Every business will have vastly different content marketing strategies, whether they involve blogging about the benefits of certain products or infographics that people can share via social media to strengthen brand awareness. Though these strategies may vary, their goals should all be the same: to garner attention, build trust for your brand’s marketing message, bring people to your place of business whether online or in person, and generate leads that eventually turn into customers.

All content marketing strategies should also have a few common elements, such as the five I reference below. These five have helped shape my success with my own company.

Create a Sales Funnel

Before creating your content strategy, put together a sales funnel for each piece of content, whether that’s a blog, infographic, or landing page mentioned. Create product or service awareness for prospective customers. The rule of thumb is you have 30 seconds to capture their attention: The more respect and trust you can garner immediately (through a past client testimony, awards, or any recognition), the better.

Once that door is open, they’ll want to evaluate your product or service. Tell stories of other clients’ success, and always bring its most positive purpose in the simplest form. For example, we reiterate the fact that we continually offer the least expensive arrangements for those traveling into and out of Africa.

Finally, they’ll need to make the decision to purchase. Everything beforehand prompted them to this position. Now, what can you offer? Make the pitch valuable by offering whatever guarantees you can provide. 

Understand Your Target Audience

You simply can’t start a content marketing strategy without knowing your target audience. The best route to learning who they are is through intense research of your top competitors, along with listening to the customers you already have and trust most.

Visit not only your competitor’s website but also any third-party publications they were featured in. If competitors have case studies, examine them closely. Check out their social media platforms and tap into their audience.

One way we like to listen to our current customers is through a simple email campaign. We send emails to our top customers, asking for a few minutes of their time to fill out a survey and offer suggestions for better service. In return, we offer a discount on their next trip booked through us.

Appeal to Your Audience

Every piece of your content marketing strategy should be appealing. Use visual elements and charts. Videos will always trump other media forms, but they do take some time to execute well. The next best thing is infographics and appealing charts that show statistics about your industry. Use all three of these elements together to consistently appeal to all potential customers. Always make sure the creative elements educate, entertain, and add value.

Include a Call to Action

Some businesses create a thorough content marketing strategy but likely let many potential clients/customers pass by because they forget to include calls to action (CTAs). Include easy ways to communicate with your organization in your material, whether it’s by email, phone or visiting your website through external publications.

We make sure our CTAs are sprinkled generously throughout our content, but not enough to annoy and deter any marketing message. Experiment and track results of each content marketing strategy you create and revise accordingly. Remember, the market changes often, so a content strategy that worked in spring may not work that fall. Constantly revise while keeping the CTAs strong.

Don’t Skimp on Content Creation

Never skimp on content creation. Once you put together the optimal content strategy, get that content created. If you’re seeking a writer to craft content for your blog or social media platforms, don’t hire a hack. Research and find a respected content creator who has experience and proven success.

The same goes for other mediums such as video or graphic designer; that adage of “you get what you pay for” speaks bounds of truth here. In the beginning stages of our company, we spent considerable amounts of time in-house creating content strategies, but sometimes outsourced the material to the wrong people. We learned, and hired a digital marketing agency known for its talent, and let them work on the creative side. Our results have been successful ever since.

Before you start any content strategy for your business, consider the above five tactics. As entrepreneurs, we have priorities that range from financial to administrative to marketing. We can’t lose focus on any element, especially a content marketing strategy, which sometimes gets pushed aside. Make sure your content marketing strategy is sound in order to build your customer base.

More than often, an online experience begins with a web search. Yet, how do you make sure people searching for companies and services like yours land on your website, and not someone else’s? One thing you can be certain of is that you’ll need to make a case to prove the value of SEO to be able to direct any of your company’s resources – or client’s resources – to site audits, content marketing, technical optimization, local and backlink strategies.

