Tag: marketing strategy

Consider These Five Things for Your Company’s Marketing Strategy

One question remains top of mind for every business owner: How do I reach my target audience? They try to find the answer in the next-best marketing trends and ever-evolving advice for boosting social media engagement and Google search rankings. While staying on top of customer behavior and needs is essential, some marketing strategies consistently expand your brand awareness and generate leads.

Incorporate User-Generated Content

All companies have to face it: customers are no longer simply consumers. They are active participants and content creators and are impossible to ignore in your marketing strategy. UGC content serves as social proof for your brand reputation and product quality. New customers are more likely to purchase your product or service when they discover positive reviews.

You can capitalize on formal or informal UGC. You might (with the creator’s permission) repost pictures or videos demonstrating customers using or raving about your products, or you can solicit active participation through company-sponsored contests and giveaways. You also have the option to access UGC regularly through partnerships with influencers.

Brand partners and influencers allow you to set the terms for the content that will best serve your brand, and they allow you to reach a large audience through influencers’ trusted advice. Whatever direction you take, incorporating UGC into your marketing strategy is essential.

Create Quality Content

The content you release should reflect your specific audience’s needs and preferences, but one thing remains true for every brand. Your content must be of high quality.

Your long-form content, such as blog posts and research articles, should be grammatically correct, engaging, and contain optimized keywords to boost their SEO performance. Using tools like Ahrefs and Semrush, you can edit your work to increase your readership and add value to your customers.

Video content should also hold an esteemed position within your marketing plan. Videos quickly capture viewer attention and increase accessibility by utilizing audio, visuals, alternate text, and subtitles. While every company battles for customer attention, you can set yourselves apart through quality videos that present them with information quickly.

When you make or solicit videos, you should ensure they have high-quality visuals and audio, show multiple angles, and keep the product, creator, or customer within the frame. You must engage viewers through authentic and relatable stories.

Conduct Market Research

You might have the most impressive, trusted marketing practices in your toolkit, but they are only effective if you know your target audience. While many consumers share similar needs and preferences, you find business success in identifying their unique qualities and niche groups.

You must center your marketing strategy around your niche audience. Whether you’re launching your business or updating your previous marketing strategy, you must identify and narrow down your target audience to provide more personalized content and outreach. Build consumer personas and perform SWOT analysis tests to determine what calls to action, color schemes, and information your customers respond to.

When you conduct market research, stay on the lookout for trends that work for your industry and specific audience. Though trends come and go, incorporating some of them into your marketing techniques will help you stay relevant and generate excitement. Additionally, you’ll want to study your competition’s marketing strategies to take stock of their strengths and weaknesses. You can adapt what they do well to meet your business needs and avoid their pitfalls. Comparative market analysis will help you stay on budget and stand out from the crowd.

Outline Your Objectives

Developing a marketing strategy requires goal-setting. You need to know what specific results you’re working towards and implement measurable KPIs to reach them. When creating or updating your marketing approach, select a few long-term goals and outline short-term objectives.

Setting goals will help get your team on the same page and allow you to track your progress and adapt to unforeseen challenges. Actionable market plans increase brand awareness, generate leads, and boost revenue.

Take SEO Strategies into Account

You can’t overlook search engine optimization when creating and sharing content with your target audience. Including optimized keywords and generating backlinks to your website in other off-site articles boost your search engine rankings and allows you to share your credentials and expertise with a larger audience.

SEO also helps you improve the customer experience. By adapting your content to reflect what your customers are looking for, you make it easier for them to find solutions to their problems.

Conclusion

You can improve the results generated from your company’s marketing strategy by incorporating user-generated content, conducting market research, and outlining your objectives. While it might seem like the marketing world is an ever-changing landscape, if you base your marketing techniques on your target audience’s needs and preferences, you’ll find success.

December 13, 2022
Tips For Optimizing Your Email Marketing Strategies

Only 2.62% of recipients click links for “more information” in marketing emails; however, we will send a collective of 361 billion emails per day by 2024. More along, 90% of marketing professionals say email engagement is the number one metric that can help them measure content performance. Similarly, 87% of marketing professionals say email is one of their top free, and organic, channels for content distribution, and 81% say email newsletters are their most used form of content marketing.

Email newsletters can lend a great deal of help in client retention, communication, and revenue-building. Many newsletters provide readers with coupons, exclusive offers and products, as well as membership perks and discounts. As a result, experts have found shoppers to spend nearly 137% more with a business after receiving email offers. To the benefit of the brand, a $45 return is seen for every $1 spent on email marketing.

