Learn The Art of Attracting Customers

Wouldn’t it be great if your customers not only come to you to purchase your products and services, but they also come to you well informed so all you need do is swipe that plastic? Well, it is possible and Inbound Marketing is how you do it.

Why is Inbound Marketing Different?

Marketing to people is getting more and more difficult in the technology era. People have become really good at blocking marketing messages. They fast forward through all the advertising on TV. Caller ID allows people to block marketing/inside sales calls. And when they’re online, people block unsolicited marketing messages.

Using Inbound Marketing, you market to to those savvy customers in a different way. You produce great marketing focused content that helps attract people with relevant and useful information that they are looking for. You may have experienced this yourself – when you want to buy something, you would research that online before you talk to the vendor, right? Inbound Marketing makes that research easy for your customers and helps attract them to your brand.

How exactly do you attract customers through Inbound Marketing?

In order to attract customers, you need to offer what they are looking for in form of valuable and relevant content. And in order to offer great content, you need to understand what your customer needs are. Simply put, you need to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Here’s how you do attract them:

1. Research

Do your research to answer questions that help you get in your customer’s psyche:

1. Relate with your customers at a deeper level. Build buyer personas for every different type of buyer you have.
2. Define the activities various buyer personas carry out at different stages of the buying cycle.
3. Understand where your customers “hang out” – what social media channels you should target to meet your customers where they already are.
4. Find the SEO keywords that your customers use to search for your products and services online.

2. Planning

Plan to be consistent with your marketing efforts:

1. Put yourself in your customers shoes and determine what kind of content will be useful to you if you were buying your product/service.
2. Review the type of content you currently already have, and determine the content gaps.
3. Build a content plan and an editorial calendar to ensure that you create content consistently.

3. Creation

This is where it usually gets tricky, but you can always get help if you need it:

1. Whatever content you create, whether it’s a blog post, an eBook, an infographic or a white paper, ensure that it is awesome content that you would like to spend time reading yourself as a buyer.
2. Be sure to add proper call-to-actions – you want them to take some action after they’ve consumed the content. This also needs to play well with the stage of the buying cycle the customer is currently in to keep the customer engaged. Maybe it’s pointing to another piece of content that they should consume next, or maybe it is the logical next step to contact you.

4. Promotion

Now that you know where your customers hang out, you’ve got to go there and promote your content:

1. SEO keyword optimization will help your content get found.
2. PPC campaigns can be another way to promote your content.
3. And don’t forget Social Media. This is where you can have conversations with your customers and build everlasting relationships.

5. Analysis

Now that you’re done with the first iteration, you need to analyze the performance and prepare for the next round:

1. Find out what worked and what didn’t work.
2. Optimize your strategy even further and make it even better for the next iteration.

That’s easy enough, isn’t it? Just remember, this is not a “Do It Once And Be Done” campaign or some sort of a 5 step program. Inbound Marketing is a continuous process. Your customers crave new exciting content all the time. It’s your job to provide it to them to keep attracting new customers.

If you need help with any of this or need some templates to help with the research and planning stage, please get in touch with us or leave us a comment. We will post some more exciting stuff every week here, so remember to subscribe to our blog feed to get notified right away.