Know your buyers

To generate leads, marketers must first understand their buyers. Today buyers are the ones who orchestrate the entire selling/buying process. Buyers research the products they desire, and from there they form opinions and carefully make their decisions. Creating buyer personas from research can grant some insight on possible buying patterns, which ultimately guides marketing strategies. With this knowledge in mind, marketers can strategize accordingly to buyers wants and needs in a way that will attract them.

What are buyer personas?

Buyer personas are essentially a detailed mock-up of what makes a target audience buying behavior. Every business has a target audience of people they are trying to reach out to and pull in. Buyer personas are how businesses know whom to target, and how to go about it. In other words they are the representations of the “right” customers for a business.  There is no correct amount to the number of buyer personas needed for your business. However, each business should have enough buyer personas to cover their target market.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is when a company attracts and draws potential customers in to their website by creating relevant content via blogs, social media, and search engine optimization (SEO), etc. Traditional marketing such as Print Ads, Telemarketing, Radio Ads, etc. are losing impacting effect on modern society. Advances in technology are altering, and evolving how companies do business today. This world has become an Internet driven, automatic place.  Web users want responses, updates, and knowledge instantaneously.. According to The Statistics Portal, as of 2014 there are 2.92 billion active Internet users around the world. This high number of people online goes to show the importance of businesses securing a strong Internet presence and using their website as part of the sales process with inbound marketing techniques

In the previous two previous blogs, 5 Factors that Determine AdWords Quality Score and Understanding the Google AdWords Ad Auction and Ad Rank, we have mentioned the importance of how different types of ad formats or ad extensions can affect your quality score in achieving the best possible ad position.  You can look at ad formats or ad extensions as an additional enhancement to the structure of an AdWords ad.  A typical AdWords ad looks like this. 

As mentioned in the previous post, Google’s ad auction does not just reward the ad with the highest bid. While the amount that you bid is a certain factor, the Google auction rewards quality more than quantity. The work and time you put in to optimize your ads will yield a greater quality score and can ultimately increase more targeted impressions and a lower cost per click. The process in which Google’s auction works is quite unique but, very important to understand.

So, how is your ad rank calculated?

Choosing the correct keywords is the foundation to every paid search campaign, but understanding Google’s auction system and Ad rank factors can prove to be even more important in creating a successful campaign.  Google states that their auction system is a secondary auction. A traditional auction works when the person with the highest bid wins. However, this is not the process Google’s ad ranking system or auction system works. 

Employing online advertising techniques, such as Google AdWords, can provide a significant boost to your website traffic while you are working to optimize for organic search results through inbound marketing.

A Business Plan serves 3 purposes:

1. First and foremost a Business Plan provides a framework for the company Founders to consider all the significant elements of defining the customer, how the product/service serves that customer in a “unique” or highly differentiated way, and how management will pull together all the resources needed to   develop and launch the product/service and of course make money.

2. The Business Plan is used by third parties such as the bank, accountant, attorney and advisors during the formative stage of the business to help guide the Founders through the business formation.    In the operational phase, vendors and consultants may use the plan to determine their level of commitment to support the plan.

3. Lastly, if the goal is to raise capital to finance the business, the Business Plan is used to communicate the investment opportunity to potential investors.

There are number of tools that have evolved to help plan and execute an inbound marketing campaign to more efficiently manage the range of strategies and tactics employed over an extended period of time. When trying to attract new potentials buyers and clients, the most important part is planning a strategy on how you you’re going to do so.  

Over the years, Social Media channels have been such a driving force in the digital marketing space.  The power of connecting on a personal level with potential and returning customers is a definitive root in the inbound marketing strategy and, this is exactly what social media can do for your business.  Inbound Marketing is all about personally knowing who your customers are and informing them with engaging content.  Social media outlets have the power to do this instantaneously with your existing following.  The goal is to have your social media following promote your services and connect you to their spider web of friends, connections and followers. This can forever grow your network of potential customers and constantly drive the reach of your business to others. Social media outlets create “word of mouth” marketing over the digital space.