The #1 thing great inbound marketing should aim for
How to get found online quick
Step 1: You want to deliver your concept so simplistic, that everyone can surely remember and repeat it.
Let’s be clear, nothing beats word of mouth.
I’ll explain why in a bit.
With word of mouth, other people serve as the medium that conveys your message. They become the carriers of your content.
Because word of mouth is still the most effective, the importance of good branding is indisputable.
Only a strong concept with recognizable and clear branding is easy enough to be remembered.
That is why a conversation about marketing strategy should always start with word of mouth.
By the way, this article is part 3 in my series “Can you send me your Marketing Roadmap?”.
The series is an answer to questions we get all the time.
It takes you through the framework we use at Hapklaar Agency to explain to our clients the meaning and purpose of (what we think is) great marketing.
Want to start at the beginning? Go to:
“Can you send me your Marketing Roadmap?” Pt. 1: Branding & Design.
I’ve written it in such a way that you can easily pick any article and read as you see fit.
The chronological order in which I’ve posted these articles is the way we take our clients through each step of the process as we start working together.
Today, third stop: Word of Mouth, Inbound Marketing, and PR.
If you have a great concept that is designed in a fantastic and recognizable way, you could get away with hardly any marketing activity at all.
If you don’t do any inbound marketing (where you ensure that you are found as well as possible) and outbound marketing (where you actively look for customers), then you can still expect growth.
Maybe not as fast as you would like, but it can be as simple as that.
How? Word of mouth.
The challenge with word of mouth is that it only works if the person who tells you about anything is credible and respected.
This credibility ensures that a connection is established between you and what is talked about, even before you have personally become acquainted with the company or product.
There’s a direct correlation between the credibility of the source (your friend) and the level of connection that’s established with the brand before you ever interact with it directly.
In addition, people have a strong tendency to talk about a company within the context of their experience.
They tell this experience in story form: “We were recently there and there …”
This type of communication (telling a story) sticks well and ensures reliability (authority principle).
Make sure you have strong branding so that you can turn every person who comes into contact with your company into the best medium there is: word of mouth.
Great word of mouth is a KPI for great SEO.
Step 2: make sure it’s super easy to find you online.
Even if you can count on great word of mouth, you still have to ensure that the first people come to find you.
You can open a store in a desolated forest, but if nobody knows you’re there you can wait a long time before someone spontaneously walks in.
It is, therefore, no wonder that entrepreneurs choose popular locations in a busy center, preferably on a corner, to establish themselves. That way you will be found easily.
SEO actually works in the same way. SEO, freely interpreted, means the way in which you ensure that Google places you high on a specific search query.
Almost everyone suffers from selective perception. You can walk past a glasses shop for weeks on your way to work. Only when you experience problems with your vision do you notice that the store is there (if you can still see it).
You usually only find what you are specifically looking for and computers are even stricter: you have to say exactly what you are looking for, only then will you get the right answer.
This applies in the first place to your website, but nowadays it also works for your social media accounts and external partnerships (such as blogs, etc.)
To ensure that you are the answer to a specific question, it is important that your website is adjusted to your specific question-answer / demand-supply context.
You now understand why your market research and customer characters play an important role: if you know your target audience well and can even form a picture of the people who should become your customer, then you can properly present their problems and questions.
Want to read my thoughts on market research? Please read: “Can you send me your Marketing Roadmap?” Pt. 2: Market Research.
Market research that is carried out in the context of SEO is not rocket science, but it can’t be too simplistic either.
If you think that your target audience loves horses, it means in no way that it is your sole task to fill up your website with the word “horse.”
Supercharge your word of mouth
Step 3: Rank high on the thing that delivers you great word of mouth
There are countless professional and not-so-professional tools to help you with good SEO research.
This is essential and the specialist hired by you must be able to deliver this. It does not have to be an award-winning presentation, as long as you know how and where the research was conducted.
In our experience, your research often presents you something you might already know (if you already have great word to mouth):
What people remember about your brand is often (part of) the thing you want to rank high on.
As your brand builds, you’ll notice that a lot of people find your website through your brand name + the thing that makes you special.
A client of ours makes organic lemonade sachets. We’ve mapped a clear trend where we see people entering the brand name on Google + obvious words like “lemonade”.
But, look at the data more intently and you’ll notice opportunities that are hidden in combinations such as “sage lemonade” or “organic syrup”.
These words are often correlated to the things that people tell about your brand that really stuck to them.
I mean, how could they not! Sage lemonade sounds delicious.
If you’re starting out and don’t have people talking about your brand, there are a lot of tools that help you present your concept to a broad audience.
It really delivers value to have people comment on your concept, your USP’s, and see if you have an understanding of what people will start to talk about.
Have a look at tools like Usability Hub or simply send an online form to your Facebook friends using Typeform.
Do you want to know more about doing SEO research? I like to hear it, we’ll write an in-depth article about it.
So how do you implement all this research onto your website?
First step: ensure that your website is full of text, image, and video in which specific questions from your customer characters are answered.
Make sure to use those words you found through your market research, including your word of mouth- and SEO research.
You can do this by having different pages on your website, publishing videos, regularly writing blogs and ensuring that all your texts are written optimally.
The next steps get very technical, very quickly.
