results. Clicking through, they learn that the temples are located near the village of San Jose Succotz and that the lower temple is famous for its stucco frieze (a band of sculpture along the facade). Let me remind you that this is a hotel website. The team even created content about the Tikal Mayan site, located about two hours from Chaa Creek in Guatemala, a whole different country!
All this content drives people from the search engines to the hotel site. Many of them will then choose to stay at the Lodge at Chaa Creek. Indeed, some 80 percent of new bookings to the lodge come directly from this content marketing effort. This reduces the lodge’s reliance on the old-fashioned techniques of its competitors, which get a large percentage of their bookings from online travel sites (for which they must pay a commission) or advertising in travel magazines (which is very expensive). And it all starts by providing would-be travelers with the information they’re looking for when they begin researching a trip.
Develop Information Your Buyers Want to Consume
Companies with large budgets can’t wait to spend the big bucks on slick TV advertisements. It’s like commissioning artwork. TV ads make marketing people at larger companies feel good. But broadcast advertisements dating from the time of the TV-industrial complex don’t work so well anymore. When we had three networks and no cable, it was different. In the time-shifted, multichannel, web-centric world of the long tail, YouTube, DVRs, Twitter, and blogs, spending big bucks on TV ads is like commissioning a portrait back in the nineteenth century: It might make you feel good, but does it bring in any money?
Instead of deploying huge budgets for dumbed-down TV commercials that purport to speak to the masses and therefore appeal to nobody, we need to think about the information that our niche audiences want to know. Why not build content specifically for these niche audiences and tell them an online story that is created especially for them? Once marketers and PR people tune their brains to think about niches, they begin to see opportunities for being more effective at delivering their organization’s message.
Big Birge Plumbing Company Grows Business in a Competitive Market
Plumbers and other tradespeople used to generate business through the print telephone directory (when I was growing up we called it the Yellow Pages). I remember my parents both turned to it when they needed, say, a house painter or an electrician.
We’re in a new world now. People go to search engines and consumer review sites like Yelp to research companies. In this new world, it’s not the expensive half-page Yellow Pages ad that grows business. It’s the best website—especially in a highly competitive market like plumbing.
When I was in Omaha, Nebraska, for a speaking engagement, I had an opportunity to speak with Lallenia Birge, who with her husband Brad Birge operate Big Birge Plumbing Company.6 Lallenia goes by a wonderful title: “A Plumber’s Wife to Big Birge Plumbing Co.”
“Don’t let your money go down the drain! Call Big Birge Plumbing Company. For all your plumbing needs!” The clever, if punny, writing personalizes Big Birge Plumbing Company, making it stand out from the rest of the market. When the vast majority of plumbers either don’t have a site or just maintain a basic one with straightforward facts and contact info, being different gets you noticed. The Big Birge Plumbing Company site uses fun original photos, has a great design, and showcases the company’s humorous personality.
Here’s how Lallenia introduces herself on the Meet Big Birge page: “Hi! Unlike my husband, I do NOT have years and years of plumbing experience nor have I dug ditches in 100-degree weather. Honestly I’m pretty sure my husband has had to use our drain cleaner at our house more than most of his ‘regular’ customers (pun intended). I did not realize you aren’t supposed to flush wax down the toilet or not place all the food scrapes [sic] off the plate into the garbage disposal! (Whoops!)”
The fun carries over to the design of their trucks (Lallenia with a “gasp” expression, peering into a toilet filled with money) and to their social media presence, including Facebook.
In a crowded market—there are more than 400 plumbing companies in the Omaha area—Big Birge Plumbing Company has grown very quickly in less than five years in business.
“Our very first year, we received Best of Omaha due to our marketing online via social media and the image we display,” Lallenia says. “This is a major award in our city, and we came out of nowhere. We have won it two years in a row now.”
Big Birge Plumbing Company shows that anyone with a smartphone and a focus on reaching buyers online can grow a business, even in a very competitive market. When I checked recently, Big Birge Plumbing was ranked on the first page of the Google results for “Omaha Plumber.” That’s amazing, considering the company is only a few years old. You can achieve the same result in your market.
Buyer Personas: The Basics
Smart marketers understand buyers, and many build formal buyer personas for their target demographics. (I discuss buyer personas in detail in Chapter 10.) It can be daunting for many of us to consider who, exactly, might be interested in our products and services and is visiting our site and checking out our content. But if we break the buyers into distinct groups and then catalog everything we know about each one, we make it easier to create content targeted to each important demographic.
For example, a college website usually has the goal of keeping alumni happy so that they donate money to their alma mater on a regular basis. A college might have two buyer personas for alumni: younger alumni (those who graduated within the past 10 or 15 years) and older alumni. Universities also have a goal of recruiting students by driving them into the application process. The effective college site might have a buyer persona for the high school student who is considering college. But since the parents of the prospective student have very different information needs, the site designers might build another buyer persona for parents. A college also has to keep its existing customers (current students) happy.
That means a well-executed college site might target five distinct buyer personas, with the goals of getting younger and older alumni to donate money, high school students to complete the application process, and parents to make certain their kids complete it. The goals for the current students aspect of the site might be making certain they come back for another year, plus answering routine questions so that staff time is not wasted.
By truly understanding the needs and the mind-sets of the five buyer personas, the college will be able to create appropriate content. Once you understand these audiences very well, then (and only then) you should set out to satisfy their informational needs by focusing on your buyers’ problems and creating and delivering content accordingly. Website content too often simply describes what an organization or a product does from an egotistical perspective. While information about your organization and products is certainly valuable on the inner pages of your site, what visitors really want is content that first describes the issues and problems they face and then provides details on how to solve those problems.
Once you’ve built an online relationship, you can begin to offer potential solutions that have been defined for each audience. After you’ve identified target audiences and articulated their problems, content is your tool to show off your expertise. Well-organized web content will lead your visitors through the sales cycle all the way to the point when they are ready to buy from or otherwise commit to your organization.
Understanding buyers and building an effective content strategy to reach them
