How to Create a Strong Video Marketing Strategy
Implementing a video marketing strategy is a must if you desire to reach today’s consumer. The popularity of video is undeniable as more consumers are using it to discover, engage and stay connected with brands.
Video marketing can enrich every aspect of your digital inbound strategy. From growing brand awareness, improving lead generation, boosting engagement and driving revenue. Videos can be the secret sauce you need to amplify your inbound efforts. The key is creating a video strategy that aligns with your ultimate business goals and the needs of your customer.
Are you ready to add video marketing to your inbound marketing mix or looking to improve your current one? If so, here are five steps to creating a robust strategy that gets in front of your customers and generates results.
1. Be Clear on Your Audience and Goals
Knowing who your target audience is and the results you desire from your video marketing campaign are essential to your strategy. It sets a solid foundation and serves as a guide to ensure that the content you publish aligns with your goals and speaks to its intended audience.
Create Buyer Personas
Perhaps you’re already clear on your target audience from your inbound marketing plan. If not, the best way to gaining this clarity is by creating buyer personas. This process allows you to paint a clear picture of your ideal customer which positions you to produce content that appeals to their needs.
You’ll glean data such as their job description and responsibilities, the problems and pain points they have, what their role is in the buying process, keyword phrases they’re likely to use when searching online, their unique goals, and more. It helps you create the content that your audience wants to see. Therefore, making your strategy highly effective.
Know Your Goals
What exactly do you want to achieve from your video marketing strategy? Are you seeking to build brand awareness? Capture leads? Increase your sales?
Whatever the goals, it’s important to know upfront to keep your campaign centered on achieving them. When your business understands why you’re creating video stories, the content becomes intentional and purposeful.
2. Brainstorm and Decide On Your Video Content
There are a plethora of video content ideas. From how-to’s and product videos to customer testimonials and video email marketing, the options are many when considering the video topics you want to publish for your audience.
In addition to key videos, every business should have that highlights their brand and purpose; it is important that you create content that supports different points in the buyer’s journey to hit all targets in your audience.
You see, some may be familiar with your brand through social media or as an email subscriber. Others are more in the discovery phase. Having videos tailored to each prospect maximizes your reach and impact. Viewers are likely to move in your favor (opt-in or purchase your product) when your content relates to their specific journey.
With that said, here are different types of video content every brand should have in the vault and ones that relate to each stage in the buyer’s journey:
Videos Every Brand Needs
- Explainer Video – videos that explain your product or service or offers an in-depth explanation of a specific facet of your product empowers future clients to make educated buying decisions
- Product Videos – each of your products and/or services should be featured in its own exclusive video. Highlight the benefits and the results your customers have achieved through your business
- How-to Videos – showing your customers how your product works is extremely beneficial for customer success
- Customer Testimonials – did you know 88% of people trust reviews as personal recommendations? Posing your testimonials using video can be a power-packed strategy to building trust and converting leads into customers
Videos for the Buyer’s Journey
- Awareness Stage - Prospects are simply looking for educational content that will quickly solve a problem. You want to position your brand as an expert. The best videos here include social videos, YouTube (for search), and ones shared in your blog articles
- Consideration Stage - Prospects are looking at options on how they can handle their issues. They view you as a trusted, credible source and looking to stay connected. Optimal videos in this stage include webinars, instructional, mini-video series, and adding a video to your landing page to boost conversions
- Decision Stage - Your lead is closer to making the buying decision. Make it easy by sharing demonstration, product, and customer testimonial videos
3. Decide How You Will Create Your Videos
With clarity about your audience and content topics ready, it’s time to create and publish remarkable videos that capture attention and WOWs your audience. You have to decide whether you’re going to make your videos in-house or leverage a video production team that can bring your ideas and vision to life.
Using both approaches to creating your videos is highly suggested as you can designate professional ones for evergreen and promotional content and others such as live videos and webinars can be performed by your team.
