How to Build a Buyer Persona and Why They Matter

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Even the best marketing strategies and tactics can only get you so far if you do not know who you’re marketing to. Creating a buyer persona is an integral part of marketing. Buyer personas help outdoor marketers and businesses understand the needs, desires, and habits of their customers while also predicting what triggers them to buy their product or service. 

What is a buyer persona?

The point of a buyer persona is to better understand who your ideal customer is and how to market to them. A buyer persona is your ideal customer avatar that represents one of your key target audiences. We recommend making more than one persona since often your data will be composed of a variety of people. Your personas will be created by assessing the demographic and psychographic data that you have accumulated since the start of your business. 

Follow this blog and learn the 6 steps to building your buyer persona.

1. Demographics

First let’s think about demographics. Demographic data is collected information used to inform researchers and outdoor marketers about the characteristics of your outdoor customers. While this may be surface level information, it is integral to understanding your audience and building your persona. Demographic data can help you answer the following questions: How old is your audience? What part of the world or country do they live in? How much money do they make per year? Do they have a family? Are they single or married? These high level questions are the first step in identifying the persona you will be building. 

Demographic data has helped us understand key features of this persona including income range, age, family, education, and location. We recommend choosing a photo for your persona that will embody these characteristics so you can better visualize who you are speaking to. 

2. Psychographics

Psychographic data is collected to better understand why the population buys and does the things they do through collecting data about their lifestyles, behaviors, and habits. Psychographic data is harder to get but is extremely helpful in building and validating buyer personas. The best way to collect psychographic data is to ask your audience directly through surveys and forms throughout your website. Psychographic data helps us build a bio for our personas as seen in this example:

Creating a bio for your persona unpacks the lifestyle, hobbies, and the interests of your outdoor customers and helps marketers understand the language to use while writing things like website copy or ads. 

3. Build a User Story

Once you understand who your persona is, build a user story for them. A user story describes what the persona is ideally looking for without necessarily identifying how your product or service can help. Building a user story helps outdoor marketers understand potential pain points and goals that their products or services can help ease or how they can fit into the personas lifestyle. 

user story example

The user story can be brief but should have enough information to help frame the goals and triggers of the persona. 

4. Identify Goals and Triggers

The goals of the persona should take into account the lifestyle and values they hold. Are they on a budget and looking to save money? Do they want to spend more time with family? Do they have time for a high maintenance project or product? Look back at your profile, bio, and user story to estimate what these goals will be. 

Triggers are the things that push your persona to finally purchase the product or service. Maybe they’re looking for a replacement for something they’ve had for years or are seeking a solution to a new problem they’ve been having. Understanding your persona’s triggers will come in handy when the customer is getting close to a purchasing decision. If you touch on their pain points in your ads or website copy, they will feel more inclined to buy. 

5. Understand Your Persona at Each Stage of the Buyer Journey

The buyer journey is broken down into awareness, self-educating, consideration, rationalizing, and decision. As your persona moves throughout these stages of the journey, the way you should interact with them will vary. In the awareness stage, they may not even know they have a problem or that your company exists. In this stage it is important to show them your brand and products without pushing sales too much. Once they realize your product and brand is right for them, your interactions are going to eventually lead to a sale. To understand this journey, map out potential questions your persona may have as they move through each stage and create landing pages and ads that help move them to the next stage.

6. Build the Persona

Once you’ve completed each of these steps, download our buyer persona template and fill out the document to build your persona. 

Creating buyer personas is the first step in transforming your outdoor content and marketing efforts. Humanizing your data this way will help your outdoor marketing team stay on track and be consistent with your messaging across all channels and generate more sales for your brand.

Are you interested in starting your content transformation? Contact us today for a consultation. 

8 Must-Have Content Marketing Skills!

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Content marketing skills are powerful, but only if done right.

It’s researching what your specific audience wants to know. It’s talking to them as a friend, in your own unique way and voice. It’s keeping up with current trends, so you can create valuable content that resonates with your audience. 

Follow along this blog and learn 8 skills to master and lift you to success in no time.

1. Research Your Audience

No matter how compelling your content is, you won’t convert anyone if you don’t know exactly who you’re speaking to.

For instance, look at this content from Pond King’s email campaign.

The email holds enticing promise to readers who want to purchase in the near future. But what makes it compelling isn’t fancy wording or clever phrases. It’s simply that we knew his audience’s pain and need before writing it.

