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Website marketing: The definitive guide

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By Castleford

What is website marketing?

Website marketing is the strategic promotion of a website to drive relevant traffic to the site. The goal is typically to attract people who may be interested in a company’s products or services. More traffic coming to a site means more opportunities to put your value proposition in front of potential customers.

The goal of most website marketing strategies is to rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs) through the implementation of search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics, content marketing, social media engagement, and other digital and offline efforts.

In the majority of industries, pages that rank in the first SERP position get more than 50% of the traffic for their target keywords. There’s a steep drop-off for pages ranking in the second and third positions, and pages in positions 5-20 compete for less than 5% of traffic.

Properly managed, a website marketing strategy can help your business attract new customers and ultimately expand your business’s share of the market.

Your website is your best marketing tool

These days, your brand’s website is the primary channel in which users can learn about your brand and take actions that directly contribute to the growth of your business.

Getting a lot of shares and likes on social media is good – but only if it translates to desired actions. For example, posting funny memes to your brand’s Facebook page may be a good way to increase your social following. But the real goal is to get those users to your website where they will not only be less distracted by competing brands, but also have more ways to interact with your content and offerings.

How to promote your website

To the uninitiated, website promotion can seem like a daunting task.

With an estimated 1.6 billion registered websites in 2019 and more than 4 billion active internet users, standing out feels like an impossible task.

The good news is that there’s nothing impossible about it.

When you understand what your audience is looking for and how search engines identify quality websites, the internet is your oyster.

SEO

As the name implies, SEO is the set of methodologies used to make websites both accessible to search engines and appealing to readers.

Modern ranking algorithms like those used by Google are designed to sniff out dozens of signals that make websites useful and trustworthy.

Moz has done a great job summarising the critical needs of SEO:

Backlinks

Never forget that the web is a network, and movement between network nodes (websites) is crucial not only to digital marketing, but to the modern global economy as a whole.

So if you think about website traffic as a form of currency, it makes sense that you would want to receive it from reputable sources. Just as you wouldn’t want to take money from a shady lender, you don’t want traffic from irrelevant or disreputable sources.

Backlinks – which drive traffic from another site to your own – are extremely important promotional tools. Credible backlinks signal to search engines that your content is trustworthy and relevant.

Influencers

Influencers are connectors; they are people who have established reputations as knowledgeable experts, trendsetters and entertaining personalities. They have large audiences of social followers who enjoy the influencer’s content and actively participate in online conversations.

Brands partner with influencers to appeal to new audience segments and extend the reach of their messages. In 2019, influencer marketing spend is predicted to more than double 2017 figures, with 69% going toward B2C campaigns.

Email signatures

The average worker sends and receives 121 emails per day, so why not put those outgoing messages to work promoting your website?

Any email that comes from your brand’s domain name should include a link back to your website. That way, any reader who is interested in learning more about your offerings can easily get to your site without any extra steps.

Quality content

Some have said that content marketing is the only type of marketing left. And while there’s certainly room for disagreement there, it’s true that content marketing is more relevant than ever.

Content provides site visitors with immediate value in the form of new knowledge and insights. For many visitors, it’s the sole reason to view your site.

If you want people to stay on your site long enough to absorb your messages, you need highly engaging content.

We’ll talk more about that farther down.

Building an effective website marketing strategy

Marketing your website effectively requires a deep understanding of several disciplines, including analytics, modern mobile technology trends, human psychology, inbound and outbound methodologies, and more.

Conduct a site analysis

Everything you do to increase the amount of traffic coming to your site should be measured. It’s the only way to know how effective your strategies are and the only way you’ll be able to identify new opportunities to attract more visitors.

For example, if you implement a content marketing strategy, you’ll want to measure traffic coming to your blog articles, the number of click-throughs each one produces, the amount of time visitors spend reading the content and more.

Thankfully, Google Analytics is free and fairly intuitive to use, though certain types of site analysis are best left to professionals.

But there is more good news: By setting up a Google Analytics account for your website and running monthly reports, you’ll be ahead of 49% of B2B marketers.

Consider mobile optimisation

The internet is quickly becoming a mobile-first environment.

More people are conducting searches, reading content and doing business from their smartphones every day. In Q1 2019, mobile search accounted for 64% of organic traffic, up from 57% in 2018.

In fact, Google began to use the mobile version of webpages for indexing and ranking way back in 2018.

To rank highly, webpages must be able to load fast on mobile devices and display their content in a manner that is mobile friendly. That means image optimisation and dynamic site markup are essential for SEO moving forward.

Managed properly, search marketing can increase web traffic significantly without raising costs exponentially.

Map the user journey

How do users move through your website?

Do they find you organically through a blog post and then browse your product pages?

What about when they arrive from your social media page?

Asking these and similar questions will help you develop a user experience that encourages visitors to stay longer and read more.

You may want to consider developing multiple user journeys for distinct buyer personas. Your Google Analytics dashboard can show you where users are currently leaving your site so you can optimise those pages.

In addition to thinking of site utilisation as a journey your users take, consider other models, such as the marketing flywheel, that seek to build SEO momentum over time.

Develop email campaigns

Email marketing is one of the most popular and useful forms of web marketing currently available.

From small businesses to the enterprise, email lists are the lifeblood of sales. They can also help you pull in returning visitors with engaging content, special promotions and more.

Cold emails – messages sent to prospects with whom you have no prior relationship – require a personal touch, and a little humor, to fully engage your target audience. Your subject lines should be eye-catching and succinct. The best strategies use content to capture visitor emails, then reinforce that relationship with additional, more relevant content.

