Inbound marketing

5 Signs You’re Attracting The Wrong Customers — And How To Fix It

July 15, 2020 by Michael Sanders Leave a Comment

Understanding your ideal customer(s) is paramount to your digital marketing success and the growth of your business. Many organizations attract the wrong type of website traffic, leads, and clients. Narrowing your focus and refining your buyer personas will help you stop wasting valuable resources on the wrong types of people and enable you to bring in more ideal customers for your business.

One key factor is to ensure you are targeting not your current customers, but the customers that will drive your business forward. Chances are, you are attracting more potential clients who will not be profitable or engaged. In this article, we examine five signs that your business is attracting the wrong customers — and how to fix the underlying issues so that you bring on more of the clients your business wants in 2020.

1. You Still Haven’t Defined Your Customers

If you still haven’t defined your current and ideal customers and shared that knowledge among your employees, you’re firing blind. The most critical attribute to discover about your customers is their buying intent. Knowing why the people who buy your goods and services chose your product or service is paramount to understanding both what is driving the marketplace and your key differentiator within it.

2. You Haven’t Defined Yourself

If you truly believe in something, someone will probably disagree with you and get upset. And that’s ok. If you aren’t upsetting anyone, it’s likely that your brand is so vanilla that it doesn’t mean much of anything, to anyone. It’s impossible to gain the vocal champions you need among clients to spread the word about your business if you don’t stand for anything. Your goal should be to have a clear vision and mission statement and attract clients that share your values. Check out our blog to learn how to find your brand voice.

3. You Compete Primarily On Price

There are only a few valid ways to compete — and if you are Walmart, go ahead and compete on price. Are you Walmart? I didn’t think so. If you don’t have the lowest cost structure and compete on price, eventually you’ll go out of business. That’s just how numbers work. Stop chasing low value clients who prompt you to do 80% of the work but 20% of the profits. The ones worth your while aren’t the ones who talk about price until you’ve established your value. And once you’ve established your value, you have the flexibility to charge more. It’s really that simple.

4. You Don’t Do Enough Discovery During Sales & On-Boarding

Before your marketing team can effectively do anything, they need to intimately understand the pain points and goals of your new clients. If your customer service, project management, and/or salespeople don’t have the right tools or exert enough effort to have a firm grasp on the motivations of new customers, it will be next-to-impossible for your marketing team to consistently deliver value-driven solutions.

5. You Have A Disorganized Sales & Marketing Process

If your company doesn’t continue to put energy into re-establishing your brand, over and over again, you will find that your brand value erodes over time. A disorganized brand will attract disorganized clients, and that spells death for your business. You want a firm brand (again, it’s ok to alienate some folks) that evokes a belief in everyone on your team — and by extension, it will evoke a belief in the people with whom you want to work.

Fixing The Issue

Now that we’ve established the “wrong” customers, how do you go about attracting the right customers? Everything boils down to a strategy that aligns your brand, profit model, and target buyer persona with each other. Try these three fixes for starters:

Create Your Target Persona

Note: the operative word here is “target”. That means you need to stop being all things to all people. You have to drill down and discern what is the core audience your business aims to serve. It may be a role, an industry, or a service — it might even be some combination of all three. Either way, focus on a narrow niche and get to know it better than anyone else in your market. That will lend credibility to your offering and allow you to earn a better profit for your services (see below). Here is a previous article to help get you started on writing to target personas.

Create Your Profit Model

When businesses attract the wrong types of customers, it’s often due to a bad pricing strategy. If you price too low, you’re going to attract bargain shoppers who bleed your time and resources. We are not advocating that you overcharge: we’re just saying you should reframe your business and brand story so that it focuses on the value that you can bring to customers. Sell them on your unique ability to solve their problem and you’ll be surprised what they’re willing to pay.

Create The Right Story

Your brand narrative acts as a beacon to attract and retain the right (or wrong) types of customers. Creating the right story typically involves the following elements:

Distill your core values and your brand purpose
Create a mission statement if you don’t have one
Dig deep to understand why you started the business in the first place
Find elements that make your brand unique

When telling your story, try and visualize the ideal customers. Craft your story to appeal to them. Introduce story elements that would filter out customers that are wrong for your business. For this, you need to go back to the buyer persona creation step.