When we are identifying our target customer’s pain we use these five powerful methods to dig up clues about our audience so we can find them a solution. Here are a 5 powerful ways to put on your detective’s cap and dig up clues about your audience:

  • Use Google Analytics to find out who’s visiting your website. Analytics gives you information like the names, ages, and genders of your site visitors.
  • Go on Answer The Public and research topics around your niche. What are people saying? What are their fears/desires/dreams? Reading what they talk about will help you understand them on a deeper level.
  • Take note of how users respond to your content. With a tool like Moz , you can learn how people are reacting to what you write. Analyze your top engaged posts and discover what made them appealing to your audience.
  • Ask your users through surveys (with incentives like free downloads – an e-book).
  • Engage with people in the comment section of your blog and social media. Listen to what they’re saying and respond personally and directly.

Remember, speaking to your audience should be like conversing with a friend. The better you know this friend, the more personal and appealing your message will be.

2. Become an Expert Interviewer

To write amazing content, you need to be an expert on your topic. When you master the art of conducting subject matter interviews, you can produce authority content even if you are not an expert in the niche you write in.

But you can’t just jump into an interview with an expert and ask any question that comes to your mind. Remember, the value of the information you get depends on the quality of your questions.

Here are 5 tips to make your interviews seamless.

  1. Be prepared. You don’t want to come to an interview with absolutely no idea on the topic. Rather, you want the interview to be a deep dive into the topic. So, before you start the interview, do as much research as you can. From your research, make a list of questions you can’t find the answers for online.
  2. Skip open-ended questions. You want your interviewee to gush over the topic. You want them to feel excited. To do that, intrigue them with unusual questions. For instance, instead of asking, “Is your product great?” you can ask, “Can you give me some facts most people don’t know about your product?”
  3. Bring your content outline with you when you interview. Asking a bunch of random, unrelated questions wastes time. To avoid this, base your questions on the outline you prepare for your content. This will help you ask specific, driven questions you can use in your writing. 
  4. Record your conversation. Later on, you’ll want to go back over the exact words your interviewee said during the interview. Then you can write notes later without disrupting the interview process.  If your interview is through zoom we love using Otter. It takes notes for you so you can save them for later and spend more time focusing on your content outlines.  
  5. Don’t be afraid to ask for clarification. If there’s something you don’t understand during the interview, ask! This can open doors for an even deeper dive into the topic.

When you approach interviews with a genuine passion for your topic, there’s nothing you can’t dig up from the experts’ knowledge banks.

3. Fine Tune Your Keywords

So, how do you choose keywords to use in your content? Keywords don’t only help you rank higher on Google, they act as the spine of your content. Keywords direct what you say and allow you to stay relevant with what people want to read.

  • Go for long-tail keywords. For example, instead of choosing “dress,” go for “Walt Disney princess dresses for kids.” Keywords like this help direct quality traffic to your site.
  • Choose low competition keywords. If you go for a keyword like “shoes,” you’ll find yourself up against content from huge brands like Adidas and Nike. As a rule of thumb, go for keywords with a score below 50.
  • It’s OK to select a keyword with low search volume. As long as there are people searching for this keyword, creating content around it will get you results.

To help you find the best keywords for your content, you can use tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush.

Did you know?

76% of marketers use organic traffic as a measure of content success

4. Planning and Time Management

So, how do you choose keywords to use in your content? Keywords don’t only help you rank higher on Google, they act as the spine of your content. Keywords direct what you say and allow you to stay relevant with what people want to read.

You don’t want to wake up one morning panicking because you have to produce content but have no idea what to write. To avoid this, create a content calendar.

With a content calendar, you’ll avoid problems like repetitive content and stay up-to-date with events like holidays and special occasions.

Always remember, to leave room for spontaneity. For example, if a relevant question from one of your followers suddenly pops up on your social feed, why not address it at length in a blog?

After you’ve solidified your idea and did your research next comes your outline. 

5. Creating Strategic Outlines

An outline is your roadmap to the content you create. It not only helps you with your work but also shows the client what to expect. Put as much detail into your outline as possible. Take a look at our example outline below. 

6.Writing Value-rich Content

When you write, put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Ask yourself, would I read this? Did I learn from what I just read? Was it a user friendly experience? The content you write is the solution to your audience’s pain point.

74.2% of companies saying that content marketing is increasing their marketing teams’ lead quality and quantity.

If you want to improve your content here are 4 simple steps to follow: 

Step 1: Understand what data-rich content entails.

When writing a data-rich blog post, every key point that you make should be backed by a credible data source. The more legitimate your source is, the more authoritative your content will be.

Step 2: Firm up your content marketing strategy. 

Firming up your content marketing strategy and what you want to accomplish with your content, most specifically, will allow you to cut out the guesswork and get consistent results.

Each content you write needs to have a clear purpose. Understand who your audience is and the information that they want to gain from reading your blog post.

Step 3: Come up with engaging headlines.

