3 ways to reach your ideal customers

During the last decade, the amount of content aimed at your target audience has exploded, making it harder than ever for your company’s voice to be heard. This exponential proliferation of content also makes it harder for your ideal buyers to find you.

It’s like playing a game of Marco Polo in a huge, crowded room. You can’t see each other, much less hear each other. “Marco…Maaarrco…MARCO!!”

I recently connected with our Agency Director, MaryAnn Long, on this topic. She suggested that to stand out in the hearts and minds of your audience, you need to cultivate a strong, distinctive “digital presence.” Let’s explore what that means.

What is a digital presence?

Every place your company can be found online – your website, your emails, your social media channels, your industry directory listings, your videos and more – needs to tell a consistent, compelling story that resonates with the deepest needs of your ideal audience. It also needs to clearly communicate the unique value you provide. And it needs to build trust.

Building a consistent and compelling digital presence isn’t easy but it’s well worth the investment. “Over time, it will become like an annuity for your firm’s future, generating a growing number of inquiries, leads and sales for your company,” Long emphasizes.

Here are three things you can do now to improve your digital presence:

1. Improve your website user experience

For many prospects, their first impression of your company is your website. Make sure it’s an OUTSTANDING one!
First, imagine your ideal prospects coming to your site. They have a job to do. They need to source new widgets to help them cut costs, increase productivity and streamline operations. Ask yourself:

• What questions are they likely to have?
• How can you make it easy for them to find answers?
• What does their buying process look like and how can you enable that?
• How can you personalize their website experience around their needs?

One simple way to do that is to produce blog content that’s deeply relevant to their needs. Over time, consider dividing it into resource centers or filtered collections that are focused on specific sets of needs – for example, by vertical market, type of buyer or the key issues they’re struggling with.

“It’s pretty basic: Save them time. Provide them with value. Make them glad they found you!” MaryAnn declares.

Finally, consider investing in a reverse IP service, which can help you understand which companies are visiting your website and what pages they’re viewing. From that data, you can make inferences about their needs. You can use that intel to contact them and discuss their needs.

Our clients are astonished when they see the data produced by the reverse IP tools we’ve set up for them. One common scenario: A key prospect that “ghosted” them six months ago has visited your website four times in the last week.

“That creates a natural opportunity to reach out to your contact and begin a conversation with them,” she emphasizes.

2. Upgrade your content – get visual!

Let’s face it: A steady diet of text-based blog posts can get boring for your readers after a while. Plus, people are super-busy and distracted today. The phrase “TL:DR” – “too long, didn’t read” – exists for a reason!

Delivering your knowledge and expertise in bite-sized chunks can often be more fruitful. Create a mix of engaging, content, such as motion graphics, explainer videos, infographics, webinars and more. You can even convert your existing text-based content into refreshed and attention-getting visual, animated and interactive formats.

Remember: In today’s hyper-messaged world, a picture is worth FAR MORE than a thousand words!

3. Supercharge your LinkedIn game

To win the digital presence game, you need to focus on one social media channel and “own” it. By concentrating your efforts on it, you’re more likely to build traffic and engagement. Plus, you’re also more likely to get really GOOD at it than if you dabble in multiple platforms.

For most B2B companies, LinkedIn is the place to be. Increasingly, buyers are using it to find prospective vendors. But few marketers are using it to its full potential.

Here are four ways to supercharge your LinkedIn presence:

• Use your company page to tell a compelling story that’s focused on the needs of your ideal prospects. Forget about the usual corporate blah-blah-blah. Everyone does that. Tell a better story! Here are two quick examples of small businesses making outsized impressions on LinkedIn: HackerEarth uses social proof to demonstrate that its solutions are proven and trusted by many professionals (and even promotes their latest ebook – smart!). Gong.io uses the “life” tab of its LinkedIn page to showcase what it’s like to work there, which helps to humanize it not only for recruits but also prospective customers.
• Explore the growing collection of tools LinkedIn offers to help you interact with prospects. The latest addition: You can integrate forms with your page. When a prospect uses your form, LinkedIn automatically populates it with their data. Totally cool!
• Encourage your employees and channel partners (such as dealers or distributors) to share your company page updates with their networks. This vastly expands their visibility, and also “juices” the LinkedIn algorithm so it shows your posts to more people. Win!!
• Analyze the engagement data from your LinkedIn posts. Pick one or two that have captured the greatest number of likes, shares and comments and convert them into sponsored posts. The fact that they performed well as organic (non-promoted) posts increases the odds that they’ll perform just as well in front of an expanded, paid audience. I’ve used this approach on several projects and it works really well!

Contact Cultivate today for help in amping up your brand presence and attracting more ideal buyers!