Search Engine Marketing | It is not about you, it is about your persona

Most old-school and even modern marketing practices, require your audience to be redirected or bothered to engage with your content – to be redirected. An email is received with a call to action that requires a click. An SMS broadcast needs a response. Social media posting is often used to drive traffic to a site. TV commercials have the same affect. The roadside billboard takes your eyes off the road. These forms of marketing require you to bother or interrupt your audience.

Most marketing fails to be targeted. Most marketing is a broad net cast among the masses trying to land a prospect. Email marketers tend to want a big list. they constantly ask, “How big is your list?” Like that’s a viable tactic. Put up a billboard, and your concern is “drive by traffic counts”. Sponsor an event and the marketer wants to know “expected attendance”. Yes – marketing seems rude – it loves to interrupt and demand attention – “hey, look at me!”

Search engine marketing, unlike almost any other form or marketing, takes a potential audience down the path they desire. It is not annoying and when you nail it, it is increasingly effective. Unlike that banner ad that gets in the way.

A marketer’s dream is for their audience to actually find content they want to see.

While vacationing in Maine, I searched for “Top Ten restaurants in Portland that locals love”. You know what I found at the top of the Google search? Exactly what I was looking for. Somebody keeps a list, with the article title and copy using that exact phrase. As if they knew I was coming to Portland. The restaurant we chose, we loved so much we ate there twice. I high-fived the chef. A very smart marketer, with just the right information on a blog post, scored big for that restaurant.

Search engine marketing, like no other marketing, brings an audience to you – the exact audience you want. Easier said than done? Of course it is.

If you follow our blog or attend our live Infusionsoft User Group meetings, you’ve heard about the importance of a rigidly defined buyer persona, understanding that buyer’s pain or problem. You have been told to produce content that talks about the problems your avatar has- you have written this content using the words and phrases your buyer person actually uses. You have re-purposed this content into blogs, videos, pages or paragraphs in your web site and your web sites FAQ’s, podcasts and yes even your live event speech.

Guess what – you have the foundation for a great search engine marketing program!

However, even great content can benefit from laser guided enhancements. Those enhancements mean revising your existing content and writing future content based upon what your buyer persona looks for. A well crafted blog is not like an article in a magazine. The magazine already has the person captured. Your blog has to find the person searching for what is in it.

First, let’s make sure we understand some terminology. Understanding the difference here can save you a bundle of money later.

• What is SEM? Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising.
• What is SEO? Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results – often referred to as “natural,” “organic,” or “earned” results.
• What is PPC? Pay per click (PPC), also called cost per click, is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner or a host of website) when the ad is clicked. It is defined simply as “the amount spent to get an advertisement clicked.”
• What is search advertising? In Internet Marketing, Search Advertising is a method of placing online advertisements on web pages that show results from search engine queries. Through the same search–engine advertising services, ads can also be placed on Web pages with other published.

It is my experience that most organizations fail with their search engine marketing programs, because they optimize for keywords and phrases that are not specific enough or that their buyer persona does not tend to use. If you are a chiropractor, you probably use the activator method for back pain. However, your patient does not search Google for relief using the activator method. They do not call your treatment, spinal manipulation either. What do your patients search for? You better know exactly what they search for!

Success from search engine marketing comes from driving buyers directly to the content resource they are looking for. It does not come from optimizing for small keywords. What is the difference? The difference is like fishing with dynamite or a well crafted presentation at the end of your line. Crafting specific search terms that your audience actually uses is the long tail of search engine optimization. Your product name, your company name, your URL should all align with the search term your buyer persona uses.

Obviously this takes a great deal of research. You have to know your audience – and not from your perspective – but from how they ‘speak’ when they look for what you offer.

What is the end result? When your buyer persona searches for the long tail phrase you have built content around, they find you in their search. With one click they hit your content – most importantly they feel like they have ‘found it’! You’ve instantly got their attention and you did not interrupt them. 

Curate and cultivate your content carefully and your marketing assets will serve your audience for years to come. Organic traffic – free hits to your site because you gave a great deal of thought to what you produced.

Copyright 2015 Viral Solutions LLC

by Thomas von Ahn | Chief Elephant Slayer

We help overwhelmed small business owners duplicate themselves – so business can be fun again.

Viral Solutions LLC is a Digital Marketer Certified Partner, an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant, a Google Partner – Certified in AdWords and a Mobit Certified Partner.