Propsective customers want to learn; then they’ll buy. Research from Gartner reveals that 99 percent of purchases of complex products and services begin with a Google search. How far do they search? A study by Google found most people consume an average of 10.4 sources of information before making a purchase decision. This is up from 5.3 sources in just 2010.
Today, no matter what we sell, we are first and foremost, providers of information. Is our information searchable? Is it sent out through our social channels? When people are searching via Google, they are stringing together a set of words to fill that search bar. How closely does your website content match the group of words they are typing? As Jay Baer puts it in his book Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype
, “You have to understand what your prospective customers need to make better decisions, and how you can improve their life by providing it.”
How can you build that kind of vital content?
Indium Corporation identified 73 of the most important keywords their prospective customers would search for. Then, they created 73 different blogs that focused on each keyword and wrote stores for those blogs, based on content. Once the blogs took off, customer contacts increased 600% in a single quarter. And everyone who contacted a blog author, commented on a blog post or downloaded a white paper opted in to the company’s customer database.
It’s OK, and it’s preferable if your blog posts are not about selling your business. Use your blog to develop rich content that gets to the heart of your customer. Answer every question you can think of. You blog is not the place to echo your press releases in slightly modified language. Your blog is a source for rich, valuable information that is relevant to your customers, and to help them make informed, educated decision. Today’s new and complex search engines gives you a greater challenge but also a greater window of opportunity to engage customers.
Susan (at) plumbline1.com
[contact_form]