In our first lesson, we’ve talked about becoming experts in Expectation Marketing, what it actually is and how it helped us gain the trust of our visitors. If you haven’t seen it yet, start here.
All of this information is a good thing to have, but let’s find out how it can positively impact your own business and marketing strategy. So today we’ll focus on:
- The benefits of the Expectation Marketing Strategy for your own site
- What it actually looks like when brands use it
- Our Client’s Success stories with the strategy.
Your Brand’s Personal Benefits with Expectation Marketing
Knowing what your audience is searching for and creating the content they need is clearly going to have a positive impact. But Expectation Marketing goes beyond specific topics and focuses on the image of an active brand.
The first problem this marketing strategy solves is having a consistent message. If you follow the steps of this plan, you’ll have a clear message that will be reinforced throughout your strategy. It will connect the content on your site with the one on your social media profiles and emails as well.
Having a clear message through all the marketing campaigns within a year is a problem that many companies face. Because you focus on specific events and short-term milestones, you lose sight of the bigger picture.
The Expectation Marketing strategy helps you because it instills a workflow that makes you constantly publish useful content. So you don’t have to re-invent the wheel every single time.
Secondly, it helps you logistically to plan for continuous publishing. A big part of this strategy as you can see in our book [pre-sale] is about planning ahead. When you have a company and a brand you can not choose to create your content in short terms.
You need a system that will help you plan your creation, feedback, and publishing process. The secret (when it comes to Expectation Marketing) lies in applying this new strategy in the structured way we’ve established.
Third of all, what we’ve learned by applying this strategy to our clients, was that it was easier for them to be found and contacted. Having active social media profiles and sites brings you clear measurable results when it comes to Google ranking.
When the audience is in the early stages of decision-making, especially exploration, they will search for an answer to their needs. The content we created for our clients was focused on presenting the needs from the perspective of the audience.
This didn’t always take people from content to purchase. That’s not how content marketing works. But it gave the audience the possibility to start a conversation. Which manifested in comments on articles, reactions, tweets and tags on social media, and even emails to sales and support.
Now here comes the good part. There are people who have heard about your brand: from industry trade shows, received your business card, via word of mouth, via flyers, via ads (even if they didn’t click the ad), they saw mentions on forums, on Quora, etc.
Many marketers these days focus only on gathering traffic to their site and then trying to convert it with email pop-ups. I’m not saying that this is bad. I’m saying that you might miss out on better leads by focusing on that.
It’s a numbers game. Give me a customer who has been doing their research about Squirrly any day of the week, rather than 100 new subscribers to email. My chances of converting that super interested person into a paying customer are much higher than a 1% chance of converting from a small sample size like 100 people who just landed on a site and who don’t know if they need anything we sell, they’re not ready to buy yet, etc.
Here’s the best part of the funnel where Expectation Marketing helps your business: when there are people who research you already. They don’t just research something they need; they start looking to see what your company and your brand are all about.
Now your own brand can benefit from these advantages. Let’s focus on how your site can look like once you’ve implemented this strategy.
How Does Expectation Marketing Actually Look Like?
There are a few clear indicators of companies that are doing Expectation Marketing right. One company I’ve noticed doing this in a great way is Rezdy.
Aspects that are important to notice on their site are:
- They have contact information on each page. If you scroll down on any of their pages, you’ll find their contact information.
- They publish articles on their blog every 3-4 days.
- You can find a clear definition of what the platform does on the home page of the site:
“Online Booking Platform For Tours & Activities
Where tour and activity professionals network, trade and thrive”
- Their audience can easily find content to help them use the platform and educate them: webinars, e-books, and toolkit.
- An about page that presents their company, team, and values.
- They constantly post on all their social media profiles. More than that they make sure to answer the comments they receive there. It’s just a way to show their audience their support has been seen.
This can be the way your own site and social media channels look like. Full of engagement and interactions with your audience. Let’s focus further on the success stories for brands we’ve helped implement this Strategy.
Success Stories: How Our Clients Have Embraced Expectation Marketing!
An insight into the strategy of our clients (to make it clear: the clients of our Agency, NOT the SEO Plugin or the software products) should help you better understand how it will enhance your own marketing experience.
