Anyone who’s ever been involved with email marketing is aware of the term “Buyers persona” and why it must be inculcated in the marketing strategies. For those of you who are still unfamiliar with the term, need not worry. As we are going to explain and show you how to make the best use of the Buyers persona to boost your email marketing efforts.
Its sales & marketing 101 that in order to sell your product or service, you have to know your customers to the fullest. And creating a buyers persona helps you out with just that. It is a fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real info. Such as their online behaviour, demographics and even educated speculations on customer’s goals and challenges.
Just keep in mind that the buyer’s personas are not about the customers that you could bring. But more about the customer you really wish to attract. This thought process will give you a clearer idea while creating them.
Now, why are Buyer personas so crucial in email marketing? Let’s find out…
What Makes Buyer Personas So Crucial in Email Marketing?
Let’s face it, as of today the world of email marketing has turned into a battlefield. An average person receives a legion of emails offering countless offering N number of offers & deals on a daily basis. Most of these get deleted without a second thought.
So now the question is how can you make sure that the emails that your brand sends don’t meet the same fate?
People like to take their business to brands they can trust and speak their language. As we mentioned before the buyer persona are created based on the needs, goals and challenges of your ideal customer. With the help of such information, you can create powerful emails that will have the highest probability of touching base with customers and achieve your business objectives.
Buyers personas are pivotal to creating highly targeted email marketing campaigns which get more opens, clicks, and engagement. Targeted emails more optimized towards lead generation and result in increased conversions.
Now that we have made abundantly clear how important buyers personas are in email marketing, lets’ go into some of its applications.
Segmenting Your Email Lists
The best feature of the buyer’s persona is that it provides a great source to customise your email lists in a personalized manner.
Utilising data such as demographics (age and gender) segment your email lists is a good start. but this will only give you a one-dimensional client profile. By crawling inside your prospect’s head and figuring out their thought process while making their buying decisions, you can refine the segmentation quite a bit.
The segmentation list allows you to send more engaging and contextual content pertaining to needs, based on:
Personas: The buyer personas does the receiver align with?
Engagement level: Based on emails opened, website pages visited, products bought or resources downloaded.
Status: Whether an existing customer, prospect, or a curious passer-by?
These segmented lists can be created in the automated email marketing tool like Infusionsoft and targeted emails will be automatically sent once the segment criteria are met by the user, prospect, or client.
Making an Offer One Cannot Refuse
By taking the customer’s goals and challenges into consideration. You can present customized offers that have the highest probability of meeting the objective of the email.
Just make sure that you do not make the offer in your first email. Send and a couple of nurture emails, providing helpful information regarding your product or services.
Let’s take an example of one of our clients, Brain Wellness Spa who help people with their mental and emotional health challenges. As per their buyer persona, one of the major challenges is people’s apprehension regarding the therapy.
Therefore based on the user action on the website, we designed targeted email sequences. By providing useful information along with free audios to gently nurturing the prospects. With the idea of opting for the client’s services. And making an offer for a free consultation at the end of the sequence greatly enhances the chances of conversion.
Create Actionable Content
Content is the message that your brand wants to share with the World. By tailoring your email content starting from the subject line to the body and CTA. You can boost the open and click-through rates by several folds.
Consider the buyer’s biggest concerns and challenges, and then write copy that will address them all.
Also, consider verbiage used in your mail as you cannot market to a Millennial as you would to a Baby Boomer. So take into consideration aspects like age and education. Would the reader relate with complex words or a simpler approach would get the job done? All of these elements will help your email marketing efforts resonate more with the readers.
Few Last Words…
We hope you found out take on buyer persona helpful and if you require any assistance, then please contact us. Our experts would be delighted to assist you.
Don’t forget that as your business grows and changes over time, then so would your brand’s buyer persona. Therefore it is necessary for you to review the persona from time to time and implement the changes in your email marketing.
First to brush up your knowledge on the meaning of sales leads. Sales lead is any sales contact, an individual or organization that shows interest in your products or services.
What is the effectiveness of email marketing? Email marketing is the leading form of communication. 77% of consumers choose email over other online channels. A well-executed email campaign has the following advantages,
● Increases sales ● Increases client loyalty ● Generates Leads ● Produces additional repeat business and ● Reduces marketing costs
Now you have known the usefulness of the email marketing campaign. Next, let me take you through ways of generating more leads through email marketing.
Gain Permission
Courtesy matters. You should get permission from your target audience to send emails to them. Gaining permission is the starting point to get leads.
For example, you can ask them to fill a form on your website. If they do it then it is a positive sign. It shows they are interested to know more about your services. So you gain leads.
Offer your Audience Something Special
Your marketing email will not be opened if there is nothing special in it. Offer something special, like discounts, early bird price or freebies. By this, you tell your target audience that you have a big deal to offer.
Send Personalized Emails Without Your Customer’s Name To Begin With
If you are going to email-market a customer first time do not use their names. Getting more personal, in the beginning, will only create a fake-familiarity approach. Instead, tailor an email around customer’s needs and interest.
Don’t Heap Offers Per Message
If you run a retail business you will have a craving temptation. That is to send a bulk list of all offers in one message. Don’t do this. People only scan contents online.
So it is enough you mention three offers per message. This gives your business a profitable scope to woo customers.
Shoot A Weekly Newsletter
Weekly newsletters are important in email marketing. Send tips and articles related to your industry in the newsletter. This has two benefits, ● You high-quality information will boost your authority. And of course, the trust your customers have on you. ● Customers will remember your brand and portfolio for a long time.
Send your Email on the Best Day and Time
Don’t follow the conventional competitive timing to shoot your emails. Statistically, everybody prefers to send the same. This actually will not work. Try sending it during unconventional timings. Maybe you will hit the target.
Short Emails are More Often Read
You are not in for an essay competition. You are just email marketing. Let your emails be short and to the point. In hurried scanning, customers just look for your message alone. Be straightforward. Provide only information.
Have Catchy Subject Lines
Subjects lines are the ones that prompt your customers to read further. Don’t slump here. Don’t be too wordy. Frame your subject line based on the customer’s present need.
Optimize Your Email For Mobile
Of course. Understood. Almost everyone has got a smartphone. You know, 60% of emails are opened/read on smartphones. To optimize your email marketing message to fit the mobile contours.
Link your Email Marketing to a Landing Page
You have to link your email marketing to a landing page. Don’t link it to your website or blog. Contents in the landing page are suitable to trigger conversions. They take the customers directly to the product or services they need.
Links to your blog or website will put your customer through more confusion. They may not find your product there. They will have a lot of distraction.
Drip Campaigns are Important in Email Marketing
Make sure you send automated emails to keep up with your loyal customers. But don’t over send triggered emails. This will displease your customers.
Gate your Content
Once your content is ready to decide if you want to place it in your email. Or you can add it in additional steps for users to access your content. Gating your content provides you with a list of better-qualified leads.