With updates being done to Google’s search engine algorithm continuously, deciding to craft (an execute on) an SEO strategy sounds like a lot of work. How do you convince your boss or client that it’s worth it? Is keeping up with Google really that important? Yes. Being on Google’s good side, and making it to the front page, will impact your business tremendously. And what about other search engines? What is the value of being searchable? Do you show up online?

To help you make a better case for SEO to justify the value of organic search, I’ve compiled a list of eye-opening SEO statistics about organic search, Google facts, and the internet at large. Be free to use them, tweet them, embed them or insert them into your own presentation.

Check them out, and show them to your boss:

When Google went down for five minutes, global Internet traffic dropped by a whopping 40 percent.

It seems like the Internet really does revolve around Google. In 2013, Google’s services were unavailable for only five minutes due to an outage and web traffic dropped by 40 percent. Google is the heart and soul of the internet. How important is your Google presence and global web traffic? Very.

There are more than 2.3 million Google searches conducted each minute.

What have you Googled today? When I “Googled” the appropriate temperature to bake Alaskan salmon, Google connected me with 338,000 results in under 0.81 seconds. The first result was more than satisfactory. With over 3.5 billion searches conducted a day, odds are that you’ve Googled something. It might have been that very search that led you here. Back when Google launched in 1995, users were conducting just 500,000 searches per day. Today, this statistic has more than quadrupled. The growth of organic search traffic has been growing consistently.

Sixteen to twenty percent of all Google searches are first-time queries.

How does Google answer questions that have never been asked before? Through extensive indexing, site crawling and millions of search precedents. Never before asked queries are more common than you’d think. Marketers should think about how to fashion their content strategy so that they find the right balance between targeting ultra-competitive, established keywords as well as the less popular queries that are ‘on the rise.’ Use Google Trends to find these niche golden nuggets.

The top five search results on Google get 70 percent of the clicks.

Does anyone ever go to the second page? Turns out, that your position within search results is of utmost importance. Studies show that the first five search results receive the most clicks (70 percent).

One in six people on the planet use Google.

A big chunk of the world is “Googling” away. With 2 trillion searches conducted on the planet every year, there’s no denying that Google is the world’s most powerful search engine giant.

Eighty-eight percent of smartphone users are using their device to conduct Google searches. 

In company with the previous statistic is the fact that the majority of cellphone users use their phones to conduct searches. According to the report Understanding Consumers’ Local Search Behavior, 88 percent of smartphone perform searches, making the need for a mobile-friendly website crucial. People are searching on the go, and are looking for local results. Google is looking to provide the most practical, precise and relevant local search results through their regularly updated mobile-friendly ranking algorithm. Optimize your local listings with a smart local search marketing plan in place.

Eighteen percent of local mobile searches lead to sales on the same day.

And what’s even more important, 18 percent of local searches will lead to a sale on that very day. In contrast, only 7 percent of non-local searches will. Capturing the local search market through SEO is a smart strategy. Potential customers and clients are searching, you just have to lure them to you. If you have a locally-focused business, you need to show up highly on Google Maps, and other local directories.

This article includes the summary of the key Google trends and statistics originally published on the Alphametic blog here.

At my web marketing company, we’ve found that videos (when done correctly) can help increase conversions and make users more comfortable with making that first phone call. In fact, when creating new landing pages, it is now a standard for our designers to include a place for a related video. We tell our clients, “If you have the budget, shoot some video for your website.”

Videos are an easy and effective way to help increase your web presence. In this age of online everything and interconnectedness, we sometimes lose the face-to-face familiarity that used to be a hallmark of business interactions. With videos, you can give your clients a window into your world, which is almost as effective as meeting with them in person. They’ll get to hear your voice and see you “in action,” which is more than what they’ll get from a static web page.

Types of Videos You Need

The unique advantage of video lies in its abilities to bridge a gap that often exists between businesses and clients when interacting online. Because most websites consist primarily of images and content, you may miss out on the chance to showcase some of your individual personality and style. But with videos, you can highlight all of this without sacrificing your professional website. Another bonus is that many users prefer to consume video content than read through dense website text.

