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Successful marketing strategies have changed a great deal in the past few years. In fact, many of today’s marketing professionals are lacking in critical marketing skills. Let’s face it, marketing has changed. It’s important to keep up with those changes.

Press Releases and Standard Pitches Won’t Cut It

Public Relations 101 used to cover the art and science of press releases and pitches. It’s important to ensure that you’re being talked about, but this strategy is passé. Marketers should no longer aim for being the golden gatekeepers of a company. You are in charge of letting a select few be in the new. In today’s marketing environment, you have to share your story with the masses to keep up. It’s not about cultivating relationships with a select few; it’s keeping your face in front of everyone. It’s about telling a compelling story and promoting that story throughout your network. You should be focusing on creating content in multiple channels such as social media, blogs, and more  designed to convey your brand’s message to buyers, investors, media, evangelists, and customers. Marketing is still about cultivating relationships; your focus has just gotten bigger.

Branding isn’t About Creating a Great Logo

Your logo is no longer the main focus in your advertising campaign. Of course, having a well-designed logo is essential, but you need to embrace the bigger picture. Design has become intertwined with key performance indicators. There is no gap between your marketing strategy, execution, and feedback. Products may be made in factories, but brands are developed in the mind. It’s important to attract and delight your customers, prospects, and leads. You’ll have to dispense easily digestible and highly visual interactions. Design can no longer be an afterthought. Understanding the various channels that you’ll be leveraging is vital. Branding and log creation is still a primary focus, but you have to concentrate on the total experience instead of just a couple of aspects.

No More Content Guessing Games

Marketing is a  real-time occurrence, not a long-term strategy. There are more tools to analyze and act on metrics than ever before. To this end, all marketers should be able to gather and analyze marketing data on a daily basis.You can’t pay the bill with marketing data or Facebook Likes. You have to know what numbers matter most to a company. You also have to know how to act accordingly. The only real differences now is that you can get data faster, and have more accurate results. The biggest challenge you face is taking those results and making a move on them in a timely manner.

It’s Not About Campaigns, It’s About Continuous Engagement

Launching a marketing campaign for each new product is no longer necessary or desirable. Unless you’re a company like Apple, no one really cares what your next move is. Your focus needs to be every day interactions. Everything happens in real-time.  Consumers live, work, and interact with technology on a daily basis. Their interactions aren’t organized around a campaign schedule you devise. Your leads, prospects, and customers leverage social media networks to research products, give feedback, make complaints, and solicit recommendations on a daily basis. Continuous is the new face of the marketing campaign. This is achieved with a cultivated network of owned assets designed to attract, convert, and delight your audience.

In today’s age, too many people think they’re capable of marketing. This isn’t the case. Creativity alone won’t cut it. You have to be aware of the subtleties of the business. The face of marketing has changed and if you haven’t kept up, it’s easy to get lost. If that happens, your chances of developing a successful strategy are nil. You can’t afford not to keep up.

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Blogging is a general term used for both personal and business content publishing. Though these days almost everyone has a blog, very few bloggers have actually succeeded to have a loyal subscriber base. Blogging is a good tool for any business who wants to reach out to the global audience. Here is a step by step guide to use blogging successfully for business.

Know Your Audience – The first and perhaps the most important aspect of blogging for business is to identify your target audience. There are a lot of people looking for information online and your job is to reach them and provide that information. Bonds can be built only when you know where to find these people and who these people are. Once this is done, you can move to the next step.

Identify Your Purpose – There is a purpose behind every blog and that is what copywriting is all about. Be sure of your purpose and do not shy away from revealing it to the audience tactfully.  Tell them what you want them to do now – like the post, share on social media, leave a comment, subscribe to the blog or visit your website. Whatever it is, be open about it and let them make their choice.

Meet Their Expectations -  Your audience has certain expectation from the content you are going to provide them through your blog. This expectation can be a result of your marketing efforts or probably what your competition does or does not provide. You need to find it out and get it done. Fresh content that the readers find valuable will earn you their loyalty. Also, maintain a schedule while posting so that the readers know when to expect your next post. This gets you credibility.  When your audience knows that you are predictable, you gain their trust. Trust is what turns potential customers to customers and customers into loyal customers.

