Brian Meert's Blog, page 60

AdvertiseMint Awards $2,500 Scholarship to 2020 Winner, Alexandra Bunting

JAN. 13, 2021

AdvertiseMint starts the new year by naming the scholarship winner for the 2020 application cycle. The 2020 winner, who won $2,500, is 21-year-old Alexandra Bunting, a Master’s student in Integrated Communications at University of Georgia. 

A former Journalism major, Alexandra recently earned her BA in Public Relations, as well as certificates in New Media and Music Business. A few classes plus a mentorship solidified her interest in PR.

I originally chose Journalism as a major as a freshman because I love to write. However, I knew that I did not have a passion for reporting and had a mind to explore different majors within the mass communication school at UGA (Grady). I had never really heard of Public Relations before and did not completely know what it meant or entailed until I took the intro class. That class led me to find a love and passion for the possibilities of a career in PR and the people in Grady. I fell in love with the idea of always working with people and creatively finding solutions to problems. It also led me to a mentorship where I was able to work on events and press that drove my passion even further. It made me feel like that was the major and field I belong in, a feeling that holds true today.”

Now she is on her way to pursuing a Master’s in Integrated Communications, and the AdvertiseMint scholarship was a way to pursue the next step in her education.

I applied for the scholarship because I am starting my first semester of grad school, and the scholarship I’ve had the past three and a half years, Zell Miller, would not cover anything past undergrad. I needed a way to help pay for school, so I researched some more scholarships and came across this one. This scholarship will be immensely helpful in my payment for my first semester in grad school, and I am so grateful!” 

Alexandra was awarded the scholarship because of her unique and insightful essay about the future of advertising. While many other candidates focused on subjects such as virtual reality, social media, and more targeted advertising, Alexandra was alone in discussing a pertinent topic: political activism in social media. Alexandra cited real-world examples — riots, the controversy around Netflix’s Cuties, the problematic Kylie Jenner commercial for Pepsi — that showed she was not only keenly aware of current events but also thought very deeply about them.

My essay was inspired by what I’ve noticed brands going through during the pandemic and all the other troubles of 2020, as well as an idea that I’ve seen portrayed from one of my favorite companies, Porter Novelli: Brands advertising and portraying themselves with a purpose, a real purpose, not just one they think will please their customers.” 

Much like her favorite brand, Porter Novelli, which has run campaigns against sex trafficking in Georgia, Alexandra aspires to use PR in spreading awareness about social issues.

That is the kind of work that I want to do, spreading awareness of issues and using PR to help the people who need it most, and that is what I personally wish to see from more brands. From research assignments I’ve done for school on the attitudes of millennials and Gen Z, I know this is a common theme amongst young consumers who want to see the brands they buy from be socially responsible and support causes they care about, so I think and hope this will be a huge part of the future of advertising and public relations.”

Alexandra is currently a marketing operations intern at NCR and hopes to someday work in the music industry and become an inspiration for the young women who possess the same aspirations.

I would love to mix PR and marketing with my passion and background for music business one day by working at a major label or music app like Spotify. Also, the reason I am pursuing a Master’s degree is to one day become a woman leader in the field and be an inspiration to other young ladies who want to pursue a career in PR, marketing, or music.”

The AdvertiseMent scholarship is an annual scholarship established in 2019. The winner for the 2019 cycle was Vanessa Phan, a student of the University of Southern California. Applications for the 2021 cycle open July 1, 2021 and closes November 29, 2021.

6 Ways to Humanize Your Brand and Make It More Relatable in 2021

DEC. 4, 2021

Researching the human experience and its relationship with consumer behavior, Deloitte conducted a study that encompassed more than 16,000 participants. And their findings largely impacted their 2021 marketing trends. It turns out that more than half of the people participating in the survey stated that they preferred shopping experiences that offered a human touch.

For brands wanting to make it in today’s competitive market, this piece of information makes for a pretty straightforward guideline. Business leaders need to find ways to humanize their brands, and they need to do it consistently and with spot-on methods.

So if you, too, are looking for strategies that will make your company more approachable, the following are some of the best ways to humanize your brand.

Introduce Your Team

As it tends to happen in life, the best solutions are often the simplest ones. With this in mind, it’s not a bad idea to get started with the most uncomplicated steps toward making your brand more relatable, and that would be introducing your team.

It doesn’t matter if you do it via an About Us page or write about each team member in a social media post. What counts is that your existing and potential customers know exactly who the people behind the products or social posts are.

For example, doctors’ offices have perfected the art of introducing their specialists so that each patient can choose the professional that best suits their needs. Similarly, any brand can find effective ways to get closer to its audience. The artisan plant-based cheesemakers from Kite Hill have an insightful Our Story page that introduces each founder. Furthermore, it gives a timeline of the company’s progress from its humble beginnings until the present.

Source: kite-hill.com

Be Authentic

Branding is, naturally, a significant contributor to how your customers are going to perceive your business. So, in addition to paying attention to your visual identity and marketing methods, it may also not be a bad idea to define your voice and values.

Having a recognizable and consistent way of communicating is inevitably going to help define your position in the market. You may think you need to sound a particular way to fit into an industry, but rest assured that being authentic is bound to connect you with the customers who are the right fit for your business.

One brand that’s got a hand of authenticity is Billy Tannery from the UK. The idea behind their brand is to build a zero-waste business and create a line of locally made leather products. The interesting thing about Billy Tannery is that their mission isn’t just limited to a statement on their homepage. Instead, it’s a guiding principle in their blog section and social media posts, too.

Source: billytannery.co.uk

Build Genuine Relationships

You’re probably already aware of the fact that engagement is one of the best drivers of conversions. By humanizing your brand, you can boost engagement over all your communication channels. There are two basic methods of increasing engagement on all platforms.

The first one is social listening, an action that depends on specialized software. What social listening does is that it sends you a notification each time someone mentions your brand, product, or competitor on social media. With this kind of insight, your marketing and customer service teams can react without delay and reach out to these existing or potential customers. It’s a great way to collect user-generated content and to address any issues before they even appear.

The second method for boosting engagement is to invest in the production of high-quality content that offers value to your customers. The simplest way to do just this would be through your blog section, but you can also do it through different social channels. One brand that’s doing a great job in producing engaging content is Eachnight. 

Source: eachnight.com

Their sleep health page is chock-full of educational posts on the best way for people to hack their sleep, how-to guides for achieving specific rest-related results, and well-researched articles about the impact of different external influences on the quality of sleep.

Personalization

The one thing to keep in mind about humanizing your brand is that the effect you’re going to achieve with your customers doesn’t just depend on how you present yourself and how you approach marketing. It’s also influenced by how they feel about shopping with you.

According to age-old experience, personalization makes for one of the most successful sales strategies. The reason behind it is that consumers, essentially, want to build relationships with the brands they support. So, it’s not a bad tactic to start implementing personalization into your online presence.

For one, you can update your email marketing campaigns to address your subscribers by name. Also, make sure that you have a well-developed recommendations section on all your product pages, like the one below from the Rei website. Finally, don’t forget to use tracking data in a way that will help you provide your web visitors with a personalized experience.

Source: rei.com

 

Give Sneak Peeks and Behind-the-Scenes Footage

Another excellent way to show the people who work at your company and reveal what things look like behind closed doors is to produce ephemeral content. Not only are stories (now available on an endless number of marketing channels, including Spotify) a way to induce a bit of FOMO amongst your followers, but they’re also a way to achieve a closer connection with your audience.

There are numerous ways ephemeral content can help your brand become more relatable. For example, you can take inspiration from 368 and show followers how your employees have fun around the office. Or, if you’re developing new products, you can give sneak peeks of the production process. Maybe you can even ask people for their input.

Source: instagram.com

 

On the whole, the success of this type of content lies in the fact that it’s limited, current, and (most of the time) an unedited glance into the current state of things at your company.

Be Vocal About the Things You Love

The last way to make your business more relatable is to connect with your audience based on the things you’re passionate about.

Perhaps you’re committed to sustainability and know that your buyers will appreciate knowing how you source your materials. Or maybe you know they care about the workers in your factory being paid decent wages. Perhaps what you and your audience share is a passion for the well being of animals. Or freedom of speech. Or equal opportunities for everyone.

No matter what you stand for, know that 63% of consumers prefer to purchase from purpose-driven brands. So make sure that you’re vocal about your purpose and your beliefs. In the end, being committed to a greater cause doesn’t have to take up too much energy or resources. But, it may ensure that you reach buyers who had been looking for a company like yours all along.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, there are numerous marketing and branding strategies you can use to humanize your business and make it more relatable. The one thing they all have in common is that they require authenticity and honesty from start to finish. Don’t fall into the trap of putting a face at the forefront of your brand just because it’s the “right thing to do.” Instead, dare to celebrate who you and your employees really are.

