I'm sure you get lots of spam emails, we do. About 90% of them start with the hackneyed term "Greetings of the day!" followed by "Hope you are doing well". If our email service allowed us to block emails based on the content I could cut out a ton of unwanted emails simply by looking for those phrases, but it doesn't.
The people who send these emails, often from low cost economies, don't understand who they are trying to sell to. They use the wrong language, the wrong messages and, most importantly, they don't understand the problems we, as a business, need to solve.
What? No Ideal Customer Profiles?
They're not alone. Not taking the time to understand customers, by developing buyer personas, is extremely common, in fact I'd go as far as to say most businesses don't do it, although because we're a digital marketing agency I can only really speak with any authority about all things digital.
I'll admit, as an engineer I found the whole fluffy marketing stuff I've got into a little odd at first. Buyer personas, buyer journeys, buyer intent yada yada, blah blah. But I was wrong. Understanding who your products and services are for and getting intimate with the ins and outs of the problems you help your customers solve is a vital and strategically important part of your business, and here's why.
21st Century Buyers Are Different
Back in the mists of time buying stuff was really simple. You walked into a shop and a salesperson, working on commission, told you why their stuff was the best and you bought it. Anyone see the flaw in this system?
Today things have changed. We're now information rich and finding stuff out is just a voice search away, "Oi little black box in my pocket, what's the best smart watch for around £300?" and off you go. This means your "Buy shit from us, we're great" marketing messages are not going to cut it anymore. If you want people's dollars you're going to need to help them, you know, be the good guys.
Content Really Is, Finally, King!
There used to be saying in the early days of the web. It went something like "Build it and they will come" and it pretty much worked. In those days, when there was only a few hundred thousand websites and it was easy to stand out. Not so today.
In 2018 standing out is bloody hard and competition has increased massively. But it's still possible to find new customers online so long as you understand the game you're playing and what it takes to win. I'm talking of course about SEO, PPC, Content Marketing and so on.
Easy To Get Wrong, Fantastic When You Get It Right
Our website attracts around 500 visitors a day. Some of those visitors engage with us and some of them become clients. It's not a difficult concept to understand. The bit that people do seem to struggle with though is how to attract the numbers in the first place.
When you boil it down, there are basically two ways.
- Buy their attention
- Earn their attention
I'll expand on that.
You Can Buy Eyeballs or You Can Earn Them
There's nothing wrong with using tools like Google's Adwords platform, in fact, it's fantastic. In a nutshell you buy clicks from Google, you buy people's attention. It's quicker than using SEO but obviously you keep paying, always, you never stop.
The other way involves developing an understanding of your ideal customers, their problems and the type of content they like. It involves keyword research, content creation, data analysis, content tweaking and the list goes on. It takes months or sometimes years to get great traction using this approach but when you get it right, it is amazing!
If your website's not generating new business opportunities and you don't know
