Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [77]
Regardless if you are marketing to a B2B or B2C audience, simply talking to a group of your target audience about the information they desire, the needs they have, and the answers they seek can provide you with directed content and multiple strategies. You will learn that a market is a group of people with varied interests that cannot be sold the same way all the time.
The more a business listens to its customers and market, the better decisions it will make when creating a website to suit their needs. Through usability testing, interviews, and most of all listening, a site will have clear direction for growth. Additionally, there will also be a clear pursuit in the analysis of those goals. By finding what is important to the users, the analytics will either support or disprove that goal. Either way, it provides an analytical framework to judge the activity on the site.
Build Rapport
Building rapport is the foundation of building human relationships. In sales terms, it is finding something in common with someone else on their terms—not what they have in common with me but what I have in common with them. In this way, I have let them do the talking, and I show that I have listened to them by finding shared values or commonalities that I have learned from listening.
For the online application, if a searcher uses specific phrases to find a site and those words are not on the page where they land, they won’t be there long. The site needs to meet the expectations of the searcher in order to be successful. Establishing rapport online is just as critical as establishing it in person.
This is the primary reason that your search terms are bold in the search engine results page—to help establish that connection. The terms you requested are returned in a visible format. Research shows that searchers tend to click results that show a bold term that mirrors their search. In addition, the odds of getting the searcher’s click increases with each additional bold term. (See Beyond Position Bias: Examining Result Attractiveness as a Source of Presentation Bias in Clickthrough Data by Yue, Patel, and Roerig, 2010.) The more your website matches the search query or the needs of the searcher, the more apt that searcher is to click your site listing.
To get someone interested, you have to appeal to their needs first. Satisfy those needs or show that you can, and then they will be interested in more information. Visitors leave sites quickly when they see no reason to stay. If your site does not reflect the reason they came, they are gone!
Too many websites are focused on what we can do and our products, our services, our staff, and our mission statement. In focusing so much time and words upon their business, they forgot to build rapport with the searcher, who has already gone back to the search results and clicked the next link.
Tuesday: Create the Need
Most people who are great at sales will tell you that they aren’t salespeople; they are merely matchmakers. They are merely matching people to the products they need. A good salesperson spends very little time closing the sale because they have already provided all the reasons to make the decision, by creating the need first.
Search is a different animal from any form of advertising. All other forms of marketing—radio, TV, billboards, magazine ads—are all based on chance; it’s the chance you may have that need when you see the advertisement and then act on that need. TV goes a long way in creating the need with visuals, but it doesn’t come close to the power of search marketing. In search marketing, the consumer types their need into a search box, advertisers are lined up in the results, and the consumer decides which message to explore further.
In this way, creating the need doesn’t stop because the searcher expressed the need in the search box. Creating the need is a necessary part of compelling the searcher to stay on your site because you are able to meet a need that is deeper than the one searched.
Beyond the Initial Need
Fisher-Price (Figure 7-2) is a well-known toy company.