Do your clients Know you?

The first component of the three-letter acronym KLT is Know (the others are Like and Trust). Know might seem like it is the most important - if they don't know you, they can't buy from you - but it's really just the top of the sales funnel. Having said that, as you go down the funnel it becomes more important at every step.

Potential clients need to know OF you - they will never become a customer if they've never heard of you. One of your marketing goals should be to make people aware of who you are. The critical thing here is to make sure you are spending time and money getting the right people to know you. If you advertise power plant maintenance tools to circus clowns, you may have more people who know you, but it will do nothing to increase your sales.

So, step one is awareness marketing, using the right channels and the right niche to get people to know of you. Once they are aware of you, and begin to seek out information about you, they will start to get to know you. Here They will quickly drop out if you are not what they are interested in - perhaps you marketed your maintenance tools to people who work at power plants, but the person who read your ad was the accounting person, not a maintenance employee. The target is closer, and they may have gotten to know you a little, but they will still drop out of the funnel.

When you get to the right person, and they are reading your site, they are looking for  clues about who you are and what you do. They want to know you, and as they proceed down the funnel to a potential sale, what they know about you will determine just how far they go. The more you share, the more they learn about you and your products, the more likely they are to buy.

The worst thing in sales is to have a potential customer drop out of the funnel before they discover the exact thing they need. "I didn't know you offered that," is a phrase that should break the heart of every marketer. If they don't know, they can't buy, and if they don't know, it is your fault for not telling them properly.

Check your funnels. See why people are coming in, and why they are dropping out. Maybe customers are searching for a particular maintenance tool, and you aren't letting them know that you sell it until too far down the funnel.

Know your clients and let them know you. Give them the right information at the right time, and help them get to know you as soon as you can. Your clients will respond, and that will help your sales.