B2B Marketing Blog

6 Pro Ways to use Twitter for B2B Marketing

By |2023-04-24T11:02:40+00:00December 25th, 2016|

topicIcon B2B Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

6 Pro Ways to use Twitter for B2B Marketing

Introduction – 6 Pro Ways to use Twitter for B2B Marketing

As a marketer, you know the importance of channelling your marketing throughout different social media networks in order to lead people to your website and through your marketing funnel down the buyer’s journey.

When it comes to social networks, B2B businesses tend to focus on LinkedIn and overlook Twitter. Yet Twitter is one handy tool that needs to be taken into consideration for your B2B purposes.

Although Twitter is widely used for personal accounts, it can have enormous advantages when it comes to B2B marketing. FollowingTwitter’s latest update, you can now tweet longer messages, add useful content images and engage in richer conversations with your targeted audience and therefore build your brand and generate leads. Take advantage of it.

Twitter is an extremely powerful tool for every CMO in the B2B field, it offers a wide range of advantages, such as real-time communication with your customers, providing customer service, connecting with other businesses and industry leaders (and learning from them!), positioning your brand as an industry expert and strengthening your offsite SEO.

This post will teach you 6 pro ways to use Twitter for B2B.

1. Find and interact with the right people

As a business, as awesome as he may be, it wouldn’t be very helpful if you followed Shia LaBeouf.

For B2B marketing, the focus lies on interacting with your target audience.

There are around 300 Million+ Twitter accounts globally, and thousands, if not millions of people out there are actively tweeting and posting. As a marketer, it’s important be proactive and reach out to those people who potentially want the product or service your company offers.

So, who should you follow?

  • People and businesses in your industry, particularly those who are considered as leaders or experts in their fields.
  • Your competitors, peers and partners.
  • your own clients and prospects

The first steps are the hardest. But don’t forget, even Rome wasn’t built in one day. So be patient. If you want people to follow you back, it is of great importance that you engage with them. In any social platform communication is the key – and that applies to Twitter just as any. Tweet at your targeted audience, retweet their tweets and content, and you have a high chance of getting on their radar and for them to return the favour. It’s always worth a try, and you might be surprised who will follow you back at the end of the day.

2. Post during relevant hours

According to an analysis conducted by CoSchedule, the perfect time to schedule your tweets is during business hours. The best times to tweet are during lunch hours where prospects have spare time to check their social accounts. You can also schedule your tweets after 5 or 6 pm when people leave work and have time to check out their Twitter feed.

3. Don’t just tweet – post rich and engaging content

No one wants to hear what the weather’s outside your office – that’s boring. Understand your buyer personas and communicate in their language. Always keep in mind that even though you use Twitter as a B2B marketing channel, there’s always a human sitting behind the desk reading and writing tweets.

The most important aspect of (re-)tweeting of rich and engaging contents is that you know your target audience by heart. Look out for what they are tweeting, what they are looking for and what they need. Your targeted audience might be posting about their needs – be on the lookout.

Things to consider:

  • If your company offers eBooks, white papers, cheat sheets, etc., make sure to promote them on Twitter and always point out what your potential customers can gain from looking at your content.
  • Links to your website and/or your blog – links aren’t counted towards the restriction of the 140 characters
  • Links to interesting articles about your industry, business or anything that might interest your targeted audience
  • Visuals – a picture is worth a thousand words and that’s way more than 140 characters. Look how SAP made a semi dull tweet come to life with an image:

SAP twitter.png

 

Retweet and share content of the people you follow. That might not only make them follow you back, but it is an easy way to generate relevant content and keep your account alive.

4. Send personal messages

If you’ve researched well enough and found your target audience on Twitter, reach out to them by personal messages and engage in conversation. Don’t interrupt and don’t make it all about you. Always consider what might interest them and how you could help them out and add value.

5. #HashtagsAreYourBestFriend

The most common and most effective way to be seen by others is to use hashtags in your posts. Always make sure they are relevant and not just nonsense.

Twitter lists and organises their topics by using hashtags, so this is a great way of making your content stand out and making it easier for others to see it.

6. Last but not least – tweak your twitter profile

A standard, boring Twitter brand profile does not really encourage others trust you. So make sure you have a profile that people will find interesting and professional.

Always include:

  • Your bio: be clear on why your business is doing what it is doing, how your business can help others, and what your business offers. Pro tip: since Twitter bios are searchable, include relevant keywords.
  • Profile Picture: In most cases, the company logo is the perfect profile picture.
  • Location: Let your followers know where your business is located.
  • Link to your website: Always make it easy to find your website.

Conclusion

If you haven’t used Twitter as B2B marketing channel, it’s time to make use of it! Use this powerful tool to strengthen your brand.

Always make sure to create useful and engaging content. Make yourself stand out by using this microblogging service. Always keep in mind the great advantages Twitter has to offer. Twitter is another platform to communicate with your partners, clients and prospects. Focus on your overall content and lead generation strategies and repackage them for Twitter

Lastly, make your account easy to be found by placing a Twitter follow button on your website, email signature and blog.

Happy tweeting!

If you find this useful, you’re invited to download our B2B Marketing Best Practices that Every CMO Must Know Ebook. Get your FREE copy now ==>

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Stop Being Boring! Brand Blog Writing Tips

By |2023-04-24T11:07:27+00:00December 13th, 2016|

topicIcon Content Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

Blog Writing Tips header

Introduction

When writing a blog post, the biggest mistake people make is to write in a formal style. A good blog is friendly and easy to read. It’s almost be the opposite of an academic paper.  Imagine you’re having a conversation or writing to a friend, and apply the same style to your writing. This post will walk you through brand blog writing tips that’ll make your content enjoyable and get people to read and relate to your brand.

