Last Wednesday I attended Inbound Marketing Day at Potawatomi Bingo Casino in Milwaukee. What a great mix of local and national inbound marketing experts. I heard great presentations about content, landing page optimization, buyer personas, video strategy, and a lot more.
Many of these ideas not only work in marketing but in daily interactions as well, whether business or personal.
Here are three key takeaways:
Dan Zarrella from HubSpot: How does your content help your fans build their reputation?
My two cents: The job of your content, or your company, is to help your customers look good to their customers. Content shouldn’t be designed to help you look good, although by helping them solve their problems you will.
What are your customers’ pain-points? What content can you provide that helps alleviate those pain-points? If you can make your customers look like heroes, you’ll end up a winner.
Jeff Coon from Stream Creative: What makes you look like a rock star? Have signals in place to alert others. What are the symbols of trust in your industry? Add them to your content, your name, your brand, etc. If there are certifications, partnerships, or logos that show you know what you’re doing, you need to highlight them.
My two cents: What makes you stand out? There are certain things that give you instant credibility. For me, it’s having MBA behind my name. For your business, it could be “Best Places to Work” or a Better Business Bureau sticker on your front door. It could be words like Author, or Speaker. These words conjure up an image of you in the eyes of people that don’t know you. Use them to your advantage.
Ezra Fishman from Wistia: Think in terms of the Trust Bank. You are either building trust or spending trust. Using video is a great way to build trust. If you teach someone something in a video, it allows you to bring the human element in.
My two cents: We should always be giving to people without the thought of getting something in return. This builds trust. Then, when we truly need help from our customers, community, or our friends, we have enough trust in the bank to be fairly certain that they will help us when we ask.
Be yourself. Allow your personality to shine through. People like doing business with people, not brands. If they trust you, they’ll trust your brand.
Do you see yourself using any of the three ideas from Inbound Marketing Day? Let me know which ones you use. I’d love to know what success you have with them.
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