Attracting Busy & Tired Customers: The Complete Guide for Small Businesses

  • January 25, 2022

Attracting Busy & Tired Consumers: The Complete Guide for Small Businesses

Finding new customers can be a challenge when you’re a new startup or a small business. Nobody knows your name, your budget is tight, and you’re competing with gigantic corporations that have well and truly sunk their claws into consumers and won’t be letting go any time soon. Not to mention that your ideal customers are likely busy, tired, and generally suffering from choice overload.

Essentially, you have a mountain to climb – and while it will be tough, it’s by no means impossible. Countless businesses make it – despite the odds – and so can you! You just need to work hard and make sure you’re on point with your marketing efforts and you’re driving engagement.

In this mini-guide, High Click Media offers tried-and-tested insight on how new businesses can reliably find, draw in, and engage with modern-day consumers on a limited budget.

Understanding the Modern-Day Consumer

Before you craft a new marketing strategy, you need to ask yourself how well you understand your ideal customers – or any customers, for that matter. In order for your marketing endeavors to gain any traction, you have to play to the audience – understand your customers’ mindset and then communicate your message to match.

As the Visual Capitalist notes, modern consumers – Millennials and Generation Z, in particular – are significantly different from their predecessors. Here’s how:

  • Less Discretionary Income:  Thanks to increasing education, food, healthcare, and housing prices, modern-day consumers have less money to spend. Extra work – and consequently, tiredness and burnout – is common.
  • Delayed Life Goals:  More and more, these younger generations  are delaying major life goals like marriage, purchasing a house, and having children. This tendency makes them less likely to take risks or indulge in whimsical purchases.  
  • Greater Diversity:  The racial makeup of consumers is changing considerably. You should expect to be doing business with a seriously diverse crowd.
  • Reeling from the Latest Disaster: Last but not least, everyone – small businesses, in particular – is still struggling with the impact of the pandemic.
  • More Choices: If Walmart doesn’t have it, Amazon will. Consumers need you less than you need them – and they know it. 

In short, modern consumers are, for the most part, a busy, harried lot. They have less money than they’d like, so convincing them to part with what they have will be tough. They also have fewer needs and higher expectations overall.

How to Attract and Engage with Customers

The picture isn’t pretty. But, like Benjamin Franklin said, out of adversity, comes opportunity. Business owners can turn these circumstances to their advantage by utilizing more targeted, savvier marketing.

Respect Their Time

When you’re busy – like, working two jobs – and stressed out, you don’t have time to listen to a marketing monologue. In fact, even being subjected to such a monologue can leave a bad taste in your mouth and likely turn you off to the brand. Keep this in mind when communicating with customers. Come up with a clear, to-the-point message and then try to refine it to 15 words or less – just like an elevator pitch. Practice it until you can get your message across meaningfully, clearly, and impactfully. 

Treat Them with Kindness

Kindness is a new business trend, and for good reason. Life can be challenging for modern-day consumers, and kindness is a soothing balm for the soul. Consumers remember businesses that treat them with genuine kindness, speak well of them, and keep coming back. Show kindness to your customers by offering meaningful advice, prioritizing customer service, resolving their problems, and keeping things simple.

Prioritize Convenience 

Customers’ time is at a premium. If you make it easy for customers to do business with you, they’re going to appreciate it. Some ways to make doing business with you more convenient for customers include posting regular updates on social media, offering digital services, accepting multiple payment options, and providing greater flexibility with your products and services.

Institute a Loyalty Program  

Loyalty programs are an effective way to both attract new customers and retain existing ones. If customers receive discounts and deals that few others are receiving, they’re going to feel recognized, special, and privileged – and this will make them want to keep coming back!

Speak Their Language 

The modern-day consumer has solid values and cares about authenticity, transparency, sustainability, and other ethical concerns. When you include these values in your marketing message, it’s more meaningful and attractive to customers.

Be Authentic  

It’s not enough to talk the talk – your brand will have to walk the talk, too. Ethics is incredibly important in modern-day marketing, according to Hubspot, and customers can tell when brands are faking it. If you manage to be authentic, however, you’ll have an easier time winning customers’ trust.

