12 Essential Small Business Marketing Strategies Posted on August 4, 2022July 26, 2023 by Jonathan Herrick Let’s face it: there are a million and one small business marketing strategies out there, but if you’re like most business owners, you don’t have the endless budget and time to find the hidden treasures that lead to results. Also, determining which marketing strategy is most effective can take months of testing and evaluation. After growing businesses, testing plenty of marketing campaigns, and helping our small business customers grow, I have come up with the 12 marketing techniques for small businesses that you can use to help your small business flourish. 1. Audience Research Marketing is about sending a relevant message to your target audience to persuade them to buy your product or service. If you don’t know your target audience, you risk focusing your attention too broadly or on the wrong people, which is a catastrophic error in the age of personalization. Successful marketing begins with target audience research — a data-backed process that culminates into elaborate audience persona(s). An audience persona is a profile or visualization of the person you’re trying to reach. It outlines traits such as geographical location, career, gender, motivation, pain points, budget, and more. Audience persona is your “north star” for creating and launching successful marketing strategies, from content marketing to word-of-mouth. It lays the foundation of your marketing strategy and informs the best channels to use for effective marketing. 2. Word of Mouth Advertising Once you’ve laid the foundation, you can get your marketing strategies rolling. One of the most cost-effective small business marketing strategies is to tap into the voice of your customer by getting them to talk about their experience with your business. That means building a great product or service first and then delivering it in an amazing manner to your customers. Encourage customers to talk about your small business on social and professional networks and to share their opinions. This will boost your chances of getting new customers in the door. Typically, people trust their friends and value their opinions. That is why it’s critical to tap into your customers who are willing and able to share your excellent products/services with their tribes. 3. Content Marketing If marketing is the engine that propels your business, content marketing is the gas in the tank. It’s a fantastic way to bring you leads through search engines, but it also works well to educate your customers on best practices. Content marketing is about creating interesting material that your audience is likely to engage with, be it text, video, or audio. It entails the creation of content for publishing on your homepage, blogs, product pages, landing pages, advertising channels, and social media. Content marketing allows you to show that you’re a top expert in your field. This means creating fresh content based on your audience’s biggest challenges and curating content that is relevant to your visitors/readers. Once you have created highly-relevant content, push it out where your audience is engaging, such as Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Your content distribution methods are the only way to harness the full potential of your content marketing strategy. 4. Search Engine Optimization Great content without search engine optimization (SEO) has a low chance of ranking on top of search engine results pages (SERPs). When you create highly-relevant content, you have to optimize it for search engines to increase its visibility when people search for keywords and terms relevant to your products or services. As a small business, it’s tough to compete with the rankings of larger companies when it comes to highly competitive keywords. Start by focusing on keywords with low competition but high commercial intent and search volume. . Once your blog or brand builds authority, throw your hat in the ring for the high-competition keywords. That said, SEO is a multidisciplinary strategy that transcends keyword targeting. Other important SEO aspects you should prioritize include: on-page SEO, local SEO, and site speed optimization. 5. Company Website Every component of your marketing plan is going to come back to your website. Don’t cut corners. It’s where your visitors find out who you are, what you believe in, and what makes you unique. Ultimately, your website exists to convert visitors into leads, and the quality of your leads will improve if you have a great website that attracts the most relevant buyers. Once you get visitors to your website, you’ve got to build a conversion strategy. You’ll want to make sure that your company website has plenty of opportunities for site visitors to provide you with their information. Add sign-up forms to high-traffic pages and landing pages to direct traffic. These pieces will enable you to collect site visitors’ email addresses and add them to your lead nurture campaigns. 6. Blogging Just as your website is the guiding light for lead gen for your small business, the same holds true with your blog. And if you’re not already blogging, you should be. Why? Brands with an active blog generate 67% more leads than those without one. To generate leads, add a call-to-action on each of your blog posts asking readers to take a desired action, be it buying a product, subscribing to your newsletter, signing up for an upcoming webinar, or downloading a whitepaper. But your blog is more than just a lead gen tool. It’s a canvas to share your thoughts and perspectives, to truly position yourself as a thought leader while connecting you to your audience. It’s also part of your SEO strategy. Create pillar posts on your blog and set up an internal linking strategy so your readers can easily find and engage with similar content. 7. Email Marketing Email has come from a basic communication channel to a powerful platform to achieve your marketing goals. Its power is undeniable – for every dollar you invest in email marketing, you see an impressive $36 return on investment. Email is also a great way to build your contact list for your small business. A good strategy to build your list is to simply create valuable and relevant content. Offer that content to site visitors in exchange for their contact information. As long as you promise to share high-quality, valuable insights, your site visitors will think the exchange is worthwhile. As a small business owner, you probably wear many hats and have to juggle multiple tasks to keep the business moving smoothly. A marketing automation tool will help you facilitate effective email nurture so you can do more in less time, saving you hours that you can devote to other important tasks. An easy-to-use tool, like BenchmarkONE, lets you automatically capture visitors from your website and send the right message to them at just the right time. Doing so improves the effectiveness of your marketing strategy while helping you make the most of your marketing budget. 8. Social Media If your small business doesn’t have profiles on top social media sites, build them today. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Each one offers a different format, but all allow you to connect and talk to your customers and would-be clients on a channel that they’re already engaged on. Using social media marketing is a must to ensure that your brand and your customer base grow. Most importantly, keep your fingers on the pulse of the tilting social media landscape, which includes joining new platforms. If your brand is yet to lay a mark on TikTok, you need to move swiftly to ride the wave of the highly-creative and playful channel. With over one billion monthly active users globally, TikTok presents an opportunity to build brand awareness, promote your products, and engage potential customers, particularly the younger generation. 9. Event or Trade Shows Trade shows and special promotional events are fantastic strategies for launching a new product or service, driving brand awareness, and getting in front of your target audience. If you are attending a trade show, swap out a sponsorship package for an opportunity to speak on a topic relevant to your audience. It will keep your cost down and elevate your status as a thought leader in your niche. Bonus tip: Don’t forget to capture the full ROI of your event! Be sure to connect with prospects on social media and capture email addresses so you can run pre, during, and post-show campaigns. 