A lot of things need to be in place for a digital marketing strategy to perform effectively. A clear understanding of your goals, audience, and tools at your disposal. A solid platform on which to launch your campaign. Lots and lots of good content.
There are plenty of articles out there that will outline exactly what you need and how to get it, but there are also certain issues that can pop up. Common problems that, if ignored, can sink a digital campaign before it even starts.
Here are three such issues and how you can tackle them up front, before you start investing in your digital marketing efforts.
If Your Website Gets Hit By a Google Penalty
Google rankings are the currency of digital marketing. If you want to drive more traffic to your website and generate more leads online, you need to rank in Google for certain keywords.
In some cases, however, it can be difficult to rank in Google because of what the search engine sees as unforgivable problems with your website. When this happens, your site can be penalized – tagged as “low quality” and held back in the rankings.
The most common penalties are for low quality or “thin” content (meaning not enough text on the page or duplicate content on your pages), and bad backlinks. If you are getting links from low quality websites, or if you hired an SEO firm in the past that didn’t do good work, this can be a problem.
An Unclear or too General Message
Online you can reach anyone, but that doesn’t mean you should try to reach everyone. A good marketing message is targeted and focused on the specific audience that you know you want to do business with.
While your messaging can be broad and general enough target a wide swath of prospects, there should be specific pages on the site that speak to each of your target personas. eBooks and white papers should be written strictly for personas, and possibly only a single problem or question those personas might have. The more specific you get, the better your campaign will be.
Too Much Content, Not Enough Promotion
The last problem sounds like a good one to have, but it can hurt your campaign as much as any of the others. I’ve run across many sites that were loaded with content. eBooks, white papers, case studies, blog posts – more content than the companies knew what to do with.
And that was the problem. They had content but no idea what to do with it, and as a result, they weren’t seeing more leads. Worse, they had invested in the content and were discouraged that this kind of marketing just didn’t work.
For every hour spent writing or developing content, there should be at least one hour spent promoting that piece. It’s all about quality over quantity – ensure you have a solid piece of content you can promote broadly and then build a promotional campaign that will generate as many leads as possible from that content piece.
Is Your Website Marketing Ready?
If you’re ready to invest in digital marketing or are getting ready to explore the possibility, the first step should be to determine if your site is ready for a full scale marketing campaign. Download our eBook below and learn what it will take to get marketing ready and how you can make small changes to put yourself in a position to succeed.
How many times have you received a promotional email from a company trying to sell you something?
How often do you actually care?
More often than not, these promotional emails sink or swim based on pure luck. Is the prospect in the frame of mind to discuss what’s being sold? If not, then the email gets deleted, or worse, flagged a spam.
But what if I told you that your own promotional emails (and everything else you publish) can be more effective at capturing attention – not only from cold prospects via email, but from a broader audience of prospects?
The truth is that outbound communications don’t have to fail. They fail because they often go out in a vacuum, ignoring the real needs of the people receiving them.
They are generic. Boring. Often highly aggressive.
And frankly, 99% of people just don’t care.
What they do care about are the problems that keep them up at night – the potential catastrophes faced in their business every single day and the ongoing issues that they just can’t figure out.
The kind of stuff that you are an expert at solving.
That’s where inbound marketing comes in.
The Role of Inbound Marketing in Your Company
Inbound marketing is a buzz word – so much so that most companies wave it away without thinking. It’s just another bit of jargon thrown about by agencies and consultants trying to land new business.
Marketing is marketing…right?
To some degree, you’re right. Inbound marketing is overused as much as “SEO” and “Brand Strategy” – it’s about capturing attention more than driving results.
But the idea behind inbound marketing isn’t buzzy. It’s highly effective – so much so that it frequently outpaces traditional marketing and sales tactics by as much as 60% when it comes to straight ROI.
A well-executed inbound campaign can drive traffic, increase lead conversion rates, and generate more sales for your business. The trick is that first part – making sure it’s well executed.
So, why is inbound so effective?
There are three reasons:
- It addresses the core concerns of your prospects instead of the USP of your product or service.
- It builds a relationship with people both during and ahead of the sales cycle.
- It provides real value to people without the expectation of sale. You’re being a good digital citizen and your reputation benefits accordingly.
Unless you have a six-figure advertising budget, it’s to the point that you can’t really promote a business online without some elements of inbound marketing in place. And that’s a good thing, because it means better relationships with the people you want to do business with.
How to Build a Successful Inbound Marketing Campaign
Inbound works, but it’s not automatic. There’s a reason not everyone reports success with their campaigns – they aren’t always setup to be successful.
What’s missing from those failed campaigns?
