Nowadays, most businesses are aware that social media needs to be a piece of their overall digital marketing efforts to stay relevant and to attract talent. However, there is still plenty of hesitation around committing dollars to social media tactics.
Oftentimes, the biggest concern I hear from prospects who work in marketing and sales is around filling their pipeline with qualified leads. Generating a new list of qualified leads for marketing to handoff successfully to sales is one of the most heroic and successful feelings that a ‘smarketing’ team can have. Refilling that bucket every week, month, quarter and year beating past records can feel daunting.
For any business to grow and thrive, there has to be a constant stream of potential customers gaining regular and frequent exposure to the business.
It doesn’t matter how amazing your product or service is, if no one knows who you are, what you do and why you do it better than the competition, you’re going to have to work a lot harder than you need to for sales and success—and that’s why brand awareness is a crucial component of inbound marketing.
Many decision-makers in business see marketing as an expense, not an investment. I'm here to dispel that rumor, because unfortunately for those that cut their marketing budgets; digital sales and marketing go hand in hand. Not only is it crucial to invest in marketing for your sales team, but much of that financial investment comes in the form of digital marketing.
Customer experience can be defined as any interaction that your organization has with your customer. Thanks to industry disruptors like Amazon, what was once considered the best experience is now the expected experience. It’s not just from the likes of Amazon, but from every experience with every company whether you are a consumer or a buyer of business services or a product. In fact, because of this, customer experience has become one of the top strategic priorities within the C-suite.
Walker Information states that customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by 2020 and according to a study done by Capgemini, 80% of consumers are willing to pay more for better service. The same can be said with business to business.
Today’s landscape of buying and selling has shifted—no longer are consumers looking for salespeople to assist or educate them through the buyer’s journey. Today, prospects are armed and ready with information—typically gathered over hours of research before contact is made with a salesperson. Considering this information, you need to position your website and print collateral to do the selling for you, without being obvious or annoying.
Drawing a comparison between Inbound Marketing and a cocktail party may feel like a great leap, but in reality, they have more in common than at first blush. How much do you dread constantly running into the person that only ever talks about themselves or brags about their accolades instead of engaging in a two way conversation? Chances are, you avoid them at all costs, or when stuck acknowledging their self-talk you’re constantly thinking of a way to escape. No one wants to be this person at a cocktail party or a networking event - and the same should be true for the way a company thinks of their brand voice online.
As a digital marketer, I’m regularly pushing the mantra that new content, whether on your blog or your website, helps assist with boosted search rankings when done properly. Our team works to create content strategies for clients that build their SEO (search engine optimization) efforts, helping their websites reach the top of the search results for Google. A question I’m regularly asked is about HOW our content works to boost search ranking results and why we aren’t utilizing meta keyword tags in that strategy.
Let’s begin with focusing on what the search engines do consider for their algorithm when it comes to determining content rankings:
Diving into a digital campaign is a huge undertaking for any marketing team. Not only does the campaign need to be focused and strategic in order to drive the results needed to prove return on investment, but team members also have to be ready to take on the tactical to-do’s that come along with creating and monitoring content across the web.
While the to-do list will always grow and great effort is needed to see success, your company’s marketing team shouldn’t be the only department that is contributing to the success of the campaign. After all, if the campaign proves to be successful, the benefits will be seen company-wide, not just within the marketing department.
Below are 3 other departments that your marketing team should consider as stakeholders in going digital:
Are you a Marketing Manager who isn’t currently using a marketing automation platform? As a marketer with years of experience in digital, I know that using the best tools yield the best results. Sure, you can puzzle piece together a digital marketing strategy and the tactical work needed to achieve your goals, but you can (and should) choose to invest in a system that helps you do your job better and make smarter decisions for your company’s overall growth plan.