Ultimately, videos allow you to showcase your business in a variety of ways, all of which point back to the larger goal: encouraging potential clients to contact you. If you’re interested in making videos a larger part of your web presence, below are four types of videos you could focus on — the same formats that we recommend to our clients:

1. The Q&A

The question-and-answer (Q&A) video gives you great bang for your buck. While many websites feature a frequently asked questions page, you can use a video Q&A to answer common questions in greater detail and with more finesse than through a static web page. When potential clients are looking for your services, this may be one of the first ways they gain insight into the culture of your business. If you think of the Q&A as a conversation, it’s an easy and accessible way to showcase what you know. 

Q&A videos are also fairly simple to record, enabling you to get through 10-15 questions at once. This strategy has limited impact on your workflow and can set you up with enough video content for the year.

2. The Trailer
   

This kind of video is a great way to introduce your business to potential clients. In a trailer, you could include shots of the physical locations (offices, conference rooms, etc.) as well as images of your employees. You may want to highlight a founder or other executive so that viewers get a sense for who they could be working with, should they decide to contact you.

3. The Interview

An interview is another perfect opportunity to show your personality while also demonstrating your know-how. Interview videos are great for highlighting one person while they discuss their area of expertise. You can create multiple interview videos that cover multiple topics of interest so clients can better understand your specialties.

4. The Event

Have an important office event on the horizon? There’s a good chance the event would highlight your firm in a positive way. As such, it may be worthwhile to document the event and create a video afterward. Clients will get to see you from a different angle (both literally and figuratively) which can bode well both for your brand and your conversion rates.

Promote Your Videos

Once you’ve created your videos, what’s next? Promoting them on social media. Show your followers that you know what you’re talking about and aren’t afraid to share it.  Whenever you’re low on posts, you can simply repost one of these videos and keep your name on the forefront of everyone’s mind.

Using video to present your value propositions in a straightforward and interactive way will keep clients (and potential clients) engaged, while also positioning you as a cutting-edge brand and differentiating your offerings from the competition.

Have you ever cold called or do you now? Cold calling can be exhausting and frustrating.

“I wanted to introduce you to my product and see if you had some time to sit down for 15-20 minutes to go through some information.”

Ninety-nine percent of the time, the prospect is thinking, “Wow, what a waste of time that would be. Their response: “I think I’m all set for now, thank you for the call though.”

Yikes!

Finding the Light

When I started my career, I utilized only outbound sales methods:

• Cold calling or emailing lists from paid lead services
• Cold emailing
• Trade show appearances
• Walking into someone’s office and knocking on their door to introduce myself

I realized there had to be an easier way to reach my audience. My goal was to “get in front” of the people who needed a product that would solve their problem. Once people knew we existed, they’d find value in the product. I just needed help getting the sales process started! That’s when I started supplementing my sales efforts through inbound marketing.

Following Up With Inbound Marketing Leads

In 2011, I convinced my boss at the time to switch to HubSpot (disclosure: our company is a certified partner), adopt an inbound marketing methodology and transform how we relate to prospects and clients. That shift was monumental for the business and for myself as a sales representative. The difference between calling inbound lead versus cold calling an outbound lead was night and day.

Using our marketing software tools, I could see the person I was calling had viewed 17 pages on our site and was interested in specific topics. Conversations were easy. Prospects were interested in learning more. The shift in our marketing and selling strategy was so gratifying, I wanted to help other clients do the same thing.

This is how our growth agency was born and our mission was set: to help other companies increase their website visitors and sales-ready leads.

From Inbound Marketing to Inbound Sales

Inbound sales mean aligning your sales efforts with the way prospects want to buy. People don’t like being sold to. Prospects want to be shown how a product or service will accomplish their goal(s) or solve their pain point(s).  