In other words, the key to successful email marketing is getting your content seen and engaged with without getting flagged as spam. Luckily, this is achievable in various ways.

One of the easiest things you can do to raise your email open rates is to replace any irrelevant text or uninteresting subject lines. When crafting an email, be personal. Feel free to use the recipient’s name or location as a conversation-builder. Continuing on, be brief. As a general rule of thumb, keep email subject lines under 10 words – and/or 60 characters. However, remember to keep your subject line friendly, as this personable method also increases email open rates. With this, be sure to use no more than 3 punctuation marks and 1 emoji.

Of course, there are many methods to messaging targeted recipients. A/B comparison methods can assist as they allow for testing across various subject lines. With its results, you can learn which outreach variant your customers prefer.

You can also categorize your contacts into interest groups and geolocation to ensure content is relevant to all receivers. Geolocations can be as specific as time zones or regions.

On the other hand, you can increase your click-through rates using hacks just as easy. For example, change your hyperlink’s text, and avoid using “click here.” Remember: not many email recipients click for more. Instead, take the opportunity to embed multiple links to the same content, and create descriptive and concise link text when doing so. You can also use A/B style testing here to test out content blocks.

When conducting outreach, one of the most important keys to remember is not getting marked as spam. Recipients rarely flag marketing emails as spam; but when they do, it’s because they’ve grown stale of the marketer’s content, their contact information has been purchased, they have been contacted without permission, or something else along these lines.

As a human courtesy, ask customers to opt-in to receiving your emails before auto-blasting them with content. In fact, take the time to explain the benefits such as coupons or other exclusive offers when asking them to op-tin. Regardless of what you, never purchase email addresses. Similarly, never hide the unsubscribe link from your emails. It’s always important to keep emails and campaigns professional – so stick to any email frequency expectations you have set for your team.

Overall, all marketers want consumers to engage with their content. The best way in doing so may be through email marketing. Do you know the best tactics for engaging with the public?

November 24, 2020
4 Inbound Marketing Tactics to Use for Your B2B Company

According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, eight out of 10 Americans now shop online. This means that the traditional ways of marketing—cold calls, trade shows, TV, radio—are not as effective as they used to be. In fact, more companies are now turning to inbound marketing to generate leads and close deals.

To stay ahead of your competition, it’s now essential to have a good inbound marketing strategy in place. Here are four B2B marketing tactics you should be using right now:

1. Create and Curate

Useful and well-written content is a powerful weapon in B2B marketing. Posting long-format articles and discussing issues more deeply attracts more visits to your website and leads to higher conversions. A study by Moz showed a distinct correlation between social shares and content length.

According to the data, readers love this type of content and are more likely to share it.

You should also post articles to your blog more frequently. A Hubspot report showed that businesses that blogged 10 or more times a month enjoyed three times more traffic than those that blog only once a month.

And, you can continue to reap the benefits of your old blog posts for years to come. Assuming that they’re good, consider repurposing older posts to generate more organic traffic by sending the content to your email list or posting them on social media.

However, creating good content takes time and effort, and sometimes a company might not have enough manpower to handle this. No need to worry, though, as curating content will work just fine. It’s a strategy that some marketers have used very effectively. Content curation involves sourcing content that is already on the web and organizing it in a meaningful way for your audience. Curating helps add new content to your site, builds value, converts readers, and helps generate traffic.

2. Collaborate With People Who Matter

Connecting and collaborating with experts and influencers creates more opportunities for your brand to be shared with a bigger market.

Look for authorities or influencers in your niche and reach out to them. Discuss how working together will benefit all parties involved. Invite an influencer to host a podcast, write a guest blog or take over your social media page for a day. This will add more quality content to your site and boost awareness of your brand.

3. Get Video Ready

Scientific research shows that most people process the information they see 60,000 times faster than what they read. So it’s a good idea to incorporate videos and eye-catching graphics in your marketing strategy.

In 2017, video became the most popular type of content on social media, and the demand for it will only continue to rise among consumers. Because of this, more companies are using the medium to showcase their product, disseminate information, teach consumers, and reach prospective clients.

Don’t forget other visuals like infographics and slides. Infographics have become popular over the last few years because they are an effective way of communicating a lot of data within a short time. These visuals are also easy to share and can be used to recycle your content and make them fresh and engaging.

