The Top 9 Best CRMs For Agencies Posted on March 16, 2022October 14, 2022 by Jonathan Herrick When it comes to a CRM, every agency has its own unique needs. Whether you’re shopping for a new software solution or getting set up for the first time, the purchase of a CRM is not a decision to be taken lightly. Before we dive into some questions, you should ask before shopping around for a CRM and the top CRMs for agencies, let’s lay some groundwork. What is CRM Software? Customer relationship management (CRM) is a combination of processes and practices aimed at managing customer interactions throughout the buyer’s journey. The goal is to engage customers at all touchpoints to build better relationships that drive retention, loyalty, and sales growth. It can be difficult to handle all of this manually, particularly when your business scales. This is the reason why 65% of businesses invest in CRM technology within the first five years of launch. CRM software automates repetitive CRM tasks and streamlines processes, giving sales and marketing teams more time to handle critical tasks. It centralizes customer contacts, gathers customer data from a variety of sources, and offers actionable insights to boost relationships between the customer and your agency. Some of the key CRM features include: Contact management Lead management Interaction tracking Email integrations Workflow automation Pipeline management Sales forecasting Reporting and analytics Here are a few questions to answer before you start test-driving different CRMs: What’s the most important functionality you need? For example, are you looking for something to help you streamline your sales process or a tool to help organize your multichannel marketing campaigns? Are you looking for a CRM for your own agency to use on behalf of your clients, or both? The more users involved in your CRM, the more expensive (generally) it’ll be. Which processes would, if automated, save you the most time and money? Different CRMs have different options for automation — for example, triggered email drip campaigns or automatic lead scoring. Which do you need, and which can you live without? What kind of user interface (UI) do you prefer? Not all UIs are created equal. Some use spreadsheet-style interfaces with unique “views” that help you sort and filter records. Others mirror social media networks with centralized newsfeeds or dashboards that all users see when logged in. Do you really need something new? If you’re using an Excel spreadsheet to track client relationships, the answer is probably “yes.” But if your current CRM is missing a couple of features you wish you had, consider if you really need them. No CRM is perfect, and switching to a new solution can be time-consuming and expensive. Get input from your colleagues and other stakeholders. Ask your sales and marketing team what’s most important to them in a CRM. And once you have your list of “must-haves” and your budget in mind, it’s time to demo the best CRM software for agencies on the market. Benefits of CRM Software for Agencies From what we’ve already discussed, the benefits a CRM offers are apparent. However, we really want to examine what a solid tool can offer your agency, so here are some core benefits that come with using a CRM: 1. Better Contact Management If you want to build comprehensive customer profiles to spur advanced personalization for your agency, CRM software is the way to go. First of all, it centralizes customer contacts, making them easily accessible for sales, marketing, and support teams. More than that, it breaks data silos in your agency, improving functions of various departments ensuring customer interactions from all departments are recorded in a single repository. For example, the sales team can easily find the deal, continue from where the marketing team left off, and progress without a struggle. 2. Better Sales Forecasting CRM software updates customer profiles as new information about them come in, helping to build comprehensive profiles. Each bit of customer detail, from needs to locale, is at your sales team’s disposal. Using historical data helps sales reps determine which customers can be profitable. Moreover, CRM tools with predictive analysis provide insights for better sales forecasting. Unfortunately, it seems not many agencies are aware of these benefits since only less than a third use CRM for sales forecasting. 3. Increased Customer Satisfaction Your agency clients expect personalized emails since they often vary in industry, services needed, or interests. With a CRM, it’s easy to use personalization to your advantage. It allows to segment clients based on different aspects such as services, deal sizes, and more. Segmentation drives better personalization, which in turn leads to higher customer satisfaction and retention. Statistics show that when you prioritize personalization, you convince 90% of customers to spend more on your services and products. 4. Consistent Revenue Growth 68% of today’s businesses are increasingly using customer experience as a competitive advantage. Lisa Masiello makes it easy to understand the force behind this trend. She posits, “Happy customers are your biggest advocates and can easily become your best-performing sales team.” A CRM helps you keep track of your customers and get to know them better. When you know them better, you’re able to keep them happy by offering them tailored services and care. And when you keep customers happy, they are more likely to become repeat buyers and even woo others to partner with your agency. Losing a client could be extremely detrimental, even leading to some agencies closing their doors. This is why retainer business is crucial for agency success, and a CRM can help you establish a healthy retainer machine. Ready to get on board with a CRM? Let’s take a look at some of the best CRMs out there for agencies. Insightly Image courtesy of Insightly Insightly features exactly the level of functionality a small business or mid-sized agency would need. It has built-in project management tools, an excellent user interface (UI), integration capabilities with third-party apps like MailChimp, and many customization opportunities. Users like Insightly because of all of the functionality offered in the free plan. Pricing: Free plan, Plus – $29/month, Professional – $49/month, and Enterprise – $99/month Podio Image courtesy of GetApp Podio is a CRM that also provides project management, workflow management, social intranet, and product planning tools. With all of its added benefits, Podio is a great solution for agencies that want to manage both creative projects and sales activities in one place. Pricing: Free plan, Basic – $7.20, Plus – $11.20, Premium – $19.20 Nimble Image courtesy of Nimble Nimble focuses on each customer’s individuality, pulling insights from social media and other channels to give you the most accurate, updated profile information. With several email marketing tools built in, this CRM is especially useful for firms that provide email marketing (or rely on it for their own marketing strategies). Pricing: Nimble Business – $25/user/month, billed monthly or $19 per user per month, billed annually BenchmarkONE BenchmarkONE is a CRM and marketing automation platform built specifically for the needs of SMBs and agencies. With customizable lead scoring capabilities and a suite of email marketing automation and tracking tools, BenchmarkONE makes it simple to manage opportunities and grow sales. Customers choose BenchmarkONE because of the ease of setup (Ranked #1 by G2 Crowd), intuitiveness, and live-dedicated customer support. Pricing: Free Plan offered, Lite and Pro plans start at $0/month for 250 contacts. Price based on number of contacts. Unlimited users. Qualifying agencies can access partner pricing and discounts. Pipedrive Image courtesy of Pipedrive Pipedrive is a sales CRM that’s focused on prompting salespeople to take action with leads and customers. It integrates with several third-party email providers and other tools, like Outlook, Gmail, Google Maps, Trello, and Zapier. It’s ideal for agencies with long or complex sales cycles, as it’s primarily a pre-sale tool. Pricing: Free trial, Essential – $12.50/user/month, billed annually, Advanced – $24.90/user/month, billed annually, Professional – $49.90/user/month, billed annually, Enterprise – $99/user/month, billed annually Salesforce Image courtesy of Salesforce If you need a CRM with all of the bells and whistles, the industry-leading Salesforce CRM may be the one for you. Though some users find the UI and the numerous capabilities overwhelming, Salesforce is a powerful tool once you’ve taken the time to learn how to use it. Pricing: Essentials – $28.33 per user per month, Sale Professionals – $84.97/user/month, Enterprise – $169.94/user/month, Unlimited – $339.88/user/month Sage Image courtesy of Software Advice Sage CRM is a multipurpose solution that connects your sales and marketing activities to other departments, like accounting, service delivery, and customer service. With lead scoring, email marketing, and territory management capabilities, it’s a great solution for bigger agencies with complex or dispersed sales teams. Pricing: Starts at $45/month/user Apptivo Image courtesy of GetApp Apptivo CRM is known for its “do it all” functionality – from lead and opportunity management to document storage and email marketing. Manage your customer relationships from pre-sale to sale and beyond. Pricing: Lite – $8 per user per month, billed annually, Premium – $12 per user per month, billed annually, Ultimate – $20 per user per month, billed annually, Enterprise is quote-based HubSpot CRM Image courtesy of HubSpot HubSpot’s CRM is free, which might appeal to you if you’re a boutique agency or testing the waters of a CRM for the first time. It’s easy to use, and while it doesn’t have as many advanced features (like a mobile app or proposal tools), it’s a great solution for keeping your customer information organized. Pricing: Free Spiro Spiro is a reliable CRM software for small and medium-sized agencies. It’s a powerful tool that lets you automatically create contacts and organize and prioritize opportunities. It distinguishes itself with a solid functionality to pinpoint anomalies in your sales pipeline and recommend sales steps to convert more sales. Pricing: Quote-based We hope this guide helps you as you consider a CRM for your growing agency. And if you’d like to learn more about what BenchmarkONE’s agency-focused software can do for you, you can sign up for a free plan here.