Pipeline Generation and Inbound Sales Tips

In my journey to become an inbound sales expert, I participated in the Hubspot Pipeline Generation Bootcamp program with Dan Tyre. Below are my top 10 inbound sales takeaways from the program:

1. Warm calling is crucial. Switching to inbound does not mean you can retire your phone. After you start generating website leads, you need to call each one (multiple times, intermixed with short, helpful emails). You may have to reach out 7-8 times before connecting with the prospect.
2. Do your pre-call research. Many sales representatives haven’t considered insight for the prospect that will actually help. Review the company website and comb through their social media platforms. Find the prospect on LinkedIn to locate some points to help you build rapport.
3. Don’t rush the sales process. The goal of this “connect call” is to establish rapport and see if it makes sense to schedule a follow up exploratory call where you’ll discover their goals, challenges and timelines.
4. Use pauses to your advantage. Let the inbound lead/prospect do the talking. Once you say your name and what company you’re from, shut your mouth and get comfortable with pauses. It’s easy to visualize but difficult to execute. Pausing is your new secret sauce. Embrace the awkward pause — it puts the prospect in the driver’s seat, which is where they should be.
5. Practice before picking up the phone. Find a buddy to hold you accountable. Bonus: If you’re like me, you’re competitive and can be motivated by hearing what others are accomplishing.
6. Embrace the art of the voicemail. Most people are terrible at leaving voicemails. Learn how to leave quality messages. This article is packed with helpful suggestions, especially No. 3.
7. Use video voicemails for an effective, less mundane approach. Try the free Soapbox tool by Wistia (disclosure: our company is a certified partner). You can easily produce personalized video voicemails to include in your email.
8. Listen. The best salespeople aren’t loudmouths that can work a room. The best salespeople are good active listeners.
9. Between calls, send emails. Your emails should offer relevant, personalized information. The following guides are packed with helpful information you can use in your sales outreach.
10. Vision boards are underrated. Why are you doing what you do every day? What’s your personal motivation? A vision board can be a collection of family photos, things you love and hobbies with bullet points of what inspires you. Keep this on your desk in plain view.

Inbound Sales Representatives Sleep Better at Night

When someone says they’re “in sales,” we immediately start thinking of ways to get these people to stop calling or emailing us nonstop. This is all thanks to traditional outbound sales representatives who call and email us nonstop while bringing no value to the table.

Flipping this mindset on its head, inbound sales can be thought of as a way of aligning our sales outreach to how the prospect prefers to buy something. This is a more powerful, sustainable position. Hopefully you found these takeaways to be helpful with your own sales outreach efforts. Start practicing these tips and let me know how it goes!

A version of this post originally appeared here. 

If we want to get our message in front of the right audience, entrepreneurs and businesses have to course correct their marketing strategy to include digital. Facebook now has over 2 billion users worldwide and 81% of millennials check Twitter at least once per day. Businesses need to find their target market where that market is currently spending time – on social media.

Before we can get to disseminating our content and our message on these social media platforms, businesses need to be clear about the “who.” If you don’t know who your ideal target market is, no matter how funny your video might be or how moving your copy is, it’s not going to be effective because you’re not going to be getting to your ideal target market.

In my book, Win New Customers, one of my chapters covers how to identify your ideal target market. I have developed the Three-Point Customer Profile Blueprint. When identifying your ideal target market, be sure to rely on data and not on hunches or guesses. If you are not sure who is your current target, survey your current customers. You will get a wealth of information from your surveys.

Starting off with point one of the Customer Profile Blueprint, we want to identify the demographic details. What is their age, gender, geo-location and household income? These will narrow down our target market, but we don’t stop there. In point two, we need to get into the psychographics of our target market. What are the pain points? Frustrations? Challenges? The more you as the business owner can understand their pain points, the better you can address those pain points with your product or service. And point three is to identify where your ideal target market is hanging out. Which social media platform are they using? Are they reading blogs? Do they attend certain events? Follow specific gurus or personalities? Once you have collected as much data as you can from the Three-Point Customer Profile Blueprint you can use that to craft your messaging and content.