Finally, don’t be afraid to share your values, passions, and ideas. In the end, they’re what make you uniquely you. The perfect customers for any business will always be those who share your vision. So dare to stand out, and you’ll quickly see the results.

6 Tips That Work to Onboard Ecommerce App Users

DEC. 30, 2020

Rami Al-zayat / Unsplash

User onboarding is a process that guides new users to find value with your app. It starts when users sign up to the moment when they realize how your app improves their lives. In other words, app users will learn not only how to use the app, but also how to use it in a way that provides benefits and helps them achieve their goals.

App onboarding in e-commerce is essential because if users don’t understand your app, they most definitely won’t use it and thus, they won’t make a purchase. The onboarding process is so important because it makes a customer’s first impression of your app, it can lead to successful adoption and is also a step to building solid relationships with users. 

In this article, you will find six tips to make onboarding your app users very successful.

Your welcome screen should convey your value proposition.

The welcome screen needs to express your value proposition in only a few words, so it’s important to keep it short and simple. A good recommendation would be to keep a balance between building anticipation and communicating your unique selling point very clearly to entice users to find out more about your app.

Context is also important when we talk about opt-in. This translates into combining push message value that is connected with the recent activity such as

Viewed item
Number of sessions with your app
Articles read
Tie your opt-in permission request to your app’s value 
Use time-sensitive app messaging and updates

The sign-in has to stay an easy process to improve retention rates

Usually, signing in is a long process, but it needs to be simple because at this stage many potential app users give up, which leads to a significant amount of drop-off in usage. Fortunately, if this stage is well-executed and if the e-commerce UX for the mobile experience is also fine, it can make a huge difference and increase the activation and retention rates. 

Offering users the possibility to sign in to your app by using their social media accounts such as Twitter, Google, or Facebook, builds trust in the users’ minds and also makes the process extremely fast and simple.

A good idea is also to test and find out if it’s better to build a signing in with various login options such as using their email address or via social media or maybe both of them.

Timing is also very important, so you will need to test with this as well. For example, you will need to test and discover if you want to ask users to sign in once the app is launched or at the end of the onboarding process.

Ask users to opt in to push notifications.

In order to build a great user experience, as well as value, many apps send push notifications that will allow users to share updates, as well as discounts, offers, and upcoming sales. 

By only asking users to opt in to push notifications without briefly explaining how that will benefit them, it will make it more likely for them to give up. With the help of push notifications, your brand visibility increases, and you will be able to add new subscribers with a single click. If users will have the choice to deny or accept the permission to receive push notifications and if the opt-in message lets them know exactly what kind of details they will receive, it will increase retention.

Let’s say a new customer downloads an app. Usually, the first question that he sees is “Do you want to sign up for push notifications?” without allowing the user to first interact with the app and build trust. As a result, he most probably will turn off the alerts, a decision of which very few customers change their minds about it.

A better way is to not ask about push notifications until the user has already used the app several times and has managed to get a feel for the way it works and if he can trust it enough to receive messages.

Once he gets at that point, the above question: “Do you want to sign up for push notifications?” will be more likely to get a positive answer.

Make it easy for a first time user to find your offers.

If you want your app to be profitable and thus, successful, you need to understand your customers and know what they want. Their browsing history will help you understand what they are searching for without actually making a purchase. 

Based on that, you will know what type of offers to provide them. Implementing a customer loyalty program is a good idea as it is designed to keep users coming back or, you can offer them a discount after five transactions, for example. Thus, it is more likely they will spend more money. 

Tracking your app users’ behavior through your mobile app helps you offer them a more personalized shopping experience. However, even if you have the most appealing offers and discounts, you need to keep the first conversion easy. This means that aside from relevant offers, it’s important how to enable users to explore them very easily, such as listing all the offers on a single page, so keep everything simple, short, and intuitive. 

It’s important to:

Use progress indicators
Avoid text-heavy, long explanations
Use app screenshots and illustrations
Avoid what is obvious
Make it easy to sign up for offers, awards, or various discounts

Provide cues to help users get started faster.

A new user has to be quickly convinced by the value of the app and the benefits that it can bring, and the first step to achieving this is to know how to hire a mobile app developer to help you get the most out of your app. Once you managed to do that, focus on how to provide a very good impression right from the start by offering tips and cues to help users get started faster and easier at the same time.

There are several ways to help you simplify the process:

Display the number of steps to complete in order to avoid frustration
Set a welcome screen and include a link to a FAQ (frequently asked question) section or tutorials 
Require just enough information to increase retention, meaning that users won’t enjoy the entire app experience immediately
Use colors to guide users such as higher contrast colors and bright hues against space 
Include pulsing visual cues which once clicked on, they will explain the onboarding steps
Use the turn off option of the tutorial for users 
Provide clear success messages as users progress, reiterating the value of the app throughout the way
Build motivation and excitement that will lead to that “aha” moment when users realize the value of the app 

Create and send well-crafted welcome emails

With effective onboarding, you get higher retention rates, greater revenues, and up to a 500% increase in customer lifetime value.

Although email might seem an outdated way to onboard app users, it’s still one of the tools that do deliver results. For example, open rates for onboarding welcome emails are 57.8%. But what makes it so effective?

The fact that users expect to add their email address on your app and thus, they anticipate a welcome email immediately. This welcome email might make him feel primed to engage with your first messages and willing to explore the app. 

Also, welcome emails are an external channel that reminds app users to start engaging with the app, and thus, they will start building usage patterns. The best practices for email onboarding are the following:

Set a specific goal for each email 
Segment your users and adapt the welcome email messages to their experience
Remind users about your app’s core values and benefits
Make the email engaging, catchy, and fun
Make sure the focus is on benefits, not features
Keep the email messages simple
Optimize for mobile: adjust the CTA, button size, subject line length
A/B test and optimize

After sending the welcome emails it’s important to also send several emails that nurture your app users. By perfecting the onboarding email flow will help you create new user habits, build long-term engagement, and turn free users into paying subscribers. 

Onboarding app users in e-commerce is an essential process. It is the most important as it helps to gain users’ trust and it influences them to purchase within your app. As apps are becoming more and more popular, the competition is also higher and higher. 

Under these circumstances, your app users’ first impression of your app users is essential as 80% of an app’s active users abandon it within the first 3 days after they have installed it.  Apply the above-mentioned tips for your app and be sure that your users will turn into long-term users. 

Keep in mind that what is obvious for you, it may not be obvious to your first-time app users, so test, optimize and always keep an eye on the best practices and apply what suits your business needs. 

By Romy Toma-Catauta

A Guide to Using Facebook’s A/B Testing Feature, Plus Best Practices

DEC. 28, 2020

Scott Graham / Unsplash

Facebook has over 2.2 billion active users, which is more than the population of China. The point is, Facebook has a massive audience.

Image Source: statista.com

Aside from its massive user base, Facebook’s revenue seems to be growing rapidly (as you can see from the graph above), and its advertising system is contributing significantly to this growth.

No wonder every business wants to use it for marketing their products or services. However, 62 % of businesses say their Facebook ads fail to reach their targets. As a marketer, you are fully aware that advertising initiatives aren’t an easy venture. 

With numerous advertising options available on Facebook at the moment, you, as a marketer, need to understand that just about any business-related objective can be realized when you target the right set of ads at the right set of audience.

So, you’re probably wondering how you can do that, right? The answer to this, like with any other digital ads venture, is split testing. For years businesses have been A/B testing their Facebook ads to boost engagement and to procure higher ROI. But the question is, have you?

This post talks all about A/B testing and the right way to run Facebook A/B tests so you can meet your business objectives effortlessly. 

A/B Testing: What Is It?

There are multiple tools on Facebook that enables you to test your ads’ performance before it goes live. Also known as A/B tests, split testing is among the most favored tools.

It enables you to test multiple advertising campaign elements to determine what works best. It does this by showing you what type of ad copy, ad creative, and targeting options your audience will respond to the most.

It’s also the most favored marketing practice, as it helps you in figuring out the type of UX visuals or ads that boost conversion rates. Basically, A/B tests give you the possibility to identify a specific content’s performance before publishing it.

The Right Way To Split Test Facebook Ads

This section covers everything you must know about A/B testing Facebook ads. Before launching the test, remember to first define what you’re aiming to uncover. You need to be clear about your objective for split testing, and this begins with a hypothesis. 

Facebook offers multiple ways to run A/B tests. This depends on the variable you aim to test. You can either use the Toolbar located in the Ads Manager, Experiments tool or duplicate an ad set or campaign.

Ads Manager Toolbar

With the Toolbar, you can perform quick tests by simply using a dropdown menu available in Ads Manager. To create Facebook A/B tests using Toolbar, you need to select “A/B tests” from the “Campaigns” tab, which you’ll find when you access Ads Manager. 