10. Online Advertising One of the fastest ways to get in front of potential buyers that are actively searching online is online advertising. With PPC advertising, such as Google Adwords and Bing, you can set your budget for the keywords that your audience is searching for and measure the cost per conversion. Remember to not just set it and forget it. For example, adding negative keywords will eliminate unwanted clicks, keeping your spending down. You should also test new keywords to ensure you are optimizing your spending wisely. Also, if you are looking to increase brand exposure, remarketing is a great way to do it. Remarketing allows you to hyper-target visitors that have been to your site that you would like to bring back, with the goal of converting into a customer or sign-up. 11. Free Promotional Tools Budget constraints could limit the options you can use as far as marketing goes. One way to cut overhead is to use free marketing and promotional tools. Evaluate your strategies and determine which activities require premium tools and which ones you could do with free software. For example, if you’re only just getting started with content marketing, you can use free keyword research tools to guide you through the initial phase. Once you scale and your strategy gather momentum, you can turn to paid keyword research and content optimization tools. Sign up for BenchmarkONE’s free plan today! 12. Networking and Partnership Building Finally, always work on networking to promote your business. This is perhaps one of the most valuable ways to grow your expertise and showcase your skills to would-be partners and customers. Networking is a cost-effective way to drive sales leads and opportunities for strategic partnerships. All of these approaches are effective but don’t forget that In the spirit of cutting overheads, it’s okay to only focus on strategies that you know will bring the best results. Start small with your strategies and experiment with different aspects to determine what works. Channel your resources, effort, and time toward sustainable methods of generating revenue. Good luck incorporating these 12 essential small business marketing strategies into the way you promote and operate your business. Doing so will help you spend less time looking for solutions, so you have more time to devote to what you do best.
3 Reasons to Update Email Marketing with Marketing Automation Posted on August 17, 2016March 6, 2020 by Jessica Lunk This blog post was updated on February 21, 2020. It seems like a new hot marketing tactic is popping up every day (do you need to be on Snapchat? Should you invest in video marketing?). So it’s easy to overlook email marketing – the old standby that businesses have used for decades to reach potential customers. However, email is still a very powerful and effective marketing tool for turning contacts into customers. In fact, according to McKinsey & Company, “E-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media—nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined.” So how do you harness the power of email? Email marketing software for small business has come a long way from the “batch & blast” email systems of the past. Today, email marketing software with integrated marketing automation technology helps small businesses to dynamically respond to the individual needs of their prospects and customers. Here are three reasons to embrace an all-in-one email marketing and marketing automation software as a critical component of your company’s toolbox: 1: Make the Most of Email Marketing Data Stand alone email marketing software tracks basic metrics like clicks and opens. While click-through and open rate indicate how effective your emails are, they don’t do much in the way of guiding your contacts to the next step in their customer journey. Marketing automation software is a tool that lets you do more with your email marketing data. Marketing automation tracks which email links your contacts click on, which pages they visit on your website, and even which forms they fill out. This data paints a picture of what your contacts are most interested in, allowing you to focus your marketing campaigns accordingly. 2: Provide Context to Each Email Send One of the reasons that many people overlook email sent from different businesses is that it feels generic. That is, the company is trying to cast such a wide net and reach as wide an audience as possible, but it leaves those who receive it feeling like the business sees them as anonymous walking wallets. However, email marketing software for small business allows you to add contextualization to every aspect of the email marketing experience. In a stand alone email marketing software, you might have lists like “Customers” and “Prospects” that you manually import from your email client, spreadsheet or database. When you use marketing automation, however, you can create dynamic lists. You can pull an up-to-date list based on your contacts’ interests, their demographics, or their contact status. By creating distinct groups of customers, you can send targeted emails to the groups likeliest to respond to these particular messages and offers. You can also set up triggered email that helps to follow up on earlier interest a customer may show. You can create entire nurturing email campaigns to organically move customers through the sales funnel while letting you monitor where they are at each step of the way. By sending relevant resources and solutions to those who need them, you show your contacts that you understand their needs, building trust – and eventually sales. 3: Take Advantage of Autoresponses and Transactional Emails When it comes to email marketing, naturally, the focus is building marketing emails and campaigns that drive conversions. However, transactional emails are opened far more than marketing emails. Think about it. When you send a marketing email, you’re pushing a message out to your audience – whether they’re ready for it or not. When it comes to transactional emails, however, you’re sending an email in response to an action from your contact (like paying for a service, or requesting more information from your website). Transactional emails therefore have higher engagement, giving them the potential to generate far greater revenue than marketing-focused emails. Transactional emails are the perfect opportunity to make a lasting impression on your prospects and customers. Personalize where it makes sense. Make sure they are in-line with current company branding. Opt for friendly language. Buffer, for example, does a great job of making a run-of-the-mill invoice into an opportunity to showcase their company culture: Not only is the Buffer email super personal, but the “P.S.” also provides a touch point with the customer – an opportunity to be heard. Marketing automation can help you offer a next step in your transactional emails to make prospects and customers feel more invested in your business so you can capture additional revenue. For instance, if a prospect fills out a form to receive an e-book from your website, send a thank you email with a link to the e-book they requested, but also take the opportunity to help them to learn more about your services. Ask them to check out a related video, for example, guiding them further down the path to conversion. Marketing automation software can monitor engagement with transactional emails. As with marketing emails, you have an opportunity to see what works and what does not and to make even this once-perfunctory part of your company communication more in line with customer expectations. Marketing automation is a powerful way to utilize email marketing to its fullest so you can squeeze every opportunity from your list of prospects and customers. With marketing automation, you send more personalized messages, building trust and nurturing relationships into more sales for your business.