8 Tips for Community Management Posted on March 10, 2022August 25, 2022 by Natalie Slyman Building and managing a community of advocates is critical to the success of your marketing, sales, and customer service strategies. However, your customers are spread out all over the internet, which makes it increasingly difficult to manage their interactions. But, it can be done! Before we share eight community management tips to help you build a strong community of customers, brand advocates, and enthusiasts, let’s cover some basics. What is Community Management? A community is the people who interact with your brand on various touchpoints, whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Snapchat, Forums, or the comment section of your blog. Community management involves everything you do to build lasting relationships with your customers, potential customers, and brand followers. In a nutshell, it’s all about listening to the internet and bringing about active discussions around your brand. Why is Community Management Crucial? There are different ways you can manage your community, but all have the same goal: to align your advocates and bring them together for increased engagement. An acronym for Support, Product, Acquisition, Contribution, Engagement, Success – the SPACES model breaks down the benefits of community management quite well: Why Do You Need a Community Manager? Appropriate community management is typically orchestrated by a community manager. A community manager is at the helm of your community-building strategy – monitoring, engaging, moderating, and measuring the progress of these efforts. A community manager juggles multiple tasks, including: Gathering raw yet valuable feedback Managing buyer complaints Building relationships with other brands Winning over influencers Initiating and managing one-to-one connections with your audience Monitoring keywords relevant to your business Quickly responding to complaints to maintain a strong reputation Gathering reviews and ideas from community members Raising brand awareness within your niche Boosting customer lifetime value, satisfaction, and referrals 8 Tips for Community Management 1. Determine Your Most Engaged Audience Engagement levels differ across channels, as does the audience. To be a successful channel manager, develop a knack for prioritizing your time. Oftentimes, the most active channels elicit the most interactions than the less engaged channels. As you set time aside to go through responses, you have to allocate more time to the most engaging channels. Use relevant metrics to rank your channels in order of activity, so you can determine which channels will require more attention. 2. Acknowledge the Customer When a customer approaches you with a question or complaint, it’s important that you acknowledge it. This goes a long way in making them feel heard and in building trust among your customers. Where possible, give them an instant solution to their problem. When that’s not possible, let them know you’re actively looking into the issue. Make it clear that you understand where the customer is coming from, as that will amplify the value in the community you’re building. 3. Be Authentic and Consistent in Your Communication When customers sign up to be part of your community, they do so hoping to connect with someone real. So, besides maintaining a consistent voice and tone of messaging across all communities, be authentic and genuine. In other words, engage with customers, supporters, and followers on a human level. Be empathetic and approach every interaction from a customer’s standpoint. 4. Always Provide Follow-Up Interactions Let’s say you handled a customer complaint about a faulty product they recently received. If you promise to ship a replacement, don’t leave it at that. Contact the customer to check-in and get an update. Did they receive the replacement, and did they like it? If they did, share the feedback with your followers on social media and other channels. This shows other community members that you care about your customers and are ready to stop at nothing to solve their problems. 5. Gather Customer Feedback Building a vibrant community doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a long process that involves a constant iteration of engagement techniques and content formats. Your customers know what’s working and what’s not, so create surveys or polls to gather feedback on various community management practices, your products, their practices, and anything else you want to know. You can survey on most social media platforms, but also consider sending customer surveys via email. Analyze the feedback and use the insights to adjust your process, how you manage your community, and the content you create for your community. 6. Set Goals and Measure Progress As you tweak the process, be sure to measure progress. Each type of community management should have a goal. The common goals are: Build domain expertise Build lasting relationships with customers Improve brand awareness Drive traffic to your website Expand your audience Connect with influencers Check the sources and volume of your site traffic, your customer satisfaction rates, and other KPIs to determine if you’re meeting your goals or not. 7. Ask for Input Community management doesn’t happen in a vacuum: broaden your perspective by involving others in the process. For example, while the community manager is in charge of comments on industry-related news, get the CEO’s input on thought leadership content for a fresh take. Similarly, ask the sales manager to answer customers’ questions on product pricing and technical details. 8. Automate Repetitive Processes Community management involves a lot of moving parts. Done manually, the process can be long and tedious. So, automate some of these processes like social listening and posting to save time for important things. Create a More Engaged Community We recommend following these tips as you try to build a strong, growing, engaged community. Sticking with your strategy is key, so make sure your efforts are fueled by a dedicated community manager for maintenance and consistency.