- A clear understanding of the target audience and their needs
- Clearly defined language to communicate an understanding of those needs
- A well optimized website to capture attention and information from prospects
- Educational content in the form of both readily accessible and downloadable materials
- A well-defined followup procedure for nurturing new prospects
Without these five things, inbound marketing will fail. Period.
To ensure they work for your business, here are some of the specific things you should know and have built before you start heavily investing in new traffic to your website:
- Who are the top 3 personas you are targeting. More specifically, where do they live, what role do they hold in a company, what factors influence their decisions? How much information do they already have and what will they need from you? What are their most common questions?
- What are the specific words people use to describe their problems? Are there industry terms you should be sure to recognize? Common complaints you hear in the sales process? Spend time on industry blogs and forums to see how your target audience discusses these problems. Do some very real research here.
- Is your website setup for success? This means a mobile responsive design that works well on tablets and phones, high quality images, clearly laid out content that answers key questions, and downloadable offers and blog posts to educate visitors.
- Do you have eBooks, white papers, checklists, or webinars on your website that require a form to access? Provide high value content at the top of the marketing funnel to capture between 100-150% more of your traffic as leads.
- What do you do after someone fills out a form or calls you? Do they receive followup emails? If not, do you have a followup call procedure?
It’s common not to know the answers to a lot of these questions, even if you’ve been working in your industry for years. It’s also very easy to assume you know the answers only to find that things have changed over time to the point that your prospects are having completely different conversations than you might expect.
The bottom line is that, by doing the research and preparing the necessary foundational pieces in advance, you can target your audience more accurately and build an inbound marketing campaign that succeeds.
Ready to take the next step but not sure where to start? Download our eBook, 17 Things to Check Before Your Website is Marketing Ready and learn what might be missing from your website and marketing collateral to support an inbound campaign.
The most critical pages on your business website are the ones that tell visitors what your company can offer.
When creating the content for these pages, many people get intimidated and often resort to drab writing that turns readers off.
If done correctly, these pages allow you to connect with visitors, ultimately converting readers into customers.
Let’s see how to do it right.
Be Clear First, Creative Second
Some people choose to create a single page for products and services, while others opt for separate pages. In any case, it’s vital to balance clarity and creativity throughout.
Having a strong brand voice is important. You can let it shine through in the names of your products and services.
However, your first priority is to give visitors a crystal-clear message of what you offer.
This starts with the page titles.
Picking strategic titles like ‘What We Offer’ is more focused than a wide term like ‘Marketing Services’.
While showing your brand personality is a good idea, using commonly-used terms allows people to quickly understand your content.
Some keyword research will help you find commonly-searched words to use in your page titles. This will help your readers find you and also give you a little SEO boost!
Find a happy medium between common and creative, depending on your brand and audience.
Open With Your Elevator Pitch
When someone visits your services page, they’ll start reading the list and category headings to see if anything interests them. If they find something, they’ll stick around to dig deeper.
To hook them straight away, use this:
At the top of your products and services page, write a short and sweet summary of what you offer prospective clients. Focus on their pain points and explain how your company can solve them.
This is your opportunity to stand out from the pack and let the customer know why you are the answer to their problems.
Show Them You Can Be Trusted
Product pages are about landing the sale, while service pages are about getting the lead.
Here’s what they have in common:
Both pages need you to build trust between your company and prospective customers.
To do this, you should include three things after your ‘Elevator Pitch’.
- Explain who your ideal client is. This will allow readers a chance to identify with some of the traits to find a connection with your brand.
2) Use testimonials from past clients and satisfied customers.
But here’s the thing about testimonials.
No matter how real the story is, some risk coming off as fabricated or downright fake. Ensure your examples use full names and likeable people. This will boost credibility and make it easier for people to relate.
- Be transparent with pricing.
If people can’t find prices for your products or services, they most likely won’t contact you to find out. They’ll simply leave your site and search for a competitor.
Simple & Solid Structure
The last thing you want to do is scare readers off with a confusing array of options. Make it easy for prospective buyers to find their way around with a clear and simple design.
The descriptions of your products or services are a major factor in your sales volume. But keep them concise.
All you need is:
- The most important benefits;
- The features that enable these benefits;
- Frequently asked questions about it;
- Any unique characteristics the reader may not know about.
Include a Strong Call-to-Action
Your products and services pages present a natural conversion opportunity.
After reading your irresistible elevator pitch followed by your testimonials and pricing transparency, the prospective customer will know two things:
- You have the answer to their troubles.
- You will deliver top quality at a price they can afford.
This is the perfect chance for you to persuade visitors to take the next step.
Include a clickable button such as ‘Get a Quote’ or ‘Contact Us Now’ at the bottom of the page.
