This is not like when you have a birthday party for your son or daughter and discover you have to account for a lactose intolerant guest who then has to be excluded from the jelly and ice cream ritual and make do with an apple instead; or when you throw a dinner party for the coming of age of the venison from the last shoot only to find that Tarquin’s new squeeze is a vegan so can only eat the trimmings – and just a few of them at that. Putting together a package of tailored information for prospects is a strategic process and there are steps you must follow in order for you to achieve your goal.
There is a lot to cover in this topic so I will divide it over this week’s blog post, How to Tailor Information for Prospects, and next week’s The Prospect and the Landing Page.
There are two things that will feature heavily when deciding on the content of a package of information; the buyer’s journey and your customer’s personas; and one main action that is vital to the longevity of your interaction – CTAs (call to actions)
I have added links to previous blog posts on the above factors but just to refresh your memory briefly; the buyer’s journey is a process a customer goes through when buying a product, and a buyer persona is a research-based representation of your company’s ideal customer.
Okay, so first thing’s first – define your objectives and your goal. Got them? Right, let’s move on…
For the purpose of this blog, my objective is to educate prospects on SEO and my goal is to have them engage my services and undertake a review and optimisation.
As this is an inbound marketing activity the onus is on you to provide great content to entice prospects in and guide them along their journey to becoming a purchaser. You’ll want to start by creating awareness of the problem.
As your buyer personas will be different you have make your initial piece of information for a generic audience. Awareness is the first stage of the buying journey but some may not yet be aware that they have a problem to fix or need for a service or product.
You are creating awareness of a common problem that you can fix, there is no point in creating awareness of a common problem that you can’t fix as any site visitors you get won’t stay for long. You could try something enticing like “Did you know that SEO is bigger than football?”. The content should explain how SEO is bigger than football and start to describe why – this is your stepping stone to the next stage and your next piece of information. Creating desire.
Now, when I say stepping stone I am of course referring to the aforementioned CTA. Your call to action will take someone to the next logical piece of information which should be something simple like “click here to understand why search engines favour optimised sites”.
With this information you are identifying an issue that all realistic prospects will have – how to get their site favoured – and once this information is consumed you can start to bring out the big guns and implement the element of request before you divulge anything more.
If people have got this far, the next step (CTA) is to identify their pain points as you guide them further along the journey. To do this, you should provide options for them to garner more information in exchange for increasing levels of personal information. By incrementally “upping the stakes” you can gauge their degree of interest and the likelihood of conversion.
There is some clever software out there that allows you to determine where in the buying process a prospect is and hence where you should send them next. I.e. are they ready to progress to the next stage or do they require some further nurturing in order to keep their interest. The next step might not be what they need at that moment in time, you see, and if you’re pushy you run the risk of losing their interest. This is the smart part and also the lead up to next week’s blog when I will talk about landing pages and segmenting your prospects based on the answers they give you from your CTAs.
