When you’re launching a product or service, advertising on the biggest mediums like television and radio might seem like the best idea. You might suppose that if you make a big enough splash, everyone will know who you are and the sales will come rolling in. That’s not strictly speaking true. While these mediums do attract large audiences, your target audience are a very niche segment of that wider demographic. What you need to do is find out exactly who your ideal customer is and target material specifically at them. If you’re in the process of scaling, you may have some data from home regarding what type of person your ideal customer is and where they hangout online. If you have that, great, and if you don’t, it’s not difficult to work out. All you have to do is take a look at your product or service and figure out who that helps the most. What problem does your product solve and who is suffering from those pain points? It could be an individual or even a number of different people within an organisation but the point is that your product is solving somebody’s problem. And, if you can think of these prospect as a real people, you can develop buyer personas for each one of them.
The Steps You Need To Take
Inbound Marketing though is not just about posting content and hoping it works. It requires proper planning and while it may be considered a slow burner in that it doesn’t generate instant impact, what it does do is develop longer and more meaningful relationships with your followers and customers.
Here’s a brief overview of how you could develop an inbound marketing campaign: Firstly, you need to remember that this an ongoing approach, which will need you to have a good understanding of your customers and the ability to focus on long term goals. You then need to focus on creating content for the buyer personas you have already identified. Remember to match relevant content to each persona and keep an eye on the stages of the sales process as content that generates interest is different to content that seals the deal.
Ideally, we want your customers to find your content when they are looking for answers by going through a search engine or using some other method. This means that your articles need to be available at the right time and in the right place. As we said though this is a long process, so do not get disheartened if your content doesn’t go viral straight away. In fact, what we are looking at more so than the numbers of followers is the quality. The right audience can turn into advocates for your product or service, can interact by posting comments and can spread the word by sharing your content. And, this is the way to really optimise what you’re posting. Of course, optimisation becomes a continuous process as you gather more data about how your content is performing. The advantage here is that you can adapt your strategy to post more of the type of content that performed well and abandon the stuff that didn’t work at all.
Ultimately, as this begins to pay off, you will come to be seen as a trusted advisor and source of quality information. When your business is there to offer all the right answers, the prospect is more likely to buy from you. On top of this, you will come to be seen as experts in your field which will automatically boost your reputation.
Let the Social Channels do their Work
One other way of getting your best content seen, which shouldn’t be overlooked, is getting social channels to boost traffic to your site. The rule here is that you post a paragraph of your search engine optimised (SEO) copy on LinkedIn with a link to the full piece on your site and the same on Twitter but this time only using a sentence or two as the hook. It’s important to research the social channels for your particular product or a service as this is a constantly changing space.
The Highly Visible Benefits of Content
Of course, the quality of the content is vitally important as by solving your target audience’s problems, they are more likely to become customers. As an added bonus, providing quality content helps to improve you search engine visibility which means that even more potential customers can find you.
Further to this, high quality content helps you to build trust and credibility in the minds of the consumers. And, as we all know, people will buy from people they trust. You could reasonably think of content as a way of being able to have a conversation with your customers before you’ve even meet them.
A Simple Solution
Although we have gone on at some length about Inbound marketing, the formula is remarkably simple. Good quality, original content that answers the pain points of your ideal customer’s pain points increases you reputation and gets you to be seen as an expert. In turn, people start to search specifically for your content and visit your site more. This turns into relationships being built and sales being made. Any questions?
Ready to Go
At Aexus, we are ready to work with you to strategize, create and implement an Inbound marketing program. So, if you’d like to see how this could be the cost-effective, sales boosting solution you’ve been looking for, get in touch. We’re always happy to jump on a call.