How Google Analytics Ruined Marketing
Marketers in the high-tech world who use phrases such as “social media marketing, ” “Facebook marketing” and “content marketing” do not understand..
Sales Renewal’s insight:
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.
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Why the Focus on Short-Term Marketing Effectiveness is Bad for Brands
New research suggests the marketing industry is focusing too much on short-term marketing effectiveness and that this is having a negative impact on awareness, share of voice and ultimately profits.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Insights about strategic marketing that apply to big brands also apply to smaller companies.
Measuring short-term KPIs is just one element of strategic marketing. And, according to new research, this short-term brand building is not all bad. But, the key to effective strategic marketing in both the long- and short-term is to see it as a continuum of continuous improvement. Plan, Do, Check, Act. Manufacturers know this cycle, and it’s time for marketers to understand it, as well.
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7 Strategies For Selling Marketing To Your CEO
What can a CMO do to get better strategic support and key resources from a CEO?
Sales Renewal’s insight:
No one said it would be easy to get buy in for your marketing programs. In fact, according to a Forbes Insights survey, 69% of CEOs said they thought their companies waste money on marketing initiatives.
But we also know that without any marketing efforts, your business runs the risk of being dead in the water.
One of the keys to management buy in is to support your requests or plans with data that speaks to the bottom line. For example, strategy #4 in this article emphasizes using strong insights to show why your approach is working-or how it may need to be adjusted-as a way to strengthen your position and get leadership on your side. Equally compelling is using analytics for predictive modeling.
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When Should Engineering Marketers Pass a Lead to Sales?
Find out how engineers answered the question: at what stage of your investigations into a new product or service do you prefer to engage with a vendor representative as opposed to conducting independent research?
Sales Renewal’s insight:
1, 000 engineers were asked: “At what stage of your investigations into a new product or service do you prefer to engage with a vendor representative as opposed to conducting independent research?”
The answers could be:
- At the beginning of the process to discover the potential solutions
- Later in the process when I need to dig deeper into a few possible solutions
- Near the end of the process, when I need pricing or delivery information
The question was asked to determine the right marketing approach, from sending engineers directly to sales to nurturing them through several touch points prior to passing on the lead.
Read on for the results.
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Why Marketers Can’t Afford to Chase a Silver Bullet Strategy
Too many marketers chase a “silver bullet” strategy, in which a single tactic will address all their challenges. Here’s what to do instead.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
It’s worth repeating – focusing on a single tactic to market your business is not the way to go. B2B marketers need to take a holistic view of the buyer’s journey and apply the right marketing tactics (plural) at the right times.
For example, since it’s been shown that B2B buyers complete over 60 percent of the buying journey before contacting a business. That means that your content marketing shouldn’t be all about selling prospects on your products, but rather helping them locate valuable information while they’re in the research phase-or better yet, helping them self-educate about solutions to their key challenges.
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Writing a Blog to Grow Your Business
“What do I write about?”
It’s inevitably the first question any business starting up a company blog will ask. And it’s inevitably the question that will continue to be asked as long as the company blog exists.
If you’ve done any research into business blogging, you have probably encountered endless articles about why you should have a business blog. These articles are often supported by survey results and data analysis. They typically explain that it can be a successful, cost-effective way to bring traffic to your website. An active blog means the search engines see your fresh content, which, if set up properly, can help improve your SEO performance. An active blog means you have plenty of fodder for sharing on your social media networks. You can also email articles to prospects and clients, and encourage people to contact you in the post itself (calls to action). All this, in turn, can grow your leads, increase sales, build your authority, and expand your market reach.
Write to Delight
Dive in a little deeper, and you are guaranteed to find even more articles about how to put together a blogging program. And they all make it sound so quick and easy.
Chances are you’ve come across some version of this advice: “To bring readers to your blog, all you have to do is write to delight and inform.” This is usually accompanied with plenty of tactical (?) advice:
- Plan your content in advance
- Use an editorial calendar
- Headlines/images/bullet points sell
- Understand your personas
- Blog daily/weekly/monthly/regularly
- Write to delight (there it is again!)
Sounds nice at a first read, but if you stop to think about it, what does it really mean? Can a business owner really turn this advice into an effective company blog? We don’t think so. At least not without investing way more time into understanding what it all means than anyone actually has. Because first and foremost, you still need to answer the question, “what do I write about?”
A Thoughtful Way to Structure Your Blog Content
There’s some old-school advice about writing that can be more constructive: “Write what you know.” You know your business. You know your customers. So in theory, you know what your customers need to know about your business.
We’re getting closer, but we need to take it to the next level by adding some manageable way to plan your content that takes into account all the benefits we discussed above: SEO, social media sharing, individual distribution.
