When evaluating your marketing strategy, consider that the average person is interrupted hundreds of times every day by the likes of cold calls, spam, and online ads, and they’re jaded. Many now rely on ad blockers, caller ID, and spam filters to minimise this intrusion. It’s annoying for customers, and expensive for businesses to penetrate the market through these methods.
Fortunately, there’s a more effective way to reach out to your target audience, one that can meet people on their terms, and support their purchasing decisions with guidance, solutions, and insights that offer genuine value. And as it happens, this value isn’t just reserved for your customers. Because when done right, this strategic marketing approach can reduce overall spend by 62%, while generating three times the volume of leads compared to traditional marketing methods.
Here’s how it’s done.
Understanding your customers
Before you can find your customers, you need to know who they are. And that starts with creating a buying persona per different customer profile.
Looking at your previous and current customer base, you might be able to spot certain trends. Things like age ranges, location, what their job titles are, gender, occupation, the size of their company, and the industry they operate in.
Now it’s time to draw up a list of things that matter to these people. What their goals are, and the specific roadblocks that might cause them to seek out the solutions your business offers. You should also aim to draw up a list of the kind of social channels they favour, the sites they browse, and the places they go to engage with new ideas.
The more you know and understand the people who use your products, the better you can reach them in the places where they like to spend their time online, with content that addresses their specific pain points.
At this stage, you’re building awareness of your brand, and giving people good reason to take further interest in what you offer.
Creating a flowing buyer journey
To make your customers go from awareness of your brand, to taking further action, you’re going to need carefully crafted content and web design elements in place. These will ease your visitors through the next stages of their buyer journey.
While social media and ads may be great for building that initial awareness, your customers will soon crave further information.
Creating a blog, and filling it with regular, quality content, tailored to meet the needs and issues that are relevant to your buyer personas, is critical to helping people make choices during this stage of their purchasing decision making process. Check out or blog on The Dos and Don’ts of Blogging here.
According to research by Hubspot, 80% of business decision makers prefer to get information from a series of articles, rather than an advertisement. Over time, as you build up a catalogue of articles and other content, you’ll see your costs drop. In fact, the same research by Hubspot showed that after a five-month period of consistent content marketing efforts, the average cost per lead dropped by 80%.
This is where your web design should be there to help people access the most relevant content, and provide easy access to contact and enquiry forms. This way you can gather more data, and customers can reach out and start a conversation with ease.
Meanwhile, offering up your most valuable content, such as white papers, ebooks, and case studies, in exchange for contact information, is a great way to gather more valuable data on your audience – while opening up an avenue into more targeted and personalised communication.
Generating new business
As visitors continue their buyer journey, and their awareness becomes engagement, you’ll need a strategy in place for keeping the conversation going. One that can be tailored to each lead’s specific circumstances.
Maybe they’ve downloaded your free eBook, and requested a quote. At this point, you’ll know they’re likely weighing you up against your competitors. You could streamline this process for them, and provide side by side comparisons of your goods or services with others on the market, with an emphasis on what makes you the first choice.
Perhaps a different customer attended your free webinar, but you haven’t heard back for a few weeks. You might follow up with a low-key request for feedback, to see if you can nurture a conversation from there.
You may even recognise that during the later stages of the buying process, some customers now have to deal with their final barrier: Access to purchase approval from higher up. Having content ready to go that can adapt your marketing message to address things like ROI and the bottom line, will help penetrate the C-suite.
At the end of the day, the more you know about your potential customers, the better you can keep them warm and happy during their decision-making process.
Some may browse quietly for years before taking action. Others may want to go straight to talking budgets and lead times. With a marketing strategy that supports their buying decision-making process, you can anticipate their every need, personalise the process, and nudge people ever closer to closing the deal.
Ready to generate more leads, reduce your marketing spend, and become the go-to knowledge base within your industry? It all starts with our FREE audit of your current marketing strategy. Book your session today.