Why is it SO important to know your customers?

Do you know who your customers are?

Reaching new customers is a challenge every business faces on a daily basis. Trying to capture their attention and engage them is a never-ending pursuit. While traditional marketing focused on using mass advertising and direct mail to find customers, today, marketers have to be proactive, providing insightful information and interacting with them even before they visit your website.

Why bother?

The goal is to enable and entice prospects to find you, get interested in what you have to offer, then visit your website. Rather than blasting to the masses, marketing is now focused on 1:1 targeting.

Think of it this way, when you market to everyone in the world, then you end up with a mixed bag of customers, all who are less loyal to your brand. Consider this as a customer yourself, do you prefer a product designed specifically for you, or more of a one-size-fits all?

Because of this, knowing whom your ideal customer takes on greater importance. It enables you to be more effective with your communications. Documenting and distinguishing whmo your ideal customer is –is referred to as your buyer persona.

What are Buyer Personas?

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.

A buyer persona will consist of your customer demographics, their behaviors, challenges and goals – someone who is interested in your products. Due to the type of products or services you offer, you may have more than one.

“You just need to ask the right questions to the right people, and present that information in a helpful way so your company can get to know your persona better than the back of their hand.”

Knowing your buyer persona helps you refine your product so that it will meet the needs of that customer – its as if you custom made it for them. It also helps you develop good content, no longer wasting time marketing (and spending money) on those who are not a good fit. Creating content that is designed just for them will attract new buyers. And, you’ll have an easier time hitting their pain points because you will know exactly what they are.

In addition, understanding your buyer persona also provides a common view of your customers across your entire organization, with everyone working to reach the same customers. Documenting and focusing your efforts on your buyer persona will help everyone in your company get the right visitors, the right leads, and the right customers.

According to Single Grain, using marketing personas made websites 2-5 times more effective and easier to use by targeted users. Personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14%, and conversion rates by 10%.

How do you go about gathering this info?

1. Interview or survey your current customers
2. Talk to your sales and support teams – who are the interacting with the most?
3.  Use offers, such as a white paper, to gather intelligence through forms
4.  Identify trends in the marketplace or industry

Fundamentally, here is the basic information you want to try and capture:

• Name
• Age
• Job Role/Title
• What does a typical day look like?
• What are their main sources of information?
• Goals
• What are their biggest challenges/pain points

Fill in the blanks and share what you have learned. Use this information to help your marketing and sales teams to craft messages that are specifically targeted towards your buyer persona. It’s not enough to know just who you’re trying to reach, you also have to know what they need to see to solve their biggest challenges. Be the solution and gain new customers.

7 Steps to Creating an Integrated Marketing Campaign

Putting together a marketing campaign consists more than simply creating a new piece of content, say a white paper, then sending an email to your lead list that a new white paper about XYZ is available. This is a typical drip marketing campaign – a one-size-fits-all style of marketing. It is static, does not take into consideration the interactions of your leads and does not extend to any other promotional channels.

Rather than a one-time shot at converting leads, consider the many ways you can leverage that paper, increase your reach, AND gain a higher rate of conversion.

How? By taking that one piece of content, your new offer, and turning it into an integrated marketing campaign.

Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) is the application of consistent brand messaging across both traditional and non-traditional marketing channels and using different promotional methods to reinforce each other.

A consistent brand message includes sharing the same message, the same visual identity, and the same call-to-action across all forms of communication. The integration – communicating across a number of channels - allows you to reach more of your audience with consistency in look, feel, and tone, all designed to support each other.

“To draw in their attention, deliver a strong message using multiple media sources. Repetition gives you more chances at conversion.  Hitting prospects through different channels builds a stronger awareness.” – Marketing MO

Here is how to get started building your integrated marketing campaign:

1.     Set a goal for your campaign. Examples include increase the number of visitors to your website, subscriptions to a newsletter, or even drive a set number of purchases.

2.     Know your audience. Know their demographics, their attitudes and interests.

3.     Make a list of the channels your audience uses – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Determine which channels will help you to reach your goal.

4.     Create your primary piece of content – white paper, video, slideshare. While you cannot use the same piece of content for each channel as it currently exists, pull segments of content, and visuals to create new promotion pieces for your new offer. This is where having your list of where you plan to distribute will help you determine the type of content you will need.

a.     Twitter: 140 characters. Use symbols to make your tweet easier to read and use photos to add value to your tweet.

b.     Facebook: While you can post lengthy messages, limit them from 100-119 for optimum results. Pin posts and highlight posts. Include images.

c.     LinkedIn: Share links and photos frequently.

d.     Pinterest: Use rich pins – way of adding useful information to your pins.Use taller images for more repins.

e.     Blogs: Blog consistently. Make your quotes and stats shareable.