So let’s start with what you know: your products and services. Ideally, your website is structured so each category of products or services has a dedicated page (on the SEO side, think broad key concept, or a category of keywords). These Category Pages link to individual Product or Service Pages (for SEO, this equates to “longer-tail keywords”). There may be one or two additional, highly-targeted pages for each of those services, focusing more in-depth on various aspects of that service or product.
Enter your blog. Each of your product or service pages offers near endless fodder for blog posts. Product updates, news, customer reviews, customer examples, how-to articles, all make good blog content.
Put the pages and blog posts together, and you have a content hierarchy that can be used to strategically answer the question, “what do I write about?” Not only will you have something to write about, but you will have content that will help your SEO efforts, move your prospects along the sales funnel, and allow you to reach out via social media networks.
An Example: Sit, Stay, Home – an Electric Fence Company
Let’s use Sales Renewal’s fictitious company, Sit, Stay, Home, to demonstrate the power of this model.
- Our top-level Category Page “Electric Fence Models” gives a summary of all our electric fence products.
- Each summary is linked to a Product Page, for example, “Model 1 – Electric Fence with GPS Collar”.
- This, in turn, links to a Special Features page, explaining “How the GPS Collar Works.”
- We can then generate Blog Post content for these Product or Special Feature Pages to enhance the reader’s understanding of your product: how the idea was developed (company insights); true-life example of how a dog was saved by wearing the collar (testimonial); why it works even in snow (geographic reference); what types of dogs it is best for (customer example); how to prolong the battery life (tips).
You’ll want to go through this process for each category of product or service you offer. At the end, you will find you have plenty to write about. And you will be able to systematically plan and schedule your content so you develop a well-rounded website, with pages and posts that support and explain your business.
With this birds-eye view of your content, you can balance they types of posts you write, as well. For example, one week you might write about why the GPS model works in the snow, the next week a customer testimonial about how Model 2 worked better than anything she had tried. Week 3 announces a software update for Model 4, and week 4’s post offers tips and tricks for better training.
Of course, once you know what to write about, you can rely on readily available advice for how to write it, being sure to take into account readability, WIFM (what’s in it for the customer), delight (!), SEO, and social sharability.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
“What do I write about?”
It’s inevitably the first question any business starting up a company blog will ask. And it’s inevitably the question that will continue to be asked as long as the company blog exists. By looking at the content of your web pages and blog posts together, you have a content hierarchy that can be used to strategically answer that question.
How Small Businesses Can Use Social Media to Grow Their Online Presence – for Free!
A large business with widespread consumer appeal can naturally expect organic social media growth in terms of followers and interaction: people already know your name, are interested in your brand and are looking for answers. In this case, you may spend more time interacting with customers and keeping up with questions than you do just promoting content.
But we were curious: does this mean that if you are a small business with fewer resources, or in an industry not known for an interest in social media, you should abandon all social media efforts?
The simple answer: No!
We don’t mean that you can sit back, do nothing and watch the Likes roll in. But after conducting our own social platform/content test for several months, we were able to prove that by investing a minimal, but regular, amount of time and effort, any business can grow its online social presence – for free.
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Which Social Media Sites Will Work Best for My Small Business?
The answer will vary based on your particular market, but we recommend starting with the “big 3”: Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Each platform allows you to interact with different audiences that when used together allows you to create a unique community of peers, prospects, clients, and more. The key to getting the most out of your efforts is to understand these differences and use them to your best advantage.
But first things, first. Before we get into the details, let’s talk strategy, because whether you’re a large or small business, you shouldn’t “do social media” for the sake of doing social media.
What is the goal of your social media? Is it to increase sales? Is it to build awareness of your business? In our test, we’re focusing on the latter.
The next step is to set expectations for the three different platforms and understand how all three will contribute to your unique community. Our test confirmed that we can:
- Use Twitter to build relationships with others in the same industry
- Use Facebook to build a solid base of interested fans
- Use Google+ to increase reach among those who may not be familiar with your business
Finally, figure out what content you are going to promote. Do you have original blog posts that others might find interesting? Can you share images of recently completed projects? Is your business part of a larger industry of which you can curate news to share with followers?
Once you understand your content, you can set up a schedule for finding, creating and publishing on each social media platform.
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So how does my small business use Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ all at the same time, but in different ways?
Use Twitter to Build Relationships with Others in Your Industry
Even if your individual business is small, chances are it is part of a somewhat larger industry. And even if you are in an industry whose customers do not actively interact with you on social media, chances are your peers are ready and willing to “talk”. This is where Twitter can be of great benefit to you. You can use Twitter to build a business community which could lead to partnerships, referrals and even potential customers. If you can create this connection with your peers, then your content has as greater chance of being noticed by other businesses and shared among your industry and beyond. Here are three ways to help get you into the game:
1. Start following others in your industry. For example, if you have a painting company, follow others with “painting” in their name. At the very least, you may get some good sources of content from these companies, but they will most likely follow you back. Both you and your followers gain sources of content, and you gain new followers as well. Win-Win.
