I recently attended a webcast entitled ¡°Find Your Invisible Customers¡±, which was presented by Vocus and featured a presentation by Tom Martin from Converse Digital. It was an overall interesting and informative presentation. The following summarizes a few key points from the webcast:

The Self-Educating Buyer

The buyer is invisible until ready to buy. Most consumers look at an average 10.4 sources before making purchase. Even in the B2B space, 77% of buyers conduct research before contacting a sales person, 57% of buyers are halfway through the funnel before contacting business, and 51% of buyers make a short list before contacting any vendors. You could be losing half of your sales opportunities by not playing to digital world and helping self-educating buyer make the right decision.

The Google effect is that people believe that all questions in the world can be answered on Google. This belief powers self-educated buyers. However, a Google-centric strategy is not necessarily going to be effective, as Google is not a ¡°silver bullet¡± to the results that you need. Years ago it was much easier to rank organically, but with increased competition and Google algorithm changes, it¡¯s getting harder to win. If you are trying to win at Google, it will be hard. Don¡¯t NOT try to rank, but instead focus on providing quality content that will help your prospects and keep your company at the top of their mind during the purchasing process.

Propinquity

Propinquity is a rule in the social science realm that the greater physical or psychological proximity between people, the greater chance that they will form a relationship. The way this process works within marketing is: Aware¨¤ Know ¨¤ Like ¨¤ Buy. To achieve this, you must focus on propinquity points. These are places where people turn for information and assistance (web, social, etc.).

A simple way to use this is by creating Twitter lists of key prospects. By doing so, you can uncover the sites that they are sharing content from, which are great places to publish your content.

The ideal way to conceptualize your content strategy is ¡°be the taco truck¡± ¨C find your customers; don¡¯t be a restaurant and expect them to come to you. Take your content to other sites to find customers, because it¡¯s easier to take content to another site that has already built a community than trying to build community on your own site.

How to Amp Up Your Content Marketing

In order to meet the above points, you are going to have to produce many content pieces. These can be overwhelming, but there are several ways to boost your efficiency. To start, you have to stop thinking in terms of singularity. Instead, you should be thinking of building an ecosystem. Always craft pieces while keeping in mind how it can be spun into other types of content. For example, take a section of one blog post and turn it into a post focused on only that section. And remember, ¡°awesome gets shared while educational gets bought¡±.

How Will You Find Your Invisible Customers?

To sum up, don¡¯t neglect your invisible customers. Make sure that you find your prospects¡¯ propinquity points, develop content to be published there and build start to build relationships with your prospects. This way, you¡¯ll spend less time cold calling and more time attracting qualified leads.

Let us know what you think about the points brought up in the webcast by commenting with your input below.