Remember to Personalize 

It’s flattering when someone remembers you, including your choices and preferences. When it’s a business doing the remembering, that’s even better! Build up a profile for each of your customers – it’s easy with technology – and personalize your products and services through recommendations, suggestions, and generally being welcoming.  

Ask for Feedback  

Gathering feedback collected from customers and using it to make improvements is what separates great businesses from good ones. Sometimes we don’t see our shortcomings – or our greatest potential, for that matter – until other people point them out. Feedback can not only take your business to new heights, but also has the added benefit of making your customers feel valued.

Get People to Vouch for You

Customers are more likely to trust their friends and family over the words they read in an advertisement. Get your customers to vouch for you, in any number of ways, to build on your brand in the market. Some ways to do this include starting a referral program, featuring customer testimonials on your site, and offering incentives for customers to review your business.

Be Memorable

Having solid branding is essential. It creates a bigger impression on customers and makes it easier for them to remember you. Getting a DBA (doing business as) name is an effective marketing strategy. DBAs allow you to sell your products under a different, more memorable moniker – or even branch out into a new niche. Furthermore, it’s handy when you want to market your services under a new domain but your desired domain isn’t available. 

Emphasize the Human Touch

Last but not least is the human touch. Names and branding are obviously important – but people remember other people and how they make them feel better than anything else. Some ways to emphasize the human touch are offering face-to-face meetings, training your sales team well, and making it easy for your customers to get in touch with a human being on the phone. 

Final Thoughts

Being successful in business, like everything else in life, revolves around your ability to build and maintain relationships with people. Prove yourself a worthwhile business partner and your customers will be happy, remain loyal, and keep coming back. 

If you’re in the early phases of your new startup or small business and you’d like some help getting started with digital marketing, give us a call today at 252.814.2150 or drop us a line at marketing@highclickmedia.com to see how we can help elevate your brand!

 

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About The Author:

Alyssa Strickland created millennial-parents.com for all the new parents on the block. She believes the old adage that it takes a village to raise a child, but also thinks it takes a village to raise a parent! Millennial-Parents is that village. Today’s parents can be more connected than ever, and Alyssa hopes her site will enrich those connections. On Millennial-Parents, she shares tips and advice she’s learned through experience and from other young parents in three key areas: Education, Relationships, and Community.

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How to Build Brand Affinity with Your Customers

How to Build Brand Affinity with Your Customers
How to Build Brand Affinity with Your Customers

How to Build Brand Affinity with Your Customers

Conventional wisdom says that if you put your customers front and center, they’ll stick with you no matter what. But it’s not as simple as that. You have to give them a reason to stay. The best way to accomplish this is by building brand affinity with your customers.

Brand loyalty is something many companies strive to cultivate with customers. But what if you could take the concept of brand loyalty one step further?

Connecting deeply with your customers on an emotional level can build a long and healthy relationship that’s not only essential to growing sales, but also influences how people speak about your business to others.

Brand affinity involves looking at the customer as an individual, determining how closely connected you are to them, and figuring out how to further cement that connection to secure their steadfast allegiance.

Customers become advocates for a business when they feel connected to its purpose and personality. Defining what you stand for as a company can help cultivate a long-lasting affinity for your brand.

 

Brand Affinity

What Is Brand Affinity?

Brand affinity is the most enduring and valuable level of a relationship between a business and its customers. It’s based on the mutual belief that the customer and the company share common values. When businesses are able to form this kind of deep emotional connection with their customers, there’s nothing better than that!

Every buying decision a customer makes is based on a mixture of emotional, rational, and behavioral factors. When a customer feels an affinity toward a brand, the emotional aspect is likely to play the dominant role in their decision.

Consumers demonstrate their affinity in a number of ways, including: the likelihood that they’ll stick with the brand over time; the high probability that they’ll purchase the brand when free to choose among others; the good chance they’ll refer others to the brand; and the tendency to describe high levels of overall satisfaction with regard to the brand.

Branding Terminology: What’s The Difference?

