silhouette of man fishing on lake

Fishing For Customers: Do You Have The Right Gear?

I love the outdoors and outdoor activities, and fishing is no exception. Put a rod and a reel is this girl’s hand and you get a happy marketer. One of the things I love about it is how peaceful it is. It gives you a chance to think about things like how marketing is a lot like fishing. You have to have the right gear, be in the right place, at the right time. If you have all that, you have yourself a customer.

The Right Place: All the Many Marketing Choices

What kind of marketing do you do? There are so many kinds, you could write a series on it:

  • Email marketing
  • Content marketing
  • Video marketing
  • Paid marketing
  • Social media marketing
  • Print marketing

The list goes on. Are you using the right format for your audience? Have you ever checked? To have a successful marketing campaign, it’s imperative that you’re where your audience is. Let’s break this down a bit, using a few of the choices above.

Content Marketing

If you’re sending out posts to non-related sites just hoping to catch something, this is not good marketing. If you have a technical product, for instance, and you’re guest-posting on a site for shoes, it’s not the right place. If you’re nodding your head and saying, “of course,” this happens a lot more than you might think.

Don’t waste good content in the wrong places. Do your research and make sure you’re putting it where it will actually do you good, either as an audience builder, an authority builder or straight sales.

Further reading:

Social Media Marketing

Social works much like content marketing. You have to be where your audience is. It seems like there’s a new social media platform popping up every week; your job is to find out whether your customer base is using it.

Again, do your research (this will be a common theme in this post). Don’t just jump onto a social media platform because a lot of people are using it. It doesn’t matter how many people are using a platform if none of them are interested in your product or service.

Also, consider this: if you’re posting on all the platforms, and your audience is only on a quarter of them, you’re wasting three quarters of your time, money and resources on empty results. Make your social media efforts matter!

Paid Marketing

Paid marketing, or PPC, or ad placements, is a straight-forward way to turn dollars into more dollars. You put up an ad on Google, people click and order. No worrying about ranking or anything else, right? Or is it more complicated than that?

If you’re doing PPC, do yourself a favor and hire a professional. The only time PPC is for the novice user is if you have enough time to go through Google Ads training and if you have enough money that you can afford to make mistakes.

The Right Gear: How to Hook an Audience

In fishing, it takes the right gear – the right jig, the right pole, the right weight of line – to catch a fish. And, the fish you’re going after changes the type of gear. The same can be said for marketing. You won’t be able to catch all your audience using the same methods.

Repurposing Content

This very thing is why there are so many ways to push content, and why we recommend using a variety. However, you don’t have create brand new content every time. Instead, use the content you have in a new way to reach a different audience. This is called “repurposing content,” and it works.

For example, the blog post you created about the 20 best cat lolz can be turned into a Slide Share. You could take each cat lolz and turn them into memes. With just those two suggestions, you’d have 22 pieces of content (counting the original post), that you could share out to your audience.

With that in mind, consider you content offerings. How can you modify them to fit another platform?

Further Reading:

The Right Time

Obviously, you wouldn’t post articles about Christmas on the 4th of July, or Happy Valentines on Memorial Day. That makes sense. However, you need to take the same consideration with the rest of your marketing efforts. It takes A/B testing to get it right. When is the best time for your audience?

Email marketing is a good example. When is the best time for people to receive your emails? You might think first thing in the morning, but so do a lot of other publishers. Which means your email gets lost in the crowd. Instead, test your email send rates. Look at open rates. Look at the days you send. You’re look for the day and time with the most opens.

Another example is social media marketing. Facebook and Twitter both have scrolling feeds, which means you need to post not only when your audience is on, but when they’re actively looking at the feeds. Again, this takes testing. Look for higher engagement rates and audience reach, days you post and times you post.

It might take awhile to get it right. It might take a lot of tests. But the right time makes a huge difference.

Final Thoughts

If your marketing efforts are suffering, don’t assume that it’s one thing or another. Do your research, do your testing, because it could be one thing… or all things. Maybe you’re using the wrong social media platform for your audience. Maybe you have the right email content, but you’re sending it out at the wrong time. Maybe you’re in the right place and time, but with content that doesn’t speak to your audience.

If you don’t test or research, you’re casting blindly into the dark. As we at Level343 have said numerous times, test, tweak and revisit. The right place, time and gear make all the difference to your bottom line.

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