Good emails are highly shareable. How to make your emails shareable? ● You should embed pre-formatted tweets in emails. ● For quick access, add a signup link to your email. ● Add social sharing buttons. This will help people to easily share your content on social media. ● Add an icon for email formatting.
Segment your Emails
You can build unique conversations only by segmenting your audience. With segmentation, you can reach customers with specific needs and wants.
You can segment your audience based on the following actions, ● Behaviour ● Opening an Email ● Signing Up ● Click on CTAs in email ● Click-through but don’t run up on the landing page ● Not performing any action
Include CTAs (Call-To-Action) in your Email
CTAs increase customer engagement. CTA buttons or lines can be included in your email. You can place CTAs that lead the customers to your landing page.
Sometimes you may want to place multiple CTAs. In this case, place the much needed CTA on top. This will make your customer take the much need action. Not placing your much needed CTA on top will make you lose 70% of customers.
Let your Design be Simple
Your best email should have the simplest of designs. Use not more than two to three fonts. Use abundant whitespace. And wherever possible use images.
The human brain processes image 60,000 times faster than texts. Try to convey your message more through images.
Make Way for Engagement
Your email should technically be of two-way communication. You should start a conversation. Convey to your customers that you care about what they say. Encourage them to respond to you.
Say, you recommend some products in your email. At last, you can ask your customers to opine on the recommendations. Such conversational email is a more of humanizing your brand.
Winding Up with Stats to do Email Marketing
According to Statistica, the number of email users will increase to 4.1 billion by 2021.
The total number of consumer and business emails sent and received in 2017 per day was 269 billion. This will continue to grow at an annual rate of 4.4% in the next four years. So it will reach 319.6 billion by 2021. Statistics by Radicati Group.
You know, email has a median ROI of 122%. This is 4X higher than other marketing formats. This statistics is by DMA and Demand Metric.
86% of business professionals prefer using email for business communication. This statistics is by HubSpot.
89% of marketers say they use email as their primary channel for lead generation. This statistics is by Mailigen.
Thus your efficient use of above ways for email marketing will ensure more sales leads for you.
This post is by guest author, Junaid Ali Qureshi. This article has been edited and published with the author’s permission.
The term behavioural research might be relatively unknown to many people in the advertising sector but what if I told you it has the ability to improve the outcome of your marketing strategies, sometimes by even tenfold, if executed to precision.
As the name implies, behavioural research is a research section that focuses on finding what variables can have a direct or indirect effect on an individual’s habits.
These can help amarketingcampaign better communicate their message to the consumers. For those still unconvinced on the benefits of behavioural research, read on as we list a number of benefits.
You Can Make Your Company Seem More Trustworthy
People are more in favour of conducting business with a company they deem to be trustable and are familiar with. By understanding the behavioural patterns and habits, you can market your company or your product in a manner that pulls at the consumer’s emotional strings.
An emotional connection will ensure that consumers keep coming back to your company after the first time around. According to a study done by analysts, a marketing campaign that had a more emotional tone to it always outperformed generic campaigns that were not emotional. This was true in all aspects of marketing.
Allows Your Marketing Campaigns To Stand Out From Other Campaigns And Competitors
Humans stay on autopilot mode for large amounts of time. Whether it is in the bus on your way to work or driving for long periods of time, we generally do not pay attention to a familiar environment that we have become accustomed to, unless we come across something that is unfamiliar.
Things are no different when it comes to the general public. If you have a generic marketing campaign, then chances are that your consumers are not going to regard it either. In order to get them to notice you, you need to step out from the usual boring campaigns and come up with something powerful enough to draw their attention. This does not mean changing just the also message but can include things like changing where your campaign will be seen or how it will be made use of. All these aspects will be significantly easier when one has access to information about the consumer and their behavioural patterns.
It Helps You Center Your Company Around Your Consumers
To start with, extensive research into the consumer’s behaviorand habits will allow you to centre the firm around the consumers. The majority, if not all, companies tend to get embroiled in internal issues, politics, focus more on other ventures and projects and so on.
When this happens, it is easy for a company to lose its way, head in a different direction and most importantly, lose touch with their customer base. Behavioural research allows you to stay on course and make serving your clients a priority.
The importance of meeting the expectations of consumers, understanding what is it that they want. And how exactly they want it cannot be stressed enough. For instance, if you wish to open an e-commerce site, it would be great if you can find behavioural patterns in your consumers. That can assist you in developing the site in a manner that fits their behaviour before you hire magneto developer. Or invest in a magneto development company.
You Can Project the Impression of A Popular Company
Crowds are always wary of a new or relatively unknown product in the market. If they feel that the company or product is new, they will think twice before buying it as opposed to buying a product from a long-standing company. If they are given the idea that the product is popular and often used, they are more likely to be interested in using it. This is again something that can not be done without extensive research into consumers’ behaviours.
Keeps You Future-Oriented and Ready for Sudden Changes
An age-old saying is that those who fail to change tend to be left behind in the cold, and in today’s competitive and rapidly evolving market, that is gospel. Behavioral research also allows you to better predict the future of the market.
It can give you an idea of where the market is heading and what trends are coming up. This is important because if a company fails to get on a trend or new market direction, they can quickly go obsolete, such is the industry today.
A fine case in point is Nokia. With adequate research by your side, you can even anticipate sudden changes and act accordingly. Most importantly, the research data allows you to see the bigger picture and focus on long term results rather than short term results that can quickly make your company irrelevant and stunt the longevity of the business.
You Can Have More Detailed Marketing Campaigns
When you are armed with data on what consumers want and what they do not, you can put that in your marketing campaign and deliver something that is filled with details and information that show your customers that you understand them and perhaps most importantly, understand what they want and how they want it.
This can make a massive difference and will always stand out over a vague campaign that does not seem to know the customer’s needs. These details even have the potential to change behaviour and similar to the previous point above, helps you stand out apart from the crowd which generates more interest and attention in your product or company which is exactly what your campaign wants. The increased attention is invariably going to generate higher profits.
Greatly Enhances Your Decision Making Skills and Reduces the Level Of Risks
Knowing more about your customers and their habits will help you vastly when it comes to making important decisions. Behavioural research will give you a lot of meaningful information into your industry, your products and competition to name a few.
Having this wealth of information at your fingertips will make it easier for you to make important decisions with assurance and clarity. When you know how your consumers are likely to act towards your methods, it gives you more confidence to act out your strategies.
Talking about marketing strategies, this extra information makes it easier to brainstorm and develop better strategies that can directly target the consumer as well reduce the amount of risk that is associated with new ventures and plans.
Allows You to Pursue Better Opportunities
Furthermore, knowing what your consumers like and what they do not allows you to separate lucrative opportunities from other opportunities that are not doing as well. When operating a business, it is usual to get confused when deciding which path will deliver the best profits. Armed with information on your consumers, you can decipher this much easier than doing it without any information.
Not only is it easier, but it will also ensure that the task is more accurate. You can figure out what type of marketing campaign you should follow, which product you should market to which demographic and most importantly prioritize important tasks ahead of the others.