You may hear marketers like us kicking around a number of different words to describe the brand-building process. Between brand awareness, brand loyalty, brand equity, and now brand affinity, it can be difficult to determine the difference. Let’s take a closer look at each.
Branding for Beginners

Brand Awareness

This is, quite simply, the extent to which consumers are aware of your existence; or, more specifically, how familiar they are with your brand. Being the first brand name that pops into someone’s head when they’re asked about a particular product is a clear indicator of strong brand awareness. When a consumer is aware of your brand, they may buy it or they may not – but at least they know it exists.

Brand Loyalty

A customer might be loyal to a brand for any number of reasons. It’s possible that they appreciate the quality of the product or the value it adds to their lives. Perhaps they’re motivated by compelling, or maybe they just buy it out of habit because they always have before. With brand loyalty, a customer may prefer your brand and generally choose it over others; but this a purely rational decision on the part of the buyer and doesn’t necessarily indicate a strong personal connection between the customer and the brand.

Brand Equity

Brand equity is the overall added value that a brand bestows upon a product or service. Based on awareness, perceived quality, associations, and loyalty, brand equity is how a brand justifies the value it’s seeking to get in the market. Companies with a high level of brand equity can set higher price points for their products, knowing that most consumers will be willing to pay.

Brand Affinity

This factor is measured at the individual customer level. Customers with brand affinity don’t just like your brand – they love it! They don’t just buy your products – they tell others about your brand and encourage them to buy your products as well. Creating brand affinity with consumers is the pinnacle of any brand-customer relationship.

The Benefits of Brand Affinity

From promoting trust to building stronger relationships, brand affinity comes with a variety of unbeatable benefits:

  • Minimizes the Competition:  Customers who are emotionally connected to your brand are far less likely to run to your competitors the first chance they get. In fact, customers with a high level of affinity tend to buy more in general, shop with you more often, and complain less about inevitable price increases.
  • Helps Build Relationships:  People would much rather do business with a brand that’s not afraid to get personal with customers. Humanizing your business can go a long way toward building relationships with your customers.
  • Develops Brand Personality:  If your brand was a person, what would they be like? What would their goals be? Once you’ve nailed down your brand’s personality, you can use it to better target your ideal audience.
  • Creates Trust:  In business, as in life, trust is the foundation of any solid relationship. Customers are more willing to trust a brand if they know it treats its customers and employees well. Communicate the things that you do well, as a brand, to take care of your clients and your workers. Being open and straightforward with customers – especially when something goes wrong – can also improve a client’s impression of your company.
  • Improves Satisfaction Levels:  When people like what you do, they’ll want to shout about it. If they also have a strong emotional connection to your brand, they’ll want to shout about it even louder. The more that potential customers hear about how satisfied your clients are, the more they’ll come to realize that you’re a brand worth doing business with.
  • Boosts Your Bottom Line:  Perhaps the biggest benefit of brand affinity is that it can convert “regular” customers into brand ambassadors for your business. When these brand advocates share their positive opinions about you to others in their social networks, it’s likely that you’ll receive an increase in word-of-mouth referrals – which can turn into more leads, which can translate into greater sales.
Brand Affinity - We Like You Too

How to Build Brand Affinity with Your Customers

Brand affinity isn’t something that you can force or manufacture – it must evolve naturally between you and your customers. However, if you are willing to invest some time and resources into cultivating this level of connection with your customers, the payoff can be huge.

Here are 11 tips to get you started:

 

1) Improve Your Customer Service

Determine what your customer base values in terms of customer service, then do everything you can to meet and exceed their expectations. Once customers have come to identify your brand with excellent and responsive service, you’ve created a way to set yourself apart from your competitors. Ongoing positive customer experiences help build strong, rewarding relationships with your customer base.

 

2) Encourage Customer Engagement

Give customers the motivation to keep coming back to your brand and interacting with it. Encourage comment engagement on all your social media posts. This gives your audience a forum to interact with each other as well as with your brand. Try to determine the ideal platform for reaching your specific customers and consistently post content that followers will be excited to engage with. Photos, images, and videos get a higher number of likes and comments as compared to text-only posts, so keep this in mind.