1. Always use contractions

School teachers, cover your eyes for this next sentence..
Whether speaking or writing – use contractions!
Case in point, check out two versions of one sentence, with and without contractions:
1. With contractions:
Don’t forget your goal is to get your buyer personas to read your content. It’s important your blog visitors will receive content that’s compelling. Otherwise, you’re wasting time driving traffic that won’t ever convert.
2. Without contractions:

Do not forget your goal is to get your buyer personas to read your content. It is important your blog visitors will receive content that is compelling. Otherwise, you are wasting time, generating traffic that will not ever convert.

Which of the above was easier to read?

2. Write in a simple language

KISS – Keep it simple stupid.
Big words don’t make you sound smarter or knowledgeable. They make you sound boring and unconfident. Write your blog as if you are writing it to a third grader.
Here’s an example of a sentence with and without simple language.
Without:
Going back to time immemorial, marketing teams have relied upon reports to measure the success or failure of their campaigns, at first using manual data entry and storage and later on, as technology evolved, progressing to online machinery.
Still here? let’s check out the simple language version:
Marketers have always relied on reports to measure the success or failure of their campaigns. Initially using manual data entry and storage, and later progressing to computers.
Same message, less effort to understand.

3. Be clear and concise

Scan your text and remove any extra words, irrelevant ideas and obvious details that don’t contribute to the flow of the text.

It’s a good idea to include analogies, metaphors and basically anything that can help simplify concepts.

4. Use short sentences and paragraphs

Your text should be as clean and easy on your readers eyes. Make sure to create white spaces around your writing. White spaces provide readers a rest and create a sense of rhythm.

5. Cut all fluffy words from your writing

no more: very, really, actually, just, incredibly, in order to etc,  – they don’t add anything to your sentences.

6 . Always spell out acronyms

Don’t assume your readers are familiar with all the acronyms you use. That’s true even when writing for professionals. Whenever writing an acronym, make sure to spell it out on its first mention. Also, don’t go overboard with acronyms, you’re not writing a user manual.

7. Spell check!

If this needs an explanation, you’re in the wrong line of work dude.

Conclusion

Keep your blog simple, flowing ,fun to read, and easy to understand. People are busy, make them stop and then make them stay. If you’re a content rockstar, take it a step further and make them want to come back for more.

If you found this useful, you might also find our ultimate blog content editing checklist. Click below to get your free copy.

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B2B Brand Storytelling

By |2023-04-05T11:47:52+00:00December 11th, 2016|

topicIcon B2B Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

B2B Brand Storytelling header

Introduction to B2B Brand Storytelling

In a world where your goal should be connecting and building long-lasting relationships with clients to be, it’s important to resonate with the people whose problems you solve with your product or service.

If you think emotions and human interactions are irrelevant to B2B brand storytelling, “because you are targeting businesses”, consider this a wakeup call:

B2B isn’t about businesses communicating with businesses. It’s about humans connecting with humans.

A brand story has the magical power of bringing your brand to life, providing it with context and granting your audience something to identify with.

This post will walk you through the elements of brand storytelling and finding your unique brand voice.

1. Find your “why”

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Finding your “why” will help you lay the grounds for your brand’s story.

The guru on this matter is Simon Sinek. Marketers swear by his well-known “golden circle”:

Golden Circle

The idea is to understand:

  • WHY your business is doing what it is doing.
  • HOW your business helps and
  • WHAT your business offers.

The answers to your “why” and “how” should be led by emotions. Cold answers result in heartless messages. Try staying indifferent to Microsoft‘s “why”:

Microsoft's Why

 

Inspiring right? Consider motivation, passion, and what emotions your answers should evoke among your target audience. Which leads us to the next element:

2. Understand your audience

Your content isn’t for “everyone”, it’s important to figure out who your buyer personas are. Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal buyer. Figure out what your buyer persona’s goals and challenges are. What do they care about?

Ready to Step up your marketing?

 

3. Make sure your story includes a conflict

Once you understand your buyer personas, consider how you help them, what conflict are you solving? The conflict should correlate with your buyer persona’s problems, their needs, and their stage in the buyer’s journey.

Buyer_journey

 

Outline the problems your buyer personas have, with solutions that are relevant to their stage of the buyer’s journey. That will provide you with an understanding of the conflicts you can use in your content.

Remember this: if your story does not include a conflict, it’s not a story it’s a pitch!

4. Make sure your story includes a resolution

The purpose behind every stage of your story should be a resolution. Putting metaphors aside, your content should include a call to action that provides a solution relevant to the stage of the persona at hand.

5. Be authentic

“Tell the truth, but make it fascinating.” – David Ogilvy

People call BS quickly – don’t make promises you can’t keep and don’t make statements you can’t back up. This is a long term game, the idea is to build your brand’s authority and get your personas to come back for more value. This however does not mean that you need to be “more of the same”. A good storyteller will keep people on the edge of their seat. Make sure you aren’t writing technically, remember your “why” and let it lead the way.

6. Be clear and concise

Don’t get too in love with your own voice. There’s no need to say the same thing in five different ways. Remember that people are impatient. Review each sentence and ask yourself

  • does this contribute to the story?
  • Does it add value?
  • Is it interesting?