What Happened to a Print Shop that Embraced Inbound Marketing Posted on June 1, 2016June 3, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Victor Clarke has been the owner of Clarke Inc. for 20-plus years evolving it from strictly a commercial printing firm to an inbound and outbound marketing firm using marketing automation. We recently checked in with him to gain some of his marketing insight. Here’s what he had to say: Can you tell us about how you transitioned your business from a print shop to an inbound/outbound marketing firm? My 20-plus years of experience has taught me that bigger isn’t always better. The latest management fad is just that, a fad. Implement now, perfect later. I always thought that I wanted the big, fancy building as a monument to me along with dozens of employees to keep my monument humming along. I learned I not only managed 25 employees, but also their families and problems, too. I likely managed 100-plus people if you counted all the families involved with the business. The family problems became business problems, which became my problems. Bankruptcy was a distinct possibility if I didn’t change how I did things fast! I spent way too much money investing in the latest management theories and software in an attempt to be perfect. Nobody and no business can be perfect. A few years ago I sold my building and laid off most of the employees, but kept all my customers and brokered out the business. Now I spend more time, and less money, growing my business rather than investing in the latest fads. What were the most important real-world marketing lessons you learned while building your firm? Create an integrated marketing plan. Identify all of the many promotion sources in an integrated marketing plan before you start a campaign and highlight how they can link across media platforms. Consider, for example, how a print ad might direct consumers to enter a contest on your website, helping your website’s performance. Product packaging such as a rewards program also has a role to play in an integrated marketing communications plan. This could take the form of a rewards programs that allow consumers to “earn points” through purchases and taking part in an online community. Move away from transaction-based to relational marketing. Transactional marketing campaigns focus on the sales process for an item. Due to the strong emphasis put on the sale, it can be an overly aggressive hard sell that can put off the consumer. Relational marketing is more effective because it attempts to create a relationship between the customer and the salesperson or business that will build loyalty. An integrated campaign can build loyalty by engaging your database in ways that are not always a hard sell. What were the biggest mistakes that you made early on with your business? What did you learn from them? Forgetting this basic rule of accounting: “Profit is an opinion. Cash is a fact.” Years ago I left the financials to my accountant and rarely looked at my business financials. Now I watch my checkbook and accounts receivable like a hawk. What do you think are the most important skills or tools those in inbound/outbound marketing need to have? Find a true differentiator. Everyone has “quality products and great service” these days. What makes your products and services unique? Do you serve a specific niche? Do you have a different approach to a specific problem or technology? Define what truly separates you from the pack. Offer helpful information without a sales pitch. What do you think are the most overrated skills or tools? I believe the days of “old” selling styles using techniques like “The Puppy Dog Close” and the “Ben Franklin Close” are over. These techniques evolved when the sales person was in control of the information. Now customers are smart enough to see through this and may consider the salesperson an amateur. Today the customer has access to the same information as a salesperson. They can self-educate and will only speak to a salesperson when they have exhausted all self-help information. Today’s sales close is just the end of a process where you help the customer get answers and make an informed decision. How can marketing automation help small business owners? When most small business owners discuss client acquisition they think about hiring a salesperson. I’m willing to bet that 90 percent of sales hires end in failure. It’s not because the salesperson has poor skills or is lazy. It’s because most salespeople are awesome at objection handling and closing skills but stink at prospecting. To acquire new customers a business needs a constant stream of qualified leads. To grow your business don’t hire more people. Invest in marketing automation. And hire a great website designer to create a website that will attract, nurture and delight prospects driven to your site by automation. Prospects will qualify themselves as hot or cold leads to pass along to your awesome sales staff. How can businesses use marketing automation most effectively? 1. Provide Helpful Content Provide marketing content that helps the buyer by focusing on their areas of interest, rather than your background or how great you think your company is. Initially, their interest will be to solve a small problem, something they don’t need to hire your company to solve. But when your content gives them a viable solution, and they apply it, they start to see your company as a resource. This positions your business as top-of-preference and not just top-of-mind when your services or products are truly needed. 2. Tailor Your Information to the Stages of the Buyer’s Journey It’s important to give the prospective buyer the correct type of information relative to their position in the funnel. For example, a prospect might still be trying to figure out how big or important their problem or challenge is. They aren’t going to make any buying decisions until they know the scope of the situation and have some criteria in place for making a choice. Trying to sell anything to a person at this stage is a complete waste of time, and they won’t appreciate the pressure. A piece of marketing content such as a checklist or a simple diagnostic tool can help them walk through the issue in a thorough manner so they understand what they are really up against. Then they are ready to enter the decision-making phase of their buying journey armed with the information needed to make value-based choices. And guess what, when that information was sourced from your website, it makes your company look like a really good option. 