Once you have identified your target market, use the messaging to create content. Content is where you get your message across to your prospects. It’s a way to engage with your prospects so they get to know, like and eventually trust your brand. Look at your customer avatar, create content that addresses their pain points and frustrations and put it in a format that you think your audiences would like. Nowadays, you can use video on your mobile phone. It’s a lot easier for busy professionals to interact with video. As a business, you get a lot more engagement with users when they’re interacting with your video versus with images because the user has a much better glimpse of the personality of the person behind the brand. But besides videos, businesses should also consider other types of content based on their audiences such as articles, blog posts, podcasts, case studies or white papers.

Ideally, as a business, you want to create multiple pieces of content to engage with your prospect. And we also need to think of how the user interacts with the content as they flow through the funnel. A funnel is just a simple way to visualize how a prospect interacts with a business. The top of the funnel is wide open with numerous prospects. This is the awareness and consideration stage. As users go through the funnel, they identify if your product or service is the best solution for them from the content that the business provides to these users. The middle of the funnel, the engagement stage, now gets narrower. Some users have fallen off and decided to pursue other brands. And the bottom of the funnel is the conversion phase. At this point, the user is now going from prospect to customer. Your prospects get to know, like and trust your brand. And when it comes time for the sale, it isn’t out of the blue. It’s just the logical next step in the process.

Entrepreneurs and businesses often have a product and they want to push the sale too quickly. You want to ascend your prospects through a funnel, through a series of interactions and touch points. If the sale request appears too quickly then the prospect might feel distrustful of the brand and be turned off. Right then, you just lost a potential customer.

The ideal target market, content development and customer lifecycle funnel are the building blocks of a superior digital marketing strategy. Once these concepts are solidified by your business, the next step is to use social media, paid media or retargeting to get the attention of your target audience and bring them into your brand’s fold.

This post is an excerpt from Win New Customers: How to Attract, Connect and Convert more Prospects into Customers in 60 Days Using Digital Marketing Strategies by Jean Ginzburg. Copyright Jean Ginzburg, 2017

Just like any marketing campaign, you should A/B test your Facebook video ads created to promote your custom videos to see which ones receive the best response rates and drive the best results. 

With video, doing so can sometimes be more of a challenge than with other types of ads because of the time, energy and money required to re-shoot, re-edit or adjust a video ad. But you can stay one step ahead by planning your video production to be easily updated and playing with certain variables to get it just right. Once your A/B testing is complete, you should have a good idea of what will work and can tweak your final video according to what you learned about people’s preferences. Here are a few ad characteristics that should be tested with your Facebook video ads:

• The title: often the title or description of your video can drive views
• Graphics: test all new graphics if you have the resources
• Colors of the titles and graphics
• Opening clips: this can have a huge effect on whether a viewer keeps watching
• Ad length” a single ad can usually be cut into 15-, 30- and 60-second versions
• Calls to action
• Ad thumbnails
• Target demographic locations
• Target age ranges and interests

Before messing around with too many variables, keep these strategies into mind:

Wait a Few Days Before Making Changes

It’s best to wait 10-15 days to gather enough data. Often people are in a rush to find the best video ad or demographic, but a short test can give back a false sense of which is the best combination.

Change One Variable at a Time

After testing a single video, you may have a lot of ideas on how to improve or update your video for testing — but then you won’t know what caused the increase or decrease in effectiveness. Try just changing one aspect at a time so that you can pinpoint with confidence which is working better.

Know What to Look For

Determining what works is not as simple as checking to see which video gets more views. More often than not, a higher view count does not translate to more sales or website visits. Make sure to set your specific goals and test for that outcome.