No? delete it.

Conclusion

All businesses have people behind them, all businesses have a soul. Brining your vision and passion to the front of your brand, is the key to generating human relationships that have the potential of evolving to long-term business co-operations. Learn your audience, tell your story, be authentic. There’s no better way to attract strangers, get them to identify with your vision and “join your tribe”.

Ready to Step up your marketing?

 

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Stay on track: How to Report and Measure Inbound Marketing ROI

By |2023-04-24T11:08:44+00:00November 29th, 2016|

topicIcon Inbound Marketing Reporting

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

measuring inbound marketing header

Introduction – Measure Inbound Marketing ROI

“A recent survey of 1,200 CEO’s indicated that nearly 70% had lost trust in their marketers’ ability to deliver growth, in part because of the inability to show ROI on campaigns.”  Don’t be that kind of CMO!

Inbound Marketing is one of the most important, yet underrated and misunderstood sections of business, particularly this ever so mentioned key performance indicator “ROI”.

So what does this section contain? The lovable, useful and job-saving ROI (Return on Investment). In layman’s terms, ROI means how much money you brought in for the cost of your campaign. In this post, I’ll break down how to calculate Inbound Marketing ROI, and what metrics to take into account. I’ll also throw in some of the proven and most efficient ways to track your Inbound Marketing for that exact purpose.

Why keeping track of those numbers is so important

The average CEO often sees the marketing sector as nothing more than a costly hassle with little to no reward. Without proof or numeric data to show exactly how an Inbound Marketing campaign can be significantly useful, the title CMO can be nothing but a “glorified role without any purposeful impact on the bottom line.”

Without a measured ROI, you as CMO have no possible way to quantify what your business gets in return for its possibly costly campaign. B2B Marketing budgets can, have, and will be slashed without evidence of effect. Why spend all that money on something that MIGHT improve sales? The CEO ponders, but cutting marketing’s budget could be a choice that results in the slow death of business.

More so, with a calculated ROI a failed campaign doesn’t mean a scolding or vacant position for said CMO. The issue a lot of B2B marketers have is the simple lack of analytic ability in its marketing team, e.g. they don’t know what metrics or parameters they should be documenting. When marketing leaders were asked to name the factors that their department was weakest in, 49% stated: “Use of analytics to guide marketing decisions.” If a CMO is keeping track of the right metrics, a failed, or not totally successful marketing campaign can become nothing more than a learning experience, or even beneficial to the marketing team in the future.

How to calculate ROI

On paper, ROI couldn’t be any easier to explain. You take the revenue derived from the investment, subtract the total cost of the investment and divide the total by the expense of the investment:

(revenue-cost)/cost

Sounds simple, right? It’s a trap. It’s never that easy.

“Hard” and “Soft” metrics

Hard metrics are things that can be easily quantified, for example, if you sold a product for $ 350 and the overall cost of advertising was $ 100 your ROI rate would be = 2.5

Soft metrics, on the other hand, are harder to define, and are not concrete. For example, you can’t easily quantify social media attention or buzz, but it is a very affecting factor to your bottom line. You could count every Facebook like as monetary value and treat it like a hard metric, but this is incredibly unreliable, unrealistic and amounts to wishful thinking.

Marketing Automation eBook

 

How to calculate ROI for Inbound Marketing

Now that you got your head around the basic formula, and are certainly excited about the return, you will face one dilemma: the investment.

Simply said: profitability depends on numerous things that requires you to look beyond simple sales figures.

Some companies subtract the overall cost of the marketing campaign from how much the customer paid, but what they fail to do is to factor in the ‘true’ budget for marketing and it’s totally and completely wrong. CMO’s often fail to take into account other costs for Inbound Marketing, while this creates more work, it creates a more realistic ROI measurement.

The 4 Up-front costs to consider when measuring inbound ROI:

1. Employees costs

An example of a seemingly obvious but often neglected metric is the cost of employees. Working with an in-house marketing team, or hiring freelancers can be costly, and depending on the experience of said employee(s) you could end up paying lots for little.

2. Agency costs

Short term-wise, it’s usually cost effective to work with an expert agency. Agency teams work together providing only the skills and expertise needed at the given point of your campaign, meaning you pay for those skills and expertise when they are of use. Long term-wise, it’s smart to calculate the ROI of training your in-house team and to gradually shift to that, hence keeping the know-how under your wing.

3. Marketing automation tools

Unfortunately for B2B marketers, bombarding a potential lead with advertising, while simpler than Inbound Marketing, is interruptive and doesn’t prove effective. The most effective way to implement an Inbound Marketing strategy is to use marketing automation tools. Factor the cost of the latter when calculating ROI. Yearly costs vary between $2,000 to $60,000. There are “best of breed” solutions as well as “all in one”.

These tools provide closed loop solutions that will make a CMO’s life a breeze. The challenge of working without these is titanic. Marketing automation tools have been proven to create marketing improvement, because more feedback for every sector is provided and a potential lead’s behaviour can be monitored and tracked from the source.

Tools that enable you to keep track of the traffic, or the click to your website don’t show you what influences leads to become MQLs, SQLs and eventually customers. You may have methods to receive the numbers but no real information on precisely how a sale was created. Without marketing automation tools, you’re almost playing a guessing game.

Marketing automated tools create feedback that is not only useful for marketing, but allows for every section of the business to know what methods result in sales and should be included.