Leverage PPC

Pay-per-click ads can be an effective way to drive more traffic to your site, but they require a more substantial investment.

As the name implies, businesses only pay when someone clicks on the ad.

These days, PPC is most effective when used in tandem with another channel like content marketing, because visitors need more information than can fit in an ad before they make a purchase decision.

Types of website marketing services

Website marketing is a full time commitment.

Brands big and small often outsource some or all of their digital marketing efforts to agencies because they lack the internal resources to run effective multichannel campaigns.

Here are some examples of what might be shopped out:

SEO

Google and other search engines are constantly updating their algorithms. Specialist marketing agencies maintain an updated working knowledge of SEO best practices to ensure their clients comply with the latest standards and methodologies.

Content production and optimisation

It’s easy to hire someone to write a few hundred words of blog copy, but marketing agencies can do so much more. Agencies will conduct market and subject matter research, develop written and visual content, promote web content and update assets as needed.

Email marketing

Though many aspects of email marketing campaigns can be automated with the right technology, someone still needs to write and format engaging content. Agencies can help businesses develop and implement end-to-end email campaigns based around unique campaign objectives.

Managed PPC

Marketing agencies can help businesses create PPC campaigns with eye-catching headlines and text. Consultants can fully manage bidding strategies to maximise the reach and ROI of every campaign.

Content and website marketing

Content marketing and website marketing go hand in hand.

Once you’ve attracted readers through your promotional efforts, you need something for them to engage with. After all, if users come to your site only to find a few paragraphs of sales messages, they’re likely to bounce.

However, when relevant users come to your site and find useful information, they’ll not only stick around to read it, but they will also be more likely to take an action, such as signing up for a newsletter or contacting your sales team.

Content development and publication requires a scientific approach

The content you publish on your site needs to be highly relevant to your readers’ needs; it also needs to be visually interesting and easy to parse. Indeed, there are so many factors at play, and site owners need to take a scientific approach to content production and publication.

Considering 1.2% of all indexed pages are responsible for 68% of all website traffic, it should be clear why a scientific approach is necessary to attract people to your site.

The best content marketers consider many things when approaching every piece of content, including:

  • Target audience: Who will get the most use out of the content? What are their pain points? Where are they in the buying process? What content formats do they prefer? What social media marketing channels do they respond to?
  • Commercial goals: What conversion action should readers take? How can we measure the impact of our content?
  • Keywords: Does the content use language that users actually search for? Do pages competing for similar keywords offer greater depth and breadth of subject matter expertise?
  • Tone and branding: Does the content conform to the brand voice?
  • Visuals: Does the imagery and typography reflect the brand? Does it align with the written content?

In addition to these considerations, content marketers also think strategically about which platforms to publish content to, what social channels to promote that content on, the best time of day to publish content and much more.

Your website is probably the most important and powerful marketing tool you have. With plenty of care and strategic thinking, it can become your biggest source of business growth. Take what you’ve learned here and put it to good use. Let us know how it goes in the comments!

By Castleford

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10 Effective Content Marketing Ideas for Your Ecommerce Business Every Marketer Needs To Know

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Sourced from Fincyte

Creating a content marketing strategy for your eCommerce business isn’t always easy, but you need to have one if you want to succeed.

Content marketing provides a way to differentiate your business from the competition and show that you offer something unique to consumers.

It’s a great way to build rapport with customers, improve rankings, humanize your brand and take your ecommerce business to the next level.

10 Best Content Marketing Ideas

Here are ten ideas for creating a solid content marketing strategy.

1# Set your goals

SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. You need absolute clarity about what you want to achieve with your content and how you will go about promoting it. Do you want to generate leads, promote your brand, or build a community?

If you don’t have a clear goal, you can’t focus your content and it will be difficult to know where to promote it.

If you want to create a simple marketing calendar including details such as topic, content details, keywords and target persona, Hubspot offers some free Microsoft Excel templates for this purpose.

2# Know who you’re writing for

A top priority for 73% of content creators is to create more engaging content. The only way to do this is to get to grips with who your customers are and what they are really interested in.

You need to create a customer persona from data which you can obtain in many different ways such as surveys, telephone and face-to-face interviews.

Building up a comprehensive persona gives you the power to write directly to a person. At the very least, you need to make sure you know the age ranges, gender breakdown, geographic location and purchasing power of your target audience.

3# Identify content that resonates with your audience

It’s no use writing content if it doesn’t resonate with your audience. If you’re writing for an audience of sophisticated, fashionable woman, how-to articles revealing style tips would be a good fit.

If you’re writing for millennials, entertaining content full of gifs would be more appropriate. There are endless types of content and topics and you need to focus on what your audience will read because it offers value to them.

4# Produce consistent, high-quality content

It is better to create fewer high-quality posts than huge volumes of lackluster content. Make sure your headlines are arresting – don’t over-sensationalize but try to capture the attention of your audience.

Always include pictures because humans process images much faster than text. A good mix of content includes videos, infographics, images and text.

Everything you publish should be well-researched – always check your facts and never make promises you can’t deliver on. If you don’t produce content on a regular basis, you will lose out on traffic and if necessary, use the help of freelance content creators.

If you are managing the marketing for your business and also studying part-time or if you are a full-time student, it’s better to take help from a dissertation service or  an essay writing service for your writing requirements for thesis, dissertation and college essays.

This will allow you to have more free time and focus equally well on college work and the website or the brand that you are working on for content marketing. The essay writers service helps you choose the best best paper writing service reviews for your writing needs. Specialized my assignmenthelp offer you quality work in less time.

