Online Marketing Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Marketing Best Practices

In prior posts, I’ve talked before about keyword research and niche research, Unfortunately, a lot of training out there skips the step of explaining what these are and why they’re important. I’ve even heard people referring to their keywords instead of their niche. While they are connected, they are quite different.

What Are Your Keywords?

Keywords describe your business, what you’re selling, where you’re selling, and how you’re selling. This is important for two reasons.

First, you should be clear on what you’re selling and focus your marketing around that. You don’t want your Twitter account to mention widgets and your Facebook page to mention gadgets while you’re main web page discusses doohickeys. It’s important both for your buyer’s perception and for Google’s impression of you.

When Google is evaluating your site, it looks at your keywords and your social media. So it’s important that you put your best keyword forward. That being said, you can have other keywords.

Is your site is selling lower cost but unique light fixtures to homeowners who enjoy DIY or those who want to have a custom home but hire people to do the work or own rental homes and want to get a quantity discount, or all of the above? If you have all those keywords on your home page, Google won’t know who to send to your site. But if your main page is lower cost unique light fixtures, and then you have pages for DIY, custom decorating tips, and bulk purchasing, you can have a variety of keywords on your site without the confusion.

Buying and Researching Keywords

People search differently when they’re researching than when they’re buying. It’s important to know the difference. If you push for the sale when people are still researching, they won’t be happy. And if you keep offering research when people are ready to buy, they’ll go somewhere else to talk to someone who will sell it to them.

A researching keyword would be like “best first car for a teenager.” The searcher would expect to see blog posts or articles discussing things they hadn’t thought about yet like initial cost, maintenance costs, reliability, etc. This is where the potential buyer is figuring out what they know, what they don’t know, and what the next steps should be.

And that’s where you can enter in. It’s important to slowly build up a positive relationship with potential customers, and the sooner the better. You should have researched ideas for content and what problems they fun into. Then, when they find your site, you can offer them an ebook or email series that explains what they need to know and to do.

Buying keywords tend to be very specific. “Best DSLR camera for underwater” is a researching keyword. “Nauticam 7D Mark II housing” is close to being a buying keyword. “Nauticam 7D Mark II housing for sale” or “on sale” are definitely buying keywords.

What Is Your Niche

Your niche is your well defined market including who you’re going to sell it to as well as where you’re selling it. When you have defined your niche, you will know how your ideal customer will find you, and how much information they will want to make an informed decision. You will know exactly where to advertise to get their attention. You’ll know when to give information and what type to keep them moving along the sales process. This is sometimes called a “sales funnel.”

If you’re selling kitchen items to people living on their own the first time, you will want to find out what they’re searching on and provide them with what they need. I’m suspecting they’re searching on easy or foolproof recipes that don’t require more then the one pan they own. If you have a few impossible to mess up ones posted, they will probably hang around your site and read your reviews of slow cookers, stand mixers, etc. When you can get them to see themselves using what you’re recommending, then they will be ready to buy. The key is testing and figuring out what’s motivating your niche.

Once you get started, you then refine your niche and expand your products or services to better serve them. You do this through polls and other engagement techniques as well as using your analytics

You can also learn more about their hobbies and interests using Facebook’s ad system. When you get to a certain number of page likes, you can get expanded metrics that include other fan pages that your tribe likes.

What Are Buying Cycles?

Ok now we’re going back to marketing When you go from a potential customer potentially being interested in your product or service through where they’re ready to buy is a sales funnel. You want to get them the right information at the right place in time to help move them along.

A sales funnel could also be called a sales cycle, but generally the sales cycle is a part of the sales funnel. In the sales funnel, you have people entering and dropping out. In the cycle, you’re defining the research keywords through buying keywords. When people talk about sales cycles, they often talk about the three phases.

Beginning of buying cycle – buyers start with basic research about the products or services. i.e. “printer reviews” “luxury sedan comparisons” “wine refrigerators for apartments”
Mid-stages of buying cycle – buyers are narrowing their online searches. “color laser printers” “audi sedans under $55,000” “12 bottle wine refrigerator”
Final stage of buying cycle – most marketers focus only on this final stage where the customer is ready to buy. This is a mistake since you want to be in a solid relationship with the buyer by this time so it makes sense to only buy from you.

How Do You Build the Relationship?

This is why it’s important to do your homework. When you know about your ideal customer, you can enter into a relationship with them when they’re first looking around. You can have the authority website that captures their email address. You can have the active Facebook group that helps answer their pre-sales questions.

The email address really is key to get. Then you set up an email series to send them regular information about what they’re researching. You could send them notes about how to use the product or service, or notifications that you just published a YouTube video showing them how to use it.

The key is to get them excited and visualizing that they’re using your product or service. They can achieve that goal and get rid of that pain that’s been bothering them. And you’re there to help them. You’re there to guide them.

Just don’t sell to them. Remember, people love to buy but hate to be sold.