Anyone in the marketing field knows that the ability to multitask is of immense importance. At any given moment, a marketer could be juggling multiple tasks or multiple projects. When this happens, there is always the chance that one can miss the bigger picture or prioritize less important tasks over important ones. This problem can be avoided if one has the information that allows them to easily figure out where to focus their attention on.
Staying competitive in today’s dynamic world is becoming increasingly challenging, especially for small to medium businesses. The number of possible lead nurturing touchpoints (where consumers can interact with the brand) has increased beyond imagination.
It is with this context, the idea of lead capturing and lead nurturing can be well understood. The process of engaging with the leads in a personalized (or targeted) way by providing highly relevant and contextual information at each touchpoint of the consumer buyer’s journey can be termed as lead nurturing. The intention is to provide enough value so that the lead can make a purchasing decision in the end possibly in favour of our business.
Marketers have to make sure they treat each prospect with due consideration irrespective of their source. To overcome the challenge of keeping a track of all leads and engaging with them in a personalized manner, organizations invest in CRM and marketing automation tools like Infusionsoft, HubSpot or others.
These Marketing Automation tools play an integral role in managing leads and enhancing the engagement abilities of the marketers with the leads.
What is the most effective lead nurturing method?
Now, let’s look into several automated lead nurturing strategies that can possibly boost your ROI.
1. The Art of Segmentation
The first step and more importantly the most effectivelead nurturing strategy for maximizing ROI is to segment the prospect in a meaningful manner. Segmentation will help classify the prospect as per the personas which will determine the method through which the client needs to be pursued. Although it’s not always possible to segment in an automated manner, you can deploy some of the below lead nurturing techniques for automation:
In tools like Infusionsoft, you can TAG a prospect based on his website behaviour. For example, if the visitor has spent considerable time and action on a particular service page, it might indicate a preferred interest area
For web-forms, we can add an extra field to segment the visitor based on their interest.
Expected Outcome – A prospect list which is segmented based on their interests, behaviour or geographies.
2. Timely Follow-Ups
The second important step is to ensure the prospects are followed-up in a highly personalized and timely fashion. This is where marketing automation yields the best results for lead nurturing. The idea is to create an automated machine (as Ryan Deisscall it) so that you can focus on other value-added activities. The medium of follow-up can be any, email, SMS, or push notification. Some of the examples of timely automated follow-ups
A sequence of three nurture emails (Download – Gain-Logic-Fear template) to request the user to purchase your initial offer
Abandonment Cart Email Sequence say within three hours after the user abandoning the cart
Drip series on a successful sign-up to educate the user about your product
The best part about marketing automation tools is that you can structure your follow-ups based on IF-ELSE logic. If X happens, then send Y email/SMS, or if Z happens, then send T Email/SMS. Expected Outcome – A highly targeted lead nurturing email campaign set-up in your own marketing automation tool.
3. Automating the Consumer Journey
Consumer journey refers to step-by-step activities (or touchpoints) a consumer goes through in the entire lifetime with the brand. Through automation, you can stay ahead of the curve and literally chart out the funnel (or steps) through which you want the consumers to move, before or after their purchase. For example,
Customer is driven to a landing page from a Facebook Ad -> Prompted to download the e-book -> the ones who have downloaded are requested to attend a webinar -> Ones who have attended a webinar are nurtured to undergo a free trial of your product -> Nurture to purchase paid version of software ->nurture the lead to purchase any top-ups (upsell) for the product -> Request feedback, and if feedback is positive, request to refer friends, provide reviews and ratings.
Having a well – constructed representation of the consumer journey (also known as a funnel) which is specific to your business is helpful in optimizing your marketing strategy.
4. Lead Scoring
The next strategy is to assign scores based on user behaviour and engagement. The idea is to devise a meaningful point-based system (or lead scoring) that can be useful for prioritizing the follow-up with your prospects. You should think through your own lead scoring formula and then implement in preferred marketing automation tool. An activity indicating a higher level of interest in your products or services should get more points. Also note, it is also important to keep analyzing the formula and not be afraid of refining it as you go.
This procedure is effective in prioritizing the leads that need to be targeted first. For instance, if the lead is marked as cold, then they would need more engagement with your lead nurturing team. On the other hand, if the lead is marked as hot then they are ready to close the deal and should be approached by the sales team immediately. Expected Outcome – Your prospects are assigned leads cores which in turn will help you segment them as Hot, Warm or Cold.
5. Loyalty through delight
It is an indomitable fact that the most powerful form of marketing is from the word of mouth. And this only comes through loyal customers who have been extremely satisfied with your product or services. With the help of CRM, businesses can collect personalized information of their client and use that to create personalized WOW lead nurturing sequence for their customers.
Now, who doesn’t love personalized experiences designed just for them? Off course this goes without saying that delighted customers turn into a loyal customer and customer loyalty goes a long way into increasing the ROI for your business
6. Analysis and Optimization
Any marketer knows that analysis plays an integral role in the framework of any marketing strategy’s success. Analytical marketing automation tools help marketers quantify the success and failure of their marketing techniques.
As you all know that there is no certainty of success while implementing a marketing strategy. However, with continuous analysis of any marketing strategy, marketers can determine the parts of the strategy which are succeeding or failing.
Once the above-mentioned points are ascertained then strategy needs to be optimized accordingly, thus increasing the probability of its success.
To sum things up it has been made extremely clear how crucial a role marketing automation tools play in the success of a business. From automating client communication to optimizing your marketing funnel, Marketers need to embrace lead nurturing for their business wholly and solely.
Yes, you heard it right. Persona-based marketing can help you generate better and more targeted leads.
Remember those days where traditional marketing was in trend. Let’s take an example of toothpaste. In toothpaste advertisements, marketers used to show a person having teeth problems and the dentist who recommends the usage of particular toothpaste to overcome dental issues. This is nothing but persona-based marketing. Believe it or not, persona-based marketing has always existed in the field of marketing. The only difference is earlier such approach was referred segmentation based marketing. Be it either demographic or psychographic segmentation.
However, in Persona-based marketing, the complete user profile is considered and not just one segment. Marketers develop personas based on all possible segmentations i.e. behavioural, demographic, and psychographic to map their target customers’ features.
What is persona-based marketing?
The very first question is what exactly persona-based marketing is. Here, the answer is simple. Persona-based marketing is an inbound marketingpractice which keeps the buyer persona in the centre rather than the product or service.
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your targeted customers. This takes into account their goals, behaviour, demography, interests, pain points and medium of content they consume.
How to create a marketing persona and buyer persona?
Various tools, templates, tutorials, and resources are available online to create personas. However, you need to know the basics of how to create it. The overall process of creating a persona includes the collection of research data, layering and segmentation of data and storytelling to the devised persona.
