Website Marketing – Don’t be that guy

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Tactical Web Design   •   March 11, 2019

Website Marketing Chicago – Don’t be that guy

AAs soon as your customer wakes up in the morning, they are immediately pummeled with media from all angles and companies trying to sell their products to them and get their attention. Mainstream media blares marketing to your potential customers at every point in their day, from billboards, radio, television, small signs, solicitors, they are always being confronted with businesses trying to get their attention to buy their products and services. YOU included. This has caused a certain level of numbness with consumers towards mainstream marketing. There is a shift in the poles. With the information age well in gear and the internet being a literal bottomless pit of information, businesses are looking for new and inventive ways to make their product or service stand out. Today’s savvy potential customer is looking for more than just who is the loudest, they are more armed with information than ever to cut through the hoopla traditional marketing to find the product or service that best meets their needs.

All About Me

We have all been to a gathering where there is a person who only talks about themselves all night long, eventually what happens? People get tired of hearing it and they tend to “tune out” that person. The goal of this blog is to get you thinking about your website marketing from this perspective – Am I being “That guy” with my website marketing? Does your website only talk about ME ME ME? If so and if you are not seeing the results you would like to see, it might be time to stop thinking and talking about ME ME ME and start talking and thinking about Customer Customer Customer.

What do I mean by this? Today’s internet shopper and overall general consumer is starving for information to make the most informed decision about how best to fulfill their needs. Taking advantage of this thirst for knowledge via Inbound Marketing can help put you in the driver’s seat of your website’s destiny and how you interact with potential customers.

How do I start?

Getting started with Inbound Marketing is actually rather simple, just follow these simple rules:

  • Share information about your expertise in your business or product

  • Interact with your potential customers to convert them from “potential” to “actual” customers

  • Use social media to keep your customers informed

  • Encourage your customers to “share” your content on social media

Content… What content?

Ahh, Content… What’s that you ask? But I don’t have any content I have products. What is this “content” you speak of you say…. Let’s look at a quick example of what good productive content is and how it relates to Inbound Marketing.

Let’s take a look at this example.

Bill owns a liquor store, he specializes in hard to find beers and other specialty products. Bill’s sales through mainstream marketing have been ok, but he feels they could be much better considering the specialty offering of products he has. Bill doesn’t have a lot of money to invest in paying high-end search engine fees to get his site ranked for those products, but what Bill does have is 20 years of experience tasting and pairing different beers and wines with food. Bill sits down and starts writing a blog about food pairings and he does this every week diligently, before long more and more of Bill’s present customers are subscribing and reading his weekly blog. Before long the current subscribers are sharing Bill’s wealth of information with their friends, dramatically expanding the number of subscribers who are reading his weekly blog. It does not take long before Bill starts to see an increase in sales which can be directly traced back to the increase in his blog subscribers.

What has Bill done here? Bill has taken the information he has that did not cost him a thing and shared it with his customers, his customers loved the information so much they began sharing his blog post with their friends, and their friend’s friends, and so on. Bill appealed to the thirst for information his customers and potential customers had for beer and wine-food pairings; turning that into a gold mine using the information he already had. He did not have to spend a fortune putting the blog together, the time he sets aside weekly to sit down and write his blog is more than justified over time by the increase in sales. This is a perfect example of how Inbound Marketing works. Bill stopped blaring ads for the cheapest beers and spirits but rather fed his customer base information and it reacted positively and grew. He also found that he enjoyed sharing the information and the positive reactions of his readers.

Don’t be that guy.

You, as a business owner, must decide to stop being “that guy” and start feeding your customer base and potential customers information that is useful and will stick with the customer. Appeal to their thirst for knowledge and information, you will provide them with a helpful service using the knowledge you already have that will reflect ultimately in a better bottom line for your business.