The Importance of Brand Voice
When it comes to distinguishing your brand, having an appealing visual identity and logo surely helps, but what also matters is your brand voice. In order to make your business stand out from the rest and connect with your target market, establishing a brand voice and using it consistently in your marketing strategy is vital.
There’s a reason why a hip brand catering to young adults might use “cool” slogans, or why luxury cars keep it sleek and professional. Your brand voice helps you to make your brand recognizable and reach the right audience.
Let’s talk about what brand voice is and why it’s a good idea to think it through for your brand. We’ll also cover how to create a unique brand voice that you’ll use throughout your communication channels.
What is Brand Voice?
Just like how a personality makes a person unique, a unique brand voice distinguishes a company from its competitors. Brand voice is defined as a personality that your brand consistently communicates. It reflects your brand’s values and serves as a guide on how and what you say when it comes to your marketing strategy. It also helps you connect to your audience and reach potential new customers.
You can think of your company’s brand voice almost as if it were a person. What personality does your brand voice have? What phrases does your brand use? Imagine that your brand is at a dinner party; how would it speak to the other guests?
Why is it important to establish a brand voice?
There is an overload of noise when it comes to advertising and other online content. Individuals and brands are constantly talking through social channels, so it’s important to stand out. Having nice photos, a unique logo and well-thought-out products are all great ways to strengthen your brand, but what you write needs equal care.
Having a consistent brand voice helps differentiate your company while switching up your voice in each post can quickly lead to an unfollow from your customers.
How can you create a unique brand voice?
1. Start with your brand values and mission statement.
Do you need help creating your brand voice? Look at your brand values to determine your voice and how you communicate with your target audience. Make sure that what you promote and say to your audience also reflects your values and mission statement.
Let’s say that your brand named “Green Sea Turtles” sells bright-colored sustainable cleaning products for Gen Z. You value eco-friendliness, have a modern approach and donate 5% of your yearly income to a charity that saves baby sea turtles.
How you communicate to your customers and in what style should also reflect your products. You probably won’t be speaking strictly professionally to your Gen Z customers and the advertising could be directed in a fun, light-hearted manner.
2. Identify your buyer persona to target the right audience.
Making a list of potential customers and writing down their personalities, habits and what they might be interested in is a great way to explore your brand voice.
Knowing that your Gen Z customer for the “Green Sea Turtles” brand is 19 years old, loves to dress in vintage 90s clothing and watches ASMR cleaning videos on TikTok can help you to create your brand voice. Making t-shirts with “God save the sea turtles” slogan and videos promoting your cleaning products showing a Gen Z cleaning her apartment can end with her saying, “Omg so clean, thanks Green Sea Turtles.”
Knowing your buyer persona can also help you to choose the tone of voice that you will use when communicating with your target audience. If you want more tips on how to reach Gen Z customers, read our blog article 5 Tips for Marketing to Gen Z.
3. Keep your brand voice consistent over all social channels.
This includes being consistent on all your social platforms, email communication and even packaging. Think of your brand like a bundle. It would be weird if you communicate your brand in a casual, fun manner and have extremely formal emails like you’re talking to a corporate audience.
One brand that is a great example of keeping its brand voice consistent is Apple. The brand often leaves the wording simple and to the point and adds an eye-catching image to highlight cutting-edge technology. Even their packaging is simple and enjoyable to open, just like how their products are enjoyable to use.
Apple’s advertisement above for the new “unsend” Imessage feature is almost like a short movie. At the end of a message that was unsent, Apple wrote, “Relax, it’s iPhone.”
How do you know your brand voice is working?
Remember, be yourself. One way you know your brand voice is working is if your customers feel as if your company is directly speaking to them, they feel connected to your brand and they feel like they’re part of the conversation.
You can also investigate how your customers are engaging with you online to see if your brand voice is working well. Make sure to read our How You Can Use Social Listening to Improve Your Business blog article to track what others are saying about your brand, and if your brand voice is structured correctly.
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GoViral Case Study: Timing PPC Campaigns for In-Person Events
A common question among marketers: how far in advance should I advertise an in-person event? When should I start using my PPC advertising budget? At GoViral we’re committed to learning from experience, so let’s take a look at the numbers from three recent events.
When Should I Start Advertising an In-Person Event?