Wrapping it Up

Being prepared for the post-COVID world means knowing whether you are attracting the right — or the wrong — customers, and why. Understanding where you’re going wrong from among the five common errors is a start. From there, narrowing your focus and refining your buyer personas will help you stop wasting valuable resources on the wrong types of people and enable you to bring in more ideal customers for your business. If you still have questions, contact DaBrian Marketing Group Today.

Drive Web Traffic With Paid Digital Advertising

February 28, 2020 by Justin Miller Leave a Comment

You have a great looking website, but this is not Field Of Dreams. Just because you built it does NOT mean people will come. So, how do you increase traffic to your website? Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media, Email Marketing, Paid Advertising, etc… Where should you start???

Here are a few questions to consider:

Is your website mobile-friendly?
Is your content clear and concise?
Is it easy to achieve the end goal on your website?
Do you have a budget to acquire more traffic?
Do you need web traffic immediately?

While all of the above listed options are valid methods to increase traffic, some take time (SEO), or require an existing audience (Email and Social Media.) However, if you answered “Yes” to all the above questions, then you are ready to run Paid Digital Advertising. Running Paid Ads isn’t quite that simple. What kind of ads – Search, Display, Video or Shopping? Where will these Ads be shown – Search Engines, across the internet, on Social Media? And very possibly the most important how will you reach your desired audience (targeting settings)?

While this blog will never answer all your possible questions about Paid Digital Advertising, let’s at least tackle some of the big ones.

1. Type of Paid Digital Ads

Search Ads – Context based ads that appear above and below Search Results. These ads consist of Headlines, Body Copy, URL and often various Extensions (ie. location, phone numbers and other additional information.)

Display Ads – Image ads that show on various sites above, below, next to, and among a websites content. Since these ads are not the primary reason a person comes to the given website, they need to grab their attention and give them a reason to click.

Video Ads – Often shown before, after or during a desired video similar to a tv commercial. Again, this ad needs to distract a person from their desired video and give them a reason to click.

Shopping Ads – Product focused with the goal for selling typically via an ecommerce site.

2. Placement of Paid Digital Ads

Search Engines – Seems obvious, but Search Ads are shown on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP.)

Display Network – Display Ads can show almost anywhere on the web. There are several Display Networks with the most popular being the Google Display Network (GDN) which boasts to include over 2 million websites,videos and mobile apps. Since videos are included in the Display Network, your video ads will show on this network along with your display ads

Shopping Ads – These ads mostly shown on Search Engine Shopping sections (Google and Bing). However, depending on targeting setting your shopping ads could also be Display ads and therefore be shown across the Display Network.

Social Media Advertising – Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and several other social media platforms have their own Advertising platform. These ads are often similar to display ads, since they are often shown along the side of the page and are not based upon a search, but rather other targeting settings (geographic, demographic and more.)

3. Target Audience

The success of your Ads ultimate starts with your targeting settings. Even with the greatest Ads (search, display or other) shown to the wrong audience will never succeed, While Search Ads are primarily targeting and shown based on what a user searches, there are several other targeting settings involved. A short list of setting that can (and should) be setup on most, if not all, Paid Digital Advertising campaigns:

Geographic Location
Day Parting/Time of Day
Demographics (Gender, Age, Parental Status, Household Income)
Interest/Topics (for Display Campaigns)
Bidding Strategy
Device Targeting/Bid Adjustments
ReMarketing/Similar Audiences/In-Market Audiences

Following this very oversimplified process to setting up your Paid Digital Advertising will help put you on the path to not only driving web traffic but also growing your business and bottom line. However this is only getting you setup, you will still need to monitor and optimize your Paid Advertising campaigns on a regular basis.

Ready to Start your Paid Digital Advertising? Want Help setting up, monitoring and optimizing your Advertising Campaigns, or just have additional questions – Contact DaBrian Marketing Today.

4 Steps To Find Your Brand Voice

July 19, 2018 by Michael Sanders Leave a Comment

Congratulations! You’ve just launched a new service and are eager to create a strong online presence. Or perhaps you’ve just been given the green light for your business’s first website redesign since Al Gore invented the internet. Either way, you’re ready to start the process of crafting a winning digital brand strategy. However, before you start shouting your message to anyone and everyone, there are some important things you need to consider.

