Product Life Cycle Stages Posted on July 2, 2020July 29, 2021 by Allie Wolff We talk a lot about the customer life cycle, but let’s not forget another critical cycle that’s key for strategizing your marketing plan: the product life cycle. When preparing for a new product launch and devising how you’re going to build and maintain momentum, it’s crucial that you understand the full product life cycle. Doing so ensures that you set yourself up for success. It’s also a helpful exercise in better grasping the developmental stages that dictate how you should be phrasing your marketing copy. Below, we’ll cover the basics of a standard product life cycle, including the six stages that every marketer should know about. What Is The Product Life Cycle? The product life cycle features unique steps with unique opportunities for storytelling and brand growth. All products follow a life cycle, and all steps within this life cycle offer you a chance to optimize your message and facilitate more interest. An excellent way to understand the importance of the product life cycle for marketing purposes is to look at times when it wasn’t capitalized on. For example, look at Blockbuster. Netflix, Redbox, and the rise of streaming content were the death knell for this ubiquitous brand; despite the fact that before the introduction of these other companies, it was a total market mainstay. Instead of adapting their marketing — and their inventory — to align with their product life cycle, Blockbuster stayed steadfast in their message and purpose — and lost their foothold in the process. We’re not all Blockbuster, and we’re not all peddling in products that are becoming obsolete. Regardless of your product and your industry, it’s incredibly important to understand the cycles that products take, from their peak popularity to their inevitable decline. The Six Stages of a Product Life Cycle Now we can get to the good stuff, namely the life cycle stages themselves. Stage 1: Development This is the stage when an idea turns into action. There’s not any outbound marketing to be done since the product is not complete. However, what you can and should be doing, is focusing a lot of your time on market research. Development should be all about defining and distilling the audience for your product as well as you can so that when it does launch, you can hit the ground running. Don’t be afraid to put a lot of time and effort into this stage. The more you take your time and truly understand your audience and the need your product meets, the stronger your product will be. Stage 2: Introduction This is a major moment for your company and your marketing team, with a surge of initial promotion that could make or break the success of the product’s performance. Are you up against a lot of competition, or are you bringing something totally novel to the stage? Is your product designed for a wide audience group, or do you have a very specific subset of potential customers to target? However the chips fall, maximize marketing potential as much as you can, utilizing all of the channels at your disposal to introduce your product to the world. Map out your promotional plan of attack, so you’re clear what channels you’ll be using and how. Consider your content marketing strategy, and what pieces of new content you want to create to promote your product. Weave those pieces into your editorial calendar so you can be as prepared as possible. Here are some promotional channels and tactics to consider: Paid ads Social media push Blog posts Guest-contributed content Dedicated webinars that explain how to use the new product Video tutorials and promos Stage 3: Growth Your product is taking off, and that’s great news. To keep the momentum going, utilize all channels to facilitate growth and broaden your pool of prospects. This includes social media, reviews and roundups, blog posts, newsletters, and standard print and digital advertising. The more people you can reach, the more growth potential you have. It’s also important that you listen to the feedback you’re receiving from your customers and users at this stage. When people begin using a new product, they can sometimes pick up on issues or inefficiencies that the product creators missed. If negative feedback goes unresolved, it could drastically affect the trajectory of your product’s life cycle. Make sure you provide customer surveys and ask your customer-facing teams what people are saying about the product. Stage 4: Maturity Your product will spend a lot of time in this stage, which is when it hits its peak and is just riding the wave. You’ve still got to keep the momentum going though, even if you’re not quite as aggressive in your marketing efforts as you were before. Look carefully at the data you’ve gathered around performance and reviews to dictate your strategy here, since ignoring these key data points could lead to a shorter, less profitable maturity stage. While it’s fine to ride the wave of success for a bit, you also want to make sure you don’t become too complacent. Think ahead and about your product’s lasting power. Anticipate the market and how it may evolve, and ultimately, how that may affect and shape your product. Stage 5: Saturation Competition is all part of the game. In this stage of the product life cycle, you’re up against other, newer, cheaper options pulling your prospect’s attention in other places. How you respond will make a big difference. Think innovation: mixing up a product feature and/or how you market your product can create a ripple of interest and keep your prospects’ interest. You must maintain some sort of competitive advantage to keep your product desirable and offer value to your customers. This should always be top of mind with your marketing team; otherwise, you risk product decline. Stage 6: Decline Even the best waves don’t last forever. The decline in the product life cycle refers to when interest wanes and sales start to falter. Your job here is to come up with ways to stay relevant. Sometimes this means a brand new marketing campaign that puts a fresh light on your product. Other times it means pulling the product entirely and accepting the loss. Whatever you do, do it with purpose and ensure there’s a clear end goal in mind beyond just dragging the product out as long as you can. How you tackle the life cycle and how well you tap into the market and your audiences’ needs greatly determine the success and lasting power of your product. Never get complacent. Instead, foster innovation and continue to entertain ideas for improvement. Oh, and whatever you do, don’t be Blockbuster.