Over the past few years we’ve helped one of our clients, a global leader in business and consumer electronics, advertise their presence at in-person industry events.
When our client attends these events, they want the best bang for their buck. Their end goal is leads. Getting face time with existing and potential customers is invaluable.
But even priceless marketing activities are limited by budget. Regardless of your budget’s size, you need to think carefully about how and when to spend it. So let’s take a look at lead time. How far in advance of an event do we see results for booking in-person meetings?
Our Results from Three Recent Events
For each of our three most recent events, we launched our PPC campaign at a different point in advance of the event date. One campaign started 17 weeks before, one 4 weeks, and one just 3 weeks before the start of the event.
Keeping in mind that we define a lead as someone who schedules a meeting with our client during the event, here are the results of total number of leads acquired by campaigns of varying lengths.
As you can see, we acquired more leads with a shorter timeline ahead of the event. In other words, more time did not translate to more leads.
Furthermore, the Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) decreased as the lead time decreased. How much did we spend to acquire each lead? Considerably more when we started earlier.
Takeaways for Advertising Events with a PPC Campaign
Our overall takeaway? Don’t assume advertising an in-person event earlier means your results will be better.
There are other factors besides the timeline to consider, of course. But one thing is clear from our results: most of our leads for in-person events were acquired in the three weeks immediately before the event.
Our experience has shown that PPC campaigns for in-person events can find success even when limited to the month leading up to the event, and in fact we have had most success acquiring leads during that time.
Further Considerations
As with all marketing advice, your mileage may vary. Consider your specific situation and make strategic decisions accordingly.
Maybe your event requires early registration, or maybe there’s a competing event in a different city on the same dates. In those cases, you might want to start earlier.
Remember that a marketing campaign requires careful planning, including consideration of the buyer’s journey and other factors specific to your business.
However, if you find yourself starting your advertising efforts just a few weeks before your event, don’t despair! There’s still time to get results.
Looking to advertise an in-person event? Let us help you! Tell us more about your project and request a proposal.
How You Can Use Social Listening to Improve Your Business
Building brand awareness and connecting to customers online requires a holistic approach. Practicing social listening is just as important as creating meaningful content. In this blog post, we will introduce you to this topic and give you some tips on how you can get started on improving your brand through social listening.
What is Social Listening?
According to HootSuite, “Social listening is the practice of monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitor brands, and related keywords.” You can track any mentions online about your brand or business, which can give you insights into how people are reacting. It can also help you to quickly identify a crisis and react accordingly.
Social listening can help you:
- Understand how your customers feel about your brand/business
- Figure out what you can improve if there are complaints or other negative comments
- Find out what competitors’ customers are talking about and discover trending topics
- Complete all of this in real-time, so you can act fast if needed
Is Social Listening the Same as Social Monitoring?
Social monitoring, or brand monitoring, is when you get notified when your brand or business is mentioned online. This is useful for responding quickly when needed, but it doesn’t give you a whole picture of your brand or the industry you’re focused on.
Social listening is more expansive in that it gives you mentions about not only your brand but also conversations about your competitors, the industry and similar products. This is a more complete picture instead of just snippets related to your brand or business.
Through social listening, you can make better decisions about how to structure your marketing or social media strategy, since you have a clearer picture of all that surrounds your business.
Why You Should Use Social Listening for Your Business
1. Know your audience
By listening to what is being said about your brand or business online, you can better understand what customers want and how you can improve your offering/services.
2. Respond to crisis
If something goes terribly wrong in relation to your brand, you want to find out right away and respond quickly.
3. Build customer relationships
Social media can be a great way to talk to current or potential customers, but your goal doesn’t always have to be about selling something. Build relationships and respond to customers instead of just offering a product or service every time. Share useful information that piques interest instead of strictly pushing what you have to offer.
4. Learn more about your competitors
Social listening can keep you in the loop about what your competitors are doing and give you updates about the latest trends in your industry. This can inspire you to create new products or services.
5. Improve your social media strategy
Listening to your customers, competitors and your industry as a whole can help you create tailored content. You’ll be able to learn more about what your customers want and what content seems to resonate with them. Need help creating meaningful content for your customers? Take a look at our Content Strategies for Different Stages of the Buyer Journey article.