Our test: By following this simple step over the course of 12 months, we managed to organically grow followers for one client by 93%! By growing followers, we also grew impressions and interaction in a similar fashion, which means all of our content is now seen by a much larger audience.
2. Promote your original content via Twitter. Share it with those in your industry. Tweet at specific people to get noticed (think @ and #), and tweet often. Then, with those followers that you’ve recently gained, you will likely get likes and retweets from those in your industry. Once you break into the scene and share great content, others will notice and remember your name.
Our test: We began our content campaign in September, and by the end of the year we had already seen 80% growth in interactions, including mentions, retweets, favorites and replies. Keep in mind that we already had a working Twitter account before the campaign, but you can see when we changed tactics by the results in our chart. We saw similar results with all our clients, so believe that you, too, can see similar results with your Twitter account.
3. Interact! Retweeting and favoriting posts will gain recognition, and soon enough you’ll be part of your industry’s social media world. Once you’ve tapped into this network, your impressions are bound to increase exponentially.
Our test: We started this “interaction” campaign in November. As you can see, we grew our reach by 25% and more than doubled interaction in just two months!
This is only the beginning. By keeping up this cycle of following, promoting and interacting with those in your industry that care about the same topics as you do, you will see exponential results over time.
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Use Facebook to Build a Solid Base of Interested Fans
Unless you hired a firm that offered to grow your fans for 5 cents a Like (please tell us you didn’t do that!), chances are the majority of your followers are folks who are genuinely interested in you. These are valuable prospects and customers, because they already know your business and they care about your success. The most important types of posts for a small business are those directly related to your company. This includes images of recent projects, company news, products, etc. If you want to see interaction spike, including shares, impressions and reach, your best bet is to promote as many of these types of posts as you can. (Of course, we would never advocate 100% of your content be about you, 80% is a good target.)
Our test:In a study conducted with our signage company client, we posted three types of content over the course of a one-month period: projects/company news, original blog posts, and curated content/industry news. The same number of posts for each category were promoted at similar times of day for similar days of the week.
By far, the posts that got the most views and interactions were related to recent projects or company news. Original blog posts came in second, but only received 62% of the reach of “projects” posts. Curated content was least effective, only scoring 41% of the reach when compared to “projects” posts.
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Now we know what works best, but does this mean you should limit yourself to only one type of Facebook post? Of course not! It just means you can emphasize recent projects and company news, and intersperse this with curated content. Remember: Curated content is always important because it brings variety to your posting – people don’t want to only hear about you.
Use Google+ to Reach Those Who May Not Know Your Business
Google+ may not be the social media platform Google was hoping it would be. But you know what? That’s okay, because that means you do not have to split your efforts to grow multiple fan bases – stay focused on Facebook and Twitter. If you do have a decent following on Google+, that’s great. You can still post to it and receive clicks and interaction as you would with Facebook. But Google+ brings an added benefit – SEO! – that does not require you to have followers.
When you post to Google+, your posts then have a chance of showing up in a Google search, which can increase traffic to your site. When you post to Google+, you want to make sure you have clear and concise titles for posts, as well as descriptions that include relevant keywords. When people search for these keywords, they may be directed to your Google+ page, which could then lead them to your site.
While we spent the majority of our interactive efforts on Twitter and Facebook, we regularly shared our content on our Google+ page. By making sure our our titles and descriptions were targeted to a specific key concept, we found that our Google+ posts showed up in Google searches for those key concepts. This allowed us to reach yet another “community” – searchers who may not necessarily know our business but who are interested in our topic.
Make it a part of your routine to share to Google+ whenever you post to Facebook. It only takes an extra minute or less.
It is often difficult to show a direct correlation between social media marketing efforts and the bottom line, particularly for smaller businesses. But when social media is viewed from the right perspective – as means of building your community of peers, prospects and customers – it’s clear that it is an important tool for marketing a business, large or small. And while it may be harder for smaller businesses with a small following to earn followers and interaction, we’ve proven that it can be done by understanding and taking advantage of the strengths of each particular platform. By following these tips, you can grow your following, increase reach, and gain valuable interaction in just a few short months.
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Sales Renewal’s insight:
A large business with widespread consumer appeal can naturally expect organic social media growth in terms of followers and interaction: people already know your name, are interested in your brand and are looking for answers. In this case, you may spend more time interacting with customers and keeping up with questions than you do just promoting content.
But what about if you are a small business with fewer resources, or in an industry not known for an interest in social media? After conducting our own social platform/content test for several months, we were able to prove that by investing a minimal, but regular, amount of time and effort, any business can grow its online social presence – for free.