 

3) Keep Your Customers in the Loop

Be sure to keep your audience up to date with new announcements and features. Whether you’re launching a new product, going through organizational changes, or giving your website a facelift, make sure you let customers know what’s going on. Being transparent with your objectives and taking the time to communicate with customers can help build trust and organically boost affinity for your brand.

 

4) Use Social Media to Your Advantage

Engage with your followers on social media by replying to messages, commenting on posts, and participating in groups and communities. Interacting with customers on a personal level increases brand awareness and develops trust in your company. Establishing strong connections with your audience boosts the likelihood that they’ll share your content and spread the word about your brand in a positive way.

Monitor and listen to online communities to find out what people are saying about your brand. Spend some time talking to people and reading comments online. Try to figure out what motivates consumers to buy or not buy from certain brands.

 

5) Connect with Your Audience Using Targeted Messages

Remind your customers on a regular basis that you’re there for them, to alleviate their pain points and address any specific concerns they might have. Reinforcement helps customers continually associate you with the value they originally experienced with your brand.

Track and study how your customers interact with your products, services, and website in order to figure out what interests them. This will allow you to build messages that are customized just for them, which demonstrates that you’re more genuinely interested in your customers as people, not just as potential sales.

Email marketing is a great way to stay in regular contact with your audience. Whether you’re sending out promotional emails about upcoming sales or conveying important information, keeping an open line of communication with customers is key. This will help keep your business at the forefront of their minds while reminding them why they chose you in the first place.

 

6) Create a Seamless Customer Experience

Customers don’t like it when you make them work in order to contact you or to purchase from your store. A previous stressful experience with your business will linger in the back of customers’ minds and make them hesitant about doing business with you again.

Whether you set up a 1-800 number that connects customers to a live service rep or design a website that’s easy to navigate – if buyers can purchase what they need without any issues or significant delays, they’re likely to think more highly of your company when considering your products and services in the future. Make it a point to regularly review your customer’s journey so you can continue to find ways to make their interactions with your business smoother and simpler.

 

7) Use Affinity Tools to Analyze Your Customers

You can’t be everything to everyone, so don’t waste your time trying. When companies try to appeal to everyone, they often lose the unique, emotional connection upon which brand affinity is built. A number of online tools are available that you can use to help home in on your target audience.

Google Analytics offers a wide range of audience demographics including age, gender, location, and browsing behaviors. Its “Affinity” category helps inform you what type of lifestyle choices your website’s visitors make. For each “Affinity” category, you’ll also be able to see data related to website visits, new visits, bounce rates, pages per visit, and visit duration. For websites that are set up for ecommerce, Google Analytics displays data detailing transaction, revenue, and conversion rate information for each “Affinity” category.

 

8) Offer a Personalized Experience for Customers

Personalizing their experience makes each of your customers feel that they’re valued. One way to do this is by allowing customers to create a profile on your company’s website. Set up form fields that specifically focus on which aspects of a user’s profile will help create the most personalized shopping experience. Offer customers some type of reward around their birthdays. Consider offering a one-time discount that customers can use on their birthday month – instead of just on their actual birthday – to make this reward experience easier to redeem.

 

9) Implement a Loyalty Program

Setting up a points-based reward program allows your customers to earn points by making purchases with your business. After earning a predetermined number of points or spending a certain amount of money, members receive a reward. In many cases, these types of rewards come in the form of discounts toward future purchases.

Tier-based rewards, by comparison, are based on how much a customer spends with your company within a set amount of time, typically within a year. Higher tiers unlock greater rewards – these might come in the form of deeper discounts or access to exclusive sales.

 

10) Understand Your Brand Associations

Social intelligence will provide you with knowledge about how consumers currently view your brand personality and the brand associations they make. Create a search for all “mentions” of your brand. Take a look at topic clouds in order to identify common themes when people talk about your brand. If there are specific qualities that you wish to be associated with your brand, search for those words within all the mentions of your brand. Conduct a comparative study to see how you stack up against your competitors.

 

11) Be “On-Message”

When you have identified your targeted audience and come to an understanding of how customers associate with your brand, you can better determine how closely your perceived image aligns with the reality of your audience. Work on highlighting the areas that fit the message you wish to convey.