Here’s what you need to remember: To finish the test, you must have an existing campaign draft or ad campaign. If you don’t have any existing campaign ads or draft, you’ll get the following pop-up:

After selecting your preferred campaign, you can pick the variable you wish to test. There are several different variable testing options, and they’re segmented on the basis of your campaign goals. The variables include Audience, Creative, Placements, Delivery Optimization, More than One, and Product Set. Later on, we’ll be discussing which variables you should be testing.

Once you’re done picking your test type, you can run your test. In Ads Manager, you’ll be able to check the status or progress of your test by clicking on the “Account Overview” tab. Here’s an example of how it looks like:

Duplication

With this option, you can easily set up a test by altering one element from an almost identical ad set or campaign. This option is for campaigns or ads that have been created already.

To select this option, access your “Campaigns” tab, which is just next to Ads Manager. Here, you’ll be greeted with a list of active campaigns. You’ll also find your drafted ads or campaigns. Pick the one you wish to duplicate.

After picking the campaign you wish to test, select the section under the title. Here, you’ll find the “Duplicate” option. This will pop up when you select it:

Choose the option that suggests duplicating a campaign specifically for split tests. Do note that by choosing this option, you’ll also have to select a variable to alter to test performance. As such, pick a campaign that matches that criterion.

Once you’re done choosing your variable, you can view your tests side by side in a preview. Once all changes have been made in this phase, you’re all set to publish. To do that, you just need to select the green icon:

Experiments Tools

By choosing the Experiments tools option, you can either duplicate or create ad campaigns for testing. It not only enables you to optimize your campaigns but also learn more about your test progress while it’s running.

Turns out, to choose Experiments tools, you’ll have to select “Experiments,” which you’ll find in your Business account. Alternatively, you can simply use the search bar. When you access Experiments, you’ll find this:

Select “Get Started,” which is available under the A/B test, as seen above. A menu will pop up, where you’ll need to provide the campaign details. For instance, you’ll need to pick the campaign you wish to test:

Here, you’ll have the option to schedule your test run time, name, and even determine how to choose a winner. You have the option to pick between cost or conversion lift or cost per result. 

After you’re done filling the campaign details, Facebook will let you know how impactful your test is. Basically, this is to ensure that your draft matches the A/B test criteria before you publish it. 

Also, you can create numerous ads for testing, depending on your ability. If your ability to do so is limited, you just have to create a few ads at a time. Even so, you can still be very detailed. 

A/B Testing Best Practices

Now that you’re aware of the different ways to run A/B tests, let’s put our focus on some best practices when performing Facebook A/B tests.

Don’t Test Multiple Elements at Once

You can start testing one element of the ad against another ad with all things equal, except for that specific element. You can understand this better by having a look at the image below:

Here, AdEspresso is testing one variant of their ad, the ad copy. As you can see from the image above, everything is the same, including the headline, the image, and we suppose the same goes for its targets. However, one variant is different, the copy. By split testing just the ad copy, they can determine which copy works best for their targets

Keep it simple, remember not to test multiple elements at once. Instead, test one element at one time, and once you acquire a satisfactory sample size, feel free to test other variables.

Elements You Need to Test

There are certain elements of your ads that you’ll need to test. Since Facebook provides you with options that are determined by its advertising platform, you need to test the following 4 elements:

Ad copy
Headlines
Call to Action
Images

Because your main priority to ensure that your audience actually views your ads on Facebook, your images are key to success. Though they aren’t the only thing, they are of utmost importance. Consequently, having more image creatives in place will help you determine what type of ads will really grab attention.

When your audience is done viewing your ads, the next important thing is to make sure the headline in your ad is giving them a good reason to engage. Invest your time in crafting enticing ad copy and headlines. Get your creative juices flowing and take some chances. Like any other sales speech, the worst thing that can happen is your audience saying no. Regardless, with A/B tests, you can determine how to reach them successfully.

Ad Targeting Is Just As Important

Every element in your ad is vital, and your targets are just as crucial as the creative. With ad targeting, you can reach your targets based on gender, geographical location, and more. You need to test the following for ad targeting:

Education level
Purchase Behaviors
Relationship status
Custom Audience
Age
Interest
Placements
Gender 
Country

Choose an Ideal Budget For Your Business

Depending on your ad details, Facebook offers an ideal budget. Alternatively, you can choose an ideal budget by yourself when filling the details. Doing this helps you in determining a winning strategy.

Make Ideal Time Frame

If you can recall, you can schedule your test time frame when you are setting your A/B test. Well, you have the option to run your A/B test for 30 days. A minimum of four days is enough to deliver accurate results, suggests Facebook’s Business Center.

The Bottom Line

A/B tests allow you to better understand your audience’s behavior. If you haven’t yet performed A/B tests, you better do it now. Any digital ads initiative of any kind, regardless of whether it’s on Facebook or other platforms, is doomed to fail without active tests.

Remember, the more you learn, the better your advertising initiatives will perform. And A/B test lets you do just that. Facebook A/B testing, when done right, can easily determine what type of ads resonates and works best with your targets. With each test, you acquire more actionable information, which, in turn, helps you in executing better future ads on Facebook.

By Robert Jordan

 

How to Boost Your Branding through Social Media Engagement [Infographic]

DEC. 25, 2020

Christian Wiediger / Unsplash

As a marketing professional, business owner, or entrepreneur, it goes without saying — don’t underestimate the power of social media. If you were hoping posting and tweeting were just fads that would go the way of the CB radio, you’re out of luck. It’s simply no longer optional to have a presence online because customers expect to find you there. 

Even if you’ve embraced these platforms, you still may not be getting the most from them. It isn’t enough to just put your message out there and hope someone pays attention. Whether you’re still a novice or have people dedicated to managing your feeds, there’s always more work you can do to build better social media activity. 

Engaging with your audience is crucial. Without it, your brand becomes lost among all the other voices. When you find a way to connect with customers through these platforms, you build loyalty and enhance the way people perceive your business. Creating content that grabs people and makes an emotional connection with them isn’t as difficult as it may seem. There are numerous elements that go into posts that do this successfully, and knowing what they are can go a long way toward boosting your efforts online. 

Know Your Audience

For example, it’s crucial to understand who the primary users of these sites are and why they use them. Those who have LinkedIn accounts are likely interested in making professional connections with others. They tend to visit the site to find relevant news and opinions concerning their respective industries, as well as to see motivational content. This means sharing new product announcements or testimonials from your clients has a better chance of resonating with users when posted here. 

On the other hand, Instagram is frequented most often by millennials and Gen Zs who want to keep up with trends. This means if you can contextualize information about your products in a way that matches the cultural zeitgeist of the moment, you stand a better chance of being noticed there. 

Deliver Relevant Content 

Knowing what social media users look for as they scroll through their feeds is another important element of building better engagement. Although about half of consumers follow brands on social media because they want to learn about new products, almost as many want to be entertained by what they see. Assuming there’s a significant overlap between those two, it’s important to make sure that what you’re posting isn’t the same type of information-heavy videos you would display at a trade show. 

You also need to find the difference between providing a steady flow of posts and oversaturating. A significant number of consumers say they have unfollowed a brand in the past because they were seeing far too many advertisements and promotional posts. Finally, never forget that the point of social media is to be social. That means communicating with customers and listening to them when they have questions or concerns. 

If you’re looking for more tips and data you can use to become a better engager, take a look at the accompanying infographic. No matter how you feel about the technology, there’s always a better way to make it work for you. 

By Rebecca Purrington

This infographic was created by Crestline, a leading provider of healthcare promotional products.

Google Adwords vs. Social Ads

DEC. 23, 2020

Brett Jordan / Unsplash

Which one should I use, Google AdWords or social ads? Which one is more effective? In which one should I invest?

Nowadays, there is a big debate regarding Google Adwords services and social ads services. There is a big debate towards the importance of these two forms of advertising, and also, towards the usefulness of each. Some people argue that Google AdWords are more effective, whereas, other people argue that social ads are more effective.

Our opinion is that both Google AdWords and social ads are very important. Both are more effective when they are used together, when they are integrated in the same campaign.

First of all, we are going to show you the benefits of both modalities of advertising and then we will explain how you can integrate both of them in your campaign.

Google Adwords

Google is not a social network, instead, it is search engine. However, Google can be sometimes regarded as a social network, as its users use the different applications that Google offers, such as Gmail, Google Calendars, or Drive. Moreover, Google owns YouTube, which is a social page in which users can interact with each other and react to content. So, Google and social networks are not so different.

The biggest advantage that Google brings is that everybody uses it. People from any age, sex, and region of the world can use Google. This is very important to take into account because anything you post on Google can reach many people (it could literally reach the whole world).

There are many ways in which you can introduce your ad in Google: you can introduce it in the results of the search bar, or you can even introduce your ad in any website. The possibilities that Google offers for advertising are immense, and that is why the use of Google AdWords can be so effective and beneficial for your organization.

Social Ads

The use of social networks has grown exponentially since 2009. The reason of this, is that there are many social networks, that are different between them, and that each adapts to the different tastes of different people. Nowadays, in 2020, the most popular social networks are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. Each of these social networks are different, and they bring different opportunities.