Tips on How You Can Start Social Listening
1. Use the right social listening tools
Depending on what you want to track, make sure to use the right tools. There are various social listening apps that can help you monitor your social channels. Make sure to do your research to choose the right one for your needs.
Buffer, Hootsuite, Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics are just a few that are worth looking into.
2. Create a Social Listening Strategy
You should structure your social listening and treat it as a project. Aside from monitoring tags or direct messages, monitor variations of your brand or business name, and the founder or other public figures associated with your brand.
3. Monitor your competitors
And not just the happy customers from your competitors, but keep an eye out for unhappy customers. What are they saying? How can you cater to them? You could find solutions to their problems.
We hope this introduction to social listening was helpful for you and that you can get started using these tips right away. There are so many opportunities to connect to your existing and potential customers by using social media and the various social listening tools available.
Want to connect with your audience, and get paid for it? Make sure to read more in our article Facebook & Instagram Subscriptions Feature: How to Make the Most of It.
An Introduction to Influencer Marketing Guide
With so many social media platforms, one surefire way to expand your online presence is influencer marketing.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to influencer marketing, but you could make it work for your business with proper research and planning.
What is Influencer Marketing?
When an influential person known as an influencer collaborates with a business to promote their products or services, it is known as influencer marketing.
In the past, brands only had celebrity endorsements. But in the digital age we live in, online content creators with dedicated and engaged groups of followers have changed the game of influencer marketing.
It is common to find yourself asking, “Does influencer marketing bring any positive results?”. Well, Civic Science reported that 14% of 18 to 24-year-olds and 11% of millennials in the U.S had bought some products or services in the last six months because an influencer recommended it.
When it comes to influencer marketing campaigns on social media platforms, Instagram currently tops the list, but it seems like TikTok is catching up. With 68% of U.S marketers planning to use TikTok for influencer campaigns, it is becoming as popular as Facebook to be the preferred platform.
Types of Social Media Influencers
When we say social media influencers, usually celebrities come to your mind. As we said earlier, while celebrities are the top influencers, not all influencers are celebrities.
On the contrary, influencers with a niche follower base could be more effective for brands as they have a higher engagement rate than celebrities. Plus, it won’t burn a hole in your pockets.
Usually, influencers are grouped based on their audience size. Let’s look at different types of influencers.
Nano-influencers
These are the ones who have just started out and have less than 10,000 followers.
While their reach is low, their influence on their small, tight-knit community is enormous. Nano-influencers may know most of their followers on some level.
It could be beneficial for a brand because we are more likely to buy a product on family or friends’ recommendation than some celebrity. Nano-influencers bring a sense of relatability and trust that is rarely seen with celebrity influencers.
Micro-influencers
The most common influencers you will find are micro-influencers who have between 10,000 and 100,000 followers.
Micro-influencers are more specialised and have a more engaged audience than their bigger counterparts, thus bringing in more qualified leads for your business.
Macro-influencers
With followers between 100,000 to 1 million, macro-influencers have a celebrity status of their own.
Since macro-influencers have grown their follower base from scratch, they know their audience well. The strong connection with the audience makes macro-influencers a preferred choice for brands with more major marketing campaigns.
Mega-influencers
With more than 1 million followers, mega-influencers have a following outside the social media world. They are usually celebrities, actors, singers or internet personalities who have risen to fame recently.
However, mega-influencers don’t have a personal connection to their followers, so they could be considered less trustworthy.
Tips for Creating an Influencer Marketing Strategy
Know Your Audience
The first step is to define who your audience is for your campaign. To make your strategy effective, you need to target the right people.
So how do you know who the right people are? Through buyer personas.
Developing your buyer personas is a great way to know your audience. Defining your audience helps you understand the kind of influencers you should collaborate with.
Establish Your Goals
For marketers, the number one goal of influencer marketing is to reach a new audience. Your brand visibility increases when your products or services reach the influencers’ followers.
Usually, the top goal for brands is to reach potential customers, while bringing an actual sale is lower on the list. It is essential to create measurable goals that you can track.
Shortlist Influencers
Trust is the most significant factor when it comes to choosing influencers. If your audience doesn’t trust or respect this person’s opinions, you will find yourself scrambling to get tangible results.
One way of finding out if your potential influencer is trusted is through their engagement. You should check if their posts have plenty of views, comments, likes and shares.