The Importance of Brand Voice

First, you need to establish your brand’s voice, or how you plan to consistently express your brand through words. While images, videos, and podcasts have grown in importance, text-based communication remains critical to online marketing. Relatable language lends credibility to your message and can contain the keywords that your customers are searching for.

While you can certainly improvise and have some success, by not having a defined brand voice you risk confusing your audience with different messages. And since 83 percent of customer loyalty is driven by trust, mixing your messages makes turning first-time customers into returning customers that much harder.

Instead, consider how you’re going to communicate your value before you start a conversation with the audience. The process can be broken down into four easy steps:

1. Define Your Major Brand Traits

Think of a few words or phrases that describe your business, your product, or your culture. Are you professional or fun? A thought leader or a product innovator? Whatever words or phrases you choose, these brand traits will form the foundation of your company’s marketing efforts and the cornerstone of your brand voice.

The characteristics should reflect the value you aim to provide. Do your B2B customers want to hear that you’re adventurous? Maybe not. But if you sell gaming products, that trait might resonate with a large segment of your target audience.

2. Convey Why You’re Different

Odds are, the traits you’ve chosen to reflect your company aren’t exactly unique. We get it: here at DaBrian, we’re also quirky and authentic. Remember, you’re trying to reach the same buyers as competitors in your industry. This means there’s a good chance that you’re all defining yourselves in similar ways. However, if you can move past the “what” and the “how” to convey the “why” to your listeners, you can quickly set yourself apart from the crowd.

The WHY is about what a company believes in, not about what you make or how you make a profit. So extend each of your key defining traits so that they begin to tell a story. If one of your traits is “irreverent”, have a plan to explain why you’re irreverent. People want to hear your David vs. Goliath origin story, not the latest software features you offer. Influential companies link their purpose with their brand voice to convey why they are different.

3. Give Your Voice a Break and Listen Up

This is a key step that many companies skip in their rush to spread their messages. Don’t forget that the audience you’re trying to reach probably has its own way of communicating. Take a break from developing your own brand voice and tune in to what your peers, competitors, leads, and customers are saying.

Every industry has jargon that you need to be careful to include – or avoid – in your own messaging. Brands that fail to embrace the language of their target audiences come off as outsiders who don’t care about the people they want to work with. Companies that listen develop stronger brand voices, and come across as consultants instead of the latest in a long line of product pushers.

4. Put Brand Voice into Action

Once you’ve agreed on a few unique traits for your brand voice and confirmed that they align with your audience and industry, it’s time to put your plan into action. Extend your voice characteristics to include a few practical “do’s” and “don’ts” for your marketing team. If your brand voice includes “passion”, you might give the direction to include strong action verbs and to take a stand, even on controversial issues. You might also tell your marketers to avoid passive voice and lukewarm endorsements.

Lastly, make sure your team is on-board. Your brand voice needs to be clearly articulated to everyone in your organization as part of your overall brand guidelines. Go through examples of content that hit the mark. And show content that misses the mark, and make suggestions to fix it. Doing so will provide clarity for your content team and ensure that your brand voice is consistent across your marketing channels.

Conclusion

Developing your brand voice is crucial to conveying your brand’s personality and authenticity to potential customers. With just a few unique traits that resonate with your target audience, you’ll be on your way to digital content that builds brand awareness and customer loyalty.

For more information about brand elements to consider when designing digital content, contact us or leave us a comment below!

Grow Social to Build Your Brand

March 12, 2018 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Social media has exploded exponentially the past few years. It started off as a way to share a conversation with a colleague (Facebook), share music with a friend (MySpace), or write all of your personal thoughts in a public diary (Every platform?). But, it has grown into a marketing tactic to allow businesses to get their products or services seen and in the right hands. With how simple it is to click “Buy”, it’s now crucial for businesses to maintain active social media accounts. If you haven’t come to this realization, you’re falling behind.

Creating an account and “posting” just isn’t enough. How do you create worthy content for your customers? How do you portray that your brand is the best to new customers? How do people even find what you’re posting!? With the right advice, this can all happen in no-time.