Make sure your brand stands for something, and that it’s a well-defined “something.” If you communicate that message effectively, you’ll soon have customers buying into your brand values.

Final Thoughts

Building brand affinity is one of the most effective ways to nurture both short-term and long-term growth. But it isn’t something that happens overnight. Like any other relationship, one between a customer and a company takes time to grow, mature, and strengthen. But by integrating these approaches into your business, you can secure a more successful relationship with your customers today – and enhance and expand that partnership tomorrow.
 

At HighClick Media, our marketing experts are ready, willing, and able to assist you with all of your branding needs. We dive deep with you to answer the questions that matter most to your audience. What makes your company different? What competitive edge makes you worth someone’s time, energy, and money?

A strong brand identity will stick with your customers. We help you create a corporate identity that will build trust and resonate with people. From your tagline to your brand persona, we’ll help you find your brand voice.

Call us today at 252.814.2150 to find out how we can help your business connect with your target audience like never before!

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Marketing to Millennials: Here’s What You Need to Know

  • November 30, 2021

Marketing To Millennials: Here’s What You Need To Know

Marketing professionals for small-to-medium-sized businesses should be aware that when creating messaging and content for the Millennial generation and younger, different rules apply. Marketing approaches that might have been effective in attracting the positive notice of older generations might miss the mark for Millennials – or even send the wrong message entirely. This means you may be failing to earn the interest and loyalty of the largest living generation, even if it’s not the generation that has the most buying power – yet.

Why Are Millennials Important as a Target Audience?

The short answer to this is that everyone is important. Good marketing is accessible marketing,  taking diverse needs into consideration and leaving no one out. Neglecting Millennials simply because they hold less wealth than Boomers or Gen X is problematic from several standpoints. However, from a purely pragmatic perspective, marketing that ignores Millennials is sabotaging itself.

This is partially because Millennials will come into greater buying power in the near future. It’s also because Millennials are more likely than other generations to be the primary consumers of marketing messaging since they are the most plugged in.

Here are some key considerations if you’re developing a marketing campaign with Millennials in mind:

1) Quality of Design Is Important

Older consumers may not notice if a website is poorly laid out or looks outdated. They may notice if a site is difficult to use, but they won’t necessarily be able to pinpoint why. Millennials, on the other hand – having grown up alongside a variety of developments in the digital world – are extremely savvy about what constitutes good design versus what looks cheap, tacky, or cheesy. If you’re not confident about your capacity to design for Millennials, consider enlisting the services of a professional website designer.

2) Craft Content That’s Social-Media-Worthy

Millennials and other younger consumers are probably going to come across your marketing on social media. So, you’ll want to craft content that works well across different platforms. Social-friendly content types to consider include videos (both video Stories and live streaming), testimonials, contests, and holiday-themed content. Also, make sure that your marketing content translates well to mobile devices.

3) Short-Form Content Is the Way to Go

Optimize your social media content to cater to the shorter attention spans of this generation. In many cases, Millennials simply don’t want to waste a lot of time trying to absorb marketing material, and they probably aren’t going to sit down and gaze at a lengthy video, either. Shorter snippets and brief stories are better than earnest but lengthy infomercials. Avoid using clickbait techniques in an attempt to lure Millennial consumers to go deeper into the content. These techniques are glaringly visible for what they are and are a major turn-off for this generation.

4) Make It About the Experience

Millennial consumers tend to value experiences over ownership. They’re more likely to splurge on an adventure or an excursion than on expensive material belongings. And, of course, they’re also likely to want to translate those experiences into Instagram shares. So, instead of focusing on what Millennial buyers might want to possess or purchase, emphasize how your products or services can enhance their life experiences.

5) Deliver Prompt Customer Service

Digital tools make it possible to communicate far more rapidly and effectively than we did even a decade ago, and Millennials are well-accustomed to using these tools. Consequently, they expect others to have mastered these so-called “instant gratification” tools as well. Delayed response times, particularly when it comes to customer requests or service, are likely to provoke a certain level of impatience.

