The digital media landscape has allowed organisations to instantly reach audiences on a mass scale. However, with every business now able to do this, it has also become increasingly difficult to break through the noise, stand out, and capture your target audience's attention.
Every day we receive marketing e-mails and see so many advertising social media posts, but how many of those provide value to us? How many of those address our challenges and offer a solution?
This is why HubSpot and its inbound methodology can be invaluable tool in developing a content strategy - to connect with your potential customers and encourage prospects to purchase from you in an appropriate, helpful way that provides genuine value and addresses their needs.
Below are our top tips to engage your target audience and connect with your prospects.
Optimise your website
A fundamental cornerstone of building brand awareness for any B2B organisation is designing a quality website that is optimised for both your target audience and search engines. Make sure that your website is easy to navigate, with your products and services clearly explained and easy to find, and your content written to an excellent standard and aligned with search engine optimisation (SEO) best practices.
HubSpot has a wealth of tools for creating a high-quality website, or elevating an existing one. The platform has catalogues of templates for every kind of content or web page that you could create, and drag-and-drop options for designing ones from scratch. In addition, there are helpful prompts to ensure that you never miss an opportunity to make your content more searchable or optimised for search.
Adding chatbots or live chat to your website is another opportunity to give your visitors a positive experience in an efficient, user-friendly way. Both are simple to create and add where needed in HubSpot.
Define your target audience and their challenges
'Know your target market' is a mantra often repeated by those in sales and marketing but how do you actually get to know your target market? One of the most effective methods is to create and document buyer personas.
According to HubSpot, a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. You can learn how to make your own buyer personas here.
When developing your personas, you should consider your current customers, the prospects in your sales and marketing pipelines, and those that seem to fit the profile but aren’t yet aware of your organisation.
Once you have created these personas, you can use them to segment your contacts in HubSpot and tailor your content and messaging to best fit their needs, goals, and challenges at different stages of their buyer's journey.
Utilise social listening
Social media can be a highly effective tool to reach your target audience. Use HubSpot to schedule posts ahead of time that share your blogs, videos, and other content with relevant hashtags, and track and measure their performance all in one place in the CRM platform.
Contribute to discussions on LinkedIn where you can share knowledge or resources. Follow influential figures or leaders in areas relevant to your target audience to stay up to date with the latest hot topics for new content ideas, and follow and engage with your existing customers to both maintain a positive working relationship, and to increase the likelihood of them recommending you to their connections.
With HubSpot, you can easily create and schedule social posts and ads to increase reach, clicks, and webinar sign ups - and monitor and measure their engagement all in one place with the platform's social monitoring and social listening tools. All interactions that happen on your website with live chat or chat bots are also saved and stored in contacts' profiles to enable you to understand exactly where a contact is in their buyer's journey and what their needs are at that time.
Humanise your messaging
Today, a 'human touch’ is essential for businesses to survive. Corporations can tend to be perceived negatively as faceless, so reminding your audience about the people and values behind the brand can help to leave a positive impression and make your brand seem more relatable and approachable.
First, put yourself in your buyer’s shoes. Try to understand the challenges of your target audience, and then build your campaign around those insights.
Second, stop using business jargon. Explain your message using simple, straight forward language that anyone could understand. What may sound impressive to you might be unfamiliar and off-putting to a potential customer.
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Use various types of content with challenge-based copy
After developing your personas and positioning your messaging, it’s time to develop a solid content plan using various types of content and challenge-based copy. Have a strategy to address your prospects’ pain points and provide information for all of the key questions or queries your target audience might search for. Use keywords strategically – enough to be picked up by search engines, but not too many to avoid ‘keyword stuffing’ which will make you less favourable in SEO.
When you first roll out your content, some experimentation is required to find out what works with your audience in terms of content type and copy. Use HubSpot's A/B testing and engagement tracking and dashboard tools to check your engagement analytics and find what content works best, the optimal time for posting, where your visitors are coming from, and more.
Collaborate on content
Sometimes, who you know can take you far. Collaborate with experts on thought leadership content, or invite them to contribute to your website as a guest blogger or as an interviewee. This not only diversifies your content and makes it more searchable, but it also allows both parties involved to benefit from each other’s audience when promoted on social media. You can also create guest content on other trusted, relevant websites to have the same effect, and show your brand as a reliable, expert source of information.
Retarget website visitors
Remember that many visitors to your website are in the very beginning stages of their buyer’s journey – in HubSpot’s inbound methodology, this is called the ‘awareness’ stage. At this point they will have identified a problem they need a product or service to resolve, and have begun searching online for what is available, who the providers are, and may even still be determining whether or not they actually want to follow through.
Ad retargeting strategies enable you to continue to show ads to website visitors who have left your website for the next 60-90 days. This will help to keep you top of mind and encourages the prospect to re-visit your site to explore further.
On your own website, you can use HubSpot to create pop up forms and smart modules to prospects re-visiting your website - including anything from a 'Welcome back!' message to tailored forms to ensure you are not asking for the same information from a contact twice.
For further information on how to optimise your website to increase lead flow, click below for our free guide.