5.     Make a list of keywords. Using the same keywords and phrases throughout the variety of your content types will help to gain traction and optimize for SEO.

6.     Use market automation tools. They streamline your efforts, save time, and enables you to test your efforts in a variety of manners. Automate your social posts, and your email campaign. Use the tools to provide new offers to your leads nurturing them to convert.

7.     Take a look at your post-campaign metrics. In addition to learning the results of your efforts – did you achieve or even exceed your goal? Use market automation tools help to understand what channels were the most effective.

Rather than continually creating one-offs, and spending an enormous amount of time creating new substantial pieces of content, start integrating. Leverage that piece of content and share across the Internet. The benefit of an integrated marketing campaign is to increase your reach. Your target audience is the same, however you are increasing the likelihood they will be exposed to this new offer by reaching them where they are present. As a result, this provides you with a greater chance of not only gaining interest but also converting. Exceed that goal, by integrating your efforts.

Need to get social? Start by doing what you do well.

You will hear over and over that it is important to have a social presence where your audience is for reach. And yes, it is very important. But when you are just getting started, in order to build momentum and to help you to stick to a plan, start doing what you do well. If you are a strong writer, begin by writing a blog. For community builders, setup a Facebook page and start enticing visitors to follow you. Or if visual is your forte, create videos for YouTube or post photos on Instagram. By doing what comes easy, you can begin to build relationships.

To use your time and effort strategically and efficiently make sure you set your strategy and goals. Know who your audience is and what is important to them. Develop a compelling message – one that will attract and engage your audience. This will be the cornerstone of all your communications. Then prioritize. Start with what is easy, then build on your marketing continually focusing on what is important to your audience and reaching them where they are. This way, everything you publicize will be associated with the same communications thread – your company message.

Here is a list of marketing functions for who need to get started on social:

1.     Writer: You love to write. You are good at writing. Start by writing a blog. Write consistently and often. Look for guest blogging opportunities. Guest blogging allows you to repurpose your content and reach new readers.

2.     Content Creator: Creating communications materials is your strength. White papers, presentations, infographics, etc., all of these can make great offers for your audience. They make great tools for your lead generation efforts.

3.     Social Communicator: Some people have an amazing sense of humor and have the ability to communicate clearly and positively with others, building an audience without much effort. If this is you, put your efforts into reaching others through social media. While there are many outlets, choose one that is easy to manage and where your audience is and start communicating.

4.     Community Organizer: Despite challenging situations, you come away with patience and grace. Your curiosity transcends difficult situations with an effort to understand and help others. Begin building a community on Facebook, Google+, or a forum on LinkedIn.

5.     Visualizer: You have an innate ability to create images and videos that outshine anything remotely close within your industry. Customize your photos and videos then share on YouTube or Instagram.

6.     Instructor: Using your knowledge and knowhow, host a webinar, or create a video that demonstrates how to use your product.

7.     Campaign Manager: Managing campaigns is your specialty. Start planning and building email campaigns as well as offers with landing pages to attract and capture leads.

8.     Project Manager: Maybe you are a behind-the-scenes kind of person who prefers to put it all together. Pull existing content and images together to create a new piece of content or added enhancements to your current website.

9.     Sales: You have the ability to sell socks with holes in them to someone who never wears socks. If this is your specialty put a sales plan together and start reaching prospects.

10.  Analytics: While it may be too early to have the traction to analyze your market performance, start by optimizing for SEO. Add keywords – one per page. Make sure your page performance for each page is high. And one item that can easily be missed – meta data. Make sure you add meta data copy for the search engines to leverage and score. Once you have been in business for a short time you will be able to establish your company’s KPI’s. From there, you will be able to put together market performance and key marketing activities reports.

Yes, creating a content plan, known as an editorial calendar will help you be more effective reaching and communicating your audience. However, don’t allow limited time and resources prevent you from laying that foundation. Since you are starting from ground zero, sometimes it’s best just to get started. So, whatever your strength – just get started. Use your efforts to begin building an audience. From there you can begin to construct your marketing plans to expand your audience reach and increase engagement with content. 

Never Underestimate the Importance of Website Usability

It is easy to get caught up on the look and feel of your new website design. Big, bold images and fun icons, with words written to emphasize the awesomeness of what you have to offer. Best website EVER.

However, if you were to test it, would it be easy to use, and easy to navigate? If you didn’t know anything about your company or product, would you get a good first impression from your home page?

