Wouldn’t it be great if you could ensure your advertising budget is spent only on those that are likely to buy from you and not wasted on those that would never be interested?
This is the premise that reputable growth marketing agencies operate on, deliberately constructing methods to identify and attract potential leads while eliminating marketing spend on irrelevant targets. And with the help from the Automated Sales Process™ (ASP™) framework, you can do the same.
If you’re still trying to attract prospects by chucking resources at marketing and hoping for the best, you’re stuck in 2008. Technological advances have changed the online marketing game, allowing us to achieve a lot more with a lot less.
Using the Automated Sales ProcessTM (ASP™)
The ASP™ is a growth hacking framework. Using tools like technology and automation, alongside the growth marketer’s mindset of always seeking a shortcut, the ASP™ helps businesses scale like never before.
There are six components to an ASP™:
- Attraction
- First impression
- Engage & educate
- Follow-up
- Sales technology
- Referrals & retention
Let’s dive into the Attraction component.
How do Growth Marketers Generate Leads Differently?
The Attraction phase is where traditional marketers often misuse their resources, resulting in a lot of waste. Traditionally, lead generation reached many of the wrong people since it wasn’t possible to single out the right ones (e.g. a billboard on the side of the freeway has no ability to discern targeted audience from the rest). This is no longer the case thanks to advancement in marketing technology. Growth marketing and advertising online is all about using the strategies, tools, and software available now to eliminate wasted marketing dollars and the benefits are plentiful.
Greater Precision
Technology allows us to target our ideal buyer precisely. We don’t just get to tailor our marketing message and ads to a certain demographic, we can now tell advertising platforms such as social media sites to only show those ads to that demographic. Handy, right?
Immediate Feedback
And in situations where our hypotheses about the target market are incorrect or we target the wrong people, we are able to get immediate feedback empowering us to make adjustments. We no longer have to wait around to see if that huge and expensive radio campaign or magazine ad was successful. We can stop current campaigns that are underperforming, make proper adjustments, then republish the campaign for immediate feedback.
Instead of risking it all on costly marketing campaigns, this feedback allows growth marketers to start small with multiple smaller marketing experiments to identify the perfect marketing message and target, then scale up once they empirically identify what works best.
Automation
Another advantage of technology is automation, allowing every step of the attraction process to unfold at your convenience. Run ads when you’re best placed to respond, and cut down on manual tasks specifically. This reduces resource wastage in an entirely different way.
As you can see, our examples are focused on marketing online. Does that mean growth marketing agencies must shun offline advertising? Not necessarily – but it shouldn’t be your priority or the first thing you try especially if you are resource constrained.
Targeting Your Ideal Buyer
The ASP™ framework allows us to target our ideal buyer precisely. But before being able to do so, we first need to have a clear idea of who exactly these “ideal buyers” are.
And a growth hack to help arrive at this is to create what growth marketers call an avatar. An avatar is a typical buyer profile based on demographic information such as gender, marriage status, age, and profession and income. And it would serve you well to go beyond that and imagine even more personal traits such as their likes and dislikes, their hobbies and interests, and their hopes and dreams and greatest fears. This information will help you identify the best manners of reaching these prospects through your marketing efforts.
Reaching Out to Your Ideal Buyer
Once you know who, it’s time to think about when, where, and how.
- Will your avatar come across your advertisement when they’re hoping to make a purchase, seeking out education, gaining awareness, or merely browsing?
- Where on the internet will they be when they find it? (Top tip: use SimilarWeb for clues.)
- Which medium do they prefer – text, image, audio, or video?
These are considerations to keep in mind as you strategize on how to attract prospects.
Growth Hacking Tactics to Attract Prospects
There are four main ways you’re likely to attract prospects, and most marketing efforts fit into one of them:
- Direct: leads already know you because of brand awareness
- Search platforms: leads find you through search (SEO and PPC encourage this)
- Branding platforms: leads find you through social media or review platforms
- Other: leads find you through news sites, partner sites, and more (be creative!)
As you coordinate your marketing efforts, there are several growth hacks you may look to leverage to improve your odds of success.
Advertising Arbitrage
This fancy-sounding term is a perfect example of the growth hacking mindset – advertising arbitrage allows you to get the most results from the least effort.
There are predominantly two options:
- Advertise somewhere with fast-growing reach yet limited demand from advertisers (e.g., YouTube when it first launched and marketers were either not privy to its advertising potential or mistrusting)
Or:
- Advertise somewhere with sufficient reach yet fast-decreasing demand from advertisers (e.g., the Yellow Pages as advertisers often ignore the fact that many small businesses and older generation still leverage this long-standing resource)
These techniques are designed to help you identify the perfect intersection between supply and demand.
Partner Content and Commerce
A partnership between a commerce site and a content site might seem a bit odd, but when you think about it… it actually makes a lot of sense if you do your proper diligence. That is, if you find content sites that complement your service/products and therefore, attract website visitors who may be interested in your offer. After identifying prospective partner sites, it’s a matter of making a proposition that is enticing for them as well – creating a win-win situation. Will you promote their site to your audience? Offer a revenue-sharing arrangement? Barter your services in exchange?
Let Prospects Qualify Themselves
The point of growth marketing is accelerated growth while avoiding wastage – so don’t be afraid to let prospects identify themselves. It’s okay if you create an ad that speaks specifically to your avatar while in the process alienates others. Like how a steakhouse will focus resources on meat-eaters while not worrying about catering to vegetarians, your marketing efforts should focus only on those that are likely to buy and not worry about those that never will.
Start Attracting Your Ideal Customers
Of course, attracting leads is only the beginning – once you’ve got their interest, you need to make a good first impression.
And our article on First Impression sheds light on how to do exactly that.
Before you hop off, we’ve got a question to help you unleash your inner growth marketer. How would you acquire the most customers in the least time with a zero-dollar marketing budget?
See what you can come up with. And, if you’d like a second opinion, contact Deviate Labs. As a US growth marketing agency that has worked with businesses across many verticals and of different sizes, we’ve asked ourselves this question countless times before when working with clients, and helped them to achieve incredible results.