The Thing People Really Care About It
If you want to make sales from your website, you should treat it as an interactive salesperson. However, all efforts must be customer-centric.
But here’s what many people don’t realize:
Customers don’t want to read a list of features. What they care about most is finding answers to their problems.
Focus on the benefits to people and how the products and services you offer will benefit their lives.
Your biggest benefits need to be all over your website, on every single page! Whether it’s free express shipping or hands-on customer service, make sure it’s obvious.
Anything that sets you apart from the competition should be made loud and clear.
By stating your unique sales proposition, you can grab the readers’ interest, which will leave them in no doubt that you are the right choice.
This isn’t your first rodeo. You know your business and you know your customers, so why is that every article about digital or inbound marketing starts with what seems like a no brainer?
Define your ideal customer persona
You’ve been told to build these persona profiles time and again, but for most small business owners, it feels redundant. But it doesn’t have to be. Sure, writing a short description of your ideal customer doesn’t do much, unless you are training new sales and marketing professionals, but what about an in-depth persona profile that really gets to the heart of what the people you want on your website actually need?
That’s why this is so important. Let’s take a closer look at what a persona is, and more importantly, how to write content that targets them effectively.
The Definition of an Inbound Marketing Persona
An inbound marketing persona is an avatar of sorts. It’s a high level “bucket” that captures everything that matters about the ideal customer you want to engage with.
More importantly, it puts a name and a face to that avatar, building out a fictional character who can interact with your brand.
Why is this so important?
Because it vastly improves the quality of the content you produce. Think about how differently you talk on a conference call with eight other people vs a quick call to a good friend or a family member. You open up, you relax, you know your audience and you stop being so careful.
The biggest problem with poor performing marketing campaigns is that they play it safe. They use a scattershot approach that never commits. It’s written for everyone, and as such it’s written for no one.
The solution is to write for one person – the ideal persona you’ve defined who should be being your content.
This doesn’t need to be a brain burning exercise, either. A good inbound marketing persona is short – no more than a page and a half – and touches only shortly on background and demographics. The heart of what you need to know is how this person asks questions and how they get answers to those questions.
Here’s a summary of what a good persona profile looks like:
- Background – Who is this person. Where do they live, how old are they, do they have children, what are their life goals and major job duties.
- Primary Concerns – What are the biggest problems and concerns that keep this prospect up at night? Your sales team is a gold mine for these types of problems and questions.
- Content Desired – What kind of content are they most likely to want? Again, your sales team can help here, but so too can your competitors who are likely already creating some of it.
- Decision Making Influence – Can this persona make a buying decision? If not, what influence do they have?
- Where Does This Person Gather News? – What websites, magazines, social media sites, and forums does this person visit to gather information and answer their questions?
- When Do They Consider What You Offer? – When does what you offer cross their mind? It’s not a problem if it doesn’t at all, but it’s important to know that now, so you can create content that educates them.
- What Industry Knowledge Do They Have? – Will jargon work or do you need to take a few steps back to explain what you provide and why?
- What Are the Most Common Objections? – From a sales perspective, what kind of push back do they most commonly give?
It seems like a lot, but you likely already know 75% of this. It just hasn’t been written down before. And more likely than not, you’ve mixed and matched what you know about the different personas your company has.
Yes, I said personas.
The average small business has at least two inbound marketing personas and as many as five. The decision makers you target, verticals you work within, industries you sell to, and people you engage with on a regular basis likely cross a spectrum of different life stages and positions.
Your marketing should do the same.
Creating Content that Targets People Based on Inbound Marketing Persona
Once you know the answers to the eight questions above, the rest gets a lot easier. Instead of wondering what types of blog posts or emails could possibly be interesting to these people, you now have lists of:
- Their most pressing problems and questions
- The places they go to find answers to these issues
- The types of content they look for to answer them
- The objections they make to your sales team
That’s a whole lot of information, and without doing any additional research, you should have a half dozen or more content ideas. But we can go deeper. Here are three steps that get to the heart of what these people want:
- Let’s see what other people are publishing
Step one is to do a bit of light research. There are some very powerful free tools out there that will help us understand:
- Which keywords people are searching for – AHREFs, SEMRush and Moz.com all offer keyword search tools, or you can go to Google AdWords Keyword Planner for their ad data. Watch our short video about how to get this data.
- What competitors are writing about – These same tools can give you an idea of what your competitors are writing about and which topics are working best. Watch the video here.
- What competitors are advertising for – Similarly, you can pull a list of what keywords your competitors are paying money to show up for in Google. Watch the video here.
- The most shared content on these topics – Finally, what are people sharing and engaging with in social media. BuzzSumo is a great tool for this.
