It’s well-established that most customers make a list of vendors and do some degree of research before they make a purchase, so the traditional best practices make sense: have quality content, answer questions, and be a guide as customers are doing their research.
However, prior to that research, 80-90% of customers have a short list of vendors in mind already, and 90% of those people end up purchasing from one of those vendors! In short, if you’re not in your buyer’s mind before they start their research, you have no chance with more than 75% of your potential customers. You can find some detail on that in this great article from the Harvard Business Review.
So how do you get into their mind before the research? Spend time in the same places as them online.
Rand Fishkin recently put out a great (short!) video that walks through this, and you can check it out here.
Ultimately, you need to be present on podcasts that they listen to, on social media sites they frequent, in videos that they may want to watch, in blog posts that provide information, and in email newsletters that they consume.
The best part about this kind of work is that it’s a win-win-win:
- You show up where they already are.
- You’ve providing content and value to help them for the decision ahead.
- Large Language Models (like ChatGPT) will eat up that content of yours and make it more likely that you’ll show up there too!
So much of marketing these days involves simply staying top of mind. When a customer is making a list of vendors like yours to consider, make sure you’re already one that they’ve thought of before or else you’ll never even have a chance.