PRESS RELEASE: BenchmarkONE Launches New Features: Dynamic Content and Teams Posted on July 1, 2020October 1, 2020 by Guest Author St. Louis, MO – July 1, 2020 – BenchmarkONE, a leading software as a service provider of sales and marketing solutions, today announces the launch of two new features: Dynamic Content and Teams. These new features will offer users more personalized options for their outreach and a new layer of contact management. Dynamic Content allows users to send multiple audiences targeted content from a single email. The ability to choose which contacts see certain email content makes unique offers or hyper-targeted messaging seamless and easy to implement. Teams provides users a way to easily organize contacts into groups that only specific users can access. This is ideal for organizations that manage multiple territories, buildings, districts, franchises, and groups. With these features also comes the release of BenchmarkONE’s Lite Version. The Lite Version is a scaled-back package perfect for email marketers who want to manage contacts but don’t need a full-blown CRM. “By adding these pivotal new features and also releasing a pared-down version of BenchmarkONE, we’ll be able to expand our customer base while providing the same stellar experience and allowing users to scale their sales and marketing strategies no matter their size or budget,” BenchmarkONE CEO Jonathan Herrick said. Additional Resources: Schedule a live demonstration of BenchmarkONE here. Learn more about Dynamic Content and Teams here. About BenchmarkONE BenchmarkONE helps SMBs and digital marketing agencies streamline sales and marketing to save time and scale. The all-in-one platform is an easy-to-use hub for small businesses that need to build better relationships with customers and automate their sales process.
New! Dynamic Content and Teams Posted on June 30, 2020October 1, 2020 by Jonathan Herrick We can finally tell you all about two of our latest features: Dynamic Content and Teams! At BenchmarkONE, we’re continuously striving to make our product an easy-to-use necessity for marketers, sales professionals, and small business owners. We know that in doing so, it’s imperative we fully understand what it takes to make their lives easier, and what is necessary to help them deliver on their marketing and sales goals. That’s why developing these exciting new features was a no-brainer. Let’s dive into why these features are so important. Dynamic Content Offers More Personalization One simple fact about marketing is that audiences respond differently to certain kinds of content. People are not robots, and what may yield a positive response with some people, may not do the same for others. But we’re busy people. And we don’t have time to manually tweak our messaging so that it caters to the right people. Which is why Dynamic Content is magic. Dynamic Content allows users to send multiple audiences targeted content from a single email. The ability to choose which contacts see certain email content makes unique offers or hyper-targeted messaging seamless and easy to implement. Teams Enables Better Contact Management If you’re part of a company that manages multiple regions, territories, buildings, districts, and areas, you probably have a strong appreciation for any tool that offers a better way to organize. Well, with Teams, you’re in luck. Teams provides users a way to easily organize contacts into groups that only specific users can access. This eliminates any confusion over whose contacts are whose, and can assist in reducing any user errors that come with full list access. We’re so excited to release these features to our users, and we’re even more excited at the chance to offer them more value and options that will make their lives easier. Set up a demo to learn more about these features and our marketing automation software.