Facebook has become the pillar for social ads, however, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, also have its own forms of social ads, and they are becoming bigger. 

The biggest benefit that social networks bring, is that their public is more specific, so, if an organization wants to reach a specific public, it will be easier through social media. That is why social ads are becoming so important, because they will be directly directed to the target audience of the organization.

Why Mix Google Adwords and Social ads?

According to the experts of Wordstream, when in a marketing campaign, results of different strategies are mixed, the results are better. A marketing campaign should be an integrated strategy, which means that different strategies should be used to reach the objectives of the organization, for it to be more effective. Google AdWords and social ads, both have the advantage that both of them can be adapted to any business, so any business can decide to integrate both strategies.

The main advantage of mixing the Google AdWords strategy and social ads strategy, is that you can get information from each of them that can be applied in the other strategy, making them stronger. Both, AdWords and social media are sources of information, and the information resulted from both campaigns can be very helpful. Moreover, this information serves as a very cheap market study. This means, that by using both, Google AdWords and social ads, you will get more information about your public, and as a consequence, your campaign will become more effective.

The next advantage that the combination of these two forms of advertising brings, is that you will be able to reach a bigger public, as you will reach different people through social media and through Google, getting a bigger public than if you used only one strategy.

With these tips, the idea that we want to transmit you, is that you should be always thinking about improving your marketing strategy. Do not focus in only one strategy, because as we have explained, sometimes the combination of two strategies works better than only using one alone. So, do not hesitate to combine the use of Google AdWords and social ads, and about always improving your marketing strategy!  

By Leyre Inigo Lazaro

 

3 Strategies to Becoming a Niche Influencer

DEC. 21, 2020

Word of mouth is still one of the most powerful forms of marketing all over the world. People trust other people they admire more than brands and their sales tactics. That’s why influencer marketing is on the rise. It’s based on authenticity and trust. 

To gather an audience and recommend products or services to your followers, you first need to understand who you’re trying to target. Depending on the target audience, the channels and the content format is going to be very different in length, tone, depth and style. 

In this article, you’re going to learn three different target audiences and the channels you should choose to reach and grow these audiences. You’re going to learn some actionable tips to get started as an authority or influencer in a particular niche. 

Influence in B2B: High Ticket B2B Products and Services

To have an impact in the business-to-business sector, you must build authority around your name. You have to create valuable, expert-level content to build this type of trust. 

One of the most common ways of doing that is creating articles and guest posts on different blogs in that particular niche. Having your name associated with niche-specific advice is a great first step for getting your name out there. Similarly, guest appearances on podcasts are effective for creating authority around your name. 

Another highly effective way to create authority in a niche is by hosting industry-specific webinars. Webinars are basically live online seminars where the host is teaching the audience a new skill or sharing practical knowledge about industry-specific problems and solutions. The webinar host could also talk about the latest and greatest trends in that industry. After creating your webinar event or publishing an article or a podcast, share it in relevant LinkedIn and Facebook communities. 

By hosting webinars, the host is seen as a thought leader and an expert in that particular field. The live element of a webinar gives an opportunity to truly engage with the audience and create a connection. Professional webinar platforms have the features to launch polls and answer audience questions live. 

You can also launch live offers during your webinar. One indicator of your influence could be the audience’s willingness to actually buy the product or service you’re recommending at the end of your webinar. However, it’s not always effective to push the sale right then and there during the webinar. If you’re just starting with B2B influencer marketing, it’s often more effective to produce content and give value for free, only asking your audience’s email in return.  

The long-term value of gathering email leads is often higher than any short-term sales you can make. Having a large, targeted e-mail list of people who trust your advice is a huge asset. You can leverage that email list in the future to further establish your expertise and authority in that niche. Furthermore, it gives you the ability to recommend products and services to that list in the future.  

Influence in B2C: Expensive Consumer Items and Services

Two big commonalities between promoting high-ticket business products and expensive consumer items is that it often takes a lot of in-depth research and consideration before making a purchase decision. Therefore, your produced content should match the expected detail level. 

One of the best channels for creating this type of in-depth content is YouTube. The video format automatically creates a lot more trust, because of the added layer of video and audio. These additional layers allow you to deepen the trust between you and your audience. 

To be more authentic and trustworthy, the best YouTube influencers are not afraid to talk honestly about the disadvantages of a product or service. They even don’t recommend a product if they truly don’t think it’s any good. This type of openness shows your integrity and makes you seem congruent. 

The tech influencer and blogging niche is a competitive one, partially because of the high traffic volume and high price point of tech products. That’s why it’s recommended to start in a narrow niche, address a narrow market and establish your absolute authority in that space. You can always branch out later. 

For example, if you’re looking to become an influencer in the wearable tech space, start with “smart watches for left-handed people” or “EarPods for punk-rock lovers”. Really commit yourself to establishing your influence among that target audience first. 

Some other “hygiene” factors for YouTube product videos reviews are

high video quality (1080p is a must)
clear audio quality (invest in a professional microphone)
edit your video (music and alternating zoom level help you keep viewers engaged)
show your face (if you’re shy, turn it into a character trait)
speak clearly (if you have an accent, put emphasis into articulation)

It could be quite a significant upfront investment in terms of money (buying the equipment) and time (learning the required video editing tools and presentation skills). However, considering the expected level of content quality regarding these high-cost consumer items, it’s a must. The upside is that once you get going, the rewards are cumulative. 

Influence in B2C: Low-Cost Emotional and Impulse Purchase Decisions

The third target audience is consumers and targeted through Instagram and Facebook. The influencers (or brand ambassadors) recommend products and services to their loyal audience and followers. The social media channels are very exploratory, that’s why low-cost impulse products work best here. 

The key assets in influencer marketing is your Instagram followers and the engagement rate of your followers. One of the most effective ways to gather more relevant followers is by using hashtags. That’s how you’re making your content discoverable. Posts tagged with locations are also easily discoverable on Instagram. 

However, it’s not enough to have tons of followers – they have to be engaged and loyal followers who actually trust you and listen to your advice. 

When a brand is doing influencer outreach, they always check the audience engagement rate. The engagement rate determines how many of the people who saw your post actually liked or commented on it. Smart brands also try to determine the audience demographics and interests to make sure they’re targeting the right audience for their brand. 

Some other important influencer metrics are: 

reach
mentions
hashtags
follower growth (or decline)

For Instagram and Facebook influencers, a loyal audience is the biggest asset they have. That’s why it’s important to use analytics and  social media management tools to understand your audience demographics, interests and affinities. When you know your audience, you understand the value of your asset, which gives you leverage to negotiate better deals with brands. 

When negotiating a deal with a brand, it’s wise to agree on the terms of the influencer campaign, for example: 

Duration of the partnership
Number of posts expected to deliver
Hashtags and keywords used
Type of content (posts, stories, videos)
Message that the brand is trying to convey

Make sure you know the value of your audience and how your audience would identify with the brand. It always helps to have a vision for the campaign to negotiate the best deal.  

Summary and Key Takeaways

To be smart about building your influencer profile regarding a specific subject, you first have to determine who is your target audience and what is the product or service you’re selling. From there, you can choose the right channels to create a following and influence that audience of followers. 

For B2B products and services, it’s best to write expert articles, appear on podcasts and host webinars. These products are often more complex and require more explanation and examples. When your goal is to sell expensive consumer products or services, YouTube video reviews and in-depth analysis videos work best. YouTube is the 2nd biggest search engine in the world and it’s amazing for long-form content. 

The last product segment is low-cost consumer items, which are often bought on an emotional impulse or on a whim. Instagram and Facebook have proven to be the best channels for this type of content. However, it’s crucial to understand your audience first before starting a collaboration with a brand. That’s why you should be aware of your audience metrics, even better if you’re tracking it. 

4 Powerful Ways to Grow Your Brand with Social Listening

DEC. 18, 2020

Kyle Smith / Unsplash

Do you want to discover an audience, grow your business, drive sales, and get more traffic? Start by asking who your customers are and what they want.

How?

With social listening. Social listening is when you monitor the mentions of your brand, products, competitors, and relevant topics around your business on social media. By monitoring conversations around relevant topics and mentions, you get a wealth of data that you can use to make business decisions. Ultimately, this helps you grow your business.

Here’s how to get started.

Social Listening Improves Customer Service

Social media is a place where you view cute cat videos, post pictures of your awesome life, and rant, sometimes about brands.

Social media has given users a platform to voice their concerns. It’s also easy for customers to reach out to a brand through social media where a simple one-line message suffices rather than waiting for many minutes at the other end of a phone.

Here’s why social listening is so important.

Ilana Wiles, an influencer running a mommy blog (Mommy Shorts), posted an article about her experience contracting home renovation to HomePolish. The company completely botched the redesign that she paid for.