For videos produced on your own, use these tips to help you in the creation process:
- Get to the point quickly, keeping it short and concise
- Showcase your personality to stand out. Allow viewers to relate to your brand through your style and message
- Make great eye contact. Refrain from looking at yourself in the screen but rather gaze into the lens, so it appears you're looking directly at your viewer
- Give a call to action. Tell your audience what to do next to improve engagement. Whether it's to opt into your list, give a comment, or share with their friends, make it clear, so people follow your instructions
4. Create Your Video Promotion Plan
Getting your video in front of as many targeted eyeballs as possible is crucial for brand awareness and meeting your goals. Traffic, lead generation, and sales opportunities are dependent on how successful you promote your video content. In fact, you should spend 54 minutes promoting your content for every hour you spend creating it (Source: CoSchedule).
Although there are tons of ways to spread the word about your video, be sure to include the following tactics in your promotion plan:
- Social Media Promotion - Each network has a different tolerance of how often you should post and the way you tailor the headline for that specific network. It’s okay to share your video more than once to increase exposure. Just be sure to switch up your headline, so it appropriately speaks to the audience when you’re promoting your video
- Video Email Marketing – Your subscribers should be the first to know about your video as your fans. Keep them connected by including your videos in your email strategy. Create your campaigns if your videos are designed for the buyer’s journey
- YouTube – Although a no-brainer, simply uploading your video on YouTube is not enough to drive engagement. Optimize your video and its title, description, and tags for SEO to improve ranking in Google and YouTube search. The title should include the full keyword you’re aiming to rank for. Also, consider uploading a transcript for further optimization
- Influencer Marketing – Leveraging influencers can play a big role in getting your video in front of new people. They already have a large active following that supports their content. Build relationships with influencers in your niche to create winning partnerships where they promote your video in exchange for something (whether intangible or tangible)
5. Decide How You Will Measure Results
The final step to creating a strong video marketing strategy is measuring your results to test effectiveness. There’s too much invested in “hopes” that your video generates desired engagement to meet your business goals. You must know what’s working and what isn’t so you can continuously make improvements to your strategy to yield favorable results.
The good news is, deciding on how you’ll measure your efforts isn’t complicated. You can create a simple system of questions that analyzes and gauges your outcomes. Here are a few to consider to test your video marketing strategy:
- What keywords are people using to locate my video in search (on Google and YouTube)?
- Which content topic generates the most shares (i.e. explainer, tutorials, social videos, etc.)?
- How long are viewers watching my video? Are they staying for most of the video or leaving after the first few seconds?
- How many views did my video receive?
- Which content topic produced the most social engagement (combination of likes, shares, and comments)
- How many leads did my video generate?
A Strong Video Marketing Strategy Engages Your Customers
Video is a game-changing tactic to capture attention and increase engagement with your target audience. Engaging video helps your brand become more visible in search results. Best of all, it converts prospects throughout the funnel. It’s one of the best tools you can leverage in your inbound marketing.
Use this blueprint as a guide to building a strong video marketing strategy in 2017. You will appeal to today’s consumer and find your company quickly meeting milestone goals for your business.
Much success.
Are you ready to publish compelling videos that sell your product, educate and delight your customers? Reach out to us here to discover how we can help get you to your next level through video.
Inbound Vs Outbound Marketing
You might not have heard the terms inbound and outbound marketing before, but you have most likely experienced both without realizing. Read the scenarios below about inbound vs. outbound marketing.
Outbound Marketing:
You’re in the middle of working at your desk and the telephone rings.
You: Hello, this is John.
Marketer: Hi John, this is Sam from [insert name of Company X here]. Company X manufactures widgets. We pride ourselves on our quality and superior service. We have managed to help other companies transition to our widgets, and in doing so, we were able to help one company raise their retention rate of clients by 50% in six months. I’d like to ask a few questions to see if I can provide you with our services.
You: Well, right now is not the time for me to talk. Let me think about it, and I’ll get back to you.
This is an example of cold calling, which is an outbound marketing tactic. You’ve probably experienced this before and felt caught off guard. This type of tactic doesn’t form a relationship with the prospect and is interruptive. It shows a marketer-centric mindset and usually is not very efficient and rather costly. Other types of outbound marketing are mass emails (spam) and interruptive ads.