4. Asset creation costs

So you have a stunning blog, you have in-house/ outsourced experts working on your strategy, and you’ve implemented automated marketing tools. What’s missing? Oh, that’s right, the core. You will need to create assets for your Inbound Marketing, i.e blog posts, ebooks, infographics, landing pages, CTAs and more).

Inbound Marketing agencies will have tier 1 writers and designers ready on demand. Freelancers can also result in a cheap and effective option for ‘one off’ content. Just remember that your inbound assets are probably the most important factor in your Inbound Marketing strategy, this is not the place to cut costs. If you decide to get your in-house team to create the assets, make sure to follow the following editing checklist. Factor asset creation costs into effect.

Where CMO’s handle metrics wrong

 1. “I know, I know, I should measure Inbound Marketing results, but I just don’t know how.”

A primal reason that CMO’s fail to use their analytic data in a beneficial way is that most of them don’t know what metrics are of value. It’s all well and good having a warehouse full of data, but utterly pointless if you don’t know what data is relevant or how to process it.

“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is better than two doubles.”
Steve Jobs

Marketers tend to track the large, great looking data that simulates results. As a CMO, it’s your job to keep track and monitor the most important metrics when it comes to generating leads. By now, you are certainly familiar on how to optimise your website or blog in order to create a long-lasting marketing strategy. If not, we strongly advise you to read our detailed guide.

Next to keyword rankings and conversion rates, it is important to understand the lifecycle stages for successful inbound sales. Simply said, you must know the steps to turn a stranger into a customer.

MQL (marketing qualified leads) and SQL’s (sales qualified leads) are as well key metrics you should know by heart, as they are the basis to improve your marketing and sales approach to incoming deals. If you just thought about SQL being a database, then we advise you to read our detailed article on the importance of MQLs and SQLs when it comes to generating leads.

But big numbers don’t confirm the generation of leads or conversions. While social media plays an essential part of Inbound Marketing and may lead to numerous results, it is important to track and monitor the quality of leads generated. Otherwise, you will end up asking yourself why you’re not getting high-quality B2B leads.

2. “I just measure what is easy!”

CMO’s love to collect the easy data, and often only focus on singular metrics, how many visits to a website, email systems to track how frequent emails are opened or how many attendees at events. The problem with prioritizing metrics like this is no promise of lead or conversion, and no variation in its methods. These metrics show interaction, yes, and generate potential leads too, but this data doesn’t show in concrete what influence was successful and the most efficient at gravitating leads and securing conversions. This metric alone isn’t enough to result in marketing improvement. To put into other words, there’s no easy way out.

Finding your way out of the maze

Good news: the hard part is over, so make yourself a nice cup of coffee and let the information sink in. Now that you understand the whole process of calculating and measuring the ROI, there are two recommended methods by marketing experts you should consider:

1. Closed-Loop-Marketing

The method of Closed-Loop-Marketing is recommended by HubSpot. This process makes sure that every step of measuring your ROI is documented and shared between departments.

 

 

Source: HubSpot

With this method, you have to focus on the right channels and offers that are the most powerful ones, help you to get clearer results, and gain insights into your target audience (as discussed here, defining the ideal customer persona is important to target your marketing strategy). It can also shorten your sales cycle and help you save overall investment costs.

In other words: The Closed-Loop-Marketing reporting helps you to quickly identify if something is broken or not. If it’s broken, fix it. If not, make it shine!

2. Attribution Modeling

A second, important method of reporting the ROI is tracking results of marketing programs to assign the value to the first (or last) program that has touched the deal. Since it is quite a complex method, it’s best to read through our overview of the attribution Modeling.

Conclusion

Reflect on past metrics that show Improvement.

“Study the past if you would define the future.”

― Confucius

No matter how big a number is, or the effort took, the primal thing to think upon is which metrics advance your marketing effectiveness. Data that proves one particular marketing method is working, will let the CMO know where to focus their time and resources, leading to less waste of financial investment. A market leader who doesn’t keep track of practical results and data creates no progression and leads to financial loss. So, if you want to keep your title of a CMO, better stay on track.

If you found this useful, I invite you to download our FREE Digital Marketing MUST Reports and Measures eBook. This is your guide to start measuring what truly matters in your campaigns and take control of your spend. Get your FREE copy now >>

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10 Ways to Nail Inbound Link Building

By |2023-04-24T11:09:55+00:00November 24th, 2016|

topicIcon Inbound Marketing SEM

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

10 Ways to Nail Inbound Link Building header

Introduction to Inbound Link Building

Building inbound links, aka backlinks, represents the process through which another website links to your website or blog. Literally, they are the links on other websites that lead and direct users to your own blog. The amount of inbound links to a website has a significant influence on the website’s SEO ranking. However, we’re playing a game of quality here, so the links you generate need to be from relevant, high authoritative websites with natural and reasonable anchor texts (the text that is being hyperlinked).

Any company, striving to generate relevant inbound traffic should spend time link building. This post will walk you through 10 pro ways to tackle this.

 

1. Write for people, not search engines

Successful Inbound Marketing is about educating and providing value to your prospective target audience. Make sure your content strategy doesn’t revolve around trying to rank on SERPS with no regard to your readers. Publish remarkable content that people will want to share and link to.

2. Give to receive

The message behind this method is literally giving to receive back. As in, giving outbound links on your website or blog to others, preferably popular and authoritative websites, in order to get noticed by them and, accordingly, get an inbound link back from them (shoutout to Moz, cough…). Now is the time to mention that websites with a higher authority than yours will have less of an incentive to link back to your content. That’s where the quality of your content steps into place. Be valuable and the web will acknowledge it. You can find out which websites are already linking to your blog using the Ahrefs tool.

