5 Tips for Effective Marketing Communication

When building your business, having a great product or service is just the beginning. Communicating your company’s offerings, solutions, and advantages is crucial for turning a good product into a wildly successful one. But in the age of digital communication, traditional advertising is no longer the only way to tell people about what you offer. Connecting with your target audience through digital media can be an incredibly powerful asset to your brand and business – as long as you can optimize your message and create effective, ongoing communications with your customers.
Here are our top five tips to more effective marketing communication.
1. Articulate your marketing goal(s) and message
It’s difficult to be effective if you’re unsure what your goals are. Without defining a clear message and a way to measure the success of your communications, you’ll end up with a less cohesive and less engaging strategy that uses up time and resources without generating returns. Instead, practice making SMART goals that center around a clear, direct message.
2. Define and understand your audience
Knowing what you want to say is one thing, but knowing what your ideal customer wants to hear is another! Research your audience and identify what types of conversations or solutions are important to them. Learn where they go to find information that helps them make decisions. Craft your messages around your researched data to ensure you’re investing your marketing time and budget into communications that will get attention, rather than falling flat amid the rest of the market noise.
3. Tell a story
If the movie and television industry gives any indication, people love a great story – especially when they can identify with the characters and conflicts. Craft your messaging into relatable narratives that put your ideal customer at the center of the story. Creating recognizable situations and offering the best-fit solution to a known problem will help your brand establish a more intimate connection with your audience than traditional advertising.
4. Focus your message
Keep your eyes – and your communications – on the prize. Once you’ve identified a key concept and message, stick to it. Creating too many individual messages can become overwhelming to the consumer. If you have multiple messages that you’d like to work with, consider separating them into independent campaigns that build consistency around each message, rather than trying to work multiple discussions or points into the same campaign strategy.
5. Create a dialogue
One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing over older methods of advertising is the ability to have a conversation with your audience. A billboard or TV commercial is a one-way communication, but social media platforms, email marketing, and other digital media forms allow the customers to engage with the material and messaging. Open your campaign to dialogue by asking your audience questions, encouraging them to share their experiences with your brand, or by creating an approachable persona on your accounts. When your customers feel connected to your brand on a personal level, they are more likely to not only listen to what you have to say, but to act on your offerings as long-term clients.

Don’t Overlook These Email Marketing Fundamentals

In a world where every marketing plan is competing for attention with thousands of other messages, email marketing is one of the best ways to get YOUR message directly into your audiences’ hands. While other digital marketing strategies rely on the audience to visit or view your content, emails land in their inboxes, and recent data shows people check their email an average of 15 times per day! Whether you’re already using email marketing, or are just starting to add this tactic to your overall strategy, make sure you’re building a solid foundation to maximize your reach and your impact.

Read the full article at: www.clickz.com

6 Insanely Effective Tactics to Engage Email Subscribers

Marketing Automation is noted as a top marketing trend for 2019. But how to do it well? There are a few proven tips and tricks to increasing engagement and therefore customers via email marketing. It all comes down to list segmentation, telling the right story at the right time to each individual, and powerful design. While these may seem challenging, when you break each down and have a good plan, it really is achievable.

How to Create an Email Marketing Campaign That Gets Results

Is email marketing dead? Not if it’s done right! The key is doing your homework before you even start: identify the goals of the campaign, define your audience, determine how you will engage that audience, and build the best possible target list. Many businesses struggle with email marketing, but a well thought out plan often leads to success. Obviously, the email should look good, but more important are an effective subject line and engaging copy. The call-to-action should be prominent and unambiguous and spell out exactly what you want your audience to do. Whether it’s a one-time eblast or a longer-term lead nurturing campaign, make your emails timely, relevant, interesting and valuable, and your audience will begin to look forward to your next mailing!

