If You Market It, They Will Come (But Only if You Do it Right)
At one time or another we’ve all fallen into the trap of believing, “If you market, they will come”. Just doing marketing of any kind doesn’t necessarily translate into sales, leaving many business owners and marketers feeling frustrated when their marketing efforts fail to achieve the result they had hoped for. Unlike in the classic film Field of Dreams, simply building a marketing presence for your business or product is not enough to make the customers come flocking to your door. To really get the customers you want, you have to make sure they can find you, and that when they do, you need to have what they are looking for.
Outbound Marketing vs Inbound Marketing
Armed with the power of online search, today’s consumers are much more demanding (and in control of their purchase process) than those of previous decades. Once recent survey estimated that “81% of shoppers research their product online before purchasing".1 While the amount of time spent researching can vary, many people don’t spend too long deliberating.
What does this mean for businesses looking to market their products and services? It means that they need to get in front of prospects fast and early, when they’re just starting their research. If your company isn’t easily findable when someone is searching for what it is that you offer, then you won’t even be considered as an option. But how do you make sure prospects can find you? By moving away from traditional “outbound marketing” toward what is commonly called “inbound marketing”.
According to HubSpot, “outbound marketing includes activities such as trade shows, seminar series and cold calling. It is costly and the ROI is much lower than inbound marketing.”2 While outbound marketing is an essential component of marketing strategy, it should not be your primary source of lead generation. COVID-19 has demonstrated the danger of placing too many eggs in the traditional outbound marketing basket as we’ve all had to pivot quickly to meet evolving consumer needs and the new channels that we can access them through.
In contrast, “inbound marketing is a strategy where you create content or social media tactics that spread brand awareness so people learn about you, might go to your website for information, and then purchase or show interest in your product.”2 Essentially, when you employ inbound marketing tactics, you are helping your ideal customers find you, instead of spending your precious time trying to locate and convert people who may, or may not be interested in what you have to offer.
But how do you know who your ideal customers are? And how do you know where they’ll be, and what they’re looking for? The answer is simple – data.
Leveraging Data
One of keys to successful inbound marketing (and really any marketing), is good data. Quality data should be at the root of every step of your marketing journey, from constructing a profile of your ideal prospect, to guiding the development of content that will not only help those prospects find you, but eventually convert them into loyal customers.
For instance, let’s say you own a company that makes ultrasound machines for veterinary practices. You do your research and discover that your target audience is largely female and between the ages of 29-45. You do a bit more research to discover that “diagnostic ultrasound” is a popular search term on Google. You now possess 2 pieces of very useful knowledge – what your target audience looks like and what they are looking for. Since you know this information, you can now modify your website, and inbound strategy to better suit your ideal audience and include the exact words they are looking for so you will be more likely to show up in the search results.
But it’s not just the quality of the data that matters - the quantity is important too. The more data you have, the better you will be able to identify and guide your prospects. Luckily, with the big shift toward digital marketing, there are many sources of data currently available to marketers (so many, in fact, that we will explore them further in a future post), which means you don’t have to go far to get your hands on it.
Once you’ve captured your data, and used those analytical insights to learn more about capturing the attention of your prospect, you can then focus on making sure you have the content that not only makes them stay, but keeps them coming back for more.
Creating Content that Converts
While optimizing your website to help prospects find you is a piece of the content optimization puzzle, it’s not all of it. There are many other ways to develop and leverage content that will help inspire a deeper connection with people that will ideally result in a converting your prospects into customers.
Let’s revisit our veterinary ultrasound equipment example. Let’s say you have a “Contact Us” form on your website, and you notice that you get a lot of questions about portable systems. This data gives you some insight into the needs of your prospects, which in this case, is a desire that your prospect has to know more about the benefits, and potential drawbacks, of portable ultrasound systems. Therefore, you should develop a piece of content that offers a comparison between mobile and non-mobile, whether it is a free educational webinar, a simple infographic, or perhaps a short eBook.
Test your current inbound marketing expertise with this free checklist.
By recognizing the needs of your potential customers, and providing this helpful information, you are fostering a relationship and positioning yourself as an expert resource, so that even if they are not ready to purchase yet, you will be top of mind when they are.
Making Marketing Work for You
Interrupting people with your marketing messaging is not the way customers want to interact with you, and in 2020, they hold the power. Instead, engage with prospects where there want to have a conversation, and leverage inbound marketing to create value and form relationships that differentiate your brand and build loyalty.
If you are interested in getting started with inbound marketing, but aren’t quite sure where to start, we are here to help. Using a foundational approach, Red Brick Partners helps provide you with the infrastructure needed to support long-term success. Whether you’re just getting started, or need to re-invigorate your current marketing strategy, we can work with you the get the results you want.
Schedule your free consultation here and find out what Red Brick Partners can do for you.
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References:
1. GE Shopper Research Study. 2019. https://transaction.agency/ecommerce-statistics/81-of-shoppers-research-their-product-online-before-purchasing/
2. Halligan, Brian. “Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing”. Hubspot, 2019. https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/2989/inbound-marketing-vs-outbound-marketing.aspx