While each of these tactics may have a place as part of a larger marketing campaign, they do not work on their own in a vacuum. Let’s take a look at an inbound marketing scenario.
Inbound Marketing:
The sales process has changed dramatically in the past few years. Instead of relying on salespeople to inform them about new products and services to solve their problems, buyers are doing research on their own and arriving at a buying decision often without ever speaking to a salesperson at all! For this reason, marketing companies are transitioning from outbound to inbound marketing. Because of this, buyers feel more connected to the brand or business because of the relationship building aspects of inbound marketing. Read this scenario and think of a time you might have experienced this:
Steve is the production manager for an outdoor product manufacturing company. He has a problem with a bottleneck on his production line that has slowed down operations and decreased efficiency. He hits the Internet to search for a solution.
While researching, he happens to come across a blog post outlining areas that most plants usually incur wasteful production and how to remedy such issues quickly. At the bottom of the post, he finds a call-to-action that asks for his email in return for an e-book entitled “10 Steps to Immediately Increase Production Efficiency.” Steve is happy to give his email in exchange for such valuable information. Thus he has moved to the next stage in the buyer’s journey, or into the sales funnel.
After receiving his ebook, Steve receives subsequent emails promoting content and videos that help Steve to solve further his problem as well as other related issues that production managers like him have encountered in the past. Through this process, the company promoting this content has accomplished a few things:
- They’ve established a relationship over time through a contact frequency that made sense to the stage of the buyer’s journey where Steve was at the time.
- They have established a high level of expertise in Steve’s mind. He trusts this company with helping him to solve his problems.
- The company has nurtured this lead (Steve) all the way through the Awareness and Consideration Stage of the sales funnel to where they can now position their product or service in a way that Steve would be very willing to listen - sure beats a cold call!
How is it different?
In this scenario, Steve didn’t get bombarded with spam emails that were irrelevant to his interests or feel caught off guard with cold calls. Steve decided on his own time whether he felt that the company’s services were for his business, and he made the decision to call.
With inbound marketing, the consumer can give permission to be contacted instead of the marketer acting as an interruptive sales person in the consumer’s day. Inbound marketing conveys a customer-centric mindset.
Inbound marketing uses tools such as blogging to create interest, social media to engage leads, email marketing as part of the sales funnel and providing value with free resources, such as a downloadable ebook. All of these tactics build relationships with consumers over time.
Inbound vs. Outbound. Which one would you choose?
4 Strong Ways to Boost Exposure for Your Software Business
We can all agree that the inbound marketing way is the strategy to promoting your Software business online. From social media to SEO, visuals, email, and PPC, these are the best channels to attracting qualified prospects and customers to your brand. However, with so many pieces to the digital marketing puzzle, trying to “do it all” can prove to be an overwhelming, daunting task. Especially as a startup or one that is rebranding with a new product, the challenge of knowing which techniques to focus on to create fast results can be frustrating.
We have compiled four simple, yet highly effective, inbound ways to generate more exposure to your software business
By focusing on these tactics, you will increase awareness, traffic to your website, leads, and better your thought-leadership.
#1 Bolster Your Blogging Strategy
Developing a well-thought-out blogging strategy not only positions you as an expert in your software niche, but it draws needed exposure to your brand. You see, 71% of business bloggers say their blog increased visibility in their industries. Also, companies who blog regularly have 434% more indexed pages than companies who do not (Source: Search Engine Land). They also generate more leads and sales.
Use your blog to educate your audience on the problems you solve as a SaaS business. Consider the common issues and questions your market has and address them via your blog. Additionally, publish blog content that highlights the features, benefits, and usability of your software.
The key to generating results from your blogging is consistency and ensuring that your topics resonate with your target audience. Use an editorial calendar tool to help you plan, organize, and schedule your content. The calendar will help you maintain a regular blogging cadence to boost brand awareness.