I have a wonderful guest post for you this week from Sean D’Souza. I hope you learned as much as I did. I highly recommend his newsletter as well as 5000bc. I’ve also purchased The Brain Audit. It’s the kind of package you need to review once every two to three months to get new ideas on how to refine things. (kind of like Think and Grow Rich).

Biggest Landing Page Mistake And How To Fix It

(To read or listen to this article online click on the cartoon)

There’s a reason why I moved from PC to the Mac.

In 2008 I had to do a series of presentations for a radio station. Since the clients of radio stations are always looking for ways to get the attention of their clients, the presentation of The Brain Audit seemed like the perfect match. If there’s one thing I’m very possessive about, it’s the slides for my presentation.

I tend to make changes, simplifying the content and moving the slides around until the very last minute. Even if I have done the presentation dozens of times before, you can be sure I will be making changes at the very last minute.

In this case, the terms of my contract prohibited me from making those changes at the last minute.

The radio station was putting all their slides together in advance, so all slide decks had to be submitted the week before the presentation. This rattled me enough to show up three hours before I had to make my presentation. The technical crew was more than happy to let me go through a run through of my presentation on the big screen.

As I clicked through the slides, I realised that something was wrong. The presentation I was seeing on the screen looked a bit like my presentation, but somehow it was different.

The weird part was that it looked better than what I had done.

After I had got over the shock of someone tampering with my presentation, I asked the crew how they had gone about changing the presentation. “We didn’t do anything with the presentation itself,” they said. “We just ran it through keynote — which is a presentation software for the Mac.”

That one idea was enough to get me hooked onto the Mac, even though I had used the PC for close to 15 years. The Mac had solved a problem that I didn’t know existed. It had taken the best possible presentation I could muster, and made it far more beautiful than I could imagine.

Since then, I have dumped all my PCs and stuck to the Mac. So does this make me the ideal client?

It does not, because I wasn’t aware of the problem in advance.

To find the ideal client, you have to find someone is already deeply aware of the frustration they are facing. If you find someone like me—someone who’s surprised and delighted, you’re going to get a very shallow rendition of the set of problems the client faces—and most certainly never get to the depth of the biggest problem.

You have to find someone who already has a problem

And the best place to start could be a random place like Facebook. Since everyone already has an opinion on Facebook, you may shortlist your ideal client based on a friend that responds to your question.

You may have a tiny list of subscribers on your e-mail list, and if you send out a request, there’s a good chance that at least a couple of responses will show up in your inbox. If you already have clients like we do, you’re often still like a newbie, especially when you want to launch a new product or service.

Let’s say we want to launch a product on how to take outstanding photos with your iPhone

In many cases it’s easy enough to locate a great client, and it’s more than likely that they would like to take great photos, but don’t know how. Once you interview them over the phone, or in person, you’ll quickly find a series of issues.

– Taking great food pictures with an iPhone
– How to improve your vacation photos
– How to use manual controls with your software
– How to shoot close up or macro photography
– Great portrait photography with Your iPhone
– How to dump the SLR at home and take outstanding photos with your iPhone.

The problem is obvious, isn’t it? How do you choose? All of these problems seem headed in divergent directions.

The answer is: You don’t choose. You get the client to choose.You focus on the problem at hand and dig deeper.

The questions would hinge on the single problem:
– Why do you want to take your iPhone instead of a Nikon?
– What frustrates you when you take the Nikon?
– Can you describe a day on your vacation?
– What are the consequences of taking a heavy camera along?

If you own a Nikon 7000 like I do, you’ll find yourself leaving the camera back in the hotel room a lot.

The Nikon 7000 is a great camera, but it feels like you’re lugging a brick along—and when you take three months off every year, that’s like lugging a brick for 90 whole days.

So unless I’m going on a trip—like the time we went to see orcas in Vancouver, or camels on the road in Australia, I keep the DSLR—that’s the Nikon—in the hotel room.

And once you get me started, I can keep going on and on about the problems of a heavy camera. However, as the interviewer digs deeper, she may find that I like the iPhone for other reasons as well.

I can use a slew of software, improve my photos, use filters, create depth of field (that’s a feeling of fuzziness for objects in the distance)—and do that all before I get back to the hotel. With the Nikon, I have to get back, download the photos into a program like Lightroom, and then I’m chained to my computer, instead of enjoying my vacation.

When you dig deep into a single problem, you get the client to give you a ton of details.

You get them to describe their frustration on that one problem.
You also get a sense of what they experience with that one problem when you ask them to describe their day.And finally, you get the consequences—a truckload of consequences.

You then take the biggest problem and put it in your headline and sub-head on your page

The frustration and the sense of what the client experiences: that needs to go in the first couple of paragraphs, followed closely by the consequences. Which leaves us with a sort of dilemma, doesn’t it? What do we do with all the rest of the problems the client brought up? Do we just get rid of them?