55% of visitors spend fewer than 15 second on your website. And as many as one in three visitors will leave your site after their very first visit.

Now that you have them, how do you keep visitors on your website?

Usability.

What is Usability as it relates to website design?

Making sure that visitors can easily navigate your site, understand what you have to offer, and it loads easily no matter the platform.

From Great Web Design Tips, here are the most common reasons why new visitors to a site leave without exploring the site further:

1. The visitor doesn't understand what the site is about, or simply decides that it doesn't have what they were looking for;
2. The home page takes too long to download, and they give up waiting;
3. The visitor doesn't find what the link to your site promised; and
4. Your site requires an plug-in, such as Flash, to use, and they don't have, or dislike, that plugin.

Since that first impression is critical, make sure your website loads quickly and easily. Your website should:

-       load within 3 seconds or else you risk losing them, possibly to a competitor

-       be responsive – more and more people are researching and shopping via mobile. Make it easy for them to see what you have to offer.

-       be well-organized, simple, and a clean design, free from clutter. No one wants to spend time staring at a page trying to figure out where they need to go to get the information they are looking for. Besides, simpler designs are scientifically proven to be more appealing to buyers. If visitors can’t find it easily, they will leave.

-       quickly and clearly community who you are and what you have to offer – your main message - using words and phrases that are common among your industry. Words and phrases familiar to your visitors.  

-       provide simple navigation. To many menu items, and dropdowns makes it confusing and hard to figure out where to go. If you have a number of items to navigate, look to use Group Items, then use Hidden menus to provide additional navigation. Make it easy for visitors to know where they are through page headers or breadcrumbs. For every page, a primary course of action needs to be clear and obvious using CTA’s to help guide your visitor.

-       use forms that are smart. Using smart forms enables you to incrementally capture the details per contact that you are interested for each time they visit and interact with your site. Plus, asking a few simple questions each time, rather than 25 the first time, will increase the success rate of your submissions.

Attention to a few simple details, will make your website easy to understand and easy to navigate, increasing the time a visitors stays on your site. Good for you, good for your prospective customer. To see how user friendly your website is, check out this blog from Hallam, “How to perform a fast Usability Check on your website”.

The Secret Decoder’s Ring to Search Optimization

With the amount of effort it take to write content that is relevant and insightful to engage your audience, then promote it using social, the last thing you need is for your content to get lost in Google’s many-page listings black hole. And while it may feel like you are searching for a secret decoder ring, one thing you can do to help you efforts is to optimize.

Let’s get down to the basics:

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.

Where do you rank?

Did you know that 75% of people never get passed the first results page in Google? Because of that fact, the level of importance placed on SEO is very high. The effort is highly competitive. And, organic listings get more clicks than a sponsored ad listing.

Here is what you can do to improve your chances for a higher ranking:

Keywords – Make sure you are the top-ranked site for key search terms. While there are many common terms that apply to a wide-array of companies, look for keyword phrases that can narrow a search to only a few. Use those keywords appropriately within your website. For example, assign 1 keyword (or keyword phrase) per page. Make sure the keyword is a part of the page title, header and sprinkled a few times throughout your content.

Content – Note that social content now contributes to your SEO ranking. Just as you create new content for web pages – tie these together with your social promotions using the same keyword phrase. Another piece is that Google is always looking for fresh content. Refresh old content that might still be relevant with new numbers or updated facts. Provide unique insights as that can be influential and often holds greater value than a simple repeat of information. And finally, content length is important. Due to the lack of depth within a short post, a longer post will typically been seen as providing content of more worth and therefore rank higher.

Links – Don’t get penalized by Google, make sure the links within your website connect to relevant content within your site or prominent and beneficial content externally. For internal links, the number of links to a web page determines importance of that page relative to the rest of the site to Google. Therefore, pages that are of high importance to your audience should have a number of internal links from within your website promoting the page. This is something will often see with company blogs. It is always helpful to get a reputable website to promote an element within your site such as your blog.

Website – A few notes about your website. The first and one that will be the number one indicator of visitors making it to your website is page loading speed. Too many large images will slow it down. Make sure your site can load in under 3 seconds (many expect 2 seconds or less). Once they get to your site make sure it is easy to understand and navigate. They will spend more time on your site, which helps your Google ranking. When people are on your website for a period of time, Google will know the information you are providing is relevant, and therefore helpful.

Think of optimization as the maintenance piece of content development. Without it, your content will get lost and quit working (to drive traffic and engage). With regular, proactive maintenance, your content will be seen, be helpful, and turn visitors into customers.