When an influencer has a reasonable engagement rate, they have a loyal following. So check if their follower count is inflated through bots or fake accounts.
Do Your Research
Now that you’ve compiled a list of influencers you would like to work with, the next step is to find out how often they share sponsored content.
Check how they are keeping their audiences engaged – do they post a lot of organic, non-sponsored content, or is there a ton of paid posts on their page? Posting paid content often affects the engagement rate.
Before you approach an influencer, make sure you do your homework. Know what channels they post, their audience, the frequency of sponsored content.
Track Results
It is pretty normal to get impressed by the sheer number of likes and comments on the influencers’ posts. But to measure the campaign results, you must figure out its return on investment.
One of the most effective ways to measure results is UTM parameters. Prepare unique links with UTM codes for each influencer. This way, you can know how many sales you made through an influencer and get a clear idea of how your campaign is performing.
Don’t forget to request your influencers to send you insights and detailed reports on their posts’ reach and engagement levels.
So there you go, a starter guide to help you start working on your influencer marketing strategy. If you find the right approach, you will soon be inundated with many new customers and sales.
Do you want marketing services? GoViral Digital has a whole decade of experience specialising in inbound marketing, and we are taking clients for 2022. Request a proposal to help you improve your business.
Content Strategies for Different Stages of the Buyer Journey
What is a Buyer Journey?
We usually don’t make purchases on a whim, and instead, there is a whole process of research and consideration before anyone shells out those bucks. So in simple terms, a buyer journey is your buyer’s path to purchase.
Buyer Journey gives marketers an insight into the pains and problems experienced by their customers and the influencing factors that push them to make a decision. It allows you to better empathise with the buyer and position your products or services along the process.
With the aftermath of the pandemic, around 57% of the buyer journey happens without any human interaction even taking place. So how do you engage your buyers without actively interacting with them?
Content strategy is your answer. It is essential to prepare a content strategy for each stage as it will be easier for you to motivate the buyer to make a purchase when they hit the human interaction part of their journey.
Let’s dig in a little further to understand better the different stages of a Buyer Journey and the types of content for each stage.
There are five stages to a Buyer Journey:
Awareness Stage
Example: “I am thirsty.”
This stage is where the buyer realises that they have a problem. They don’t know how to meet or solve the problem yet. Their goal is to alleviate the pain, but this is only an information-gathering step.
They are looking to get a better idea and give a name to their problem. They are not ready to make any decision.
Your content strategy should focus on the pain and problems of your buyers and provide them with big-picture industry-focus resources that can help them define their problems. Your best choice is press releases, social media promotions, or advertorial content that leads them to the next stage.
Questions to ask yourself:
- What is the priority of the challenges for buyers?
- How do buyers talk about their goals or challenges?
- Are there any misconceptions buyers have about addressing their problems? If so, what are they?
- What are the consequences of buyers’ inaction?
Research Stage
Example: “Where can I find some drink?”
Once buyers have a little understanding of their problem, they get interested in finding a solution. They start discovering products, brands, and trends.
The goal of your content plan is to educate and help buyers evaluate buying criteria. Usually, buyers trust videos, webinars, events, or ebooks in the research stage.
Questions to ask yourself:
- How do buyers educate themselves on these goals and challenges?
- What are the symptoms that bring their attention to the problem?
- What will help them identify the problem and push them to your products or services designed to help them?
- What online or offline sources do they find reliable?
Consideration stage
Example: “The vending machine has water, soda and juice. What should I buy?”
Now that your buyers have clearly defined the problem and are committed to solving it, the next step is to guide them through different approaches or methods available to them. Your content strategy should help them make a decision.
While case studies or data sheets can prove helpful in this stage, offering demos or leading them to trusted reviews will motivate buyers to solve their challenges.
Questions to ask yourself:
- What are the different categories of solutions available to the buyers?
- In what way do buyers educate themselves on the various categories?
- Are there any pros and cons for each category? If so, how do buyers perceive them?
- What factors influence the buyers’ decision for the right solution for their needs?
Purchase Stage
Example: “I will buy a soda.”
When your buyers reach this stage, they are ready to make the final decision and has a solid reason for their choice. They have already decided on the solution and evaluated providers. As a marketer, you should focus on learning if they have any objections before making the purchase.
