Marketing
Throw a Killer Dinner Party and Increase Lead Generation
By Flying Hippo
Finding, attracting, closing, and keeping new customers is a lot like hosting a dinner party. You want to impress your guests by giving them a great experience. The food needs to be just right, you have to play at least one Taylor Swift song (it’s a crowd pleaser and you know it) and you want everyone to return when you invite them to the next party. You tweak your offerings at the party depending on the crowd you’re entertaining. Regardless, you hope Jerry doesn’t dance on the table again like he did last year.
Luckily, Flying Hippos know how to throw parties that are off the chain and we’re sharing the three steps you need for party success.
1.Plan (buyer personas)
We know that the best parties have been thought out and planned beforehand. You have to think through what you will be serving, where you will be entertaining your guests and, of course, how to assemble a great music playlist in case an impromptu dance party breaks out.
One of the most critical aspects of the planning process is figuring out who you’re going to invite. You want to have the right mix of personalities. Think about your guest list like they are your buyer personas. Your buyer personas help you segment your audience to create stronger campaigns that appeal to them, and will ultimately lead to more sales. You need to know your buyer personas very well, just like your party guests. Do they have a gluten allergy? Are they vegetarians? Would they enjoy playing board games after dinner? You need to know these aspects before you can plan a great party.
2. Prepare (strategy)
Now that you’ve got your guest list ready it’s time to prepare some delicious food. Let’s say you’re baking a cake for dessert. Think of the recipe as your inbound marketing strategy. When you’re baking a cake from scratch, you are able to personalize the recipe and tweak it to get the taste you want. But you don’t want to miss a critical ingredient. You don’t want your cake to fall flat, so don’t take out the baking soda!
Just like baking, inbound marketing has ingredients that you can tweak and experiment with until you get the recipe that is just right for you. Although you can add certain flavors to make it unique, there are certain foundation elements to your inbound recipe that are untweakable.
Inbound Recipe
Untweakable Ingredients:
Each of these foundation ingredients are critical to make your website easy to use and findable. If your site isn’t easy to find you will lose lead generation, which is one of your biggest sales opportunities:
1 Cup Web OptimizationChoose from the most used tags
2 Cups Website Forms
½ Cup of SEO
Tweakable ingredients:
These are the ingredients that you can add to fit your preference. Perhaps you decide to bake a chocolate cake this time, but next time you decide it’s marble – you want to tweak content in your call-to-actions and blogs. Like any good chef, you need to be constantly tasting your batter and analyzing whether or not it’s working. These tweakable ingredients are what makes your strategy unique and you have flexibility to experiment with them over time:
3 Cups Sifted Titles
2 Teaspoons of Keywords
1 ½ Cups all-purpose Calls-to-actions
2 Cups Blogging & Content
In a medium bowl, stir in your ingredients one at a time until your batter (the strategy) is smooth. You will be feeling the heat once you put your batter in the oven. But be confident in it. Do not take it out of the oven and start mixing in different ingredients before the time is up. Great strategies, and batters, take time to reach their full and delicious potential.
3. Party (delighting)
The last step is to partaaay! Seriously, though. You want your party to be the topic of conversation around the water cooler on Monday. You want the people who turned down your invitation to feel jealous after hearing how your boss got tipsy while playing Cards Against Humanity.
How can you do this? The key is to provide such a great experience that your guests are delighted when they leave. Turn them into evangelists for your parties- their word-of-mouth endorsement is one of the most powerful resources to closing your sale and convincing your invitees that you host the best party on the block.
Are your parties unforgettable? Is your lead generation process creating brand evangelists for your product or service? It’s time to start planning your party!