#2 Tell Your List
According to Forbes, email subscribers are three times more likely to share your content via social media than visitors from other sources. Your email list is your biggest fan, and they are waiting to hear from you to engage with your brand. Even if you have a small list or you are just starting out, keep your subscribers in the know when it comes to the development and promotion of your SaaS. Share your blog content and ask them to share it with their social networks.
One way to get your list involved is to extend a 2-week free trial offer of your software, so prospects get a real-life experience with your product. Send them a survey at the end of their trial to get feedback and reviews. This information can help you tweak and modify, so it aligns with your audience’s interest.
Also, continue to grow your list. Building your leads list is the safety boat of your business. With proper nurturing tactics, it is where the bulk of your sales will generate from. With 59% of B2B marketers saying that email is the most effective channel for generating revenue, it is important that you leverage assets like your landing pages, web forms, and blog posts to keep growing your sales funnel.
#3 Facebook Retargeting
Follow your website visitors everywhere with retargeting. Also called remarketing, this paid strategy allows you to place a tracking code on your site which will set a tracking snippet (or cookie) on the browser of those who visit your site. This tactic will position your ad content to “follow” recent visitors everywhere they go online. Retargeting is extremely useful in keeping your software brand “top of mind” long after people leave your website.
The same concept applies to Facebook retargeting. You will create custom audiences and tailor marketing content unique to them for better engagement. It is highly cost-efficient for your brand and is one tactic that should constantly be running to maximize traffic to your site and produce fresh leads.
#4 Host Live Webinars
Webinars are solid platforms to share a wealth of knowledge in a presentation-style broadcast. You significantly improve your thought-leadership as you delve deeper into topics for more depth and understanding. In regards to marketing your product, webinars provide an opportunity to demonstrate, share the features and advantages, and allow participants to see your new software firsthand. Answer questions live to boost engagement and give the chance for viewers to purchase at the end with the benefits they will gain from acting now.
Finally, a webinar is a great method to growing your leads as each participant must register with the name and email info to join your broadcast. Simply promoting your upcoming webinar to your social channels and list can foster new leads every time.
Following the suggested inbound marketing tactics will increase brand awareness and exposure for your software business. Focus on getting good at implementing two of the tips, test your results, then ramp up from there. The key is to stay consistent in your efforts to measure what's working and resonating with your audience accurately.
Ready to leverage a professional team to help bolster your inbound marketing strategy for 2017? Use the form below to reach out to us. We are equipped to help you step up your marketing game!
Inbound Marketing to Ensure Customers Find Your SaaS Business (Part 2)
As the developer of a Software as a Service company, you obviously have put a great deal of thought into your product or products. Even before development began, you thought about what kind of service you could provide, what kinds of companies you could serve, why your product(s) is best for those potential customers.
Now, you need to figure out how you can best reach those potential customers and convince them your SaaS company is the best solution to their needs.
That's where the services of an inbound marketing company can come to your assistance. This is the second part of a two-part blog on how inbound marketing can ensure customers find you in the burgeoning SaaS business. In the first blog, we offered you a primer on inbound marketing that you can find here. In the second part, we will explain how all that hard work you did in development can lead directly to a successful inbound marketing program for your SaaS company.
Who Are Your Potential Customers?
As we explained in the primer, inbound marketing targets potential customers who turn to the Internet looking for your service, generally to solve a need or problem they are encountering in their lives or business. In the marketing field, we refer to this as their "pain point" and address how your product can ease their pain.
The first step in identifying these potential customers is to develop a "persona" so you can target the communication to the appropriate level.
Do you have an accounting software package you'd like to sell to Fortune 500 companies? Or do you have an accounting package you'd like to sell to a mom and pop retail store? Or maybe it's an accounting package you'd like to sell to farmers who spend their days in giant tractors, tilling thousands of acres. Each of these "personas" will respond to different forms and levels of communication.
What if your SaaS idea is something completely different? Maybe you've developed a program that can point avid readers to authors who write similar works and you get a share from each book you recommend through an online bookseller. Or maybe it's obscure documentary films. Or Japanese anime. Again, you are targeting very different "personas" so you need your language to appeal to each of these targets as they search for answers.