@MommyShorts/Twitter

@MommyShorts/Twitter

So, she turned to Instagram and posted a few images of the visibly botched redesign. Her miffed followers responded by commenting on Homepolish’s page for a solution. 

The company dragged the issue for months on end, far from solving the problem. There wasn’t even a reasonable response from them or a comment acknowledging their mistake. Eventually, national media got wind of the Mommy Shorts story and picked it up.

What happened next? No influencer wanted to work with HomePolish. A deal they were working on to raise capital fell through. One thing led to another and finally, all these events led to the undoing of a $100 million design startup.

The lesson? When customers complain, listen to them. Customers dislike waiting, and they hate being ignored. As in the case of HomePolish, bad customer service can end up very badly for a brand. The truth is 85% percent of customers stop doing business with a brand because of poor customer service. The sooner you respond and solve the problem they have, the better it is for your you.

Social Listening Generates Leads for your Business

Just because they’re on social media doesn’t stop people from being potential leads. You can target them on any platform.

To generate leads using social listening, monitor keywords in your niche, in and around your brand. Monitor product names, competitor brands, and other keywords that are relevant to what you stand for. On social media, it has now become more common than ever for people to look for buying advice. They are looking for recommendations and suggestions from people just like them.

Every single day users are engaging in conversations around products, debating features, and bemoaning what’s missing. Social media is a place to drop by these conversations and recommend products. That doesn’t imply you can blatantly advertise your products. You can offer a helping hand, and if the situation warrants, offer a product suggestion. This is called inbound marketing and here’s how Airbnb does it.

Airbnb is a startup that provides accommodations to guests at people’s homes. As a company, they’re known for their customer-centric approach. When Dan Wetzel, a sports journalist, tweeted about his dissatisfaction with the hotel room he had to stay in, Airbnb was quick to the rescue. Listening to Dan’s complaint that the room lacked even the basic amenities, Airbnb promptly reached out to him and provided him accommodation options.

Airbnb/Twitter

The tweet went viral and even received media coverage.

Social Listening Connects You with the Pulse of the Customer

Social listening helps you improve products because it provides real-time feedback. As mentioned earlier, customers on social media have an open platform to voice their concerns. On social media they feely share opinions and reviews about the products they use. That’s why listening for feedback is way better than any survey you can conduct.

Naturally, that makes social media a place where you can hone in on real user feedback. It can give you plenty of customer insights, some of which can be actionable when creating new products or improving existing ones. As a brand, these insights, reviews, and opinions are extremely useful. You can improve your product by adding features and improving upon existing feature sets by listening to customers. This is the exact strategy Go Pro used to launch GoPro Hero 4.

Go Pro improved their product by analyzing online commentary around Hero 3+. The insights they gathered helped them add features that improved user experience. Whatever was lacking earlier got added to Go Pro Hero 4.

For a slightly higher price point, users got a much more compact and lightweight product with double the frame rate. Online discussions often raised the lack of file sharing options. Hero 4 solved this with the inclusion of Bluetooth.

Amazon

These customer insights are valuable because they are so genuine. It’s unadulterated reviews coming directly from users. These insights can help you create a much better product that will sell more and cater to the interests of people.

Social Listening Gives You Content Marketing Ideas

As a marketer, content remains an important factor that drives traffic back to your site. Social listening can help you come up with topic ideas. All writers have a point where they struggle with finding new topics. Social listening can fix that. It’s simple. Start by monitoring niche relevant keywords from your industry or blog. If you sell business proposals, you might try searching for proposal templates, free proposal templates, or website proposal templates, and so on. Run these keywords by Buzzsumo or a social listening tool to get a list of trending articles and content around the topic.

Discover social media discussions around these topics. Based on how your audience interacts with your product, you can create relevant content around it. 

Here’s an example. Sole Bicycles sells 15,000 bikes annually.  These aren’t your usual run-of-the-mill bikes but high-end and expensive. The bulk of the sales happen through their blog that drives traffic and captures leads. You might imagine them publishing long-form content, guides and articles. They tried publishing in-depth guides and checklists for some time. It didn’t work. They decided to listen to what customers were saying with the help of social intelligence tools and found out what they were interested in. So instead of minting new blog posts, they started releasing mixtapes that these users could listen to when cycling. The strategy worked and generated a lot of new users for the company.

Conclusion

Social listening helps you understand who your audience is. Social listening helps you understand your marketing campaigns better and tells you how you can best reach them and create value. 

By George Mathew

How to Promote Your Food Delivery Business on Instagram

DEC. 16, 2020

Jon Tyson / Unsplash

When Instagram first popped into the scene in 2010, it looked the same as any other social media platform. Full of pet selfies, food images, and much more. Fast-forward to 2020, and Instagram is considered one of the best marketing tools for business owners, with enticing features such as advanced analytics, shoppable Instagram posts, live Stories, and IGTV. 

Food is a topic that does well on Instagram. Before jumping to marketing, you must be clear with your goals. For the food delivery business, your aim can be the following:

Displaying your various cuisines
Increasing awareness of your business
Increasing brand loyalty
Advertising

According to the latest report, more than 70% of Instagram users take action such as visiting a website, downloading an app, or making a purchase after looking at a brand’s ads on Instagram. No doubt, Instagram is one of the best and popular image-sharing apps across the world right now and the perfect social media tool that your food delivery business should take into consideration because it has the potential to turn prospects into buyers. But how do you promote your food delivery business on Instagram? What are the hacks? That’s where this guide comes in. Let’s get started. 

Switch to Instagram Business Account 

Before you start promoting your business on Instagram, make sure you have created an Instagram business account. In 2019, Instagram announced a new business profile type for businesses that offers similar features to Google My Business. It means in your profile, you can mention details such as address, hours, contact number, email ID, and website or app link. 

You need to fill out each and every information as it offers multiple benefits such to your food delivery business such as

Along with driving traffic to your website, your followers can click on the CTA button and easily download food service delivery apps, such as the ubereats clone app, to get in touch with you or place an order. 
You can easily access analytics tools known as Insights, where you can see impressions and convection on your posts.
Within a business account, you can also create and run Instagram ads. 

A business account will look more professional compared to a normal account, so create it as soon as possible if you have been using a personal account. 

Hashtags Matters, Seriously 

Instagram marketing is all about eye-catching and unique hashtags. You need to find relevant hashtags that reflect your brand and convey a beautiful message. Hashtags have become a uniform way to filter content on social media platforms and enable users to explore content and accounts to follow. Here is a list of popular food-related hashtags that you can use to get more engagement:

#foodporn
#food
#instafood
#hungry
#happyhour 
#yummyfood 

Above are the most used hashtags; however, you can choose whatever fits your food business. For instance, a well-known coffee brand, Starbucks launched a contest where they asked users to customize their cup designs using #WhiteCupContest. The campaign got popular and received maximum engagement. It means using relevant hashtags is a best practice for the food business. 

Post Consistently 

The sweet spot for posting is a consistent three to four posts a day. You have to be active when it comes to posting content on Instagram. It will keep your followers engaged and connected with your food business. By doing this, your feed also stays fresh and updated, and you have more opportunities to attract eyes to your account. 

You can post pictures and short videos on Instagram every day. Moreover, you can also post recipes and behind-the-scenes stories of your food delivery business in Stories. You should know the best time to post on Instagram. Tools such as Buffer, Sprout Social, HootSuite, and Zoho Social will hone your content delivery strategy and let you monitor your follower’s activity altogether. 

Post Scrumptious Photos of Your Signature Dishes

A mouth-watering picture is worth a thousand words and a video surely worth a million. 

Instagram is all about posting pictures and images that grab the attention of users and compel them to order. Instagram is the most visual social media platform that allows people to publish quality pictures with modern filters. 

For a food delivery business, it would be beneficial as visual content brings more customers and leaves a long-lasting impact on followers than textual content. Make sure you publish beautiful, appetizing photos on your feed that will easily drive sales and boost revenue. 

Bonus Tips

There are enormous ways to promote your products and services on Instagram, but you are advised to create a strategy with clear KPIs (key performance indicators). Here is a list of several bonus tips and strategies you can use for your food delivery business to give a head-start. 

Ensure your feed looks aesthetically pleasing by delivering high-quality content.
Use similar filters, choose an appropriate theme, and keep your profile layout consistent.
Use hashtags  your competitors use and measure success.
Get started with ads for better results.
Don’t forget to add CTAs.
Post content regularly. The more active you are, the more your account will appear on the Explore page.

Growing Followers on Instagram Isn’t an Overnight Achievement

Instagram has now become very fluctuated, above are just a few tips and ways you can use it to push your social media marketing forward. The above tips will let you manage your profile for your food delivery business on Instagram and give you another chance to create a strong online presence. 

