This edition of the SEO Lead Generation Cheat Sheet focuses on co-marketing and buyer persona.

According to Venture Harbor, a whopping 65% of businesses, including SEO companies, state that generating sufficient leads and traffic is their number one challenge.

It is obvious that the most pressing issue needs to be addressed ASAP, which is why we’ve created our very own SEO Lead Generation Cheat Sheet for SEO companies who want to get ahead of the competition this coming year. There are many fixes and tweaks to your campaigns that can help you completely turn around flagging sales and dipping revenues.

CREATING AND UTILIZING A BUYER PERSONA

This is essential for any marketing campaign in any industry: knowing your target buyers. But how many times this year have you reviewed if you’ve actually been focusing on the right kind of buyers, in the first place?

According to MarketingSherpa, a staggering 85% of all new leads may not even convert at all, and this figure will continue rising if you have been targeting the wrong people in the first place. To fix this issue, you need to re-examine the buyer persona.

What is a buyer persona?

Think of the buyer persona as an agglomeration of your creative understanding of who your market would be if it were a person and all the data you have thus far about your niche. Creating a comprehensive buyer persona can help you achieve the following:

– Know where and how to focus your resources, including your time
– Modify product alignments across your business
– Attract the best kinds of visitors to your website – the ones that are more likely to convert or result in sales
– Create more profit for your SEO business on the whole

What are the components of a buyer persona?

Demographics

Demographics refer to the personal and social factors that shape your niche or target buyers. Included here are your buyers’ average age/s, income bracket or capacity to buy, ethnicity, and so on.

You may want to expand your demographic data if details like marital status are a factor, but you may also want to narrow it down if extraneous factors don’t really affect whether or not the person will buy or not from your business.

Working habits

In the case of B2B lead generation, which is the case for SEO companies reaching out to other businesses who might be interested in search engine optimization, here are some guide questions that might help:

– Who should you be talking to?
– What is this person’s designation or role in the business?
– Who is the decision-maker in the business?
– How will you appeal both to the primary point of contact and the decision-maker?
– What is the continuum of authority in the business that you’d like to communicate with and who else do you have to convince that your SEO company is worth their time and money?
– What is their level of knowledge of SEO and what is their overall familiarity with the processes involved in search engine optimization?

Personality

Understanding the personality of the buyer is a huge step in creating the perfect marketing campaign. Do they value spontaneity or being slow and methodical? Are they “business-like” most of the time or do they have a youthful, experimental vibe or drive? What is the business culture like?

One way you can determine the personality of a business is by taking a look at their website, how they are reaching out to people on social media, and so on.

There will always be commonalities among target businesses, and the more you know about who you are really speaking to, the more likely you will be able to create promotions that speak directly to the decision-makers’ sensibilities.

Goals

While profit is likely the long-term goal, many businesses have smaller goals in between that define their daily operations. Sometimes the goals are simple, such as being able to serve the best cupcakes in a small town.

But there are times that they want to go big, but they don’t know how. This is the space that SEO companies occupy: they can help businesses grow regardless of the geographic space involved.

Pain points

Pain points are the obstacles that prevent businesses from achieving their short term and long term objectives. It’s absolutely critical that you know your target buyers’ pain points, because they will act on these pain points if they feel that an SEO company has the right set of solutions for them. Some guide questions that you can use in the determination of pain points are:

– What are the essential challenges do these businesses face?
– In what ways can your business help your target buyers overcome these problems and obstacles?
– How can you help in a way that you can address even their small pain points and make their daily operations less problematic?
– What long-term solutions do you possess that can make these businesses thrive?

Resistance

When we’re talking about resistance, we’re talking about the many objections, overt or not, that prevent actors and decision-makers from actually taking action and solving problems.

If you were in your buyers’ shoes, what would be your inner resistance? What kinds of thoughts or objections would you have about purchasing SEO services?

Once you are able to understand these things and get into the mindset of the buyer, you can also start creating answers to these objections.

Part of an effective marketing mindset knows how to negotiate and stamp out resistance. You don’t even have to hear them saying their objections out loud – you can determine the possible objections based on what you already know about your buyers.

Central message

The central message of your business is comprised of two main components:

– How your SEO company can help address the major problems of the customer.

