You need to continue to attract customers to your business if you want to grow and remain successful, that’s a no brainer. But, you need the right customers. This is where inbound marketing practices come in handy. Concentrate your content marketing strategies on attracting the right customers at the right time, and stop wasting time on those who aren’t the right fit for your business!
Attracting the right customers can be simple, if you let it. So, let’s break down how to do it.
The Attract Phase
Hubspot breaks down the Inbound Methodology into 4 main segments: Attract, Convert, Close, and Delight. The “Attract” phase is what we’ll be discussing today.
Basically, this phase is where you draw potential customers and leads to your business. You tap into your target audience base, using comprehensive buyer personas, to get the word out about your services and your business. Inbound marketing is all about attracting leads to your business, not going out and recruiting customers. The power balance in business has shifted to the consumer. They now have the resources to seek out what they want, when they want.
Your content serves to attract customers and potential leads to you, but to also deter those who do not fit your ideal customer. Your content needs to be designed to attract the right customers. You don’t need to work with every individual that comes to you if they don’t fit into one of your buyer personas. The wrong customers will just drain your resources and time, and they’ll be upset they’re not seeing the results they were hoping for either.
Essentially, what is on the web and what can be easily found by a searcher is what a potential customer will judge your business of off. So, how do you attract customers that are the right fit for your small business?
- Page Content
- Blogging
- Social Media
Page Content
When a potential buyer is looking for a product or searching for reviews of a company, they go online. Your future customers are researching your business long before you ever come into contact with them, so your content needs to make a good impression on them.
Your website needs to be more than just a few, static pages you create once and then never look at again. Your small business website is a dynamic tool which can be harnessed to increase your leads and sales if you’re willing to put effort into it. You need to invest in a quality content marketing strategy to attract customers to buy your product or service. Content is how your website will be found and content marketing is how you will continue to remain competitive in your field.
Comprehensive content marketing campaigns are what will separate you from your competition.
To help you create and manage a successful content marketing campaign, you need to analytics based platforms like SEMRush, Google Analytics, Google Console, and maybe even Google AdWords. These are some of the best SEO/ analytical tracking platforms available to you.
Blogging
Most successful companies, and even small businesses, have a blog. In order to attract customers online, your website, posts, and pages need to pop up in the search results for viewers to click on. Optimized blog pages are a great way to do that.
Blogging serves a few purposes for a small business:
- Solve customer problems or questions
- Increase the number of results and keyterms your website is found under
- Act as a leader in your industry or market
You can blog on just about anything that’s relevant to your business, new technologies, current events, common customer questions etc. You blog is meant to educate your customers and attract new customers to show your superiority in your field and demonstrate your customer dedication. Your blogs don’t always have to be just text either. Diversity your content with original infographics, images, YouTube clips, or graphics.
If you’re struggling on how to layout your blog article, don’t be afraid to check out your competitors’ blogs or take a look at business leaders like Neil Patel or Brian Dean for inspiration.
The most important rule of blogging to remember is: blog consistently! If you maintain a regular presence and appearance through your content marketing, you’re more likely to gain follows because you’ll create an expectation in your readers’ minds. Your blogs should also be at least 1,000 words long with generous amounts of white space in it to help your readers’ eyes move around easier. You want to keep them engaged with both your content and your layout.
Blog articles are also great to post and share across your social media platforms and in emails, as well as publishing them on your small business website. Publishing your blog in multiple locations will ensure that the widest audience sees it and hopefully reads it. If you post it on several social media pages, you also create the opportunity for your followers to like and share it for you.
Social Media
We are in the era of social media frenzy and it’s not slowing down anytime soon.
- In 2017, Facebook reported having 2.2 billion monthly active users
- In 2016, Linkedin reported having 467 million users
- In 2017, Twitter reported having 330 million monthly active users
Almost everyone has at least one type of social media account and the ones that do, are those you want to target for your business. Social media allows you to share your blog article, and then passively sit back while others read, like, comment, and share it to others for you.
Sharing on social media is one of the easiest methods to make sure your article gets circulated with you barely having to put in any work at all! People like to share information and we’re good at it. Images can go “viral” in a matter of hours and hashtags can start trending in a matter of minuets, that’s all thanks to power of social media.
Having a social media account allows you to establish more of a relationship with your customers. You can follow them and they can follow you. Social media is also a great method to reach out to those you’ve never met in person before and start to build a relationship with them.
You will need to do some research to figure out when and where your ideal customers tend to spend most of their time so you have a better chance to reach them. You should include that information in your buyer personas. The more you get to know about your customers, the more successful your target content marketing strategies will be.
In Conclusion
The content you produce will attract customers to your small business. Determining these factors up front and knowing if it’s a good fit is so important to the success of both companies – not just theirs or not just ours. When the fit is right, both the customer and the business are in step with each other and can set both realistic goals moving forward.