Understanding the Digital Disruptive Environment
This second important question was one of the ones I answered in the webinar, telling the audience that the key to standing out is relevance and consistency. Your content should solve real problems or educate your audience. Yet, being relevant today is so difficult, isn’t it? Things change so rapidly, and there is SO much data out there, that keeping up often bubbles over into not enough hours in the day.
The problem as pointed out is we’re all in a content war. In fact, if you have relevant and consistent content, AI will cite you as a source for what it delivers to people who ask it questions! Remember: AI is drawing from the world, and that includes you!
The first thing you can and should do is understand what “right” means in the webinar title: “Right Customers.” Companies often mistakenly believe that they have to aim at everyone; these “spray and pray” strategies rarely work. The best way to approach what we’re talking about is to realize what the painter, Robert Henri, said: “You pass people on the street; some are for you, some are not.” He was talking to painters about models used in their portraits, but the same holds true of customers. “Right” is defined by your own core competencies.
For example, a plumbing company that makes toilets might thing the whole world is their market, but that would be a mistake: it is only people who use toilets. But everyone uses toilets would be your answer, so what are you saying?
Toilets, are a commodity, but even commodity marketers require careful thinking in deciding who the right customers are. For example, while all people use and need toilets, not everyone needs to buy one right now. So begin with other questions like: how do you sell your toilets? Where do you sell them? Do you sell them in bulk? What kind of toilets are they? In this case, the “consumers” seem to be the “right” targets for toilets at first, but that’s wrong too: it’s consumers who are in the market for a toilet. Therefore, WHERE your targets go for the product becomes part of the equation you use for determining how to target and hit them! Here are some ideas to stand out. And it’s not just toilets: it’s every product or service on the market today. Targeting and hitting the right targets means being VISIBLE to those targets.
Steps to improve visibility:
- Use SEO & keyword targeting to optimize your content for search. Manufacturers who sell through distribution (2-step or 3-step distribution) can still provide information to educate consumers in our example about toilets. For one major buying group/association client where we built an education portal, we discovered using reverse IP lookup that consumers were actually tapping into the educational content. Consumers wanted to educate themselves on the benefits so they can make an INFORMED decision.
The internet is the great “equalizer” in terms of how people find information, so having good SEO will help you educate your customers on why they should purchase YOUR product. Things like white papers, comparison charts on performance, all help you target and hit the right customers as they target YOU through Google. Because sometimes, you may not be aware of the “right” people who are trying to purchase your product!
- Leverage audience insights to create content that speaks directly to their needs to show EMPATHY. It is rare that a company who collects incoming information to their company cannot find unique content in such response. Keeping track of the kind of calls and the content of those calls often reveals key insights that you can share with prospects AND customers. You can see this demonstrated in the article seven in this series: How can businesses effectively use data to predict customer behavior and improve conversion rates?
- Invest in paid advertising (Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook) to cut through the noise, but be frugal in your ad spending. This isn’t always necessary if your SEO is firing on all cylinders. In fact, we’ve seen companies who score high on organic searches buying key words for the very same ads to show up in searches where they dominate. All you do by doing that is making the search engine profitable. This is especially true with AI, which the search engine puts IN FRONT of organic searches AND ads these days. Using this ad spending tactic really depends on WHAT you are selling, and to WHOM. Social and search engines have the ability to target audiences, but not all audiences they target are in the market for what you are selling. This is why SEO will always outperform paid.
Consider using Google Trends for example to help you understand whether or not to utilize paid advertising tactics. In looking at “kitchen remodeling” over the past 30 days, we can see an uptick.
Spring is approaching, and people are thinking about doing something to a kitchen. Maybe it’s time to hatch some paid strategy – or at the least, pick up your efforts on your blog if you are a showroom consultant or designer!
- Create engaging, shareable content (videos, infographics, case studies). Remember, you are in a content war, and you need a lot of ammo to win. Every spare minute should be devoted to creating content that is relevant and consistent. Here are some ideas on where to source such content:
- Google News & Industry Blogs are a great way to stay on top of emerging trends. Use Google Trends as just mentioned, and subscribe to thought leadership blogs in your market sector.
- Association website are a good source for content to build on with your experiences, as are LinkedIn posts by your competitors and peers. What the industry is talking about helps you understand if you should be talking about it too!
- You should be developing case studies for yourself as well. These real-world applications of your product and service demonstrate third-party credibility. It’s a big difference between you saying how great you are, and your customer saying it!
- Another idea is to do an industry interview the leaders in your industry. Such collaboration demonstrates a “fearless” approach to marketing, and works well with a panel discussion with your customers’ customers. For example, holding a panel with architects who specify your product and bringing in questions not only about your products but your competitors is a great way to demonstrate objectiveness, not subjectiveness.
There are plenty of other ideas. Email us if you’re interested.
- Encourage interaction—respond to comments, start conversations, and build a community for your business. And while most companies do this, most companies rarely tap this hidden influencer audience. For example, at a recent meeting with a client the topic of finding out why and if their consumers who purchase through distribution are satisfied with their product came up. The discussion proceeded with of course how do you find out about consumers who OWN the product, and research was the focal point of the discussion. My associate raised her hand and said we have an alternative: “why not use the people we know own your product already without going to a ‘spray and pray’ research approach?” The client had overlooked the fact that we were running a spiff program for them for many years, and had documentation on who OWNS their product – over 16,000 consumers we had aggregated from responses to our spiff program the way we run them. The research was easy after that because the list is the most important part of ANY campaign.
You should also have a blog on your website, a form on your website for prospects to fill out, forms for white papers you offer, and you should be using your social media posts to drive people to your website!
Keep reading our series on How to Target and Hit the Right Customers: Deep Dive Insights.