5# Use the right marketing channels

Spend time creating practical, credible, entertaining content and then spend more time distributing it through the right channels.

This may sound daunting but here are some ideas for a content distribution strategy.

  • Post your content on your social media channels.
  • Reach out to communities or forums that may be interested in your content.
  • Send emails to your current customers with links to your latest content.
  • Let influencers know if you mentioned them in a blog post.
  • Syndicate your content piece on large news sites.
  • Transform your content into another type of content and publish it on a different platform.

6# Make your content actionable

You need to make sure that people are able to act on what you put out. Pull people in by promising to fix their pain or add value to their lives. Provide them with solid, evidence-based information and you will earn their trust. Once you have earned their trust, they will be ready to take the action you suggest.

If your content is not producing sales for your business, it is failing in its purpose. You need to use calls to action – they won’t be obnoxious or annoying to your customers if you’ve already built trust and they will bring results. Put your calls-to-action in optimized, strategic positions, run A/B tests on them, and invite users to buy your products.

7# Appeal to the emotions

Your content will have more impact if you can appeal to the emotions of your audience. The brands that tend to thrive are those who are adept at eliciting the right emotions. They know how to evoke awe, laughter, amusement, or joy. Using images and stories is a great way to elicit emotion.

Images of faces and certain colors can help to make your audience feel a specific emotion. Why not identify a specific color that’s tied to a certain emotion and incorporate it in your content. For example, if you have a romantic post about Valentine’s Day gifts, incorporate the color pink.

8# Improve your conversion funnel

You may know how to produce high-quality content, but you may not understand how to turn it into sales. Your conversion funnel is the path a customer takes from being a first-time visitor to an actual customer.

You should be able to define the main channels a customer passes through, such as visiting your site, becoming an email subscriber, visiting your sales pages and becoming a customer.

You can use analytics to find out if you have an effective conversion funnel. If no-one is buying your products, it could mean that your product doesn’t meet the needs of your audience – either you have the wrong product or the wrong audience.

9# Don’t overlook search engine optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization has evolved over the past ten years and SEO experts use many different best practices to earn ranking. SEO is complex and you might not want to go into all the intricacies.

However, it doesn’t hurt to at least research targeted keywords and learn how to use some basic website optimization to improve your rankings. There are many resources available to help you test your site’s SEO health over time, such as SEMrush.

10# Use influencer content marketing

Consumers are becoming blind to advertisements and you need to incorporate different strategies to appeal to them.

Aligning with an “influencer” or someone who has a large following and credibility in a certain niche enables co-creation of content that will build awareness and drive sales.

Using social media influencers helps to generate measurable results when they subtly promote your brand.

Conclusion

What is of primary importance is to create quality content and then do whatever you can to share and promote it. You don’t have to worry about all the more complex aspects until you have mastered the basics.

By putting these ideas into practice, you will be able to make sure your content marketing is focused and brings you better results.

Author Bio:Sharon is marketing specialist in essay writer service and writer from Manchester, UK. When she has a minute, she loves to share a few of her thoughts about marketing, writing and blogging with you. Currently, she is working as a marketer at BestEssay. You could follow Sharon on Facebook.

Sourced from Fincyte

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8 steps for building an effective content calendar

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By Sammi Caramela

Every good content marketing strategy starts with a well-planned content calendar.

Here are eight steps for building an effective calendar:

1. Design your calendar. Choose a format: an actual calendar template, a spreadsheet, a PDF template or even an online project management tool. From there, decide how to map out your content (e.g., weeks or months in advance). You can start short term and expand as you come up with ideas.

2. Organize content types. Create personas of potential customers, considering any questions or concerns that you can address for them. Ask what brand voice you want to project. Do you want to be casual, professional or somewhere in between? Define your brand’s identity, and ensure your content reflects it. Identify content categories: long blog posts, short blog posts, social media updates, photos, videos, infographics and so on. This will help you vary your posts rather than exhausting one or two formats. You might color-code each type of content to help you visualize it.

3. Determine how often you want to post. Depending on your resources—business size, number of employees, free time—and what works for your business, you might post on certain platforms daily, semiweekly, weekly, biweekly or even less frequently. Regardless, it’s important to be consistent. For instance, if you publish a blog post each week, specify a day and tell your followers, so they know when to expect it. On social media, post more frequently to be considered an “active” user.

4. Look for opportunities to repurpose content. Despite the massive demand for “new” content, you don’t have to come up with original assets for every channel every day. There easy ways to slice, dice and stretch the content you create for one medium for use on another. If you write a blog post, you can take adapt a snippet for a Facebook caption. Highlight key elements for a text-based video on Instagram. You might even turn sections into an appealing infographic. You can also update older, high-performing content with new information. The more mileage you can get out of a piece of content, the easier it will be to sustain your content marketing efforts.

5. Be flexible enough to jump on trending topics. Along with a steady stream of “evergreen” content ideas, you might also post timely content covering industry developments or current events. This will help establish you as a relevant and credible expert in your field.

6. Ask your team for help. The more people you include in brainstorming, the more insights and ideas you’ll gain. Plus, you’ll have more people to delegate to, which will help you tackle more projects in less time.

7. Schedule cross-channel content. When planning content, integrate other types of marketing into your strategy. For instance, pair a blog post with a social media update, and schedule them to go live on the same day. Also, engage with other bloggers or influencers in your industry or niche, through follows, comments, “likes” and shares.

8. Measure your content performance and adapt. As you publish your content, check your stats to evaluate posts’ performance. Maybe your audience prefers short listicles to long blog posts, or maybe they want more videos and fewer photos. Whatever the results, don’t be afraid to make adjustments and experiment with new ideas.

