Blog - Page 18 of 28 - Cyberwalker Blog

How to write online articles for materials handling

To create content that will attract a sector in the Materials Handling industry that you are trying to target, it’s important to consider what those people need. What are their “pain points”, or consistent concerns/issues/problems that relate to your business; The problems that only you can solve? What expertise could you offer to solve what is missing for people in your target market?

How to write online articles for materials handling:

It’s not hard to figure this out. Ask your sales force, the people who are closest to the people you want to sell to. It’s likely they know better than anyone what those customers are dealing with on a daily basis. These are the issues you want to help them solve. These are the issues you want to produce content about.

You can also do something as simple as ask them. Use things like surveys with giveaways for their efforts. The more you know, the more understanding you gain about the content you need to create, to help you attract the right demographic

Once you know what content to generate, brainstorm a running list and keep adding to it. By evaluating how effective the articles are, you will be able to continue to tweak your strategy.

Appointing a competent content writer

Producing great content is often a team effort. Unless you happen to be a great visionary, writer, editor and web developer all rolled into one. In all cases, there are two methods of execution:

Option 1: Appoint a qualified and knowledgeable team member with great copywriting skills to write and post the content.

Option 2: Hire a marketing agency or freelance writer to learn your business, work with your internal experts, and generate the content for you.

Option 1 is great if you don’t have the funds to spend on hiring someone to produce articles for you. However, it involves an investment in time, sometimes a lot of time. And it’s likely that if your staff are great at Materials Handling they may not be great content writers. (Unless, they have a degree in journalism or a particular natural talent for writing.)

The person who you appoint to generate your company’s web content needs to be able to write effectively. If you create a bunch of content but it’s not well put together, contains spelling errors, or is badly structured, it will damage your brand.

If you decide to go with Option 2 and hire a marketing agency or freelance writer, you are equipping qualified professionals to do the work. It often saves a company more money to hire a qualified team than to train someone and manage the process internally.

If you hire professionals, you won’t have to worry about the work getting done properly and promptly. The content creation process takes care of itself.

If you do decide to hire an agency or writer, you need to understand that they charge by the word or by the piece. A professional agency will charge anywhere from .50 cents to $2 per word. This amounts to $250 to $2,000 per article. This depends on that article’s length and quality.

It’s often worth the expense. A good article can convince hundreds of people that your company is an expert. Think of it this way: If it’s read 1000 times in a year and produces 100 queries and 10 sales, it was worth the investment.

To learn more about content marketing and using digital tactics to turn your business into a warm lead generator, order a free copy of the 60-page book: Digital Marketing Secrets for companies in the Materials Handling Industry. You’ll also get a free PDF ebook version. CLICK this button to order your book now:

How to get more warm leads for your business

This article shares the No.1 secret that will turn your business into a lead generation machine. If you want to encourage more leads to seek your business — instead of you seeking their business — read this article. It reveals the newest trend in marketing towards developing and sharing great content to create yourself as an expert in your industry.

How to get more warm leads for your business:

The secret is… Content marketing

If you want to bring more business to you with minimal sales effort you’ll want to understand content marketing. It’s a marketing process that involves creating and sharing strategic content that does the following:

Showcases your expertise in your industry
Naturally attracts the business you want to attract because they come to you for help and guidance

The goal is to attract and engage the intended demographic with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

There is a long-standing sales approach that suggests customers only buy from companies they trust. That trust is quickly established when a company becomes an expert in their industry. If your aim is to solve the problems of your target audience, you are on the right track.

Thinking like a content marketer

Shift your focus. Stop asking: “How can I sell more?”. Start asking: “How can I be of assistance to people in my target market?”. When you think this way, selling becomes a natural process. It requires minimal sales effort.

Be an expert and potential business will come to you. And, it will be easier than you ever thought possible. The expertise that you demonstrate through content marketing removes or weakens the resistance toward a sales come-on.

A content marketing approach allows you to change your business’ overall brand conversation and establish that you are more than just another corporation.