Best of Growth Spurts – Focus on Maximizing Your Content Marketing Efforts

In this month’s content roundup, we’ve focused on different ways you can get the most out of your content marketing and blogging efforts. After all, content marketing is often one of the biggest components – in both time and dollars – of many small business marketing budgets, so it makes sense to maximize that investment.

To be successful, it’s important to see content marketing not as a silo tactic, but rather something that is just one component of your overall integrated marketing strategy. So, a single blog post can be used to support your SEO, email, social media, PR, and retention efforts, to name just a few. The goal is to get the most out of every piece of writing, whether you share it on social media, link to it in your email signature, syndicate it, create a companion download, or even pay to promote it.

Here are 5 timely and relevant posts that look at maximizing your content marketing efforts.

How to Reuse Old Content to Boost Your SEO and Keep Your Audience Engaged, marketingprofs.com – Does your content plan include “evergreen content”? While it’s critical to have a steady flow of fresh, quality content, you can often maximize your impact by including at least some content that doesn’t “expire” (in other words, it will still be relevant a year from now). This content can then be re-used and repurposed for SEO and social media. Read the full article here.

How to Create Content That Keeps Earning Links (Even After You Stop Promoting It), moz.com – Content + linkbuilding = powerful SEO strategy. And the key? Creating something that people will find and link to when they’re in need of sources to cite. This puts you in a good position to earn a lot of passive links.

This article describes the content types most likely to satisfy people in need of sources and tips on how to execute these content types. Read the full article here.

7 Ways to Ensure You Maximize Your ROI from Content, quicksprout.com – From “picking 1-2 channels and designing around them” to “never stop promoting, ” this post offers solid advice for getting the most out of your content marketing efforts. See all 7 ways here.

How We Grew Our Organic Traffic by 43% Without Publishing a Single New Blog Post, hubspot.com – An interesting approach one company took to maximizing its content marketing efforts by putting into place a strategic plan that included the whole staff. Read the case study here.

28 Ideas for Content Upgrades to Grow Your Email List, sumo.com – Get more out of your content creation efforts – whether you’re doing the writing or have hired a writer – by creating a companion “upgrade” or bonus (tip sheet, checklist, video, slideshow) that you can promote and give away for the “cost” of an email address. See all 28 ideas here.

The variety of ways a business can get the most out of its content marketing efforts can be overwhelming. Sales Renewal has programs that can help, from our comprehensive JointSourcing Solution™ to our guided Marketing Essentials Solution™ to our on-demand Flex Marketing™. Get in touch today.

B2B Marketers Say Email Delivers the Highest ROI Leads

Best of Growth Spurts – Our Favorite Posts from January

We regularly update our Growth Spurts blog with actionable marketing & technology advice, news and information. These articles are often hand-picked to address issues and projects we’re working on with our clients, but they are relevant to most business owners involved with any aspect of marketing their business. Here are our 5 favorite posts this month:

On Content Marketing

10 Content Marketing Goals Worth Pursuing – Content marketing – your blog, downloads, white papers – is quite often one of the biggest marketing expenses, and one of the most difficult to measure.

Adwords and email gives the satisfaction of seeing immediate, measurable results. But your investment in “content”? It’s often a big unknown.

The goals in this article help put that investment in context: Invest in content, and you invest in your business. Consider: building trust and rapport with your audience; attracting new prospects; deepening loyalty with existing customers; helping with SEO; and even attracting strategic partners.

And to help you develop your 2017 Content Marketing plan, this article – B2B Content Marketing 2017: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends – gathers 25 content marketing stats all in one place … dive in, explore and learn.

On Email Marketing

13 Things to Start, Stop & Keep Doing With Your Email Marketing in 2017 – Email marketing is a powerful tool to encourage your audience to engage with content and to nurture leads in your database along the buyer’s journey. Understanding the points made in this article will ensure that your email marketing is 2017-ready.

