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:

Know Your Customer And Win More Business

What is the dream of every marketer? To build interconnections with customers/buyers for long term success, of course. What is the dream of companies’ CEOs? To build brands that resonate with customers. However, that’s only part of a larger story. For both sides to accomplish:

• each must advocate for the customer/buyer, and 
• take the customer/buyer side along with understand the customer/buyer position. 

Instead of shunning when a customer calls, embrace the moment for here is a customer/buyer that we have the chance to not only speak with but understand. Yet, so few do.

Position A Brand Amongst Geo-Local Universe Of Consumers

Brand positioning is key to brand survival. I know simple, right. However, why is it that many geo-local brands fail? Oh this not to say that national brands do any better a job. Looking at geo-local brands that struggle, denote a lack of support for how the brand’s mission connects with target audience demands.

The key is Relationship Development. Relationship Development begins by understanding who your customer is, and how to divide into profile segments.

Inbound Context Messaging And Social Online Marketing

Vollmer and Precourt (2008) describe why it is essential for marketers to accommodate different audience variations through uniformity in order for advertised messages to be heard. Brands detect these variations through a type of social culture shock. Audience segmentation melding within targeted audience environments is what triggers shock. Brands then learn to shift between target audiences by micro segmenting, which in turn reduce audience sizes to smaller predictive model groups. This maximizes inbound message interpretation as well as response and desired reaction to the messages.