While most people will read your headlines, few will commit to actually reading the blog post. You have less than 3 seconds to grab your reader’s attention, and a data-driven headline will leave your audience wanting more.

Step 4: Develop data-driven outlines.

Do you create outlines for your blog posts? Whether you’re writing a data-driven post or sharing your unique perspective about a relevant topic, developing an outline will speed up the blog writing process and keep you organized and on track.

7. Editing

Engaging content can be powerful enough to persuade hesitant prospects to buy. And, on the flip side, messy, error-prone writing could cause the end-user to abandon your site entirely.

In short, the ability to edit is the difference between mediocre writing and compelling, engaging, high-converting content.

We love using grammarly.com, it helps whip your content in shape and checks for things like:

  • Proofreading
  • Revising
  • Drafting
  • Spelling
  • Structure
  • Style
  • Punctuation
  • Strong Vocabulary
  • Using the Rhetorical Triangle
  • Devise Structure
  • Establish Tone
  • Forming a Thesis

8. Measuring Your Content’s Success

Analyzing data is the key to knowing if your content performed well and if you need to make changes. Attaching metrics to your content will help you determine whether the content is successful or needs improvement. Here are three great ways to measure content success:

  • Email click-through rate. If people are clicking the links in your email campaigns, take note of what makes this email different from others.
  • Bounce rate. Do people leave your site without clicking through to other pages? The rate at which they do so is your bounce rate. If people click away more than 70% of the time, you need to improve your content.
  • Scroll depth. Do people read your intro and then leave the page? Or do they scroll all the way to the bottom? At what point do they stop reading? When you analyze what’s working and what’s not, you’ll be able to improve your content.

Marketers need to constantly learn new skills and adapt to online changes. As online behavior and algorithms shift, so do marketing tactics – and therefore marketing best practices. Marketers that thrive on this change and are eager to learn new techniques will succeed. 

Once you hone in on these skills it’s only up from here. Your content will improve and so will you as a professional. 

How To Leverage Video In Your Sales & Marketing Campaigns

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Generating views for videos can be quite hard for any company. Some have never tried to develop a video marketing campaigns for their users at all. This is an untapped gold mine for a lot of businesses. And deserves the attention of anyone looking to generate leads on the web. Your video marketing campaign(s) should be centered around your viewer and use the following for engagement techniques.

Video marketing campaigns is the next frontier for data mining

Unique & Creative Content

Any video marketing campaign should start out with a vision of how you want your viewers to interact with your brand. Whether you are looking to be informational, demonstrational, or abstract, you should put yourself in the shoes of your viewer. To better understand how they will digest your content. The creation of engaging content can be extremely powerful for developing your customer base and creating brand recognition.

Personalization

Personalization in video marketing campaigns can be leveraged with various data points. Mainly your user’s current or past web behaviors. This could be a first name, the name of company employees, and any other data point you could think of. This kind of personalization engages the viewer and demonstrates a perceived knowledge of their business and/or industry. Personalized advertisements make us feel like something was created specifically for us.

Longer Videos

While our attention spans may be shortening, longer videos are engaging users at high rates. If complex topics require time to explain, the explanation should get the time it deserves. The viewer will quickly understand the value of a long-form explanation.

Someone sticking around for a longer video is more likely to convert into a customer as well. Or at the very least, tells us they’re an engaged & valuable contact.

Interactive 360 Degree Video

VR experiences and augmented reality continue to improve and enter households across the nation. The possibilities are endless for demonstration videos, action videos, walkthroughs, and so much more.

Many users who find these videos entertaining say they would be willing to interact with brand videos if they were deployed. Major brands continue to enter this space and you could potentially benefit from the production of these types of videos.

Searchability – Search Engine Optimization

Videos contain metadata related to the topics found in the video. If you produce a long-form video, your video could be packed full of valuable keywords. This provides positive ranking effects on your website.

Businesses live and die on Google therefore it is important to have a plan for getting ranked on search engines for the keywords related to your product or service.

Using any or all of the above will help you create clients or customers that stay engaged with your product or service. Choose the ones that you think you can engage with and provide the best value, or contact us for a consultation today.

What To Do If You’re Struggling With Top Of The Funnel Strategies

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If your company is struggling at the top of the funnel, we’ve got 5 tips that will attract prospects to your website and convert qualified leads into sales.

Your outdoor company has built a beautiful website and the sales team is ready to answer any questions prospects have. But they’re waiting…and waiting…and waiting.

The sales team has received a few calls and emails but only a handful are qualified leads and they’re not converting. What’s an outdoor marketing team to do?

What Is A Marketing Funnel?

