Link Marketing -- Solve a Customer Problem

Figuring out how to apply a marketing tactic to your particular business can be difficult. Solving customer problems and offering the solution for free builds brand awareness and links.

Successful businesses, such as Google, can teach you all about link marketing. Let’s look at some examples of specific B2C and B2B industries and how to solve customer problems for link building.

Business-to-Consumer (B2C) Example

Let’s say you sell home goods, such as kitchen gadgets and small appliances. Finding good recipes is one obvious problem to solve. Yet that’s rather overdone and excessively broad.

Instead, narrow the focus and audience. A good starting point to figure out a narrower topic is with your favorite keyword research tool. A quick search with KeywordDiscovery.com shows 1,233 searches for “gluten free recipes.”

Keyword research is a good place to start your investigation, but widening the search to examine medical conditions that would exclude specific foods from a person’s diet could improve the results.

Also, a trip to your local health food store will provide a wealth of information. Notice the niche sections, and talk to the staff about your idea. Ask the owner of the store if you can leave a survey to gather input from customers.

A narrow topic will make it easier to gain the attention of certain online communities for links and traffic. Improve the results by getting those online groups involved by contributing or rating recipes. Even turn it into a monthly contest.

Here are two simple searches to find those online communities: “gluten free” newsletter and “gluten free” forum.

Business-to-Business (B2B) Example

Let’s say you’re the marketing director for an office supply company. A simple way to help customers is offering solutions to help them operate more efficiency and reduce their operating costs. It might even free up some funds for them to increase their purchasing budget.

Many businesses offer advice in private newsletters to their customers. That’s fine, but there are many lost opportunities with that approach. Publishing this information in the form of a blog or online guide could gain them new customers, branding, and links.

Let’s not forget all the lost mentions (links) from business publications and blogs.

Want top-notch content to attract links from business publications and bloggers? Get the right people involved. Contact your customers who deal with the subject every day. There are a variety of approaches that could be taken. Here are a few examples:

• Interviews: Publish weekly interviews with office managers or operations managers from a variety of industries. Ask them questions about solving specific problems, or get them to talk about specific things they’ve done to improve efficiency or cut operating costs.
• Group Questions: Put together a group of experienced managers and pose a specific problem for them to solve each week. This will provide a variety of solutions from different viewpoints. The added benefit of getting multiple people involved is that they’ll promote their participation on their company site, newsletter, or blog. That translates to more links and traffic.
• Training Guides: Training new employees is expensive. Save businesses money by writing training guides for new office managers and staff. This will be a big hit for small businesses that have limited or no human resource staff, and don’t have the knowledge of efficient office management techniques. Improve the results by allowing businesses to edit and have their own custom training guides. That way, it will be customized to their particular business for either online training or printouts.

These are just a few examples of how solving customer problems can help with your link marketing and build up your brand at the same time. What’s worked for you? Let me know!

Join us for a Search Engine Marketing Training in Boston, November 6 at the Hilton Boston Back Bay. Not only will you walk away with the knowledge and skills to be a successful search engine marketer, you’ll also jumpstart your career and enhance your professional know-how.