12 Keys To Successful Marketing And The Buyer's Journey.
PLEASE NOTE:
I will encourage you to read this article to the end.
When I understood this information, my marketing results greatly improved!
Marketing is one of the best investments you can make in your business.
The #1 key to successful marketing is testing!!!
Nobody knows what will work.
Therefore, test small and scale.
Every market is different.
Because markets evolve, there is a need for constant testing and content creation.
Effective content creation requires targeting the right people with the correct information at the right time.
Effective communication creates desire, trust, and the confidence to take action.
Who is your target buyer?
The better you can identify, describe, and define your buyer, the more targeted content you can create.
12 Steps To Successful Marketing
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Marketing Plans: Strategies and Tactics
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Buyer Personas
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Buyer’s Journey
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Market Research
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Search Intent
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Key Words
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Create content following the Buyer’s Journey
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Qualifying and targeting your audience
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Being omnipresent
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Link Building
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Testing leads to success
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Blog Posts
Marketing Plans: Strategies and Tactics
A marketing plan includes both strategies and tactics.
Strategies and tactics often get mixed up and need to be clarified.
Strategic planning looks at long-term goals.
Tactical planning is a step-by-step process determining how you will achieve your long-term goals.
A written plan helps to clarify thoughts and optimize marketing efforts.
Keep it simple and make sure it is something that everybody can understand.
Buyer Personas
Buyer Personas represent your ideal potential customers.
When creating Buyer Personas some companies have pictures and names associated with their Buyer Personas.
They use the Persona names in meetings.
For example, if ten people sit around a conference table, one might ask, “Would Jack like this? What about his wife, Ashley?”
It can feel weird or stupid to post pictures and names of your ideal customers. However, a picture can convey a thousand words, helping your entire team understand your marketing.
Creating Buyer Personas:
The list below can help you describe and define your target audience.
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F.O.R.M. - Family. Occupation. Recreation. Motivation
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We want to know their beliefs, interests, opinions, and activities
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What are their “Whys?”
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Likes and Dislikes
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What do they read?
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Where do they hang out online?
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What makes them tick?
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Background: Job. Career path. Family
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Demographics: Male. Female. Age. Income. Location
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Identifiers: Student. Teacher. Laborer. Executive
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Communication Preferences
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Goals. What can we do to help them overcome challenges and achieve their goals?
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Use actual quotes about your customer’s challenges and goals.
“I have to pay for private school.”
“I am embarrassed about my
smile.”
“I work two jobs and would love
to be able to buy a new car
and a new home.”
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What are the common objections of why your customers do not buy?
For example:
“No time to make an
appointment. I work a lot of
hours.”
“It is not in my budget right
now.”
“I can get it someplace else,
and it is of better quality.”
The Buyer’s Journey
The Buyer’s Journey is about qualifying your buyer and determining how you can best help them.
Do they know what your target market wants?
What’s important to them when choosing a product or service, etc.?
Buyers usually go through 1 to 4 stages before purchasing a product or service.
When you understand the buyer’s journey, you can create better content targeted to your customer.
4 Stages of the buyer’s journey
Below is an example of the Buyer’s Journey.
You are considering buying a new car.
You are in the awareness stage.
You start looking at different types of cars: sedans, SUVs, trucks, and convertibles.
After looking at many different types of cars, you decide you want a convertible.
You are now in the consideration stage.
You know you want a convertible.
You must decide which make and model you want and compare the different makes, models, and features.
You decide you want a Mustang convertible.
You move to the decision or transactional stage.
You’ve looked at many different cars, researched, and made comparisons.
Now, it is a matter of deciding who you want to buy your car from.
Who is going to give you the best price and terms?
The content for each stage of the Buyer’s Journey is different.
Creating content focused on the Buyer’s Journey can massively increase your sales.
The Buyer’s Journey applies to all aspects of marketing, including Pay-per-click, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.
When you ignore and don’t understand the buyer’s journey, it can cost you thousands of dollars!
You will often get less than optimal results and become disappointed in your marketing.
Market Research
Marketing software helps you to research your market.
It shows you how to outrank your competitors and is like a marketing financial statement.
It helps to level the playing field when competing with large companies.
If you outsource your marketing and website, subscribing to marketing software helps you monitor the company doing your marketing.
Search Intent
What are your buyers searching for, and what is their intent?
