Category Archives: Insurance

Internet Marketing Guide – 4 Content Marketing Miscues

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Internet marketing campaigns revolve around 3 things – search engine optimization, social media and content marketing. These marketing efforts are referred to as pull strategies. These are the marketing efforts that are designed to “pull in” your target clients, instead of pushing them to make favorable buying decisions.

The oft-repeated adage in Internet marketing – content is king – remains as relevant as ever. After all these emerging developments and shifts, the content of your Webpage remains to be the lynchpin of Internet marketing. Search engines scour the pages of your Website to assess if such pages measure up to the search query. On the other hand, your target readers will follow the content of your blogs, whitepapers, articles, etc. in order to get a clear picture of the product or services that you are offering.

This means that you need to generate quality content to build your reputation online. You have to exert extra effort to show that you are a trusted and reliable source of information. Thus, if you want to hit the jackpot in your Internet marketing campaign, you have to work on your content.

There are 4 common pitfalls that you must avoid in your Internet marketing campaign. These are the following:

Inadequate Fresh Content

Fresh content is the lifeblood of content marketing. This may appear to be a perfect case of redundancy. How would you perceive a blog site where the latest post is already a few weeks old? Blogs that are generally stagnant are considered by readers as fairly useless and won’t waste their time reading through the content. You are losing out on the opportunity to rank well at Google since each of the posts in your blog can target various keywords and these can help improve your online presence.

Connecting With the Wrong Audience

Follow the basic rule in marketing – profile your potential clients. You must monitor who are reading your blog posts regularly. Carefully assess if you are missing out on some earning opportunities from other segments of the market. Determine what your priorities are. Do you want to build your reputation as an expert in a particular field or niche? Or do you want to share information with your target clients? You must also get a good grip of the online behavior of your target readers and find out what they are looking for when they browse the Web.

Coming Off As a Hard Sell

You will surely mess up your Internet marketing campaign if you treat your content marketing as your medium in selling your product or service. You have to remember that your primary objective is not to sell but to market your product or service. You are into content marketing to “help” your potential clients. Your readers will surely not appreciate it if you sound a bit too “promotional” when you provide content for your blog.

Producing Content Without Promotional Value

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you should find ways to promote your product or service without going overboard and appear to be a hard sell. Learn of the “stealth” techniques so that you can get the desired response from your readers. When you produce a great article or white paper, you can get positive response from your target audience. This puts you closer to your main objective of developing a potential business through higher CTRs. Make yourself visible on the Web. Get those posts on your social profiles, company newsletters and social bookmarking sites. Of course, don’t forget to put share buttons on your blogs so that your target audience can republish or link to them.

Are You Practicing Meaningful Marketing Or Mindless Marketing?

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“Mindless habitual behavior is the enemy of innovation.” – Rosabeth Moss Kanter

In their book “Meaningful Marketing”, Doug Hall and Jeffrey Stamp lay out the differences between what they call ‘meaningful marketing’ and mindless marketing.

Meaningful marketing is a data-driven, analytical and methodical approach to getting the most from your marketing efforts while minimizing cost, effort and waste and maximizing sales, efficiency and long-term repeatable effectiveness.

Mindless marketing is that which causes you drop your prices at the whim of your customer, spend countless and unaccounted for dollars on promotions while hoping that customers respond differently to the same tired, repetitious messaging scheme.

How do determine if you’re doing “Meaningful Marketing”

  • Your marketing is actually useful in helping your customers make the best decision for their particular set of needs
  • Your marketing materials are 100% honest with no puffery
  • Your marketing is transparent and authentic and speaks with earned authority
  • Your marketing has FOCUS (target markets, message, what you sell and what you don’t sell)
  • All marketing is focused on customer acquisition and business growth (retention is a great goal too, but I simply call that ‘re-acquisition’)
  • Your marketing actually seeks to engage in a dialogue with customers rather than just ‘talk at them’ (think: blogging)
  • Your marketing seeks to fill a valid and well defined need rather than simply persuade a gullible customer into a one-time purchase

Watch out for these signs of “Mindless Marketing

  • You use sales & marketing gimmicks or tricks to capture interest
  • You don’t rely on the actual merits of your product/service to sell themselves and stand on their own
  • Your marketing is faddish or trendy and not part of an overall strategic plan
  • You have succumbed to ‘bright shiny object syndrome’ and are using the latest social media vehicles or other marketing tools without an understanding of how/why/what to expect them to do for you
  • Your marketing is focused on the transaction and not the relationship

At the end of the day, there’s no sense in marketing for the sake of marketing. It’s common sense really. As I was looking for some resources for a project recently, I found this quote from the government in one of the SBA marketing guides.

ALL company policies and activities should be aimed at satisfying customer needs, and PROFITABLE sales volume is a better company goal than maximum sales volume.

I would add that “ALL MARKETING activity should be focused on delivering a meaningful message and adding value during the prospect’s decision making process”.