November is all about gratitude, celebrating with family and friends over pumpkin pie, football and for some, shopping on Black Friday. If there’s one thing November calls for, it’s a bit of excess, and that’s why we’re suggesting it’s time to celebrate one more thing in this chilly fall month: we call it Knowvember.
Knowvember is all about knowing your audience, your customers, your leads and those who might be a good fit for your brand. It’s digging in to better flesh out your buyer personas, finding out what activities are attached to an eventual sale and what kinds of content help your leads move closer to a decision.
Knowvember is a great way to prepare for the marketing year to come: you’ll be more ready than ever to connect with audiences when you know them well.
Now, you might be wondering what kinds of desserts come with a theme like Knowvember. We’re still working that out at SJC. One team member suggested festive little gingerbread people decorated to look like each client, but we will keep you posted.
What should you do in Knowvember? Here are a few ideas to get you rolling:
Consider a Survey: A survey is a great way to obtain direct information about your customers and leads. Simply ask them a few questions about what they like about your brand and what they would like to see next. The simplest, and perhaps most effective, survey could ask one question: Would you recommend our brand to a friend?
The most important thing to remember is to keep the survey short and resist the urge to ask for a bunch of personal data points. Your respondents will bail if you start asking them their income range or how many pets they have because they will know that you’re not as interested in their opinions as you are in their sales.
Track What’s Working: …and what’s not. With Google Analytics you can gather a lot of information about how leads end up on your site. You can also track behaviors with A/B testing, such as whether a certain type of landing page is more effective than another.
Use your email analytics to see if specific subject lines are particularly effective at encouraging people to open your newsletter or if an embedded video seems to lead to more click-throughs.
Don’t Tell Customers What to Care About: One of the biggest and most common mistakes marketing teams make is insisting on what’s important to their customers, no matter what their customers say. For instance, Zappos knows that one of the more common aggravations with ordering shoes online is that they often don’t fit or don’t look the same in person as they did on the screen.
That’s why they offer free shipping on returns. They could ignore their customers’ actual frustrations and talk about how great other parts of their service are, but they’ve tapped into the biggest shoe-shopping frustration, making it easier than going to a brick-and-mortar store to buy shoes.
Create High-Quality, Personalized Content: On WordPress alone, there are over 82 billion blogs published in a single month.
What does that mean for you? Your content needs to stand out, adding value for your audience in a way that feels personal to them.
You need to understand the pain points of your target market and create blogs that solve problems or effectively address an issue that has been troubling them. Otherwise, they may go somewhere else, which means you’ve lost an opportunity to build a reputation for being an expert resource for them.
Tighten Up Buyer Personas: Knowvember activities should lead to a better understanding of your customers, which equips you to flesh out your buyer personas. Rather than just knowing that “Betty” is a typical customer between the ages of 45 and 55 with an income in the $50,000 to $60,000 range, you may soon also know that Betty tends to have one or two outdoor hobbies, exercises five to six times per week and tends to meet friends for drinks or brunch on most weekends. Betty’s kids are a little older and she has a bit more free time than her younger counterparts.
All of this information should be applied to your buyer personas so that every time you produce a piece of content or post on social media, you have Betty in your mind’s eye.
Who’s Got The Time?
If the thought of adding another holiday, even if it is a marketing holiday (what’s not to love?) gets your heart pounding a little too fast, it may be because you’re already so stacked that you can’t add one more thing. You are running a business, after all.
Your worries are over because SJC Marketing is here for you. Besides, we never found a holiday we didn’t find worthy of a few extra desserts and drinks.
Want to get started with your own Knowvember? Contact us at SJC Marketing, and we’ll get the party hats ready.