By Deep Moteria

3 Ways to Ensure Your B2B Marketing Strategy Is 2021 Ready

DEC. 16, 2020

Moritz Knöringer on Unsplash

Future-proofing marketing strategies for the upcoming year is something that B2B marketers do without fail, and it’s a crucial task in their marketing arsenal. However, considering the unpredictable events of 2020, preparing for 2021 looks quite daunting. But in such uncertain and scary times, robust preparation can be the only key to achieve desired business goals!

Now, B2B marketers have learned how to handle and bring traction when surviving in the “new normal,” but finding viable ways of supporting evolving buyers’ journeys and dynamic revenue goals is something they still need to figure out. 

To design a holistic B2B marketing strategy that is ready for 2021, marketers need to pause, reflect, learn from their mistakes and plan for the year ahead because guesswork wouldn’t help in a pandemic-hit economy!

Despite the uncertain B2B landscape of 2020 and things looking scary for 2021, you can leverage various techniques to make your marketing strategy ready to cope with the unpredictability that lies in the future. Before diving deep into those measures, how about brushing-up our B2B marketing basics!

Is Creating A B2B Marketing Strategy Tough?

B2B marketing is also known as industrial marketing, where the fundamental purpose is to promote an organization’s products and services to other companies and not individuals. Creating a robust B2B marketing plan is quite challenging and way more complicated than the B2C landscape because more people engage in the buying process. Decision-makers and B2B sales require deliberation from prospects. For B2B marketers, generating leads and validating the ROI of their marketing efforts are the two crucial challenges!

Source: Sales Hacker

Looking at the challenges B2B marketers witness in regular days, it would be difficult to assess what kind of hurdles lie in their path of building a marketing plan for 2021. However, a cautious approach and taking small steps to prepare and face the year ahead with confidence could be the game changer! 

Irrespective of the challenges, creating a proven B2B marketing strategy framework that’s 2021 ready is crucial for identifying your ideal customer profile, best marketing channels to generate leads, and most prolific market segments.

Many B2B organizations create a marketing plan comprising 40-page documents emphasizing different aspects such as their mission, vision, and values. However, it makes things messy, and nobody has a clear idea of what’s going around! With 2021 around the knocking at the doors, you can’t afford to leave any stone unturned!

What Are the 3 Ways to Ensure Your B2B Marketing Strategy Is 2021 Ready?

As your B2B organization is still absorbing the aftershocks of the global health crises, we’ve put together a couple of proven tips to ensure your B2B marketing strategy is ready for 2021 and capable of securing the ultimate results. 

For creating a holistic B2B marketing strategy, you should work in three phases that are as follows:

 

Pre-planning: Identify what you need to do before planning your 2021 B2B marketing arsenal.
Planning: Based on the insights of the pre-planning phase, you should cherry-pick your B2B marketing strategies.
Executing: Determine how you will implement your B2B marketing strategies.

Now, each of these three phases will have separate actions and measures. Let’s look at them in detail.

I. Pre-Planning Phase

This phase is all about doing pre-planning so you can pick the most relevant B2B marketing strategies for 2021. The crucial steps involved in the pre-planning phase are as follows.

1. Understand your target audience, their preference, and pain points.

When functioning in the B2B landscape, it’s mandatory to understand your target audience; otherwise, your B2B marketing campaigns won’t work in 2021. As a B2B business, you target many people, and your ideal buyers can be both companies or decision-makers.

Try to figure out who you are targeting before moving ahead with your B2B marketing plan by determining details such as:

Company size
Location of the organization
Type of the company
Designation of each decision-maker within the organization
Pain points or problems faced by the target buyers currently

Source: Single Grain

Identifying all of this information about your ideal B2B audience is referred to as a “buyer persona” that helps you create a relevant marketing campaign tailored to suit the customers’ specific needs.

Understanding your target audience and various aspects, such as their inclinations, issues, and behavior, are quite challenging, but you can equip your sales team with one of the best sales prospecting tools, like RingBlaze, LeadFeeder, and LimeCall, to help them boost their prospecting efforts and analyze website visitors to identify ideal customers.

2. Define your B2B organization’s goals.

Nobody does marketing just for the sake of it, as everyone has specific objectives to achieve. Before moving further with planning your B2B marketing strategy, you must define your specific goals. Lack of goals will make your 2021 B2B marketing strategy directionless, and you’ll be unable to analyze if it’s a success or failure.

Analyzing your priorities and establishing clear goals will help you identify what you want to achieve from all of your marketing campaigns in 2021. There are different type of B2B marketing objectives, such as

Increasing email sign-ups
Boosting conversions/sales
Increasing leads
Building brand awareness or market reputation
Increasing newsletter subscribers

While setting your marketing objectives for 2021, make sure that these are SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. SMART goals aren’t generic but specific to your B2B organization and help you in driving results. 

An example of a SMART goal is to increase leads by 30% by the end of the second quarter. This objective has a time limit and can be easily measured.

3. Understand your budget constraints.

Getting an idea of your budget is crucial for designing a B2B marketing plan for an upcoming year. Considering the statistics provided by Marketing Charts, it’s clear that in the B2B niche, there will be maximum spending on various digital channels in 2021.

Source: Marketing Charts

The trends and studies give you a direction on how you should plan your budget for the 2021 B2B marketing plan. Based on the market scenario, you can establish your budget by keeping the following costs in mind:

What tools you will need to manage your B2B marketing campaigns in 2021.
Whether you are going to outsource your marketing initiatives or will be doing in-house.
What type of training your B2B marketing employees will require.

Considering potential B2B marketing costs will help you allocate sufficient funds for running effective marketing campaigns in 2021.

4. Dig out the strategies of  your competitors

Understanding the B2B market and your customers is crucial, but there’s no way you can ignore your competitors. Doing a competitor analysis is a must for designing a bullet-proof B2B marketing plan for 2021. Your audience continuously judges you against your key competitors and will switch to one of them if they find that you aren’t offering what they’re getting elsewhere!

One of the biggest perks of B2B competitor analysis is that it allows you to keep your finger on your niche’s pulse and lets you dig out which specific marketing strategies will help you boost conversions and drive revenue. Competitor analysis is an integral element of your entire B2B marketing plan.

Source: Single Grain

Conducting a B2B competitor analysis will help you in many ways, such as

Identifying your key competitors.
Studying the type of products and services your competitors are offering.
Discovering what your competitors are doing online.
Analyzing the differences and similarities between your and your competitors’ B2B businesses.
Highlighting your strengths, weakness, and unique selling points.
Understanding how your competitors address their customers’ pain points and which strategies they leverage for doing the same.
Studying competitors’ websites to get an idea of their navigation, design, page loading, time, landing pages, mobile experience, etc.
Getting an idea of the advertising strategies your competitors are leveraging.
Analyzing your competitors’ social presence and observing whether you are ranking higher for specific keywords in their comparison.
Studying the specific organic keywords for which your competitors are ranking higher than you.
Observing the type of engagement your competitors are garnering on social media channels.
Analyzing the kind of customer and employee reviews and ratings your competitors get to understand their image in the B2B market.

Performing a detailed competitor analysis will help you refine your 2021 B2B marketing strategy based on your findings. You can identify and use your competitors’ specific techniques to convert more leads and ensure that whatever you are doing, it’s better than your competitors.

You can use one of the best tools for conducting a comprehensive B2B competitor analysis such as Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic SEO, and SEMrush. These tools will help you spot the opportunities and threats you have to consider for keeping your B2B business afloat in 2021.

5. Be flexible in embracing shifting priorities by conducting market research

The year 2020 has been an unprecedented roller-coaster ride for B2B businesses as it demonstrated how rapidly industries could change and even slump altogether. As B2B marketers, one of the essential attributes to learn in 2021 would be being flexible in shifting marketing priorities and understanding how the B2B market might change in the coming time.

With robust market research, you can identify threats before they arise and hit your B2B business hard in 2021. You will get extra time to plan, prepare, and adapt to these potential transitions and come-up with relevant back-up plans. You can also discover potential opportunities and patterns ahead of time, so you have a chance to make the fullest out of them.

But this isn’t going to be as easy as it seems because there are many teams involved in translating B2B organizational goals such as market penetration, sales targets, and market positioning into relevant and useful strategies.

You should leverage one of the best team collaboration tools for keeping all your teams, including sales, customer support, marketing, and the upper-level executives, on the same page. It will help you keep track of the shifting priorities and changes in the B2B economy.

In 2021, when your B2B company will be experiencing the aftershocks of the pandemic, having a flexible approach and observing the changing market landscape will help you in identifying the following factors:

Which B2B business verticals or market geographies are losing momentum?
Which specific B2B business line or products are performing poorly?
Which new avenues for B2B companies may be emerging on the horizons?

You can use advanced technologies such as predictive analytics to create super-targeted B2B marketing campaigns for 2021. Also, by leveraging this technology, you can identify high-intent, in-market leads, and prioritize prospects based on their preferences and pain points. 