How and Why You Should Build Your Partnerships Posted on June 30, 2020June 26, 2020 by Natalie Slyman When you effectively brand your company or product, you create something truly memorable and lasting. But when you pair that memorable brand with another, you create a partnership that can take both brands to the next level. Brand partnerships are a great thing in the marketing world and can play a notable role in company growth. A co-branding opportunity could be just the thing you need to refresh your image and boost your business’s growth. When done right, a brand partnership can help you increase visibility and tap into new markets — and you only have to do half of the work. Below, we’ll detail the benefits of brand partnerships and share some tips for building them. Why You Need to Build Partnerships Marketing is a competitive sport. And while it’s mostly done solo, there are some big advantages to bringing on a teammate every once in a while. A brand partnership helps strengthen your influence through third-party credibility, allowing you to make a strong, positive impression on a new audience. In turn, it opens the door for more referrals and leads and can help you expand everything from your email list to your customer base. There’s a ton of opportunity in partnerships. Join forces with your partners on co-branded efforts like promos, webinars, and social media campaigns and add value to both your voice and your product or service. You can also create partnership programs by offering each other’s services to your respective clients, thereby instantly boosting your referral traffic. It’s clear that a successful brand partnership opens up a lot of doors. So let’s talk strategy. How to Build a Brand Partnership Impressive brand partnerships aren’t created overnight. From the outset, you’ll want to be sure to put a lot of thought into your partnership building blocks and convey the value that you bring to the team. Find Your Partner You want your partner to be a brand that you trust and admire, and whose audience is similar to yours. To narrow it down, ask yourself a few questions: Who’s creating a lot of high-quality content in your space? Who’s getting published online frequently? Who’s hosting webinars? What are the other products and services that your clients are using? Create a list of brands that check off the right boxes, but keep in mind that there should also be some comparability in terms of size and brand strength. You’ll need to convince your potential partners that they have as much to benefit from teaming up as you do, so you’ll want to make sure the brand you attempt to partner with isn’t significantly larger than yours. Start Sending Outreach Once you have your list of brands, you can start pitching. To get in touch, fill out forms on their websites or send emails asking for a blog swap or partnership discussion. While you’re at it, make sure that there’s a clear-cut way for other brands to reach you with partnership queries, such as a form they can fill out on your site to contribute to your company blog. Need some help getting your foot in the door? Ask the leaders at your company if they have any connections they can introduce you to. Likewise, test the waters on LinkedIn, joining industry groups and messaging others in the group who it might make sense to partner with. Reach out via other social sites by sharing potential partners’ content, tagging them when you do, and initiating a chat. Don’t forget to personalize your outreach. For each brand you reach out to, you should be sure to reference specific content they’ve written or produced, and to give a clear cut reason for why you think you should partner together. Be a Strong Partner We’ve all worked in group projects where one person does everything while the other person just tries to reap the reward. Don’t be the latter. When you lock in your new brand partnership, live up to the expectations that you’ve set and done your part to make the partnership work. This means delivering on-deadline and on-promise, divvying up work equally, and ensuring any content or materials you’re creating are co-branded. Being a reliable brand partner means you’ll get the most out of the partnership and be closer to meeting your intended goals. When you form your partnership, be sure to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with concrete ideas for how you might do so. From there, the sky’s the limit in terms of what you can achieve.
8 Marketing Publications To Read Posted on June 25, 2020August 5, 2022 by Jess Lunk Where you get your news matters, and that includes your marketing news. There’s a ton of content out there, and it’s easy to get caught in the hamster wheel, being fed the same old content day after day. You have to make an effort by seeking out the best marketing blogs and publications so you can stay up-to-date on trending topics and themes. Doing so can ultimately dictate the success of your efforts, as well as serve as a way to inform your content creation. But with content saturation at its most intense, and with so many online publications pushing out content regularly, how do you know a reliable source over fluff? Here are eight recommendations for the cream of the crop marketing publications that you should definitely have on your reading list. 1. Marketing Land What Marketing Land does extremely well is consolidate need-to-know topics to provide you with a hub for everything happening in the industry. Their articles offer accessible breakdowns of digital marketing trends, marketing tips and tricks, and evolving best practices so you can get the advice you need to do more with your strategies. Don’t miss: The Analytics & Conversion vertical, dedicated to helping you stay on top of the messy — and often complicated — world of data-driven marketing. 