Master These Three KPIs to Grow Your Business Posted on March 9, 2022March 8, 2022 by Guest Author Marketing without monitoring and tracking your progress is pointless. In fact, it’s worse than pointless – it’s a waste of resources and a missed opportunity to improve your business. If you are going to spend the time and money required to pursue marketing campaigns, you need to be committed to carefully evaluating the success of those initiatives. That’s where KPIs come into the picture. KPIs – key performance indicators – are measures that you select to monitor the quality of your marketing efforts. In a high-tech world, it’s easy to get distracted by the enormous wealth of information that is always available at your fingertips. However, by looking at too many numbers, you might struggle to get a clear picture of your success or failure. Consider narrowing your focus to center on these three essential KPIs. 1. Return on Investment Return on investment – often referred to as ROI – is a logical place to start. Each of your marketing efforts is going to come along with some financial cost. Certain activities will cost more than others, of course, but your goal is to have all of your marketing initiatives generate as much revenue as possible. If a certain area of your marketing spend is actually bringing a negative return, you’ll likely want to discontinue that effort. The calculation for ROI is deceivingly simple. To determine the return on investment for a specific marketing effort or for your marketing department as a whole, simply divide the amount of revenue generated by the cost of your campaigns. If that calculation leaves you with a number larger than one, you know that you have at least come out ahead. So, what makes that calculation “deceiving?” The issue here is figuring out what revenue to credit to what marketing measure. How do you know which of your many marketing plans actually led to a given sale? This can be tricky, to be sure, but there are ways to produce accurate numbers. 2. Win Rate Where you have almost certainly heard of ROI before – even if you aren’t yet tracking it carefully – you may not be familiar with the concept of win rate. This is a KPI that aims to measure how many opportunities you are actually turning into customers. It’s great to present your products or services to a lot of interested people, but if those people aren’t making purchases, it will all be wasted. Win rate is one of those metrics that you’ll never be completely happy with. Even if you are doing a good job of turning some of your opportunities into sales, you’ll always want more. By monitoring this metric, you can see how certain adjustments impact your win rate, so you can continually adapt and grow. It’s important to think about win rate from a big picture perspective as you analyze your business. If your win rate is falling below where it needs to be to turn a profit, there are a couple of angles from which you can approach the problem. A marketing issue. It’s possible that your lagging win rate is a marketing problem. That is, it’s a problem related to attracting the wrong potential customers with your advertising plan. Placing your advertising in front of the wrong people is going to result in leads that don’t have any chance of converting. Attracting quality leads is the first big step toward establishing a solid win rate. A funnel problem. Once you get prospects into your sales funnel, you need to have a structure in place that will compel them to make a purchase. So, for instance, if you want your prospects to click a link for more information, what happens after they do so? If your win rate is disappointing, it might be that the link you’re directing them to is to blame. Tracking your win rate over time can provide important insights into your business. Stay on top of this one and reverse negative trends in win rate before it’s too late. 3. Cost Per Acquisition You might also see this one referred to as cost per new customer. No matter what you call it, the idea is simple enough – you are trying to track how much it costs you to add a new customer to your business. This is important because you need to confirm that the amount you are spending is worth it in the long run. If each new customer costs more to acquire than they will be worth to your business, you are playing a losing game. To calculate your cost per acquisition, you’ll divide the amount of money spent on a marketing campaign by the number of new leads that campaign generated. So, if you spent $1,000 on a marketing plan and that plan helped you acquire 100 new customers, your CPA would be $10. Is that good? Well, it all depends. In some industries, a $10 CPA would be incredible and would lead to huge profits. On the other hand, some businesses would quickly fall apart if they had to pay $10 per new customer. It all depends on the value that the customer brings to your business. In other words, how much do you expect that customer to spend with you over the years to come? If they can only be expected to make a one-time purchase for $5, you are obviously in trouble. You’ll need to know the average value of a new customer, so you can properly evaluate how much you can spend for acquisitions. Sometimes business growth can be very simple. By focusing on these three metrics, you’ll be able to make some small strides towards growth that can lead to more opportunities. Good luck! Matt Buchanan is the Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer at Service Direct, a technology company that offers local lead generation solutions for service businesses. He is a graduate of Vanderbilt University. He has 15+ years of expertise in local lead generation, sales, search engine marketing, and building and executing growth strategies.
Your 2022 Hiring Guide Posted on March 3, 2022May 8, 2024 by Jonathan Herrick The Great Resignation has led to a scenario where there are far more open positions than employees willing to work. This has given job seekers leverage they never had while taking away the control employers held over employees. Hiring in 2022 is now more complicated than ever before. 61% of employers are having a hard time filling vacant positions despite the high unemployment rate. You thought hiring the right candidate was hard, but now, it’s even harder. The Great Resignation is throwing us all a curveball. So, if you’re finding it increasingly hard to fill open positions, we’ve got some steps you can take that are sure to help. Check them out! How To Attract The Right Talent Amidst The Great Resignation Grace Lordan — associate professor at the London School of Economics — states that employers haven’t seen the end of job-hopping. She also says that employees who value a flexible and hybrid working model will change jobs until they find a company that offers just that. If you can connect the dots in Grace’s message, you’ll get hiring right amidst the recruitment upheavals. Today’s employees are attracted by more flexible work hours, continued availability of remote work, better treatment, and higher wages, to name a few. If you offer these, there’s no doubt top talent will knock on your company’s doors in droves. However, 70% of candidates these days are passive job seekers, and 40% of applicants are unqualified. This means that even though many applicants will tender a formal interest to fill a position, you’ll need a proper strategy to pinpoint the right candidates. Hiring in 2022: A Comprehensive Guide Let’s break this undertaking down into a step-by-step process. 1. Create a Stellar Job Description People are quitting jobs in droves because they no longer meet their expectations. To ensure you appeal to the right candidate, you need to put together a job description that is transparent and honest. Job descriptions are super important for capturing exactly what the job entails so you can accurately manage the expectations of those applying, as well as find a candidate that is actually qualified. Create a comprehensive job description that captures: Job requirements Desired characteristics Requisite experience Special qualifications Salary and benefits Nature of work: remote or in-office If you’re hiring for a newly created role, make sure it aligns with your overall business goals and plan. Doing so will help you stipulate the scope of that role and decide the qualification and characteristics of the ideal candidate. 2. Post the Job Description Finding the right candidate often begins internally. Consider posting the job in internal communication channels, such as Slack, and ask qualified employees to apply. If you can find a good candidate internally, you don’t need to advertise the job externally, which can save you a lot of time and headache. After all, when you hire internally, you already know the candidate and his or her work ethic and process. However, if you’re determined to cast a wider net and capitalize on a larger pool of candidates, post the job externally. Generate a promotion plan that outlines where, when, and how you’re going to publicize the job. External publicity will likely entail posting the job description on: Your company website Online job boards LinkedIn and other job posting sites Industry publications Keep in mind that 68% of Americans would choose a remote working option over the 9-to-5 work, so consider offering remote work. If you’re looking to hire remotely, consider job boards such as: We Work Remotely Flexjobs RemoteOK Working Nomads Also, consider posting your job on social networks like Digital Nomad Jobs, Nomad List, and Work From for some added exposure. 3. Build a Strong Employer Brand Online These days, candidates don’t just read the job description and apply. 75% of interested candidates first gauge your employer’s brand reputation to decide whether or not to apply. 52% of these candidates first go to your website and social media to learn more about your company. Others will scour the web and sift through online reviews on job websites like Indeed and Glassdoor. Before you post your job, audit your online reputation. What do former employees say about working for your company? Take note of anything negative and address it in advance. 4. Vet Candidates Once the candidates apply, separate the wheat from the chaff. On average, a corporate job attracts 250 resumes, only 4-6 candidates get interviewed, and one gets hired. An applicant tracking system will help you review applications to eliminate unfit or under-qualified candidates. Besides that, use applications such as ThriveMap and Saberr to review candidates’ cultural fit and whittle down your list. Be selective but also don’t disqualify someone if they aren’t an exact fit. If you think their experience may still lend to the role, consider moving them to the next step. As we mentioned earlier, despite the wide candidate pool, employers are still finding it hard to place roles, so being too selective could be a bad move. 5. Interview Candidates If you’re hiring remotely, you’ll have to conduct interviews via phone and video conferencing platforms. Alternatively, if you’re filling an in-office position, schedule interviews with candidates at your company. Depending on your interview structure, you can put candidates through further assessment and background checks. This is quite possibly the most important step of the entire process. Since the hiring landscape is much different than in the past, you’ll want to establish and ask the right questions. This includes focusing on candidates’ motivations, passions, and the real “why” behind them applying. With so many people experiencing burnout, the last thing you want is to select a candidate you’re really excited about, only to have them quit a few months later. Make sure your questions land and help establish adequate expectations for the role. Lastly, evaluate the interview and assessment performance to identify the top candidate. Be sure to select a backup candidate in case you fail to find an agreement with the top candidate. Most importantly, keep both candidates engaged. Remember: the candidates are likely to be courting multiple offers, so losing touch with them would be costly. 6. Make it Official At this point, extend the offer to the number one candidate, detailing: Start date Salary and benefits Potential severance fee Paid time off Remote work policy Company mission statement – if you haven’t sent this already. The information helps the candidate evaluate the offer and decide whether to take it or not. Sometimes, the candidate may open negotiations if they aren’t comfortable with an item on the offer letter. Interestingly, the person extending the job offer may influence the candidate’s decision. 94% of candidates accept the offer when they are contacted by their prospective manager, compared to 89% when contacted by the recruiter. Once the candidate accepts the offer and signs the paperwork, move them along the hiring process with the following paperwork and documents: Form I-9 and E-Verify Form W-4 State registrations Organization’s rule book Take into account employment and payroll policies in different countries when hiring remote workers. If unsure, seek advice from remote employment experts such as Remote. 6. Onboard Your New Hire The recruitment doesn’t end the moment the employees ink the deal. You hired them to help you achieve your goals, so signing the paperwork is just the start of the journey. Next, you need to onboard employees and integrate them into your team. Do not underestimate the power of onboarding: it reduces employee turnover and boosts new-hire productivity. According to statistics, 69% of new hires would stay in your organization for three years if you offered them a great onboarding experience. Welcome new employees in a professional way to make them feel valued. Doing so lays the foundation for a super-productive relationship between the hire and your company. Give them clear scheduling and program of the orientation process to help them prepare in advance. And, if possible, assign new hires a mentor to take them through the first stage of their career. This can be their manager, or it can be someone else at the company who has expressed interest in mentorship. Either way, this will help ensure your new hire feels secure and ready for success at their new job. The Great Resignation has made hiring new employees extra tough right now. The tips above should help you get the ball rolling and ensure your next new hire is in it for the long haul.
