If you’re reading this, the headline likely caught your attention, right? While results may vary and overnight success in the marketing world is certainly not a typical outcome, there is still much to be gained from these tips.
The cold hard truth is that many businesses do not fully understand how to market effectively and correctly. A company that focuses strictly on sales and numbers is ignoring the most powerful feature that marketing provides. A truly successful strategy is about so much more than just selling your product or collecting the highest numbers of followers. Ultimately, it’s about the customer, or at least it should be.
Building a long-lasting connection with your audience is what turns a business into a true success – overnight or not. Take these four smart tips to heart and see how you can include them in your marketing strategy from the start.
- Start with Blogging
Do you take a special interest in a topic or have lots of personal experience in a certain area? If so, use it to boost your name value through content curation.
Becoming an influential blogger requires you to establish credibility. Start off by writing about the things you know well. For example, if you love to travel, branch off of that topic and write about the places you’ve been to, recommend great restaurants or tourist spots to visit, or suggest how to save money along the way.
If you’re a published author, a great topic would be about something like selling ebooks or sharing tips about how to create memorable content. Whatever your niche is, find a way to expand your key focus to provide meaningful and actionable information to your readers.
The key to crafting content that converts readers into loyal customers is writing to provide value. Your posts need to be compelling, informational, and full of wisdom to grab and hold the attention of your audience.
In order for your blogging strategy to be a success, you will need to attract the kind of readers that stand to benefit from your posts. Before you start writing, take some time to consider your core audience. What kind of people would ideally like to read your blog? What are their ages, jobs, interests, likes, and dislikes? Make lists or customer personas to help you understand your audience’s interests before diving into content creation.
Over time, blogging can dramatically boost your website traffic and SEO rankings. If you are using a strategic keyword approach. This will require you to do some research and dig into the terms and phrases your target audience frequently enters into the search bar. Google’s Keyword Planner Tool can show you trending searches and data in relation to frequency and competition levels to help you determine your approach for keyword inclusion.
- Challenge Conventional Wisdom
There’s a lot of noise out there when it comes to marketing. With the majority of the population sharing, tweeting, and streaming all day long, the internet can be a very loud and busy place. That being said, it can be hard to make sure your brand voice is being heard, especially if you’re a small business or startup with a limited marketing budget.
Disrupting the norm takes some guts and courage, but the payoff can be spectacular.
Take inspiration from brands that took innovation to a whole new level: Uber and Lyft challenged the taxi service industry and created a whole new dimension of the market. Airbnb went head-to-head with big name hotels and changed the way we think about staying in strangers’ homes. Tesla made saving the earth sexy, elegant, and luxurious by designing a sporty electric car.
In the same way, your marketing strategy should strive to bring something new and interesting to the table, rather than just following the path everyone else is taking. Dollar Shave Club is a great example of this. Their business premise was rather simple: cheap razors that are shipped to your home. However, their genius marketing strategy pushed the envelope by incorporating humor (and gender equality) into their advertising in ways that paid off big time.
Challenging convention is all about finding your brand voice. It is what communicates your business’s values and personality to your customers. Narrow down the exact words and phrasing in which you want to present your tone. It can be funny, serious, educational, eloquent, trendy, or even controversial. Whatever you choose, make sure that your content aligns with your voice to provide a consistent message to your audience.
- Focus on Meaningful Emotions
Human emotion is one of the strongest driving forces for action, which is exactly why many companies tap into its power with advertising. We often buy things because they make us feel good, rather than out of necessity. Numerous studies have found that advertising with emotional triggers report higher profits than using rationalization!
While the spectrum of human emotion is immensely broad, it can be narrowed down to four main components when it comes to emotional advertising.
Happiness: Happiness builds a positive connection with others. People love things that make them feel good, and they generally want to share this feeling with others, which is why many positive videos and posts often go viral on social media.
Sadness: Negativity has a powerful pull on consumers as well, especially when it tugs at the heartstrings. It can stir up feelings of nostalgia and build a desire for change. Many charities and nonprofits use this type of emotion to grab attention and inspire action for a better future.
Fear: Again, negative emotion can have a positive effect when it comes to building a connection with your audience. People buy things to protect them from what they fear. Cosmetic companies use the fear of getting older to convince people to buy expensive wrinkle creams, while insurance companies offer peace of mind in the case of an emergency.
Anger: Just as sadness can inspire change, anger or disgust can also move people to action. Using shocking statistics or taking a stand regarding current controversies certainly gets your audience talking, whether they support your stance or not.
You will need to build meaningful connections with your audience if you want to create this type of emotional correlation with your brand. Customers want to be heard, and getting a response from a company or personality they admire makes them feel special and appreciated.
Take the time to respond to positive comments and answer their questions. Thank your followers for sharing your posts. Ask them for feedback or what they would like to hear from you next. Opening up avenues for conversation can build genuine connections with your audience that lead to loyalty and valuable interactions.
- Over-Simplify Sharing
Sharing online is the virtual equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising these days, and it is a highly effective way to build a loyal customer base. The goal of most online marketing strategies is to entice their audience to share the content with their personal followers, thereby growing the company’s reach organically.
You would be more likely buy a product if your friend or family tell you about it, right? You trust their opinion and judgment. If they were satisfied with their purchase, then you probably will be, too.
This is why sharing is so important; it is a way to build social proof and let your customers put their stamp of approval on your brand. Online shoppers are more likely to buy something when they see that someone else has given it a positive review. By sharing your content, they are, in a sense, endorsing your company to their friends, who very likely trust their opinion.
In order to boost the number of social shares for your marketing campaign, you must incentivize your audience to share. Again, this comes back to generating valuable content that provides something of value.
For example, fitness brand SoulCycle’s community page creates highly shared posts that focus on all aspects of health and wellness, expanding beyond the classes they offer to healthy recipes and travel destinations. Their posts cater to their audience’s interest levels in physical health and aim to provide tips and tricks they can easily share with their friends and family, too.
Give your readers a reason to tell their friends about you! Be funny or creative or write about something totally unheard of. Your followers have no reason to share content if it will not interest or help their connections as well. In everything your produce, ask yourself: Is this content share-worthy?
Include social share buttons into your content and website so it just takes one click for readers to post on the major social sites or share to their friends via email or embedded link. Simplifying this step can significantly help to increase your shares since it requires very little effort from your readers.
In Conclusion
While overnight success is definitely not guaranteed, putting these strategies into practice through your marketing campaign(s) will certainly help put you on the path to success. Modern marketing is a whole different ball game than it was ten, five, or even two years ago. Things change at lightning speed, thanks to technology and evolving consumer mindsets. Analyzing your customers’ preferences will play a huge role in helping you create content on the right topics as well as personalizing it.
High-quality content will never go out of style, and neither will emotional connection. Your marketing strategy must revolve around your customer base or it is sure to fail. Put your audience first by creating valuable and authentic messaging throughout your platforms. Make your voice heard by challenging the status quo and trying new things. Tap into your audience’s emotions to create strong connections. And finally, build a community by making it easy for your followers to share your marketing content.