3. Guest blogging

Cooperate with other blogs and write guest posts. Seek blogs where your buyer personas “hang out” and always keep context in mind. Websites such as MyBlogGuest are a great way to find websites who are actively seeking for guest bloggers.

4. Case studies

Write case studies about other businesses, your clients, or volunteer to have a case study conducted on you. This is a helpful strategy towards gaining inbound links in an easy and legit manner. If you make others look good in your blog, a clickbait is promised to come from their websites (this probably goes without saying, yet when publishing a case study about one of your clients, make sure they approve of it first and don’t mess up your most important relationships in the sake of link building).

5. Contribue to discussions

Participate in discussions in forums, Facebook groups and Q&A sites such as Quora. This is both an opportunity to show expertise to your buyer personas, as well as to trigger their curiousity and encourage them to visit your blog and learn more on the subject at hand. Note that with respect to SEO, placing a link on some websites (Quora for example) will not count as a point in your website’s favor and will not help your placement in SERPS. While such links (called no follow) might seem useless from an SEO perspective, their value in generating contextual and relevant inbound links is golden.

6. Visual content

Visual Content Importance for Inbound Link Building

Source: seopressor

Quality visual content such as infographics or charts tends to get a credit back as an inbound link. Their usage is increasing daily, and not everyone can or wants to get in the fuzz of making them. So consider this a small hack to getting linked back to (the above visual defenitely got us to link back to Seopressor – case in point).

7. Slideshows and presentations

Lots of people hate to make presentations themselves and just wish for someone else to have already made a slideshow they could use for their own needs in their blogs or on their websites. Take advantage of this loophole and put together relevant slideshows and presentations, so that others will be able to easily backlink to you.

8. Newsjacks and press releases

Say a new company is launching a product or a new business and wants to make a bold statement about themselves. Catch the rope and write about it, then try to showcase it and hook on to newswires that would be willing to share it, with backlinks of course.

9. Ask for help

No need to go around begging others to backlink to you. Just make sure you have relevant content that you are confident is good enough and look around for websites that would want to share it. Ask around to see if they’d like to collaborate. This is both for getting you more inbound links, and is also great for getting feedback.

10. Learn from others

If you feel like your blog is lacking what it needs to be more shareable and get higher SEO rankings, a good idea would be to search around the net, take a look at websites you look up to and see who they are being backlinked by and what type of content is generating those links. Then return to your website, apply what you’ve learned and see if it works for you as well.

Summing things up…

The inbound link building tower is steep. Applying the above 10 tips should help you climb it faster. Sparing you the rest of the literary description, just remember that inbound links are essential in getting relevant traffic and attention to your blog and helping you in gaining noticed. Don’t hesitate to use them to their absolute, maximum extent, because you’re going to benefit from them, once you learn how to use them to your advantage.

If you found this useful, and you’re curious to learn more and find out how to create a long lasting Inbound Marketing strategy, we invite you to download our How-To guide for creating an Inbound Marketing strategy

Schedule a FREE consultation

 

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5 Fucking Awesome Examples of Brands Swearing in their Marketing

By |2023-04-24T11:10:48+00:00November 16th, 2016|

topicIcon Content Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

fucking swearing in marketing-1.jpg

Introduction

Following one of the best talks on Inbound 2016, where Doug Kessler addressed the crowd and gave a fascinating walkthrough of how swearing in marketing can be a good idea, I was inspired to write the following post. Hope you enjoy it!

In a personalized world, your marketing should not only attract the personas you’d like to turn into customers, it should also filter those who are not your target prospects. Swearing in your marketing is intimidating. You don’t want to come across as distasteful or just off, and you don’t want to have to defend yourself. Yet, there are benefits to using swear words:

  • Grab attention – we can’t NOT process swear words
  • Signal confidence
  • Resonate with your target audience
  • Increase the authenticity of your message
  • Make people laugh

Here are examples of 5 brands who are rocking it.

 

1. Burger King

FUCKING BURGER KING AD

There’s not way they could fit the letters “BURGER” behind this small burger image. Yes, they wanted you to read “fucking great”. And you know what? it is.

2. Metamucil 

Metamucil Shit Ad

This ad speaks for itself – If this isn’t a legit example of using swearing in marketing, I don’t know what is. 

3. Sofa King

sofa king low ad

Sofa king prove that they indeed rule, with this catchphrase “Our prices are sofa king low”.

Try and read it any other way, I dare you.

4. Air Asia

phuket I'll go

Yeah, fuck it. Let’s go to Puket.

5. Fcuk

free-vector-cool-as-fcuk_038069_cool-as-fcuk.png

Taking things to a whole other level, this entire brand is rocking it with a little twist of letters and one clear meaning.

Final note

Swearing is not always a good idea. When considering it, ask yourself if it truly works or is just a distraction or a strange attempt to sound cool. Don’t be afriad to experiment.

“creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes and having fun” Mary Lou Cook.

If you found this useful, and you’re curious to learn more and find out how to step up your marketing I invite you to download our How-To guide for creating an Inbound Marketing strategy.