The marketing funnel is the process of turning prospects into customers. Today, we’ll just go into the three most common stages of the marketing funnel. But if you’re interested in turning your loyal customers into brand promoters, check out this blog post.

Top of the funnel strategy

All versions of the marketing funnel start with awareness. Prospects need to know your company exists and understand your services or products before they can become a customer.

The next stage is consideration. This is where prospects turn into qualified leads. These prospective customers are more invested in learning about your outdoor company. With the right lead nurturing, they can be converted into customers.

The final stage of the marketing funnel is conversion. The prospect has gone from visitor to qualified lead, to customer.

Deeper Dive Into ToFu Marketing

Marketers love seeing more visitors on their website and views on their blogs. Attracting visitors to your website is what top of the funnel (aka ToFu marketing) is all about. And if you want to turn visitors into loyal customers, you need a strong top of the funnel.

Customers at the top of the funnel are just beginning their search to address a problem. They know they need something new but aren’t sure what they’re looking for. An example of this would be, planning to go fly fishing in Montana but not sure where to find the best rivers for cutthroat. These prospects are just browsing the infinite web to gather information.

Marketers can use ToFu marketing strategies to bring awareness to prospects as they search for solutions to their problems.

The key to top of the funnel marketing is driving quality traffic to your site and nurturing them into a lead.

When marketers focus more on the amount of traffic they get to their site, they end up having a low conversion rate. They can also frustrate their sales team when they hand off “leads” that aren’t truly leads. Just because someone has landed on your site, doesn’t mean they’re ready for sales to give them a call or send them a personalized email.

Top of the funnel marketing is all about bringing awareness to your brand and guiding potential prospects in the process of solving their problem. When we work with clients on ToFu marketing, we approach projects looking for short-term wins and long-term gains.

Short-Term Wins

We live in a world where people want results instantly. We want our clients to see leads right away so we develop a strategy for short-term wins. When it comes to top of the funnel marketing, our focus in the short-term is keywords, meta descriptions, and a PPC strategy.

Man placing hand next to the keyboard of a laptop

Focus On Keywords & Meta Descriptions

Building content around keywords can drive prospects to your website. When people search for yourkeywords, make sure your meta descriptions are accurate and the content is relevant so you don’t increase your bounce rate.

Have a Pay-Per-Click Strategy

The easiest way to attract people to your website is to use broad keywords in pay-per-click campaigns. They may not always turn into leads but this will raise your brand outreach with more eyeballs on your website. It’s much easier to rank for broad keywords than long-tail keywords.

Long-Term Gains

As those begin to gain traction, we transition into long-term gains. And long-term gains is all about quality content. The key to top of the funnel content is to convert and nurture using the content you feel solves their specific pain point.

Social Media Is Your Friend

Facebook is still the ruler of social media but with their on-going algorithm changes there is a constant battle of iteration and decision making which tends to lead us into analysis paralysis. Quickly adapting to these changes will ensure your campaigns are fine tuned for any issue that might arise. Social media is a low-cost to entry spot for brand awareness. Social media is a long-term gain because it takes time to build up your page. You need engaged fans and valuable content like videos to become a trustworthy source of information. Social media isn’t free but targeted ads can be a low-cost way to build brand awareness and drive traffic to your page or website.

Create A User-Friendly Website

This might sound obvious but it must be said. I’m sure you’ve found yourself on a website that took forever to load, was hard to navigate, or wasn’t mobile-friendly. And what did you do? Immediately leave. It’s important for companies to invest in their website so it not only looks professional but encourages users to stay on the site.

Camera set up overlooking canyon

Generate Valuable Content

What is the first thing you do when you need to solve a problem? Ask Jeeves. I mean Google! And from there, Google can take you down a spiral of blogs, videos, podcasts, and more to help you solve that problem. No matter what product or service you’re selling, adding relevant content to your site will help not only attract people to your site but generate qualified leads. If you are a lodge that takes anglers on fly fishing excursions, then create blogs that talk about the best rivers for cutthroat trout or a video on how to release a deep hooked fish. Providing solutions helps outdoor companies build trust with prospects.

Slow & Steady Wins The Race

Why would you ask a prospect to buy your service or product the second they subscribe to your email list? Remember that top of the funnel marketing is all about awareness. Prospects are just learning about your company so it’s important to nurture your leads. Send them a welcome email with links to blogs or videos that might help them solve their problem.

Generating Qualified Leads At The Top Of The Funnel

Building a strong marketing funnel takes work at the top. It’s important to spend time educating prospects and building awareness if companies want to generate more qualified leads. Your company can be positioned to keep your funnel full with our 5 tips that focus on short-term wins and long-term gains.