6) Don’t Try to Fake Authenticity

This is a big one. A lot of the pitches that were popular in marketing campaigns directed at Gen X or Boomers come off, in the eyes of Millennials, as just that: sales pitches. This is a generation that has learned to distrust too much smoothness or fakeness and will view rehearsed sales scripts as smarmy rather than smart. In fact, Millennials are more likely than preceding generations to distrust the motives of the business itself. This is why it’s important that your marketing campaign is backed by real evidence with regard to company ethics and influence.

7) Appeal to Their Values

Millennials tend to take values and ethics seriously. Shopping, for them, is not just about satisfying individual needs or desires or getting the best deal. It’s also about making informed choices that can contribute to a better future. Unlike the “me generation,” these younger consumers are likely to think more about sustainability and the future and ask questions about the values and mission of a company.

8) Make Affordability a Selling Point

Here again, Millennials are probably going to look past the pitch and determine whether this product or service is actually a frugal choice. The generation that made thrift store shopping hip cares less about showcasing expensive brands and more about making their spending money go further. When Millennials do splurge, they’re often motivated less by the need to have what everyone else has, and more by the desire to have something unique that reflects their personal style and brand.

9) Where Millennial Audiences Hang Out

In order to reach Millennials on social media, you’ll want to make use of the major platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as some of the newer ones like Snapchat and TikTok, where younger Millennials may be more active. Email marketing also is an effective way to reach your Millennial audience. Compared to Gen Z, Millennials tend to use a variety of platforms and don’t focus simply on those which are primarily video-oriented. Since you will need to diversify your digital marketing in order to capture broad Millennial interests, consider working with a local digital marketing agency like HighClick Media.

A good marketing strategist understands that while human nature remains relatively unchanged from one generation to the next, human trends, tastes, activities, and self-definition are very culturally relative. So, it’s important to understand the different tastes of diverse demographics, including Millennial consumers.

At HighClick Media, we’re ready, willing, and able to help with all of your digital marketing needs. Give us a call today at 252.814.2150 or drop us a line here.

About The Author:

Alyssa Strickland created millennial-parents.com for all the new parents on the block. She believes the old adage that it takes a village to raise a child, but also thinks it takes a village to raise a parent! Millennial-Parents is that village. Today’s parents can be more connected than ever, and Alyssa hopes her site will enrich those connections. On Millennial-Parents, she shares tips and advice she’s learned through experience and from other young parents in three key areas: Education, Relationships, and Community.

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What Do You REALLY Know About Your Customers?

  • December 7, 2021

What Do You REALLY Know About Your Customers?

 

If you want to be truly effective with your marketing, you have to understand your customer so well that you know the “conversation going on in their mind” that’s so personal they won’t utter it to anyone. How do you gain that level of intelligence from your customers? The answer isn’t a simple or easy one.

You can’t just survey people. All consumer polls, surveys, and research are deeply flawed for several reasons. The first is that many people don’t understand the questions asked because they’re barely paying attention and give abrupt, short answers. They also won’t get into the real emotional drivers upon which they base their decisions because that’s not how they consciously communicate.

One of the real ways women choose medical doctors for certain conditions is based on the age of the doctor. They don’t want to go to a younger male doctor because they feel intimidated, ashamed, and deeply embarrassed about their bodies. They want an older female doctor who’s closer to their age.

Most men won’t go to a young female doctor (or a really young male doc) for impotence for the same reasons. They want to go to a doctor who’s a peer in their age group.

But if you poll these patients to see why they chose the doctor they did, they’ll give more logical justifications, such as “they came referred” or “they had great reviews.” While that might be true and may have contributed to their decision, it’s not the exclusive reason they chose that doctor – and it’s not the MOST important factor.

Another problem with consumer research and surveys is that most people don’t consciously know they’re making these decisions. They feel pulled to buy, but they don’t analyze their choices.

Steve Jobs’ principle rings true here: it’s not your customer’s job to articulate what they want, that’s up to you to figure out. That’s where the big money is made – not chasing customers’ whims and surface requests, but knowing them so well that you already know what they’ll buy, what they want, what will get them excited – without them having to spell it out.

Here’s a somewhat crude example, but hear me out. Most people don’t want to ask for what they want when making love, because it kills the magic of the moment. No one wants to be barking instructions at a lover in the heat of passion, mapping out a play-by-play of what turns them on or telling their partner to stop doing what they’re doing.

