Hello Manchester Ink Link nation! My name is Daryl and today we are kicking off an educational marketing series in conjunction with the fantastic team at the Manchester Ink Link.
Our goal: To help you improve your marketing and lead generation programs to grow and thrive in a competitive economy.
But enough with the introductions, let’s dive into our first topic to set the stage for what’s to come.
Every business faces the challenge of getting the most from its marketing dollars. Choosing where to spend your marketing budget can have profound consequences on the success or failure of your business. Pipelines don’t fill themselves and products don’t sell themselves.
There are more channels and options to invest in than there are marketing dollars in our budgets – direct mail, cold calling, print, radio, television, social media, lead aggregators, search engines and events, just to name a few.
So, what do we do? How do we ensure we are in fact getting the biggest bang for our marketing buck? A complicated question, no doubt.
First, let’s talk about an important principle and then we’ll get back to that question.
The reality is, most marketing channels are demographic in nature. You are targeting a person or group that resembles your ideal client or customer. Maybe you are targeting age, gender, income, geography or interests, among other demographic markers.
While this may comprise an audience that mimics your ideal client, one big thing is missing. You have no idea if, or when, they might be in-market-now to purchase your product or service. And when they are in-market, you only have a chance of being in front of them with fortuitous timing or non-stop messaging.
A better marketing strategy is what I call intent-based marketing. I’m sure you are familiar with what is called the buyer’s journey. A path from awareness to consideration to decision for anyone looking to make a purchase.
Intent based marketing targets a prospect as they enter the consideration and decision-making stages of the buyer’s journey, signaling they are in-market-now, making this type of marketing a powerful opportunity to fill your pipeline with prospects looking to buy today.
Circling back to our previous question about marketing channels and where to invest your budget, only one offers intent-based marketing right out of the gates. Can you name it?
If you chose paid search marketing, you nailed it!
Every day, prospects are using Google, Yahoo and Bing to search for products and services they are looking to purchase, and they do it in droves. Crafting a keyword strategy to target these prospects as they come in to market puts you in front of an audience with the proper intent.
Right audience, right message, right time. Sound familiar? It should.
Paid search marketing not only affords you the opportunity to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time, but when done properly, allows you to track every penny you spend to every penny you make – along with a repeatable mechanism for growth, if you can compete profitably.
Of course, paid search marketing isn’t for everyone. It does come with some challenges. You’ll need a professional that knows the tools of the trade and how to utilize them properly, the ability to add assets to your website and a budget for the ad spend. It’s also a competitive place, so you need to understand how to differentiate yourself to compete.
But if you can compete, you have a trackable, repeatable and profitable ROI-based marketing and lead generation mechanism to fill your pipeline year after year. The holy grail of marketing, no?
Does that mean other channels can never be intent-based?
Glad you asked, and we are going to dive into that in our next installment when we discuss how you can take a fresh look at layering demographic marketing with intent-marketing to utilize in other marketing channels.
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for our next installment, coming soon!
Daryl Eames is a marketing and lead generation specialist with more than a decade of experience crafting performance based ROI-positive programs for businesses in a variety of industries all over the U.S.
His programs have created millions of dollars in revenue for his clients through intent-based marketing strategies. Learn more about how his strategies can help you scale your business. Visit his company web site at NewEnglandWebStrategies.com.
Daryl Eames
New England Web Strategies
info@newenglandwebstrategies.com