The more you know about your potential customer, the better your inbound marketing effort can succeed.
What Are Their Pain Points?
Before you ever developed your software, you had a vision for what it could do and why it could appeal to your customers. You already were thinking about how you could relieve their pain points, whether you thought of it that way or not.
Putting that thought into language that will attract potential customers is the next step to a successful inbound marketing effort. Knowing the language of your potential customers is vital to successfully meeting the ever-changing demands of Internet search engines.
If you're promoting that accounting software to Fortune 500 companies, their CFO is not going to search for "accounting software". She is more likely to search for "ASC 606 compliance" to deal with her latest pain point. Understanding how your best potential customers will speak and search boosts your chances of reaching them in the first place.
Drawing Your Customers into the Funnel
If you remember from the primer, we talked about how inbound marketing casts a wide net through search engine optimization to ensure your company appears highly in search results. The next step is to make those searches pay off into customers who enter your funnel and become paying customers.
Research now is pointing to the absolute necessity to feature video on your website and in any marketing effort. HubSpot reports that 59 percent of executives would rather watch video than read text; while individual consumers are four times as likely to watch a video as read text about a product, Small Business Trends reports.
The same report from Small Business Trends notes that 50 percent of executives are likely to seek more information about a product or service after watching a video. The same research found 65 percent will visit a marketer's site and 39 percent will call a vendor after seeing a product or service video.
As you can see, you've already done much of the hard work necessary to launch an inbound marketing effort for your SaaS company in identifying your potential customers and their pain points. Contact us to learn how to take the next step in developing a marketing program that will make your company stand out in the crowded field of cloud computing.
Inbound Marketing to Ensure Customers Find Your SaaS Business (Part 1)
You have the idea. You have the expertise to put the package together. You even are entering into one of the hottest fields of business. Now, you just need to learn how to find customers in need of your software as a service company.
Since you're targeting a tech-savvy field, you need to be where they can find you. According to Forbes magazine, public cloud-based business is expected to grow at a robust 19.4% annually with revenues to reach $141 billion by 2019. Those kinds of projections also mean opportunists will be flocking to the field, increasing competition for your business. Inbound marketing is the best way for you to ensure customers find you in the burgeoning SaaS business.
In this two-part blog series, we'd like to give you a quick primer on why inbound marketing can benefit your SaaS company and in the second part start you thinking about how you can stand out to your potential customers.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Plain and simple, inbound marketing is how you find customers among those who come searching for you. Well, maybe they are not literally looking for you, but they are looking for someone who can do what you do to help them do what they do.
Put another way, your potential customer has a need or a problem, what marketers call a pain point. When they have this pain point, what are they going to do? In today's technological market, they are going to go to the Internet searching for a solution to their pain point. You are the person with that solution, so they need to be able to find you, then believe that you are the best person to solve their pain.
Inbound marketing works by positioning you to be found by the most potential customers who have a similar pain point and need your solution.
How Does Inbound Marketing Succeed for Software Businesses?
Inbound marketing works by looking at your potential customer base with a funnel approach. A funnel is wide at the top and narrows down as it gets closer to delivering the goods where they belong. A funnel approach to marketing is one that casts a wide net at the top where potential customers can learn about you and your service. Once the customers become interested, the marketing becomes more targeted to convince them to advance further into the funnel to learn how your service solves their pain point, ultimately turning that potential customer into a money-paying customer.
Inbound marketers first cast that wide net by ensuring your company is positioned to be found by anyone who has a certain pain point that your company can solve. Inbound marketers do this by understanding your potential customers, knowing their pain points and ensuring when they search for a solution, your business stand out among the search results. This is called search engine optimization.
Because Internet search engines always are trying to give their customers the best results, they constantly change how they judge content to ensure the best results. As a busy executive, you don't have time to keep up with those changes, but an inbound marketing company can do that. Marketers must understand such language as keywords, long string keywords, video matrix, etc. to ensure your content stays at the top of the search engines' results.
