The online world is buzzing with the business growth opportunities that can be realised through social media and inbound marketing. Roger Edwards examines the concept.
To get people to find you when they come looking, you need to provide accessible and useful content that will pop up on Google. The centre piece of your inbound marketing hub is a series of relevant articles about your niche. Call it a blog if you want, but it is really just good content.
Going back to the chicken example. If you had a blog that answered the question, ‘Who provides the best barbecue chicken in Liverpool?’, this would show up on Google and, low and behold, you would have a visitor to your website who is now a potential customer.
Obviously, you need to make sure that your site is fully optimised for search engines, but again this is not as hard as it seems.
If you think you might not have enough content think about it this way. What are the top 50 questions that your clients ask you about protection? You know the answers to those questions. Indeed, you could probably recite them in your sleep.
There you immediately have 50 topics for articles that could be up on your website optimised so that when people search for answers to those questions, you are the one providing them.
People will not type just ‘life insurance’ into a search engine just as they would not type in only ‘chicken’. They might type, ‘What is the best way to buy life insurance in Liverpool?’
Pete Matthew, an IFA in Penzance, has used this technique, using videos instead of articles and, as a result, gets found when people go looking for information on protection products.
As an example showing how the difference between interruption marketing and the type that encourages people to look for you works, there is a viral video online filmed on an iPhone. It shows a mother cat and a tiny kitten sleeping on a rug.
The tiny kitten is having a nightmare and flutters its paws and opens its mouth in obvious distress. The mother cat stretches out her own paw and cuddles the kitten in close as if to say, ‘Hush little one, you are safe. I’m here to protect you.’
The first time I watched this video it had 500,000 hits. Last time I looked it was up to 100 million hits. I have subsequently seen it on Twitter and direct into my email box from friends.
Just think if the video had been mine, and just as the mother cat gave her protective cuddle, a strapline came up saying, ‘Protect your loved ones with a Bright Grey policy’.