The steps include:
Survey of online consumer buying trends and their preferences
Interview of customers to understand their buying process
Research on how consumers consume the content or get engaged with online content
Collation of comprehensive demographic information of targeted consumers
Analyse the collected data and confer with the sales team about prospects
Consider current market trends and recent market statistics to finalise the persona
Create a marketing pitch (story) with which your persona/prospect can relate to
Note: In persona-based marketing, the content strategy should be in line with the buyer’s journey. Three major stages of the buyer’s journey encompass:
Awareness: Prospect becomes aware of prevalent issues and starts searching for solutions online
Consideration: Prospect is in the process of narrowing down the best possible options available
Decision: Prospect has reached the final stage of the decision – here, convince them why your offering is the best possible solution for them and persuade them to buy your product/service
Example of buyer persona template
Why persona-based marketing is a preferred practice?
According to Marketing Sherpa, Persona-based website saw a 210% increase in website traffic, a 97% increase in website generated leads, a 124% increase in website generated sales.
The main advantage of such marketing practice is that here you get a holistic picture of your target customer. Hence, in this case, you are better prepared and able to foresee how your customer might behave or respond to your promotional campaigns.
This insight provides you with an edge over the intense competition. Also, it helps you to beat your competitors with better promotional strategies that are bound to guarantee your success.
You can also have a negative buyer persona. Here, pen down the points that your customers don’t like or don’t want. Accordingly, your marketing pitch should exclude some words.
Example if you are selling CRM software intended for start-ups, your negative buyer persona would perhaps consist of enterprises.
How do personas influence marketing campaigns and lead generation?
The reasons why personas can have a great influence on marketing campaigns and lead generation are enlisted below:
1. Personalized promotional content
As a marketer, you can take the persona’s perspective into consideration when designing and developing advertisements or promotional content.
Example
Colgate marketers’ broad segments include patients suffering from stained teeth, gum decay, tooth decay, and sensitivity. Hence, all their advertisements are targeted on the solutions to these dental issues.
2. Targeted product descriptions
You can inline your product description with their interests and needs.
Example
The marketing message of Colgate toothpaste is: “1 shade whiter teeth in 1 week’. It indicates that they are targeting the buyer personas that have problems with the shades of teeth.
3. Enhanced Persona-based marketing creativity
Your Persona-based marketing creativity can expand wings since you know who you are going to target and what they are looking for. Based on your market research, analysis and existing trends, you can craft your marketing pitch in a creative way.
Example
This is how Colgate advertises toothpaste for the persons suffering from sensitivity.
4. Shortened sales cycle
You can generate better quality leads by utilising personas. Since you know what your personas want, like or don’t like, you can use this information in writing product descriptions. Sending the right message provide you with the excellent opportunity to generate better leads. Such leads can be effortlessly converted into sales.
Example This is how Colgate explained to its target customers how their teeth can be whitened. It included “power of salt and lemon” as a push.
5. Targeted graphics
Not only targeted content but also you can use targeted graphics when your marketing efforts are buyer persona centric.
example cavity protection toothpaste of Colgate has graphics on its wrapper that attracts kids.
6. Timely modification
You can use forums, public groups, community platforms and social media to learn more about different groups of people. And hence, you can keep updating your buyer personas. However, don’t change it too frequently. Otherwise, you would not be able to judge the parameters that worked well or needed improvements.
SIGNING OFF…!
Persona-based marketing, since focused on buyer persona and buyer journey, help you creating better leads.
Of course, it might take some effort to create a proper persona, but it will always have a huge impact on your ability to generate high-quality leads. This is because you target your marketing efforts to the people who are looking for product/service providers like you.
Always start your marketing efforts only after creating personas. Focus on the factors that align with your ultimate business goals. While preparing your personas, use your own analytical knowledge too. Don’t just rely 100% on scripted survey forms. It is ideal to start with 2-3 persons in the initial phase. The only key to success is to create more effective content and promote your content effectively. This will drastically improve your ability to generate and nurture leads.
There are online businesses that run for several years but don’t know how to create a buyer persona or what exactly it means! However, it doesn’t imply that they are stabbing in the dark. Perhaps they are unknowingly following some strategy which is almost similar to concentrating on buyer persona.
A buyer persona is “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” – HubSpot
However, if you know how to create a buyer persona and how to use it in your inbound marketing content strategy, your digital marketing campaigns would be far more balanced.
Inbound marketing is all about connecting with your customer base. A strong and successful inbound marketing content strategy starts with a fully developed buyer persona.
Buyer persona and inbound marketing content strategy
Most of the marketers struggle when they start creating buyer personas for their businesses. And, the most common complaint they raise is “All customers are different and unique in their own way”. Of course, their argument is true too!
Remember, a perfect inbound marketing strategy does much more than boost website traffic. Successful development and implementation of inbound strategy largely depend upon how well you have created your buyer persona. If you have not yet dealt with it for your online business, you should implement it NOW.
Tips to Create Buyer Persona for your Online BusinessCLICK TO TWEET
1. Identify your best customers
However, vast your business is or whatever ranges of services you cater too, somewhere you have to begin with creating a persona for your business.
You can start with identifying best customers from whom you can get the best margin and who are comparatively easy to win. Pen down their details: starting from their age group, gender, education level, purchasing power, interests, hobbies, etc.
These details form the outline of your buyer persona.
“Too often, Buyer Profiles are nothing more than an attractive way to display obvious or demographic data.” ― Adele Revella
2. Figure out general pain points of your customers
This is regarding how they finalize their buying decisions. This is the second step in creating personas. A pain point is a touchpoint in the customer that creates frustration for him/her while making the buying decision.
Based on the outline derived in the first step, figure out the pain points they might consider while making buying decisions. Do they focus on cost, quality, reputation, or any other parameter?
For all possible questions, ask yourself ‘WHY” and come up with the best-fit answer. Once you get these basic answers, you will get a pretty good basic awareness of their pain points and how to deal with it.
QL Tech Tip: Once you identify the entire customer negative touchpoints i.e. pain points, you can improve them with positive moments of truth.
3. Conduct interviews and dive into extensive research
This step largely depends on your availability of time and flexibility of budget. If you are not getting the perfect questions or their answers, you can opt for conducting interviews. It is indeed costly but worthy! In case, your budget is flexible, you can offer them some FREEbies or incentives so that they turn up for interviews.
In case there is a budget restriction or deficit time to conduct interviews, opt for surveys.
4. Walk in the shoes of your persona
When writing for a specific buyer persona, you need to approach industry to speak and jargon lightly.
Daniel Reed, Creative Director at Square 2 Marketing
After knowing the above details, generic features and pain points of your personas, you need to put your leg in their shoe. It means to try to get into the character of your prospective buyer. This will enable you to plan and craft a content that connects with them personally and professionally.