With this information, we now know the top 10-15 topics related to your persona’s problem. If you wrote responses to all of these topics, you’d be set right there, but more likely than not, you’ll have new ideas to go with them.
- Build at least three content pillars
If you use Hubspot, open the Content Strategy tool. If not, you can do this in a mindmap or on a piece of paper. We’re going to build Content Pillars that help to structure the campaign.
What is a content pillar? It’s a central focal point around which we can write four or more pieces of content that relate to the key concerns of our persona.
For example, if you are a startup offering real estate search services to millennials on their smart phones, you know that they have questions around things like how to get a mortgage, how to evaluate neighborhoods, what type of real estate agent to work with, and similar questions about buying and moving into a home. If your persona is a 31-year-old millennial professional who has been married for two years and is ready to move to the suburbs and start a family, your first content pillar could be:
Neighborhood Selection
This content cluster will deal exclusively with choosing the right neighborhood based on a number of important questions that our inbound marketing persona may not have thought of yet. Related topics could include:
- Amenities to look for when moving to the suburbs
- Common questions about the suburbs for city-dwellers
- How to evaluate schools before buying a home
- Does it cost more to live near mass transit?
- Suburb moving guide for New York City/Los Angeles/Chicago/Houston, etc.
These topics all relate to our core content cluster and provide value to the reader who may not have lived in a suburb since high school (or never if they grew in the city).
- Build content around singular actions
Good inbound marketing content is actionable and designed to help your visitors. It should certainly lead them to your products and services, showcasing items that you want them to engage with – whether an app download, a software demo, or a contact form – but that is not the primary goal.
To ensure your content meets these minimum requirements and speaks to the needs of your audience, write content that solves at least one problem and drives them to take a singular action. Want to do more? Great. But don’t write short, high level information they could find on a dozen other websites and then link to your consultation form. It won’t work.
Engaging with Inbound Marketing Prospects to Drive Sales
Content is all fine and good, but the goal here is to make sales, right?
It’s a fine line we walk when building a content strategy. It needs to be actionable, interesting, and educational, but no matter how much people like that content, if it doesn’t drive action, it’s hard to justify the time or money spent.
That’s why inbound marketing persona identification and optimization is so important. Your personas will allow you to speak directly to the core needs of your target audience, address their key problems and concerns, and provide a viable solution they will be more eager to engage with. Generic, high level sales speak may feel like a better use of these resources, but it’s instantly forgettable. Be an authority who is legitimately in it to help and you’ll drive much better results for your prospects.
In the last few years, there’s been a rush by marketers and marketing product creators alike to tell people that it’s gotten a lot easier. Just launch a blog! Post to social media every day! Give people real value and they’ll find you!
It’s a compelling message. If you shift gears from sell, sell, sell to help, help, help, people will find you instead of you having to track them down. And it works. Inbound marketing and content-driven campaigns based on helping people solve problems rather than selling them on features and scarcity is both a cost effective and efficient way to improve sales in most industries.
But what the excited marketing crowd doesn’t always mention is that creating the content, building the blog, and posting to the major social media channels is not enough on its own. In fact, by itself, content production can be a black hole into which you throw your marketing budget. Without promotion of that content, it won’t do a whole heck of a lot unless you get lucky. And the last thing you want as a business owner is to rely on luck.
So once you get past what seems like the hard part – actually sitting down and writing all that content or hiring someone to do it at exorbitant expense – how do you get people to read it, click, and interact with it so you can get your money’s worth out of it?
The Three Fundamentals of Content Promotion
When it comes to inbound marketing, a lot of the most effective tactics come back to things you’ve been doing for years. The difference now is that instead of publishing an ad that touts the newest features of your software, you’re writing an article about software selection and publishing ads to promote that article. It’s only a slight paradigm shift, but it trips up a lot of people.
Here are three fundamentals of content promotion for an inbound campaign and why they differ so much from what you may already be doing:
- Where Is Your Audience? – Your audience is different from most other companies. So you need to evaluate target personas and determine exactly where they spend time, what type of content they consume, and then focus your energies there. Why invest time and money in Facebook as a software company targeting accountants if your target audience spends no time on Facebook during work hours?
- Where are Your Influencers? – Every industry has a number of key influencers. These are the men and women who know their stuff inside and out and speak out on it. They are the speakers at your industry conferences, the by-lines on industry think pieces, and the people whose books you have on your shelves. Find them and do your best to engage with them. By engaging with people who the industry respects, you can grow your audience as they help to share your content.
- Are You Distributing? – Finally, there is the very real, somewhat tedious, and incredibly effective process of distributing content. A brilliant blog post remains anonymous until people can actually find it, and Google won’t help unless there are other sites linking to it and readers engaging with it. Create a list of viable channels through which to syndicate your content, blogs where you can ask for links, and people who can share on your behalf. This is a time consuming process – usually about twice as long per piece as it takes to produce that piece. Budget for it in advance.
