How social media has changed the whole marketing industry
Before digital marketing has taken over social media, social media was only a platform for people to connect and virtually socialize. Businesses were using traditional marketing channels such as broadcasting, prints, billboards, and more. These marketing channels are costly and are no longer delivering impressive results as they once were because consumers are moving away from these traditional media to digital media. As more people are predominately active on social media, marketers as well as businesses see the potential of social media and started leveraging social media to their own benefits.Read more
Content Readability and Its Effect On SEO
When improving the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of your website, it’s all good and well optimizing your content with keywords and meta tags. However, if your content doesn’t read well then chances are that it won’t stay on page one of Google for very long.
5 Reasons Why Marketing Matters More Than Ever
Marketing has always been around with every product and service produced by a company. More importantly, businesses succeed when innovation and marketing work hand in hand. However, while most business leaders welcome innovation in their companies, they tend to neglect marketing. This has not only caused missed opportunities, but also capital and failure to the business.
To be exact, marketing is not only about online presence and promotion of the product or service. It is way beyond that. Marketing is about building relationships with your audience while meeting your promise as a brand. It is about persuading consumers why your product or service is needed in the market and how it is different from others.
On that account, marketing has become more important now more than ever. The world is developing innovative products, services, business model, solutions, technologies and more every day. These products and services are crucially dependent on marketing to create awareness, generate revenue and profit. Businesses must focus on marketing, as a product or service alone cannot sustain a company.
Here are 5 reasons why marketing matters more than ever today.
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Brand Definition
Your brand is the most valuable asset of your business. It is important to note that branding is not just about design. Rather, it is a whole experience created for your consumers to drive sales. Branding can change how people perceive your business. A strong brand can be built through an effective marketing strategy. As such, brand marketing is an investment companies need to make to create their business assets. It is important to offer a product or service as a brand that resonates with your consumers in order to generate revenue.
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Lead Generation
Marketing has become an essential source and process in generating lead and driving sales for a business. To do well, businesses need to capture consumer attention through both inbound and outbound marketing.
Content marketing is one of the leading marketing strategies that should be adopted by businesses. Contents provide value to your audience, build brand awareness and grab the attention of potential consumers.
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Understanding the consumer
To bring your business’ product or service to the target market and increase sales, it is important to understand your consumers. Conducting thorough market research can help you understand your target audience. With that, your consequent marketing strategy can help your business effectively release your product or service in the target market and grasp the eye of your ideal consumer.
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Building relationships with customers
Consumers need to resonate their values with the brand more than ever. This will produce a sense of belonging in the consumer, resulting in strong relationships with the brand. Whether it is B2C or B2B marketing, your ultimate consumers are people. Therefore, it is not just about sales and profit, but about keeping up and building relationships with your consumers over time with consistency.
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Prepare for the future
In these unpredictable times, your business needs to deliver and continuously plan for the future. The more efficiently you plan, the more likely you are to act and produce results through marketing. In a way, marketing is more than knowing your market and competitors, as it is also about constantly getting an edge that puts your business above the rest. Ultimately, a well-planned marketing strategy will help you measure your success and rectify your voids.
If you need help from a marketing consultant with your marketing, Robotic Marketer can help your business with marketing strategies based on market research, including in-depth analysis of competitors. Our marketing consultants will ensure that you will receive the best robot-possible marketing strategy available in the world today.
Marketing Strategy for B2B – Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing has been around for a while, however, has often been seen as a B2C tactic; leading to its slow acceptance in B2B circles. While B2C companies were flourishing through the help of mega-influencers, B2Bs have been skewed towards more traditional ways of marketing. But, this is changing.
Research suggests that 92% of people trust recommendations from individuals over a business advertisement. With the price of paid advertisements (Google ads/ social media ads) on the rise, influencer marketing is becoming important for B2B companies when considering cost-effectiveness. Note that 91% of B2B transactions are influenced by word of mouth, and the impact of referrals is crucial to the success of the business.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing uses influencing personalities or leaders to drive a business message to the larger market. This marketing strategy allows your business to hire or pay influencers to promote your product or service to the target market. This tactic goes hand in hand with content marketing, especially in this digital era. Content is everything, and to achieve success in influencer marketing you’ll need to create content to engage with the influencers you’re aiming to get on board.
