How to Make Marketing That People Love
Gift from Sugar Paper and desk accessories from Kikki.k
Marketing has a lovable problem. People don’t like marketing. We feel annoyed when our favourite TV show is interrupted by an ad, we delete any commercial email in our inbox and get furious when we answer the phone to just a telemarketing call.
If consumers hate your marketing, how are they supposed to like your brand? The big challenge companies and marketing professional have always faced is to make marketing that people love.
The digital era has changed the traditional ways to make marketing, becoming more valuable, appropriate and personalised for each individual.
“Modern marketing in the digital age is not just about numbers and processes.”
In today’s post, I’m sharing some tips to make marketing that people love. If your audience love your marketing they will engage with your brand. By creating emotional connections with your audience, you increase your chances to find new clients and leverage existing ones.
1. Know your customer/client
Any business trying to connect with a certain type of customer needs to create a comprehensive profile of exactly who that person is. This is what in marketing is called ‘buyer persona’.
Buyer personas are fictional, generalised representations of your ideal customers. By having a detailed knowledge of your buyer persona, you’ll be able to tailor your content, messages, products and services to meet their specific needs and address their concerns and challenges.
Some effective – and free – ways to craft buyer personas are:
- Through your web analytics, you can get geographical and demographical information.
- Through their social media activity and engagement
- Through interviews or surveys
- Through market research and public reports
This other article by Emily Winsauer explains in more detail how to create buyer personas.
2. Create valuable content
Once you have a clear idea of who your ideal customer is, you can produce content that is relevant to them.
Your clients want to see that you understand their concerns before working with you, so your content must be around what really matters to them:
- Solutions to their problems or answers to concerns.
- Tools and tips to help them achieve their goals and aspirations.
- Articles to entertain and make them laugh
Produce content that help people enhance their lives and make it easier or happier somehow. You can find some ideas:
- Through your clients and prospects conversations
- Through questions and comments in social media groups and forums
- Through Google Trends to know what people search for in Google
In this other post published previously in my blog you can read my simple formula to write engaging content.
3. Deliver the content in different formats
Traditional marketing used to be disrupting, and that’s one of the reasons why most people hated it. The audience is now in control.
By delivering content in different formats, your audience can decide when it’s the right time to consume it and how, whether it’s reading a blog post, attending a webinar or listening to a podcast while they’re driving.
In this other post, I give you 8 ideas to present your content in different formats (with infographic)
4. Personalise your messages
Knowing your client also allows you to personalise your communications, by using their names in emails, etc.
Understanding individual interests and needs also will allow you to produce more specific content and send to each individual content around only those topics that they are genuinely interested in.
- Personalise emails with each individual’s name so that they don't look like an automated bulk email.
- Create a private client area in your website with a personalise welcome message.
- Send email alerts based on each subscriber’s specific interests. By checking content topics of their interest in the registration form you can create different email groups based on those interests.
5. Align your marketing to the buyers’ journey.
Every buying cycle has four steps: awareness, research, comparison and purchase. Your marketing messages will be different for those who are just discovering your brand, versus those who have already bought from you.
By creating different marketing actions for each of these four stages, you will be able to deliver more relevant messages to each group, making your marketing communications more effective.
6. Make your clients/customers feel special
Your business success depends on our capacity to build long-lasting and positive relationships with different groups of interest. Buyers are the most obvious group of interest, as it’s easier selling a second product to an existing customer – or being hired again by the same client – than finding a new one.
To make your customers feel special always give them a bonus after purchasing from you. For example, give them a discount for their next purchase or a gift for loyal clients.
Other groups of interest are your suppliers, your local community, your social media followers, your blog readers, newsletter subscribers, bloggers and influencers, etc. Think about what bonuses you can offer to each of these groups.
For example, give your newsletter subscribers free downloadable content, offer your blog readers a free ebook or invite your local community and bloggers to an exclusive event.
To know more about how to build relationships with these different groups of interest read my previous post on Key Relationships For Small Businesses.
Wrap up
Making a lovable marketing is about marketing people as you like to be marketed yourself. Think about what value you are offering to your audience and whether it will be beneficial for them somehow.
Are you a small business owner? What are your tips to make your marketing loveable? What do you offer that people love?
The revamping of the Oh Flossy play make-up boxes came with a clear brief to create attractive and engaging packaging designs to capture the attention of children as well as their parents. The project goals were well-defined and the result would delight customers and pour great reviews.