Driving traffic and getting engagement on social media is a good start, but there’s a phrase that says “you can’t eat likes for breakfast.” This refers to the fact that exposure doesn’t necessarily equal conversions and traffic doesn’t always equal sales. If you’ve found it difficult to get quality leads for your business that actually increase your bottom line, you’re not alone. This is an issue faced by organizations in nearly every niche. Here are some tips on how to target quality leads, close sales, and get help from a content marketing expert.
Define Your Target Audience
First and foremost, you should define your target audience and ideal buyers within that group. This helps you ensure that you create marketing campaigns that are as effective as possible. If you’re advertising to a larger group of people with vastly different interests and ideas, you’re not optimizing your marketing dollars. Instead, make sure your efforts are going towards putting your brand in front of the people most likely to make a purchase with you.
One way to do this is by creating buyer personas.
Why Your Buyer Persona Helps With Quality Leads
Why Use Buyer Personas?
Buyer personas enable you to connect with your customers in a more genuine and personal way, broaden your brand’s reach, and cultivate loyal advocates for your business. You may find that many of your ideal customers share the same qualities, allowing you to create more niched marketing campaigns.
How to Create a Buyer Persona
When defining your target audience, consider things like geography, culture, patterns in behavior, motives, and goals. The more information you provide, the better your finished personas — and the marketing you do using them — will be.
Evaluate Quality Leads Performance
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel and start entirely from scratch with your content marketing. What products or services are selling to which target markets? Do you currently have any marketing campaigns running? If so, how are they doing compared to each other? Take what already works for you and what has proven effective and leave the rest behind. Then, you can fine-tune your content to attract more ideal customers.
Create Trust-Building Content Campaigns
Potential customers may be hesitant to spend money with new providers who they don’t know or haven’t heard of. This makes it more difficult than remarketing to existing customers and is crucial to building trust with your target audience before you ask them to talk with you. It’s important to establish yourself as a trustworthy source of information before attempting to call a user to action.
What Builds Trust?
Include trust-building elements in all of your content marketing campaigns. Use logos, quotes, and other snippets to create pay-per-click ads (PPC) that are highly relevant to your brand. Here are some examples of key elements that are used to build trust between a company and a potential lead before attempting to close a sale:
- References from other clients. If you have happy customers, ask if they’d be willing to write a testimonial or offer a reference for you. New customers want to be reassured that you’ve solved the same problem they’re having for other companies.
- Successful case studies. Write detailed case studies about customer success stories. Include pictures and data about how the client came to you with their problem and what your business was able to do to help them. Then, end with a strong call to action to reach out to your organization.
- Endorsements from well-known brands. Has your business been endorsed by a larger or more well known company? Perhaps you’ve had the opportunity to partner with another company. Include this in your marketing in prominent, easy-to-see places.
Analyze Your Results
After launching your content marketing campaigns and allowing them to run for a period of time, you should analyze the performance of each. Are you reaching your target audience? Are some ads converting leads and others are not? Is sales getting demo requests? What is the overall response to your content within relevant communities on social media? Asking these important questions, along with running Google Analytics, can help you understand how your campaigns are performing.
Refine Your Marketing Strategies To Target Quality Leads
You don’t want to waste your marketing budget on campaigns that aren’t producing quality leads. It’s important to reevaluate your advertising strategies to determine which ones are generating a return on investment (ROI) and which ones are not. Then, you can cull poorly performing campaigns while simultaneously funneling those resources into campaigns that are driving leads.
Cultivate or Hire a Content Marketing Specialist
If you’re busy helping customers or growing your business, developing consistent content may be a time consuming task. Personas will help your sales team, but also your content marketing team in building the right top of funnel content needed to interest and attract your targets.