Benefits of B2B Influencer Marketing
Influencers offer a unique point of view to your business that resonates with your target audience. This marketing strategy will not only promote your content but will also provide you with valuable networks and professional contacts. Here are some key benefits:
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Develop credibility for your organization
You might be offering a unique product or service that makes you stand out from your competitors but it is hard for prospective clients to understand what you do due to the complexity of B2B products and services. Hence, business decision-making teams often face difficult purchasing choices. Businesses are likely to purchase from businesses that are logic-driven and authentic. Having credibility to your organization through influencers adds value to your business.
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Fresh Content Opportunities
There is no doubt that content is hard to maintain. Many business leaders find it difficult to produce content relevant to their industry and market. With influencers at work, your company will have relatable content to share and stimulate engagement. By sharing influencer content you tend to build a relationship with your target audience.
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Reach a new and relevant audience
The goal of influencer marketing is to reach a wide audience. This can be a good marketing tactic for businesses looking to acquire new customers. It can be difficult for businesses to generate leads. Influencers build a pathway for businesses to reach out to other businesses and build meaningful connections.
Build your B2B Influencer Marketing Campaign
With all this knowledge in place, here are a few tips on how to create your B2B marketing campaign.
- Work with micro-and nano- influencers
People are aware that high-profile influencers and celebrities make millions of dollars in promotion and produce invaluable endorsement. In this case, micro-and nano- influencers are beneficial. It not only helps you connect faster to prospective clients and generate leads but is also cost-effective.
- Create a buyer persona
Conduct market research to understand your buyers. Create a persona resonating with your target audience. Through this, you’ll be able to choose your influencer more wisely. If you don’t find the right influencer, you are unlikely to reach the right business audience.
- Educate – Tell a story
Customers are attracted to content that tells a story or provides value. Companies should focus on content, tell your business history, your company values, resonate with your target customer. Encourage your influencer you work with to promote your product or service through a story or experience.
- Track your campaign success
Produce metrics relating to reach, sales, and product or service awareness to measure and analyze the success of your influencer marketing campaign. This will allow you to see where you need to improve and amend your campaign accordingly.
Influencer marketing can be difficult to implement for B2B companies as compared to B2C companies. But it is seen that B2B companies can also benefit from practicing influencer marketing.
Need help from a marketing consultant with your B2B marketing or lead generation. Robotic Marketer can help your business with Marketing Strategies based on market research, including an in-depth analysis of competitors. Our marketing consultants will ensure that you will receive the best marketing strategy available in the world today.
How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: A Beginner’s Guide
Source: HubSpot
While Google keeps us on our toes with all the algorithm updates they keep rollin’ out, one thing has stayed pretty consistent for inbound marketers looking to optimize their websites for search: keyword research.
Well, the need to do keyword research has stayed the same. How you actually do it hasn’t.
What Is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines with the goal of using that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing. Keyword research can uncover queries to target, the popularity of theses queries, their ranking difficulty, and more.
More and more, we hear how much SEO has evolved over just the last 10 years, and how unimportant keywords themselves have become to our ability to rank well for the searches people make every day.
Source: HubSpot
How to Develop a Marketing Strategy in 5 Easy Steps
According to Bob Hoffman, “Without strategy and planning, marketing is useless.” This is a belief shared by all marketers in which businesses cannot move forward in the right direction without careful preparation and tactical approach. Subsequently, this is where developing a marketing strategy is essential – a practical research methodology that can provide guidance in terms of focus and direction for marketers, marketing consultants, and businesses alike with informed decision-making comes into play.
A marketing strategy provides a roadmap to enhance reputation, engage with customers effectively and persuade potential customers on the unique value of a business through identified key messaging.
Here are five steps to develop your marketing strategy easily:
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Initiate a situational analysis – An internal look into yourself
Before looking at practical advances and the manner of execution, research must be the priority in order to truly understand the foundation and situation of your business.
Primarily, characterizing your business altogether, the products or services you provide, the customers you pay attention to, also identifying the unique value proposition which positively differentiates yourself from your competition. This would be regarded as a “situation analysis”.
Effective situational analysis requires a SWOT analysis which is the summation of the business’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Specifically, the strengths and weaknesses indicate the attributes that are currently present within your business, whereas the opportunities and threats belong to outside elements.
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Outline the marketing objectives and sales you want to achieve
The marketing objectives and the number of sales are interconnected aspirations for a business to achieve. Marketing consultants along with businesses should document the range and the expectancy of these outlined objectives within a short to a long-term period of time.