Content marketing isn’t quite as easy as some make it out to be. But here’s the good part – where you can rest easier to some degree.
Once you’ve done the three things above – identified your audience, thought leaders, competitors, and distribution channels – you can create a system to automate a lot of this. A good promotion checklist with a list of everything that needs to be done as soon as a new blog post goes up, for example, can be executed by a marketing coordinator or intern instead of a high priced marketing agency or the writer.
The key is to take the necessary time to build out the information you need, build a pipeline for promoting your content, and then ensure you do it every single time. Only then will you start to see maximum return on your content marketing investment
Inbound marketing drives innovation and success at all levels of business, but like all technology-driven marketing practices, it continues to evolve. The ability to stay at the head of the curve, implementing the newest tactics and adjusting your strategy accordingly will keep you atop your competitors in 2018 and beyond.
Let’s take a closer look at the areas that your business should be focused on most in 2018 to adhere to best practices for inbound marketing.
Persona Development as a Foundational Tool
Persona identification is not new. It’s one of the oldest pillars of a good marketing campaign and is more important than ever for small businesses using technology to target narrow streams of new traffic. But technology is making it increasingly possible to use your persona targeting efforts to improve everything from the language in your nurturing emails to the targeting on your landing pages and blog posts.
- Identifying Key Channels Based on Personas – Where are your target users spending their time online? Forums, social media channels and groups, websites, and newsletters – knowing these things can provide key insights into the content they want and the thought leaders they trust.
- Building Thought Leader Profiles – In addition to your persona profiles, you can now generate thought leader profiles that illustrate the types of content you should create, the medium and channels through which to deliver those insights, and the types of resources you can build to help your audience.
- Optimizing Content Based on User Search Intent – Google is getting better at understanding what a user wants when they search for something, and if your site doesn’t provide it, you’ll rank lower. Persona development allows greater insight into that search intent so you can update existing content and create new content to meet it.
By understanding who your target audience consists of and the language they use to describe their problems you can upgrade your messaging at almost every level – on your website, in your marketing materials, and even in person.
Media Matters More Than Ever
I’m not the first person to tell small business owners that they need to invest in media to support written content, but in 2018, it matters more than ever before. People can retain 65% of what they see in a relevant image after three days, compared to just 10% when they hear something, and in 2017 video content represented more than 74% of all internet traffic. Even more telling, according to an Animoto survey, four times as many consumers would prefer to watch a video than read an article.
People are visual creatures and technology has finally reached the point at which we can consume media in the way that best fits that nature. Video is more compact and Internet access is faster than ever. Tools like Canva, Venngage and Designrr are inexpensive and make it possible for even a small business to build visual content without a designer. Whether it’s creation of custom image headers for use on social media, visualizations of data in your articles, or slideshare and video versions of your written content, media matters and should be top of mind in your marketing efforts.
SEO Is a Living, Breathing Organism
Search engine optimization has evolved in ways that few could have expected, even just a few years ago. When Google launched, it measured dozens of factors on a static basis. Smart marketers were able to game that system quickly, and they kept ahead of the curve for more than 15 years, updating their tactics as Google announced and implemented new algorithm changes.
In the last two years, this has changed. In 2016, for example, Google conducted 9,800 live traffic experiments and more than 130,000 search quality tests, resulting in 1,653 search changes and 11 major algorithm changes. In 2017, there were 12 major algorithm changes and Moz’s Mozcast measurement of search volatility was routinely at or above 90-100. The search engine is a living, breathing thing now – constantly updating and revising its measurement of your site and its value based on thousands of known and unknown factors.
Yes, links matter, but you can’t manipulate the system in the way you once could. Even the best SEOs have shifted their focus to what matters most – quality content delivered to answer questions and address search intent. What matters now?
- Site quality and user experience
- Content quality and frequency
- The ability of your site to address the questions and concerns of your visitors
The stuff that always should have mattered – and as the search engines improve their ability to scan your site and determine if it is effectively addressing these concerns, those technical factors will matter less and less.
What can you do? It’s simple. Produce quality content, fix problems on your site, and be actively engaged with users to ensure your content addresses their questions. Look for red flags like high bounce rates, drops in the number of new backlinks to your content, or insufficient engagement from your audience.
Staying Ahead of the Curve in 2018 and Beyond
Content-driven marketing is the core of most B2B marketing departments, but it cannot rely on the same old tactics year to year. Like the search engines and user media preferences, these best practices will only continue to evolve, and your efforts need to keep up.