7 Most Common Link Building Mistakes You Might be Doing and How to Avoid them this Year Posted on March 2, 2022February 25, 2022 by Guest Author At the beginning of a new year, SEO marketers may find themselves looking back at how the discipline of SEO has changed over the years. Certainly, in 2021 SEO evolved. And as in previous years, it evolved largely to reflect the changes and updates made to the Google ranking algorithms. In recent years, many Google updates can be seen as the company’s response to what we’ll call the SE-Only approach. This approach leads to content designed only to boost Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings. In other words, it leads to content that is heavy on keywords but light on actual information. Besides content, there are also important things you should consider when it comes to keeping your link-building strategy up to date. Read on to discover what the most common link-building mistakes are and how to avoid them. 1. Broken Internal Links Ensuring you have a well-organized internal site structure that is optimized for crawlers is possibly the single most important thing you can do to ensure your content is found by the right people. As such, when it comes to your linking strategy, prioritize your tasks so that dealing with broken internal links is the first thing you do. That’s because when a crawler encounters a broken link, it has to terminate there and will be unable to continue to pages that may be linked to from the affected page. Broken links are frustrating to visitors and signal to search engines that a website is of low quality, yet a recent study by Semrush found that 42.5% of websites were affected by the issue. Image Source If you encounter broken internal links on your website, the first thing you should do is check whether the link’s URL is correct and change if necessary. If a webpage returns an error, remove the link leading to the error page or, preferably, replace it with a live link. If, for some reason, you can’t do this, create a redirect from the broken page. 2. Not Enough or Badly Structured Internal Links If a page features content that you want to be findable by search engines, you need search bots known as crawlers to be able to index that page. For them to be able to do this, it needs to be linked to. You don’t need to link every page to every other page, but having a clear interlinking structure and strategy will help crawlers to index your pages and therefore improve their search engine visibility. XML sitemaps are an essential tool to help crawlers navigate and find new pages on your site. Sitemaps are a way to show search engines the different pages that exist on your site. If you’re a web developer implementing CI (continuous integration), remember that you’ll need to list every new page in your website directory and adjust your sitemap accordingly. 3. Confusing Website Navigation If your internal link structure doesn’t follow a clear and intuitive logic, people won’t be able to find the content they’re looking for. The art of creating a clear and effective sitemap is one of the biggest challenges of web design that can help people get from A to B within your site. Image Source As well as making sure that you’re making the most of expandable menu options so that visitors can navigate your site with ease, for navigation best practices, you should also install a search bar in a visible place on every page. Search bars can be especially useful for navigating blogs, where there may be hundreds of posts in a given timeframe. For example, a blog that focuses on business technology may feature posts on topics ranging from WFM tools to marketing automation trends to CRM comparisons. As different people would organize such a wide-ranging group of topics according to their own system, it can be difficult to design intuitive menus. A search bar solves this problem by creating a fast and efficient way for people to find posts on a given topic, in turn decreasing bounce rate. 4. Having the Wrong Linking Strategy for your Content-Type Many people think that link building is link building, no matter what the specific content you’re trying to promote is, or who makes up your target audience. But this simply isn’t true. For example, consider a recent post from Google engineers on the Google Search Central blog. The post concerns a 2021 update to the way reviews appear in search results. In it, the engineers offer two pieces of advice for product reviewers looking to rank highly on Google SERPs: Provide evidence of your experience with the product to reinforce the authenticity of your review. Include links to multiple sellers to give the reader the option to purchase from their merchant of choice. As we can see, according to Google’s own advice, product reviewers should be applying a linking strategy built around consumer choice if they want to boost their SERP rankings. Image Source In other contexts, linking to multiple sellers could end up negatively influencing your SEO. For example, if you were to write an article claiming to be about free video chat but then only linked to paid video chat solutions, it may decrease your page authority. 5. Redirect Loops and Chains Redirects, which automatically direct traffic from one page to another, can be useful if you have a discontinued page that still receives regular visitors. However, poorly organized redirects can seriously damage your SERP rankings and create friction in the user experience of your site. A redirect chain is when one page redirects to another, which in turn redirects to yet another, and so on. Not only do redirect chains make it more difficult for search bots to crawl and index your website, but they can also inhibit the ability of browsers to navigate effectively. Slow page load times or even failure to load can create significant frustration for visitors. A redirect loop is when a redirect chain loops back around on itself, creating an unbreakable cycle. Search engines hate redirect loops, yet they are a surprisingly common link-building mistake. Problems with redirects most often occur when external web pages are involved. When it comes to internal pages, chains and loops are usually the consequence of a website’s previous migrations. For external links, make sure any links that make up part of your inbound or outbound lead generation strategies are properly coordinated with your backlink partners. Avoid internal redirect chains and loops by reviewing all your redirects and ensuring they link straight to the correct destination page. Image Source 6. Breaking the Three-Click Rule The three-click rule is a frequently applied principle of web design that states that a visitor to a website should be able to find any information with no more than three mouse clicks. The three-click rule is based on the idea that users will become frustrated and leave a site if they can’t easily find what they’re looking for. You go through all that effort creating quality content optimized for search results and building backlinks in order to increase referral traffic. But all that work is wasted if poor website navigation design means visitors leave without finding what they’re after. While some web designers insist that the three-click rule should apply to paths between any two pages, others state that it only applies to how many clicks it takes to reach content from the homepage. However, you choose to count, keep in mind that the three-click rule is more of a guide than a strict rule and that usability can’t be boiled down to a specific number of clicks. To check whether your website adheres to the three-click rule, write a list of the content visitors are most likely to be looking for and try to navigate there from your homepage. If you find that pages are frequently breaking the three-click rule, it’s time to re-evaluate your site navigation. Ask yourself whether you’re efficiently organizing your menus with categories and subcategories or if you’re making use of non-click navigation options like expandable menus. 7. Accumulating Toxic Backlinks With the increasing digitalization of business communications, it can be hard to keep track of which websites are backlinking to yours. To make matters worse, advances in automation technology and the easy programmability of contemporary bots means your site may unwittingly become the object of a spam campaign. We call these unwanted backlinks toxic because: Links from low authority or known spam websites can be bad for your SEO Few things will put people off your brand more than if they arrive at your website via a spam link. The best way to remove toxic backlinks you will need to use one of the SEO software tools available designed specifically for the job. Backlink analysis tools allow you to see and analyze all of the backlinks leading to your site. Having identified toxic backlinks, all that’s left to do is to disavow those links on Google. Disavowing a link comprises of creating a disavow file that tells Google which links you consider illegitimate and don’t want to be associated with your site. As SEO evolves to reflect changes to search algorithms and the way people search, the art of link building inevitably changes too. Keep up to date with SEO best practices and avoid these common link-building mistakes if you want your content to succeed in 2022 and beyond. Author Bio Jessica Day is the Senior Director for Marketing Strategy at Dialpad, a modern business communications platform and leading Bitrix24 alternative that takes every kind of conversation to the next level—turning conversations into opportunities. Jessica is an expert in collaborating with multifunctional teams to execute and optimize marketing efforts for both company and client campaigns. Here is her LinkedIn.