Creating An Effective Call-To-Action

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Quality content on a blog post or website is key to attracting prospective clients. At Sage Lion Media, every email we send, blog post we write, social media post we create, a call-to-action is included. In our blog today, let’s review what a call-to-action is and some best practices when creating an effective call-to-action.

What Is A Call-To-Action?

So what is a call-to-action? A call-to-action (CTA) is “an image or line of text that prompts your visitors, leads, and customers to take action,” according to Hubspot. It’s important to encourage prospects to contact your office or sign up for an event after reading a blog post or email. If they don’t, what’s the point of creating engaging content?

CTAs take prospective clients to a higher valued page on your website. If the call-to-action says, “Read more…” in the meta description on Google, this gets your prospect to your site. The page you direct that prospect to on your site should include another CTA which takes them further down the sales funnel.

Inbound Marketing Methodology by HubSpot

Best Practices

Since CTAs are all over websites which shows it’s not rocket science to create. However, creating an effective call-to-action takes a little more finesse. Such as a converting CTA that sends a clear message about why they should click and delivers that promise immediately. Including an action verb is Rule #1 when creating a call-to-action that converts. But just because you said, “download” or “click” doesn’t mean prospects will download or click.  Here are Sage Lion Media’s rules to an effective call-to-action:

  1. Actionable Messaging. Yes, you need more than an expressive verb to get people to click on a CTA but this is the first step. Without an action verb, you’ll just have a fancy graphic, words, and zero clicks.
  2. Make it clickable. You can have the most creative copy in your CTA but if it doesn’t look visually appealing and clickable, you will miss out on a lot of prospects.
  3. Create urgency. Nobody wants to be left out so let prospects know they need to download your ebook NOW! Include a countdown next to your CTA that informs prospects your ebook is only free for 48 hours. If you’re trying to fill up spots for an event, say, “Spots are limited. RSVP today!”
    Image of cell phone with download offer
  4. Focus on placement. CTAs should be weaved in naturally to a blog post. Typically you’ll find a call-to-action at the end of a blog but you can also place one in the middle, on the sidebar, at the top of the page. Whatever makes the most sense. Don’t go overboard and have a CTA in all locations.
  5. Color matters. A CTA needs to stand-out. If the webpage is blue, the CTA should be a different color. Easy enough! Pick a contrasting color that is still in your theme so it will pop out on the page.
  6. Size matters too. You want people to easily see the CTA but it can’t be too big that it takes away from the main content.
  7. Clear and concise. An effective CTA is short and to the point. A prospect should know exactly what they’re getting once they click on the link.

Pro tip: We like to do A/B testing on CTAs for our clients. We’ll play around with wording, placement, and sometimes the color to see what gets more clicks.

Start Creating

While a call-to-action encourages a prospect to take one more step down the sales funnel to become a lead. That action can be a link in an email that says, “Shop Our Lightweight Tents Now” and guides the prospect to your company’s brand new line of backpacking tents. Whatever you want your prospective customers to do, creating a CTA that gets clicks can turn those prospects into leads.

3 Reasons Why Your Calls To Action Are Not Converting

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Have you ever read through a blog post and left because no one “told” you what to do next? You were left hanging in space, free to leave at anytime. Leaving your visitors (prospects) hanging is the first simple way to NOT generate more leads. It’s important to have calls to action in every step of the sales funnel. If one directs you to a free educational download your focus should be on your messaging. 

One essential element of any solid inbound marketing strategy includes visually-focused content that guides a visitor through the buyers journey. These important invitations to the next level are the job of a good “Call-to-Action”. Also commonly referred to as a CTA. Think of them as road signs, leading the way to the desired destination.

Here are some questions we receive for our clients:

  • “I need a button for an email that directs my leads to a secondary form on my website. Is this possible?”
  • “I’m having issues tracking the conversion rate of my new eBook offering. What am I doing wrong?”
  • “Do we need a catalog of CTA’s for each stage of the inbound sales funnel?”

But first, where are the most important places to include a CTA? A CTA is, quite literally, a hyperlinked button, that guides your reader to take a desired next step.

A CTA acts as a link between exploratory content that your prospect is interested in and premium content offers that can only be accessed by providing personal information. Think of a time where you read the summary of a blog post. If you’re interested in finding out what the article examines, you simply choose the “Read More” button at the bottom. If they don’t turn into leads now, they’re more likely to come back if they see your website as insightful. 

Here are a few ideas about why your CTAs may not be getting the responses you hoped for.

1. Target Your Buyer Persona

Tailored messaging delivered at precise moments during the buyer’s journey through clickable CTAs will resonate with your leads. The more you know about your visitors, the more segmented your content will be in the future.

