10:11am
In today’s world people are bombarded with emails, texts, ads, and social posts all fighting for eyeballs, attention, clicks and ultimately dollars. Here is how to effectively find your audience and get them to engage with you.
First you must look inward. This one is the most important and for some reason also the most overlooked. Everyone and everything has a brand. Your brand is not just visual like your logo or colors (which is a part of it) but its everything you do. It’s what your office looks like, how you answer the phone, who is in your photos, and even how much your price is.
What do you do? Why do people care? Why would someone buy from you when they can buy from anyone? You MUST have an angle and own it. You can’t tell people you have great customer service and wait a week to return emails.
Talk like you really talk. Act like you really act. People do business or buy from people they like and can connect with. Constantly acting like someone or something else is not only stressful but people see through it.
We have all been there, where we see an ad or commercial that seems to talk directly to us. We come away ready to just give our money away for that thing that has been created JUST for me. That type of marketing comes from personas. Develop your core personas and talk directly to them. Try to understand them, what they care about and have a conversation with them. Most companies try to talk to every person who would buy their product. Have you ever been networking event and tried to talk to everyone in the room? If you did were you having real conversation or get to know that person at all? You probably came home with a pocket full of business cards and can’t remember who was who. Guess what? They don’t remember you either.
Then ask yourself the big question. Does my core message match what my personas care about?
Now you ask “Ok we have our core message and we know who to talk too. Now how do we get them to buy?”
Wrong question.
The slower you go, the faster you will get there.
Let me explain.
I fully understand the need to sell a few products quickly to either have a proof of concept or generate some quick funds. But, that is what we call short money. Do you want to sell a few products or build a company? If you want to build a long term sustainable company you need to slow down and game plan.
Game planning should be attacked in phases:
Attention/Awareness (phase 1). No one knows who you are yet. This is where you introduce your brand to the world. Example: Video and banner advertising with video and digital ads through programmatic advertising.
Interest/Desire (Phase 2) Now that you have gain some attention, you focus on text based ads, SEO, and develop a lead building campaign through content marketing. Implement tracking and marketing automaton.
Acquisition (Phase 3) Re-marketing paid advertising, direct email and content marketing based on interests.
Retention (Phase 4) Continue to update current user base through email marketing and social media channels.
Talk about what people are talking about and develop a content marketing strategy. When you know who you know who you, you are authentic in your message, and you are talking to your audience…content marketing is EASY.
Speak, write, blog, tweet, make videos, whatever. When you build an audience, you don’t have to buy people’s attention. They give it to you. If they care about what you have to say, they will care about what you have to sell.