Focus on them – Agreed you have the best products or services in the industry but your readers want to know why. Give them the freedom to post their problems and provide them a relevant solution using one of your solutions. You may not want to start selling right away but you need to keep the talk relevant to your industry. Best marketers involve the users with them and it is the users that are promoting their products and services for them instead of them doing it directly.

The Metrics - Today, tools are available to measure different parameters of success of a blog. Start with short term goals and also make a few long term goals. If needed, take help from a SEO expert and learn some basic concepts. SEO is not only about link building or writing keyword rich content. Learn how to strategise and plan your blog posts.

Regular blogging with the purpose of sharing and informing people goes a long way. There are many organizations that have gained huge success through blogging over the years and continue to do so. It is all about communication and bonding. Learn to do it right and see how blogging can take your business to new heights.

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Successful business owners understand the importance of customer feedback. It is, by far, the best way to discover what the customer wants and needs. This knowledge allows the business owner to more easily customize the service or product to better satisfy each and every customer. Happy customers usually discuss their experience with friends and family, often times sending a truly organic referral back to the business that pleased them. The key to maximizing this entire process is in the effective management of customer feedback. Here are some tips to help your business successfully gather and utilize customer feedback for the growth of your company.

Know Your Destination

Before starting the car, most people know the destination they want to drive toward. Managing customer feedback utilizes the same principle.  A company must first understand its objectives and  goals before they can effectively utilize the information obtained through managing customer feedback.

Collect and Manage

Customers leave feedback in many ways. From in-person complaints at the service desk to glowing, but virtual, comments on the company blog, each customer interaction is important. Take the time to thoroughly assess each and every touch point that your customers use when dealing with your company and which touch points are used most often. This list of touch points, when sorted, can quickly show business owners which ones are most effective and which could be improved upon.

Now that you are actively tracking and collecting feedback, the next step is to manage this wealth of information correctly. Put in place systems and controls that help keep this information orderly, timely and easily accessible. For instance, the company blog should consider forcing registration before visitors can leave comments or have a comment approval process to deal with irrelevant comments, unacceptable language and spam. In person complaints might be sent directly to an on-site customer care specialist. Each of these examples depict ways of managing feedback. However, you choose to handle each touch, make sure that the response is both appropriate and immediate.

Respond,  Advocate and Incorporate

Customer feedback is best-managed when you have a pre-engineered plan of action. Knowing how you will handle various touch points and having a set plan of action for each type makes it easier to respond appropriately in any situation. These timely, caring responses show the customer that you truly value them, making for stronger customer relationships in the future.

Good customer feedback should also include a response of some type. Feedback can be a valuable tool for both staying in touch with current customers and targeting new customers. Sharing feedback of all types with team members is a great way to promote a feeling of well-being throughout the team. It also provides the best way to problem solve for solutions that will help to continue improving customer relationships.

In today’s fast paced world, effectively managing customer feedback is one of the best ways to truly understand your customer’s needs and wants. Using this information to continually improve the level of customer satisfaction directly defines the level of success the company will reach. Customer feedback is the best way to truly learn about your customer base, and as the old saying goes, the customer is always right!

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Business owners now have more choices than ever in how they present themselves and reach customers. If you are selling items online, for example, your marketing strategy might very well include a way to appeal to customers worldwide. Most businesses will be targeting customers within one country or even one specific area. One thing is for sure, though. Whether you are trying to market to customers that live in your town or across the globe, integrating online advertising into your marketing plan is essential if you want to maximize your chances of success.

Combining Your Efforts

Implementing both traditional and online marketing strategies is the best route to go because it casts a wide net that will reach different kinds of customers. Your marketing plan doesn’t necessarily need to be split equally so that you have half traditional advertising and half online. Look at where you are now and slowly go in the other direction. A few online advertisements on websites your customers likely frequent can be a good, slow start.

Expanding Your Reach

Get creative with both forms of marketing and take advantage of low-cost marketing efforts. Consider your product and who your primary customers are. If you have a very visual product, perhaps connecting with customers on Pinterest would be good, but you don’t want to sign up for every social media website. Target specific ones that you think would be a best fit for your customers.

Proceed with Caution

Expand your outreach slowly and always have a thorough plan for every marketing campaign. Traditional advertisements may include handing out a free flyer with coupons to customers in grocery bags as they check out, but putting flyers on customers’ wind shields is more likely to inspire their ire than their business.

