(888) 893-2165To get your business out there, you have to be online. Building a digital marketing flywheel for your brand is the goal of all marketers, so let’s talk about five efforts you can make to turn the wheel.
1. Define Your Audience
An audience is dimensional. In the b2b audience development graphic below, each level towards the middle gets more granular and closer to the decision-maker.
To get your business out there, you need to find out how to reach the right people. Think of the dimensions of an audience like a sales funnel; taking potential customers from awareness to purchase. Or even advertising—brand awareness ads aren’t targeted to a buyer persona, they’re targeted to the entire target audience. Similarly, a call to action campaign selling a product or service isn’t wasted on people who don’t know the brand (target audience), those are directed to people who are similar to our buyer persona.
Start with who you think makes up your target audience. If we were selling Zoom, the target audience could be anyone who works for a corporate or start-up company. The ICP is the most ideal company or customer out of your entire target audience. For Zoom, the bigger the company size, the higher Zoom’s recurring revenue is from that company—Wells Fargo will be their ICP.
Next up, the total addressable market. TAM is the total number of companies that are in the market for your product times your annual contract value.
I’m not going to do the market research on this one, but you can imagine the hefty TAM that Zoom has.
The final step is to craft a buyer persona. Rand Fishkin made a great point in our last webinar, that having a relationship with your audience members is preferential to assuming what your buyer persona would do. If a relationship isn’t an option yet, a buyer persona is the right first step.
Below is an example of a JumpCrew buyer persona. Do this for yourself and you’ll know how to tailor your messaging, target your marketing efforts, and who to ask for one the phone. For more on how to complete a buyer persona, read this article. Oh also, for Zoom, their buyer persona might have a job description of COO.
We wrote a complete white paper on the subject of developing an audience not too long ago. For more information on the subject and a breakdown of defining your audience, click here.
2. Create SEO-conscious Content
SEO is a complex beast requiring continued website maintenance to truly reap the benefits. However, a good way to get your foot in the door is to optimize your web pages and blog content based on highly searched keywords. If you don’t know, SEO is the process of growing your website traffic by increasing the visibility to users of a web search engine like Google. Despite the fact that doing SEO correctly is a monetary investment, the resulting traffic is considered organic.
Back to keywords. In order to have an organic chance of getting in front of your target audience, you have to optimize your content for the terms they’re using to search. For the purpose of this article, we’re talking about how to optimize your content for SEO. However, as a general rule of thumb, the #1 thing you can do is create content that provides value to potential customers. Combining the two is where you see results.
JumpCrew uses SEMrush to find high ranking keywords that our audience is using to search. A high ranking keyword is one that has lots of searches per month. There’s a sweet spot between the higher-volume keywords that also have a high keyword difficulty (lots of other people have the same idea that you do), and the niche keywords that have a lower search volume (fewer searches per month) but also lower keyword difficulty.
The more niche you go, the higher the likelihood that the searcher is near the bottom of the funnel. But that also comes with less potential traffic. The broader and higher volume/difficulty you write for, you must recognize that those searchers are closer to the top of the sales funnel. Don’t sell to people at the top of the funnel, provide value to them, and answer their questions.
If you’re thinking about how to get your business out there, brand awareness is probably a good first step.
SEMrush is a paid tool but has a 7-day free trial. I will note that while a trial is a great way to start, search volume ebbs and flows with the industry and national/global market, so you need to find software to use long-term.
Here is SEMrush’s list of top free SEO tools in 2020. If you conclude that SEO is too much to DIY, we know a guy.
Click here to read more about optimizing blogs for SEO.
3. Share Content Through Email and Social Media
If you’re wondering how to get your business out there, having a social media presence is a must. First, decide which platform is optimal for your business. JumpCrew’s prime social marketing platform is LinkedIn considering we focus on mostly b2b partnerships. Once you pick, you’ll create content for that platform, then syndicate it across your other platforms. Pull up your optimized social media pages and start a post.
A good way to begin is by repurposing blog content as a social media post. Throw three relevant hashtags on the bottom of your post (yes, this applies for LinkedIn and Facebook too) to extend the reach and tag people/companies that you mention in the caption. The key to social media is not to post just to post. The algorithm can detect bullsh*t. Not really, but it does detect low engagement and limits your reach. If you provide value with every post, you’ll be fine. Lastly, don’t give up. Social media takes years to build a solid audience.
Now on to how to get your business out there via email. Email remains relatively untainted in the eye of the consumer. Yes, we get tons of spam, etc., but the open and conversion rates on email far outweigh the results you get from social media. With that, you shouldn’t solely focus on email. Building the marketing flywheel that we talked about requires a diverse presence online. Imagine if someone was interested in your company based on an email, then goes to learn more on Facebook. When they get there, you haven’t posted since 2014. What would you do? I would assume they’re not legit and bounce (literally).
A great entry to email is a newsletter or incentivizing users to sign up for discounts and special offers. With a newsletter, you can, again, repurpose blog content and add other useful information for your audience. Starting with one newsletter a month is more than enough. Be careful with email though, as going wrong can get you blacklisted from the server.
Read more on email strategy here, and tips on avoiding email-punishment, here. Campaign Monitor is a great resource as well.
4. Capture first-party data
Another key tidbit that came out of the Audience Development webinar is that building a database of first-party information is the most important thing you can do in 2020 and beyond. Creating valuable content and asking for emails in exchange for the full PDF is a good value exchange. Typically this strategy is paired with paid advertising on social media and search. If a paid strategy isn’t realistic for you, try the newsletter/discount strategy to offer value when asking for an email address.
Read more on ways to collect first-party data here.
5. Get a Solid Sales Team
Steps 1-4 can only do so much. When you get to the point that you’re driving leads, a good salesperson is invaluable. They should be doing their own outreach paired with marketing’s online strategy. Proper training, process, tools, and management are just a few of the efforts that create good salespeople.
Closing deals isn’t all about convincing someone to buy what you’re selling. It’s about showcasing how your product solves their problem. Check out this blog post from one of our sales directors on this subject.
Find other sales resources here.
If you want more information on how to get your business out there, or decide you want help, contact us.
