In an increasingly digital world, how is it possible to increase business visibility in an endless sea of companies and services against which you compete? And when you do manage to boost online visibility, how can you be sure the right audience is seeing you, hearing your message, and understanding that your marketing efforts (and ultimately offer) are right for them?
Right sight: Getting the right visibility
Chances are, you have been through the hit-or-miss challenge of trying to increase your online visibility and discoverability for the right audience without success. Businesses across industries have suffered the consequences of launching blind (and fruitless) awareness and marketing campaigns designed to increase online visibility, only to discover that even if they do gain traction or recognition, it’s often with the wrong audience.
Inevitably this comes down to not having the right sight on the data for the insight! In other words, your data will drive a better understanding of who your right audience is, where you might find them and what message(s) they might be receptive to. Just like with lead generation, building business visibility should not be a numbers game. Instead, you’re looking for quality over quantity.
If you’re aiming for any visibility over the right visibility, you aren’t going to see your marketing and sales funnel fill up, and you won’t be able to justify the marketing spend for your scattershot efforts.
Who are you and who is your target audience?
Embarking on a journey to increase online visibility and reach the right audience is an ongoing, step-by-step trek. It requires asking a lot of questions about yourself, your company, your goals and your products, services and target audience or customer. It is equally an opportunity to showcase and share both your value and values while gaining a clearer view of what you offer, what your competitive advantage is, and what your differentiators and USPs are. Defining these characteristics is a good exercise any time, but certainly crucial when you are making a serious investment in your online visibility.
Know thyself
Define who you are first:
- What is your business?
- What do you want to sell or inform your target audience about?
- Who are your competitors, how visible are they, how did they achieve that visibility, and what are their key messages?
- What goals do you have?
- What data do you have to help you? Do you need more data, and if so, how will you get it?
Know your target
Based on the answers you generate to questions about your business, you can start to think about who your target audience is. If you don’t really know your value proposition and to whom it will appeal, you won’t get far. The data you have on hand may provide valuable insight into your audience and/or potential customer base:
- Who do you think your audience is?
- Do you have data about this audience and their actions from which to extrapolate patterns or behavioral habits? Do you know what appeals to them,
- Do you know how people like your target audience members have interacted with your website, apps or even in-store before?
- Can you identify what the target audience might need or want and how you fill that need or solve their problem?
Does your data reveal some of the information listed in the list above? Can you use any of it to craft a data-driven marketing plan to reach more of the same kinds of people?
While this is not an exhaustive list of questions about the target audience, these questions will be informed both by what you discovered about your own business as well as by what you hope to accomplish in terms of visibility.
Online visibility strategies and tactics
Designing your online visibility strategy will require the data you collected and answers to the questions you’ve been asking. Information is at the heart of your visibility campaign and the implementation of the tactics you opt to use.
Surprise! One size does not fit all
It won’t surprise you to be told that a given (digital) marketing mix must be unique to you and your business needs. What makes you findable to the right audience is not going to be the same for every business. If you, for example, operate a small SaaS company with a global footprint but not enough visibility for the B2B customers who need your services, you will deploy an entirely different set of touchpoints as part of your visibility campaign than a large multinational medical devices organization that wants to become more visible within a single country to sell its commoditized PPE for distribution to a national network of clinics. By the same token, a mid-sized fashion-oriented e-commerce company faces an entirely different set of needs and challenges than the two aforementioned examples. Nothing is at all the same about these three businesses, the target audiences or their needs — the same mix is not going to resonate or be appropriate.
Let’s look at some examples. While all of the companies in question might benefit from some of the most fundamental visibility strategies, such as website design, performance, usability and ease of use, as well as the application of SEO best practices, this is just about all they have in common.
As a high-level comparison, here is a sample of some of the ways these three companies’ approaches would differ based on what data has indicated:
- To begin with, a small but global SaaS company, for example, will probably benefit from a mix of social media and content marketing, how-to and demo videos, testimonial videos/case studies from big-name customers, guest blogging on bigger-name company or partner platforms, PR, and seeking reviews on rating sites like G2.
- The healthcare organization is going to be quite different, and might not benefit as much from the full digital marketing treatment. This is why it’s important to define your audience from the beginning before diving into marketing efforts. Will your audience, for example, a purchasing department within a large healthcare provider, be looking at, let alone be influenced by, most digital marketing tactics? Your existing data, and potentially further market research, might tell you that purchasers could respond to a webinar on reducing costs of single-use protective surgical equipment, but they won’t respond to email, other types of content, or social media. Likewise these kinds of organizations are often government-run and require tender processes, and pricing may be the only thing that moves them.
- The fashion e-commerce company by contrast works across multiple markets, is exclusively online, faces exceptional levels of competition and demands for customer satisfaction, and may have a relatively sophisticated marketing organization in place already. But to inspire growth or reach a new audience, they might want to tap into the full range of the marketing mix, which could be everything from campaigns, promotions and discounts to TV ads or SEM and PPC ads, and from customer reviews to significant search engine optimization efforts.
These examples only begin to touch on how different a visibility campaign might look on the surface and illustrate how challenging the visibility-building effort can be without the right approach and expertise.
How visible are you — and are you reaching your right audience? Get visibility into your digital marketing and visibility performance: Sign up for a digital marketing audit.