Likewise, while trying out new strategies, be sure to think through the consequences. Social media is free and extremely effective, but you do want to hire someone to do it right. For example, if you set up an official Facebook page, you need to have at least two administrators that work different shift. If you are on a social networking site and someone does sloppy posts, neglects to post, or fails to respond to customer complaints in a timely manner, the social media marketing strategy could actually hurt your brand. Doing too much too soon is a bad mistake too many businesses make.

Tracking The Success of Marketing Strategies

Every business is unique and will have different levels of success with types of marketing strategies. When someone signs up for your company’s newsletters or sends a message to your website, it’s okay to ask where they found your company. You can track where the hits to your website are coming from as well. When a customer completes an in-person transaction, you can also ask how they found you. Use both simple and sophisticated methods to see which marketing efforts are most effective and focus more on those. As you continue to grow your business.

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Business to business marketing, or B2B, can seem like just an extension of regular marketing. The same principles of marketing should apply. The only difference is the type of product being sold supports a business selling its wares to consumers, and the business client is probably more savvy about what’s involved so the selling requires more technical knowledge for successful pitching. However, there are other aspects that businesses need to pay attention to so as to enjoy better results from their marketing efforts.

Trend 1 - Focus on Targeted Marketing

Too often businesses throw themselves out in campaigns to just anyone on the hope that other businesses seeing an ad will just pick up the phone and call for orders. Unfortunately, businesses can be just as finicky about ordering services and products as regular consumers. The continual blanketing approach just wastes a lot of money and ad space most of the time.

Instead, businesses need to put their efforts into targeted marketing, going after those business clients who definitively have a need for particular service or product and more likely to consummate an order. This saves resources towards efforts that produce better results, and connects with better leads.

Trend 2 - Ignore the Click Metrics, Focus on Dollars

Businesses live and die on their revenue. Lots of Internet clicks to a website or marketing effort can sound really good, but if they don’t translate to sales, what’s the point? Marketing efforts need to produce, just like any other aspect of a business. There needs to be a realized connection within a set time window that a marketing effort has produce real results. Otherwise, it’s just a waste of money.

Trend 3 - Don’t Forget Price

B2B marketing has to address the price factor. Client businesses are regularly trying to keep their operating costs down. So they don’t need a Cadillac product. They need one that works and is cheaper than other options. B2B marketing still has to include the cost factor and make it attractive, either in a way that reduces long-term purchasing with better quality or reduces short-term cost with a lower price.

Trend 4 - Back to Bidding

Online auction platforms provide a consolidation of businesses to businesses in a targeted manner. While an auction approach obviously increases price competition, it also allows a business to show its stuff to a targeted client versus just an unknown party. This is because auction buyers have to describe what they need adequately for a bid to work. The information game shifts to the bidder versus the buyer. The buyer then only controls the winning price or winning bid that best matches the defined need.

Trend 5 - Don’t Ignore the Power of Email

It seems a bit old-fashioned now, but targeted email marketing still works. Why? If a client already has a need, emails marketing solutions for that need resonate. The challenge, however, is for the B2B marketing to know what the given client need is in the first place. That takes research which means B2B marketers need to study their clients and find their areas that are receptive to offers. That research can be in the form of identifying new client issues from their quarterly reports to talking with their buyers and figuring out what the top needs list is this month for a company versus last month. In short, good sleuthing provides material for targeted emails providing good alternatives to a client.

In Summary

Again, it’s important to remember in B2B marketing that businesses don’t behave exactly like regular consumers. They have a better product or service knowledge, and their priorities can be markedly different. Paying attention to these details as well as focused efforts on receptive business parties and revenue will pay dividends for commercial marketers.

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With the state of the Internet today, and the importance of digital marketing therein, key performance indicators (KPI) have taken on a greater value than ever before. Whether you’re a small business or an established brand, having a solid knowledge of KPIs is essential. Finding the right metrics by which to measure your KPI is important as there are a wide range of metrics, but not all are as valid as you might think. Luckily, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best metrics by which to measure your content marketing.

How Many Visitors Has Your Content Brought In?

Measuring unique visits is a useful tool to figure out precisely how many individuals have visited your site and viewed your content. While it might not provide much information besides that, it serves as a useful foundation for other tools to compare with.

Where Is Your Content Being Viewed?

