Unlocking the Secrets of InBound Marketing for Promo Products with David and Cathy Houston (Delta Marketing)

Traditional marketing methods in the promotional products industry have been largely interruption-based tactics: unwanted emails, intruding calls, boring social media posts.

Interruption-based tactics are big and flashy but largely ineffective, despite rampant use.

• If you’re a distributor, how do you develop intriguing content that drives more prospects to your business?

• If you’re a supplier, how do you get a distributor engaged in the product you are promoting?

Seth Godin famously advised that if you want to build a successful business, solve more problems for your customers.

Or, in the words of David Houston, “Always be helping.”

David and Cathy Houston of Delta Marketing Group reinvented their business after a series of crises (if you haven’t heard the Houston’s story, you should check it out).

At our skucon event in Las Vegas, the Houston’s shared their transformation from print to content marketing agency, in their session “Why Our Customers Don’t Care About Price (Unlocking the Secrets of InBounding Marketing for Promo Products).

Inbound Marketing (also known as Content Marketing) has become a vague phrase that small businesses generally have a hard time implementing, but content marketing is simply about helping customers solve their problems.

David and Cathy demystify inbound marketing by breaking down the complexity into essential ingredients that you can implement today, including:

• Using inbound marketing to build trust

• How to convince a customer to think beyond price

• Discerning where customers are at in the buyer’s journey (lifecycle)

• The power of personas for prospecting

• The significance of a multi-channel marketing presence

• How to outsmart, not outspend, the competition

• The power of quarterly sprints for your marketing plan

To help maximize the advice from the Houston’s session, consider the following questions:

1. Who are your top 5-10 customers?

2. Who are your buyers within these organizations?

3. What types of problems do you solve for your top 5-10 customers?

4. Are there correlations between different customers and the problems that you solve for each?

5. Consider the buyer and their personality, their role within the organization, and what specific problems you help resolve for them. Are there similarities among your buyers that could be combined into one composite persona?

These questions help create better conversations and lead to real solutions. Here’s David and Cathy to explain:

Thanks to David and Cathy for their generous advice and for being willing to share their journey with us (rarely will you find experts on lead gen within our industry who are willing to share). You can download the PDF from the Houston’s presentation, here: