"Don’t be that guy" – A different perspective on website marketing
As soon as your customer wakes up in the morning, they are immediately pummeled with media from all angles and companies trying to sell their products to them and get their attention. Mainstream media blares marketing to your potential customers at every point in their day, from billboards, radio, television, small signs, solicitors, they are always being confronted with businesses trying to get their attention to buy their products and services. YOU included. This has caused a certain level of numbness with consumers towards mainstream marketing. There is a shift in the poles. With the information age well in gear and the internet being a literal bottomless pit of information, businesses are looking for new and inventive ways to make their product or service stand out. Today’s savvy potential customer is looking for more than just who is the loudest, they are more armed with information than ever to cut through the hooplah traditional marketing to find the product or service that best meets their needs.
We have all been to a gathering where there is a person who only talks about themselves all night long, eventually what happens? People get tired of hearing it and they tend to “tune out” that person. The goal of this blog is to get you thinking about your website marketing in this perspective – Am I being “That guy” with my website marketing? Does your website only talk about ME ME ME? If so and if you are not seeing the results you would like to see, it might be time to stop thinking and talking about ME ME ME and start talking and thinking about Customer Customer Customer. What do I mean by this? Today’s internet shopper and overall general consumer is starving for information to make the most informed decision about how best to fullfill their needs. Taking advantage of this thirst for knowledge via Inbound Marketing can help put you in the drivers seat of your own websites destiny and how you interact with potential customers.
“So what do you mean?”
Inbound Marketing is a not new but it is more recently becoming more popular as more and more business owners are finding that it is better to draw in potential customers by sharing information the customer finds useful instead of force feeding that potential customer with traditional outbound marketing tactics and methods. This sharing of information has proven to be an effective means of attracting more ‘potential customers’. You must stop thinking about people who come to your website as just “visitors”, visitors come and visitors go, a visitor is defined as “a person who pays a visit; caller, guest, tourist, etc”. Stop thinking about the people who come to your site as visitors but every one of them is a “potential customer”.
“Where do I start?”
Getting started with Inbound Marketing is actually rather simple, share information, interact with your potential customers to convert them from potential to active customers. This could be something as simple as using social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to keep your customer informed of happenings, encouraging them through social media to share your content. Ahh.. Content.. What’s that you ask? But I dont have any content I have products. What is this “content” you speak of you say…. Let’s look at a quick example of what good productive content is and how it relates to Inbound Marketing.
Bill owns a liquor store, he specializes in hard to find beers and other specialty products. Bill’s sales through mainstream marketing have been ok, but he feels they could be much better considering the specialty offering of products he has. Bill doesn’t have a lot of money to invest in paying high end search engine fees to get his site ranked for those products, but what Bill does have is 20 years of experience tasting and pairing different beers and wines with food. Bill sits down and starts writing a blog about food pairings and he does this on a weekly basis diligently, before long more and more of Bill’s present customers are subscribing and reading his weekly blog. Before long the current subscribers are sharing Bill’s wealth of information with their friends, dramatically expanding the number of subcribers who are reading his weekly blog. It does not take long before Bill starts to see an increase in sales which can be directly tracked back to the increase in his blog subscribers.
What has Bill done here? Bill has taken information he has that did not cost him a thing and shared it with his customers, his customers loved the information so much they began sharing his blog post with their friends, and their friends friends, and so on. Bill appealed to the thirst for information his customers and potential customers had for beer and wine food pairings; turning that into a gold mine using information he already had. He did not have to spend a fortune putting the blog together, the time he sets aside weekly to sit down and write his blog is more than justified over time by the increase in sales. This is a perfect example of how Inbound Marketing works. Bill stopped blairing ads for the cheapest beers and spirits but rather fed his customer base information and it reacted positively and grew. He also found that he enjoyed sharing the information and the positive reactions of his readers.
<imgsrc=”https://www.mltinnovations.com/wp-content/themes/doover/images/choices.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”choices” width=”109″ height=”96″ style=”float: left;” />You, as a business owner, must decide to stop being “that guy” and start feeding your own customer base and potential customers information that is useful and will stick with the customer. Appeal to their thirst for knowledge and information, you will provide them with a helpful service using knowledge you already have that will reflect ultimately in a better bottom line for your business.
Look for other MLT Innovation blogs on Social Media Basics, Website Redesign 101 (how to make your site social and search engine friendly) on our website at www.mltinnovations.com.
If you have any questions about Inbound Marketing, Website Redesigning best practices or just would like a FREE website evaluation by one of our marketing professionals, email us anytime at info@mltinnovations.com