Persuading your clients to adopt a new tactic

Today’s tip is related to persuading people to adopt a new approach.

Hello, and thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Today’s tip is related to one way to move your clients when you’re trying to persuade them about a new approach to SEO or digital marketing.

I picked up this tactic when I was in a sales role working for the Points of Light Foundation years ago. And the tip is pretty simple. 

It’s human nature to want to be persuaded by your peer set. I called this the “keeping up with the Joneses” tactic. 

While I was at the Points of Light Foundation, part of my goal was to persuade people to buy this volunteer management software. I quickly realized that for some of my prospects in Florida, they were more influenced by my discussion of the others in Florida who had switched to our software than other points I was making. So as I collected more clients who had switched to our software, that became a huge part of my selling technique. In fact, one of my prospects was persuaded entirely by the number of other peers in that state who had switched.

So now, I use this in my SEO work by doing competitive analysis. I work with a lot of federal agencies. One of the things I tend to do pretty regularly to persuade them to do something that seems new or perhaps not approved by the government is to track down every other government agency who had executed on that tactic before and present that data to my clients. For instance, if you are trying to persuade a federal agency to run any paid online media (which is a relatively new tactic for them), presenting all the other federal agencies that have gotten approval to run paid ads tends to help.

In other instances, I have done some LinkedIn research and pulled all the staff employed at their top online competitors to persuade them that they might be under-resourced. I will also talk about what other tactics they’re using to support their overall online marketing program and present those when I’m trying to nudge a client to (for instance) launch engagement on a new-to-them social media platform.

So that’s your tip for today — deploy the “keeping up with the Joneses” tactic when you’re trying to persuade your clients to adopt a new approach that they’re hesitant about.

Thanks for listening, come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

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