Casting the net is just the first part of the inbound marketing approach. The next steps involve capturing those potential customers' attention and convincing them your company offers the best solution to their pain point(s). In the next blog post, we'll talk about how you can help with an inbound marketing campaign by thinking about who your potential customers are and how you can offer them the best solution to their pain point.
Contact us if you'd like to learn more about the intricacies of inbound marketing and how it is the best solution for SaaS companies seeking to expand their customer base.
Climbing Gym Marketing: Inbound Marketing Funnel
Take your business to a new level through proficient inbound gym marketing. Increase your day pass purchased, increase memberships, get your current classes to a new level of participation.
Inbound Marketing
Top of The Funnel
Introducing new prospects to the top of your funnel may include several methods, all of which are unintrusive but welcoming. It isn't about chasing after leads, but rather inviting those who are intrigued by your content. For example, your gym produces a video about bouldering that your site visitors who have never bouldered find interesting. They notice that bouldering is based on balance and strength, that you have a spotter close by and a thick crash pad for safety. They have considered trying climbing off and on, and by watching your video, they are highly intrigued and are interested to know more about bouldering.
After watching your video, they go to your website and fall into the top of your marketing funnel (Awareness). This video helps your prospects get to know more about climbing, and how being a part of it may support them to find a solution to a problem, or help them in a particular need such as needing a new form of exercise. These 'learners' at the top of your funnel represent 85% of your website visitors.
Middle of the funnel
About 10% of your site visitors come back as 'shoppers' to scout and learn more about your gym. While they are browsing, they find an article regarding climbing harnesses and shoes. This post goes over not only the thrill of the climb but important aspects of safety such as inspecting your harness. They become more curious and take a look at testimonials from your customers, the cost involved, the benefits, training, and everything a novice needs to learn.
Since they are close to reaching a decision, it is time to ensure that your social media portion of your marketing strategy is fully engaged. Instagram is mainly geared toward small business and will benefit your marketing. In fact, Small Business Trends posted an article stating 50% of Fortune 500 companies use Instagram for marketing. The article includes great information about the best times and days to post in order to secure the highest engagement from your audience.
Bottom Panel
The bottom portion of your funnel is about 5% of your website's inbound marketing traffic. These are the 'buyers' who need a summary to reinforce all the benefits of becoming a member. This may be a time to offer a new member promotion, or a free trial. By introducing them to the sport and by giving a brief introduction on the basics of footwork, different types of holds, and climbing with straight arms, you are able to build new climbers who are far more likely to make climbing a lifestyle
Your climbing gym is on the rise. Through inbound marketing tools such as videos, blogging, and social media, you will have great success in building your foundation in regular memberships, newcomers, and investigators.
Contact HARNESS today to get a wealth of information to assist you in marketing your climbing gym.
Inbound Marketing Essential
Wouldn’t you agree that it’s better to attract qualified, ideal prospects to your sales funnel rather than attempt to promote your business to everyone, creating “hit and miss” results? Or that it’s advantageous to embrace a strategy that connects with, engages your audience, and builds long-term customer relationships versus just focusing on getting the sale?
Absolutely! You see, there is an entire methodology that not only brings potential customers to you but keeps them coming back for more! This approach has resolved multiple issues for businesses like time wasted on unqualified leads, little website traffic, and low lead conversions. The more effective way to promoting your business is through inbound marketing!
This strategy has shown to be the best way to do business online. In fact, 3 out of 4 marketers across the globe prioritize an inbound approach to marketing (Source: Hubspot). Studies consistently reveal that inbound marketing successfully increases traffic, lead generation, sales and repeat business for brands who leverage this tactic.
What Exactly is Inbound Marketing?
The inbound marketing concept centers around creating and sharing valuable content that solves problems and answers questions for your ideal customer (or buyer persona). It simply draws prospects in through education. Because of this noninvasive, selfless approach, prospects are instantly drawn to your brand and see you as the expert in your niche.
There are four key components to a working inbound marketing strategy. It includes:
- Attract: Driving quality traffic to your content via blog posts, social media, SEO strategies, video marketing, etc.
