The Investopedia website defines marketing as “activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling a product or service.” The website explains that marketing includes various strategies ranging from advertising to delivering products directly to customers. With that in mind, consider this truth about online marketing: the simple question is digital marketing gold.
As a discipline, marketing has a long and storied history. Successful marketers have developed lots of strategies commensurate with the culture and times in which they were implemented. Some of those strategies have survived for generations. Others lasted only a short time. They all exist only for as long as they are useful.
In the modern digital marketing arena, one particular strategy that doesn’t get enough attention is the practice of asking a simple question. In fact, the simple question is really what fuels the internet.
What People Want to Know
The driving force behind all marketing efforts is making customers aware of a company’s products and services. That is pretty straightforward. A customer will not know to buy from your company if he doesn’t know that your company offers what he needs. With that understood, let’s apply it to the online world.
People use search engines to locate information. Sometimes they are after information relating to a product they want to buy. Other times they need the information to help solve a problem. The one thing common to all searches is the need to know something. And how do people start the process of learning what they do not know? They ask a question.
Typing keywords into a search engine is an abbreviated way to ask a question. You might not construct a full sentence complete with the proper punctuation, but the keywords you enter indicate what you want to know to the search engine. You are asking a question using just a few words and phrases.
Let us take that one step further with a voice search. The way voice search works encourages people to ask questions literally. You might bring up your phone and ask, “Where is the nearest coffee shop?” The search engine combines your question with geolocation information provided by your phone to present you with relevant results.
The Right Questions Win
Digital marketing firms ask all sorts of questions without even knowing it. Keyword research is, in itself, a question. According to the team at Webtek Digital Marketing, keyword research answers one of the most fundamental questions in the SEO realm: which keywords are the most appropriate ones to target for this particular client?
The point of all of this is to say that asking the right questions is the key to winning the online marketing game. If you know what your customers want to know, you can focus your digital marketing efforts on providing answers. That is how you win customers. That is how you sell products and services.
Do you want to write guest posts guaranteed to generate traffic? Then find out what types of questions your customers are asking about your industry. Use your posts to answer them. Do you want people to read your blog to learn more about a topic you are passionate about? Find out what they are asking about that topic.
There are lots of ways to discover the right questions. These are another topic for another post. In closing, the most important thing for you to know is that the simple question is the foundation of online marketing success. It is digital marketing gold. Every answer to a legitimate question will bring in customers.