Your marketing objectives should be concentrated internally or externally varying on your situation. These objectives should be written in the SMART format to safeguard responsibility. SMART comprises of Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bounded. These marketing objectives should facilitate improvement in sales.
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Recognize and understand your target audience
Target audience is the specialized segmentation of your ideal niche market with the intention to position your product or service competitively. Identifying your target audience is a wide-ranging process of asking the right questions where marketing consultants need to recognize the underlying desires, challenges, and expectations of an ideal customer to know them better.
As a business or a marketing consultant, you need to be conscious of your target audience’s daily lives and how those concerns can be answered all through your products or services. To meet these client assessments involves the utilization of buyer personas. Buyer personas are depictions of your ideal client centered on demographic information, online behavior also speculated motivations and apprehensions that make them who they are.
Nevertheless, to effectively distinguish your constructed target audience for in-depth insights, attempt to narrowly characterize the meaning of your ideal customer within your marketing strategy.
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Evaluation and implementation of marketing tactics
In the preceding segments of the marketing strategy, you have pinpointed the customers you are targeting, and what you can provide as a business. As a result, you must feature the marketing tactics you will implement in order to connect with your customers and reach the marketing objectives you want to achieve. The listed marketing tactics should compromise with the allowance of your budget and how much you are willing to spend. Examples of these marketing activities may comprise of:
- Paid marketing: television, print and online publications, websites
- Publicity: press releases, testimonials, and referrals
- Sponsorships: community events, local charities, sport endorsements
- Promotions: direct mailings, coupons, sales, point of purchase displays
The marketing tactics you decide on should reach your ideal customer when they are highly interested in your message.
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Assessing the implications of your marketing strategy approach
Determine which marketing tactics are useful and modify your marketing strategy development. The best way to achieve this is through moderated feedback. By asking existing customers about the impact of your business and pursuing which marketing activities were most effective and generated the most sales.
5 Reasons Why it’s Time to Rethink Your Digital Marketing
It’s almost 2021 and it’s impossible to think of marketing without digital marketing. If you are a business owner, you are sure to be using at least one form of digital marketing in promoting your products and services. According to DigitalMarketer, “Digital marketing is the act of promoting and selling products and services by leveraging online marketing tactics such as social media marketing, search marketing, and email marketing.” Here are five reasons why it may be time to rethink your digital marketing strategy.
Reason #1: COVID-19
If it weren’t already obvious, COVID-19 has created waves all across every industry, the digital marketing space included.
According to Bernard Marr’s Forbes piece, COVID-19 has resulted in many businesses depending largely on their digital marketing strategies, even to the extent that it may, in many cases, “be the deciding factor in whether they make it through the tough times ahead.”
Many businesses rely on having face-to-face meetings, attending and hosting events, conferences and tradeshows and entering awards to market their brand. However, with these avenues being entirely blocked from access due to the pandemic, it’s time for marketers to get creative.
Marr explains that B2B companies particularly depend on tradeshows and exhibitions to network and build customer relations. While larger companies may be investing equally in online efforts, they would have no doubt lost millions of dollars due to canceled events. This means bringing back the focus to social marketing, content marketing, SEO and influencer-led campaigns.
Reason #2: Your digital strategy lacks clarity
Smart Insights finds that many companies (regardless of whether they have a digital strategy or not) tend to lack direction in terms of their online marketing strategies. This could be a lack of clarity in terms of their digital strategy to gain customers, retain existing customers or any other marketing goals they may have.
If your digital marketing strategy lacks direction, it’s time for a digital marketing refresher.
Start by thinking of your digital marketing objectives. Taking a SMART approach is one way to articulate this – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely.
Reason #3: You’re missing adaptive content
Adaptive content is simply the opposite of static content. While static content stays the same throughout all social media channels, adaptive content is content that is tailored to each digital channel, whether it is your blog, website content, EDM, social media or other channels.
While the substance of your content can stay constant, it is really important to use the correct style, structure and length to meet each digital channel. For example, while blogs are allowed to be long-form, someone browsing your content on Instagram is not likely to read an extravagantly long caption.
Reason #4: It builds credibility
A clearly defined digital media strategy starts with your target audience.
This involves ideating and creating buyer personas to be able to target your market better – ensuring that your message reaches each target segment effectively through appropriate channels. For example, while Instagram has seen a heavy increase in popularity among people up to the age of 30, if your product is mainly aimed at people in their 40s, the message will be lost through this channel.
