How to Attract Attention to Your Brand In marketing, your goal is to attract and stay top of mind with a wide audience of good prospects. After all, if you aren t, someone else is (Hint: Your competitor). You want to be perceived as the industry expert, the trusted advisor, and the goto company when prospects are ready to make that important buying decision. To stay in the game you need to attract prospects with valuable, educational information that will help them make a well-informed buying decision; hopefully, to buy your products and services. Your small but mighty business is running a tight ship. You know that sharing compelling content on your website and social media helps to attract, entertain and inform your audience, but not many small businesses have a resource on hand that can be completely dedicated to creating content and sharing it through your website and social media. Producing enough content to power social media and attract visitors to your website can feel overwhelming. But feeding your content marketing engine to attract new prospects can actually be pretty simple. Here are a few tips on what types of content to create, and what types of content to curate to attract more attention to your brand through social media and content shared on your website:
What to Create Repurpose existing assets. Some content is evergreen and never goes out of style. Recycle your existing content to expand your content library. Combine 10 related blog posts into an ebook. Break up a guide or report into 10 new blog posts. Upload an existing presentation to SlideShare. Reimagine print material like brochures, handouts and packets into online presentations, articles, and guides. Customer stories. Your best customers are advocates of your brand who want to help you succeed. Interview your customers for powerful collateral you can share on your website and social networks. Ask how your business has impacted your customer for a compelling case study. Ask your customer how they have tackled a problem that your audience faces for an easy how-to article. Survey results. It s the age of big data, and we love using data to draw conclusions and to back up opinions. Send out a quick poll to check the pulse of your audience and write up a blog post on your findings. Survey your current customers and create a sharable report.
Slides. While you might not be an infographic genius, tools like Powerpoint, SlideShare, and Prezi make it easy to look good. Break up an article into digestible chunks for a sharable presentation. Create a workbook using a Powerpoint template with prompting placeholder text. Use slides to highlight individual data and facts. Team Members. Often content creation falls on one person, whether it s the marketing manager or the business owner themselves. If you re driving content creation, don t forget to reach out to your team members for help. Interview a team member for a Q&A article. Ask a team member to write a blog post about their niche or give their view on a topic. What to Curate Lists. Pick and topic and run with it. A top 10, the best of, the mostest lists are like candy, they re addictive, easily consumed and your audience loves them. Curate a list of articles. Take a page from BuzzFeed and compile a list of fun photos or gifs. List stats, facts, or data.
News. Were you mentioned in an article? Is your industry in the national spotlight? Share with your audience. Set up a Google Alert or Talkwalker Alert to be notified when your business or industry makes news. Follow reputable sources in your industry on social media and share the news that s going viral. Videos. Today, video is super easy to create and share through the rise of the smartphone and through apps like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo, Wistia and Vine - and audiences love to digest video content. Share informative and entertaining videos. Embed a video within a blog post. Curate videos on your YouTube channel and share the link. Infographics. Compelling visuals are easy to understand and share. Search Google images for powerful infographics that speak to your audience. Embed (and attribute) an infographic in a blog post. Send a link to a helpful infographic in an email. Industry Reports. As a smaller biz, you don t necessarily have access to tons of customer data. Third party reports can help add credibility to your value proposition. Industry analyst reports.
Reports published by non-competitors in your space. Thought Leadership. Share what thought leaders are saying about your industry or a customer painpoint. LinkedIn is a great place to start looking for thought leadership articles in your area of expertise. Photo Inspiration. A photo is worth a thousand words, but you may not be a photog or designer. Tap into others talents to inspire your audience. Create a Pinterest board and send it out in an email campaign. Creating your own content is extremely valuable, but can be time consuming. Don t be afraid to supplement the content you ve created with awesome third party resources. Not only will your audience love seeing something fresh, inspiring, entertaining or educational, but you ll gain a bit of good karma by sharing (and attributing, of course!) in today s social economy. With a plan in place for creating and curating great content to share on social media and your website, you re on your way to attracting awesome prospects to your brand. Next up, we ll talk about how to capture these prospects so you can start building a relationship with them and help them through the sales funnel.
How to Capture New Leads Do you hold the elevator door open, or frantically push the close button as you see others approach? As Hatchbuckers, we try to be door-openers, not door closers. You re probably a door-opener, too. But when small businesses build websites, they don t always think about opening their virtual door for leads that visit their site. You work hard to get the word out about your brand and to drive traffic to your website by creating and curating awesome content, then sharing it through outlets like: Social Media Online Ads Direct Mail Print Ads Blogging Networking Events So the next time you think about website optimization or redesign, ask yourself: How can we hold the door open for online leads? Letting web traffic bounce from your site and leave without a trace is like slamming the door shut on a window shopper. You ll never know who they are, or what challenges your business could help them solve.
If you don t have a way to identify interested site visitors, you re missing a big opportunity to generate new leads. Lead Generation Forms One mistake we see a lot of business websites make is an absence of lead generation forms. Resource Lead generation forms invite prospects to learn more by offering something of value in exchange for a few contact details so that you can assist them down the line. For example, if you sell eco-friendly cleaning products, your best customer might be interested in eliminating toxins from their environment. You can offer a report, like 10 Shocking Toxic Chemicals Haunting Your Home. Download When a visitor to your website downloads the report in exchange for their name and email address, two things happen to help your sales and marketing team: 1. Segmentation: You know what the lead is interested in. In this case, it s creating a healthy environment for their family. 2. Identification: You have the lead s contact details. Now you can reach out to them down the road with a related article on healthy homes, or with an offer to try your latest product line.
Timing is Everything Do you have a catch-all Contact Us form on your site? While effective at attracting spammers, the generic contact form does little to generate new leads. Contact form submissions are usually well into the sales process, prepared with questions and looking to make a decision soon. Lead generation forms, on the other hand, capture prospects early in the buying process, during their online research phase. By interacting with them earlier, you gain more control of the whole sales process through - 1. Education: You can educate them on the issue they face, making it less likely that they seek information elsewhere, like from your competitors. 2. Optimization: You can shorten the sales cycle. When your contact fills out a lead generation form, they essentially raise their hand and say, Here s my problem. Now you re equipped to help them reach a solution much faster. 3. Awareness: You ve positioned your brand as the go-to expert. When the time comes to make a decision, they ll deliberately reach out to you first. By offering resources that speak to the needs of your prospects, you open the door to better leads early in the sales cycle, giving you the opportunity to close business sooner and more often.
Conclusion You re creating and curating content, sharing it online, and attracting a bigger audience to your brand. You re even capturing new leads on your website. With a steady stream of new leads being delivered, your sales team can focus less on prospecting and focus more on building relationships with prospects who have shown interest in your business, shortening the path from prospect to customer. So what s the next step to putting a modern marketing process into place? An integrated CRM, email marketing and marketing automation system like Hatchbuck can help. With the right technology, it s simple to capture and identify great prospects anywhere online.