One of the clients who had the most to win with The Expectation Marketing strategy is The Grable Group. They are a talent managing company that has numerous Musicians, Comedians, Entertainers, and Speakersthat they get booked for different events.
The entertainers they represent include:
- Oz Pearlman, world-class mentalist and finalist at American’s got talent
- Bob Stromberg, the comedian shadow puppeteer that you’ve seen on Steve Harvey Show’s Little Big shots
- Bria Kelly, that you’ve seen on season 6 of the Voice
- Louie Anderson, the famous comedian, and actor. (all of us at Squirrly love Louie!! And the Grable Group for bringing these people into our lives)
As you can see in the image above, even from their homepage you can tell they’re doing Expectation Marketing right. They have contact details, an easy way to help visitors search for the entertainment they need. But most importantly the content, even on the first page, is focused on the needs of the audience rather than promoting their services.
By implementing our content marketing strategy we’ve helped their business in continuously promoting the video content of their clients. This gave them a longer time frame in which the audience (that fell in love with the performers) can remember and even book one of the artists.
This wasn’t the only content we created for their sites. By keeping the needs of their audience in mind, a big part of the content we created for them with this strategy included materials that help event planners choose the right entertainment for their specific occasions. This is what made their audience loyal to the brand.
It also made way for recurring bookings from the same planner. This strategy makes your brand more approachable. Because you don’t only concentrate on promoting content that focuses on your services, or products. Rather the content is focused on helping the audience decide and understand the process if they have never been through it in the past.
Another example where the Expectation Marketing offered benefits for our clients is in the case of Personal Brands. Until now we’ve discussed how it can help businesses, but this strategy can bring advantages to your personal site as well.
One great example of this strategy in action is Apphil, the personal website of Philipp Kandal, the Senior VP Engineering of Telenav. (world leader in navigation technology)
Taking a close look at the site we can see :
- A clear message regarding what the site stands for:”Philipp Kandal, My thoughts on mobility of the future“
- Contact information and the possibility to send Philipp your message.
- Constant posting on the blog.
- Accessible social media profiles and newsletter subscription.
- The about page that explains the site further than the initial message.
Now that we have a clear idea on what the Expectation Marketing elements are let’s discuss how this strategy has helped him.
The first advantage the strategy brought him is a growing social media audience. We can see this especially on Twitter where Philipp now has: 16.8K followers, and he started from about 3,000 followers in 2014. And this is an audience that engages with the tweets on his profile.
This growing audience came from the fact that he constantly posts on Twitter. He posts blog content from his site, and he also posts thoughts and other articles regarding the mobility of the future.
This is what makes him a thought leader, not just a brand that promotes only its own work. This aspect is crucial for personal brands more than anything. Focusing only on your content and products will have a negative effect as few people want to subscribe to a feed of self-promotion.
The second big win Philipp has gotten from this strategy is people actually contacting him. People who can close 5 to 6 figure deals with him and Telenav. The value he got out of Expectation Marketing was huge. Sadly, I am not at liberty to disclose anything. (we respect and value our agreements; our clients have full copyrights over the content we create and publish for them)
The strategy delivered.
Because his blog focused on news in his industry and his opinion on this subject, it showed people who were already doing their research on him that he is active in the industry and well informed.
Finding the contact information easily turned these possibilities into solid realities. The recipe?
- High profile person does research.
- Ends up on Twitter.
- Sees how popular and active Philipp is.
- Decides to check out the blog as well.
- Impressed.
- Looks for contact details.
- They end up discussing a deal.
Takeaways
As you’ve seen, this marketing plan can bring a lot of great and tangible advantages:
- Clear messages about the brand and what it stands for
- Constant publishing
- Brand looks really active in their industry. This builds trust for the people who research them. Nobody wants to do business with a brand that seems to have run out of business.
- Access to all the information the visitor needs to make the decision of getting in touch with brand representatives: sales, support, the person behind the brand.
All these advantages are possible with our strategy.
We’ve shown you the elements that can tell you if other sites are using this type of marketing. And we’ve focused on the main advantages our clients had so far with the Expectation Marketing strategy while working with our Agency.
If you’d like to start applying this strategy, you can contact us today.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can apply this strategy yourself, we’re coming back with a new lesson soon. There you’ll learn how to do a clear audit for your current strategy. It will help you understand which elements are missing and guide you through the steps you need to take.