4 Obstacles and Solutions for Better Sales and Marketing Alignment Posted on February 24, 2022September 16, 2022 by Guest Author Sales and marketing are traditionally viewed as two separate departments. However, it wasn’t until recently that companies began to understand the benefits of aligning their sales and marketing strategies and making them work together towards the common goal – increased revenue. Still, sales and marketing alignment can be challenging, and you are likely to come across various difficulties. So, we compiled a list of the obstacles you should expect to come across and how to deal with them. 1. Weak Communication Poor communication between your sales and marketing departments can be the result of many things – independent development, unclear responsibilities, ineffective tools, etc. And you must address this issue, as it can lead to decreased productivity and increasing costs. One of the ways to improve communication is to schedule regular feedback meetings. It can be very beneficial to have the two teams together in the same space (virtual or physical), discussing ideas and working on the problems. In these meetings, they can discuss the following: Ideas for quality content Social media strategies Targeting new customers Defining sales goals that can benefit from marketing assistance Process updates The efficiency of marketing campaigns Another way to tackle this problem is to create centralized communication using messaging apps such as Slack, ProofHub, Twist, etc. This way, you will have one platform where all parties can get informed on the workflow and stay in sync. 2. Unshared Goals While marketing concentrates on generating and tracking leads, sales representatives are trying to convert those leads into customers. It is often the case that the marketing department isn’t providing quality leads to sales and the two worlds end up colliding. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to fix this, as we are going to explain further. Make a shared plan that determines the road from leads to customers to revenue. Reach the agreement on what the quality leads are and how it’s best to attract them. Define a marketing-qualified lead (MQL), a sales-qualified lead (SQL), and determine where account-based marketing fits into. Define which are “cold,” “warm,” and “hot” leads and prioritize the ones worth pursuing. Analyze where the leads are coming from, how many of them turn into customers, and how to improve your marketing plan to generate more conversions. Another way of unifying goals is to enable these two departments to work together on providing the answers to frequently asked questions on sales calls, via the company website, and on social media. Visitors often search for a solution for their particular problem and are not interested so much in the website design as they are in quality content that can help them achieve their aim. Providing your leads with valuable information will ultimately lead to a greater conversion rate, and that is the goal that both departments should aim for. 3. Different Metrics Marketing metrics focus on evaluating the efficiency of marketing campaigns, while sales metrics evaluate overall business performance. The two teams are commonly working and assessing success separately. To maximize your results, your marketing and sales teams should have an insight into all relevant key performance indicators (KPI) results. These indicators are important for targeting problems and coming up with fast solutions. We are going to explore some of the most important marketing and sales KPIs. Marketing KPIs: Marketing revenue attribution indicates how much revenue came from your marketing campaign Customer acquisition cost (CAC) indicates how much it costs you to obtain a new customer Customer lifetime value (LTV) indicates how much revenue can your business expect from a single customer over the average lifespan The traffic-to-lead ratio gives an insight into your website traffic and where it’s coming from Sales KPIs: Sales target shows whether you are reaching your planned sales goals Customer drop-out rate shows the number of customers who stopped using your products or services The lead-to-opportunity ratio measures the possibility of your leads becoming customers The sales teams can provide the marketing department with better insights into customers’ behavior. This will help the marketing department create more personalized marketing campaigns, ultimately leading to better results for both marketing and sales. It is more than obvious that the two teams can benefit just from knowing each other’s KPIs and results. This will enable them to work together towards a common goal – revenue. 4. Inaccurate Customer Data From the sales point of view, an incorrect email address or phone number means substantial time wasted on tracking down accurate contact information. From the marketing point of view, inaccurate data means that their campaign might not reach the right person, which can lead to a high email bounce rate. Thankfully, a team of good web application developers can create a data platform that can easily solve problems related to inaccurate data. These platforms allow your business to acquire, store, prepare, deliver, and administrate all your customer data. Setting accurate customer data in one place is beneficial for both marketing and sales. The Advantages of Sales and Marketing Alignment There are many advantages you can gain from sales and marketing alignment, and here are five of them, in case you are still not sure whether all this trouble is worth your time and effort (it is). 1. A Better Understanding of Your Customers Understanding who your customers are is what can make or break your business. This is why it’s crucial for marketing and sales to join forces in creating more quality leads that convert to customers, and in order to do so, both teams will need to have a firm grasp on who your customers are. 2. Winning Your Competitors’ Customers With sales and marketing alignment, everyone is informed about the tactics your competitors use. This helps your sales team prepare for answering the questions about why your products or services are better than your competitors’. Without alignment, your sales team would be in the dark on this information, and they wouldn’t be able to benefit from knowing certain lead objections or competitor comparisons before they’re presented. 3. Increased Revenue With sales and marketing alignment, your revenue and conversion rates increase because your teams are both working towards the same goal. This results in a shorter sales cycle and a more accurate sales target. 4. A Better Strategy By planning and enabling alignment, the company acknowledges the impact of both your marketing and sales efforts. When the two sides work on strategies for launching marketing campaigns, attracting leads, and converting them into customers, their chances of success increase. 5. More Feedback From Customers Both sales and marketing gather relevant feedback from customers as they interact with them on different levels. Sales and marketing alignment facilitates sharing this valuable information. That creates a better understanding of how to reach higher conversions and win rates because both can understand and find strategies that address customer pain points. Aligning sales and marketing comes with many challenges, but the end result is worth the effort. Their work creates the bigger picture of your business, and that puts you on the right road to success. Author Bio Carl Fisher is a PPC and CRO specialist, but writing was what led him into the world of digital marketing. Armed with a Bachelor’s degree in English language and literature and extensive writing experience, he writes about technology, web development, and marketing. After his writing is done, he mostly spends his time creatively, working as a sound engineer.