Schedule a FREE consultation

 

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9 Truths That Will Save Your Company From Dying In 2018

By |2023-04-24T11:12:04+00:00November 15th, 2016|

topicIcon Inbound Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

9 Truths That Will Save Your Company From Dying header

Introduction

Inspired by Inbound 2016, I’ve prepared this list of truths that all companies need to accept in order to stick around in the years to follow.

1. The cold call is dead

Stop harassing people, nobody like to get a call from a stranger trying to sell them stuff they don’t care about. Relationships don’t work that way. Companies who rely on cold calling as their growth strategy, and hope to generate meaningful cooperation’s, will not be around for long (if you’re trying to steal people’s money by calling them and misleading them – cold calling is not dead. But who are you and how do you sleep at night?).

mobile-phone

2. Email is alive

Email open rates have dropped dramatically during the past few years. Unicorns such as 90% open rates don’t happen anymore. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be using emails for your sales and marketing. It means you need to craft personal and relevant emails. It’s all about the context. And no, adding a personalized name token to your emails is not what this is about. People aren’t idiots. Here are 6 pro tips for creating an email marketing strategy.

3. Enough with the ABC

Always Be Closing is a state of mind you can’t afford. You should Always Be Helping. You need to add value to your prospects and to keep adding value to them once they are customers. If you ignore that you’ll be disrupted.

Understand who your buyer personas are and start adding value to them, gently pushing them down the buyer’s journey and helping them to choose you when they are interested to come back for more value.

4. A taste is more

As we’ve established, people expect to get value from you. They expect to get this value before they decide to purchase from you. Let them. Provide them with a taste of your offering, be it a free trial, a freemium or any other model that will show them the real deal. If you’re afraid people will not want to buy from you after getting a taste – you have bigger problems on your plate. Go fix your product or service and come back when you’re ready to play.

5. SEO = HEO

In order to win at SEO, you need to master HEO – Human Enjoyment Optimization. It’s not enough to get people to visit your site. You need to want them to engage with your website, view pages, and stick around long enough to get excited. Make every interaction with your company an enjoyable one.

think different

6. Prospects talk with your customers

Like it or not, your prospects are speaking with your customers and making decisions based on those conversations. 74% of prospects decide based on word of mouth and 46% decide based on customer references. Make sure they’re acquiring praises and not in a race to close customers and ditch them. Retention is key.

7. It’s a terrible time to be a huge company

Huge companies have a hard time adapting to trends. Change is their enemy. The fortune 500 list is constantly changing. This means:

8. It’s a terrific time to grow

If you company befriends change, identifies trends and stays ahead of the game, hey, you just might end up on the list yourself. Find out where your target audience is, and make sure to be there. I hope this list will inspire you:

gartner october 16.png

Source: Gartner

9. Inbound is mandatory

It’s time to stop interrupting and start attracting prospects by offering them value. Inbound is not longer that vague term marketers like to use to sound smart. It’s a necessity. Create content, match it with your customers’ needs and preferences and naturally start attracting inbound traffic that can be converted, closed and delighted over time.

Summing things up

Stop interrupting, befriend changes, provide value, and nurture relationships. It’s about quality not quantity, and it’s up to you to shine. No excuses.

If you found this useful, and you’re curious to learn more and find out how to create a long lasting Inbound Marketing strategy, we invite you to download our How-To guide for creating an Inbound Marketing strategy.

Schedule a FREE consultation

 

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How to create your 2018 B2B marketing plan [updated]

By |2023-04-05T11:47:03+00:00November 14th, 2016|

topicIcon B2B Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

B2B Marketing Plan header

Creating a Successful B2B marketing plan for 2018

2018 is around the corner. This post will walk you through a suggested layout of a B2B marketing plan, and the elements you should consider when proceeding to write your own.

Executive summary

Write a general overview of your B2B company background, current stage and the overall purpose of your marketing plan. This is the place to identify weak points in your conversion funnel that require curing.

For example:conversion funnel

 SMART Goals

In order for your marketing plan to be actionable, it’s important to set very clear goals.

In this section of your B2B plan, make sure you have a clear understanding of what you’d like to achieve this year. Simply defining “more traffic” or “more leads” is moot. Make sure your goals are:

S – specific

M – measurable

A – attainable

R – realistic

T – time bound

Competitor analysis

A review of the competitive landscape includes looking at what your competitors are and are not doing, as well as larger trends within your industry.

When reviewing your competitors, you’ll want to look at them strategically and tactically. Pick the competitors to review deliberately.

Who are the clear leaders?

Who are they targeting?

Can you reverse engineer any of their personas?

How do they differ from yours?

What are their key messages?

What needs, pains, or aspirations are they hitting?

Who’s struggling (learn from their mistakes) 1?

Who does your client consider to be your most direct competitors?

Are there any new players or outliers in terms of taking an approach outside the established market?

Target market

Identify your buyer personas. These are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers. It’s important to understand who you are trying to reach. What are their behavioral patterns? Their demographics? Their goals?

You can research and figure this out by:

Speaking with your sales and learning who your current best customers are and why

Researching the web (specifically websites such as Quora, blogs and industry forums)

Making educated guesses

Interviewing your current customers. Focus on:

  • Background
  • Demographics
  • Mannerisms
  • Primary goals at work
  • Primary challenges on their to success
  • What are their common objections

The buyer’s journey

“The buyer’s journey is the active research process a potential buyer goes through leading up to a purchase.”

There are three stages to the average buyer’s journey:

Buyer's Journey

 

(source: HubSpot)

Make sure you understand your average customer’s buyers journey. Each stage requires specific types of messaging, which helps guide your audience all the way down the marketing funnel. That way you will not make the mistake of trying to sell to your prospects when they’re not yet ready and don’t trust you.