B2b Buyer Persona Elements
For a B2B buyer persona, Liz Smyth, Marketing Director EMEA, Marketo recommends the following elements:
Persona summary and basic details
Job details and their likes/dislikes
Sources where your persona does his or her research
Primary and secondary goals
Challenges and pain points
Preferred content medium
Quotes related to insights gathered during interviews
Anticipated objections during the sales process
Role and influence in the purchase process
A marketing message that speaks directly to this persona
Killer reasons why you need to create a buyer persona
Till now, we learned how to create a buyer persona for your business. Let us understand why it is imperative for your business:
1. Help you define your audience
A well-defined buyer persona helps a marketer to identify the needs and wants of a prospective buyer.
For example, when you go to a shop to buy a gift for your friend or spouse, it is very easy for you to visualize their needs and wants. Similarly, buyers’ personas help define your audience, their needs and wants.
Honest buyer personas improve your sales pitch, your customer service, and even your product development.
Raka, Director of Inbound Marketing, Brian DeKoning
2. Understanding of buying decisions and stage of the buyer journey
The biggest advantage you get by creating buyer personas is to obtain a thorough acquaintance of buying decisions. It helps you to connect with your customers. With the help of buyer personas for your business, you can provide a general platform for language and communication about buyers.
Through in-depth study and research, you can identify how they arrive at their buying decisions, what all factors they consider, etc. This relevant information will aid you to create relevant content for your target audience. If you know what they are looking for, you can tailor your content in line with their needs and buying patterns. It means selling your products/services without sounding like a salesperson.
3. Create more targeted content and thereby effective content marketing
Every bit of the content that you create as a content marketer is fundamentally based on the buyer persona. It gives you a clear picture of what to create, with whom to connect, and in front of whom to share your content. Rather than blindly creating content and then sharing it haywire, it is vital to define and consider your personas in detail.
Understanding the needs, wants, goals, challenges, etc. of your personas allows you to better understand what type of content will appeal to them. Since you know what is valuable to them, you can target your content towards those values and develop content that is relevant to them.QL Tech Tip: The entire content you develop should be targeted towards at least one of your buyer personas, if not all.
4. Segmentation of email lists
Email marketing is also an old but effective tactic to reach out existing as well as prospective customers. A buyer persona is crucial for creating personalized email marketing campaigns that convert
One study by MarketingSherpa showed a 7% conversion rate for a persona-based campaign.
Your buyer personas play a huge role in the segmentation of your email lists. Email lists that are segmented on the basis of personas help you create more effective and relevant email content.QL Tech Tip: When you ask your website visitor to fill out a form on your site, ensure that you ask their goal of visiting a website. If you know what persona they fit into, you can better segment email lists.
5. Generate better quality leads
Targeted email campaigns enable you to get better quality leads and build better lead nurturing programs targeted at different personas. It means you would be in a better position to cater your marketing to the right people in the right places.
Signing off…!!
To summarise, it can be said that precise research on the potential of buyer insights help to develop an accurate buyer persona. The more researched a buyer persona is, the more effective an organization can accomplish inbound content strategy goals. Buyer personas assist you to create the right content that will efficiently and effectively attract your ideal visitors, convert them into leads, and close them into customers.
If you would like to add anything to the buyer persona and its effectiveness, feel free to drop in your thoughts in the comments section. We’d love to hear from you!
Content marketing – it isn’t as easy as it sounds. While creating content, you should know what you are talking about. If the content sounds generic, emotionless, or too salesy, it is your very first content marketing mistake.
“We basically decline 70% of the content being submitted to us because it is being too salesy…”
Outbrain Australia, Ayal Steiner
If your content is focused on selling rather than engaging, you are not the alone making this common misstep. According to Neil Patel, the focus of content marketing is to educate first and sell second.
Another generic content marketing mistake is viewing your content marketing strategy as a short-term activity to achieve a short-term goal.
Most commonly made terrible content marketing mistakes:
1. Ignorance of the content planning stage
Content marketing is a practice to create and promote engaging content that provides value and knowledge to your customers. And hence, your content marketing strategy should be more than perfect. Prior to executing your strategy, first of all, have a proper plan in place. Your plan should be in line with your vision and goal. Figure out your goal, set your priorities, and know your audience for better content planning.
Most of the marketers jump upon campaigns without foreseeing its probable pros and cons. If your campaign isn’t targeted to the right audience, hardly there are any chances of getting the desired success.
QL Tech Tip: Create a content back and ensure at least a blog database of three months in advance.
2. Complete ignorance to Buyer Persona
In digital marketing, initially, you don’t know who would be your actual customers. Hence, it may happen that the entire content you write goes in vain because it is not reaching to the audience who needs it. And this is also one of the most common content marketing mistakes done by start-ups. To avoid this pitfall, do audience analysis and prepare buyer persona for each of your products and services.
QL Tech Tip: For a successful content marketing, start with creating buyer persona. Define and develop a buyer persona for your products and services. Accordingly, create content and share in front of your target audience.
3. Incorrect mapping of content with the buyer’s journey
Is it you who creates a lot of relevant and engaging content, but each time fail at the point of conversion? Well, it’s not just you! There are many content marketers who create killer copies but still can’t convert. This happens when you fail to map your content with the buyer’s journey. According to HubSpot, a buyer’s journey is the process buyers go through to become aware of, evaluate, and purchase a new product or service.
You need to know under which stage of marketing funnel your prospective buyer falls. Accordingly, create content they want and dish it out in front of them.
4. Using content marketing as a tool to link building
A digital marketer often confuses content marketing with link building strategy. Of course, quality content builds backlinks. But, don’t just churn out tons of content so that it can be promoted haywire to generate backlinks. To be honest, it will never work.
Healthy link building is a costly and time-consuming process. Your content strategy is a two-edged sword. It can either make or break your entire SEO campaign. Rather than the quantity i.e. amount of backlinks, you need to work on acquiring quality backlinks. For this, your content should sound great and provide value without losing its uniqueness.
QL Tech Tip:
Ensure that your great content passes through below checkpoints: – Original, unique, and actionable – Provide value to visitors – Focus on solutions to users’ problems – Updated regularly to keep it fresh and relevant – Cited from trusted sources
5. Lack of storytelling
According to some studies, brains are always hungry for good stories that can connect them emotionally to the context. Most of the content marketers are aware of the importance of storytelling. However, they fail when it comes to delivery. A prime content marketing mistake that is noticed consistently is lack of storytelling art.
According to Sophie Elizabeth Smith, 45% of a brand’s image can be attributed to what it says and how it says it.
A story is nothing but just a narrative constitution that describes either an event or sequence of events. It should involve a two-way interaction between you (as a storyteller) and your audience (as listeners).
QL Tech Tip: For effective storytelling, create a scenario having issues/concerns or problems in the start of your content and over the course of a narrative, end it with a logical and actionable solution.
6. Ignorance to quantity, consistency, and frequency
Content marketers are often unsure about the quantity, consistency, and frequency of content to be published and promoted. This ignorance leads them to commit a content marketing mistake.
If you get rigid about publishing timelines, you might lose focus on the overall quality of the content to be created. Further, it is not always right that the more pieces of content you produce, the more results you can achieve.
