The team at Weaver Brothers Volvo Cars has learned a thing or two about successful marketing since we opened our doors 60 years ago. In this article, we’ll share our top-secret marketing tips that are almost always overlooked in today’s day and age. This article will focus on our digital strategies, though principles can easily apply to other campaign channels. You’re always invited to learn more about our store, but we encourage you to kick back, relax, and enjoy some insights that should help you increase your market share and customer engagement.
Where Modern Marketing Goes Wrong
There is a lot of static out there. You can do a search for marketing tips & tricks and find reiterations of reiterations of scattered concepts given by self-proclaimed experts. Following that advice will land you in hot water. We’re going to say something that might come as a shock, but we firmly believe that marketing isn’t about marketing. All too often, marketers’ campaigns die on the sword because the focus is lost on marketing’s original purpose, which is to help someone along the buyer’s journey. Nowadays, the “experts” are so focused on broadcasting how much they know about marketing trends that they have missed this essential ingredient.
So what do you do to get marketing right?
Step one: Read the next section!
Modern Marketing With a Purpose
It doesn’t matter what product or service you are advertising. A successful marketing campaign always comes down to understanding your buyer. This is your purpose as a marketer. Put aside all that theory about funnels, touchpoints, and conversion rates for a second. Remember who you are in this for: the buyer. Here are some of our favorite questions to ask when we are trying to help our buyers before they even make it into our Volvo dealership in Raleigh:
- What needs do our buyers have?
- What are their wants?
- What hopes & fears do our buyers have?
- How does this particular product cater to all of the above?
- What obstacles might our buyers have to overcome to make a purchase?
- What solutions do we offer to help our buyers?
If you can start by answering these questions, you’re well on your way to satisfying the needs of your target audience. Understanding these fundamental aspects of buyer psychology will help you create a relevant, emotionally engaging, and logical campaign. When all of these elements are integrated, you’ll have an effective marketing strategy regardless of your selected channel.
But what about the actual execution?
Modern Marketing & SEO Done Right
Well into the digital age, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that customers are gathering information at their computers and on their phones. These devices are like the ultimate billboards from back in the day. All eyes are on an electronic device of some sort, and Weaver Brothers is committed to making sure that our customers can find us.
At its core, SEO (search engine optimization) is a two-part process that caters to two entities: search engines and people. To make sure your product or service is found, you have to craft an effective SEO strategy that first satisfies the technical needs of the search engines. In SEO-speak, this is called “writing for robots.” In order to have your SEO material appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), you should always:
- Target relevant, high-ranking keywords (KWs)
- Optimize your title tags, meta descriptions, and site indexing
- Create an effective internal linking strategy
- Understand the region(s) you are targeting
- Clean up your existing digital mess, such as broken links and page errors
- Optimize your platform for speed
There are plenty of other things to look at, but these points are usually enough to get you off to the races. Now onto the second part of the process. As we said, effective SEO is writing for robots so that your message is identified as the most relevant message for the search query. But once your message owns those top SERP spots, it has to earn and hold its place there. And you do that with clicks. You get those clicks because your metadata is also written to engage a human being. This is precisely the strategy we deploy when we launch a campaign for our new Volvo Cars for sale. Here’s how to make material that wins every time:
- Craft a KW-rich title tag and meta description, as this is the teaser for your readers.
- Can you include a question? A joke? An offer in the description?
- Ask yourself if your content is unique & engaging.
- Are you earning your reader’s interest from one line to the next?
- Are you writing in a language that is appropriate to your target audience?
- Do you illustrate enough of your product or service’s features and benefits?
- Do you understand the difference between a feature and a benefit? Are you speaking about them correctly?
- Do you offer purchasing and process information in an inviting way?
Always keep in mind that you are a buyer, too. What was your best purchase experience like? What was your worst? We can all answer these questions. If you can write something that guides your reader through the gauntlet of product and purchase, you’ll get the sales opportunity.
Growth & Expansion Through Effective Marketing
If you can put yourself in your customers’ shoes, you are well on your way to bridging that all-elusive gap between marketing and sales. Fads, platforms, and trends will come and go. We’d be remiss if we didn’t say that we spend a great deal on analytics, as it’s essential to an effective digital strategy. But it isn’t everything.
Focusing on your buyer will always come first. The proof is in our success and the success of other businesses like ours, where the customer is the priority. When you realize that you are of service to people first and helping them buy something they need as an extension, you are paving the way for sustainable growth. Visit our sister store, Volvo Cars of Cary, if you need more proof that service compounds real growth!
Anyone can try to sell something. It’s another thing entirely to be of service to your fellow human being. If you can identify the wants and needs that you are in service of, every marketing and sales campaign will fall into place.
We hope that this article was helpful to you, and we want you to have a successful campaign. If you need any assistance in identifying your target market and digital strategy curation, the Weaver Brothers team is, as you might already expect, at your service.