Visualising Your Direct Sales Content Marketing Strategy
Take a look inside a simple content marketing strategy for your direct sales company.
The direct sales industry is transitioning from home parties to online selling, and consultants are left contemplating how to market their online businesses. The internet offers more opportunities for home-based entrepreneurship, and direct sales businesses can take advantage of the internet’s accessibility to reach new consultants.
Though, marketing your products online isn’t just posting to Facebook or Instagram. The main issue is that many companies don’t know how to teach successful online marketing strategies to their consultants. While it’s tempting to post on social media, hoping friends and family will buy your products, the support you get won’t be enough to expand your business. Often times, your social media posts may irritate your small audience and negatively impact your direct sales industry.
Selecting a Platform
When visualsing your strategy you’ll need to determine what platform works for you. Our article Should I Have a Blog for my Direct Sales Business can help you answer whether it’s worth the time and effort to start a blog, but the easy answer is: it depends. Blogs take consistent publishing and you must create strategies to promote your blog on other social media. A blog is a great way to develop content that is unique to you and your brand. You’ll have a place to provide resources and build email subscribers, and blogs are great for SEO. What can set your blog apart from others is the frequency with which it shows up in searches.
If you can’t invest the time into researching keywords and writing articles, then there are alternatives. Microblogging, short-form blogging, is publishing short blog articles in the form of social media posts. Facebook and Instagram can be great platforms for microblogging, as well as Twitter and Tumblr. Microblogging gives you the advantage to connect to followers on a more personal level since the posts are published directly on social media channels. If people take the time to read entire posts and engage with it by sharing, liking, or commenting on the post it can increase your page’s exposure.
The Biggest Feature of Inbound Marketing: Content Marketing
No matter which route you take, sustaining your business depends on how well you use inbound marketing to reach potential customers. One of the biggest features of inbound marketing is content marketing. Content marketing is using published content, such as blog posts, email messages, social media posts, and videos to reach your target audience. In order to have successful and enticing content, you’ll need to establish a content strategy.
In direct selling, it’s important to create a following of fans who like, know, and trust you. Creating connections with your readers and customers through shared interests builds trust. When a customer trusts you, a purchase is more likely to happen. Although it’s easy to first write about your products, you should avoid content focusing on your business and how to join it, and instead focus on content that demonstrates who you are as a person. Once people get to know you as a human, they will be more open to published content about your products. Your first priority is to create content that shows off your personality; promotional content should appear later.
Building a Customer Base
Once you have an idea of what content to post, you’ll want to focus on building your customer base. Your direct sales content marketing strategy has several objectives: fill your sales funnel, gain followers, increase sales, and add team members. Each objective impacts the others; attract target buyers to fill your tunnels and your following will increase (in the form of email subscribers and social media followers). These followers can then become customers and some may join as team members.
Content marketing helps fill sales funnels and increase the number of people that view your content. A content marketing strategy follows steps that parallel the buyer’s journey, and you’ll want to visualise their journey in order to understand how best to help a potential customer reach a sale. The potential customer first seeks out social media or search engines in order to answer a problem. They find a blog that has the answers or help they need, follow that blog and download any content in exchange for their email address. Then they enjoy the posted content and develop a connection with the direct sales consult. Finally, they buy the product at the consultant’s recommendation and become a loyal customer. The emphasis should be on engaging with a potential customer on a personal level in order to draw them in and build that lasting relationship.
Your content marketing strategy should correlate with the buyer’s journey. You should determine your buyer persona and keyword search, create enticing content that answers readers’ questions or helps them with their problems, offer further resources and expand your email list, gain followers and build relationships with your readers, and, finally, convert followers into customers and team members. Posting quality content and excelling at customer service will set your business apart from others.
SMA is invested in helping you develop an effective content marketing strategy, and we can assist you with defining your target buyers, optimizing your website for search engines, and helping research keywords that will draw in more customers.