Having an idea of shifting B2B market priorities and taking those changes into account will refine your marketing plans and reshape your strategies in the direction where the market is leading. So, in 2021 that will be full of endless metrics and measures as a B2B marketer, your responsibility would be to dig deeper into the market landscape and discover hidden truths and trends.

II. Planning Phase

Once your pre-planning completes, you can dive in straight and start picking the B2B marketing strategies. Let’s take a look at the effective B2B marketing strategies that’ll work in 2021.

1. Analyze your B2B website and make sure there are no gaps

There can be nothing worse than having an outdated B2B website in 2021. Your priority is analyzing your portal and ensuring that the design, user interface, and navigation is seamless. Apart from these aspects, two crucial factors need your attention:

Optimize your B2B website’s loading time: Google and end-users both hate slow-loading websites as they offer poor user experience. You can’t take the risk of losing potential leads and search engine rankings in 2021, so make sure that your B2B website loads quickly. You can leverage tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to let you know your website’s current loading speed. Using this tool, you can gain insights on how you can optimize your web portal’s loading time.

Source: WebFX

 

Offer seamless website experience to mobile users: Google takes the mobile-first approach to rank websites in search results and what isn’t optimized for mobile devices lag in rankings. So, for grabbing a higher position in search results, you should make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. You can use the Mobile-Friendly Test Tool to analyze your B2B website. Suppose you found that your B2B portal is non-optimized for mobile devices. In that case, you must incorporate responsive design that will make your website capable of offering a seamless experience to everyone, irrespective of the device. 

Source: WebFX

2. Embrace empathy while crafting your marketing messages

We dwell in a human-first world where showing empathy is the key to a person’s heart! While dealing with the B2B landscape, you must embrace a customer-centric approach and craft messages accordingly. According to CMI, most of the organizations have customized their messaging strategy to cope up with the pandemic and grab leads even in the challenging times.

Source: Content Marketing Institute

However, tailoring your marketing messaging depends on your business’s specific goals, but while entering 2021, you must ensure that your messages are relevant and empathetic enough. Craft messages that facilitate customer education and resonate with different buyer segments’ specific requirements to ask for more!

Each of your marketing messages should be capable of hooking the audience and demonstrating how your products and services can let them achieve a desired future state. It will help if you learn the art of compelling storytelling to connect with your audience and build brand awareness for your B2B business.

Avoid talking too much about your company in your B2B marketing messages and structure the stories with buyers in mind.

A couple of pointers that you must keep in mind when crafting B2B messages for your organization in 2021:

Be specific about the issues of your target customers.


Take inspiration from your current customer base while creating and optimizing your marketing messages.


Train your sales team to be solution-focused when dealing with potential customers.

In 2021, you’ll see that building brand awareness will continue to be an effective strategy as B2B companies will be surviving in a virtual world. Your messaging, brand identity, and similar techniques demonstrate both your experience and the specific needs of your customers.

When you’ll embrace empathy and put your customers first in your B2B marketing messages, you’ll be able to build relationships that last and convert maximum leads in 2021.

3. Pay attention to SEO and integrate relevant keywords in your B2B website

There’ll be no survival without SEO for your B2B website in 2021 as 70% of B2B customers perform online research on search engines before choosing products. Without proper SEO, you won’t be ranking higher on search engine results and lose many potential customers.

Integrating SEO in your 2021 B2B marketing arsenal, you need to perform extensive keyword research. Conducting keyword research helps your B2B website rank higher for the right phrases in search engine results to let your target audience discover your business quickly. Ranking high for the right keywords allows you to grab the leads that are interested in your offerings.

Identifying relevant keywords for your B2B business isn’t easy. Let’s assume you have an architecture business in New York; the keywords “New York architects” or “architecture firms in New York” are more relevant to your business than the keyword “architects in New York.”

You can use many tools for performing keyword research, such as Google Adwords Planner, Google Alerts, Ahrefs, KeywordsFX, LSI Graph, etc. For example, for the keyword “architecture firms in London,” Ahrefs shows the following details:

Source: Grow

While exploring your keyword options, you must look for long-tail keywords that comprise at least three or four words because long-tail keywords have a better search intent, and you can figure out what your prospects want.

4. Plan to invest in PPC advertising in 2021

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a paid advertising technique where you invest in creating paid ads that appear on the top of search engine results. The reason why PPC advertising will be crucial in 2021 is that there is a lot of noise in organic search results, and you can cut through the noise and scale your business quickly by creating profitable PPC campaigns.

Source: One IMS

Along with putting your B2B brand on the top of search results, PPC ads let you connect with the right audience and measure your campaigns’ progress. When considering PPC as a potential B2B marketing strategy for 2021, you must 

Design a customized landing page for PPC ads: Most of the B2B companies use an existing landing page on their portal as the target page for their PPC ads, which isn’t a good idea. You should give a personalized experience to your prospects, and hence having a customized landing page for PPC ads is crucial. A tailored landing page delivers relevant information to the leads via PPC ads and helps them keep engaged.

Leverage Long-Tail Keywords: Keywords are the backbone for PPC ads, just like SEO, because when a prospect types a relevant keyword in search, it triggers your PPC ad to appear in the results. Paying attention to long-tail keywords can help you get the most out of your B2B PPC campaigns. Long-tail keywords are particular, and there’s less competition, which means the cost per click will be lower because not many B2B companies bid on them, and you will get more clicks for your budget.

Take help from ad extensions: Ad extensions help you add more information to your PPC ads and persuade more people to click on them. Various ad extensions, such as callout extensions, highlight your B2B products or services and site link extensions to add more links to your B2B website.

5. Content marketing has become more important than ever

While planning your content marketing strategy for 2021, you should keep in mind that people will be working remotely and are dependent on content even more for finding answers to their problems and relevant information.  So, you need to do content marketing smartly for driving leads down in your sales funnel. Remember, not every prospect is equal, so you must keep a few pointers in mind while planning your B2B content marketing initiatives for 2021:

Create a range of content pieces: Creating only one or two types of content won’t help you in 2021. Still, you have to broaden your perspective and develop various content such as case studies, blogs, sales sheets, infographics, videos, eBooks, guides, etc., to appeal to different decision-makers in your B2B audience base. You can create engaging videos with online video templates that you can easily customize by adding sound effects, music, text, motion, and exciting animations. Moreover, podcasting is one of the rapidly growing forms of content that’s extremely powerful when it comes to generating B2B leads. Podcasting helps you know more about your target audience by sharing insights, building healthy relationships, and making them thrilled to know your B2B brand. So, podcasting is a must-have in your 2021 B2B marketing arsenal!

Come up with stories that align with your users’ intent: If your content fails to match your search intent, you won’t be driving any leads. Search intent is the art of understanding what users expect to see or read when they look for a particular topic. It will help if you research what others have written about a particular topic when creating a similar piece by searching for the seed keywords for that topic. It will allow you to create content that offers relevant information to the target audience. To make your stories more fun, you can leverage animation software to create animated GIFs and grab the target audience’s attention. It makes your copy visually appealing and lets you gain an edge over your competitors.

Make a habit to post content regularly: If you aren’t publishing content regularly, you are losing many potential buyers as there’s no option for them to discover your B2B business. Posting quality content often will help you drive more traffic to your B2B web portal and build a loyal audience base from where you can grab leads quickly. However, handling various content formats and posting them regularly on different channels, and coordinating with guest publications isn’t a cakewalk. A content calendar can help you in planning your 2021 content publishing and let you stay on track. With the help of an editorial calendar, you can keep all your team members and guest bloggers in one place, do follow-ups on time, and meet deadlines to ensure that every content piece you produce is high-quality well-timed.

6. Add social media and video in your 2021 marketing arsenal

There were 3.8 billion social media users in 2020; however, as per Statista, half of the globe is anticipated to leverage these channels by 2021. Massive, isn’t it? Being B2B marketers, is there any way you can take advantage of such an extensive social media customer base?

Source: Statista

You can get an idea of the crucial marketing theories and apply them in your 2021 B2B social media campaigns that drive maximum clicks, conversions, and engagement. Social media channels allow you to connect with your target audience and give them real-time updates related to your business and industry or share knowledge, such as:

Communicate updates on new content pieces or blogs
Announcing new and updated service offerings
Sharing industry expertise with the target audience
Updates about any changes to availability or operations of your B2B organization
Conducting FAQ sessions with the target audience for solving their pain points or doubts

One of the most effective ways of leveraging social media channels for grabbing B2B leads in 2021 can be live videos that have been dominant on Instagram and Facebook since 2016. It’s a fact that live videos aren’t a new trend, but in 2021, they’ll become a valuable asset for B2B marketers!

LinkedIn has been one of the best social media platforms for B2B marketers because it helps build long-lasting business relationships with prospects. On LinkedIn, you have the liberty to target people based on their location, occupation, expertise, company, designation, etc. 

On LinkedIn, you can find most of the entrepreneurs and C-suite executives engage professionally. You can listen to what these higher-level people discuss and what professionals who might need your products or services are talking about on this platform to figure out their preferences and pain points.

