In today’s very noisy digital marketplace, it’s more important than ever to develop and nurture a platform where your company can be seen and heard. Even though we have many tools that make it easier to create a strong marketing platform, the world is more noisy. Sometimes we forget basic but important details that can cost you a lot of wasted time and effort for little or no return.
Old Constructs
Old town squares acted as the central hub for community activities. It is where people went to hear community announcements, where leaders came to speak to the masses and scholars came to share their philosophies. Right near the square would be a marketplace. It was the gathering place for merchants and customers to transact business. The job of the merchant was to explain why you needed to buy his goods and to sell enough to provide for the needs of his family and the families of his workers.
A person would win in the town square by having the best ideas. The merchant would win in the marketplace by selling enough of his goods to meet his financial needs. Our current digital marketplace requires us to develop the skill of the townsperson to promote his ideas, and the skills of the merchant to sell his goods. Finding the right balance between the two can be a challenge.
The Digital Marketplace
In our new digital marketing world we have blogs and podcasts and plenty of images. We use these to attract people to our virtual town squares. Why do we need this content? To bring enough people into our square, so they wander off over to the marketplace. It doesn’t matter how good our town square ideas are though unless we get really good at selling our products and services.
In order to be successful in our businesses we to have and be really good at both sales and marketing content. We also need to consider whether our efforts in creating material matches our goals.
Some enterprises spend all their time on developing and promoting great ideas but how does this benefit them? Others spend all their time touting how great their products or services are but without spending adequate time on content that attracts customers to their digital square there won’t be anyone to listen.
The key to true business success is your ability to balance out the time you spend in your town square coming up with great ideas and content to attract people to visit your marketplace along with how well you create content that truly sells your products and services. You need to do both.
Generally, it is good to look at your content in the following way. For every two marketing or “Town Square” posts such as general blogs, deep content, pillar posts, videos, and images you should make sure you also post one killer sales piece. Measure how well you are attracting people to your digital square and how many people visit your marketplace and buy. You can adjust the type and amount of content you are posting based on your analytics.
Your analytics should be able to tell you what types of content are attracting the most visitors, which content pieces are the most popular and which content pieces are delivering the greatest number of conversions. That information will help you to balance out your posts to optimize the number of visitors to your site, and the number of customers you convert and hold.