3. Get Up Close and Personal You should do everything possible to ensure your prospect’s experience with your company is a positive one. Do this by making your marketing personal. Personal means that emails come from real people in your company, not just the “info” email address. It can also mean they are connected on social media to people in your company, not just be following the company page. Most importantly, it means your help-based marketing content really addresses their needs and it’s delivered in a timely manner. This shows your business puts the prospect’s interests ahead of its own. 4. Use a Range of Media to Retarget As many as 90 percent of visitors to a website never convert to sales or clients. Most of them won’t return. If you retarget through advertising on a wide range of mediums you will be more visible and it may help entice visitors back to your site. Retargeting allows you to bring traffic back and convert it later on. Offer helpful content they can subscribe to or download when they complete a form. Then email them to come back to get more helpful information. You can see how this easily translates into the design of a marketing funnel supported by a drip email marketing campaign. If potential leads also see you on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ you may end up in their subconscious thoughts. Link posts on social media back to your website, ideally a landing page that will channel them down the next step of your funnel – for example, an ebook, promotion, trial or a purchase. What trends, headlines or innovations in inbound/outbound marketing are you most excited about or interested in right now? Why? Outbound products no longer exist to be the sole source of information for buyers, despite the fact that’s what we have done since 1439 AD. Don’t forget that print cannot possibly compete with nearly free and virtually unlimited digital storage space. Your outbound marketing exists to create awareness of your company. It exists to drive prospects to your website to capture them in your marketing automation system. It exists to act like your inbound marketing, but better. Why better? Have you noticed how many email messages fill your inbox every day? Have you noticed how many direct mail pieces you receive every day? If your email inbox and USPS mailbox are like mine it’s like a 50:1 ratio of emails to direct mail. Start using direct mail again because nobody else is. Your marketing is going to be noticed because there is a lot less competition for your attention. Start mailing printed newsletters with links or prompts to your website and blog. Create rack cards and flyers and banners that invite prospects to learn more by using QR Codes which make it easy to access your digital sites. Ah, the much abused and maligned QR Code! Used properly these things are gold. Don’t take your customers to a static home page when they scan it. Take them to a landing page to sign up for your blog, webinar, eBook, etc. and let marketing automation take over from there. Want to learn more about inbound marketing? Subscribe to our monthly newsletter.
Small Business Doesn’t Have to Mean Horse and Buggy Posted on March 14, 2016June 20, 2018 by Jessica Lunk When it comes to marketing software, many small businesses dismiss the idea as something too expensive, too complex, and too much the exclusive province of major global companies. However, nothing could be further from the truth: 21st-century marketing automation software is affordable, versatile, and can provide a quantum leap in marketing effectiveness for your business. What is Marketing Automation Software? Marketing automation software is designed to help businesses automatically manage multiple business campaigns, to automate a variety of daily businesses practices, and to measure the impact of different business strategies. Ultimately, the goal of such software is to allow businesses large and small to take advantage of advanced marketing tools like digital communication without creating new logistical problems that end up hampering overall marketing effectiveness. How does it benefit small businesses? When it comes to ways for marketing automation software to benefit small businesses, the sky is truly the limit. Software can help manage business leads via dynamically segmentation via online forms, and then automatically generate a reply to interested queries. In fact, this software can help track and manage all leads while helping to facilitate communication within the business and, most importantly, with clients. The longer you use such software, the more useful it becomes, because as you gather more data about clients, leads, and marketing campaigns, you are better able to tailor future marketing strategies to your specific audience through marketing messages. What’s the catch? It’s not often that sales professionals are on this side of a pitch, and the natural question about this software and all of its uses is, “What’s the catch?” In all honesty, there isn’t a catch. The software does, of course, require a significant investment on the part of the small business. However, the improvements that the software provides to efficient lead management helps it pay for itself many times over. In fact, 98% of buyers are looking for dedicated marketing automation software for the first time. Because the whole point of automation software is to ease the workload of a business, you don’t have to worry about hiring additional personnel to manage it. How do you pick the best software? Start by creating a list of features you would like to have the software to handle. The more features a software has, the harder it will be to manage without hiring additional personnel. As for pricing for the marketing automation software, you will be looking at an upfront startup fee and a monthly subscription which may be based on the size of your database of contacts, so it’s important to know if the price will increase as your business grows. Similarly, it’s important to note what the minimum license period is – standard agreements are for 12 months, though whether the full amount must be paid up front or part in monthly installments is up to the software manufacturer. Finally, do your research. Read reviews on software review sites. Find similar-sized businesses who have adopted this software so that you can ask for unbiased opinions, and, if you decide to purchase the software, see if there are additional charges for user training. For more information on improving your marketing strategies, be sure to download our Big Guide to Small Business Marketing:
Save Time with Marketing Automation Posted on February 22, 2016September 16, 2020 by Jessica Lunk This blog post was updated on February 7, 2020. Modern marketing campaigns are fragmented with different channels and lots of moving parts. An interested buyer might see your ad in a trade magazine, see your AdWords ad in a Google search, like your social media page, and subscribe to your email newsletter all before deciding to buy from you. It can get a little complicated. It’s no surprise, then, that small business owners want the most help when it comes to creating a sales and marketing process. Segmenting contacts, sending catered messages, nurturing, tracking, and converting can take a lot of manual labor and time. That’s where marketing automation comes in. Marketing automation is key to saving you time while making sure that every contact is being nurtured for your best chance to turn them into a customer and a loyal fan of your business. Let’s take a deep dive into the various features and areas of marketing automation that save you a ton of time. Tasks Marketing Automation Takes Off Your Plate 1. Lead Nurturing Wish you could regularly communicate with leads so that they’d move closer to being sales-qualified leads? One effective marketing automation functionality is a drip-email