For example, it is important that all meta tags of images on your website (the text that appears when you move your mouse over a picture) are optimized, that you have a favicon (a picture when you open a tab) and that your website is SSL certified, to name a few examples.
All these small things ensure that Google marks your website as reliable, which benefits your overall rating.
Do you work on this often and extensively?
Then you have a good chance that Google will place you higher.
I’m not going to lie. This can take a long time. Especially if there is already a lot of competition.
It is very challenging to make a website popular in an organic way (unpaid).
Fortunately, there are different ways to lend a hand to this process.
There’s no such thing as bad publicity
Step 4: make sure that important sources start talking about you, it increases your findability and credibility.
We mentioned earlier that respect and credibility are important factors in word of mouth.
If someone you believe and respect gives you a tip or advice, there is a good chance that you will do something with it. The greater the credibility and respect, the greater the chance that you will “convert”, as it’s called.
Google understands all too well that this is how it works online as well and they also constantly adjust their algorithms to bring this process as close to the physical reality as possible.
That means that if you are mentioned by an online source (usually a website) that is highly regarded and respected, your findability and reliability will increase rapidly.
This phenomenon immediately gives us the opportunity to make a short trip to the realm of PR.
Part of the responsibilities of a PR agency is making sure that you are mentioned by the right (online) sources.
If an important source, preferably even within a relevant field, places a link to your website on their website, it’s positive for your rating with Google.
An important source was previously determined by Google in particular by the number of visitors that a website received daily. Nowadays that is no longer the only important factor, but relevance and target group also play a major role.
Link building, as this is called, can be done “in an organic way” without having to pay for it directly.
Although you can pay for a PR agency to send out press releases for you to a warm network that they maintain, you cannot guarantee that they will actually write about you.
This PR value is the highest though if you’re looking to direct traffic from one source to another.
If you do not pay to be written about, it is the most authentic, which gives you the best reputation.
So next to ranking higher on Google, unpaid publicity traditionally results in more traffic from the source to the website.
What’s the value to you: traffic or reputation?
The chance that people will click on your link when they see that it has not been paid for is the highest.
However, for your findability, it doesn’t really matter whether or not you pay directly to an important source to refer to you.
That is why many companies also choose to be mentioned on various (relevant) websites for a fee.
That is a good idea, provided you know what the added value is for you.
My advice is to make paid links a part of your marketing mix (the total of different marketing activities), provided that the objective is based on your general findability and does not directly measure the amount of traffic you receive via this source (that’s an added benefit).
In addition, especially for companies that are just launching and companies that want to grow fast, it is a very good idea to add PR as well as paid linkbuilding to their marketing mix.
Paid linkbuilding is great for ranking your website, PR is greater for ranking your website and directing traffic.
In my personal experience, PR comes closest to word of mouth, because the nature of this industry works the same way:
PR people maintain a warm network of journalists, influencers and other media outlets. This network writes articles without payment but based on the relationship they have and the newsworthiness of the information.
Is the relationship good, credible and respected?
Then you have a good chance that your hired PR company can ensure that well-known, credible and respected media sources start writing about you.
It works as a good catalyst for the growth of your own media channels, provided you have coordinated and set them up properly.
You can then channel the sudden hype surrounding your company to your channels and “catch” them in a web woven by you.
When the hype is a bit over (as it always does), you still have a large part of these people in your network, whom you can reach whenever you want with relevant content.
Do you often have something interesting and newsworthy to report? Then it certainly makes sense to regularly work with a PR agency to repeat this cycle.
These types of partnerships especially pay off in the long term:
Your PR efforts work best when a number of different, respected sources keep relaying a slightly different version of the same story over different media channels over an extended time period.
I have a single warning about this: if you do not know exactly what you want to communicate and you are solely dependent on a PR agency for both the newsworthiness and the distribution of your news, then often friction with a PR agency will arise.
In my experience, PR people tend to blow up the truth to save their relationship (with you). Meaning they might pitch you ‘news’ just for the sake of communication.
Don’t get me wrong, they’ll never communicate something which may hurt their relationship with journalists and media outlets. That is their product after all.
But they might not always communicate what’s completely in line with your mission, focus, and brand values.
That, of course, is also a bit of the name of the game: they sell news that should come across as authentic but interesting at the same time.
It is easy for them to become entangled in the forced enthusiasm that they are expected to bring with them on a daily basis.
My tip: make sure that you or your product marketing team (more on this in the next article) have given proper consideration to the newsworthiness of your company and product. Let the PR people hook on to this, instead of placing this responsibility on them too.
In practice, you get better and more honest feedback from the PR people because they now start to think critically about what they have to pass on.
If they have to come up with the news themselves, you often notice that they are too far away from your product to really understand what your concept is about.
The one thing great inbound marketing should aim for is:
It’s this: make sure your SEO, PR, and linkbuilding are in sync with your Word of mouth.
Do your market research.
Find out what makes you special.
(and what has people already talking about you).
Identify these opportunities online.
Fill up your website, social media, content output, etc. with these words.
Forge partnerships and create linkbuilding around this.
Set yourself up to be found for the things that make you special.
And don’t forget to track and analyze everyone and everything that happens.
If you liked this article, give me a clap and stay tuned for the next one in line: content marketing.
Cheers, Roger