How to think like a content marketer

Find out what the “pain points” or persistent complaints are for the people you want to sell to, and create content that solves these issues. The content could be in the form of:

Articles
Blog posts
Videos
eBooks
Infographics
Industry reports

Share your content on social media, on your web site, or over email.

Here’s the big secret to content marketing…

You have to think strategically and/or do thorough research to really understand the pain points of the people in your target market. If you don’t, your efforts won’t be effective in generating the leads you want to generate. Sometimes, the content you do generate may even need to be unrelated.

For example, if your business is a bridal boutique that sells bridal dresses you may want to write content that solves the pain points of brides. Don’t just write about wedding dresses. Write articles such as: “Wedding planner’s money-saving secrets”, “Brides guide: Where to splurge and where to save”, “How to make wedding planning easy”. Give away things like “Free wedding month-to-month wedding planning guide for brides”. Yes, you may sell dresses, but this content will attract the attention of your target market.

To learn more about content marketing order a copy of our FREE ebook: Digital Marketing Secrets Revealed. We actually give away our complete proven-results digital marketing strategy in this book. To get yours now, CLICK HERE.

How to market yourself strategically on the web

It’s important to learn how to market yourself strategically on the web. Learning the correct techniques will allow you to easily grow your business with limited effort.

The foundation of the approach we teach our clients is content marketing. The following article shares what content marketing is and how incorporating it into your strategy will dramatically increase your ability to sell.

How to marketing yourself strategically on the web:

What is content marketing and why do I need it?

Content marketing is a marketing process that involves generating and distributing valuable content to a specific audience. The goal is to attract and engage the intended demographic with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

This form of marketing takes into account the long-standing sales approach that customers only buy from companies they trust. That trust, is quickly established when a company becomes an expert — a resource for their people — and is able to solve the problems of their target market.

Thinking like a content marketer

If you shift the focus from: “how can I sell more?” to “how can I be of assistance to people in my target market?” selling products and services becomes a natural, seamless process that involves minimal sales effort.

When your company is an expert in your industry, potential business will naturally come to you. That expertise that you demonstrate through content marketing removes or weakens the resistance toward a sales come-on.

The important part is to show them your expertise every time they look for a solution to a problem. That will have them come to you for many things, not just when they need to buy something you provide. A content marketing approach allows you to change your business’ overall brand conversation and establish that you are more than just another corporation selling widgets or services.

You step away from solely being the provider of a product. You become the ultimate resource.

A brief explanation of a content marketing approach

The following example was written for the Material Handling industry. We do a lot of work in this arena. However, the words “warehouse manager” and “rack” in the example below can easily be swapped out for any other product and service.

Example: Think of it this way, a warehouse manager needs to buy more rack for his warehouse. You could be one of two things for that potential customer:

Option 1: You’re the company he chooses to buy from among a selection of similar racking companies. He comes to you when he needs rack. And only when he needs rack. He chooses to buy rack from your company because his company has purchased from you before.

Option 2: You’re the company he chooses because your brand is cooler than everyone else’s. He visits your web site often because it’s a refreshing experience. When he comes to your site it’s not just all pictures of rack and prices. He sees the faces of sales and service people he actually knows and innately he feels a connection.

He found your site from a Google search when he was looking for racking design support. And he has returned to your site many times because you helped him solve his problems – even if he has never purchased from you before.

When it comes to buying rack, he doesn’t even consider any other providers. Even though your rack is a bit more expensive, he’ll get so much more from you than he will from the competition.

Option 2 is much more effective. The company in this example is taking a content marketing approach. They are putting effort into sharing themselves and building their brand as an expert resource. This way, they have become a go-to resource for people in their target market.

This approach works for almost every industry. If you are a plastic surgeon, share your knowledge about patient procedures to build credibility. If you operate a residential cleaning business, put your effort into writing and posting article about cleaning, like: “Microwave a lemon in water for 5 minutes to steam clean your microwave with minimal effort”.