campaign. Pre-written emails are sent out to specific individuals at the right time when they perform a specific action. Once you’ve written them, your marketing automation software handles the timing and sending, allowing you to nurture leads without spending your entire day sending emails. Each customer has a path to take before making the decision to buy – whether it’s investing in new technology, partnering with a business consultant, or choosing the right insurance. That path – the buyer’s journey – can include blog content, social media, digital ads, emails, and phone calls. You can’t control exactly where buyers go, but you can help guide them in the right direction, shortening their journey. Once you’ve been introduced to a new lead – maybe from a trade show list, lead magnet or networking event – a lead nurturing process can automate the flow of information to the buyer. For instance, say you’re a travel agent who specializes in corporate incentive trips. You meet several great contacts at a networking event, including the CEO of a midsize business. After such a short introduction, it’s not the right time to proceed with a sales pitch, but you want to stay on her radar. You put her information into the CRM of your sales and marketing software and start her on an introduction campaign. The campaign automatically sends her an introduction about your company, then proceeds to send a sequence of your best blog posts regarding employee incentive programs. As she clicks blog post links and goes back to your website, she downloads your Incentive Trip Planning Checklist. The intro campaign stops, and she’s started down a more sales-focused campaign, sending a case study of businesses that have improved sales performance through your employee incentive trips. The case study is followed by a call-to-action to reach out to you for a free incentive trip itinerary. She follows through, and you’re on your way to winning another customer who has been warmed up with relevant, helpful information through the lead nurturing process. 2. Email Marketing Email marketing campaigns, quarterly newsletters, end-of-the-month sales incentives – there are a lot of emails to create. In fact, most lead nurturing campaigns include multiple emails and some can be super short, but some can include 10 or more. Email has been around forever, but it’s still the most effective digital channel for converting contacts into customers. Email can pay off, but getting bogged down in design woes can hinder your performance. Instead of reformatting every email you send, marketing automation lets you build and track email templates. Benefits include: Maintaining a consistent look and feel for every email you send to prospects and customers, boosting recognition and recall of your brand. Using merge fields to include personalized text in your emails, such as contact name, contact company, the contact’s sales rep and more. Tracking email open and link click stats for each email template Testing one template against another to see which templates perform the best. Many marketing automation systems provide an email template library of predesigned templates so you can start out with a format that adheres to best practices, giving you an even greater chance of reaching prospects and customers in their inbox. 3. Lead Scoring and Segmenting Not every lead is ready to talk to a sales rep. The quickest way to annoy your sales team is to send them the contact information of people who aren’t ready to make a purchasing decision. With marketing automation software, you can assign scores to leads based on what kinds of activities they perform. So if someone just visited your site once, they probably aren’t very interested in buying your product or signing up for a subscription. But if they signed up for your newsletter, follow your social media, tune into your webinars, and downloaded your ebook, they are clearly an engaged lead who may respond to a sales call. If you pulled a list in a standalone CRM, or even pulled up your contacts in Outlook, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell which contacts where hot prospects, and which were cold leads. Lead scoring allows you to approach marketing more efficiently by spending your time on promising prospects. When you hook your CRM into marketing automation, however, you can track contacts’ activity and tally a score. With contact scores, you know who is ripe for reaching out to, and who could use a little more information about your business or their pain-point before starting a sales conversation. For instance, you might give every lead one point for clicking an email link, five points for filling out a form on your website, and -10 points for unsubscribing from your newsletter. Lead scoring your contacts with marketing automation gives you the information you need to determine what leads are most important to follow up on. You can intelligently prioritize people to contact so that no one will slip through the cracks. It also helps you understand what kind of activities you should perform (emails, calls, etc.) to move colder leads down the funnel. Marketing automation allows you to segment your leads into respective contact lists. For example, a common pain point or interest in services. With an automated process, these emails can be drip-fed to these designated contact lists. Again, relevant content at the right time! 4. Content Management Content is valuable, be it for your brand, your clients, or both. Prospects and customers want to be targeted specifically based on their interests, or they’ll pass you up for your competition. Marketing automation can help you manage that content efficiently and save your agency time by connecting the right content with the right leads. Below are several ways marketing automation software supports your agency’s content management: Dynamic Content Dynamic Content is “smart” content. It’s also your secret weapon. It adapts to the behaviors and interests of the lead, based on website data it gathers from your leads and customers. The content can be personalized based on the lead’s request or previous visits to your website. It also allows leads to submit information back to you, which will help you gain additional information on that lead’s behavior. And better yet, updating the materials is a lot simpler and less time consuming than doing it manually. Content Amplification Take that valuable, dynamic content, and break out of the traditional organic strategies. Integrate it with paid, earned and owned tactics across multiple channels, such as websites, social media, and advertising. 