Keep an Eye Out for Holistic Success

I’ve had clients who hired us for some corporate videos that they would use for Facebook video ads. The ads performed moderately when it came to views and click-throughs, but saw a huge spike on Amazon sales and searches because users were watching videos on Facebook and then heading to Amazon to purchase.

Establish Customer Service Parameters

Being a business owner for a few years, I’ve found that customers are becoming significantly less satisfied with generic solutions. We can no longer direct customers to the FAQ page they neglected to read, or spout a “tough luck” response without pushback. Customers will often request that we break our longstanding rules to accommodate their mistakes. We try to side with our fans 99% of the time, but not every situation is workable. In our business, because customers make transactions with each other, righting one side of the situation often means wronging the other. So when dealing with the type of customer who doesn’t agree with our company rules and requires more than meeting them halfway, it’s important to maintain integrity and establish customer service parameters for the long run.

If we’ve done something wrong on our end, we provide a full refund and a promo code for future use. When customers are at all unhappy with their experience, we’re willing to forfeit our 10% commission on the transaction. If at the venue, customers run into problems, we work up until the event time to right the situation. These few, yet strict parameters have gotten us through hundreds of seemingly unworkable situations. In most cases, our team can lean on these guidelines to provide consistent and attentive service.

Nonetheless, customers expect more tailored approaches to their problems, believing businesses can afford to make exceptions without realizing how many customers are desirous of the same “special treatment.” When customers feel they are being cared for, they advocate for businesses. But if they aren’t, they use the power of social media at their disposal.

Create a Checks and Balances System for Social Media 

Social media is both a blessing and a curse. For as much positive publicity your company elicits, the customer is in the real driver’s seat when it comes to public brand perception. When someone directs a comment to us on public social media platforms, we handle it like we do emails. Responding to customer concerns via social media has been an effective way to show how fast and attentive our customer support is. Since social media is an open channel for the whole world to see, we respond to all of the customer comments we receive.

Despite our efforts to amend all situations peacefully and tactfully, we’ve had customers threaten to blast us on Twitter, write scathing Google reviews, or simply “tell everyone they know” to steer clear of our business. Because we’re still paving a reputation in this industry, we don’t take these threats lightly. When customers try to wield this power, it’s in your best interest to maintain a level head and hope they won’t cross the line. Our customer service agents first tackle situations individually, but if they feel exhausted by a customer, will pass them onto another agent for further guidance and perspective, creating a checks-and-balances type of system. Support for each other helps us achieve an end, and provides customers the opportunity to take a breather between one agent and the next. With power spread out amongst a team, customers can be assured they’re being handled with rationale and care.

Keep Customers in Their Comfort Zones

Most customers prefer one method of communication. If a customer contacts us on Twitter, they likely want communication contained to Twitter. If they engage in email correspondence, they may not warm up to the idea of a phone call. We’ve had customers completely shut down during phone calls because they didn’t expect to communicate with us verbally. If a customer service agent can’t reach a virtual understanding and wishes to switch methods of communication, they should first seek the customer’s permission. Most customers reach out in ways they are comfortable with; they should never feel caught off guard. After watching our customer service agents further complicate situations by surprising customers, it seems keeping customers in their comfort zones is the best thing to do, even if they’re in the wrong.

With an educated customer support team, we can more carefully walk the fine line between serving our customers’ needs and being trampled by those who try to take advantage of us. We strive to side with the fans who have given our small company a chance and believe in what we do. Above all, I believe companies have to treat customers as human beings. But at the same time, if your employees are being treated as extensions of the company rather than people, should you give a courtesy might not be returned?

Ninety-nine percent of the time, yes. But as a boss, you have the responsibility of making sure your employees are being spoken for and feel supported by the company they work so hard to represent. So when a customer in the wrong comes our way and crosses the line despite all efforts to defuse the situation, I feel it’s better to take care of our customer service agents who wrestle that fine line every day. Because when it comes down to it, human decency isn’t something you are entitled to. It’s something you give in order to deserve.