We talk a lot about staying away from tempting and costly gimmicks and work hard to educate our clients on how to create connection rather than chase vanity metrics. In a world where you can build your own audience and have a relationship directly with your prospective and current customers, it is important to stay away from a spam reputation whether it comes to keyword stuffing your site, sending thousands of emails to a bought list or sending unsolicited direct mail.
Making sure your direct marketing efforts are not perceived as junk requires vigilance for any business that wants to avoid being ignored based on their reputation. It takes some intentionality and patience to build a marketing engine that will provide ongoing inbound leads for your business. We like to stay inbounds with a few best practices.
Building Engaging and Useful Content Beats Having To Interrupt People
Email providers are punishing domains that are spammers. Google is filtering out web spam. The web regulators are interested in helping customers. And customers do not want to be interrupted. Trying to find workarounds to this and interrupting people may feel good for the short term, but we look at it as not only wasted energy, but it can kill your future efforts to connect. Your emails may not get delivered or you may not get found.
We would rather play by the rules and do the hard work of researching valuable content, writing something that will last and provide value for our client’s customers. It’s energy that builds online assets that are immortal. Google indexes the content and it becomes a body of work that creates a backlist which becomes extremely valuable. The more touches that your content makes with a person’s mind, they more they become agreeable to your worldview. That is what makes them excited to eventually or continually do business with you.
Breadcrumb Trails Recognize That Consumers Are In Charge
Spammers think about how to sell. They are thinking of themselves and what they want. Too bad it comes with a cost now.
The intelligent marketer on the other hand recognizes that the customer is in charge. If you find your customers are getting really good at ignoring interruptions, then change your approach. We like to study buyer behaviors and think deeply about what a buyer naturally does to learn about and buy what they want.
This, of course, means that we have to recognize the buyer can do this for themselves and opt out or click off of your site quickly and easily. Thus, the hard work of having a strategy and then making it work with clean logic and natural experiences becomes an art form. It means listening, noticing and designing processes that feel delightful, not disruptive and annoying. The customer’s control demands this and we build the breadcrumbs for them to follow accordingly.
Tell Your Story To Win
Your story is something unique about you and being able to share who you are, why you exist and what you are wanting to do to change the world invites the type of people that get you. Such shared core values is part of a greater law of attraction. Putting yourself out there and knowing that the people who get you will raise their hands means that your story resonated.
We all have a story and your marketing needs to center around this to promote your brand and establish connection with your audience. Story telling comes across not only in the content that you create but the way you engage a new buyer and provide services. Everything that touches a customer has to be congruent. If it’s authentic, this will naturally happen. It is what the delighted customer will tell their friends about you. That story has a ripple effect if what you say, what you think and what you do all line up in the customer’s firsthand experience.
It’s About The Marketing Assets
When you look at a business that continually chases after the elusive jackpot to get found or get leads, what do they have to show for it? If they are on Google’s blacklist, was it really worth it?
All that energy and time is not replaceable. It could have been used to build marketing assets that connect with buyers, bring them value and nurture them 24/7/365. It takes patience. Perhaps that is why so few plug in and build what would work for the long-term.
When you think about your marketing strategies, do these make sense for you? How can you create higher engagement with your prospective customers?