- Convert: Turning website visitors into leads through your lead offers; you giving visitors something valuable in exchange for their contact information
- Close: Transforming leads into customers by using closing tools like email marketing and marketing automation to help seal the deal
- Delight: Creating happy customers and loyal, raving fans of your brand, converting into repeat business
The major benefit to inbound marketing is the process of nurturing a “stranger” into an eventual promoter of your business.
Why It’s Essential in 2016
Inbound marketing, when done right, positions your business for long-term success. Consumers are fed up with being inundated with advertisements yet they are constantly online seeking solutions to their problems. Search is the #1 source for content traffic generation and it’s the preferred choice for looking up information. Inbound marketing positions you to be found by your target audience when they’re searching for you, making it essential for your business in 2016!
If your business is ready to start leveraging inbound marketing tactics to begin drawing qualified prospects into your sales funnel, contact us here for a scheduled consultation. We are certified to help!
Climbing Gym Marketing: Improving Your Inbound Marketing
One of the biggest problems in climbing gym marketing is that their social media efforts do not bring them the results they expect. They take beautiful, interesting pictures for Instagram and Pinterest, but don't get traffic to the gym. This does not mean that the pictures are bad, it just means you need to make minor tweaks to your posts. Here is how:
Write Good Descriptions
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but no one will find your picture without a description. If you are using social media solely for climbing gym marketing, your post needs to be keyword rich, but engaging. Don't just post a bunch of hashtags or keyword phrases, either. Write an interesting comment and include a strong call to action with every post.
Reply to Comments
It's not what you say, but how you say it. Once people find your pictures and comment on them, you need to take a moment to convince them to take the next step. This should be done naturally and uniquely. For example, don't write "Thanks for the like, visit us in person to see more." Instead, try something more personal, "Tammy, I'm glad you like the technique we are using. If you contact us, we can show you how to do it at the gym."
Include Links
Not everyone will want to pick up a phone to contact you. If you have a website, take advantage of it. Include a link to every picture. This will allow people to easily gather more information about you as a climbing gym, making them more prone to buy.
While taking one-of-a-kind photos or videos for social media is a great first step, it takes an effort to make the perfect inbound marketing campaign. To learn more techniques that can help your climbing gym grow, contact us today.
3 Outdoor Brands To Inspire Your Inbound Marketing Strategies
The most successful companies today aren't creating siloed marketing strategies. They're combining inbound and outbound marketing to get the best of both worlds. This one-two punch gets your business in front of your target audience and then earns their full attention by providing them with the valuable information they want. Inbound marketing is especially important for niche areas, like the outdoor sports industry, which is packed with enthusiasts and experts. These customers frequently make purchase decisions based on a first-hand experience and trusted advice from other practitioners. They're loyal customers who are unlikely to be sold by advertising alone.
To support marketing dollars going toward paid ads and print promotions, forward-thinking companies are also providing their target audiences with valuable information to educate and inspire. That way, customers feel more confident buying from brands they can trust after performing their own due diligence. Here are three examples of brands that are embracing inbound strategies to offer buyers more value and stay ahead of the competition:
Therm-a-Rest - Engages Enthusiasts with Social Media
Therm-a-Rest has a healthy mix of written and visual assets on its website to offer a behind-the-scenes look at its camping mattress technology. In addition, it has strong social media presences on Twitter and Instagram that go a step further to engage its audience. How? The company posts pictures of rustic campsites and tents perched alongside striking landscapes. It offers camping tips and asks followers to write in with their favorite destinations.
http://www.cascadedesigns.com/therm-a-rest/blog/rickshaw-south-dispatch-3-no-fools-errand/
These kinds of posts establish Therm-a-Rest as an authority in outdoor adventures, but also give customers a reason to follow the brand organically. Prospects and customers want to be a part of the conversation and they want to stay connected with the company.
BioLite Energy - Content for Every Stage of the Sales Funnel
BioLite Energy is a newcomer to the outdoors scene. It's a startup that produces wood-fired stoves for biofuel and off-the-grid cooking. The company has a mature marketing plan, however, and a blog that's rich with content to addresses readers at every stage of the sales funnel.