How to Advertise Your Small Business on Facebook Posted on February 23, 2022February 23, 2022 by Jess Lunk For small businesses, expanding your audience means stability and consistent growth. However, getting traffic and attention to your company’s website can be a challenge. Tapping into platforms where your audience is already engaging, like Facebook, is a great way to find new customers. Social media, review sites, and online publications are always great hubs for tapping into an engaged target market. Most have tools you can utilize to ensure you’re reaching the right kind of people, but few can get you the kind of awareness and exposure that Facebook can. Why Should Small Businesses Advertise on Facebook? Facebook advertisements can boost your small business growth and performance in many ways, including: Build brand awareness and trust: Your customers and prospects hang out on Facebook every day. Facebook uses an algorithm that makes your ads show up as people explore the groups, people, brands, and products they’re interested in. This is the reason new products gain 80% greater discoverability on Facebook than on retailer or brand websites. Generate high-quality leads: Facebook offers rich sets of data to help you narrow down your audience. There are many ways to segment your audiences, such as job title, age, gender, location, spoken language, and much more, to target people most likely to click. Get a high return on ad spend: Facebook allows you to set your own budget based on the ads you want to run. According to statistics, Facebook Feed offers the best return on ad spend (ROAS) compared to other pay-per-click platforms. To suffice, in 2019, 41% of small businesses in the U.S. achieved the best RAOS on Facebook. Before we walk you through how to put together your Facebook ad, let’s explore the various kinds of Facebook ads you could run and the benefits of each. Types of Facebook Ads The good thing with a Facebook ad network is that you’re not tied to a single ad type. The platform puts multiple ad types at your disposal, letting you pick one that suits your placement and marketing goals. Some of the popular ads on Facebook include: Image Ads: This is the most basic Facebook ad format. As the name suggests, these simple ads contain only a single image showcasing your product or services. Video ads: Videos add movement to your ads, springing them to life to grab the customers’ attention and pique their interest. They run in Stories and News Feeds and are great for showing your product in action. Carousel Ads: Carousels are similar to images ads, but they showcase more than one image, each with an embedded link. They are great for highlighting multiple products or showing the different benefits of a single product. Instant Experience (previously known as Canvas ads): These ads are unique in that when a user taps the ad on mobile, it instantly opens in full-screen to give the customer a completely immersive experience. Collection Ads: Collection ads are offered only for mobile. The ads allow you to showcase multiple products in a single ad that opens like Instance Experience when the customer clicks. These ads allow your customers to make a purchase without ever leaving Facebook. Slideshow Ads: These ads allow you to use multiple images to tell your brand story in a slideshow. Facebook has a built-in slideshow tool that features branded music, text, formats, overlays, and more to help you create eye-catching slideshow ads. Facebook Ads Specs Regardless of the ad type you want to create, Facebook recommends following the ad specs guidelines to create high-converting ads. When it comes to ad specs, Facebook prefers to keep digital marketers on their toes. The platform constantly updates the specs to make sure each type of ad is delivering the optimal results. To keep up with the changes, be sure to bookmark the Facebook Ad specs page and visit it regularly. Tips For Facebook Ads Success To give your campaigns more power, you should adhere to these best practices: Assemble With Care Ads with spot-on messages and eye-popping visuals catch people’s attention and make them take action. As you create your ads, pay special attention to these four areas: Text: Make sure the text is clear and concise. Facebook recommends keeping the copy to two to three short sentences. Image or video: Use high-resolution images, and most importantly, ensure the images complement the message in your copy. Headline: As you’ll notice in the Facebook ad specs guideline, the ad headline should be short (40 characters or less). It should be catchy and clear so users can quickly and easily understand what the ad is about. CTA: What do you want people to do when they see the ad? Buy your product, book air tickets, or sign up for your email newsletters? Spell it out in the CTA to prompt people to take action. Some of the best converting CTA texts include “Book Now,” “Shop Now,” or “Sign Up Today.” Leverage Campaign Budget Optimization Let’s say you’ve created a set of five ads on Facebook. Normally, you’d set the campaign budget for each ad, but that comes with one pitfall: you can’t prioritize the budget. Facebook’s campaign budget optimization is the perfect workaround to that problem. With the tool, you set a budget for the entire ad set. Doing so enables Facebook to prioritize your campaign budget to channel the biggest chunk to the best-performing ads. Use Placement Optimization Facebook can serve up your ads on News Feeds, Audience Network, Instagram feed and stories, and Messenger. Instead of messing around trying to figure out the placement that will deliver the best ROAS, use Facebook automatic placement. In this case, you activate all placements. At first, Facebook will run ads on all platforms but will gather more data from each placement to learn about it. This way, the algorithm will gain insights to pick the least expensive placement with regard to the average cost per optimization. This ensures you make the most of your campaign budget. How to Set Up Your Facebook Ad Facebook boasts over 2.9 billion users, so to say the site offers a huge advertising opportunity is an understatement. But before you dive into creating cool graphics and choosing between video ads and slideshow ads, it’s important to know what you want to accomplish. Our quick guide will give you the perfect overview of how to execute an effective Facebook ad campaign. 1. State Your Advertising Objective Mindlessly shooting an ad into the social media space won’t reap the rewards. Taking the time to define a precise advertising objective will. What is an advertising objective? It’s what you want your ad to accomplish. Do you want an ad that builds brand awareness, directs traffic to your site or generates sales? If you’re uncertain, identify where your intended audience is in the buyer’s journey. Are they in the awareness, consideration, or conversion stage? A clear objective is vital because it serves as a touchpoint throughout the process. It determines the ad copy you’ll use and how “pushy” your ad should be. For instance, if your audience is still in the awareness stage, they’re not ready for an ad that says, “Buy Now.” They are unfamiliar with your product, so their mental filter will file your ad away as spam as they scroll through their newsfeed. Instead, an awareness stage ad should focus on providing value over pushing conversions. This also allows Facebook to present you with appropriate ad formats. For instance, if you’re trying to encourage sales by advertising a specific product, you can create a Facebook ad with a CTA that directs people to “Shop Now.” 2. Identify Your Audience A poor understanding of your intended target audience can hurt even a brilliant advertising campaign. If your company sells life insurance, marketing to 18-to-24-year-olds won’t win many leads. But it’s not just about basic demographics, like age. Interests also play an important role. A travel company that specializes in Spring Break tours promising a good time won’t have much luck running commercials during a cable news program. Facebook lets you filter your intended audience by: Location: Do you want your ad to go out to people who live close to a college campus? In the downtown core? In the suburbs? Age: Are you targeting seniors? Young adults? Teenagers? Gender Language Interests Facebook allows you to target (and even exclude) people who hold specific interests. So that Spring Break tour company we mentioned earlier would be wise to target 18-to-24-year-olds on a college campus who like pages related to travel. You can also create a customized audience based on existing followers, website visitors, or app users. Once you’ve carefully considered those first two strategic steps (objectives and audience), creating your ad is as simple as gathering your marketing assets. 3. Select Where Your Ad Will Run We previously mentioned this, but you can choose between automatic placements and specified placements. Facebook recommends automatic placements because they’ll be able to put your ads where your audience is most likely to see them. This saves you time and is likely much more efficient. 4. Determine Your Budget Outlining your marketing budget is an important step in your Facebook ad creation process. Provide an estimated daily budget and choose whether you want your ad to run continuously or over a fixed time period. Luckily, your company doesn’t need to be rolling in dough to advertise on Facebook. You can run a lean or robust campaign, depending on your budget. 5. Choose Your Format We have already covered the various Facebook ad formats above. Choose wisely and upload the appropriate graphics, and add your text. Facebook will review and approve your ad after you place your order. Do You Need A Company Facebook Page To Advertise? No, but it’s in your best interests to get one. Without a Facebook page, you can only run sidebar advertisements known as Right Column ads. With a Facebook page, your company’s advertisements can appear in the Newsfeed as Sponsored Posts. Image: Sponsored Post Image: Right Column Ad Monitor, Monitor, Monitor Meta’s Ads Manager dashboard allows advertisers to monitor their campaign performance. The dashboard provides insights on engagement, performance, clicks, conversions, and more. You can also customize your metrics and compare performance across different campaigns and time periods. Start reaching new customers and converting existing ones with Facebook ads. By embracing best practices, you can use the social media giant to advance your company’s advertising goals.