Concerned your website isn’t ready for an investment in marketing due to these best practices? Download our free guide, 17 Tips to Ensure Your Website is Marketing Ready, and learn what you can do to maximize your marketing investment and generate real ROI.
A successful internet marketing campaign has a lot of pieces – almost too many to easily convey to stakeholders what’s being done. In my previous job, we created a long and detailed monthly report that would break down most of what we did, but generally from the perspective of the results we were trying to generate.
There were plenty of bits and pieces that would get buried in the data and while I strongly encouraged team members to elaborate, there was no way to consistently report on all of it every single month.
To me this didn’t matter. The clients wanted to know what they were paying for, but more importantly, they wanted to know that what they were paying for was working. That they were investing in a sound product and getting a good return on that investment. The reporting showed what they were getting back from their investment (or not getting back in a handful of rare cases), and it succeeded for that reason.
So it’s not surprising to me that I get certain questions more than others – people wondering why their current investments aren’t working the way they expect them to. My new clients come to me with any number of concerns – the lack of results from a previous SEO engagement, the cost of content, the potential (or lack thereof) of a social media marketing campaign, and biggest of all, the massive cost and often small return of an advertising campaign.
The Growing Cost of Paid Search and Social Ads
As the digital business landscape has evolved, so too has the cost of advertising in it. Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, and even smaller platforms like Twitter or Bing have increased in cost rapidly because the audience is so much more robust, active, and ubiquitous in 2016 than it was in 2006.
It’s hard to imagine a time before PPC advertising as a vital component of a digital marketing campaign (or a time before digital marketing campaigns), but it was only a decade ago that advertising online was a scattershot enterprise, done with banners and animated gifs.
Today, savvy advertisers target thousands of very specific keywords in tightly defined markets with weekly or even daily review and turnaround on bids, placement and ad copy. It’s the single fastest moving and most revised component of a digital marketing campaign. Google PPC is such a big beast and so deeply entwined with the vagaries and technicalities of Google’s search engine, that it requires an expert – a single person whose sole job is to do amazing things behind the scenes. And it can be very costly if you don’t have that person.
The Lead Question
Which brings me back to the big question I get from new clients and business owners I meet and discuss marketing strategy with. The number of leads they are currently getting with an advertising campaign, and it all comes back to the holistic nature of digital marketing.
The problem with a lot of PPC advertising campaigns and SEM agencies that focus on them is that they approach paid search in a vacuum. They create landing pages, update site copy, and run ads without considering the impact of outside factors or the way in which these campaigns can benefit from other non-paid tactics.
Here’s a prime example:
Several years ago I worked with a locksmith in Wisconsin who was running paid ads in Google for about $1,000 a month. He was targeting a number of local keywords and driving that traffic back to one of three landing pages – a general one, a local targeted one for his biggest market, and a consultation form.
The conversion rate was not good. He was spending close to $300 per lead, getting only 3-4 new leads per month with his $1,000 spend. For a locksmith whose average order size was between $200 and $500, he was barely coming out ahead. Not losing money, but not growing his business either, and the cost of having someone manage that campaign was bringing him very close to a break even.
His first question to me was “how can I get more leads from my ad budget?”. I looked at the following five things:
- The keywords being targeted – The keyword groups weren’t bad. They were related to specific problems and pain points his customers might have, and they were effectively geotargeted to people in his immediate area. The real issue here was that his website didn’t reflect these keywords. Quality scores were middling and he was paying too much for his ads because the website had no local content, nor did it cover those specific problems.
- Landing page design – He wasn’t using specific landing pages that related to his keyword groups. Someone would click on a very targeted ad for “24 hour locksmith, kenosha, Wisconsin” and end up on the homepage for a generic looking locksmith that didn’t mention Kenosha or Wisconsin. I recommended creating a new landing page for each of the ad groups that were running (about a dozen).
- Clear conversion points – The ads were targeting problems, but his website did not. Because of this the above two points became issues. We created new content on the site targeting specific problems people might have that would lead them to call a locksmith. These were split between an FAQ and a blog that we started scheduling weekly posts on. The content would eventually help drive traffic organically, but also offered support for the claims made by his ads.
- Ad timing and placement – The ads were being run 24 hours a day, because he was a 24-hour locksmith. The problem, however, was that it was being shown evenly throughout the day. After speaking to his sales and support team, we determined that the best hours for a locksmith are actually between 10am and 5pm – the majority of his work was contractor or home owner related, not emergency lockouts. So we adjusted the spend. Second, for those ads that do run late at night, we shifted the spend to mobile devices where people are most likely to be looking for a locksmith at 1am.
