Sustainable business growth is finding a tribe of customers or consumers that love you. But how do they fall in love with you?
They easily find you when they actually need you!
Needing:
Long gone are the days where brands and services can highjack our eyes and stand in front of you until you consume them. The days of road blocks and share of voice metrics have lost most if not all of their value in guaranteeing the consumer is going to buy you. But what is so great about technology is we don’t have to road block the world anymore to get the 10 folks we care about. We can go hang out where our customers are hanging out and organically engage with them about a common issue, interest, or need.
However, this can change the way we start our relationship with the customer. We don’t need to lead with:
“I know you have been waiting all your life for me to magically appear here, today, right this very minute! Plus! I am ready to tell you everything you never wanted to know about me….so… Buy me damn it!”
Not likely to get the click here response you are looking for. However, brands that find the conversations on Redditt, Ada Fruit, Pinterest Board on “clogged sink remedies” and share relevant content that your customer is looking for start to build a relationship where the customer now sees a personally relevant reason to need you.
When:
It is no longer our timeline, but the customer’s timeline that matters. This is why the best brands and services have a vast library of evergreen content out there ready to serve their consumer whenever they might be looking.
2a.m. “I can’t sleep, might as well get up and search for solutions to fixing my pink laundry… Googling, googling, ah! Rit White Wash! add that to my grocery list for tomorrow.”
Consumers often search for information, inspiration, stuff at unusual times and places. Tagging all your content and optimizing it for search terms, phrases and topics will make you discoverable 24/7 on Google or any of your consumer’s favorite search platforms. You don’t need to play the guessing game anymore, but you do need to produce great content that is relevant and shows up when the customer is looking.
There are several plugins now that help you make sure your content is SEO optimized. My favorite is the plug in on WordPress, Yoast SEO Premium. It is comprehensive from readability and discoverability to tagging. It gives you specific recommendations on how to optimize content and gives you red, yellow and green lights when you make adjustments.
Easily:
Which brings us to being “easily findable”. Marketing words need to be completely blocked from all marketeer’s brains. Content should be in consumer speak, not company speak. Go back to “Need” phase where we are finding all the places our consumers are chatting about the topics our brand or service can support, solve, improve. What conversation topics are they actually engaging in and what words are these real consumers using?
Brand: “Hartz Ultra Guard. Best flea and tick drops for the money. Don’t waist money on Vet brands. We work just as well and we only cost $10!”
Consumer: “Nope, not really what I’m looking for. My dog is the only member of the family that loves me. If I have to spend $50 for flea and tick drops so be it…”
Brand through consumer lens: “National research report on the efficacy and safety of top 3 flea and tick drops shows that Hartz Ultra Guard is as efficacious and safe as brands sold in Vet offices at a fraction of the cost. Plus conveniently available where dog and cat owners are shopping for groceries and home goods. Take that extra $40 and buy your favorite family member a new toy!”
Bingo!
Easily findable may not be the easiest for us as brand stewards. Easiest refers to the Consumer. No one is going to work hard to find you. But we can work hard to be found easily.
Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing are critical to our success as brands and services today because they make us easily findable when the consumer is interested in our story. The analytics we get for free from Google alone make it easy for us to see when and where consumers are engaging in brand relevant topics. But all the analytics in the world won’t pay off if we don’t also recognized the art involved in SEO and SEM, often the hardest part of SEO/SEM. Hard because we need to be dedicated to the time and effort needed to produce quality, ever green content for consumers to discover. Hard also to be patient for consumers to find us, versus running around Time Square saying, “Look at me! Look at me!”
Looking for help with your SEO/SEM. Give me a shout at rebecca@firebirdbranding.com
Firebird Branding 