USP

A strong positioning will set you apart from your competitors and help you attract the most relevant customers for your business.

Think strong and hard about the following questions:

  1. Why does your company exist?
  2. What inspires you at work?
  3. What’s the purpose of your work?
  4. What do you help solve?
  5. If your team were volunteers and not employees, what are they volunteering for?

Fill out this positioning statement:

We (provide this service/value/outcome) for (a specific type of company/industry/market) by (using a specific approach) because (why).

(source: HubSpot)

Make sure you understand your average customer’s buyers journey. Each stage requires specific types of messaging, which helps guide your audience all the way down the marketing funnel. That way you will not make the mistake of trying to sell to your prospects when they’re not yet ready and don’t trust you.

USP

A strong positioning will set you apart from your competitors and help you attract the most relevant customers for your business.

Think strong and hard about the following questions:

  1. Why does your company exist?
  2. What inspires you at work?
  3. What’s the purpose of your work?
  4. What do you help solve?
  5. If your team were volunteers and not employees, what are they volunteering for?

Fill out this positioning statement:

We (provide this service/value/outcome) for (a specific type of company/industry/market) by (using a specific approach) because (why).

New Call-to-action

 

Brand

How are you currently perceived in the marketplace? A brand story has the magical power of bringing your brand to life, providing it with context and granting your audience something to identify with. Turn you USP into a story people can relate to.

If you think emotions and human interactions are irrelevant to B2B, “because you are targeting businesses”, consider this a wakeup call:

B2B isn’t about businesses communicating with businesses. It’s about humans connecting with humans.

Website

How will your website help you achieve your smart goals this year? What needs to change in order for it to generate more growth? Consider the top, middle and bottom of the funnel.

Content marketing

35% of B2B marketers have a documented content strategy. Make sure you do too.

In a nutshell, content marketing is the art of communicating with your prospects without selling to them. This part of the plan should focus on the role content distribution will play in building trust, creating lasting relationships with prospects and turning them into customers when they’re ready.

Social media marketing

Social media is crucial for every business’s online success and sales generation. That includes B2B. This part of the plan should detail how you plan on creating and promoting content via social media, engage with prospects and drive more relevant traffic to your website.

Remember that building a solid social media presence doesn’t happen overnight and needs time and dedication to bring sustainable results. Craft your strategy, monitor social media activity and constant improve your approach to maximize the results of your investments.

Email marketing

With 91% of consumers checking their email daily (ExactTarget) and a marketing ROI of 4,300% (!!) (copyblogger), if you’ve given up on email marketing, Reevaluate your strategy for 2018.

This part of the plan should focus on how you are going to make the most of email marketing in order to improve your overall performance.

SEO

This section should map out how your SEO efforts will help you reach your organic search goals. Detail which keywords you’d like to target this year, and keep in mind an end goal of converting relevant visitors to leads.  This is also the place to detail new opportunities and the current status of your website’s health and back-links profile.

Measurement and KPIs

The issue a lot of B2B marketers have is the simple lack of analytic ability in its marketing team, e.g. they don’t have a clear definition of what metrics or parameters to document. This section should detail how you plan on measuring your efforts. Define clear definitions of ROI and what metrics to take into account.

Marketing Strategy and Tactics

Recap your overall plan and summarize the important actionable aspects of each section.

Conclusion

Your yearly marketing plan should be SMART goal oriented. Be sure to research your competition, understand your target market and buyers journey, and make sure you have a measurable roadmap planned ahead.

In order to properly plan your strategy, download our FREE yearly marketing planning template.

Get My FREE copy

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Cutting the Clutter in PPC Reporting

By |2023-04-05T11:50:39+00:00November 7th, 2016|

topicIcon PPC Reporting

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

ppc reportig.jpg

Introduction

Not all marketing efforts can be measured accurately (SEO for example can get very challenging to measure). PPC is great in the sense that it enables very precise (though sometimes complicated) measurments.

As with every aspect of digital marketing reporting, the purpose of a PPC report is to inform you on whether your marketing efforts are helping to achieve your goals. If not, your campaigns need to be realigned to do just that. Don’t let yourself get distracted by overwhelming data, remember that what matters most is to have a clear grasp of the bottom line. Not every measurable metric needs to be included in a PPC report. A good report should reflect the results of your marketing efforts and revolve around ROI.

Your periodical PPC report (whether weekly, montly or quarterly) should be built in some sort of bucketing method. This post will walk you through what you need to know.

A PPC report structure

When creating a PPC report, marketers should make sure to consider the level of PPC knowledge and familiarity with PPC terminology of the reports readers. This should go without saying but the persons being informed needs to be able to understand the report, not just be impressed by it. The data should always be explained with respect to what it actually means for your  business.

A PPC report should start with the most valuable,  bottom-line information, following a drill down of each channel/campaign.

Here’s an example of a recommended report structure:

Executive summary

This part should detail the total media spent on all channels vs. the bottom-line success of the efforts. A pro report will elaborate down to revenue and ROI/ROAS metrics.

For example: This month we’ve spent 20,000$, generated 10 customers and a total revenue of 100,000$.

Campaign Performance (Consolidated channels)

This should consolidate all channel effort per specific campaign goals.

For example: a B2B Company aiming at selling three different products will probably be advertising on multiple channels (Google, Facebook, Linkedin, etc).