Understanding the location of your viewers is an important aspect of marketing because it helps you decide where to allocate your advertising resources to better engage your audience. In fact, Google Analytics provides detailed information on the geography of visitors for precisely this purpose.

How Are Visitors Viewing Your Content?

While detailed knowledge of your visitors can be useful, so too can how they’re viewing your content. Are they doing so from a computer or a mobile phone? Understanding the difference between the two and what it means for your content will better equip you for future updates and allow your site to be more user-friendly.

How Long Is Your Visitor Engaged?

The problem with the first KPI, the measure of individual visitors, is that it does not discern a difference between users visiting the site for a brief moment and those that are actively engaged in the content and spend hours on your site. This is referred to as the bounce rate, a crucial factor in determining the success of your content. A high bounce rate indicates that you need to improve viewer retention.

What Parts Of Your Site Are Getting The Most Attention?

Heat maps are an often overlooked tool in determining the effectiveness of your website. By viewing what areas of your site are being clicked on the most, you can rearrange your website’s layout to better reflect the portions of your site that are the most attractive to visitors.

How Should You React To Comments?

The Internet has both blessed and cursed people by offering everyone the ability to communicate with complete strangers at any time. Some businesses try to curb this freedom of speech by restricting what can and cannot be posted, but this is a mistake that should be avoided at all costs. Discussions are your best tool for advertising your site and can often lead to sharing via social media sites.

As you can see, there a wide range of available options for those interested in taking their online marketing seriously. With the right tools and metrics, KPIs can not only give you valuable information on your target demographics, but also show the areas that your business can still improve upon. The only thing left to do is get out there and start making content.

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(Source: bowden2bowden.co)

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(Source: bowden2bowden.co)

You spend so much time and effort on your digital marketing strategy that you hate to think it’s not getting the results you need. Assuming you’ve taken care of the basics – analyzing your best keywords, integrating your website, email and social media marketing, and filtering and targeting prospects for each campaign – there are just three more items on the effective content checklist.

Stir the target’s emotions

The reason we do marketing is to create differentiation from our competitors and to arouse the emotion of “want” in our targets. It’s the “want” that causes people to choose one product over another that might be equally suitable, and want is a strong enough emotion to overcome price differentials and availability issues.

Creating the desire for your product — the want –requires more than just a fact sheet and a list of bullets. You need to analyze your target prospect and determine what makes them tick. If you’re selling to consumers, you’ll be trying to tap into basic human needs for status, belonging and love. The best consumer pitches make the target feel like they will be cooler, prettier, smarter, or that they’ll find true love if they use the product.

For selling to business, you’ll focus more on saving money, increasing revenue or improving cash flow. Those wouldn’t seem to lead directly to wanting one product over another, until you realize what your target is thinking. They are making the connection between your product’s cost savings and their next raise or promotion.

Say something interesting

Perhaps it’s true that there’s nothing new to say about your product or the problem it solves, but that’s unlikely. Your job is to find a way to add a new take on an old idea. One sure-fire way to create interest is to add a new case study and include a few enthusiastic quotes from the subject of the study. People love case studies because it gives them a feeling of connection with the subject, and, by extension, a connection with your product.

Look at forums or sites where your target prospect gathers, and see what the hottest topics are. Pick one, and incorporate your ideas and opinions on it into your content. Find a way to put a new twist on the conversation so people have a reason to read your content. You’ll be building your brand’s reputation and getting people to engage with your site.

Be audacious or memorable

Beige is a great color for a wall and vanilla is a great flavor, but neither inspires the strong emotion of chocolate, chili peppers or fiery red. You need to create something bold and memorable to excite the interest of your targets. Add humor to your content, coin a new phrase or at least add an interesting graphic. Customers are bombarded with advertising and sales content constantly in email, social media, websites, print and TV. They’ve learned to tune much of it out. You must do something to make your messages stand out from the crowd or you’ll fade into the background like that beige wall.

Consider Kmart’s recent “Ship my pants” campaign. Crude – yes. Funny – yes. Memorable – emphatic yes. The ad not only reached its target market, but it also got coverage in mainstream news media that caused people to seek out the ad to see what all the fuss was about. Like the ad or hate it, it broke through and grabbed attention.

As you work on your digital marketing campaigns and strategy, keep these three simple concepts in mind and you will find that your content is more effective at attracting attention and improving your conversion rate.

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