By Sammi Caramela

Sourced from ragan

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What Does ‘Marketing Strategy’ Really Mean?

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By Shannon Prager

John Wanamaker, marketing pioneer of the 19th century, is famously quoted to have said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Though this statement was made more than 100 years ago, I believe it still rings true for many business-to-business technology companies.

As the founder and president of a B2B marketing firm, I know that unlike Wanamaker, modern companies have advanced marketing automation and analytics platforms at their fingertips. But these platforms alone can’t build a solid strategy. They need input.

Why Marketing Strategy Matters 

In the quest to automate marketing journeys with artificial intelligence and machine learning, it’s easy to overlook the essential element that defines your product or service’s value to the market.

“Marketing strategy” is a loose term few fully understand. It’s not the same as marketing planning or a go-to-market strategy. Let’s define the terms:

• A marketing strategy details a company’s long-term marketing goals and objectives.

• Marketing planning aims to achieve marketing strategy goals with tactical activities and campaigns.

• A go-to-market strategy is the value proposition launched to potential customers. It’s often attached to a company, product or service launch.

The challenge most companies run into, especially in the B2B technology space, is failing to create marketing strategies that are supported by qualitative and quantitative research.

Anyone can write a marketing strategy, but if it’s lacking a clear value proposition based on customer research and buyer personas, it’s unlikely to move your business forward.

Elements Of An Effective Marketing Strategy

The most successful marketing strategies contain three core elements: deep customer knowledge, distinct branding and messaging, and market analysis.

Let’s dig deeper.

1. Understand your customers.

This sounds simple. You probably already have some idea of who your ideal customers are. But do you really know them?

Assuming, rather than asking questions, is where many marketing organizations run into trouble. Quality customer research takes time and needs to be updated a least once per year.

To truly know your customers, you must understand:

• What they want.

• What pains them.

• Where they’re searching for in a solution.

• How to reach them (i.e., content, social media, email, website, etc.).

These dynamics change, and without proper feedback loops, you could miss out on important shifts and opportunities within the marketplace.

At many of the companies we work with, time and resources get in the way of creating and updating effective buyer personas. If companies have them at all, they’re often a few years old and at the bottom of someone’s priority list to update. The companies we see generating the greatest return on investment commit to refreshing customer research and buyer personas annually.

If you are performing the customer research yourself, this yearly refresh may take the form of a nice sample size of interviews with your newest customers to evaluate and restudy their buying patterns. The findings should be captured and collected in a consistent way and shared across your teams so they can be operationalized.

2. Know your brand and messaging.

Clearly defined brands are remembered. Think of Apple or IBM: Their iconic branding didn’t pop up overnight. It was clearly defined, consistently presented and intelligently refreshed over time.

Once you know who your ideal customer is, you can use that data to build a strong brand and value proposition that attracts the right audience. Your value proposition is directly tied to the benefit(s) you offer customers and what sets you apart from your competitors. We find that studying buying patterns and asking the right questions about value and differentiation can give you direct insight into how a customer values and speaks about what sets you apart. Then the heavy work becomes storyboarding it and integrating it across your brand and messaging.

3. Keep tabs on your market position.

Anyone can say they’re No. 1 in a product or service category, but can they back it up? Making grand proclamations without supporting data can set your organization up for disappointment. To stay relevant:

• Routinely review competitor strategies.

• Compare your positioning to competitors.

• Identify what makes your organization special.

• Focus on your unique differentiators in messaging.

• Copyright key phrases and language that’s essential to your brand.

• Call out competitors that “borrow” your messaging.

How To Execute Your Marketing Strategy 

Once you understand your customers and have clear branding and messaging and a way to track your market position, you’re ready to go to market. A strong go-to-market strategy should:

• Be multifaceted.

• Tell your story.

• Be scalable.

• Focus on customers.

The Bottom Line: Research First — Or Accept Mediocre Results 

Before investing a dime on any marketing program or content creation, get to know your ideal target customer first. Skipping this essential first step will mean throwing thousands of dollars down the drain.

The companies we see achieving the highest returns on marketing investments spend time on intensive customer and market research to fully understand their customers and prospects before creating a single program or advertisement to try to catch their attention.

The research tools and resources exist to generate holistic buyer personas that will empower your marketing team to craft more powerful and effective campaigns and messages.

It’s simple, really: Either invest the extra time and effort on customer and market research upfront or pay the price later in conversations.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Shannon Prager

Shannon Prager is President of Leadit Marketing, a marketing and demand gen agency focused on B2B tech and professional services companies. Read Shannon Prager’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

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What Does Disruptive Marketing Look Like?

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By Adrian Johansen

With so much advertising trying to get consumers’ attention, what breaks through the noise? Disruptive advertising is all about breaking through that monotony, pulling the prospective consumers’ attention, and creating a revision in their perspective.

Being daring or interesting enough to alter someone’s perspective in a short ad is a tall order. While “disruptive marketing” is a newer moniker and we have new forms of media to assist us with disruption, it’s hardly a new concept. Disruptive marketing has long existed, especially in the realm of pop culture.

What is Disruptive Marketing?

Disruptive marketing tends to not only make the viewer stop what they’re doing, but to engage and participate directly, often with their emotions. Disruptive marketing can take the form of a simple black and white advertisement, a three-dimensional video stopping someone in the street, or guerilla marketing tactics, such as flash mobs. All of these examples have the potential to garner attention in fascinating ways, though many of them are now digital.