Each of the three products will be advertised in a seperate multi-channel campaigns, it’s important to understand the performance of each campaign seperatly (campaign A for product A, Campaign B for product B, etc)

The data should be displayed as following:

  • Campaign A – Summary
    • Channel Performance
      • Google
      • Facebook
      • LinkedIn
      • Any other channel
  • Campaign B – Summary
    • Channel Performance
      • Google
      • Facebook
      • LinkedIn
      • Any other channel

Improvment suggestions

Expect to find performance issues reported in your PPC campaigns. A report that presents flawless performance is almost suspicious. Shortcomings are part of the equation, it’s important to acknowledge what went wrong, and create a comprehensive plan of action in order to optimize and improve.

Two examples of how deep PPC can get

With PPC reporting, there is a wealth of information that can be measured to inform you of whether ad and keyword dollars spent are worth it or not, but there are two metrics which are particularly challenging. However complicated, these metrics are super useful to understand and they’re  not impossible measure, so go the extra mile and do. I’m talking about attribution modeling and offline conversions.

  1.  Attribution modeling, or understanding how each PPC marketing channel is performing for paid ads (Google, Facebook, etc.), takes a decent amount of effort (but it’s worth it). This metric is typically measured using Google Analytics, which allows marketers to shed light on which paid ads have the greatest campaign ROI. You can read our guide on how to setup Google Analytics attribution models here.
  2. While not applicable for every business (Low-touch SaaS, eCommerce, other online-only retailers), tracking offline conversions is often overlooked as a metric to scale advertising effectiveness. An offline conversion is basically any time a customer is converted outside of directly using your website (for example via phone or a personal meeting). To measure offline conversions using Google AdWords is a little labor intensive, but it is valuable in order determine how online ad spending has been resulting in offline conversions. With a bit of digging, you can report on how the investment in each keyword  has influenced a campaign’s success. Click here for our step-by-step guide on how to use your CRM and AdWords to track offline conversions.

Reporting shortcomings

When it comes to any digital marketing campaign, not everything is going to be perfect 100 percent of the time. A lot of times there will be tracking issues or data discrepancies that will prevent evaluating and measuring deeply enough. That’s natural. Make sure that your tracking is aligned and enables optimal indepth reporting.

Conclusion

By understanding what worked, what didn’t work and why, you will keep on improving. Don’t forget to always keep your eyes on the prize – measure for ROI.

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How to Position Your B2B Business and Set You Apart From Your Competition

By |2023-04-24T11:13:08+00:00November 5th, 2016|

topicIcon B2B Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

how to position your b2b agency header

Introduction

Creating a strong brand positioning is a challenge almost all businesses face. B2B companies have an extra difficult time positioning themselves among the most relevant clients for their business. This post will walk you through how to position your B2B business by defining your “why”, “who”, “what” and “how”. A strong positioning will set you apart from your competitors and help you attract the most relevant customers for your business.

Start with the “why”

"people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it" - simon sinek

 

Think strong and hard about the following questions:

  1. Why does your company exist?
  2. What inspires you at work?
  3. What’s the purpose of your work?
  4. What do you help solve?
  5. If your team were volunteers and not employees, what are they volunteering for?

Understand your ideal client “who”

Understanding who your target personas are is a critical step towards positioning you company and communicating in the language of your prospects. Yes, you’re a B2B business, but behind that B stands a human being. Human relationships are key to long term cooperations.

Reflect about the following questions:

  1. Who are your current best clients
  2. What is common about those clients
  3. What market segments and industries do you know best
  4. What clients do you like working with most
  5. What type of companies most need your help
  6. What are your clients pain points and challenges
  7. Is there a pattern among the clients of your clients?
  8. What clients don’t you want to work with?

Identify your core strengths – your “what”

It’s important to identify what your company is most competent at. A specialization helps on the path to positioning your company as experts.

Evaluate the following:

  1. How does what you do reflect what you know?
  2. What is your company best and most efficient at
  3. If you had to focus on only one product or service, what would it be?
  4. What is it that you do that provides the most value to your clients and makes you unique?
  5. What aren’t you?

Define your company culture – your “how”

Decisions + executions + values + work procedures =  your company’s culture.

Reflect upon the following:

  1. What are the standards that guide you when making decisions?
  2. Do you have service methods set in place?
  3. What wouldn’t you change about the way the company operates
  4. What would you never do?
  5. What do you stand for?
  6. Will you turn down a client who is not in line with your culture and value?

Final exercise

After identifying what you do well, why you’re doing it, who you are talking to, and how, fill out this positioning statement:

We (provide this service/value/outcome) for (a specific type of company/industry/market) by (using a specific approach) because (why).

Now make sure you are implementing your positioning on all aspects:

  • Set clear hiring standards and train your team on your company positioning
  • Define service delivery processes
  • Create a working environment that correlates with your company culture
  • Educate your team about the buyer personas you are targeting
  • Consider how your new positioning may help your ability to set premium pricing
  • Align your internal and external messaging to your new positioning

Final note

Taking time to define your company’s positioning, understanding your core audience and creating a clear culture, can work wonders to your business. Once you know exactly what your unique offer is and what sets you apart from your competition, you’ll be able to focus on strenghtning your positioning and getting your target audience to choose you want want to work with your business.

If you found this useful, and you’re curious to learn more and find out how to step up your marketing I invite you to download our How-To guide for creating an inbound marketing strategy.

Schedule a FREE consultation

 

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