How Much are Your Sales Leads Really Worth?
Every day, marketing and sales professionals in thousands of companies make significant investments to acquire and develop sales leads. The ultimate objective is to grow revenues and profits by winning new customers.
Unfortunately, these investment decisions are often made without a clear and accurate understanding of how valuable leads actually are. When marketing and sales leaders don’t know the true value of their sales leads, they can invest too little and miss out on profitable new revenues, or they can invest too much and acquire customers that are unprofitable.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
The author believes determining the value of sales leads is a four-step process, which he explains and details.
In the post referenced here, he discusses the first two steps. In a subsequent post, he concludes with his last two steps.
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Best of Growth Spurts – Our Favorite Posts from November
Since we update our Growth Spurts blog several times a week, our readers know they can find a lot of actionable marketing & technology advice in it. And in case you’ve missed them, we offer a monthly, summary roundup of the most popular/interesting posts of the month where we extract the most useful information into tips you can use, and in many cases, provide a link to learn more.
Here, then, are our 6 favorite posts for the month:
Marketing Strategy
- Don’t Let Silos Destroy the Customer Experience – Integrated marketing is critical for a good customer experience. It means breaking down silos not only between individual marketing tactics, but across product lines, between marketing and sales, and with upper management, too.
- A Better Way to Calculate the ROI of Your Marketing Investment – Today, marketers have access to data that allows them to track an individual’s various interactions with a brand before their purchase and better understand what role each interaction played in the eventual sale. This approach is called “attribution modeling, ” and allows companies to attribute appropriate credit to each online and offline contact and touch point in a customer’s purchase cycle so that they can improve their marketing ROI. Read more about this approach here.
SEO
- Google’s Natural Language Search Gets Smarter – If natural search traffic is important to you and you have not yet reevaluated your SEO strategy, this story makes it abundantly clear that now is the time to do so! Why? Because you are shooting yourself in the foot if you’re still focusing on traditional keywords instead of semantics.
- 9 Ways Small Businesses Can Be Big on Google – With smart planning, small businesses can have a strong presence even with a limited budget. Taking advantage of online opportunities is key. Here are 9 ways to make sure your SEO efforts pay off, including adding customer reviews and ratings to each product you sell; using a variety of images and/or videos for each product; and building links to specific product pages instead of just your homepage or other high-level pages (a.k.a. deep-linking)
Content Marketing
- How to Market to Goldfish – Did you know that the average attention span has gone from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8.25 seconds in 2015? And that is shorter than the attention span of a goldfish, at 9 seconds. But all is not lost, as we are humans, not goldfish. Find out some of the keys for holding people’s attention in this article from Hubspot.
Social Media Marketing
- How Airlines are Using Social Media for Seat Selection – They call it “social seating.” By using your social media profiles, airlines will select who you sit next to on your next flight. The claim is that it will provide you with a better in-flight experience. What do you think?
Stay up-to-date with marketing news and advice for your business – Subscribe to our Best of Monthly Digest here.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Since we update our Growth Spurts blog several times a week, our readers know they can find a lot of actionable marketing & technology advice in it. And in case you’ve missed them, we offer a monthly, summary roundup of the most popular/interesting posts of the month where we extract the most useful information into tips you can use, and in many cases, provide a link to learn more.
Here, then, are our 6 favorite posts for the month covering Content Marketing, SEO, Strategic Planning and Social Media.
A Better Way to Set Your Marketing Budget
The best way to develop a marketing budget is to treat that budget as if it’s an investment — something that delivers an expected, quantified return over time. In order to build a strong business case around this concept, a marketer must understand the dynamics of their funnel. Take a deep dive into how new potential customers enter in the top of the funnel, how much you need to invest to find those prospects and help them move through the revenue cycle …
With this model in place, marketers can run scenarios that show how the budget translates into more leads, opportunities, and wins down the funnel. (They can also quantify the impact budget cuts will have.) At most companies, any significant investment must be supported by a business case that shows it will deliver a “hurdle rate”, or minimum rate of return. If you can make that case, the CFO generally approves it. Of course, some types of activities — demand generation comes to mind — are easier to tie to ROI than others, such as brand-building or PR. But no matter what the activity, make “worst case”, “expected case”, and “best case” assumptions to show the range of possible outcomes.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
The author does a nice job explaining some of the ways to do a marketing investment analysis, and even makes a plea to treat marketing just like other business investments, even capital spending (are you listening FASB?)
We ourselves have tried to contribute to this change in mindset, for example, we’ve presented real-life data that shows the more you invest in marketing, the more your leads increase and costs per sale or lead decrease to larger growth (here).
We even offer a quick, low-cost service, a Marketing Investment Analysis, that will help you figure out what a rationale marketing investment in your business should be.
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