Now imagine the goal was 250 leads. Congratulations. You met your goal. How will you repeat that? If you only know the final result, there is nothing to tell you what worked that you can repurpose.The final blow to your competitors comes when you start measuring the "little things" effectively. What emails get opened? What fraction of visitors become leads? How well do your landing pages convert? With this information, you have a chance of adjusting your efforts before it's too late to improve the end result.If you can’t measure these little things, sadly, you are doomed to the same cycle of trial and error. Any success you have will be due to luck alone. You'll be starting over blind on the next campaign, with the same small chance of success. How long can you afford to keep doing it that way?Plan to succeed.Your content marketing strategy isn’t just about telling a story and planning how you will generate content. Planning the information you need to collect and how you’ll measure your progress are equally important to your success.Marketing automation tools are a great way to make distributing information easier. But another real benefit is the information you get in return about both your customers and your campaigns.