One of the worst rookie mistakes online is incongruent marketing.
Incongruent marketing relates to keeping your marketing uniform with the same type of phrases, ideas, images, colors and designs. Sticking to this ensures that the prospect can actually make sense of what you are advertising.
A lot of inexperienced marketers create advertisements, web pages and emails that have conflicting messages. This type of thing just confuses the prospect and results in them ignoring you.
An example of this could be an advertisement that offers some type of free training (with the intention of getting a lot of clicks), and then when people click on it the web page is full of hype about joining about a dodgy business opportunity. This obviously confuses the user because they were expecting to be offered some free training on the next page, not pitched about joining a business opportunity.
In almost all cases the user will close the page and go somewhere else, and the marketing efforts have failed dismally.
Tricking people into clicking links, and then failing to deliver on your promises is never going to win you any long term customers. It is true that you may be able to convince a small percentage of people to buy from you doing this, but even these people are not going to stick around for long.
The same thing is true with email marketing. How many times have you received an email from someone that you didn’t know, with an interesting headline that makes you curious?
And then, you open the email only to find out that the headline has absolutely nothing to do with the body of the email. You have been tricked into opening the email by a dodgy spammer who only needs a small percentage (of people opening the email) to do what they are asking.
Congruent marketing all starts from first defining your ideal prospect in specific detail, and then tailoring your marketing campaigns to solve the problems of these people.
To define your ideal prospect you need to do plenty of research into your niche to get clear on who this person is. Spend some time on online forums and blogs that are relevant to your industry to see what these people are talking about.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- How old are they?
- What is their average income?
- What do they do in their spare time?
- What keeps them up at night?
- What are the biggest problems that they are experiencing
- What are they dreaming of doing in the future?
And so and so on…
And once you have a clear picture of who this ideal prospect is, you can then tailor your marketing campaigns to suit these people. This is just a case of giving them what they want.
You can refine your marketing even further to gain an excellent understanding of your target market by performing split tests on your landing pages and sales letters (as well as your emails). By using an A/B split test and continually replacing the losers with new ideas to keep testing, you will eventually be able to laser in to what actually works – which results in more sales.
But if you are setting up a full blown sales funnel you need to make sure that each stage of the sales funnel flows seamlessly into the next page and makes complete sense. Congruent marketing creates confidence, predictability and a degree of trust.
By practising congruent marketing you will find that your conversion rates will definitely be a lot higher, and people will start taking your messages a lot more seriously.
It is important to maintain your integrity and give your subscribers and web visitors a reason to like and trust you. You will find it hard to create a loyal following without practicing congruent marketing in your business.