Free marketing advice from experts

Cyberwalker Digital recently unveiled a new free service, we call: Marketing Genius.

What is marketing genius?

It’s a quick online questionnaire that we’ve created for all business owners and entrepreneurs seeking marketing strategy guidance from experts.

Take 1 minute to fill it out and within 24 hours we send you a list with 7 marketing strategy ideas that you can put into action immediately. It will help you generate more money for your business.

Free marketing advice from experts

It’s completely free. We’re not out to sell you on anything. Our approach is about content marketing, which is sharing our knowledge and allowing people to come to us if and when they need us for services.

So, if you want extra support on implementing your list, we will send you links to our library of valuable content with how-to articles. You can also email kay@cyberwalker.com with your questions, if you have any. She’ll answer them over email for free too.

We’re entrepreneurs and business owners ourselves. We understand the value of the ideas of others, especially when they are experts on a topic. If you think the same, click here to check out Marketing Genius: https://ql216.infusionsoft.com/app/form/marketing-genius

Is my marketing agency doing a good job?

At Cyberwalker Digital, we see time and time again, business owners throwing money at marketing agencies without understanding what they’re really paying them for.They understand the importance of having a marketing agency. And, they can see that the marketing agency is doing some work for them because they see things be printed or put online. But, the problem is, they aren’t really sure if any of the strategies are getting them results. If they are getting results, it’s comment that they are not sure where from.

To help you evaluate your marketing strategy and learn how to talk to your marketing agency so you can better direct them to what you want, we’re answering the question:

Is my marketing agency doing a good job?

1. Are they providing you with regular performance assessments that show results? If your marketing agency is doing a good job, they will be able to provide you with regular statistics reports. They should be tracking everything do. The best agencies are continually evaluating their progress and adjusting the strategy to ensure you continue to improve.

Based on the services you’ve hired them for, you’ll want to ask for the following:

SEO – Analytics reports that show: How many visitors are coming to your site, how long they are staying on each page, what pages they are viewing, and what keywords are effective
Email marketing – They should be showing you: Open rates on emails, percentages of links clicked, and where contacts are entering into your funnels.If they are really good, they will split test emails to help them understand what strategies work best with your target audience.
Social Media – Are they evaluating your social media strategy? If they are sharing information on: Number of links clicked, contacts entering into email funnels from social media posts and likes and shares for posts, this is valuable information. Based on this information they should be suggesting ideas for new social media content. Have they given you your Klout score? Is it going up?
Print marketing – Corporate cards, postcards, flyers and billboards can be more difficult to track than online marketing tactics. However, they should be following up with you to gather the information that will tell them whether a direct mail piece or billboard brought in potential leads.

2. Are they asking you lots of questions? True marketing experts ask a lot of questions, especially when they first start working with your company. It helps them understand: Who your target market is, how to build an effective strategy, and what you are trying to capture with your brand.

If your marketing agency quietly works away without regular communication and then sends you a bill, consider this a red flag.

3. Are they letting you in on their strategies? Do you know what your marketing agency is doing for you and how it all works? It’s okay to ask them question about how they do what they do. If they are reputable, they’ll be willing to share strategies with you and explain how they work. If you ask them how they do something and you get an answer like “it’s too technical for me to describe it”, get rid of this agency.

4. Are they knowledgable? And are they willing to admit when they don’t know/understand something? Expert marketing agents are highly knowledgeable. If you visit their site and see valuable blog posts and articles, that’s a good sign.

If you find that they are willing to admit to their weaknesses this is also a highly valuable skill. While they are experts, it’s impossible for them to know everything about your business. If they are willing to admit to what they don’t know, and are open to learn, you’ve hired an agency that is committed to producing results.

If you are concerned that you are not getting value for your marketing dollars please email your questions to andy@cyberwalker.com. We’ll answer your questions for free. As a reputable agency, it’s important to us that we help businesses steer clear of the bad guys in our industry.