4. Improve Your Site’s Speed and Load Time

A fast website is crucial for any business. People prefer sites that have a quick loading time. Studies have shown that consumers are only willing to wait three seconds for a page to load. Any slower and they are highly likely to abandon the site and search elsewhere. Plus, Google also takes into account the site’s speed in their rankings. So if you want to keep your visitors and rank high in search engines, make sure your website is optimized for speed.

Consumers today know what they want and how to get it. If you want to capture their attention, you have to step up your inbound marketing game. Adding visuals and writing longer posts are simple tactics but they can go a long way in generating leads and traffic.

[Featured image via Pixabay]

September 20, 2018
Benefits of Adding In-App Advertising to Your Marketing Strategy

In-application marketing has grown by leaps and bounds, thanks to the prevalence of mobile devices. With more people utilizing gadgets connected to the internet, companies are now spending more of their marketing budget on mobile web advertising.

One strategy on the forefront of mobile advertising is in-app marketing. As the name implies, in-app marketing is any campaign or message that’s specifically designed to appear within a mobile application while the consumer is using the app. Unlike emails or push notifications, which engage the consumer outside of the company’s app, in-app ads take advantage of the moment and hook customers in real-time.

Digital marketing strategies, like geo-targeting, are still important but brands and marketers believe that in-app advertising is the way forward. As a matter of fact, it has been estimated that global in-app revenue will reach $189 billion by 2020.

Worldwide in-app advertising and app store revenues of mobile apps and games in 2015 and 2020

[Graphic via Statista]

Aside from the fact that in-app marketing is a money-maker, there are also other benefits to utilizing this strategy.

Benefits of Using In-App Marketing

Consumers Spend A Lot of Time on Apps

Brands should take advantage of the fact that the majority of smartphone users are spending a lot of time on apps. According to a 2017 US Mobile App Report, people are spending about 87 percent of their time online on mobile apps compared to just 13 percent on the Web. This gives companies that use in-app ads an opportunity to focus on a large market, boost their brand visibility, and improve lead generation and conversion.

Higher Click-Through Rates

Another advantage in-app ads have over mobile ads is their higher click-through rates (CTRs). As it stands, CTRs for mobile web ads is at 0.23 percent while in-app ads are at 0.58 percent. In-app ads also perform 11.4 times better than conventional banner ads. This means that in-app advertisements not only raises lead generation numbers, they also help capture and convert these leads.

More Focused Targeting

Advertisements displayed in the brand’s application are designed within the app’s context, making them look natural and more organic. Many apps also opt for interactive formats, which gives advertisers the option to choose when it will be shown. This ensures a seamless transition for users. In contrast, other types of mobile advertisements, particularly pop-ups, can be quite disruptive. They interrupt the prospective consumer and could cause them to be annoyed, thereby dissuading them from making a positive decision.

Marketing inside company apps also gives advertisers a specific view of their target market due to geo-location data and the apps’ capacity to pull in the exact demographics. This increases the chances that the audience reached is aligned closely with the company’s advertising and marketing efforts. Highly targeted marketing also means that less money is wasted on consumers who are unlikely to make a purchase via the ad.

Ads are More Memorable

Research has shown that in-app ads are more effective because they’re more memorable when seen on the application. This is due to users being more engaged in the app right from the start, particularly in the social network and gaming niches. The personal nature of mobile gadgets, which people use during their leisure time, also gives people a more positive attitude towards brands they see advertising in-app.

With in-app marketing, marketers can move away from generalized ads and instead focus on ads that are designed specifically for the brand’s demographic. This marketing strategy also reaches a lot of people in a very short time, thereby giving brands more reach and higher ROI.

[Featured image via Pixabay]

August 22, 2018
5 Ways to Use FoMO in Your Online Marketing Strategy

It’s human nature to want to be “connected” or “in the know.” In the past, not knowing where new water and food sources are could result in death. The situation now isn’t as dire as it was before, but the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is causing people to become afraid of missing out on the latest trends, products, and ideas.

Why FoMO Works as a Marketing Strategy

While FoMO was only included in the Oxford dictionary in 2013, the idea has been around for a long time. Every generation, from Baby Boomers to Gen Xers, has always had the desire to be in the loop, but it could be argued that the rise of social media has taken this fear to new levels. According to a MyLife research, 56 percent of social media users are afraid that if they’re not active, they’ll miss out on the latest news, upgrades, events, and status updates.

Marketers can, and have been, leveraging this fear and incorporating it into their strategies. This makes particular sense considering that studies have shown that 69% of millennials experience FoMO and more than half have made reactive purchases because of it. In short, these consumers have bought something just because they’re afraid of missing out.