Specifically, disruptive marketing is identifiable as:

  • Accessible: Things that were once inaccessible to most people due to financial inequity or lack or technology are now available to many, making the product and the means of advertising it disruptive.
  • Innovative: Fresh and new, innovative products require four components: scale (a critical mass using them), frequency in use, an actively engaged audience, and diversity, valuing the contributions of customers as community members.

War is Over: A Classic Example of Disruptive Marketing

In December of 1969, Yoko Ono and John Lennon launched their famous “War is Over!” campaign in twelve cities. The messages, posted on billboards, said:

“WAR IS OVER!

If you want it

Happy Christmas from John & Yoko”

This message delivered:

  • A disruptive statement, which seemed factually untrue: The United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War, and many people who read the sign wanted the war to end.
  • A means for the audience to achieve what’s being advertised (end of war): This is a promise and an invitation for participation in anti-war activities, but it doesn’t initially ask the participant to do much more than change their mindset.
  • A closing of goodwill: The message is intended to leave the viewer with kindness, regardless of their feelings on the advertisement.
  • A personalized and emotional connection: Most knew who John and Yoko were, and their brand already brought with it feelings, visualizations, and familiar sounds.

Additionally, it’s designed to be disruptive in a minimalistic fashion, presented in an uncomplicated way with sans serif font.

Disruptive Advertising: Personal and Local

The old dog of disruptive marketing has learned some new tricks since John and Yoko’s famous billboards. Available technology now bombards consumers with more ads, but also presents unique opportunities for disruption.

Augmented reality (AR) is one such arena for advertising that is both personal and local. Let’s take a look at the free-to-download AR game Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, taking place in the famous Potterverse created by J. K. Rowling.

Wizards Unite utilizes geolocation tracking to present gamers with challenges superimposed onto their real-world phone cameras. When they look at a park bench when the game is active, for example, they might find an evil wizard standing on it, challenging them to combat. This experience is incredibly personal and tailored to the player’s location; the entire experience also draws on a decades-long attachment to the Harry Potter book series and movies.

With this game, the user can become immersed in a world that also evokes sentimental feelings, and possibly feelings of empowerment. Now for the sell: local businesses can appear in the game as respites for the gamers, providing them with free in-game resources. AT&T Wireless stores show up this way, causing gamers to not only head towards those physical locations, but to associate the AT&T brand positively with their beloved favorite, Harry Potter.

This creates an innovative brand association for AT&T as well as repetitive engagement with AT&T stores. Combined with innovation and engagement, this memorable brand experience and positive association creates a successful disruptive marketing strategy.

How to Plan and Execute a Disruptive Marketing Campaign

Since the end of “Game of Thrones,” we all understand the magnitude and impact of the series on our viewing habits and pop culture, but let’s think back to the 2011 series debut. Audiences were just getting used to video streaming services (even Netflix had started with DVD delivery) and the idea of being a geek all about dragons wasn’t entirely cool back then.

HBO changed that. In addition to encouraging consumers to embrace HBO Go for its premium content, they employed dramatic marketing techniques. Like the Potter game, the technology was disruptive, and so was the marketing that went along with it.

Press contacts received immersive press kits with in-world items prior to the launch of the series, and HBO didn’t stop there. By the time the series finale premiered in 2019, HBO co-sponsored a Bleed for the Throne blood drive and a worldwide scavenger hunt. Again, these events were exciting, participatory, engaging and, you guessed it, disruptive.

How did HBO start with a show based on a book series enjoyed by a niche group of fans to marketing one of the most culturally pervasive and popular series of all time? They had a careful, long-term marketing plan that even expanded their core base by making it cool to like dragons.

Behind the scenes, this only happens when marketers communicate well internally, adequately manage sensitive information (no spoilers!) and standardize their process for success. While each marketing effort seems quirky and creative, it’s clearly the result of careful in-house communications and strategic partnerships on HBO’s part.

From a black and white ad in the late 1960s to AR wizards and worldwide scavenger hunts for items of Westeros, disruptive marketing works best for innovative technologies and cultural touchstones. These disruptions help audiences form emotional connections with innovative brands, clearly communicating the nature of the products or services advertised and engaging audiences in the use of forward-thinking technology with thought-provoking messages.

By Adrian Johansen

Sourced from PromotionWorld

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What Does ‘Marketing Strategy’ Really Mean?

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By Shannon Prage

John Wanamaker, marketing pioneer of the 19th century, is famously quoted to have said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Though this statement was made more than 100 years ago, I believe it still rings true for many business-to-business technology companies.

As the founder and president of a B2B marketing firm, I know that unlike Wanamaker, modern companies have advanced marketing automation and analytics platforms at their fingertips. But these platforms alone can’t build a solid strategy. They need input.

Why Marketing Strategy Matters 

In the quest to automate marketing journeys with artificial intelligence and machine learning, it’s easy to overlook the essential element that defines your product or service’s value to the market.

“Marketing strategy” is a loose term few fully understand. It’s not the same as marketing planning or a go-to-market strategy. Let’s define the terms:

• A marketing strategy details a company’s long-term marketing goals and objectives.

• Marketing planning aims to achieve marketing strategy goals with tactical activities and campaigns.

• A go-to-market strategy is the value proposition launched to potential customers. It’s often attached to a company, product or service launch.

The challenge most companies run into, especially in the B2B technology space, is failing to create marketing strategies that are supported by qualitative and quantitative research.

Anyone can write a marketing strategy, but if it’s lacking a clear value proposition based on customer research and buyer personas, it’s unlikely to move your business forward.