Your CTA messaging should have a direct impact on someone’s willingness to click and move further down the buyer’s journey. Because your buyer personas have key identifiers attached to each step of the journey, instead of using the usual “Learn More” CTAs you can get a little more creative with your messaging such as “Check It Out.”

It would be a big mistake to send content to prospects with impromptu CTA messaging that was developed for evangelists.

Example of our inbound marketing services page.

If the content that comes ahead of your CTA is not informative or bland, even the world’s best CTA is going to have low conversions.

Leaving you with that gut-wrenching feeling of failure. If a visitor clicks your CTA, they should have a general sense of who you are, how you can help address their specific needs and what information they need to begin the sales process. The CTA reinforces the action they’re about to take towards achieving a solution to their problem.

2. Don’t Sell All The Time

Your goal as a business owner should be to provide educational information that is useful to your industry, not just flat-out selling your products and services. You do not want to overwhelm your leads or customers with forceful selling. Your calls to action should be inviting and succinct and address problems that your targeted buyer persona’s express along their buyer’s journey.

CTAs are not the place to begin a dialogue with your leads or prospects. It is however, the place for prospects to begin the buyer journey. Remember, we develop our CTAs based on buyer persona research.

However, the research you conducted should give a clear indication of how your prospects communicate and take action in their daily lives. If it doesn’t, you need to start over and re-evaluate. 

3. Let Your Calls To Action Create Urgency

Guiding your leads naturally should be your top priority. Internet researchers are very indecisive while browsing for solutions. That’s bad news, because the longer a buyer sits and analyzes, the more openings arise for your competitors to steal your leads. Your content needs to nurture the lead to act immediately or at a later date.

The internet is one big library of anything you might want. As a result, it becomes more difficult to decide if you’re finding the best solution to your problem. Be the clear answer to their challenge, and make them want to choose you.

For instance, Amazon does a great job in converting leads into die-hard customers and eventually brand evangelists. We’ve all purchased products through Amazon, and they already know that we’re not interested in receiving deals on products we never buy. Instead they send detailed newsletters of items purchased in the past, with clear calls to action attached to each call out. They go the extra mile in making the message actionable.

Phrases such as “View our product line” and the powerful “1-Click Ordering” CTA can be seen all over their site and email campaigns. Because Amazon has nailed down their target audience and how they shop, the focus has shifted from carrying influential brands to the messaging that will resonate with the lead and convert them to customers.

These principles have already been deployed in the B2B world. And they still continue to work.

Because our clients know their customers will receive the right information at the right time, in each step of the buyer’s journey. We accomplish this by using effective calls to action messaging that is developed for your buyer personas. Using general messaging might bring in a lot of leads. But it’s very concerning to find out more than 90% of those leads had a minimal impact on your sales. The right compelling messages help to eliminate that concern.

If you’re interested in learning more about Call-to-Actions and upping your inbound marketing game, take a look at the Sage Lion Media inbound marketing blog.

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Building a Story for Your Outdoor Brand

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In 2017, Donald Miller published Building a Story Brand and it has become a measure of standard across the internet marketing space. The overarching message instructs the reader to clarify their message so their customers will listen. So many of our clients come to us with a version of struggle related to the solution Donald presents.

Whether you are struggling to get your customers to engage with your brand, or you’re just trying to get your brand off the ground, we have the track record and knowledge to provide results with creative and engaging media. None of this ties together without clear and direct messaging exemplifying your brand.

Make Your Customer the Hero

Building a brand story based around your consumer develops a sense of trust and relationship someone wouldn’t experience with other forms of content buildout. Positioning yourself as a guide along the customer’s journey to finding and committing to their solutions keeps you at the top of your customer’s mind. You are developing a trigger point in the consumers mind that relates your product or service to a solution. 

Here is the flow of nearly every story in the words of Donald Miller:

“A CHARACTER who wants something encounters a PROBLEM before they can get it. At the peak of their despair, a GUIDE steps into their lives gives them a PLAN, and CALLS THEM TO ACTION. That action helps them avoid FAILURE and ends in a SUCCESS.”

Generic customer journey map image
Customer Journey Map Example

Nearly every book you read, every movie you watch follows this plot line and we naturally notice when stories don’t develop in this fashion. Why shouldn’t your brand story follow the same model? To lead them through this process, we answer three questions. What do you offer? How will it make my life better? What do I need to do to buy it? If we can answer these questions well, we make the customer the hero and the product their solution.

Talk About Your Customer’s Problems

Relating to and engaging with your customer’s problems sets you up to understand why you are doing what you are doing. You’ve developed a product or service as a solution to a problem, but your customer may not know they have a problem. Writing about your customer’s problems shows you are just like them, and have created a product for them because you’ve experienced some of the same problems in the past. If you put those problems front and center in front of your customer’s you’ll let them use their own imagination to find you as their solution. Even though you have led them to water, they have to be the ones to drink. There are three types of problems any customer may face.