The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing Posted on February 17, 2022February 10, 2022 by Natalie Slyman Competition in the content marketing arena is heating up. Statistics show that the number of brands that are actively using content marketing has grown by 12% between 2020 and 2021. To succeed, you have to master content marketing and use creative ways to set yourself apart from competitors. But first, let’s make sure we cover the content marketing basics, from what content marketing is to the types of content you should be creating. What’s Content Marketing? Content means information in written, visual or audible format. It could be anything from blogs; guest contributed articles, white papers, press releases, infographics, social posts, podcasts, webinars, or videos. Marketing, on the other hand, is the action of promoting your brand, products, or services. Therefore, content marketing is the act of using content to market your products or services. Sounds easy-peasy, right? While the definition makes content marketing look deceptively simple, there’s a lot to the process. You have to plan, create, distribute, and publish relevant content through meticulously picked channels. You have to get each of these steps right to reach the target audience and increase product awareness, engagement, and sales. Why Content Marketing Is Essential for a Well-Rounded Marketing Plan Content marketing is a vital component of your overarching marketing plan. As the digital world evolves, customers are discovering and buying products online. Content marketing helps you spread the word about your products or services on channels like social media, websites, and email. It creates demand for your products, nurtures leads into customers, and converts frequent customers into brand loyalists. How to Use the Content You Create That said, not all content advances your marketing campaigns— you can’t just throw a bunch of words and pictures out there and expect results. In other words, you must create content that’s relevant, optimized for search, accurate, and resonates with your target audience. Moreover, have a predefined list of goals you want to achieve with content marketing. Some core objectives include: Educate prospects about your product and services Generate demand for your product by attracting the right leads Increase conversion to boost sales Build a community of engaged advocates around your brand Build better brand relationships that result in increased loyalty Types of Content You Should Be Creating If you’re getting started with content marketing, here are some types of content to focus on: Blogs and Articles: Blogging is the most basic yet critical part of your content marketing strategy. It’s through blogs and articles that you drive organic traffic to your website and start to build brand audiences. With a blog, you frequently create and publish posts to keep the target audience informed and engaged. Also, blog posts make great fuel for your email marketing efforts. Social Media Content: 72% of Americans use social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, and LinkedIn. Social media content marketing means finding where your archetypal customers hang out online and creating content fit for that platform. The content can be in the form of photos, stories, live videos, and pre-recorded videos. To keep these efforts consistent, we recommend having a monthly social media calendar. Podcasts: Podcast listenership has grown by a whopping 29% from 2010 to 2020. Your customers love listening to podcasts, which is why you should be creating them. You can use podcasts to educate customers, advertise your products, promote brand awareness, and more. Video content: 86% of your competitors are using video as a marketing tool. Video is an incredibly powerful marketing tool with vast benefits. It improves page dwell time, increases lead generation and reduces the number of support calls. Some types of videos to create include explainers, product demos, sales videos, and testimonials. Tips for Distributing Content Effectively One huge mistake brands make is publishing content, forgetting about it, and hoping it will bring the desired results. Don’t fall into that trap. For your content to flourish, you need a solid distribution plan. As Ross Simmonds, founder of Foundation Marketing Inc, often says, “Publish once, distribute forever.” Here are some tips to help you promote your content: 1. Repurpose Content Find new ways to recycle your existing content for different mediums. Take your one-year-old blog post, put a new spin on it and update it to give it a fresh perspective. This could mean converting the blog into a Twitter thread or LinkedIn post. This allows the content to reach new audiences on social media. Even if you’d shared the post on social media before, it pays off to reshare. Remember: people who followed you on Twitter a year ago are not the same group following you today. 2. Partner with Brands From Your Niche Look around your niche and pinpoint brands that are excelling in content marketing. Reach out to the brand owners with a proposal to partner up on content creation and cross-promotion. The chances are that some will reject your proposal, but others will be on board with the idea. When you contribute content for a higher-authority website, you add a link back to your site. Doing so will increase traffic to your website, meaning more people will get to see your content. 3. Collaborate with Micro-Influencers Influencer marketing can do wonders for any strategy, big or small. However, if you don’t have a huge budget, check out micro-influencers for an interesting content promotion path. They have a commendable following on social media, email newsletters, or even websites. They engage with their followers on a human level and thus have built authentic connections. Look for micro-influencers from your niche: this could be anyone whose followers are your target audience. Hint: your content writers can be micro-influencers, too. For example, if you have a writer who runs an email newsletter with over 2,000 subscribers, ask them to share your content with their followers. 4. Use Email Marketing Lastly, leverage the power of email marketing to promote your content. 81% of marketers use newsletters to promote their content. Besides adding that to your content distribution checklist, you should try other ways. Take Gareth O’Sullivan, Founder at Revealing Britain, for example. Gareth links trend-worthy content in his email signature to complement the email content. This is a viable way to promote your content, and it works if you send and reply to a bunch of emails every day. It brings extra organic traffic to your blog for free. How Content Can Feed Your Email Marketing When you create quality content and promote it, you reap the rewards. One of the biggest signs your content marketing efforts are paying off is an increase in organic traffic. When you grow traffic, sales on your eCommerce store will increase. However, some of your web visitors won’t buy on their first visit to your online store. It will take you multiple engagements to convert them into buying customers. This is where email marketing comes in. By sharing the content you’re creating with your email list, you’re able to spread your valuable resources, proving that you’re an authority in your industry and that you’re a trusted resource your leads can depend on. Over time your relationship will grow, and you’ll be able to move those leads through your inbound funnel till they’re ready to make a purchase. In order to launch these targeted email campaigns, you need to have access to prospect data and the ability to segment your email list based on qualifying factors. Luckily, BenchmarkONE offers a CRM and marketing automation software that makes this possible. Through its tagging feature, you can segment your leads, placing them into lists based on where they are in the buyer’s journey, their industry, business size, etc. This allows you to send them content that is personalized to their needs so you can begin to build that trust and work towards more conversions. Creating a content marketing strategy is a crucial component of any successful marketing strategy. It takes time and resources, but it’s extremely worth it in the long run. We hope this guide helps you get started.