The best lovers seem to anticipate what their partner wants. Women often get unfairly criticized for not directly telling their spouses what they want. Many women feel that if you’re so dense that you can’t figure out the most obvious things, you’re not paying attention (most of the time, that’s probably true). They also feel embarrassed to ask.

The same goes with your customers.

Some feel embarrassed to ask for what they want because they don’t want to appear to be a nitpicky complainer.

Others won’t articulate what they want because they feel the inadequacies of your service are so obvious that if you can’t see how dysfunctional it is, there’s no point in wasting their breath to tell you.

Others just don’t know what they want, but they’re experts on what they DON’T want.

Some are just too busy to think about it – that’s why they hired you. They want you to anticipate their needs.

So, the only way you can truly understand your customers is by first studying emotional intelligence, persuasion, and human behavior in order to gain a baseline understanding of human motivations.

Next, you have to spend time with your customers – listen to them, understand them, and go deep into the whys of what they do, how they run their business, how they make decisions, their hierarchy of value, and their unspoken desires.

That last one is the hardest, because you have to really pay attention and set aside your values, your thoughts, your beliefs, and be fully focused on them – no matter how irrational their decisions are. This takes practice and a willingness to master influence and persuasion.

While marketing professionals know that the ultimate benchmark of any idea, promotion, price point, product, or service is testing, they aren’t just blindly speculating. They’ve done the work to understand their clients on a deep level and can trust their guts to be right more than wrong. That’s a huge advantage in the marketplace, where most business owners are stuck on the “stuff” they sell and surface-level benefits.

Conclusion

f you’re a small business owner who’s struggling to connect with and truly understand your customers, the good news is that you don’t have to go it alone. HighClick Media is here to help! We’re a full-service digital marketing agency with collective decades of experience in helping small businesses just like yours succeed by optimizing your online presence.

Want to know more? Let’s start a conversation! Reach out to us today at 252.814.2150 or drop us a line here. Working together, we can help elevate your brand beyond your wildest dreams!

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How to Use Your Website As a Marketing Tool

How to Use Your Website As a Marketing Tool

How to Use Your Website As a Marketing Tool

At the center of your digital marketing efforts, your website has the potential to become a powerful sales machine capable of branching out to all other online marketing venues.

Learning how to use your website as a marketing tool is an important first step for any business owner who’s beginning to realize the importance and potential of search engine optimization (SEO). Here are some basic tips on where to begin:

How to Use Your Website As a Marketing Tool - Perpetuate Your Brand

Perpetuate Your Branding

Your branding must become synonymous with the industry you’re in. Whenever people see a meme, infographic, or video you’ve created, they should be able to instantly recognize this content as coming from your brand.

Creating a memorable brand logo has the potential to skyrocket your visibility and steer people directly to your business’s website. You might choose to use a DIY free logo creator tool for this purpose or enlist the services of a graphic designer if you’ve got the budget. Once you have your logo nailed down, you should be adding it to literally every piece of content you put out.

If your logo and branding are unique and cleverly designed, your target audience (the people actively consuming your content on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.) will flock to your website.

How to Use Your Website As a Marketing Tool - Compose a Long-Form FAQ Article

Compose a Long-Form FAQ Article

Given that 8% of all Google queries are questions from users, it’s time that you capitalized on this by answering all the questions pertinent to your industry.

A FAQ article is a type of blog consisting predominantly of questions and answers. Google takes notice of question-and-answer dialogues and is much more likely to rank content that appears to answer those questions best. As you continue answering questions, your site will quickly gain momentum by becoming a go-to knowledge hub for people who are already interested in the products and services you have to offer.

How to Use Your Website As a Marketing Tool - Create Pillar Posts for Your Blog

Create Pillar Posts for Your Blog

Pillar posts are more potent than normal blog posts because they’re designed to appeal to Google’s algorithms as well as people.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to create a pillar post that will boost your website’s ranking and add value to your audience.

