If you write messages for a blog or offer products / services you want an audience of people who will benefit from it. After all, nobody wants to perform for an empty room! Scoring high in the search engines by applying SEO well will of course help you with that. But you can do much more! That’s why I want to focus on blog marketing tips that will help your audience grow and continue to grow!
I want to show that you can get very far with 6 (simple) steps!
1 – It starts with a mission
Marketing has to do with increasing the number of people who know your company, your products and your brand; but also particularly like it. Because if you like something then you prefer to do something, right?
To be successful in marketing, you must always choose marketing strategies that fit the mission of your website. To do that, you must define the mission of your site well!
As soon as you know your mission and what makes your company or website unique, you ensure that this is always reflected in the content of your marketing.
Understandable and comprehensible
That all sounds incredibly easy, but making your mission understandable and comprehensible is more difficult than it might seem now. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you must be able to explain your mission to a total layman in 1 paragraph.
Can you do it in 1 sentence? That is of course even better, but that is not the case for everyone who thinks big. Sometimes 1 sentence is just not enough to be able to give context to your content, something that will be familiar to everyone who is involved with semantics.
Think of it as the well-known (elevator) pitch. Make sure that you can make people enthusiastic with a story that is as short and clear as possible. Being able to convince people who are far away with a clear story is very powerful.
If you want a good indicator of your mission statement; present it to your team. Is it clear to them? Yes, nicely draw the circle larger. No, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
2 – Choose marketing that fits you
More often than not it is true that people / companies are going to focus on marketing forms that are completely out of line with the company, or even the mission.
Marketing must match your brand.
Branding is the way you want to present your company to the world, visually or in the way you communicate. It may even be the way you make your products. Maybe you want your brand to be hip and young. Maybe you prefer to look traditional and solid.
Be consistent AND remain consistent
All that is up to you – but make sure you are consistent in how you convey all of this.
If you are hip and young on your website, then you need to include this in your mailings, how you come up on social media and how you present yourself in other possible media.
If you do everything, then a consumer looks at you with the question of what are you actually trying to imagine. The chance that someone will drop out is enormous.
Never forget branding is a matter of personal taste and the most important thing is that branding should reflect and where possible strengthen your mission.
3 – Really get to know your audience
If you want to sell something you must first know the man. Sounds logical right? You must know the market to which you want to sell. You must know what is going on and what they are looking for.
An important step in marketing is to find out what your audience looks like. Who are my your visitors? Where do they come from? How are they currently handling my content?
Measure, see what happens, take action
To answer these questions, there are different types of research that you can do. Google Analytics can give you a huge number of great insights, for example.
But also think of tools that show user behavior such as Hotjar or Mouseflow. Please note that it is nice to anonymize your visitors for the purpose of tracking BUT also to inform that you are doing this to gain insight.
Ask for it
Many parties are almost afraid to put a question to their visitors. Nothing makes you better than feedback. And if you don’t get it unsolicited, you just ask for it?
The balance that you have to keep there is that you give the opportunity and do not force interaction unnecessarily. It can go in many directions, but also consider surveys.
Once you have a clear picture of what your audience looks like, it is much easier to reach them on (for example) social media and to be able to respond to what they are looking for with your services / products.
4 – Don’t be afraid to meet a new audience … and be sure to get to know them!
If you have a good idea of your current audience; does it consist of the people you want to reach? How can you further expand this target group? Have you considered all potential target groups that you could reach with the site, products / services etc?
When you think of your target group, it is easier to find growth potential.
Growth question
For example, it may be that your current audience is very small, but consists of exactly the kind of people you want on your website. Your growth question would then be: where do I find more of these people?
It may also be that your current audience and your desired audience differ slightly. Your growth question would then be: where can I find my new audience?
Once you have a clear picture of what your audience looks like, it is much easier to reach them on (for example) social media and to be able to respond to what they are looking for with your services / products.
New Audience – get to know them!
You cannot ignore that if you realize that you are addressing / reaching a new audience, you should in fact repeat step 3.
5 – Make use of the correct platforms
Having a clear picture of the people you want to reach is important for the next marketing steps that you will take.
Usually, trying to reach an audience of teens on Facebook is a good marketing strategy. But don’t try to reach an audience of older (or even) retirees on Instagram.
Both the content of your content and the platform that you choose must be tailored to the target group that you actually want to reach.
Keep newsletters in your mind
Consider not only a focus on social media, but also send a newsletter. That’s a great way to stay in touch with your readers and send them brand content regularly so that you stay in mind.
You may not get everyone in your audience to subscribe to your newsletter, but those who do will be more involved.
And maybe you have the opportunity to reach a blog in a similar niche as yours and to be able to deliver a guest post to it periodically? That can be a great opportunity to both reach a larger audience and work on your network at the same time.
Deliver quality
Do not send a low-quality guest post to any blog. That is simply not a good marketing strategy and will not do you any good. Make sure you also do the work for a guest post and make it the quality that you would like to see on your own medium.
Be a professional and deliver quality. If you invest effort / time in it, people will notice it and see that you stand for something.
6 – Do not be afraid to advertise
If you have a budget, you can also decide to place ads on, for example, Facebook or Google to promote your content.
Now it is true that I would mainly advise you to bet to get the name / brand known. Because if you guarantee all other steps, people will like your content, see that you stand for something and are much more inclined to convert.
Targeted advertising with your content
You can, of course, advertise on Google, but you are limited to the possibilities or targeting in the area of advertisements.
If you want to advertise specific content or products, it might be more practical to look at a medium such as Facebook.
Facebook offers the option to give your message a boost, so that it gets more publicity. With Facebook, for example, you can really concentrate on the demographics that you want to achieve with age group, location, and interest settings, making it fairly easy to target your desired audience.
There is no 100% golden way
As a footnote I want to tell you that doing well and growing your audience does not have 1 always valid golden formula. That would save a lot of work.
You have to be careful that every company, every niche deserves its own interpretation because the situation is almost never the same as that of another.
I give that type of attention to your company with love and pleasure, because I like to enter into that relationship with you in order to get the best out of your products and services, and with that your company.
I’m ready, are you? Then I would love to hear what I can help you with!