Rather than just producing content, its promotion is also important. Your valuable content should reach to the eyes of your prospects on a consistent and frequent basis.
Consistency is posting on a regular (aka consistent) schedule. Frequency, on the other hand, is posting repeatedly during a period of time.
This difference matters a lot in content marketing. Posting (or publishing) on a consistent schedule sets expectations and hence it is a big deal. On the other hand, the frequency of posting (or promoting) content just ensures that it reaches all audiences, all time zones.
QL Tech Tip: Prepare a content calendar, preferably for posting schedules, that takes care of your consistency and frequency both.
7. Zero focus on Headlines
Imagine you have received an email in your Inbox with a subject line that sounds tacky and spammy, will you click on it? Probably not! The first thing a prospective reader notice is a headline. Craft a compelling headline; it is your very first prospect to mark a positive impression on your reader.
Basically, headlines aren’t only important in content marketing; they, in fact, rule the world of content marketing. According to David Lomas, your headlines, in effect, are your first real point of connection with your prospective customer, so you need to get them right.
Content marketers not paying attention to headlines greatly lose on the conversion opportunities. Your headlines should be interesting, relevant, creative, conversational, and insightful. Use a various headline analyzer online tools to check the score, readability, and sensitivity of your headline. According to a study published in The Guardian, headlines with 8 words do 21% better than average and using a hyphen or colon will add 9% to your CTR.
QL Tech Tip: Create more than one headline for each of your content and share it with the different headlines at different timings on different social media network to generate high blog traffic.
8. Promotion in front of the wrong audience
Not promoting the right content, at the right time, in front of the right audience is another common content marketing mistake. As a rule of thumb, don’t promote all the content that you produce. Poor content hurts you more than good content benefits you. It will not only affect your conversion rate but also negatively impacts your brand credibility. According to CoSchedule, consumers don’t take action when you want them to take action; they take action when they are ready.
Therefore, it is imperative for you to promote your content in front of the right audience. Create a content to which your audience can relate too. Use the words your user use to search their answers and accordingly provide solutions to their queries through your content.
QL Tech Tip: Not just do content marketing, rather do actionable content marketing. It is the backbone of your SEO.
Signing off!
These are not the exhaustive list of content marketing mistakes. However, we have covered the most common slips done by most of the content marketers. Take an honest look at the content marketing mistakes you are presently making, and try to fix them. Once you fix the existing issues, you will start noticing a tremendous transformation in your conversions.
If you need assistance on fixing any of the content marketing mistakes or want to highlight anything here, feel free to drop in your words in the comments section. We’d love to hear from you!
Looking at the present scenario, online life has become more dynamic than ever before. News, articles, blogs go viral this moment and a few hours later fade away into oblivion. There is a big roar on social media sites about one news, and soon after that some other news comes up and breaks the echo of the previous one.
Well, all this traction is because of one thing, i.e. – CONTENT. Content is the core of all the buzz which is there on various social media sites. Nowadays, businesses give more emphasis on content to market their products or services. They consider quality-content as the important key in achieving digital marketing success. Therefore, digital marketers plan to invest more in their content marketing programs.
If you are also looking to embark upon a content marketing campaign, you must know what will stimulate your online growth. Text-based content is an integral part of marketing. But to bring a hustle in your efforts, try to add visuals to your content.
We would like to share with you the types of visual content that you can use in your content. This will give a boost to your visual content marketing campaign.
Types of visual content to Boost Visual Content Marketing
1. Images – Visualization of ideas
If you spice up your text with some appealing and relatable images, your overall content becomes more readable. It will increase the probability of your readers reading your content until the end.
As we know with the growing usage of mobile phones, the attention spans have become shorter over large chunks of content. Therefore, it is preferable to use images in order to seek the much-needed attention of your audience.
Further, it will be an add-on if you use original images or the ones taken by you; as this adds a personal touch to your campaign. Images that are captivating are either expensive or time-consuming to create. You can take help of resources such as Canva where you can create images for free. Also, there are excellent quality photos available on Flickr and Morguefile for free.
Adding quality images to your text content will enhance your visual content marketing efforts; also in the appropriate direction.
2. Videos- 3D visualization of ideas
Videos are the best way to present the whole idea in a fantastic way. If the video gets combined with audio, it adds value to the content. It gives a positive impression that you can also walk that extra mile for the quality. This will be an add-on to your basic visual content marketing strategy as it will put a better impact on your audience.
Also, videos prove to be very useful in describing the product and services that your brand offers. You can add any type of video to your content. For instance, you can add explainer videos, demonstrations, testimonials or how-to videos. Whatever be your choice, keep in mind that your videos are congruent with the ethos of your brand.
According to a study by Moz, posts with videos receive nearly 300% more inbound links.
3. Infographic- Information in the form of Graphics
Indubitably, infographics are a wonderful tool to represent your data in a visual format. It comprises of text in the image. In your infographic, you can include your promotional endeavours like your networks of key influencers, social media etc. an infographic can become an integral part of your visual content marketing strategy.
You have to keep in mind that your design and layout should be as impactful as it could be. Your data has to be conveyed in a design which is a combination of good shapes, colours, and fonts. Also, you should try to include accurate and relevant information. Many a time it happens that mundane statistics can be brought to life when conveyed as stunning visuals.
This will reap you quick and true rewards for your infographic.
4. Memes- visuals with a humorous caption
We all find memes really humorous and they are quite popular in the realm of digital media. Nobody has ever thought that memes would play a role in visual content marketing; when they first started to be used as a form of entertainment among college students. But now they represent a quirky form of visual content.
You can also create your own meme and set yourself apart from your competitors. But before creating, ensure the type of audience. Another plus point of using memes is that they give you the luxury of creating in-house jokes about your industry. This could benefit you in establishing a community around your brand.
5. Presentations- ideas Presented smartly
They serve the almost same function as an infographic but focus more on appealing designs, colour and lengthy content. Some-time before, presentations were restricted to only board rooms. But now, with the help of SlideShare, you can share your presentation with the world; thereby expanding your business reach. A good representation allows you to communicate with your audience irrespective of the device they are using.
How to create an appealing presentation? You can just take an idea from Rand Fishkin’s presentation on Content Marketing Mistakes. The presentation has complex information presented in a humorous, easily digestible manner. Keep in mind that you follow the consistency throughout your presentation. Proofread your content for spelling and grammar mistakes.
6. Screenshots- screen captured an image
With the help of screenshots, you can provide your audience with the actual working of your product or service. Along with screenshot, you can combine a marketing copy or a testimonial to boost your credibility. This will give a jolt to your visual content marketing, thereby increasing your profits.
Further, screenshots can be very useful in backing up the claims that you make in your sales content. You can also annotate your screenshots if you wish to draw attention to a particular part of the image.
Screenshots might not be that appealing to you but they can be hugely used as a trust-building tool for your audience. Capture customer reviews or testimonials that are there on industry forums or social media. Those screenshots can be used in infographics or SlideShare presentation as they will bring meaning to the stats or information you are presenting.