This takes us to the next element—what to do with the rest of the problems.

Next Element : What do you do with the rest of the problems?

The answer is simpler that you think.

Remember the Portabooth—that portable recording booth that you could take on the road with you? Well, it didn’t have one benefit or feature, did it? It has a series of them.

And yet, the client is most interested in the biggest problem. Once you’ve solved the biggest problem, the rest of the features are really a bonus for the client. They are a nice-to-have, but not a deal breaker.

The way to use the rest of the problems brought up by the client is to see whether you want to tackle them in the first place

With the Portabooth, we could bring up the rest of the features and benefits and explain why there was a problem and how the Portabooth solves that problem. Unlike the biggest problem, where you have to go into a lot of detail, you can just use a paragraph or so to explain the rest of the main features.

You bring up the problem—for example: Assembles in seconds Just close two zippers—and describe the problem briefly, before bringing up the solution. Now you’ve taken every one of the remaining features, turned it into a problem, and brought up the solution.

But what if the problems were incredibly divergent, like in the case of the iPhone photo book?

Think about it for a second: Is the book going to show you how to shoot portraits, use manual controls, take pictures of butterflies—as well as show you how to take great food photos? If so, then hey, the product already solves the problem, so simply use the remaining features on the sales page itself.

If the problems the client brought up, don’t fit in with your product or service, then you have to ask yourself: Am I going to include them in this product or service or do I simply focus on one thing?

In Psychotactics land, we’ve focused on one thing

Instead of writing a book of 200 pages, we may restrict ourselves to 59 pages. We’ve come to the conclusion that clients want to get a skill, not more information. But if you’re selling a product like a mixer, for instance, you have a ton of features and benefits.

Even so, it’s better to restrict yourself to just four-five problems being solved.

In today’s world it’s easy to get overwhelmed very quickly, and keeping the features and benefits to just a few is the best way to go.

If, however, you still have a ton of features and benefits and would like to talk about them, then restrict them to bullet points. Bullet points are amazingly effective, because they form a quick summary of the product or service.

And there you have it—the series of steps you need to give your product or service the limelight it needs.

You focus on one.
One plane landing on the tarmac at a time.

It makes for a tidy airport and a very successful landing page!

So what did we cover?

1 How to choose one problem. (If you missed this article click here)
2 Defining why the problem is important.
3 What to do with the rest of the problems.

We looked at the racehorses—and how they bolt out all at once. It seems like a good idea to introduce all our benefits and features, but instead of benefits and features, we need to use a problem.

We get to the problems, by inverting the features and benefits. And then once we have the list of problems, we get the client to choose one. Which is the client’s most pressing problem?

– Trying to write this landing page all by yourself is usually a big waste of time.

You struggle to write it and then the problems are not that which the client experiences. Plus, it’s hard to figure out the emotions the client feels. I’ll ignore my own advice only to come back later and realise what a fool I’ve been.

It’s so much easier to call a client and record their experience. Or better still, take them out to lunch—because you’ll get to drink some wine too. And that’s always more fun. Take your recorder with you and make notes as well. Both are very important.

– Finding a client is always daunting.

The best kind of client is a client that’s already deeply frustrated. Someone who’s been going through a heck of a lot and can describe in great detail what they’re experiencing.

I’ve lugged my camera around a lot to tell you what that feels like and why I leave the camera behind. You may think Facebook isn’t the best place, but you’ll be amazed at how much feedback you can get on Facebook. Are they the best clients ever? Of course not, but once you launch your product or service, you can always tweak your landing page.

– Go deep into the problem. Ask the questions.

* What frustrates you the most? Why does it frustrate you?
* Can you describe a day on your life?
*What are the consequences of postponing this decision? How does it make you feel?

Finally, what do you do with the rest of the problems?

If they fit in with your product or service, then simply put them in as features and benefits. Or as bullets. Talking about features and benefits, there’s a way to write them a lot better than just listing them, and here is where you can find out more about how to maximise the power of features and benefits.

P.S. Take a look at that landing page as well. It shows you how to create a tiny landing page and get the right information across.

P.P.S. Click here to listen to the audio.

Product Offers: Links you should visit

If you suspect that your business could be bringing in a lot more revenue but you don’t have a clue how to make that happen without hype or hassle, 5000bc is a must-have resource.

The information and support I received from Sean and my fellow “cavers” about a single Web page was directly responsible for selling $10,000 worth of books in less than two weeks.

Try it. You won’t regret it.
Find out if 5000bc is for you.

Top-Selling Products Under $50

Is it possible to raise prices and still keep customers?
Find out here.

Do you feel like banging your head against the wall when writing content for the important pages on your website?
Wouldn’t it be just wonderful to have a systematic approach to create the important pages on your website? Find out how here.Do you know why some businesses get wonderful clients, while others seem to get clients that are a pain in the neck? Here is the reason.

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