Inbound Marketing: A Key Messaging Tip

Inbound marketing does not mean being a jack-of-all marketing trades. Quite the contrary, and too many businesses today are in the business of sales funnel management where a visitor is sent to a landing page and expected to release name, address, telephone, email. Businesses face even greater stumbling blocks if its content is an online store with nothing but products because the rising on demand culture seeks immediate resolution coupled with short attention spans. Inbound marketing though is SEO, and it in itself as well does not mean that someone who specializes in SEO be a jack-of-all marketing trades. See with all inbound marketing campaigns, it involves understanding what the targeted audience exactly wants, and positioning to deliver.  Unfortunately, far too many businesses assume they know what their desired target audience wants - and in turn - conceptualize sales funnel models around those assumptions. That's quite a fleeting assumption for the growing $60 million Gen Z, and the $2 billion .net via mobile (International Data Corp.) audiences. Nothing could be farther from reality; consequentially, here begins the losing sales funnel model.

Stop Misunderstanding Website Visitors

Some believe that the best way to get site visitors to act is to appeal to their emotional motivations. This belief is partially true if you’re marketing an impulsive product/service. Triggers can then lead to desired path response. But when a product/service requires conscious consideration, desired path response becomes complicated. To understand these site visitors, a business has to first see the big people picture because it lacks buyer mindset access to engage.

For a business, this means that what it thinks it knows about its customers is wrong. Buyers are not who a business presumes, and they pull the site with different reasons than what a business guesses. So what does this mean in terms of website context? It means that the business’s buyer profiles are incomplete needing the key ingredient, buyer insights. What the ingredient accounts for is:

Build Online Content For Relationship Development

Before doing any online marketing, take time to create a content relationship strategy that will have the consumer asking for your brand by name. Here is an outline to go about building an engaging Relationship Development Strategy.


Understand Your Target Audience

• Age plus public base.
• Percent of females versus males.
• Urban/Suburban/Rural.
• Education levels.
• Ethno-demographics.
• Prime communities for target audience.

The ideal target audience profile can then be summarized.

Framing Online Marketing Campaigns

Promotions, content creation, and outwitting your competition are necessary components for framing online marketing campaigns.  Yet where to begin? For that my friend is easy.  It all begins by understanding your target audience.  This notion though goes beyond age, sex, location and income.  We’re talking about their traits. For it’s those traits, which can be grouped, and content creation can be built out that stands out from the competition.  Here is where social media lends insight, and from that insight you begin segmenting your audience into idiosyncratic segments or silos.  Yes there will be overlap, and that is good because it gives you the opportunity to motivate as well as influence your audience via various promotions. 

Getting ideas?

Next comes all those promotions to speak to all those traits, but first your promotions have to outwit the competition.  How you ask?  It’s by marketing your brand attributes.  You know all those attributes that make your brand standout amongst the competition.  Is it your customer service, product durability, a charity supported by your brand, customization features, price, free delivery, or perhaps lifestyle projection?  See, each of those brand attributes can be precisely marketed toward your segmented audience traits.

Then to measure it all so that we know what works and what does not along with how we can improve upon what is, we sprinkle in Analytics to guide the way. 

Seeking to improve your campaign strategies?  Contact me because I enjoy bringing online marketing goals to life.