First Things First: Build Your Organic Reach

With Facebook’s new algorithm, it has become harder to build your organic reach, but doing so will only expedite your social success. Share a mix of intriguing content letting users discover not only helpful tips or information about your industry but allow them to get to know your business and your employees. Customers want to get to know YOU, your employees, and your personality. Any business with a strong company culture can soar on social media, no matter which industry you’re in. If your not an old, bland company, prove it.

Poor Big Mac®, stuck with frozen beef. pic.twitter.com/0r5beTPQfo
— Wendy’s (@Wendys) March 6, 2018

Wendy’s strong social media presence gets everyone talking, even their competition.

— If people like your content, this can also help your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, too! Social posts can be found in search results. —

Make It Known You’re There to Help

When someone messages your company on social media, do you reply? Do you wait days to respond? Do you have an automated message setup and think that’ll suffice? Customers want to speak with one individual, real human being NOW. A bot or automated response may be a time saver and at times, helpful, but it won’t do anything for the customer and in turn, your business. Most feel more comfortable writing to a business rather than calling about a question. Make it known that no matter how they reach out, you care enough to respond. So start getting those responsiveness rates up on Facebook!

Spend Money Where It’s Worth It

While growing your accounts organically is important, there’s nothing wrong with putting money behind the posts that are worth it! In fact, it’s important! There are several opportunities across all platforms that, depending on the scenario and the goal, you should put a few dollars behind. Facebook advertising can benefit almost every business. For this reason, Facebook offers many opportunities to do so such as Boosted Posts and Facebook Advertising. There even is a special, additional way for local businesses to expand their reach. Before you start spending money, think about what you’re trying to accomplish, what will resonate with your audience, and how much should your company spend on this ad? You’ll be surprised how little that cost could be.

Build a Brand Worth Talking About

Building your online presence is an ongoing process and takes a lot of time. While these tips will get you started, there’s much more you can do! If you still don’t see that you need to combine social media with all your other marketing efforts, let’s have a chat – especially if you’re a local business.

Social Media Marketing: An Effective Sales Tool For B2B Companies

September 12, 2017 by Dabrian Marketing Group 1 Comment

Social media marketing initiatives do not have to be strictly for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. Yes, social media is used for connecting with loved ones, watching dog memes (because who doesn’t love doing this?), and sharing cool activities you’ve done recently, but we can’t forget one important detail. These same people have day jobs that your company could do business with.

Business-to-business (B2B) companies have the same opportunities to create relationships and leads with other professionals to grow business and increase revenue.

Where to Start with B2B Social Media Marketing

LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ are all social platforms a B2B manager should utilize.

LinkedIn is clearly the one platform that has the reputation for being for professionals. It includes tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and advertising methods like Sponsored InMail that assist with targeting the right prospects.

Twitter

Some may find this surprising, but Twitter falls second in generating leads. Most of my clients, whether B2B or B2C, are actively engaging with other businesses on Twitter. This on-the-go app makes it easy to share quick snippets and enticing phrases that lead to content and strengthen the case to work with you. Google also takes into consideration Twitter signals where individual tweets have the potential to be linked directly on the search and help your rankings. Plus, posting a few times per day is accepted here, so share as many articles, stories, or images as you’d like!

Facebook

Facebook is the head honcho of social media, but it’s mostly considered as a B2C marketing channel, however, this needs to be part of your social media marketing strategy as a B2B company. Use photos and videos to catch the attention of users on your latest new content, industry statistics, or share expert advice.

Facebook Live is another great visually appealing way to start the conversation with prospects by having them comment during the stream. There are multiple other ways to target B2B prospects such as social advertising or as simple as engaging with another business’ content. Experiment to find out what works for you.

Google+

Google+ has over 300 million users as of 2016 – believe it or not. While many businesses don’t take advantage of this platform, it has its perks for any B2C or B2B company. Forming communities on G+ will help start the conversation with customers and prospects. These communities can serve as forums to aid with customer service or chat with leads. On top of this, the search engine optimization (SEO) benefits are also exceptional since Google search and Google+ integrated. Google has slight favoritism for its own social platform.