Skitch is a nice tool to create graphics and text on images. It’s free and simple to use.
Wrapping up
Visual content taps to the visceral psyche of your audience. That’s why it is very important to present high-quality visual content. It will truly resonate with people, subsequently skyrocketing your brand promotion.
Well, if your content is badly designed, you will end up doing more harm than good. Always try to consider the needs of your audience. With content the substance counts the most, but a good representation style is always appreciated.
We have tried our best to highlight the important points about each type of visual content. We hope those will help you in planning your “Visual Content Marketing” strategy to get the maximum gains. If you would like to add your smart ideas, feel free to comment below.
This post is by guest author, Niraj Ranjan. This article has been edited and published with the author’s permission.
What is your personal brand? Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos once said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.”
A personal brand is something that all of us who has at least one social media account have to worry about. Your digital and social footprint is more important than you would imagine.
A company that wants to hire you will certainly Google you before taking a final call; a research team will check out your online profile prior to granting you a fellowship; even your potential date will say yes to you only after running a quick search on you. So you see, it’s very important!
Mastering the art of personal branding can also help you become an influencer – quite a superpower in the digital age.
Here are some tips that can help you build a strong personal brand:
1. Always be authentic
Authenticity, be it in personal or professional life, is well-received and well appreciated by the people around you. A fake version of you or your brand can stand only for a while and is never the best strategy. Fake also involves being overly self-promotional. As a rule, for any brand, it is advisable to follow 1:5 policy when you produce content or market. It means offer 5 valuable points to the reader; in return, earn the right to talk about you once.
In addition, being fake involves a lot of non-required work. At last, you will end up looking inconsistent and untrustworthy. For example, if you are against the use of tech gadgets, don’t act otherwise so as to please people around you or your audience.
2. Communicate appropriately
The art of communication is the language of leadership – James Humes
The way you communicate has a major impact on your overall personal branding success.
It is important to have enough social intelligence on how to present yourself in a given situation. Here are some key tips:
Don’t address your senior executives as ‘guys’.
Be witty, light, and humorous while talking to a younger audience, but never sound an egoistic or arrogant.
Pay attention to what you say when you are trying to communicate your ideas and opinions. Being clear and crisp is the key to avoid misunderstanding.
Make sure that during one-to-one conversations your body language is in sync with your words. If you say that you are happy, your behaviour has to reflect that.
Ensure to respond as promptly as possible. For instance, use tools like email reminders to ensure that you don’t forget to reply back to an email.
3. Focus on relevant social media platforms
Social media marketing is cost-effective as well as smart medium to build your personal brand. However, it is important to choose and focus on the social media platforms that are relevant to you and your end goal.
A few examples:
If you want to attract recruiters and employers, a professional network such as LinkedIn is where you have to make a lot of noise.
If you are looking to build a brand amongst your friends and social circle, Instagram and Facebook would be your best bet.
If you are a critic and want to spread your reach, again Facebook and Twitter can come to your aid.
And so on…
It is important to identify your audience and figure out where they hang out the most- you can exercise this out by doing a little research online.
For instance, 67% of the internet users are on Facebook and the majority of them are women; so if you want to target women online, you should start with Facebook4. Be updated with the latest information
If I visit your Facebook page and see that your last update was months’ ago, I definitely would not be impressed enough to follow you. Being present and being up to date is crucial.
Everyone now has access to 3G and 4G networks. News and information travel like wildfire and so do feedbacks and opinions. If you want to build a personal brand, you need to stay with the flow or even better stay ahead of the flow.
For example,
if the purpose of your personal branding is to establish yourself as a thought leader, your audience expects you to have opinions and things to say about the latest events happening in your industry. In case a company that belongs to your industry is going bankrupt, they expect some reaction/response from you, as a thought leader.5. Avoid being the jack of all trades
The first thing you need to do before making any attempt at personal branding is to find your niche. What is so unique about you? Something, which only you can offer?
For example, if you are running a blog, do not overwhelm your audience with a wide range of topics and things to say. This sort of brand confusion will lead to a very weakly established brand.
Being all over the place, having multiple interests, and trying to have your foot in every door can signal a lack of expertise and credibility in any one area.
Here are some tips:
Have a central theme to everything you say. For example, if you are all about gender equality, making it the central theme of every story and every message.
Don’t make your message/key point a riddle. The gist of your message has to be clear, crisp, and apparently obvious.
Again presentation matters a lot. Tailor your message to match your audience.
Final thoughts
Back in good old days, your resume was enough to demonstrate your competence; however, it’s not the case anymore. Companies and teams want you only if you show more than a list of accomplishments on one page. They need to see who you are and what your attitude is towards life. This is what building your personal brand is all about. Just like you market a service/product to the world, you market your ability and competence through personal branding.
Affiliate marketing is now not a new concept, but it is still a very fresh and rewarding way of marketing online. It is about a relationship between three main parties: the affiliate (publisher), the merchant (advertiser), and the customer. Furthermore, affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways of making money online.
It offers a low-cost technique for traders and dealers to display their products and services and build brand awareness.
Geno Prussakov has mentioned in of his blogs that 38% of marketers call affiliate marketing one of the top customer acquisition methods.
What is affiliate marketing?
An affiliate marketing model is straightforward; it acts as a commission-based recommendation practice. A partner or affiliate promotes a trader or a dealer’s products for a slice of the pie. Affiliates are as good as extended sales and marketing departments of the merchants. They play a major role in your marketing campaign and assist the customers to choose products and buy them online.
According to a study, in most affiliate programs less than 10% of affiliates drive 90% of traffic and conversions.
Affiliate marketing is performance-based marketing. Despite affiliate marketing doesn’t require a fate and years of struggle to get started, you shouldn’t presume excellent results overnight. It is intensely competitive and you need to dedicate productive time for choosing products and ensuring that they meet market needs. Consequently, learn how to promote them and how to measure the success of an affiliate marketing program.
How to become an affiliate marketer?
Let us have a look at the traits of a successful affiliate marketer. Typically, an excellent affiliate possesses the following traits:
To become a successful affiliate marketer is not a tough job; it is a simple process as shown below:
1. Discover an exclusive niche
As a secret success formula, do not try to straightaway offer anything at all. Rather, stay focused on a precise niche market. Figure out your audience, analyze their pain points, offer them solutions to solve their issues, and ultimately assist them to achieve their goals. To identify the service area which can work best for you and your audience, the best place is to visit forum and question answers’ websites of your industry.
2. Make powerful use of search engine marketing
Search engine marketing is a powerful mechanism for online businesses. After assembling affiliate storehouse, jump into its timely and logical promotion. The preferred option of most of the affiliates is pay-per-click. However, to reap long-term benefits use a proper blend of organic search and paid search. PPC can definitely give you instant results but if you rely only on PPC for a longer time, all your profits might end up in the hands of Google Adwords.