There are external problems, internal problems, and philosophical problems. External problems are physical, tangible problems, like products or services they need. Internal problems are problems they face internally, these are deeper, more personal fears and then we have philosophical problems. These problems are bigger than the basics of purchasing a product or understanding oneself a little better. If your product or service has a deeper meaning or impact, it would be worth employing this form of content as well as writing about internal and external problems.

Position Yourself as a Guide and Call Them to Action

As we’ve defined previously, customers are not looking for another hero. These folks are looking for a guide. When you think of fly fishing, what brands do you think of? When you think of hunting, which brands do you think of? Those brands have established themselves as “guides” for fly fishing and hunting, respectively. When someone considers these items, they know where they can go to get the information they are looking for and can trust. As the internet continues to expand and content farms keep pumping out generic content intended to rank on google, it is becoming more and more important so instead of clicking through organic search results, these folks are going directly to websites for information.

Once you have established yourself as a guide, it’s time to call them to action.  “Direct” calls to action come in the form of making a purchase, filling out a form, or picking up the phone. “Transitional” calls to action are things like testimonials, free trials, and free content. You probably come across transitional calls to action all the time without even realizing it.

Provide a Happy Ending

The last thing a hero in a story wants is a bad ending. It is important for you to paint a picture of success involving your product or service. Some terminology could include “imagine yourself in 6 months”, or “if this problem was solved”. This puts success in the mind of your consumer and ties your product to it. A solid happy ending will include one or more of the following:

  1. Win some sort of power or position/status.
  2. Be unified with somebody or something that makes them whole
  3. Experience some self-realization or transcendence that makes them whole

If you can satisfy these basic human desires your client will leave with confidence and trust in anything you offer. Learn more about how Sage Lion Media develops engaging stories for outdoor brands by visiting our content marketing services page.

2 Tactics After Attending a Trade Show To Increase Sales

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Whew, this year’s IFTD was a whirlwind and a big success here in Denver. While at the show I met up with a bunch of clients. Hung out with old friends. And met several new prospects. As the show wraps up I’m getting ready to follow up with a few leads I had positive interactions with. Here’s a simple framework for developing meaningful conversations with new leads and increase sales.

While it’s easy to plow through your emails and play catch up the first day of an event, you don’t want to lose track of the contacts you made. Redirecting some of that focus to your new leads can ensure those long days on the show floor don’t go to waste.

1) Actually Connect

This seems like a no-brainer but less than 30% of all trade show exhibitors have a plan or process in place for following up with leads. Here are some tips to follow:

  1. Avoid Boilerplate. Don’t go online and search for an email template for conventional follow up. Doing this will ensure one thing, you’ll look like everybody else. 
  2. Try video. According to HubSpot adding video to your sales emails can increase the open rate by 5X. We’ve seen similar results in the last few years and include a simple video in nearly all our sales emails. One possible subject line for your follow up email could be “[Prospect name], I made you a video to say thanks for the time at IFTD. 
  3. Thank the prospect for their time. And remind them of your conversation. These conventions can be a whirlwind for people walking the show floor. A recap of your conversation can help jog their memory for what you talked about. 
  4. Ask them to do something. It can be as simple as booking time on your calendar (we use a HubSpot meeting link) or as complex as downloading a piece of premium content. But asking your prospect to take an action will give you valuable insight into how interested they really are and allow your CRM and automated workflows to start collecting contextual data.
IFTD Trade Show Hall
IFTD Trade Show Hall

2) Classify Your Leads

Not everyone you meet is going to be a sale and you definitely need to know which ones are worth emailing directly. It’s worth developing a specific goal for each business card you collected at the show. We like to split our leads up into the following buckets: 

Connected but not ready to sell

These are contacts who you meet throughout the show or at the after-parties. They may be junior members of a team or just interesting people you want to keep in touch with. I typically try to connect with these people through social media. I feel LinkedIn is the best platform to do that. It’s an opportunity to stay in touch through your channel and expose them to your news feed posts and so that you can see theirs. 

Qualified to do business

These are the new accounts I’d like to target. My goal is much more direct as we discuss specific business opportunities. I like to schedule my follow up meetings at the show, so I already have it on the calendar. I will send a personal video email within a few days of the show, thanking them for their time and remind them of the talking points we discussed at the event, so they’re prepared during our phone call. 