5 Ways to Use FoMO in Your Online Marketing Strategy

Knowing how to utilize FoMO is an effective tactic for marketing your product or service. Luckily, there are several tried and tested techniques that can create a FoMO effect. Here are five examples:

1. Have Flash Sales

The flash sale is a very common FoMO marketing campaign. The idea of limited stocks and/or a limited time period naturally creates a sense of urgency. It also creates the feeling of scarcity when it comes to products. This leads to a major boost in conversions, as seen during Black Friday sales, end of season sales or anniversary offers.

2. Organize Limited-Time Events

Event organizers have also taken advantage of FoMO by limiting the number of seats or participants allowed in specific events. Some even offer exclusive seats and bank on the idea of a limited special offer to push people to purchase tickets. While this has been proven effective in music shows or conferences, a lot of businesses are now incorporating this idea to drum up excitement and interest in their podcasts or marketing webinars.

3. Introduce Loyalty Reward Programs

Loyalty programs are another sure-fire way to ensure long-term customer retention. By giving customers timely rewards and the odd special prizes, companies create a FoMo effect among those who are not customers or loyal members yet. This fear of missing out on special gifts and freebies will result in more people joining a company’s loyalty program scheme.

4. Promote User Experience

Letting your users or customers help is another good FoMO strategy. Some companies utilize user-generated content (UGC) to let site visitors and potential customers see and experience how “real people” use their products and services. This, in turn, leads to others wanting to experience and share their experiences too. Examples of these are marketing campaigns where consumers submit their photos or use certain hashtags.

5. Give Rewards to Early Purchasers

Giving away free products is undoubtedly a great way to attract customers. But you can make it even more compelling by limiting the freebies you give away. This is why some brick-and-mortar stores only offer a special discount or give a free gift to the first 200 customers. This then forces thousands of people to line up for the product.

The fear of missing out runs deep in most consumers. However, the desire for instant gratification and the popularity of social media has given this fear an added dimension. No matter how you decide to use FoMO, you should incorporate it in some of your marketing campaigns in order to generate more sales and keep your brand relevant.

May 23, 2018
How Social Listening Can Strengthen Your Online Marketing Strategy

Businesses now have all of the tools necessary to find out how people feel about their branding efforts. Social listening is a marketing strategy that allows companies to read and respond to customer feedback on social media. This gives them the opportunity to fine-tune their marketing efforts to help them achieve their goals.

Social listening is really more about understanding and responding to the comments you’re getting from your target market on social media. Integrating social listening into your current marketing efforts can help you craft the perfect strategy based on the needs of the people you want to attract.

But how do you use social listening to strengthen your online marketing presence?

Have a Conversation With Your Customers

Think of social listening as a conversation with your customers that is happening online. As they provide you with feedback, you reward them with a response that assures them that their concerns are being addressed.

It’s important that you become more aware of feedback cues and respond to them appropriately. Failing to provide customers with an actionable response will earn you a bad reputation and diminish customer satisfaction.

Better Customer Service

Social listening can be a very effective tool to use for improving your current customer service strategy. Using social media as a supplementary customer support channel makes your brand come across as more approachable to potential and existing customers.

Customers no longer have to wait on hold in order to get a customer service representative when they can easily reach out to you via social media. Just remember to be especially responsive to complaints to avoid damaging your online credibility.

Use Social Listening Tools

Brands who argue that social listening is an exhausting marketing technique are those who do not know how to use online tools to their advantage. There are many social listening tools available that can help you efficiently manage feedback and respond to comments all in one screen. These intuitive tools make social listening less tedious and more focused.

Finding the right social listening tool depends on your budget and needs. Below are a few programs you can choose from to improve your current online marketing strategy:

1. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo allows you to closely monitor online engagement through their Content Alert feature. Similar to Google Alerts, you can set it to notify you of any trends based on specific keywords, domains, and authors.

2. HooteSuite

More popularly known as a scheduling tool, Hootsuite also has a feature that lets you manage and respond to complaints more efficiently. This can be a huge time-saver and is ideal to those who are new to online marketing.

3. FollowerWonk

FollowerWonk is a social listening tool designed for Twitter. This tool gives you access to insights about your competitor’s followers, which you can use to improve your strategy.

Social listening is a marketing technique companies should not overlook. It is critical for your marketing campaign to be tailored to your audience in order for you to achieve the results you want. Use the internet in general and social media, in particular, to make your brand more approachable to customers.

July 4, 2017