Digital Marketing for Skeptics

Lesson 7 – It pays to be skeptical, but also strategic

Hi there, and welcome to the seventh and final lesson in the series Digital Marketing Tips from a Skeptic.   Hopefully you have already listened to the first six and you’re eager to learn from our final lesson.

As always, I am Kelly Berry, your resident skeptic.

In the last two lessons, I started sharing my Six Tips for connecting with your customers.  As a reminder, let’s review the first five tips.

Tip #1 – Make sure your existing website is customer friendly to your target customers 

Tip #2 – Research and Prepare Detailed Target Market Descriptions for your customer types

Tip #3 – Become a source of valuable information for your prospective customers 

Tip #4 – Find customers where they are

And Tip #5 – Figure out when your customers are ready to buy

That brings us to our final tip for this course.

Tip Number 6 – Make Personal Connections

This probably seems obvious to you as that is what most businesses try to do from the start.

Let’s look at this from several different angles.

First – when you do post messages on social media or share information online, try to personalize your messages as much as possible.

Include videos or audio that help your potential customers feel like they are getting to know you – that you are no longer a stranger.  I don’t mean that you should address individuals by name – other than in emails that go out – but you should be friendly, and you should provide specific examples of how your services or products solve problems by customer type.

Let them see you as a person and not just a company trying to sell to them.  The more personable you are in your messaging, the easier it will be for people to feel connected to you.

Next – use your existing connections with current customers to help you grow your customer base.  Do you ask for referrals or reward them at all?  What about testimonials?

Referrals and testimonials can go a long way to introducing you to prospective new customers who already know your existing customers.  And testimonials also provide social proof that you have happy, satisfied customers, which helps when making new connections to potential future customers.

Finally, consider your existing network of  non-customer connections – whether those are people you know from Linked In, or in-person Chamber of Commerce or networking events, or even alumni from your school.  I expect that you already have a wide range of connections.  Can you reach out to some of them with some more specific asks?  Maybe they know someone who you’d like to meet that they can introduce to you.  Or maybe they can invite you onto a podcast or Linked in Live event or some other promotional activity that increases your visibility.

The idea with this final tip is that ultimately, we all know that we have the best success selling to people who know, like and trust us.

Personal Connections vs Online Outreach

Focus as best you can on ways to make personal connections to get to the stage where potential customers are ready to buy and ready to buy from you.

Should you stop posting on social media, sending out emails or optimizing your content for search?  No – but should you try a more customized approach to getting in front of your customers?  Absolutely!

Is this a simple and cheap solution to your digital marketing woes?

Not completely.  What all these tools and tips require is time – to test things out, reach out online directly, and to truly understand your target audience and where they hang out online, so you can position yourself right where they are.

And then if and when you’re ready to boost a post or pay per click for some long-tail keywords, you know you’ll making a well-thought out decision specific to your target customers.

What are YOUR next steps?

Take some time to think about what your next steps might look like.  How can you set aside time to follow through on these tips and enhance your personal connections through online sources?

If you are curious to learn more about how to proceed, or to dig deeper into some of these tips, or to learn about some cool tools that can help you along the way, then join me for a much more in-depth workshop – The Skeptical Marketer.

What do you get from the workshop?

Just like this audio course, the workshop is a series of short videos that you watch on your own time – but with so much more added value.

• Videos are still short in length and shared over time so you can manage your time for the class
• Each video goes into more detail for each of the Six Tips including (mostly free) tools you can use to manage the process and save time
• Each lesson includes a downloadable worksheet for you to work on your own business as you follow the lesson
• The workshop includes live Q&A sessions with me and others taking the class, to discuss these issues and tips in more detail
• You will have access to the whole workshop and all the content for a full year so you can refer back to content over time
• You will join a cohort of other small business owners going through the course together – so you can compare notes, share examples and hold each other accountable to moving forward

Interested in joining the next cohort of business owners taking The Skeptical Marketer Workshop?

Let me know right away so I can be sure to get you in to share this experience with others.

Click on the button below to learn more – or check your email for this special offer.

Thanks so much for joining me on this audio journey to learn more about Digital Marketing for Skeptics!  I hope to see you in the Workshop!