On Exit Planning

First Impressions are Critical in the Sale of a Business. What Impression Does Your Website Give? – For business owners contemplating selling their business, one of the many factors that can help them achieve their exit revenue goals is better and more cost-effective marketing. This includes their online presence, which starts with the company website. Not sure if your website will help or hurt your ability to sell your business? Our alliance partner at Business Transition Academy outlines five factors to take into account.

On SEO

8 SEO Trends You Need to Pay Attention to in 2017 – SEO is a constantly changing landscape. This article highlights eight trends to be aware of as we start 2017, including:

• HTTPS is no longer just an option. Security issues aside, Google has confirmed it’s a ranking signal.
• Social media will be an even larger referral traffic goldmine.
• Mobile-first strategies have become a necessity.
• Links will continue to be important, but they should be a by-product of excellent content.

Continue reading for details on these and 4 more SEO trends for 2017.

The Most Effective SEO Tactics – According to recent research from Ascend2, marketers say creating relevant content is the most effective search engine optimization (SEO) tactic. Results also show that it’s the most difficult to execute. Read the article.

On Analytics

How Google Analytics Ruined Marketing – Strategy => Content => Channel. This article reinforces the need for all marketers to understand the difference between a marketing strategy (what message are you trying to convey) and a marketing channel (what’s the best method for conveying that message).

It also reinforces one of Sales Renewal’s key beliefs that “there is no ‘digital marketing’ and ‘traditional marketing.'” Sure, there are digital channels and traditional channels, but they all should be used to support the marketing strategy. Read the article.

Best of Growth Spurts – Our Favorite Posts from July

We regularly update our Growth Spurts blog with actionable marketing & technology advice, news and information. These articles are often hand-picked to address issues and projects we’re working on with our clients, but they are relevant to most business owners involved with any aspect of marketing their business. Here are our 5 favorite posts this month:

On SEO
How to Get Past the Dreaded SEO Plateau – You’re not alone if, even with strong content and high ranking through SEO, your organic traffic may not be growing at the same rate, or your keyword rankings are stagnant. This plateau is actually a good sign that your SEO program is working. But, you can take various steps to improve your SEO performance. Find out more here. And if you don’t have a clear SEO strategy in place, contact Sales Renewal to help you get one established.

On Website Marketing
10 Tips for Making Pop Ups Go the Extra Mile for Your Business – Popups – if you are still from the school of “pop ups on my website? never!, ” it may be time to rethink your position.

We admit, they used to annoy us so much that we would never recommend them to a client. But today, when it comes to growing mailing lists, Sales Renewal has evolved to a new best practice for e-commerce clients and any service client with an active content marketing program. So rather than counting on visitors noticing a “join our list” link somewhere on a page, we proactively pop up a dialog asking if they want to join. And subscriptions have skyrocketed. Read all the tips here.

On Email Marketing
Ecommerce Email Marketing: 10 Tips to Boost Product Sales – This article reinforces the importance of supporting your e-commerce efforts with email marketing and can be used as a helpful checklist of things you can put into action today. Read more here.

2016 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study – Measurable, flexible, and affordable, email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing tactics available, and one Sales Renewal recommends for all our clients. Reviewing your email marketing on a regular basis is important to be sure your emails are working the best they can. This annual report of email marketing benchmarks from IBM is a helpful resource that offers 25 open, click- through, list churn and mobile metrics that you can use to gauge the effectiveness of your email program. Read more.

If you have questions about how you can make your email program work for your business, contact Sales Renewal today.

On Content Marketing
Brands Need to Focus on Content or Risk Failure – Ever stopped and wondered why you were ______… Fill in the blank with any marketing tactic: blogging, emailing, interacting on social media, “doing” SEO, advertising, sending direct mail.

We continually review our clients’ marketing programs, from quarterly plans to monthly reviews to day-to-day changes, to be sure we are addressing the clients’ needs in the most effective manner.

Content marketing can be one of your biggest investments and yet one of the more fluid, changing programs to manage. This article brings it back to the basics: Understand your audiences; have a plan; create quality content; and focus on integration, not silos. Read more here.