Similarly, Twitter users are more likely to buy a product promoted by an influencer, rather than based on a television ad. Therefore, targeting your audience appropriately can help with solidifying your brand image but building trust.
A clearly defined online customer value proposition targeted towards each target segment will help you articulate the value you can add through your online services. Develop a competitive content marketing strategy to generate new leads and keep existing customers loyal.
It’s all about getting the right message out at the right time, building trust and credibility and consequently, boosting sales.
Reason #5: It can make or break your business
The present is online, and the future will be online. Marketing without digital marketing can be equivalent to running on a treadmill – you’re putting in the work but not really getting anywhere.
According to Digital Marketer, having a strong digital marketing strategy will help to create awareness and engagement both before and after the sale, build brand loyalty and allow consumers to promote your content too.
So, if you haven’t already begun to rethink your digital marketing strategy, now might be a good time to start!
How Pinterest Works to Boost Your Business & Sales
Source: Lyfe Marketing
For many, Pinterest is that social network where only women hang out and spend their time sharing beautiful pictures from all walks of life. But turns out, Pinterest is much more than that. If you know how Pinterest works, then, as a business, you can use it to your advantage.
Many users (both male and female) tend to depend on it for different things. Right from finding unknown recipes to planning their baby shower to creating their own designer collections. The social network is huge, and there is an endless supply of ideas for everyone.
If you look beneath the skin of this fast-growing social media site and try to understand how Pinterest works, you’ll see what all it can do for your business — regardless of the niche you are operating in.
Source: Lyfe Marketing
The Benefits of Marketing Automation
Executing a marketing strategy can be a tedious and overwhelming process, that is why marketing automation can be a marketer’s best friend!
Marketing automation software automates and streamlines marketing activities and is most beneficial in areas such as email marketing, social media, and lead generation.
It provides personalized experiences for clients, which results in an average of 50% increase in email open rates. It is also an efficient use of a business’ time as it minimizes repetitive tasks through automation, allowing employees to focus on the core business, whilst minimizing the risk of human error.
Whether you want to optimize your employees’ time or define your target audience profiles, an automated marketing system is beneficial for leveling up your marketing efforts. So, let’s take a look at how it can help your business.
Benefits of marketing automation:
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It helps with reducing costs
Through a streamlined marketing process, you can reduce costs by using time more efficiently. It is seen that marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead costs. It also allows you to improve your analysis of big data, saving on the time it takes to have to manually analyze and sort big data.
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It helps in generating better leads
With marketing automation, implemented organizations can experience a 10% increase in their sales pipeline contribution. This is because it can target segments through landing pages, provide A/B testing by creating two versions of an ad, email or landing page determining which provides a better outcome, and helps to build your contact list.
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It improves accountability
It allows you to see where your strengths and weaknesses lie in the business in terms of staff and efforts in both sales and marketing.
Through data reporting, analysis and most importantly feedback you can align and unify the sales and marketing goals of each team by setting benchmarks and qualifiers, while also receiving reports on the successes or failures of these goals. In addition to this, it can also determine where and what leads need to be nurtured to become sales qualified leads (SQL).
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It increases efficiency
Automation can provide efficiency through a reduction in repetitive manual tasks to optimize productivity.
The software can provide marketing campaign calendars, target multichannel campaigns such as SMS or push notifications, provide seamless customer personalization (which would normally take days) and provide powerful customer retention programs such as abandoned cart or win-back campaigns.
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It helps refine the marketing process
These systems can work effectively to align with your marketing strategy and adapting communication tactics relating to the customer journey. Marketing automated software provides clarity on a buyer’s behavior. They also provide a seamless alignment to your marketing strategy and can effectively market through multiple channels such as mobile, PC, SMS and email.
An important factor in automation is the ability to test different campaigns. This allows for analyses of better-suited campaigns that can be altered or optimized to the various segments and generate more lead conversions.
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It helps with effectively targeting customers
Automated systems can segment your customers by demographic, location, interests and behaviors, allowing for accurate communication with leads, which can generate sales.
By understanding your buyer’s persona, you are able to deliver relevant content to prospects instead of just generating useless noise.
