Mar
03
2017
Know Who Your Customers Are
The 3rd largest industry in Alaska is the tourism service industry, which is built heavily around adventure tourism. That's good news and bad. The bad: you will need to attract customers online. The good: if done right, you will reap the crisp, clean benefits of a bulging wallet.
We've seen too many businesses waste a good amount of time and money only to make little headway in garnering customers or tourists. Usually this happens for two reasons: they don't know their customer demographics and interests, or they thing that simply spending a lot of time online will naturally attract customers. I call that magical thinking.
To effectively attract customers, businesses need methodical, highly targeted campaigns. To be highly targetted, businesses must know who their customers are. Demographics. How customers found you. Why they chose you. The more data you have the more answers and connections you can make.
The end goal is to create your ideal customer. Yes, that's an elaborate way of saying customer profiling. But it's extremely important. Your ideal customer will be made up of various ranges where most of your customer’s data falls. Successfully reaching out to the right customers relies heavily on having an ideal customer and the right tools/methods for tracking real life customers.
Know What your ideal customer needs to see
When you have your ideal customer(s) you have to put yourself in their shoes. Every piece of content you put online (i.e your internet marketing plan), whether it's on social media or your website, should address the following questions:
- What are their desires and concerns?
- What are the barriers that keep them from making a decision?
- Based on those questions, what content do they need to see to choose your business?
Ultimately, you cannot reach out to customers if you haven’t prepared your content properly. It would be like bringing a date to an extremely messy house and watching a movie that he/she has no interest in. For the Alaskan adventure service industry, building the right content on a website/social media will be a major step in solidifying a business.
It takes time. It takes a lot of energy. And it’s very purposeful.
Use Search Engine Optimization to Let Customers Find You
When you know who your customers are have the right content, you have to put it in the right places: where potential customers will see it. It's especially for the Alaskan adventure service industry. Competition is tough. More than any other type of business adventure service businesses really have to convince customers that spending a nice sum of money will be worth it. Here are the main things you need attract customers:
- Blogs – which act as online “catch nets,” whereby when a potential customer searches for a question online, they find one of your blogs which answer it. Blogs need to be coordinated and purposeful, and provide great content.
- Social networking – in many ways social networking is like speed dating. You have a few seconds to present your best side (i.e. your best content) and interest someone enough to let you into their life.
- Ebooks, guides, etc. – establish your authority and offer something useful to potential customers.
- Seach Engine Optimization – very long story short, you position yourself as the foremost in your industry by appearing at the top of search engine results.
Reach out to customers with catch nets, speed dating, and appearing at the top of search results. Awesome web content is what ultimately converts acquaintances (potential customers) to clients. After that, it's simply a matter of keeping customers coming back.