What do they want to know?
What information are they looking for?
What are they hoping to accomplish?
Keywords are the words or phrases a person types into search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) to find information.
Keywords help define search intent.
Create Content Following The Buyer’s Journey
When creating content, professionals use software that helps them achieve outstanding results (SEMRush, SurferSEO, Ahrefs, etc.).
The software will tell you:
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The questions people are asking.
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How many people are asking the questions.
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keywords to include in your content.
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How difficult will it be to get your content to rank.
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How many backlinks you will need to outrank your competition.
Below is a screenshot of the target and recommended keywords for this article.
When creating content, you do not stand much chance of getting it seen unless you use software to help with content creation.
If you outsource content creation, subscribing to software lets you supervise the person creating your content.
Using AI for content creation is great. However, it still needs human supervision.
Headlines And The Buyer’s Journey
All great content starts with great headlines.
Your headlines must follow the buyer’s journey.
The headlines below give examples of following the buyer’s journey.
1. At the Awareness Stage, the buyer realizes their problem and seeks general information about it.
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Are you aware …
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How to know if …
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Have you ever wondered about …
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Why you may …
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Where to find …
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Definitive Guides
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Tutorials
2. Navigational: Your buyer is looking for a specific company, brand, or website.
3. Consideration Stage: Your buyer knows what they want. They are considering their different options.
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FAQs
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How to Choose The Best …
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Discover your options
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Comparison Articles, Guides, and Charts
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Everything you need to know
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Purchasing Guide
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News & Trends
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Case Studies
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Worksheet/Calculator
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Lists/Checklists
4. Decision Stage: Transactional—Your buyer knows what they want and is deciding who they want to buy from.
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Top Reviews & Opinions
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Best of …
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Quality, Value, & Price Discussions
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Curated or proprietary Information
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Affordable. Cheap. Discount. Coupon
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Offers
Qualifying and targeting your audience.
When creating content, think about your customer's pain points.
You qualify and target your buyers with headlines (hooks) and content.
Headlines can make or break a marketing campaign!
People scan headlines and, in a split second, decide whether they want to read, watch, or listen to what you create.
The best marketing people in the world often spend a lot of time thinking about and testing different headlines!!!
When creating headlines and content, think about your Buyer’s:
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Interests
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Opinions
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Activities
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Beliefs
The more accurately you can target interests, opinions, activities, and beliefs, the better your results.
Ensure that your content correctly supports your headlines.
Be Omnipresent
We all consume information and make decisions in our own ways.
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Reading
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Listening
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Watching
Generally, you want to address all forms of communication.
You need to know where your buyers hang out online and in the real world.
You want to be everywhere!
What websites, forums, and chat rooms do they visit?
You want to follow them around without spamming them.
Give them great information!
If you give your potential customers useful information, they will seek you out!
Email marketing is part of the sales process and should always include existing customers.
Don’t Spam! Don’t make every email a sales pitch unless you want people to stop opening your emails! Give people a reason to open your email. Remember, it's not about you. It's about them.
Many people spend a lot of time creating a lot of emails, and their time could be better spent improving their content so they rank better organically.
Link Building
A link, or hyperlink, is a clickable item on a website that takes the user to another online location. They are usually blue.
Links can be internal and external.
An internal link is a link on your website that, when clicked, takes you to another location on your website.
An external link is a link that, when clicked, takes you to another website.
After you create content, you want other websites (external links) to link to it. These are also referred to as inbound links.
When search engines see other websites linked to your website, this tells the search engines that your website is popular.
Having relevant, valid, and appropriate inbound links on your website can:
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help increase your domain authority
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help your website appear higher in search results.
Building inbound links is often neglected, but it is vital for improving your website's ranking.
Testing leads to success.
Test everything about your marketing.
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Headlines
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Offers
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Content
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Fonts
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Colors
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Etc.
Test small and scale.
Create an ongoing budget for testing.
They call it R & D (Research & Development) in industry.
When testing, it is essential to have valid sample sizes.
It may take time to test a valid sample size.
Keep accurate records of all tests.
Blog Posts
You want regular blog posts:
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So that you always have current information.
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Current information is a ranking factor
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You answer all your potential customers' questions.
Life is Good
Marketing is about solving needs, wants, and desires.
Whether you are doing inbound marketing or outbound marketing, it's all about the customer experience!