When it comes to life lessons, nothing can truly teach you more than fishing. The patience, practice, and skill needed to be a professional, or least accomplished, fisherman are all traits that will serve a person well throughout their lives. Fortunately, fishing can also teach plenty of lessons and provide a better understanding of being a businessman.
If you are looking for help developing digital marketing plans and social media strategies to attract you target audience, check out these seven tips below. You’ll be amazed at the vast similarities between fishing and reaching your digital marketing goals!
1. Know where your targets are:
Much like a fisherman, you can have the best bait, rod, and boat in the world. However, if you don’t know where your fish is, then all this is for nothing. So, instead of casting your line out in empty waters, do some target audience research and find the areas that your fish spend most of their time.
In the digital world, you need to research where your target customers are online to gain maximum engagement. Find insights into engagements on popular search engines and social media platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter. These analytics will show you where any potential buyers are searching for products and services. Wherever they are, that’s where you should be casting your social media marketing line!
2. Have bait that the fish will go for:
Market research is a critical element of any digital strategy. So, you need to spend significant time testing your content strategy and ensuring that your online offering is something that visitors to your website will want.
3. Give it a second:
Digital marketing campaigns take time, but if you’ve picked the right spot you can bet it will yield results. Instead of quickly drawing out and moving elsewhere, set a reasonable amount of time for your marketing campaigns and be patient!
4. Study your competition:
Competitive fishing requires more than just knowledge about the fish and potential golden spots; it requires you to understand who you are competing against. Is the competition using a new type of rod that seems to be successful? Or perhaps their bait is unique? Understand why they are successful and use that to help improve your tactics!
You need to ensure your marketing tactics are targeted at meeting your customers’ needs; this is where researching your competitors’ online marketing channels and comparing their strategies and offerings to your own can come in handy.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) keyword research and Google Analytics will help compare the content on your website (from service pages to blog posts) to that of your competitors. This will show you which content and keywords are ranking better and give you insights into interactions on each site. Once you have this information, you can implement changes to your content marketing strategy that will increase the number of clicks on your website and where you rank in Google Search Results.
5. Alter for conditions:
In fishing, the weather plays a massive role. If it’s too cold, too hot, or too windy, a good fisherman needs to know how to properly adjust. However, as a businessman, you need to understand what conditions in digital, social media, and the world are affecting your customers. Is a holiday coming up? Is there something in the media that is gripping the nation’s attention? Use that to relate with your customers and connect with them on a deeper level!
6. Stick with what works:
If a certain rod, bait, and fishing spots yield impressive results, then don’t change what works. The fish will tell you when something needs changing because they will stop biting, so use their feedback to alter your strategy.
7. Trust your gut:
A good businessman should have an instinctive gut, just like any intuitive fisherman. You can have every game plan laid out, every tactic thought through, but if your gut instinct is telling you to go with something – do it. Learn to trust your gut when it matters and you’ll find that, most of the time, it pays off big time to gamble a bit!
As a businessman and an avid fisherman, the correlation between the two became readily apparent a long time ago. Using digital media to reach your target audience is much like trying to catch a particular type of fish. You need to thoroughly understand your target, research the conditions, use methods that work, and trust your gut!
Feel free to contact me if you need help and advice with your digital marketing strategy. Hopefully, my years of experience in the online world and out on the waters can help you reel in those big fish!
Emmanuel, thank you 🙂
Very impressive