Consumers are bombarded with hundreds of ads every day across TV, radio, Internet, newspapers, and magazines, and that doesn't even include messages they see on billboards and signs. With so many ads in front of them throughout the day, it can be difficult to capture their attention, especially if they're texting or checking email on a second screen.
Technology may provide the solution you need to reach your customers. Instead of relying on traditional methods, these tools can be used to grab customer attention, even when distractions seem to be everywhere.
Marketing Personas
To connect with your customers, you'll need to first fully understand them. You may already have a vague picture of your average customer, but marketing personas require that you flesh them out, assigning a name, occupation, personal interests, and information on how your product or, in this case, marketing message fits in with their daily lives. Create personas and keep them in mind each time you develop a new marketing strategy or content for your corporate blog.
Mobile Optimization
More customers than ever visit a business's website using a smartphone, yet businesses still use desktop-optimized tactics such as popups and banner ads to engage customers. On a smartphone, these ads may not display at all and if they do, they disrupt user experience. Some customers may leave a site completely. To ensure customers stay on your page once they arrive, use tools such as TLDR which adds in-content calls to action and also implement easy-to-complete forms. Keep in mind that customers are likely to be interacting with your site using a touchscreen, which can make entering information more challenging. If possible, limit the information you collect to an email address.
Data Analytics
Before you can be successful in your marketing efforts, you must have measures in place to track your results. From the first time you publish your landing page or your first blog post, you'll be able to monitor how customers are interacting with it. Using an all-in-one business dashboard like Cyfe lets you watch and monitor all of your website's widgets, revenue, marketing efforts and social media interactions in one place. If you notice something isn't working right away, you can tweak your content and watch to see if your results improve.
Content Marketing
Every business seems to have ramped up its content marketing strategy in recent years. A strong, online magazine-style blog seems to be part of every corporate website. Small businesses may strive to compete as larger businesses in their industry outrank them in search results. Add to your arsenal content planning and editorial calendar tools like ClearVoice to help you craft amazing content that will stir engagement which will eventually boost your search engine optimization efforts (SEO) efforts. Give your visitors something interesting to read. Over time, you'll find your engaging blog posts encourage other sites to link to your content, increasing your rankings due to the large number of inbound links.
Personalization
When a marketing message is customized to a particular customer, that person is much more likely to notice and even take action on it. Through techniques such as retargeting, you can continue to engage your site visitors long after they've looked at a product on your online store. You can also use personalized marketing to learn your customer behaviors and create emails based on their interests and their past actions on your website. Video advertising is even moving toward retargeting, with sites like Hulu and YouTube showing customers videos that are personalized to products they've purchased throughout the web.
Visual Marketing
With so many text-based messages, images can make a business stand out. Whether it's a picture on Facebook or an embedded video on Twitter, you'll keep customers from scrolling past your message without noticing it. You'll also have the added benefit of being able to convey a message through an image, which often does a much more effective job than text, especially if your business sells visually-appealing merchandise.
The right content strategy can capture customer attention and lead to conversions. With careful planning, you can create a campaign that gets results without depleting your resources. Tech tools make it easier to measure your efforts and learn more about your customers, ensuring that when you do create content you'll be directly addressing the needs of those who are interacting with you on social media and through your website.