Small Business Guide to Target Markets Posted on February 16, 2022October 28, 2022 by Jessica Lunk When you initially set out on your journey to market your brand, product, or service, you may be tempted to jump right in. However, going after everyone who is willing to listen or could even be remotely interested in what your business has to offer isn’t something we’d recommend. While getting your brand out there is essential to driving business, going too broad can water down your message. The result can be a lot of wasted time and resources on leads that will never benefit from what you have to offer. Your marketing strategy should be one that is focused on your target audience and market. This ensures you use your time and budget wisely and see the most return possible. In this guide, we’ll discuss everything small businesses need to know about target markets so they can get keep their strategy focused and successful. What is a Target Market? A target market is the core customer base you plan to sell your product or services. It’s different from a target audience in that it covers a broad or whole group of people most likely to buy your product or service. A target market can be broken into smaller yet specific segments, which constitute the target audience. In other words, a target audience is a segment within your target market. For example, if you are an email marketing software provider, you could say your target market is the digital marketing industry. However, within this industry lies your target audience of email marketers or people who send email newsletters. How Does Knowing Your Target Market Improve Marketing Efforts? Think of a forest as the digital world, the hunter as the marketer, and the arrows as the marketing message. A skillful hunter doesn’t go hurling arrows through the forest, hoping to make a kill. Rather, they identify a specific target, say a deer, and go to areas in the forest where they’re most likely to find them. Once they’re in position, they zero in on the target and shoot the arrow. Marketing your products works the same way. To hit your sales targets, you have to identify your target market. Defining your target markets is the first step towards knowing your target audience. Knowing your target audience is critical for a personalized marketing approach, which is essential for conversions. 60% of customers who get personalized experiences are more likely to become repeat buyers. Simply put, defining your target markets helps nail personalization, which in turn drives increased revenue and profitability. How to Identify Your Target Market Identifying your target market shouldn’t be difficult. If you’re wondering where to start, follow these steps: 1. Analyze Your Product or Service Let’s say you work for a marketing agency. You can identify your target market with a bit of reverse engineering. List your core digital marketing service offerings. Let’s say they are: Social media management Content creation Design and branding SEO strategy Dive in deep into the parameters of your core offerings. By defining the problems that each of your offerings solve, you’ll be able to get a clearer idea of who can benefit from them. You may find that your product or service can be tailored to fit many segments. However, it pays to put your stake in the ground and commit to one ideal buyer. 2. Define Your Target Customers Although you could potentially serve anyone in any industry, marketing to every industry would make your message quite generic: “Results-driven marketing for any entity.” Instead, your agency decides to get specific. You decide to commit your focus to higher education, narrowing your target marketing and focusing on one ideal buyer – John, the CMO of a university. You get even more specific and focus on what your agency does best – digital marketing. Now your message becomes: “Driving enrollment and increasing student ROI by helping universities get found online.” It hits home for your target audience – John the CMO – positioning your agency as the go-to when it comes to optimizing .edu websites for search. Save money and time by narrowing down the focus of your target audience enough to make your message resonate with a smaller group. Although your market is smaller, you have a better chance of attracting the right buyer. It also doesn’t hurt to take a look at your existing customers. Pinpoint some of your best customers, and figure out what makes them stand out from the crowd. Some of the details to uncover include: Age Gender Marital status Location Education level Income Occupation Don’t stop at that; research further to reveal the personal characteristics, buying habits, and interests. Are they decision-makers in their respective organizations? What made them buy your products? What other products do they purchase? How often do they purchase? How do they consume information online? With the demographic and psychographic details, it should be easy to build a specific customer profile and identify the market segment they perfectly fit into. 3. Research Competitors Competitor analysis is another great way to identify your target market, and it works for both new and existing businesses. Look around your niche and identify brands offering comparable products or services. Who are these brands targeting? Who are the top customers for these brands? Answering these questions may help you identify their target markets. You can go for the same target market your competitors zero in if your product has an irresistible, unique selling proposition. However, if it’s a small market dominated by well-established brands, it might be wise to target a segment of the market. 4. Refine Your Marketing Plan Now that you’ve chosen your path, it’s time to follow it to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. You’ve committed to your ideal buyer; now, you need to reinforce that commitment to your business and the marketplace. Put your ideal buyer at the center of everything you do: Refine your marketing message to speak to your ideal buyer. Think about how your content strategy can tap into the pain points of your ideal buyer and help them to solve a problem. Address the needs of your audience in your product/service. Build for your ideal buyer – and no one else – to create raving fans and loyal customers of your business. Create a customer experience that best fits your ideal buyer. For instance, if your ideal buyer is in the older demographic, they may prefer phone support to live chat or social media. John, the CMO, has a tough time managing his university’s social media presence because so many participants (students, faculty, departments) are involved. So you create a free social media brand guide for higher education. The guide helps generate leads within your target market. On the product and service side, you decide to create a custom social listening tool that your clients can leverage to stay connected to everything faculty, staff, students, and alumni are saying about their university brand. And, when it comes to client service, you know that your ideal buyer has to consistently prove the ROI of marketing programs to university stakeholders. So as part of your ongoing support, you email your clients a report on their top benchmarks every week. Putting John the CMO at the center of everything you do narrows your target market but also allows your agency to be infinitely more successful at driving leads, winning new clients, and making sure they stick with your agency for a long time. Once you’ve committed to your ideal buyer, follow through by integrating them into your business from product development to marketing to customer success. You’ll be rewarded with better leads, more customers, and increased customer lifetime value. 5. Encourage Your Evangelizers Now that you’ve committed to your ideal buyer and have aligned your business to them, you’re going to find yourself with some raving fans. Leverage your most enthusiastic customers to attract even more customers who are just like them. Run a referral campaign to ask your supporters to send new business your way. Reward them with incentives like discounts, perks, and even cash money. Ask for reviews. If your business is on Yelp, if you have a Google listing, or if your industry has specific review sites, it can really pay off to have your customer’s voices heard there, sharing their positive experience. Give thanks where thanks are due. When you go above and beyond for your biggest fans, they are sure to go the extra mile for you – whether it’s providing a testimonial, participating in a case study, or being a reference. Validate Your Decision and Start Marketing Before you can start launching your marketing campaigns, it’s prudent to validate your decision. Find answers to these questions: Are there enough people in the market to support steady growth? Will people find the need to use your product or services? Will people afford the product or service? How easy is it to reach out to them? If the target market ticks the right boxes, go ahead and create targeted campaigns to generate demand for your product or service. Market segmentation can feel like a big undertaking and can seem like a big risk since you limit your audience. However, narrowing your target market can actually give you a better chance to reach more people with a specific message. Put your stake in the ground and commit to an ideal buyer, align your business to their needs, and mobilize your evangelizers to penetrate and conquer your niche.