Elements Of An Effective Marketing Strategy

The most successful marketing strategies contain three core elements: deep customer knowledge, distinct branding and messaging, and market analysis.

Let’s dig deeper.

1. Understand your customers.

This sounds simple. You probably already have some idea of who your ideal customers are. But do you really know them?

Assuming, rather than asking questions, is where many marketing organizations run into trouble. Quality customer research takes time and needs to be updated a least once per year.

To truly know your customers, you must understand:

• What they want.

• What pains them.

• Where they’re searching for in a solution.

• How to reach them (i.e., content, social media, email, website, etc.).

These dynamics change, and without proper feedback loops, you could miss out on important shifts and opportunities within the marketplace.

At many of the companies we work with, time and resources get in the way of creating and updating effective buyer personas. If companies have them at all, they’re often a few years old and at the bottom of someone’s priority list to update. The companies we see generating the greatest return on investment commit to refreshing customer research and buyer personas annually.

If you are performing the customer research yourself, this yearly refresh may take the form of a nice sample size of interviews with your newest customers to evaluate and restudy their buying patterns. The findings should be captured and collected in a consistent way and shared across your teams so they can be operationalized.

2. Know your brand and messaging.

Clearly defined brands are remembered. Think of Apple or IBM: Their iconic branding didn’t pop up overnight. It was clearly defined, consistently presented and intelligently refreshed over time.

Once you know who your ideal customer is, you can use that data to build a strong brand and value proposition that attracts the right audience. Your value proposition is directly tied to the benefit(s) you offer customers and what sets you apart from your competitors. We find that studying buying patterns and asking the right questions about value and differentiation can give you direct insight into how a customer values and speaks about what sets you apart. Then the heavy work becomes storyboarding it and integrating it across your brand and messaging.

3. Keep tabs on your market position.

Anyone can say they’re No. 1 in a product or service category, but can they back it up? Making grand proclamations without supporting data can set your organization up for disappointment. To stay relevant:

• Routinely review competitor strategies.

• Compare your positioning to competitors.

• Identify what makes your organization special.

• Focus on your unique differentiators in messaging.

• Copyright key phrases and language that’s essential to your brand.

• Call out competitors that “borrow” your messaging.

How To Execute Your Marketing Strategy 

Once you understand your customers and have clear branding and messaging and a way to track your market position, you’re ready to go to market. A strong go-to-market strategy should:

• Be multifaceted.

• Tell your story.

• Be scalable.

• Focus on customers.

The Bottom Line: Research First — Or Accept Mediocre Results 

Before investing a dime on any marketing program or content creation, get to know your ideal target customer first. Skipping this essential first step will mean throwing thousands of dollars down the drain.

The companies we see achieving the highest returns on marketing investments spend time on intensive customer and market research to fully understand their customers and prospects before creating a single program or advertisement to try to catch their attention.

The research tools and resources exist to generate holistic buyer personas that will empower your marketing team to craft more powerful and effective campaigns and messages.

It’s simple, really: Either invest the extra time and effort on customer and market research upfront or pay the price later in conversations.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Shannon Prager

Shannon Prager is President of Leadit Marketing, a marketing and demand gen agency focused on B2B tech and professional services companies. Read Shannon Prager’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

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Voice and Tone: An Integral Part of Your Email Marketing Strategy

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Sourced from www.squareup.com

Voice and tone determine what you say to customers, and how to say it. 

Hitting the right voice and tone in emails ensures that you can reach your customers in a meaningful and authentic way. It may seem tricky at first, but we promise it’s easy once you get the basics down.

What is the difference between voice and tone?

Simply put, voice is what you say to your customers (the message) and tone is how you say it (the attitude with which you state your message).

Think of voice as the personality of your email –– how do you want to come across to your customers? Your voice should remain consistent throughout your messaging. To find your voice, think about the values of your company and what message you want to share with your audience.

Tone, on the other hand, is the attitude of what you’re saying in your email. And just like your attitude can change, so can your tone. Your tone can be whimsical, serious, or even funny — if that’s the attitude you’re trying to convey.

Finding your voice and tone

So now that you know what voice and tone are, how do you find them? That’s a great question. It depends on your goals for your email marketing strategy and overall brand.

If you’re new to email marketing and need help settling on your tone and voice, we recommend writing three different emails to express the same message — let’s say to offer a coupon for ten percent off a purchase. Write the email in three different voices to your ideal customer with what you would say to them about this coupon.

Once you’ve written three emails in three different voices, see which one resonates most with you. Which email sounds most like you and represents your brand the most authentically? Have it? Great – that’s your voice.

Now, let’s move to tone. Do you want your emails to feel silly, heartfelt, or maybe even objective in your emails? Again, test out a few different email by taking the email that you wrote to find your voice and now try out a few different tones with that message. How does that feel? Are you presenting your audience with the right attitude?

After you’ve settled on your tone, take note of your voice and tone with a few words that can act as your North Star when you’re writing your email. For instance, perhaps your voice is conversational, and your tone is funny. Write this information down and keep it next to you when you’re writing your marketing emails -— it will help you stay consistent in both voice and tone, which is incredibly important in marketing.

Using voice and tone in email marketing

This brings us to our next point: consistency. Once you’re comfortable (dare we say even excited?) about your voice and tone, it’s important that you stick with it. That’s not to say you can’t crack a joke here and there even if you have gone with a more formal tone, but for the majority of your emails, they should sound the same.

The more consistent you are with voice and tone, the more recognizable your brand will be to customers who receive your email. That consistency helps your email stand out from all of the other messages in their inbox.