5. Troubleshooting With an automated process, it’s more apparent when you see a glitch or bottleneck in your system. You can identify these issues more quickly and find a solution in real-time, as opposed to waiting for next month’s report and seeing discrepancies that happen too late to make changes to. Not only does marketing automation take things off your plate, but it also has built-in features that streamline your efforts and make getting things done a breeze. Here are a few of those features and how they help you save time. Marketing Automation Features You Need 1. Tagging Few things stay static these days, and keeping tabs on your database of contacts can be a chore. Tags help you dynamically segment and filter your prospects and customers into lists you can easily target with hyper-relevant communication. For instance, with BenchmarkONE marketing automation, you can tell BenchmarkONE to add tags to your contacts based on the pages they visit on your website, or the links they click in your emails. So, if you’re a fitness center, you could tell BenchmarkONE to automatically add a “Yoga” tag to any contact that visits pages on your website that have information about yoga classes. With tag rules, you can then create a rule like “if the ‘Yoga’ tag is added to a contact, send them a yoga email.” As you learn more about your contacts’ preferences and activity, you can send them messages they can relate to and help them along the path to conversion in the most efficient way possible. 2. Tasks Attracting, converting, closing, and delighting (the stages of the inbound marketing methodology) take time. It’s a process, which means there are multiple steps. But, with hundreds or thousands of contacts to keep tabs on, it’s easy for processes to break – causing hot opportunities to slip through the cracks. Marketing automation helps keep processes and people on track with campaign workflows and tasks. So, if someone makes a purchase, downloads an ebook, or subscribes to your newsletter, your marketing automation software can automatically send the appropriate follow-up email, as well as create a task for a team member to follow-up. Then, your customer-facing team – whether it be a salesperson or account manager – can easily keep track of follow-up, like meetings and calls. 3. Tracking You can track engagement, lead source, contact status, sales rep and more, giving you precious insight into what’s working, and what’s eating up valuable resources in your sales and marketing process. Other items you can track: You can tell if one salesperson is particularly good at closing big deals. You can see what your top customer lead source is. You can tell which emails are getting the most click-throughs. With data at your fingertips, you can easily turn up the dial on your sales and marketing efforts. When the daily grunt-work of tracking, tallying and analyzing is all automated for you, your sales and marketing process actually gets less robotic and more personal. With marketing automation, you can free up time and resources to focus on growing key relationships for your business. Digital marketing can seem complex, but with marketing automation, you can standardize processes, deliver a consistent customer experience and save a ton of time. Rather than focusing on manual, administrative tasks, your team is freed up to create awesome marketing content, follow-up with hot leads, and build better relationships with customers.
3 Ways Marketing Automation Software Makes Salespeople Happy Posted on February 18, 2016June 18, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick If you own a small business, then chances are you spend your hard earned money on marketing channels such as SEO, PPC and social media to drive leads. But often times those leads don’t convert into sales and long term customers. It can be a big frustration not only for you but a source of contention for your sales reps as they often blame the marketing campaigns for bad leads. So if you want to make your salespeople happy and help them close more sales, then it’s time to think about bringing marketing automation software into your business. Here’s why: 1. Improved Insights Salespeople are happy when they have as much information as possible about their leads and prospects in the sales pipeline. In today’s fast-paced online world, a sales professional needs to have more than just the basic contact info in their CRM (Customer Relationship Management System) such as: name, phone number, email, address, etc. By leveraging marketing automation software within your CRM, sales people have insights at their fingertips such as what pages of their website their leads have visited, what emails they have clicked on and what online forms they have filled out. Not only does this help salespeople to build relationships faster, but ultimately allows them to respond to leads more quickly – and we all know speed wins deals. In fact, according to Inside Sales, when leads are called within 5 minutes, they are 100 times more likely to convert into a sale than leads called in 30 minutes. 2. Nurture Leads Salespeople are happy when their leads are ready. Most of the time, leads generated by marketing get sent over to sales with no forethought of whether they are close to purchasing or not. For example, someone who is an attendee at a trade show or downloads a whitepaper from your website may not be the same quality of lead as someone who is ready to demo your software and fills out a contact form on your website. In fact, studies show that on average 50% of leads are qualified, but not yet ready to buy. (Source: Gleanster Research) Marketing automation software has the power to nurture all of your contacts from the top of the funnel all the way through the customer lifecycle. Marketing software converts website visitors into leads and then segments them into the right buckets based on their specific needs and interests. It also enables you to evaluate where a prospect is located in the sales process (or sales funnel): If the customer is in the top of the funnel (Just looking phase), the customer probably doesn’t need a hard sell, but might be better served with a simple three step email campaign introducing your business and how it can solve a problem they have. If a customer is in the middle of the funnel, a marketing automation software platform can help create a more focused response to that interest using targeted emails. These specific emails can be customized according to the prospect’s interests and how often they have visited the site and looked at a product or service. By engaging or nurturing your customers seamlessly using marketing automation software, you can better prepare leads before sending them over to sales. 3. Score Leads Salespeople are happy when they know the hot leads from the cold. Marketing automation helps identify the high-quality, hot leads from the low-quality, cold leads. It does this using a simple scoring model. Certain scores are applied to customers based on interactions on your website, online and through content they engage with. Your business can weight certain interactions differently so that scores reflect the true progress of a lead. This way, when the salespeople receives their leads from various marketing initiatives, they know the hot from the cold and where to focus their valuable sales time.The result- salespeople spend less time cold calling and more time talking to “HOT” prospects and earning commissions. The goal of marketing automation software is obviously not just to make the sales team happy, but to give them high-quality and organized leads to make them more productive and drive more revenue for the business. By leveraging automation you and your team will gain better insights into your contacts and have more time to spend with those leads who are ready to purchase.
