Curious what the top priority for marketing professionals is around the world? Take a guess… Still not sure? We’ll let you in on a little secret. The answer is converting contacts and leads into customers! In North America alone, 77% of marketing professionals feel this is their biggest priority, aside from growing traffic to their website, which supports their top priority. But, before we can even attain the right contacts and leads and turn them into valued customers, you will need a dedicated, scalable strategy in place to achieve these goals and set you apart from the competition. Employing the right attraction marketing formula will help you stand out in an ever-changing and demanding market.
A strategy is “a method or plan chosen to bring about the desired future, such as the achievement of a goal or solution to a problem.” Within this definition lies the answer and connection to the attraction marketing formula. “Achievement of a goal or solution to a problem.” Inbound Marketing is all about helping your customers wants and needs their problems and concerns. When a business does not have a strong strategy in place, as you can tell, it will not be successful and will rely mainly on luck. Luck is not something we typically want to rely on as marketing professionals but can be an added bonus if such instances occur.
Let’s dive in a little deeper about the attraction phase of the Inbound marketing methodology and how it will inform your marketing strategies.
Before you start and execute anything for your business, you will need to create a strategy. This will require time and research. You will need to map out your overall goals, services, benefits for you and your ideal customers. You want to give a thorough analysis and think in reverse. Why would your customers come to you? What are their needs? What are they looking for? Who is even my ideal customer? How can my service benefit them? These are the questions you want to ask yourself when creating your strategy. Keep in mind, this will be a team effort. You will want to work with your sales team, along with anyone else that lay hands on projects consistently.
This is also where you will need to create your ideal Buyer Personas. These are going to be your target audiences. Buyer personas allow you to better match your product or service to your customer’s demands and needs and will help you create a message that will speak directly to them. As each customer will ultimately have different objectives and obstacles, buyer personas are critical. Typically, you should start by creating three target personas. If you want to create more, then, by all means, go for it, but start with three and see where you stand. This will be the foundation of your strategy and will help you conceptualize your next steps in the process of figuring out your endpoint.
Check out more ways to create the buyer personas that match your customers.
After developing your three personas, you’re now able to see their pains and gains as a business decision maker. So what’s next? How can we create an attraction marketing formula to bring in new leads and solve their problems? The answer is simpler than you think. By utilizing Inbound marketing efforts, you’re able to increase the number of quality leads that come in for your business. There are three main phases to the Inbound methodology. Attract, Convert, and Delight. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s focus on the attraction phase.
In the attraction phase of the Inbound methodology, you bring your audience in with dedicated content, whether it be written or through video. Content is still king, and by utilizing content, you are taking your ideal customer that is searching for solutions to their pains on what is called a buyer’s journey. The beginning of the journey is called the attraction phase. With clever titles, quality content, and SEO sprinkled throughout your piece, you will help your reader find your content so they can understand how to solve their problems. Keep in mind not to offer your service right off the bat. You want to present other viable solutions that could help them and in the process, hint your service near the end of the article. This is where the reader enters the awareness stage. They are now aware of their problems and the solutions that follow, leading into what is called the consideration phase.
Let’s not forget one of the main factors to getting your content seen by the right business decision makers, and that’s through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is all about matching specific keywords from what others in your industry may be searching for in order to help your content rank in the neverending pool of information online. When someone searches for example “Developing a strategy that works”, that it’s can become a keyword! You need to do a little research and find out the most common keywords being used for your industry, but once you compile a list of highly ranked keywords and spread them throughout your content piece, the odds of your content becoming found through search engines just increased threefold. Enhancing your content with the right SEO will help your message get to more people and will help your search engine position. This means more traffic to your page.
The SEO-enhance content should also be a personal message and not just sound like boilerplate language. This will help you better connect with your customers and show them how your product or service will best meet their needs. Show them how your product or service will fit into their life and make it better.
In addition to being personable, you should also include some hard data to back up your claims for your product or service. Keep this data up-to-date and correct. Be open and honest with customers, letting them know the benefits, but don’t over promise.
This healthy mix of personable and factual will help the customer feel more connected to the brand, but will also help answer any questions they might have. Content built using attraction marketing should make your company more relatable and also show the customer who your product or service will enhance their lives.
At the end of the day, it’s critical to give customers content that they need, when they need it. Quality content will increase their interest in your offer and will build brand recognition. This will ultimately help with better lead generation: if you deliver valuable content, you are building a stronger relationship with leads at the beginning of the buyer’s journey. Then, when they’re ready to buy, you’ll be top of mind.
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As you present quality, applicable content to your audience, you want to make sure you add what is called a call-to-action (CTA) at the bottom of your written piece. This is where your reader might want to learn more about your service, or what else you have to say about their topic of interest. CTA’s can be in the form of receiving a personal email address, or downloadable content such as an eBook. It’s an exchange between you and the potential customer with personal information for a service piece to benefit both parties. Once you receive that solid piece of information from them, you now just receive that quality lead!
Finding the right platform will help you better share your message with the customer. Make sure your content offers answers to frequently asked questions and creates an emotional attraction to the story. From there, you’ll want to create separate strategies when it comes to promoting on different digital platforms. There are many different platforms you can utilize in this digital era for content marketing, here are a few:
Each platform has its own attraction marketing formula. With social media, you want to utilize LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Each has their own special strength to meet the needs of your marketing strategies. Once you figure that out and pick the platforms that are best for you, your content will skyrocket with traffic.
Instagram, for instance, is a great platform to deliver your message through videos using the app’s story feature. For long-form pieces with more dense content, LinkedIn and blog posts are useful. Email is perfect for sending a targeted message right to your customer. Each has their own special strength and once you figure that out, your content will skyrocket with traffic.
Before you do anything, find out who your ideal customers are. Figure out what their pains and gains are, and what is the best form to reach them. Ask yourself questions and collaborate with your team, and other departments. The more you know about your customer, the better your written pieces will become. Creating a strategy and building the attraction marketing formula that works for you is just the beginning of your own marketing journey so take the time to strategize correctly so that you are presenting correct, applicable information to your ideal customer and you will soon see the benefits from your hard work and research. Capitalize on SEO and understand the in’s and out’s. If your strategy is strong, everything will follow through correctly down the line. You want a strong, scalable marketing strategy that will get you the quality leads you are looking for.
There are a lot of moving pieces to create that ideal marketing strategy, let alone executing that strategy. The majority of companies struggle with hiring a writer, an editor, a web producer, a search engine expert, and a marketer when they are just starting out or even been around for a minute. It can be very costly if you outsource and if it isn’t costly, then you probably aren’t receiving a quality strategy or written piece. Fortunately, there is a viable solution. We at Responsify are an all-in-one platform solution to your strategy and content marketing needs. We help businesses attain quality leads through quality content, helping bridge the gap between your ideal buyer and your company.
If you would like to learn more about the next steps in the Inbound marketing methodology and how we can help you attain quality leads, schedule a 1-on-1 strategy session today with one of our specialists!