Your content should not only validate their decision but also make the purchase process easy. You need to cater to their every question and provide the best service to them. This stage could be where your buyer makes his first human contact with your business.
Your sales approach must highlight a unique selling proposition that provides value and set you apart from the rest. While they are talking to sales, your content strategy offers support to keep their attention. Engage them in live training, demos, user guides or kick-off events
Questions to ask yourself:
- What do buyers know about your products and services?
- What do they like about your products and services compared to your competitors?
- Do they have any concerns?
- Do buyers want to test the products or services before making a purchase?
- Do buyers need any additional information, such as user guides or manuals?
Post-Purchase
Example: “The soda is flat. I should have got water.”
Excellent customer service leads to brand loyalty. In this stage, your buyers expect an exceptional product or service performance and excellent customer service. Play your cards right, and you get a loyal customer base. Who knows, they could turn into an advocate for your brand. After all, word-of-mouth is one of the only forms of marketing that comes from your buyers.
To keep them coming back, offer loyalty programs, build customer communities (online and offline), send newsletters, or even check in through phone calls. The goal is to make them feel cared for.
Questions to ask yourself:
- How are buyers expecting to receive post-purchase support and guidance?
- What obstacles could buyers face in your products or services?
- What are buyers’ expectations of your products or services?
- What actions do buyers need to take to achieve the best result?
- How do buyers rate your product or service, its value, and their satisfaction?
So there you have it – The buyer Journey and all its stages.
Before you jump on creating your buyer journey, make sure you know your buyer personas. Be sure to read our article, “The Importance of Buyer Personas“.
Don’t forget that the primary goal of Buyer Journey is to build a more customer-centric strategy to meet the needs of your target audience.
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What’s better for your business: Facebook or LinkedIn?
As a marketer, choosing which social media channel to focus on is always a puzzle. Many are left scrambling their heads with a multitude of doubts like “Where do I start?”, “Which platform gives me the best ROI on my efforts?” or “Is one platform better than the other?”
While asking questions about different platforms is normal, it isn’t smart to gamble your way out. The key to a successful marketing campaign is identifying your target audience and your marketing goals.
Among dozens of social media platforms, Facebook and LinkedIn are popular choices with marketers. Let’s break down what works best for your business.
LinkedIn is a professional network that was initially founded as a recruitment platform. Over the years, it developed to mimic many features similar to other social networking sites. For example, you can share status updates, send private messages, and connect with people.
On the other hand, Facebook was intended to be a platform for people to share and communicate. However, you can now find plenty of new features that let businesses reach their target audience. One survey by the company found that 74% of American consumers use Facebook to discover new products and brands.
So what are the differences between the two platforms?
Statistics
When it comes to numbers, Facebook is the clear winner.
There are 2.8 billion monthly active users worldwide on Facebook, while LinkedIn’s number stands at 64.7 million.
According to reports, the most active age group on both platforms is 25 to 34-year-olds. However, due to its popularity, Facebook has a broader range of users. 10% of Facebook users are under 18 or over 64. The reason behind this is that Facebook is for everyday users, but LinkedIn caters mainly to professionals.
B2B or B2C?
Undoubtedly, LinkedIn is a more robust B2B platform. Since the platform was designed for networking, it is a go-to place for business-driven individuals. Which also makes it easy to identify key decision-makers and target them directly.
Social selling is embedded into the platform. Reports suggest that LinkedIn has the largest share of B2B display ad spending.
While Facebook can be B2B, it is recognised more as a B2C platform. If you want to reach consumers directly, Facebook is the preferred choice. Not only it is a perfect place to generate brand awareness and engagement, but it also provides you 10X more prospects.
According to reports, marketers see the highest return on investment on Facebook. The networking site wins in numbers hands down, but LinkedIn generates tangible leads.
Thought Leadership
When it comes to thought leadership, LinkedIn beats Facebook relatively easy. The platform promotes business conversations, and one of the ways brands gain credibility and visibility organically is by thought leadership.
Through thought leadership articles, brands can educate, prompt conversations, and push to action. These programs increase website traffic and subscribers, thus helping with lead generation and brand awareness.
Marketers see more success with thought leadership content on LinkedIn compared to Facebook.
LinkedIn Groups vs Facebook Groups
On both platforms, groups are where businesses can connect with prospects and other like-minded users. Before engaging in groups, marketers need to ask themselves –
“Which platform is my target audience mostly active on?”