– How your SEO company can walk alongside the business to meet their short term and long term goals.

You cannot possibly go wrong when you have these two major components in your central marketing message.

CO-MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

Let’s face it: we have competition. The SEO industry isn’t exactly barren. Every day, there are new players coming out, and that doesn’t even take into account SEO companies from Europe and even China.

The old viewpoint was all of these companies are enemies, and they needed to disappear or be stamped out. Well, that simply is not going to happen. SEO companies will fight tooth and nail to thrive. So there has to be a different kind of approach – and that approach happens to be comarketing.

Comarketing is actually a synergistic and critical partnership with other players in the industry. The goal is for all partners involved to benefit from the collaboration.

Now, before you comarket with another player, consider these questions:

– Does your business and the prospective co-marketer have similar audiences? What you’d want here is to have as much similarity as possible to your target buyers or audience, because whatever you are going to offer has to have the same value to the co-marketer’s audience, and vice versa. If there is a huge difference in what the players consider marketable and valuable, then co-marketing might not be a good idea.

– What is your estimate in terms of generating leads or sales from the partnership? Obviously, this would be up to you to determine and decide upon.

Before co-marketing with another player, it is imperative that you take a look at first at the readership or reach of the said player and determine if it’s even worth a day’s work to co-market. However, if the other player has become successful say, in reaching to people on social media, then there’s definitely an opportunity to be had here.

– What about expertise? For SEO companies, it all boils down to what your specialties area. Does the other player have expertise, tools, or techniques that you don’t have? If it does, then there’s definitely value in partnership there. However, it’s also imperative that you offer something in return: what can you bring to the table that is of value to your co-marketer?

– What is the other player’s general reputation? This might be tricky, but bear with us: to the people who matter the most, reputation means everything. People who often hire SEO companies would eventually get wind of businesses that don’t deliver. You need to be able to partner with a business that takes care of everyone, not just itself. If a partner has a bad reputation, then you may want to reconsider.

– And finally, will you enjoy working with these people? This might sound odd, because business is business, and we don’t really expect enjoyment when we’re working hard.

But this has something to do with business culture and actually harmonizing with your partner. If your co-marketer is a breeze to work with and is open to feedback, and doesn’t shut you out of negotiations and dialogues, then you will likely have a grand time working with this business. It is imperative that you pay close attention to how the other guy is treating your business and the partnership.

How do you create the perfect co-marketing agreement?

– The co-marketers must be very clear on the goals of the partnership. Do you need to generate more leads? Do you want more traffic? Do you want a joint venture or joint promotion? What is it exactly that you want to get from the effort? Outline these goals very clearly at the beginning of the agreement so there is no confusion.

– If you are curating content or contributing any type of content to each other’s websites, then the topics and themes must be laid out in advance. Ideally, all content from such a partnership should benefit both businesses at the same time. But don’t forget an even bigger challenge: the content has to appeal to the audiences of both businesses, too.

– Understand that businesses have their own schedules and that a separate timeline has to be created for co-marketing efforts. If you are aiming to produce an ebook, white paper, report, or even a webinar to attract large audiences, then we recommend that you double or even triple the time needed for the production and final touches of the product or output. Giving it more time than you think is needed will ensure that there will be sufficient time to get the material approved first, or if anyone has feedback, there is time to work sensible feedback into the material.

– An equal, beneficial partnership is always about putting your best foot forward. With this in mind, evaluate what skills you can bring to the table and invite your would-be co-marketer to do the same. This way, you can begin determining what needs to be done and by whom, in a way that is fair and equitable to both parties.

Is it possible to create a shared landing page?

Yes! Actually, all pages associated with the co-marketing should be co-branded, too. And all graphical layout associated with the branding should equally feature the partners. But be careful: check local state laws about the distribution of information and about liabilities.

How do you promote collaboration?

In addition to posting new content on your websites, co-marketers should consider PPC ads as a way to bring in a large flow of traffic faster. One of the advantages of PPC is that people who are on their way to your shared landing pages will already be warm, and there’s a huge chance that they will convert.

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Do you have any ideas on how to generate leads this coming 2020? Let us know by commenting on today’s post!