Small Business Goal for 2016: Kick Some SaaS With Marketing Automation Posted on December 28, 2015November 22, 2023 by Jessica Lunk The rise of the robot is upon us, and no industry has been transformed by automation more than marketing. A well-organized automated marketing campaign can address the specific interests of thousands of companies in a warm, personalized manner. At the same time, software as a service (SaaS) has made it simple for businesses of every size to access technology without the hassle of manual software updates and complicated installs. These two technological advancements go hand-in-hand. SaaS is the perfect way to make marketing automation accessible and affordable, while marketing automation is the perfect way to help any SaaS company find and keep more customers. To make the most of SaaS marketing automation, focus on: Message Management Effective marketing automation strategies for SaaS companies require messages that appeal to specific target audiences. To craft such messages, you must account for: Buyer Persona– Position your product to appeal to the different types of customers you serve. For instance, a company that has recently been started may be researching your type of product for the first time. They may not have even yet chosen whether to install software or buy it as a service. For new businesses, the conversation will be more towards educating them about all of the options available. They will view your product differently than a long-established business that already has a legacy product in place. For an established business, the conversation may be more around switching from a competitive software. Problems and Solutions– Once you’ve chosen buyer persona, think about the specific problems that each persona may have. Some established businesses, for example, may be frustrated with the high maintenance and repair costs of maintaining their servers. Your marketing could thus emphasize that switching to your SaaS product will save them from such costs. Partnering with an experienced SaaS marketing agency can help you create targeted campaigns that highlight the cost-saving benefits of your product. Pricing Prudence– If you offer multiple pricing options, emphasize different options to each persona. Recent startups, for example, will likely want to experiment with different options before picking one permanently, so emphasize month-to-month costs. Established businesses may be more interested in saving money by buying service for years at a time. The more prospective customers feel that your marketing appeals directly to their needs, the more likely they are to buy your product. Savvy Segmentation Successful marketing campaigns don’t stop at generating interest in your company. They also cultivate it, transforming existing interest into the will to buy your product. To help customers along this journey, consider these stages of the buying process: Initial Interest– Provide informational and education content that is relevant to your space, presenting your company as a qualified source of information. This will appeal to new customers with no prior interest. Broader Benefits– Once customers begin to seriously consider your product, provide content with more specific information on the long-term benefits of your product as well as case studies, testimonials and reviews. Perceived Problems– Before they buy, customers will look up all the possible problems with SaaS services, so anticipate and address these objections. Present your company as particularly good at solving SaaS problems, as this will make them choose you over competitors. Segmentation is most effective if based on specific customer data. Learn as much as you can about each lead, assemble it into a database, and target each segment as specifically as you can. Customer Management For SaaS companies, that recurring revenue is sweet – but it also means that customers paying month-to-month aren’t locked into a long term contract and can leave at any time. Taking care to nurture your customer relationships can ensure that your customers stay with you longer, increasing your Customer Lifetime Value. Here’s how: Reach out Often- Use milestones like birthdays, anniversaries and renewal dates to say hello and check-in with your customers. Cross-sell and Upsell- Marketing isn’t just for prospects. Market additional services and add-ons to your customer base to become more ingrained in their business and boost their spend with you. Provide Outstanding Service- When it comes to SaaS, letting your team members shine is a great way to connect with customers so they feel they’re getting more than just a tool. Reliable support and scheduled check-ins creates valuable face-time with your customers, translating into contract renewals. If you’re marketing your SaaS company, marketing automation can help you scale. Developing relevant messaging, segmenting your leads and delighting your customers is a recipe for success – and we know it works because we use Hatchbuck’s marketing automation to grow Hatchbuck.
