We Are The Champions: Show Your Stuff & Stand Out From the Crowd

In today’s world of sound bites, six-second Vine videos, and cat memes you can read at a glance, “like” and forget—how do you get beyond the hype to become the talk of the town?

Online presence.

Just being out there isn’t enough; you need to get noticed by your next customer—now. In the first stage of the Growth Cycle Marketing process, Awareness, your objective is to create quick and catchy content. But not just any content. You need content that gets attention and drives that prospect one step closer to buying your products or services.

Picture this: your next customer is out there wandering the web. They’re cold, fighting against a blizzard of buzzwords and blog posts, hungry for just the right information, and starting to feel a little lonely, even lost. They need a pick-me-up. They need a tiny little bite of nourishment to encourage them as they begin their journey across the Internet.

Their destination is your website. They just don’t know it yet.

The trick is to get your next customer’s attention so you can play navigator.

Here’s how…

Everybody Hurts
Appeal to your potential customers’ pain points. Don’t focus on the features of your products or services. Instead, focus on highlighting the benefits. How will your product or service help your customer solve a very specific, very aggravating problem? Be helpful. People love that. Present an invitation to more helpful information available exclusively on your kick-ass website. They won’t be able to resist your charm.

Feels Like the First Time
Whenever possible, backtrack your existing customer’s journey to discover their initial point of contact with your business. (If you’re not already tracking this information, you should be!) Upon first contact, what made your existing customer take the next step toward the purchase? We’re betting that same trigger will work wonders for other like-minded customers. Build on it.

Feed Their Heads
You know the old cliché, “Get into your customer’s shoes.” You need to take it one step further and get into your customer’s mind. Create buyer personas to reveal your target audience’s interests. Think on a broad spectrum—get to the core of your customers’ hopes and dreams. Appeal to what they love and you’ve not only opened the door, but you’ve stuck your foot in as well.

Leader of the Pack
When you’re known as a thought leader in your industry, it’s much easier to spark action through quick and catchy content. When building your content, be sure it’s branded. Add your logo, brand colors, and brand look and feel to each piece of content you produce, whether it’s an infographic or a 30-second video. When people share your awesome content, they’ll automatically share your branding, expanding your reach and getting more eyes glued to your content.

Anything You Want, You Got It

Understanding what your customers want is a process requiring some exploration. You want to present each of your market segments with targeted content that appeals to their variety of needs. Sometimes content should be more entertaining and fun; sometimes it should be more informative and helpful. Each piece of targeted content you create inspires further interactions between your prospect and your brand.

The type of content you produce should be dependent on your customers’ needs, not the other way around. For example, don’t decide to produce a series of one-minute videos, and then determine what each video will be about. Instead, use the aforementioned ideas to reveal what appeals to your target market, then determine which content format will best convey your ideas, most appeal to your target audience, and be most likely to reach the particular demographic you’re after.

Great attention-grabbing content formats to create Awareness:

• Quick videos
• Short, informative articles or blog posts
• Fun infographics
• At-a-glance print, web and social media advertising
• Engaging trade show booths
• An excellent website that gets to the point

When executed correctly, you’ve grabbed that future customer’s attention, held that attention, and driven that traffic to your website. Your customer is now primed and ready to enter the next stage of Growth Cycle Marketing: Consideration—and that’s where the real magic begins to stir and your prospect moves one more step closer to becoming a valued customer. Rock on!