- Traffic: 5 Reasons to explore your own backyard
- Engagement: What's your food philosophy?
- Lead Generation: Inside the Technology
- Conversion: A wildlife Biologist Puts the SolarPanel 5+ To the Test
- Loyalty: Backpacking in the Moravia Woods with BioLite (A user story)
This is how inbound marketing works. You grab readers' attention with general-interest material and then follow up with educational pieces that show how products work and why they're the right solution.
Patagonia - Storytelling to Inspire Loyalty
In the past couple of years, the outdoor clothing company has gained attention for its serious approach to sustainability. It all started with a full-page ad placed in The New York Times on Black Friday. The Worn Wear program asked customers not to replace used Patagonia gear with new items, and instead, promised free repairs in order to extend their lives. To support this campaign and recognize patrons equally dedicated to wasting less and getting outside more, Patagonia now publishes stories that follow them on their adventures. It's an inspiring series that puts the customer in the spotlight, and it also establishes a narrative where the brand can easily talk about its focus on high-quality materials and environmentally friendly practices. Altogether, these messages generate a lot of interest in the brand and foster hard-core loyalty among users.
It's an inspiring series that puts the customer in the spotlight, and it also establishes a narrative where the brand can easily talk about its focus on high-quality materials and environmentally friendly practices. Altogether, these messages generate a lot of interest in the brand and foster hard-core loyalty among users. To be successful in a marketplace where consumers research first and buy later, companies can't afford to leave marketing opportunities on the table. Inbound strategies give businesses the chance to nurture prospects with the right information at the right time - until they're ready to make an educated decision about what to purchase.
Are you ready to take your marketing to the next level? Contact us to learn more about the best-in-class strategies we build for our clients to harness the power of both outbound and inbound marketing.
Inbound Marketing & Why It’s Essential In Your Strategy
Wouldn’t you agree that it is better to attract qualified, ideal prospects to your sales funnel rather than attempt to promote your business to everyone, creating “hit and miss” results? Alternatively, that it is advantageous to embrace an inbound marketing strategy that connects with, engages your audience, and builds long-term customer relationships versus just focusing on getting the sale?
Absolutely! You see, there is an entire methodology that not only brings potential customers to you but keeps them coming back for more! This approach has resolved multiple issues for businesses like time wasted on unqualified leads, little website traffic, and low lead conversions. The more efficient way to promoting your business is through inbound marketing!
This strategy has shown to be the best way to do business online. 3 out of 4 marketers across the globe prioritize an inbound approach to marketing (Source: Hubspot). Studies consistently reveal that inbound marketing successfully increases traffic, lead generation, sales and repeat business for brands who leverage this tactic.
What Exactly is Inbound Marketing?
The inbound marketing concept centers around creating and sharing valuable content that solves problems and answers questions for your ideal customer (or buyer persona). It naturally draws prospects in through education. Because of this noninvasive, selfless approach, prospects are instantly attracted to your brand and see you as the expert in your niche.
There are four key components to a powerful inbound marketing strategy. It includes:
- Attract: Driving quality traffic to your content via blog posts, social media, SEO strategies, video marketing, etc.
- Convert: Turning website visitors into leads through your lead offers; you giving visitors something valuable in exchange for their contact information
- Close: Transforming leads into customers by using closing tools like email marketing and marketing automation to help seal the deal
- Delight: Creating happy customers and loyal, raving fans of your brand, converting into repeat business. The major benefit to inbound marketing is the process of nurturing a “stranger” into an eventual promoter of your business.
Why It is Essential in Your Marketing Strategy
Inbound marketing, when done right, positions your business for long-term success. Consumers are fed up with overwhelming advertisements, yet they are always online seeking solutions to their problems. Search is the #1 source for content traffic generation, and it is the preferred choice for looking up information. Inbound marketing positions you to be found by your target audience when they are searching for you, making it essential for your business in 2016!
If your business is ready to start leveraging inbound marketing tactics to begin attracting qualified prospects into your sales funnel, contact us to request a free consultation. We are certified to help!