Keep in mind that users engage on different platforms with different motives. On LinkedIn, conversations revolve around work-related topics, whereas on Facebook, users connect to share their personal opinions on various topics like food, lifestyles, hobbies, etc.
Let’s look at an example. If you want to create awareness about your latest blender, targeting users in cooking groups on Facebook will get you the best results.
However, LinkedIn is a better bet if you’re providing a high-priced service like personnel management.
Facebook Ads Vs. LinkedIn Ads
In terms of variety, Facebook and LinkedIn fair equally. Both platforms offer a diverse range of ads types like carousel, video, dynamic and lead ads.
Targeting capabilities for ads on both sites rely on user input and content relevant to the information provided by them. So, you can easily target users based on basic information like job title, company, age, location, etc. However, Facebook also targets based on their life milestones, behaviour, and other personalized information.
Who wins? Facebook or LinkedIn?
You decide!
Our verdict is that despite sharing standard features, Facebook and LinkedIn have different audiences and intentions.
Which platform you want to use for marketing depends on your industry, target audience and goals.
Another essential thing to remind every marketer is – you don’t have to choose. You can always select Facebook for user engagement and LinkedIn for targeted lead generation.
All we can say is the winner lies in the eyes of the marketer!
Do you want professional guidance? GoViral has now a whole decade of experience specialising in inbound marketing and we can help you improve your business. Contact us to learn more!
Can Inbound Marketing Help My Business?
How can you reach your audience in a digital world where consumers are sick of being sold to? Attract, convert, and delight your customers by incorporating an Inbound Marketing strategy for your business.
Inbound marketing is a method that attracts potential customers to your brand through engaging content, while emphasising providing value and building trust, instead of just selling. This methodology isn’t anything new, but unfortunately not used enough in marketing.
The foundation of inbound marketing are three phases: attract – engage – delight, which means inbound is not only about attracting the customers, but supporting and empowering them even after they become your customer. Inbound follows the long-term growth rule: ”good-for-the-customer means good-for-the-business!”
How can my business benefit from Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is different from other marketing strategies since it has a goal beyond just attracting new customers or making a sale. The inbound methodology is designed to create long-lasting relationships that grow together with your business. Therefore, inbound marketing ensures that you are growing optimally and applies to businesses of any size. Regardless of whether you are a big corporation or a start-up, here are some benefits inbound marketing can bring you.
Build Authority and Brand Awareness
Utilising social media, creating quality blog posts, infographics and PPC (pay per click), are just some of the tools you can use as part of your inbound strategy to spread the word and raise awareness of your business.
With inbound marketing, you can educate your prospects and change the perception that people have about your business by offering them something they need, and nurturing this relationship. And no, we don’t just mean a special discount to your e-shop. Use engaging content to share valuable information with your customers, and through time, it will result in more leads and sales.
Your audience won’t even notice that you are leading them through the buyer journey, and will subconsciously put your brand in front of many others as you continue to nurture your relationship with them.
Reach New Markets and Audiences
Inbound is executed purely online, enabling marketers to reach diverse audiences whilst running a variety of different campaigns simultaneously. Aside from reaching new markets and audiences, inbound also allows you to specifically target people who are actively searching the internet for the products and services that you offer. One of the most effective examples is using PPC campaigns.
PPC campaigns allow you to target users looking for keywords relevant to your business on search engines and social media channels. Although this seems like a simple strategy, it is proven to increase ROI (return on investment) and help deliver your content to your target audience.
Another way to reach new audiences is by targeting your content to relevant audiences using Facebook and Instagram ads. Check out this article for 5 things you should know when getting started with Facebook Ads Manager.
Cost-Effective Marketing
Naturally, when having a business, costs are an important factor that you always need to consider. For businesses of any size, inbound marketing is proven to be more cost-effective and generate more leads with less money than outbound marketing. Especially when it comes to start-ups or smaller companies, inbound marketing only requires a third of the price of traditional marketing costs to generate the same number of leads.
Create Long-Lasting Customer Relationships
One of the most important factors of inbound marketing is building long term relationships with your customers. In today’s digital world, inbound encourages you to provide support and the best possible experience for your customers. Using this innovative approach in your marketing strategy will help you keep your customers happy and nurture your relationship with them.
