Generating inbound leads takes effort, implementing new strategies and nurturing fresh leads to turn curious people into valued customers. Your content marketing plan should be detailed and focused, helping your team to understand what they are trying to achieve and who they are targeting.
Here we have 10 tips for making sure that you hit your targets every time.
Set incremental targets
You may have an end goal in mind when it comes to setting annual marketing targets, such as your revenue, number of new customers or volume of products sold. While this is important, it’s not as helpful in focusing your marketing strategy. It is better to set smaller, achievable goals that will build up over a year to your final target. You could set your goals on a monthly or weekly basis, and then look at how you can meet that week’s or month’s goals with an effective marketing plan. It is good for company morale too; having incremental targets means there are ‘wins’ throughout the year, which helps to keep motivation high and build confidence in your marketing team.
Create detailed target customer personas
Having a really focused idea of who you are trying to sell your product or service to will help you decide on the best marketing strategies. The more precise your customer persona is, the more specific your marketing can be, which is more likely to result in increased sales. For each market that you operate in, which may be one or many, you should create a detailed customer persona, a representation of your very best customer. This persona should be at the forefront of every piece of marketing you do so you know you are reaching the right people, in the right way. Our customer persona template can help you to get started with this.
Understand the questions your potential customers are asking
Your customers are likely to have questions that your product or service can answer. However, you need to know what those questions are specifically, so you can ensure that the content you are generating for your blog or your social media channels is answering the right questions. There are a few ways that you can do this. You could send out a survey to past and current customers asking them how they found your product or service, what they were looking for and whether they were satisfied that they had found the solution to their problem. This feedback is invaluable in knowing what potential customers want. You could also use online portal like Google Trends to see what is important to people at any given time, or Quora to see what kinds of questions people are asking within your specific market.
Create great content for your target customers
You will attract people to your website if the content that you are creating is giving them something of value. You have a clear idea in mind of your target customer persona and you know what kind of questions they are asking, so you want to provide the very best content available that answers their questions. You don’t want to focus solely on sales and commercial posts; attracting the right people to your website is more likely to generate new customer leads, especially if they feel that you are informed and authoritative on a topic. You also want to produce at least weekly content that is original, to encourage people to bookmark your page or sign up to your mailing list to get regular, relevant updates.
Create great offers for your target customers
Tailor your offers specifically to your target customers so that they are more likely to bite. You want offers that make them feel valued, but also so tempting that it is hard to resist. Free, downloadable products are a good way of encouraging new customers to give you a go; it depends on your product, but you can be quite creative. It could be an eBook, how-to guide, printable templates, recipe cards… Those who download will remember your generosity and the value of your free product, making them more likely to return for a paid item. You could also offer a special discount that is very targeted at a certain customer, addressing their exact problem, offering a solution and giving it to them at a very good price. This should be time-limited or only available to a certain number of people, to encourage instant sales.
Make your website and content a great experience
No matter how good your content is, if your website isn’t easy to navigate and fast-loading, your bounce rate will be high. Your potential customers will just go elsewhere. Make sure that functionality and ease of navigation are at the top of your priority list, and pay special attention to your mobile experience. When a customer lands on a specific page, usually directly to the content that you have been promoting, it needs to be easy to move around the website. For example, if they have come to read a blog on a specific subject, you can build on their interests by offering more content on the same topic all branching out from the hub page. This can include videos and infographics that expand on the original topic, encouraging visitors to explore.
Make the next steps obvious and compelling
While your customers are exploring your website and reading your content, you need to think about how you are going to convert this interest into sales. What do you want them to do next? This depends on the nature of your business. If the next step is making an enquiry, you need to make it easy to do this with an accessible Contact button on every page. Make it clear when they can expect a response so that they know you will receive their enquiry and deal with it rapidly – speed is often of the essence. You may wish to integrate a Live Chat option, if relevant, so that a customer can easily ask questions and receive answers based on what they are looking at there and then. If you are selling directly online, use text links and page adverts to create a connection between your content and your product.
Focus on building trust over selling
There is so much selling and advertising going on online and in the real world, that people have started to develop disinterest in it. They are looking for companies that can give them what they need, but who they trust to deliver in a timely, responsible way. Trust comes from delivering good customer service, using feedback forms and testimonials to attest to the value you can offer potential future customers. You want to be open and honest about the kind of company that you are. Many of your target customers are interested in who you are and what you believe in, as much as they are about what you are selling. A good mission statement lays out your beliefs and responsibilities; an environmental/sustainability policy shows that you think beyond your own corporate needs; and blogging about company events gives a real face to your business. When trust is built up, sales will follow, not just once, but on an ongoing basis.
Review regularly to understand what is working and what isn’t
Your marketing strategy needs to be fluid. If you keep doing the same things month in, month out, you may not even notice that it is getting less effective each time. Once a month, you should check in on all your marketing activities for the last few weeks and make a critical analysis of them. Did you meet your incremental targets? If you did, what worked well? If you didn’t, can you identify factors that could have affected your goal? It might be down to a flaw in your marketing strategy, or it might be an outside influence that you couldn’t have accounted for. Something as unpredictable as the weather can have an impact on some company strategies. A review helps you to tweak the next month’s marketing plan to take into account what you have learned.
Make regular small improvements – keep getting better
Finally, never settle. Just because the marketing plan that you are implementing is working and you are meeting your goals, doesn’t mean that you should stay still. There are always ways that you can improve. Your goals can be exceeded! You don’t need to chop and change dramatically to make an impact, but small improvements a little at the time ensures that you keep challenging yourself to be better, and it means that you are continuously adding value for your current and future customers. It might be that your blog is doing very well and bringing in new leads consistently, so you could add in a little extra content or introduce new content, such as videos. Your customers will notice if you are always going the extra mile and putting in time and effort to meet their needs.