Nurture

The last group of people may or may not be business opportunities. But they could be people who are your peers in the business. You may want to build a lasting relationship with them to bounce ideas or vent about problems. If you’re in the same city, asking for a recurring meeting might be a great way to build your network. You might also watch out for interesting articles you both find useful and shoot them an email about it from time to time.
IFTD and other industry trade shows are a great opportunity to meet new people and reconnect with old friends.

Following these simple strategies can help you increase sales, make sure your time is used efficiently and develops long lasting successful business opportunities.

Inbound Marketing is Like Air Traffic Control

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When I was hired by Sage Lion Media at the beginning of the new year, I was tasked with implementing agile/scrum methodologies. Prior to joining Sage Lion Media, I worked at a few reputable digital marketing agencies located in Los Angeles, Denver & Chicago.

And before entering the world of inbound marketing I had the privilege of working at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) Control Tower.

Continue reading…

Top 5 Outdoor Industry Marketing Trends That Will Matter in 2020

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Outdoor Industry Marketing in 2020

The landscape is ever changing in the world of internet marketing as a whole as well as the outdoor industry’s niche, but the core values stay the same. As a product owner or service provider, you want to capture potential leads looking for your product or service, educate them on why your product or service is a better choice, and then make the process as easy as possible to convert those folks into a sale. Here are a few of the trends we are seeing as we approach 2020 in the outdoor industry.

Video Marketing

Video Marketing for the outdoor industry is becoming more and more popular as the user base shifts into a more technologically advanced crowd. With new technologies and strategies emerging regarding live video, augmented/virtual reality, and a high propensity for “vlogging”, engaging and informing your users in the creative avenues they are looking to be engaged and informed in is vital to a successful outdoor industry marketing campaign.  While the tech is advancing at a fast pace, so are the ways in which we can display that content to users. TikTok has emerged as a massive platform for video sharing, and the old faithfuls in Facebook and Instagram remain staples to any social media strategy in the form of paid ads or organic rankings/results, and 5G gets it to us more quickly and with better quality than ever.

Inbound Sales Tactics

Inbound marketing involves the placement of your product or service in front of your potential buyers with the intention of having gathered some information on them by the time you make contact. Some of the avenues for doing so would be shoppable content. This involves utilizing services like Google shopping, Amazon, and so on. Having your products available for purchase in the areas people are looking for them leads to sales and brand recognition. Instagram has also started allowing users to “swipe right to buy” on various products, allowing those who have engaged with your product and are interested to have the easiest path possible to purchase. Product Demonstrations and tutorials are also becoming more and more popular. Giving your users the tools to understand and utilize the product from the start can set you apart from the competition.

Outdoor Industry Marketing

Voice & Visual Search

In 2020 it is estimated that 50% of all searches will be done with voice. This stat has certainly made the rounds, but what does it mean for your marketing efforts? The main area your strategy will change in relation is the types of keywords you will rank for in the future. For instance, someone may go to Google.com and type “New Outdoor Products”, while someone performing a voice search may phrase it as “What New Outdoor Products are on the Market?” While the core of the search remains the same (new outdoor products), the included keywords change the types of results that may come up. Massaging your content to include these more “conversational” based keywords is key to capturing this potential. Another area where search is improving is visual searches. People can now use their phone cameras to explore products to find out which product is in front of them. Say a friend has a really cool new gadget or product, you would be able to pull out your phone and perform a Google search based on what your camera finds. Ensuring your product is available and optimized on the various platforms ensures this process is as seamless as possible.

Paid Advertisements for the Outdoor Industry

Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence Allow More Customization than Ever

Paid ads have always been a staple of our marketing campaigns here at Sage Lion Media and we are constantly researching for changes in the space. Using tools involving machine learning and artificial intelligence, we have the ability to personalize ads at scale and segment your audience using more advance information. In 2020 users will see fewer organic results and many more contextual ads specifically targeted to the user. Ad personalization allows you to attach some type of personalization to the ad. It may have the person’s first name attached in the form of a “Hi Jerry, are you looking for ________?” or it could have something related to their previous experiences while browsing the web or with your product specifically. This personalization is intended to lead to higher conversion rates and more customization. Audience segmentation allows you to display advertisements to different subsets of people based on demographics and other factors. An example of this would be displaying more visual based ads to the 24-32 year old subset, and a more informational ad displaying for those in an older age group.

Content Marketing for the Outdoor Industry

Content is and will always be king. Your words tell the story you are looking to tell and should be built to bring your users along a journey. Some emerging trends we see popping up are experiential based content strategies, more focus on user interface and user experience, brand partnerships, and a real push for visibility on content based communities like reddit, LinkedIn, Slack, Facebook, Quora, and more. Creating an outdoor content strategy from the ground up with these new platforms in the mix keeps you at the top of mind no matter where your potential buyers are looking.