In the end, what matters is having satisfied customers who would refer your business to their friends and family and eventually become ambassadors of your brand. Lastly, with little effort, inbound allows you to retain clients while attracting new customers, which is the key to a cost-effective marketing strategy.
Strengthen Sales and Marketing Alignment
Sales and marketing have a common goal – to generate revenue. However, in traditional marketing strategies, these two teams would usually work independently towards the same goal. Here’s where inbound methodology brings the two together by mapping a clear path from marketing and sales to align their efforts.
Inbound empowers collaboration of these teams through every aspect of the buyer journey – marketing provides valuable insights about a lead’s experience and interaction, while sales create the middle and bottom of the funnel offer to address customer concerns. Finally, inbound marketing techniques are more measurable as you can easily calculate how many leads you need for each customer you want to earn.
As an endnote, taking care of your prospects and staying with them through the entire buyer’s journey through the attract-engage-deliver method should be a priority. If you are present online you already have the basics to start creating your inbound marketing strategy.
Although inbound is more cost-effective than traditional outbound marketing, it takes time and a lot of effort to understand your customers and engage with them. It’ll surely be worth it when you ensure that you are providing a valuable experience from the beginning until the end of the process.
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The Importance of Buyer Personas
Too often marketers and business owners forget that their targets are people, NOT numbers. But, you can’t expect to reach engaged customers without first identifying your Buyer Persona.
The concept of buyer personas is one of the most overlooked areas when it comes to a company’s marketing strategy. I can’t tell you how many times over the last 10 years of GoViral, I’ve asked a client who they are selling to, who their IDEAL buyer is, and they tell me something along the lines of “men and women between 18 and 65 in the UK interested in fitness.” As an inbound marketer, I NEED to know who I’m talking to in order to attract, convert and delight them. How do I talk to a “men and women between 18 and 65?” What basis do I have to understand their needs or their problems?
One of the first things I learned in sales is that if you just tell someone all the great things you do, then you are just telling them features. If you first take the time to simply LISTEN and find out what their needs are and then match your offering to those needs, then you are describing benefits. People buy benefits, not features. Yet business owners are so quick to pass over that step and narrow down on a human, authentic ideal customer to target.
Their fear is that if I make them narrow down a specific persona to target, then they won’t be able to reach other audiences. But that’s not what happens. When I identify a buyer persona, I can create content that speaks to them. So yeah, the money spent on this targeting is going to give you the best return. But do you know what else it does? It also creates content, copy, images and voice that sounds authentic. Content that speaks in a helpful and caring way. Content that brings customers.
Instead of being that person who enters a room and wants to tell everyone as loudly as possible how great they are to all the “men and women between 18 and 85,” be the person who’s done their research before they entered the party and take the time to listen and offer great advice to the people who would benefit the most. This will create a healthy buyer journey that gives you the most bang for your buck. Here’s how.
-Belinda Filippelli, Managing Director at GoViral Digital
Your buyer persona is a huge part of successful Inbound Marketing. Instead of wasting time and resources to market to the masses (outbound marketing), tailoring your content to attract potential buyers (inbound marketing) “looking” for your product or service can save you a lot of time, effort (and $$). Inbound marketing can be viewed as a cycle: attract, engage, delight. You attract potential customers and engage with them with interesting content, and then delight them by addressing their problems (usually through your product/service). But in order to engage with your audience in a way that will convert, you have to be sure you’re talking to the right people. This is your buyer persona.
What Is A Buyer Persona?
Buyer Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers based on real data about demographics and online behavior.
When creating your buyer persona(s), it’s important to go beyond the traditional demographics. You should include aspects such as behavior patterns, motivations, goals, and any other factors that would further clarify who your target is. The more detailed you are, the better.
A detailed buyer persona will help you determine where to focus your time. As a result, it will facilitate your ability to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your business, and keep them brand loyal by ensuring you use the right voice.
It’s the difference between making a few one-time sales, and making a community of brand-loyal customers who will continue to convert.
Questions to Ask When Creating A Buyer Persona
To get started, think about the different facets of your buyer persona’s life: personal, professional, values and fears, goals and challenges, and use this to better understand how to speak and sell to your audience. Below are some good starter questions we use at GoViral.