- Created educational content – The assumption was that all of his customers were locked out and needed an emergency service right away. But these lockouts only made up about 25% of his business and he didn’t want it to grow – getting pulled out of bed at 1:30 am by someone locked out of their apartment after a long night drinking is not a fun way to build a business. So we shifted strategy, creating content about the types of locks one might consider for a new house, how to ensure keys are not duplicated, and other tips that were useful to homeowners and contractors who might consider a locksmith. We gated this content on landing pages and ran ads pointing to it.
The end result of all these changes was an increase in lead generation of 175% in the first month. Granted that was only an additional 5 leads, but it meant a cost per lead drop of nearly $200 from $300 to $117 and an increase in business. That number continued to improve over the next three months, but more importantly, all that new content on the website started to generate organic leads through Google search.
People found him for keywords like “Kenosha Wisconsin locksmith” organically. The total ROI on these efforts grew over time instead of dropping off, and eventually he was able to cut his ad budget.
The Next Step with Ad Spend
This is a question I get a lot, and unfortunately there isn’t an easy answer to it. Some inbound agencies will tell clients that paid search has no value. I disagree. Content marketing and inbound techniques are important, but if you can’t drive traffic to all of the new content you created, it won’t do anything.
Paid search allows you to drive immediate traffic to high quality content and recoup your investment much faster than if you waited the 6-9 months it now takes for a dedicated SEO campaign to really kick in. But the way straight SEM tactics approach paid search isn’t effective anymore either.
Paid search can’t work in a vacuum, nor will those ads convert effectively if there isn’t a smarter approach to creating content that delivers on the promises of the ads being run. So the next time you are doing a review of your ad spend and wondering just how many leads you should or could be getting out of that budget, stop looking at the ads themselves and look closer at the content you are sending people to with those ads.
I guarantee you’ll find more than a small share of things that can be changed for the better.
Learn how to get more from your landing pages and boost your conversion rates for ongoing campaigns with our new optimization checklist:
Content needs to speak the same language as the people reading it. Generic content, content that doesn’t touch on the specific needs or concerns of your audience, and content that glosses over major concerns that your audience might have, just doesn’t work.
What does work is carefully researched content that a prospect will read as written directly for them.
But how do you create that kind of content – how do you get so far into the head of your prospects that they think you’re writing to them and them only?
Here are five tips from a top digital strategist to help master and emulate how your target prospects talk about their problems and engage them through content.
- Spend Time Where They Spend Time – Go to the websites, forums, groups, and other online places that these individuals spend time. LinkedIn groups are especially effective to evaluate the types of conversations that are held professionally. Don’t necessarily restrict this to online either. Meetup groups, mixers, and conferences are equally effective for this type of research.
- Subscribe to their Blogs and Social Profiles– Select a small group of people who are representative of the target audience you are trying to reach. Follow them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other platforms on which they regularly post. Check their blog, interact with them through comments and direct messages. Get to know their voice and their concerns in the way they naturally communicate.
- Ask Your Existing Customers – Go to the people you already know. This is your richest pool of potential data; people who have had the problems you solve and that you have already worked with. Ask your sales team to provide answers to common questions you are preparing in advance of your marketing campaign or to share the common questions that their prospects ask.
- Interview or Survey Target Demographics – Create a blind survey and ask those very same questions to people who you haven’t previously interacted with so you can avoid the bias that comes with it. This will cost money if you don’t have a list of people already that you can send it to, but for 200-300 answers, it’s well worth the investment to learn more about the common concerns and questions they have. Make sure each question is open ended to encourage written answers.
- Test Different Types of Content with What You Learn – Finally, don’t be afraid to test different types of content and ask for feedback. Write content, produce videos, and post to social media based on what you learn, and then take that content to people you know in your target audience and ask them for feedback. Ask them to provide thoughts and questions about the content you wrote and elaborate on what might need to be changed or added.
It can seem time consuming, and at times redundant to do this kind of research, especially if you’ve been in the industry for some time. But the extra time spent will be well worth it when you understand on a much more direct basis what people need and how they describe those needs.
The next step is to create that content and start promoting it. Learn how to ensure your site is ready for the spike in inbound marketing activity you’re about to begin with our Marketing Ready checklist.
One of the most common concerns I hear from fellow marketers and business owners first implementing content marketing in their efforts is that it doesn’t drive engagement. Even if the platform on which the content is published gets thousands or tens of thousands of visits, the content doesn’t drive the kind of shares, comments, and social signals they assumed it would.
The big question here is why? What makes one piece of well written, carefully researched content different from another that drives three times the engagement?
The B2B audience targeting.
A well written piece of content needs to do many things – but before you put a single keystroke to a Word DOC, you had better know exactly who that content will be written for. Good content without a clear target is vague. It’s generic and lacks conviction, and driving someone to take action when the content lacks energy is nearly impossible.