3. Understand Your Product and Identify Your Audience
This is a complete analytical exercise. You need to devote your time in knowing your product and knowing your audience. Create a database, you will find it handy as and when required glancing through. Learn in-depth about the products and/or services. Think about the value you can provide to your customers along with your products/services offerings which can help you to build your credibility. This is because trust can be earned from credibility builds trust.
Have a psychological study of your audience. This will help you in developing and designing a web site that converts well and ultimately boosts your ROI.
4. Don’t ponder all your prospects or resources in one thing or place
This is the excellent tip to become a successful affiliate marketer. Promote products from diverse merchants. This way you will be able to balance the cash flows. Furthermore, out of multiple merchants, if one or two fail to promote your product, the overall impact on your business will be minimal. It is absolutely fine to opt for diversification and promote niche products from diverse merchants.
5. Gain excellence in internet marketing
Internet marketing is a very dynamic field. On an ongoing basis, trends keep changing. You need to act intelligently here to succeed. Keep yourself updated with the latest trends, tips, and tactics. In order to become an expert affiliate, you must always dedicate your time in reading, learning, and embracing the dynamics of Internet marketing.
6. Monitor your efforts
As an affiliate, don’t give up if it doesn’t reach the satisfaction levels. Try and try, again and again. Monitor your efforts and analyze your statistics, to figure out what is working well and what is going wrong. Accordingly, amend your affiliate marketing strategy.
How does affiliate marketing work?
Affiliate marketing works on click; by clicking on a special hyperlink made available by the particular affiliate program. The most common type of tracking is tracking via a cookie. When a user clicks on the link, a cookie is stored on their computers. This cookie lets the merchant know that in case a sale transaction happens, it has come from you.
To get started with affiliate marketing, the first step is to sign up for a partner program. On getting login details, you will be assigned a link with a unique ID that makes it feasible to track all traffic sent by you to the advertiser’s site. If your visitor clicks on it and performs the qualified action, you will receive a commission. Qualified action depends on the compensation model. The most commonly used one is pay per sale model which is based on the revenue sharing when a merchant pays an affiliate the percentage of the sale.
Affiliate marketing works best in three types of products /services promotion where it has shown highest success till date:
1. Information products
can make you earn commission up to 50% since they are cost-effective; production costs are lower as compared to prospects they offer
2. Physical products
easiest to sell but churns out a lesser commission (not more than 5 to 10%) since most of the amounts get deducted in variables like shipping, wholesaling, and others
3. Services
based on trends, one can normally expect commission in the range of 10 to 30%
Over 50% of topmost affiliate programs fall into these FOUR categories: Fashion, Sports, travel, and Health & Beauty.
Affiliate marketing can provide you with a stable stream of income. How much you can earn entirely depends on how successful you are in converting your browsers into buyers and service subscribers. Affiliate marketing is cost-effective; the place is not important, you can work from anywhere in the world and still earn handsome amounts.
How to make money as an affiliate marketer?
Affiliate marketing experts often make an income that can tally over five figures per month, however, only 1 to 5% of thousands of marketers literally achieve this level. When an affiliate reaches this elite level, they are often referred to as a “super” affiliate.
“Affiliate Marketing Has Made Businesses Millions And Ordinary People Millionaires. Affiliate Marketing may be Your Next Best Career Move.”
Bo Benette
If anyone asks can you make money with affiliate marketing, the precise answer is “yes”. It is true that affiliate programs can earn extra money and even a full-time income from home. The long answer is a little more complicated. Like any home income venture, success comes not so much from what you choose to do to make money, but whether or not you do what needs to be done correctly and consistently.
Affiliate marketing is the ultimate home business since it has no dependence on finance to get started. Furthermore, neither you need to manufacture, stock, ship product inventory, nor you need to deliver a service on demand. Under affiliate marketing, you are fundamentally paid for referring new clients and customers to other businesses.
[A] Affiliate marketing WITH website
It is better to do affiliate marketing with a website. Once you have figured out your niche and have zeroed down your research on an affiliate marketing program, the immediate step is to build your site. For a newbie in the realm of building sites, an easy option is to go for WordPress. Since the WordPress CMS provides ease in operation and coding skill required is zilch, you can set up your own site effortlessly.
Make sure that you go for the authorized domain for better authenticity of your site. And, the content which you publish on your site should be of excellent quality. Your content plays a major role in your overall marketing strategy.
The type of content could consist of product reviews, banner ads, blog posts, common questions and answers (FAQs), informational content, etc. In your blog posts, you can mention about your products, how it helps your target audience, why they should buy it, what are the common issues with the product and how to deal with it, etc. Coming to the informational content, you can have a tab of FREE resources wherein you can add some slideshow, presentation, tutorial, EBook, etc. all these tactics will bring traffic to your website. In case your product is admired enough and brings sufficient relevant traffic to your website, you could also monetize the traffic in other ways, such as AdSense.
Promotion of website and content
Once your website is ready with relevant content, the next step is the promotion of your website and your content on various social media platforms. On the basis of your niche, you can choose from FacebookTwitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, and several other niches and location-specific networks.
Now, everything is ready for your affiliate marketing, starting from website to content and social media. Once all requirements are fulfilled, you can straightaway go ahead with the promotion of affiliate offers.
Remember, under affiliate marketing, merchants only pay for actual customers, not just visits. This gives affiliate marketing a major benefit over other promotional channels, such as PPC, where it’s trouble-free to spend a large chunk of money on clicks without producing any actual conversions. Successful affiliate programs use the multi-channel acknowledgment to ensure the affiliates that create the most value get paid the most.
According to Bill Burnice, top affiliate networks for 2017 are:
It might be sounding absurd, but yes, you can do affiliate marketing without having a website also.
You can start posting the products which you want to promote on blogs and forums with your affiliate link in your signature
You can take help of EBook as a promotional scheme. Go for writing a ‘viral’ book and post on sites like eBay. An informative and useful book as compared to simply laden with affiliate ads might get quite better traction from your target.
Video marketing is one of the most prominent content marketing strategies as per SEO Trends 2017. Hence, go for sites like YouTube and Vimeo and promote your video clips. You will surely convert a good amount of fan base into affiliate profits.
A simple yet effective technique is to write classifieds for the products you want to promote and submit them on various sites. Classified submissions are regarded as one of the most favoured marketing prompts for affiliates who don’t use websites.
Build your own social network and let your followers know about you and the products you promote.
Write guest posts for the website having high traffic.
Little less recommended method is PPC. Because promotion through pay-per-click technique involves creating PPC campaigns through search engines like Google and Bing, and promoting the merchant website directly through your affiliate link.
Closing thoughts on affiliate marketing
The problem with affiliate marketing, like many other home business options, is the self-styled sages and get-rich-quick programs. These sages and programs hint that affiliate marketing can be done fast and with little or zero effort. So, the issue isn’t really whether or not affiliate marketing is a viable income option (it is), but whether or not you can make affiliate marketing work for you. Affiliate marketing isn’t hard, but it does require knowledge, planning, and consistent effort to make any significant income.