You might as well get used to using it now because it’s not going anywhere. By 2050, it’s reported that every business will have a Google Plus page.

Share Relevant Content Consistently

Grasping the concept of reaching out to prospects through social media is easy, however, what to post may not be. Content marketing is critical when utilizing social media for your business. Show your audience and your prospects that you are an industry thought-leader and know what you’re talking about! And hey, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing. All it takes is the time and knowledge to create a piece of material that’ll convince your future customers to sign on with you. Drive people to your website. Make let them learn more about what you have to offer. Get people talking about your brand!

Monitor Your Online Brand and Reputation

People always have an opinion about your work or company. This could be from your employees, customers, or competitors. Unfortunately, social media is typically the first place people go to complain or share negative feedback. Being the first to respond and to react to these situations will only allow for a better outcome.

But don’t forget to thank those who give you the 5-star reviews, too! Appreciating your customers for taking the time to share their experience will go a long way.

Regular Social Monitoring Helps With:

– Voluntary Feedback

– No matter the sentiment behind the review, it can only improve products/services, attract customer, and allow for additional customer service.

– Employee Actions, Images, and Posts

– Some companies have strict social media policies that restrict an employee in engaging in certain behaviors online.

– Handling an Immediate Crisis

– Negative feedback can spread like a wildfire in today’s online world. Be the first to address the situation and hopefully, convince the user to take it down.

– Attracting New Customers

– When your content is shared, you have the ability to get in front of new prospects you might never have thought of.

– Tracking Competitors and Industry Trends

– What are you competitors talking about? What’s trending? What should you be addressing in your feed?

Social Media Marketing is Right for Your B2B Company

Social media marketing works hand-in-hand with content marketing, search engine optimization, customer service, brand management, and so much more. Skipping out on this marketing tactic is a mistake. When you find the right platforms and strategy for your business, your sales will reflect this. Your hard work will pay off as long as you keep at it.

Interested in learning more about the tips and tricks to social media for growing your business?

Using Email Marketing to Grow Your Business

April 3, 2017 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

There are many tactics in the digital marketing realm from PPC, SEO, to social media marketing. The one that’s often overlooked is email marketing which is probably one of your biggest missed opportunities. It has an ROI of 3800%. When you pair email marketing with your Ecommerce store, the results will be outstanding. If you’re not familiar with email marketing, let’s set you in the right direction and explore some of the tactics you can try.

How to Start Email Marketing

As with any marketing initiative, a clear strategy must be written to clearly align the business goals with your email marketing efforts. From there, create the process. Outline key roles, the frequency of each email, best practices for when your company should be sending out these emails, and any other features you’d like to take advantage of. Once you’ve outlined how you’ll be using email, pick the best email marketing platform for your company.

What Can I Send?

There are so many ways to regularly and creatively stay connected with your customers. These emails are critical in order to stay in front of your customers or those interested in your company. You can send an event invitation, a monthly newsletter, or announce a new product. I’m sure you’ve seen many of these in your personal inbox. But, think about which ones grabbed your attention and the ones you actually read. Having an appealing subject line and a unique element to each email is necessary for it to have any effect on your sales.

Set It, But Don’t Forget It

Automation is the simplest way for you to give each customer exactly what they would like to read. It gives you a chance to cross-sell, up-sell, and follow-up with your customers. Here are just a few ways you’d be able to take advantage of it:

Special Coupons – Deals based on a previous purchase.
Abandoned Shopping Carts – Get them to come back to your site and reconsider!
Recent Customer’s Email – Welcome them!
Customer Re-engagement Email – Win back customers you haven’t heard from.
Best Customers Email – Reward those who support you.

Tell Them What They Want To Hear

Segmenting your lists simply means adding extra information to your email list that will help organize and target specific people. This is the best way to truly give your customers what they will actually need or want. Note which category of items they typically buy, their average dollar sale, or where they live. If your business is B2B, note which industry they are in. This way, you will be able to personalize your emails and make them more inclined to engage with your content. Your customers already receive many emails that they immediately delete if it doesn’t pertain to them. Make them read yours!

Email marketing should not be forgotten with all of the ‘cool’, new tactics that are constantly being created. What ways do you see work best for your company? We’d love to hear about them in the comments below!