(Want to get involved with your customer’s buying process? Some help with web marketing may be what you need).
As you may know, faithful listener, every week we discuss what ordinary people are saying about their buying process on the air. In this article, we’ll take a step back and look at some of the major trends in what they’ve been saying.
Also, we’ve been highlighting different tools that are potentially useful to local businesses. Recently, we discussed a killer content tool called Buzzsumo. We’ll discuss some of its uses and benefits.
How do people buy? What are they saying?
First of all, every marketing guru, business leader, wise sage, and talk show pundit has been saying for a long time that the Internet is changing the economy. They’re saying that things are different now.
We agree. They are. But maybe you’re a business owner and you think, “The world doesn’t look much different than it did 5 years ago. But, one thing is true: fewer people are walking in through my door.”
How can you change that? And what’s really happening? Let’s be as concrete as possible, and clear the air with actual customer feedback.
E-mails
Most of our interviewees have said that they don’t mind receiving e-mails with offers. Some of them have said they “love it,” in fact. Often with the proviso that repeated e-mails on the same topic are annoying, and that any offer that gets sent out must genuinely be worth clicking on.
Granted, a small minority of interviewees do not want to receive e-mails from businesses. But the fact is, e-mails with offers are a successful way to reach a large number of people.
Actionable Advice: Many of our subjects observed that it was mainly big businesses using e-mail offers in their sales and marketing. Yet Mailchimp, one of the most-used programs for running e-mail campaigns, is free. There’s no reason small local businesses can’t give regular sale e-mails a try. If it works, it works.
Keep it simple
Numerous respondents have expressed a desire for simplicity when shopping online. One woman remarked that large sites often make it more difficult to buy due to the sheer preponderance of features and products that take mental energy to wade through.
To us, this may have been the most interesting trend, because clients, when involved in the process of website creation, often want to go above and beyond, sacrificing simplicity and usability for flashy features. This is often a bad trade-off.
A simple site that accomplishes a few purposes very well is typically more useful than a sprawling thing with pages hidden away in all kinds of nooks and crannies.
Content is king
The web is powered by content. Your website, your social media messaging, and your offsite content all exist to deliver the message you want to your users. This may be a marketing message, or it may simply be the information they need to make buying decisions.
The point being, if you don’t have good content, you won’t get very far.
The good news – you don’t need to rely on anything so fickle as your own tastes to figure out what you should write about. There are now tools you can use to see what customers care about.
Chief among them? Buzzsumo.
How do you use Buzzsumo?
Buzzsumo’s interface is pretty simple. Type in a search term or a URL, and it will show the pages online that have been shared the most for that term or that domain.
Instruct the person in charge of your content to find an article that would be interesting to your customers, and then cover that topic in your own way, and put it on your site.
You might not get as many shares as the original, but at least you’ll know that you are writing about an interesting topic in an interesting way. If you don’t start by satisfying those two requirements off the bat, you will be fighting a very difficult battle when it comes to content.
Managers can also benefit greatly from Buzzsumo. It’s the one of the best tools to use to know whether your content workers are doing a good job.
Keep calm and carry on
These are just a few of the things customers have been saying, and just one tool that can change your business. It’s an incredibly wide world out there. But don’t be overwhelmed, no one else is marketing correctly either, with the exception of one or two very savvy companies in each market. Try to simplify your site a bit and make it more user friendly. See if there are features no one uses that could be removed. Type your URL into Buzzsumo and see what happens.
Just a little bit of knowledge can change the game.
Found this article helpful? Listen to the show it was based on.