Some of the most useful features for B2B marketers are LinkedIn InMail and LinkedIn Sponsored Content and videos. By following the best LinkedIn video tips, you can boost engagement by making your content super enjoyable and standing out on your followers’ feeds.

Producing more video content in 2021 can help you increase your B2B brand awareness and conversions. According to Grand View Research, the market-size of live video streaming will evolve at a rate of 20.4% from 2020 to 2027 due to advanced technologies such as Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI): 

Source: Grand View Research

Recently, LinkedIn has introduced its live video feature that allows B2B brands to connect with potential buyers and broadcast their content in real-time with their network for:

Sharing exciting company updates
Offering industry advice
Answering their questions by hosting Q&As
Providing live event coverage
Revealing a new product
Offering how-to videos or product demos
Giving behind-the-scene glimpses of your organization

The best part about doing live videos for your B2B brand is that there are boundless opportunities to leverage different social media platforms in unique and groundbreaking ways. 

Live streaming is here to stay, and leveraging live videos in 2021 will allow you to interact with your target audience in real-time and develop deeper connections for moving potential leads down through your sales funnel.

However, keeping your social media profiles loaded with unique content all the time isn’t easy. Using social media content calendars can help you plan your updates and posts properly and avoid the last minute hassle!

7. Leverage email marketing for building personal connections with target audience

Email marketing is one of the most effective B2B marketing strategies. It helps you connect with decision-makers directly by sending tailored content to bring them closer to conversion. While adding email marketing to your B2B marketing plan, make sure you have kept the following points in mind:

Refrain From Sending Only One Type Of Emails: If every email of yours will be a sales pitch promoting your products and services, then your potential buyers wouldn’t be interested in partnering with you. So, you need to have a range of emails in your B2B marketing arsenal for keeping your target prospects engaged. Blog posts, videos, infographics, product tutorials, etc., are a few types of content you can send in your emails. You can also create email newsletters to provide useful information to your target audience and be on the top of their minds.

Make Sure To Segment Your Subscribers: Segmenting your email subscribers is crucial if you want to send tailored information to different groups of decision-makers in your B2B audience base. One of the most common ways of segmenting your audience is based on their designation within the organization. For instance, you can segment purchasing managers into one group and send them emails to demonstrate your offerings’ value. Likewise, you can keep financial officers in one segment and share content showing how your products or services fit within their budget.

Leverage Email Marketing Tools For Making The Process Hassle-free: Creating and sending emails to so many audience segments is a daunting and time-consuming task. You can use one of the best email marketing services to help you create, send, and track all your B2B email campaigns effectively. Using these tools saves a lot of your time that you can invest in more important tasks! 

8. Leverage the power of data to fuel your 2021 B2B marketing strategy

Data is the new black in the B2B landscape as data-driven marketing is gradually gaining popularity for various reasons. B2B companies realize the significance of accurate data collection, analysis, and reporting as data has become a crucial decision-making factor for them.

The simple principle behind data-driven B2B marketing is that it allows marketers to know more details about each prospect, which helps them market to every one of them in the best possible manner. Leveraging the power of data to refine your B2B marketing plan for 2021 can let you reap benefits such as:

Divide customers into different segments by collecting data related to your target audiences’ demographics, age, gender, buying preferences, pain points, etc. Build specific buyer personas to let you engage with each group and build long-lasting relationships.

A highly targeted buyer persona helps B2B marketers to have a clear idea of who they are marketing to based on which they can identify tailored marketing strategies.

Ensure that you successfully fulfill your target audience requirements by interacting with your customers and target audience and knowing their views about your products and services.

 

Identify what worked in the past and where you’ve invested resources but couldn’t reap the rewards. Having access to accurate data can boost your B2B marketing efforts and the ROI of every campaign.

 

With the help of data, B2B marketers can measure their marketing campaigns’ success rate and leverage tools to hyper-segment their marketing campaigns and better audience targeting for optimizing conversions.

 

Although it’s impossible to know everything about your website visitors, you can use tools such as Reveal and Clearbit to grab some crucial information, such as the company where they work. 

In case you observed multiple website visits from the same organization, it could be an indication that they’re interested in your offerings where you can develop an account-based marketing strategy to convert such visitors.

Based on the data gathered, you can analyze the outcomes and guide your marketing team to discover innovative and engaging marketing campaign ideas for 2021. These valuable inputs will help you make better choices for 2021; although no one can predict future events, having a vision, and preparing according to the past results wouldn’t harm you in any way.

9. Don’t forget personalization for driving more B2B leads in 2021

One of the most significant concerns for B2B marketers is lower conversion rates. Despite working hard to drive more traffic to their websites, that happens because your prospects land on your web portal after seeing one of your ads, but unfortunately, they don’t find what they were promised in the ad and hence switch their ways!

The most common cause of website visitors leaving your portal is that you show the same landing page or the message to each of them irrespective of at which specific stage they’re in your sales funnel. But personalization can be the game-changer in fixing this issue for your B2B brand in 2021!

B2B buyers usually spend very little time on websites, and if your portal has a signup form with multiple fields, your completion rates are expected to be at the lower end. But how about asking only the visitor’s email address and pre-filling other details like company or designation using data enrichment tools like Clearbit.

It will work for high-value leads, but not all leaders are equal. In such a case, your sales team can prioritize marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and identify the ones that are high-intent leads and are closest to making the buying call. 

For doing this, you can use machine learning technology that uses past conversion data to create effective lead-scoring models by predicting the value of the users.

Embracing personalization in your 2021 B2B marketing arsenal will be helpful for your sales team. You’ll get an opportunity to treat website visitors better and serve them relevant information that’ll ultimately yield higher close rates.

10. Embrace conversational AI

If you think that your B2B buyers make the purchase call without any research, you are highly mistaken. They take various approaches while considering to buy your products or services, such as:

Doing online research and comparing options
Asking friends and family members for referrals
Checking the online reviews and ratings given by other customers

A B2B buyer performs extensive research before landing on your website or making the buying call. With the help of conversational AI, an artificial intelligence technology, you can train chatbots to respond intelligently to the website visitors and keep them engaged!

Chatbots are changing how B2B companies used to engage with prospects online. They ask a series of different questions to the website visitors while exploring your website and identifying at what particular stage these prospects are floating in your sales funnel.

Based on the chatbots’ inputs, you can determine the ideal next steps to convert more prospects.

III. Execution Phase

You are done with your pre-planning research and have picked the specific marketing strategies you will leverage in 2021. Now, it’s time to plan for the launching of your B2B marketing campaign. 

Suppose you want to get the maximum benefit out of your 2021 B2B marketing initiatives. In that case, you should keep your sales and marketing teams in sync by using one of the best collaboration tools so that everyone is on the same page and actively contribute to your marketing campaigns’ success. Keep the following points in mind while planning to launch your 2021 B2B marketing plan:

Market By Keeping Different Marketing Personas In Mind: It’s a fact that B2B marketing appeals to a range of decision-makers, and if you want to appeal to all of them, keeping marketing personas in mind is extremely important. These personas reflect your real customers’ inclinations and pain points and help you effectively serve every potential buyer. Let’s assume you create a marketing persona for financial managers; then you know that one of the most significant pain points is the cost, and based on that, you can plan how to market your offerings to them.

Never Forget Your B2B Sales Cycle While Marketing: The sales cycle for B2B businesses is longer, and you must keep this fact in mind while marketing because having a marketing plan wouldn’t accelerate the selling process. Focus on content marketing and email campaigns for keeping decision-makers engaged with your business and keep coming back to learn more. Moreover, it will help if you keep a longer sales cycle in mind when designing new marketing campaigns to make sure that you are chasing leads towards conversion rather than waiting for them to turn into customers automatically.

Monitoring Of Your B2B Marketing Campaigns Is A Must: Suppose you think that your job will be free after launching your B2B marketing campaign. In that case, you are highly mistaken because monitoring and keeping track of your efforts is crucial to ensure that you are leading in the right direction. There are many metrics that you should track to measure the progress rate of your B2B marketing campaigns, but a few crucial ones are:

Dwell time
Clicks
Open rated. Leads
Conversions
Form submissions

Different B2B marketing campaigns will have other metrics to track to measure your initiatives’ success. In case you find that your marketing campaigns aren’t producing the results they’re expected to have, you can refine those campaigns to yield better outcomes.

Finally, It’s The Time To Get Ready for 2021!

Thinking more strategically is crucial for B2B marketers for planning how to pull up their marketing game to be ready for 2021. So, figure out the game changers that might be beneficial for your B2B business and evaluate your past actions to prepare for the next year that’s knocking at our doors. 

Plan to invest in marketing technology and digital marketing tools to identify, reach, and engage the target audiences better and faster. So, why wait? Get ready to welcome 2021 with some of the coolest as well as effective B2B marketing game plans!

By Dhruv Maheshwari