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It boosts customer lifetime value
This can be accomplished through upselling and cross-selling features in automation. Meaning you don’t miss out on this potential to increase revenue. This can effectively be implemented through personalized up-sells at the end of a transaction or sending birthday SMS/ emails generated automatically through the system.
Automated marketing systems can allow businesses to run more efficiently and effectively, saving time and costs on the overall budget. They allow for campaigns to be executed and operate with maximum impact, by providing in-depth analysis of campaigns, leads and customers.
The great thing about them is you can tailor to make them meet the needs of your business and better service your client base.
The Ultimate Guide to Blogging
Blogging, a concept that once used to represent an outlet for individuals to document their lives online has now transformed into an indispensable part of marketing.
If your business doesn’t have a blog, chances are there is a huge scope of improvement in your marketing efforts. Blog marketing is the process of using blogs to reach and inform your target audience. So, what is a blog?
Hubspot defines a blog as “posts that allow you and your business to publish insights, thoughts, and stories on your website about any topic. They can help you boost traffic, brand awareness, credibility, conversions, and revenue.”
Blogging is as simple – and as complex – as that.
Now that we know what it means, here is an ultimate guide to improving your blogging game:
Step 1: Determine the ‘why’ you’re blogging
According to SEMrush even though your blog is a large part of your content marketing strategy, its main purpose isn’t sales – and we can’t agree more!
While you create your blog, it is important to remember that your blog is a space to show your customer that you care and want to add value to their lives. Therefore, it is crucial to publish information that will establish your brand as a credible thought leader in the field.
Blogging has other advantages too.
The Balance Small Business outlines a few other pros – it is inexpensive to start and maintain, easy to use, generates website traffic, improves SEO, engages your target audience and creates more avenues to generate revenue.
Step 2: Know your audience
While the purpose of your blog may be to establish your company as a thought leader and to elevate the brand’s image, it is just as important (if not more important) to cater to your audience’s interests.
Remember, your audience is interested in the services you offer, but it’s your job to convince them that your business is the right fit for them. So, if you start pitching your business straight away, you’re sure to lose your audience.
Therefore, it is important that you are producing something that adds value to your target audience’s lives, introduces them to new ideas and hooks them to find out more. For example, if you’re a marketing firm, there are a billion other firms out there. Your audience will look to your blog to understand what you’re doing that’s new and interesting in the field. So, you may want to talk about marketing tips, strategies and tools that may help your customer, rather than the specific services that you offer.
So how do you know what your customer wants? Create profiles on your target audience!
It’s all about breaking down your target audience by demographics, needs, financial capacity and a host of other metrics to really understand how they think, what their needs are and then understanding how to meet that need.
Step 3: Engage your audience
With a wealth of information available at our fingertips, it’s no secret that people’s attention spans are getting shorter. Therefore, it becomes very important to engage your target audience.
A catchy heading is absolutely essential to capture your audience’s attention.
This should be short, snappy and attractive. This can usually take the form of “How to” or “What is” or “10 ways to…” posts.
It’s best to use the listicle format so your content looks well-organized and delivers what it promises by establishing clear topics and sub-topics.
Next, you need to have a great intro.
The first few sentences of your blog can make or break your blog. It makes the difference between generating a lead and losing a customer. HubSpot recommends that you “tell a story, be empathetic, or grip the reader with an interesting fact or statistic.”
The rest of your post can be written in any format you desire, as long as you keep your objective in mind throughout the process. This could include infographics, photos, videos, and other creative forms of expression.
Step 4: Develop a content marketing plan
Social Media Examiner recommends mapping out your marketing calendar. The idea is to create hooks around content that you develop.
This means organizing your content to come out at an appropriate time – this can include public holidays, and other important dates, as well as dates specific to your product or service such as events, conferences and tradeshows you attend or any other marketing activation that you engage in.
Step 5: Be heard
Once all the hard work of producing a brilliant blog is done, you want to share the news!
The first step is ensuring that your content is search engine optimized. This means ensuring that relevant keywords are incorporated seamlessly into the article, as well as ensuring that your blog is optimized for mobile phones. Scott Chow offers other neat hacks to SEO such as header tags, permalinks and categorization.
Other methods of marketing your blog can include simple word-of-mouth, sharing your blog across your social media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, creating an EDM campaign, engaging with other bloggers and even including calls to action on your blog to engage more actively with your target audience.
And most importantly, have fun with it!
Your blog is your space to get your creative juices flowing and create something new and interesting to share – enjoy the process!