Think of it this way: Your audience should be able to tell it’s your email even if they couldn’t see your shop’s name in the email — that’s how distinct you want your voice to be. So whether you’re writing a welcome or happy birthday email, you should let your North Star guide you.

Sourced from www.squareup.com

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How PepsiCo is ‘unlocking’ the potential of the healthy drinks market

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By Imogen Watson

As high fat and sugar drinks fall out of favour, PepsiCo UK is banking on premium and health-conscious consumers to drive demand for healthier options on the market.

With investors increasingly reluctant to commit to soft drink and energy stocks, The Drum spoke with PepsiCo UK’s top marketer to learn why it is scaling its sugar-free options in order to diversify their portfolios (or protect their market share).

“The big growth that we’ve observed across our beverage brands has been around no sugar” explained Natalie Redford, marketing director of PepsiCo UK. “We’re really unlocking what that means.” This shift is being seen around the globe.

“I think it’s the new norm,” Redford said. “Guilt-free, but not compromising. It’s proven really successful for us in the UK.”

And while the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ups its focus on cutting down high fat, salt, and sugar (HFSS) advertising, Redford said PepsiCo UK has responded to Government consultation relating to further advertising restrictions for products high in fat, salt and sugar.

“The great thing about the beverages and brands that I look after in my portfolio, and the ones that we advertise are no-sugar beverages that fall outside of the HFSS category,” Redford said.

Of all carbonated brands included in her UK portfolio, Pepsi Max tops the sugar-free market for cola, and 7up Free leads the lemon and lime.

PepsiCo UK is channelling this healthier alternative approach through its advertising.

In a first of its kind event for the 7up Free brand, this weekend, PepsiCo UK has launched a pop-up shop to commemorate the return of its chilled-out 90s mascot, Fido Dido.

“We wanted to use the ‘free’ in 7up Free to mean more than just no sugar,” Redford said. “We wanted to use the free to make a more ’emotional connection’ with our customers.”

With this thought in mind, Fido Dido House is an ‘anti-pop-up.’ While people normally ‘do do do,’ PepsiCo UK created an experience that allowed people to opt-out of the frenzy of hectic life, to feel free to just ‘be.’

Premiumisation

It claimed consumers are demanding more premium products; PepsiCo UK is increasing investment in this space.

In 2017, PepsiCo first launched Lifewtr ​- a premium water bottle brand – in North America in a bid to rival Coca-Cola’s Jennifer Aniston-endorsed Smartwater.

Serving as a canvas to showcase emerging artists’ work, the brand caters to the need for healthier alternatives to carbonated, sugary drinks, while supporting arts and culture. Now, Lifewtr has launched in the UK market as Arto Lifewtr.

Redford spoke how “premiumisation is definitely a trend that [PepsiCo] is going exercise more of in the next five years and it’s happening at every level.”

She puts it down to the breadth and depth as a company that means PepsiCo can play across those segments and foresees this will be a general direction for the brand as it steps out from the more mainstream drinks industry.

“We’re thinking how our brand can be served in a more premium way,” Redford detailed. “Whether that be a premium experience or a premium product.”

While moving towards healthier options is undoubtedly a strategic move for PepsiCo, it isn’t always an easy one. It’s main competitor Coca-Cola has to axe its Life brand, after-sales slumped in the UK, whereby the product accounted for less than 1% of its trademark sales.

Feature Image Credit: PepsiCo

By Imogen Watson

Sourced from The Drum

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The Sad Tyranny of an Inbound-Only Approach to Winning Clients

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By Anthony Iannarino

Each of us is a prisoner to our beliefs. Our beliefs shape our interpretation of reality, as well as what we believe is good and right and true. Our interpretation can constrain our thoughts, and those thoughts can restrict our actions, even when other people have different beliefs, ones that increase their choices instead of limiting them. Those constraints can be a form of self-imposed tyranny.

For the last decade, since Web 2.0 and the advent of the social channels, there has been a significant push towards Inbound Marketing. The ability to create and share content to share with your prospective clients changed marketing, eliminating the need for a budget, an agency, or most importantly, permission to publish. For the better part of this period, salespeople, sales leaders, and sales organizations have been sold the idea that Inbound is more effective than Outbound, with the loudest voices suggesting that outbound and cold outreach is no longer necessary. They have also suggested that salespeople and sales organizations that employ an outbound approach will soon be out of business, that no one will work with people companies that use cold outreach.

Inbound-only is not a strategy that any salesperson or sales organization should consider. The result is an opportunity-starved sales force, and on that is reliant on others.

100 Pieces of Content

Recently, a well-known social media marketer suggested that people create 100 pieces of content, a strategy this individual executes perfectly, with help from a large team and a massive investment of both time and money. The inbound-only proponents applauded the idea as an excellent idea. While it might be helpful for an individual working to develop a well-recognized brand, and a terrible idea for salespeople, and one that would be impossible to execute.

Imagine a sales force of 200 salespeople. Each salesperson creates a single blog post each week. First, someone is going to have to approve the content, another person will have to edit the content, marketing will have to vet the content, and in many industries, legal will have to consent to the publication. There is no reason for a sales force to create 10,400 pieces of content a year, and there is no marketing professional who approves a strategy that would create confusion and chaos.

Let’s set aside this extreme misinterpretation of a strategy for personal brand building as a sales strategy, and look at the real problem with an inbound-only approach.

Passivity and Waiting

Nothing about selling lends itself to passivity or waiting. The idea that one must sit patiently, waiting for content to bring them leads and opportunities might be one of the most debilitating and destructive beliefs to take hold in some organizations. The idea that content will cause people to beat a path to your door is every salesperson’s dream; what could be easier than merely taking orders? What could be better?