Questions for Ideal B2B Audience Targeting
So where do you start? How do you create something that goes above and beyond “101-level” introductory content and resonates with the specific audience to which you want to provide value?
One of the most important things you can learn from Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing training course is how to identify and detail out a buyer persona. This is a human embodiment of the ideal customer – a top to bottom description of who you are writing for and what they are concerned about. Here are some highlights to help identify who this person is:
- Who Are Your Best Customers – No one knows your customers better than you. Who are the best ones – the ones you would clone if you could? What do they have in common? Is there a particular industry, role within a company, or need they have that’s similar across multiple situations?
- What Are their Most Common Questions – From there, gather a list of common questions these people ask. These can be questions asked during the sales process or ones they ask after becoming a customer that you know you answer frequently.
- What Is the Single Biggest Pain Point They Face – From these questions, distil down to a single pain point you know they all share. What is the biggest worry, concern, or point of stress they deal with related to what you do for them?
- What Is Their Position within Your Target Company – Most likely, these people will share a position within the companies they work for. Evaluate job titles, roles, and positions and determine what you’ll be dealing with.
- List Some Basic Demographics – Other demographics you may want to consider in building your audience profile include age, education level, location, and income level. These will affect the language to which they respond and how best to address their problems.
Will this cover everyone who might be a good customer for your company? Absolutely not. But it will create targeted, engaging content that dives deep into what a specific segment of your audience needs rather than broad, generic content that you can find on a dozen other websites.
When you create this type of content, it resonates. And content that resonates, even with a smaller segment of potential readers, will drive more conversions and help you generate better leads in higher volumes.
What’s the Next Step?
Once you know who your target audience in the B2B space is and what they are looking for from content, you can start writing. But to better resonate and ensure your content hits the right mark with those potential prospects, you’ll want to speak their language.
From there, you’ll be able to speak their language and address their problems. This will almost certainly result in an increased rate of engagement across all of your content and becomes an integral part of your digital marketing plan.
Volume is an important factor in content marketing – the more you produce, the more people will likely see your content. But even volume has an upper cap. HubSpot’s VP of Content Joe Chernov recently made a change on the blog in which the company scaled back their content production significantly because they had reached a point of diminishing returns.
While their eventual number is 100 posts per month, well above and beyond what you and I can produce, it shows that there is a limit to what volume alone can do. Quality is equally important, but I believe above and beyond all of those factors is consistency.
Without consistently produced content released on a regular basis, a number of issues can pop up. Here’s a look at the benefits you gain from releasing content consistently.
Regular Readers
If you produce high quality content, you’ll gain a small loyal following of regular readers. This is a great thing, but if you want to keep them you’d better be consistent. This goes double for content that falls into the “limited demand” category of podcasts and videos.
People only have so much time in the week to consume content. If you fall behind in posting, you can easily fall off of their regular rotation. Podcasters live and die by this with new ones focused heavily on how to get into that rotation and old ones working to stay in it. Skip an episode and you’re out. The same goes for video production and regular blog production (especially if you write long posts that require a lot of time to consume).
SEO Friendly Production
The search engines like regular content – they also reward it with more consistent and frequent crawling of your site. This can lead to better results in the search engines for all of your content.
At the same time, there are a number of directories that will only list your content if it is updated consistently. AllTop, one of the better expert-level blog directories will only list your blog if you post consistently with fresh, expert-level content on your subject matter. Stop posting and you lose that spot.
Feeds a Regular Social Schedule
Social media lives and dies by the content you produce. No content means nothing to put into the cyclical social machine, which of course means less activity on all of your channels. If you have a regular posting schedule for your blog, YouTube channel, and podcast, you have a solid log of content you can then post related to your brand in social media.
It also allows you to schedule in advance more readily because you’ll be drawing from an editorial calendar that is hopefully ahead by several days or even weeks.
What Role Does Frequency Play in Consistency?
It doesn’t matter how frequently you post to your blog – do it consistently. If you decide to post only once a month make sure you’re posting on the same day every month. If it’s weekly, choose a day and stick to it. Consistency has to become an integral part of your digital marketing strategy.
This helps you plan time for content creation as well. If you know that you will be posting every Tuesday, you can set aside 2-3 hours every Monday to focus on content creation, scheduling, and social media publication. If you know you post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you can schedule a full day at the end of each week to prepare for the next.
This kind of time is hard to set aside when you’re running from behind – and blogging, like so many tasks that offer incremental benefits – falls to the bottom of the to do list too easily if you let it.
And if you’re unsure of next steps or how to keep your content moving into the funnel quickly enough to feed your schedule, download our blog creation checklist. It will help you prepare for and get new content out regularly without stressing over missed deadlines.
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