After you’ve established the foundations of your buyer persona, you can even take it further to really get down to understanding what drives them by considering any objections they might have, and how you could convince them otherwise.
Tying it Together
Once you’ve gotten this far, you’re ready to start putting the pieces together to make the story of your buyer persona! Here’s a brief example of one buyer persona (often, you will have multiple!) we came up with for an e-commerce client, The Clean Living Company, a health food and supplement company specialising in organic bone broth and collagen supplements.
Be Flexible
Once you’ve got your buyer persona down, don’t be afraid to change it. After you get things moving, you might realise an aspect of your buyer persona that you were way off on. Maybe you’ve seen some reservations you didn’t account for in your initial strategy? Maybe you have a totally different audience interested in your product or service that you didn’t initially account for? That’s great! Marketing is an ever-changing process, so it’s important to be flexible and willing to make updates and improvements as time goes on.
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Inbound vs Outbound Marketing
At GoViral, we’ve been practising and preaching inbound marketing for 10 whole years. You may or may not be familiar with this term, so we made sure to explain it to you. Inbound marketing is different from the traditional outbound marketing method. Do you know the difference? You can read more about it below and how it can improve your business.
What is outbound marketing?
Try to visualise that your phone rings and it’s a company trying to sell you a doghouse but you don’t even own a dog. You try to hang up but the person is still talking! Well, this is an example of outbound marketing. Outbound marketing examples include irrelevant billboards trying to sell you something, multiple emails advertising products that you don’t need and late-night telemarketing shows. This form of marketing tries to blast its message (product, service, etc) from within the company out to the world, hoping to attract potential customers. The company using outbound marketing showers everyone with these advertisements, but only a few customers will be relevant and make a purchase.
So why is this method outdated? Well, you are wasting time sending messages to people that aren’t interested. It is surprising that businesses still operate this way. They shoot their ads into the dark hoping to hit a target. Inbound marketing is different and more effective.
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing attracts potential customers to you through engaging social media content. Customers become aware of your brand through your website, then show interest in your product and hopefully end up making a purchase. For any company, this might seem quite obvious to do, right? Try to imagine a magnet attracting customers from the outside to your brand. Content from a company using inbound marketing is made to get to people who might actually be interested based on the target buyer persona. Well, it hasn’t always been done this way. Outbound marketing was the go-to in the past, and many companies and brands are still doing it the old-fashioned way.
What are the main differences between inbound and outbound marketing?
Instead of wasting time and resources to market to the masses (outbound marketing), tailoring your content to attract potential buyers (inbound marketing) “looking” for your product or service can save you a lot of time, effort (and $$). Inbound marketing can be viewed as a cycle: attract, engage, delight. You attract potential customers and engage with them with interesting content, and then delight them by addressing their problems (usually through your product/service).
How can you use inbound marketing for your business?
Are you still using outbound marketing? Times are changing and seeing that inbound marketing is more effective, it could greatly benefit your marketing performance. We made some suggestions that can get you started in transforming your business by using inbound marketing techniques.
Attract
You can start by looking at the content you use across your social channels and website. Does this content add value to customers you want to attract? Posting about a sale might be valuable, but posting a guide on how to successfully use your product or service can be even better. Also, be sure to optimise your SEO by adding keywords to your content. Having relevant, interesting content with added value will help you to appear higher up in the search engines, therefore helping to drive organic traffic to your website.
Engage
When you finally get new leads from your valuable content, make sure to keep in mind that your goal is to build a long-term relationship. Try to sell solutions rather than just a product. Make sure those that are in contact with leads are building relationships and acting courteously. Think long-term rather than short. Which relationships do you want to have?
Delight
Let’s say that a lead changed to an actual customer. He or she followed your company’s social channels, got engaged and bought into it. What’s next? Keep the engagement going by acting as advisors to help your customers anytime. You can create surveys or chat boxes to keep the conversation going at any stage in the buying cycle. Also, listen to your social channels and react to your customers when they comment (or even complain about something). Reacting can help save a disappointed customer and it makes people feel like they matter (which they do if they’re you’re customers),
These are just a few tips to get you started in using inbound methods rather than outbound marketing. Do you want professional guidance? GoViral has now a whole decade of experience specialising in inbound marketing and we can help you improve your business. Contact us to learn more!