There is a reason we use the word “hunter” to describe salespeople. It signifies one that has to go out work to be able to feed themselves. We ‘don’t describe salespeople as fishermen or fisherwomen; the idea that someone would put a line in the water and wait for a bite, no matter how long it takes, and no matter how hungry they might be is a non-starter.

For many reasons, there is no waiting in sales. Unlike most other areas of business, salespeople have a quota, a time-bound goal. With each day that slips by without the salesperson creating new opportunities, the deadline gets closer. Waiting is a dangerous strategy and a choice that isn’t available to salespeople or companies that intend to grow.

A Detrimental Reliance on Others

Some people with sales titles believe that inbound should replace outbound, that it is marketing’s responsibility to bring them leads. When salespeople complain about leads not being qualified, what they are suggesting is that marketing should bring them “opportunities,” a prospect that is “ready-to-buy.” Marketing has its metrics and goals, and “new opportunities” ‘isn’t likely to be found among them. The idea that a salesperson should rely on marketing is to misunderstand the difference in the roles and goals.

Not only does an inbound-only approach cause one to rely on marketing, but it also requires them to rely heavily on luck (even though Luck loves a hustler and ignores non-hustlers). Inbound requires your dream client to open their browser, navigate to a search engine, and type it some keyword that an algorithm directs to your website. You have to rely on your client searching, the algorithm to deliver them to you, and the content to cause them to reach out to you proactively.

A Sad Form of Tyranny

The idea that your results are not within your control or influence is an unhealthy belief, and especially harmful for salespeople. Having to wait for someone else to proactively reach out to them before being able to engage with a person or company who would benefit from their help is to accept that you have no agency, that you are nothing more than a victim of circumstances beyond your control.

There is no question that inbound marketing is important, that it should be done and done well, and that it is a powerful form of marketing that can and does help sales organizations. But inbound is ancillary to an effective outbound approach, one that includes cold outreach. Outbound is greater than Inbound.

By Anthony Iannarino

Sourced from IANNARINO

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Think Tank: Changing Marketing Tactics When Temps Rise

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By Kyle Flaherty

Kyle Flaherty, chief marketing officer at Zaius, offers insights into engaging consumers when the summer heats up.

Unless your target audience lives somewhere lucky enough to experience hot weather year-round, your customers’ behavior is bound to change as the temperature rises and vacation auto-responders go up this summer.

Whether you’re a swimsuit brand gearing up for your busiest buying season or a ski brand making it through a slow buying season, seasonal buying can have a huge impact on revenue.

But many business owners may not realize the impact the summer months will have on their customer behavior: from increased vacation time to summer hours to more time on mobile than at their desks. And as your buyers’ behaviors change, your marketing must as well.

So how do you shift your marketing to effectively reach your customers during the summer months? Your marketing team has the answer at their fingertips.

Historical customer behavior helps you understand how this season typically shifts your business and come up with interactions to create an ideal customer experience. It takes a little forethought, sure, but it’s not too late to adjust your marketing strategy to reach your buyers effectively as the temperatures rise.

Analyze last summer’s buying habits

The key to great marketing is simple: know your buyers. The more you know about how your buyers behave, the better you can tailor your marketing to their preferences and habits. This applies to all of your marketing activities, but can be especially powerful during seasonal ebbs and flows in your business.

For example, if you look at your customer data from last summer in detail, you may notice that your most popular line of products slightly underperformed, while another line did fantastically well in comparison. You may also notice that your share of site traffic from mobile jumped 15 percent overall and your best channel for promotion was Instagram.

These examples are all speculation, but by digging deep into your own customer data, you can find out what holds true for your business. With that data in hand, you can adjust your overall marketing strategy to take advantage of your buyers’ behavior and reach them where they are this summer.

Adjust your promotion mix

The same promotions that you use throughout the year may not resonate as well for buyers during the summer. Many of your buyers are likely on their mobile devices more frequently in the summer because they’re outside — whether by the pool or on the beach. If your customer data tells you this is true for your audience, it’s a huge opportunity to increase your investment in social ads and pull back on other channels.

In the summer, your brand should likely:

  • decrease investment in search ads;
  • increase investment in social ads,
  • and explore traditional ads like magazines or billboards in areas with summer tourism.

These are just a few examples, but you should run a number of A/B tests to assess whether changing up your promotions during the summer results in better conversion rates for your ads. Again, your business is unique and so are your buyers — so test everything!

Promote summer-friendly products

Going back to your customer data, you can see what products and brands perform the best during the summer months. Depending on your business and what you sell, the products that perform best may be obvious, or completely surprising.

For example, it only makes sense that if your business sells ski equipment, the summer may be a bit slow no matter what line of products you promote, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get creative. For example, a ski brand could have a mega-hyped summer sale to clear out excess inventory and drive revenue during slower months. But brands shouldn’t just send the same sale message to everyone — send personalized product recommendation campaigns to your buyers to drive higher conversion rates on the sale.

In comparison, a swimsuit brand should significantly increase its paid marketing spend for its busiest season. Using segment sync and lookalike campaigns across Facebook and Instagram, the team could identify similar buyers to their most loyal customers and make the most of their campaign spend during the most profitable season.

Either way your business shifts, you should use customer data to power your summer marketing campaigns and make sure your business adjusts to the season. Don’t get stuck with underperforming marketing campaigns this summer — be proactive and drive real revenue for your brand.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock / i like photo 

Kyle Flaherty is chief marketing officer at Zaius.

By Kyle Flaherty

Sourced from WWD

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