Getting Started with Marketing Automation in 5 Easy Steps Posted on November 3, 2015June 18, 2018 by jmiller If you are moving from an email marketing strategy to a marketing automation strategy, it can be overwhelming the first time you see how it all works. Once someone sees the level of sophistication of a marketing automation tool, it can cause spontaneous paralysis and a quick retreat into the old way of doing things. Don’t give in! Be ready to make a change…and…EVOLVE. I speak with customers every day about how to get started with marketing automation and how to avoid getting lost in the details. Marketing is not an exact science. You have to test, try new things, learn what works and improve. A solid foundation is the best starting point. Here are 5 steps to get started: Make an Offer Capture Leads Engage your Audience Stay in Touch Keep customers up to date Make an Offer The best way to attract a new client? Offer something that you have that they don’t have and want to have. Identify what that offer is and give them a taste of it. Come up with an enticing incentive, or lead magnet, to offer people in exchange for their contact information: Your offer could be something like: White paper Case study Report Free sample Free 30 minute consultation Leveraging existing content/expertise is the most efficient way to go. If you have multiple offerings, use them all. Test out different offers to see what works best to attract the right audience. Protip: Don’t give more than two offers on a single webpage, or more than one offer on a landing page. Capture Leads Putting a white paper on a website for instant download can limit perceived value. Don’t give away valuable content for free; require information in exchange for the offer. Design and embed a lead capture form on your website or landing page. The more value you offer, the more information you can request. For example, require an email address to sign-up for your blog, but request more information if you are offering someone 30 minutes of your time for a consultation. Protip: Make sure the information you request matches the offer. Engage your Audience Now that your contact has requested information, send them a little more information. An engagement campaign is a short term campaign that ultimately leads to a specific call to action, like request a meeting, signing-up, or downloading information. This type of campaign can be 3-7 steps over a 2-3 week period (this can vary depending on content available). Emails within an engagement campaign can include, but are not limited to: An introduction to your company A case study A testimonial Educational material The goal of the engagement campaign is to drive the contact into your sales process. Protip: A simple engagement campaign can have 2 emails and 1 phone call to follow up. Stay in Touch Not everyone is ready to buy right away, but it doesn’t mean that they never will. Build out a long term nurturing campaign to stay in touch will all of your contacts on an ongoing basis. A nurture campaign may include an email every 30 – 60 days. The goal of a nurture campaign is to educate your audience, offer validation as to why they should do business with you (case studies, testimonials) and simply to stay top of mind. The nurture campaign may have calls to action or offers that can pull someone into an engagement campaign or directly into the sales process. And, with marketing automation, you can track engagement activity; if someone starts to engage, a good marketing automation tool will trigger actions that can pull contacts into your sales process over time. One tip to help build out nurture campaigns is to use a resource like www.alltop.com, where you can leverage 3rd party articles and recommend them to your audience. Protip: 1 email sent every 60 days means that you only have to build 6 emails to stay in touch with your contacts for a year! Keep Customers Up to Date Don’t forget to share your blog, a newsletter or a deal of the month. “Just in Time” communications offer you the freedom to communicate when the mood strikes you. The objective here is the same as a nurture campaign but includes timely information; a new product offer, PR updates, recent newspaper articles, upcoming events. “Just in Time” communications can also be influenced by the season or time of year. Protip: Returning customers spend 20% more than first time buyers, so staying in touch with your customers is just as important as staying in touch with prospects. Getting started with marketing automation can seem like an enormous task. But, by taking a step-by-step approach, you can easily tackle attracting new leads, nurturing prospects, and staying in touch with customers.
Four Things You Didn’t Know About Marketing Automation Posted on October 27, 2015June 18, 2018 by Jessica Lunk Running a small business requires being ultra resourceful when it comes to managing your time and your budget. We know you’ve got limited bandwidth, but we also know that neglected leads result in a dry profit pool down the road. No worries – marketing automation is here to help. Here are four important things you might not realize about marketing automation and how it can boost productivity for your small business. 1. ROI May Take Time – But, Your Patience will be Rewarded! Focus Research found that 75% of companies using marketing automation see ROI within 12 months and see positive results even sooner. This is both a very quick and very slow period of time to wait to see your investment bring about profit. Too often, when a new tool is implemented, companies are impatient to see immediate results. It is important to realize that the ROI is measurable and real, but it may take time to create the kind of impact that moves your audience towards purchase decisions. In the long run, this is a short-term investment that will pay out in a great way for the company if implemented correctly. 2. Your Leads are Segmented While 61% of B2B marketers send all of their leads straight to sales, only 27% were found to be qualified, according to MarketingSherpa. This is why it is so important to analyze the position of leads and then nurture them accordingly. Yet, gathering the right data to sort and segment leads would require exorbitant amounts of time and energy from your marketing team that they just don’t have. Instead, marketing automation systems gather information and do all the sorting for you, putting your leads in the right buckets. And once you’re leads are segmented, you’re on your way to nurturing them with personalized content to achieve a 20% higher level of sales, according to a report by DemandGen. 3. Your Leads are Nurtured Marketing automation tracks your leads’ activity and determines their sales potential every step of the way. With leads properly segmented, you can meet each lead where they are in the sales funnel and take the right steps to direct them toward conversion. Marketing automation software automatically nurtures your leads by sending them personalized content they value, instead of slamming them with sales tactics and generic taglines. This lead nurturing approach is exactly why most companies see excellent results within several months of implementing their system. 4. Your Costs are Lowered When companies implement a nurturing strategy and automate mundane processes, they save money. Employees don’t have to do the mindless work of sorting through lead behavior, they can focus on answering questions and cultivating relationships. Allowing the work to be done automatically means a faster and more efficient process for everyone. Forrester Research found companies that excelled at marketing automation were able to generate 50% more leads ready for sales at a 33% lower cost. When a software system can do the busywork, your employees are freed up to work on tougher tasks that have a bigger impact on your business. Are you ready to move towards solid and sustainable growth? Marketing automation is an important next step. Get on board now and ride the wave of marketing automation’s newest trends for successful brands.