  1. Come up with a great concept that engages your audience but is also relevant to your industry.
  2. Craft a title that’s list-oriented. The longer the list of potential “hacks” or “tips” you can provide, the better!
  3. Begin by writing about three of those concepts.
  4. Publish your blog post under a catchy title, such as “3 Failproof Ways to…” or “3 Neglected Methods for…” (Note: Make sure the body of your post lives up to the hype of its title, or you might be guilty of clickbait.)
  5. Add an image or video for each of the concepts.
  6. Add another tip each month, making sure that you also change the number in your title as you add those tips.
  7. Update the existing content in the blog as well wherever relevant.

This continual adding and updating will get Google’s attention – within 6 months, you can expect your ranking to improve significantly.

How to Use Your Website As a Marketing Tool - Sell Directly from Your Site

Sell Directly from Your Site

You don’t have to transform your website into a full-fledged ecommerce site to sell your products or services online. You already have the ability to present products and sell them directly from your existing website.

You can add products, along with prices, and offer delivery as much as you are able to. Before long, you’ll have a much more convenient way of selling your products in a world where people are prone to shop at home and have items brought to their front door.

How to Use Your Website As a Marketing Tool - Customer Reviews and Testimonials

Reviews and Testimonials

Become the type of business owner who thrives on good reviews – then show off those reviews by displaying them on the most prominent areas of your website.

Google uses a 5-star system to rate businesses. If your rating is higher than 4 stars, showcase it on your homepage to instill trust in future users who might be looking for your services. It’s a surefire way to develop credibility with your audience in a market where competition is so strong.

How to Use Your Website As a Marketing Tool - Conduct Interviews

Conduct Interviews

A great way to set yourself up as an industry leader and a trustworthy source for your products and services is by interviewing experts within your industry.

Conduct interviews and post them directly on your website, or post them on YouTube, then create a video feed on your site that allows users to watch your content without having to navigate away from your page.

Who would you interview? Here are a few ideas:

  • Suppliers
  • Affiliates
  • International Experts
  • Local Experts

Basically, anyone who might add interest and value to a topic related to your industry.

How to Use Your Website As a Marketing Tool - Develop Tutorials

Develop Tutorials

Educating your audience is one of the most powerful marketing tools you can utilize – and you can do this directly from your current website!

You can embed videos on your site or simply create a step-by-step written tutorial about how to solve a common problem your target audience might regularly deal with.

This solution-based content will attract visitors to your site, compel them to trust you, eventually buy from you, and ultimately refer you to others who have the same needs.

Final Thoughts

How to Use Your Website As a Marketing Tool

In an ever-changing digital landscape, your company’s website is the most important marketing tool in your arsenal. None of the various aspects of marketing – social media, content creation, email campaigns, paid search ads, SEO, print media, or other traditional methods – have the potential to create more leads or present a more professional image of your business than your website.

Not only does your website serve as a virtual salesperson and brand ambassador for your business, but you can also use it to genuinely connect with prospective customers.

In essence, your website is the nexus at which all your marketing efforts begin and end. Whether you’re sending a tweet, publishing a blog post, running a newspaper ad, or adding a link at the bottom of your business card – the ultimate goal of marketing is to drive traffic to your website.

The success (or failure) of your overall marketing strategy boils down to the design, prowess, and intuitiveness of the website it draws people towards. If you aren’t using your website as the marketing tool it is, then you’re missing out on a lot of potential business. If you’re not making a concentrated effort to be where your customers are, you can bet that your competition is going to reach them before you can.

By implementing the suggestions listed above and incorporating them into your marketing strategy, you’ll be well on your way to seeing positive results for your business.

If you need help developing a marketing strategy, if your branding is all over the place, or if your website is perhaps too old and dilapidated to do what you need it to do, give us a call at 252.814.2150 or drop us a line here!

We’ll be happy to sit down with you (in person, or virtually) and discuss possible changes we can make together to help your business succeed in the digital age. At HighClick Media, our primary mission is to elevate your brand, no matter what it takes. Let’s start a conversation today!

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As a digital content expert, Anna Knowles likes to spread her knowledge and love for digital media. Her aim is to partner with small businesses and startups, helping them grow their enterprise with dynamite content.

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