2. Digiday Digiday helps connect the dots between two worlds — marketing and the actual world we live in. They share articles that put into perspective the role of the marketer and key marketing strategies in relation to the significant topics shaping societal discourse. Take, for example, their article on how Coronavirus has impacted the media industry. It seeks to explain the global disruptions caused by the virus, which is a topic that is both related to marketing itself and deeply important to the concept of how we connect with an audience. Don’t miss: Digiday’s podcast, which is a great distillation of key topics that are perfect for the drive to and from the office every day. 3. Inc. Inc. isn’t all marketing all the time. Still, it is valuable for finding articles related to running a successful small business and how a marketing strategy comes into play with that. You can learn a lot about how other businesses operate and take away tons of ideas for your own operations. A lot of these tips are ones that the authors have implemented themselves, pulling from real-life experiences. Using their tips can help you benchmark your processes and outcomes and help you create your own success stories to keep you moving forward. Don’t miss: The Founder’s Project, a vertical geared explicitly toward showcasing the people and practices behind some of today’s most interesting and inspiring businesses. 4. Entrepreneur Just like Inc., Entrepreneur is a publication that isn’t directly marketing focused, but that still has a lot of insight on how you plan and execute your marketing efforts. Sprinkled in among articles on startup tips and global industry news are helpful business columns, including leadership and business-focused articles from our own CEO, Jonathan Herrick. It’s the perfect way to brush up on things like amping up your content marketing and helping build more trust with your leads. Browse it daily for new content, and pick and choose the most relevant topics for the work you’re doing. Don’t miss: Entrepreneur’s regular webinars, which are both scheduled and available on-demand. They cover everything from fintech tips to HR strategies. 5. Forbes CMO Network Forbes is a mainstay in business news, and with the Forbes CMO Network, they’ve created a place where you can go just for topics related to marketing. Aside from articles with tactical, actionable advice, you’ll also find a big focus on real-world examples of companies that are getting it done — and how they do it. Don’t miss: The Editor’s Picks, a section located at the top of the page. It’s a good place to quickly find the most relevant and interesting articles without scrolling through tons of content. 6. Social Media Today You can’t talk about modern marketing without mentioning social media, and that’s why having a niche publication, like Social Media Today, on your roster is crucial. From the latest Facebook algorithm changes to the various new platform features that are worth checking out, Social Media Today is the social media Sherpa we all need in our lives and a great daily read. Don’t miss: The Content Marketing vertical provides useful advice for incorporating rapid industry changes into your content marketing strategy. 7. AdWeek If you’re running paid ads, then you’re going to want to be keeping up with Adweek, a publication largely about optimizing your digital clicks. There’s a lot of variety in news topics, but all of them tie back to ads and ad spending in some way, which helps you distill broader news and put it into industry perspective. Don’t miss: Ad of the Day, a nice place to go when you need of some ad inspiration. 8. AdAge AdAge is a go-to for everything you need to know about what’s going on in marketing and advertising. From the best commercials and advertisements by top brands to the factors guiding digital performance, you’ll find it on AdAge. It’s a great source to spectate marketing art and to gain inspiration to be more creative with your own efforts. Don’t miss: The opinion pages, where a wide variety of guest posters share their thoughts on what matters and why. Start adding these marketing publications to your reading lists so you can stay on top of what’s happening in your industry, gain helpful insight into various strategies and tactics, and maintain the inspiration needed to be better at what you do.
How to Become a Guest-Contributor Posted on June 24, 2020June 19, 2020 by Jonathan Herrick The beauty of thought leadership is that credibility and trust are at its core. You cannot just deem yourself a thought leader and expect others to consider you one as well. You have to create high-quality content that’s reliable and filled with helpful tips. What’s more, you have to do so consistently. Writing for your company blog is great, but for your ideas to reach the masses and build credibility, you have to be incorporating a guest-contributor strategy into your overall content marketing strategy. This means contributing guest articles to other sites so you can put your brand in front of a new audience and establish yourself as an expert in your field. In research by LinkedIn and Edelman, 55% of survey respondents said they use thought leadership to vet organizations that they may hire, and 60% said thought leadership has led to them buying a product or service they weren’t previously considering. But obtaining that third-party credibility that comes from publishing on trusted online publications requires effort and a tried-and-true process. Here are some steps you can take that will you get one step closer towards becoming a guest-contributor. 1. Create and Publish Your Own Content Since you and your team manage it, your blog is the easiest way to publish your great thoughts and ideas, so start there. To make sure you have a consistent amount of published content, create an editorial calendar that lists the various topics, dates, and stage each article is in. This will also hold your team accountable, so you aren’t letting months go between each published post. Make sure you mix it up, too. Incorporate guides, webinars, and other forms of content so you can eventually show external publications how varied your portfolio of work is. Proving you can create different forms of content will help you appease any particular needs they currently have. 2. Participate in Blog Swaps Make sure that you’re also offering blog swapping opportunities to other brands out there with similar audiences. Blog swaps are really just as they sound: it’s when you provide a blog post for another brand to publish on their blog, and they do the same for you. This shows external publications that you’re familiar with creating content with specific guidelines in mind, and that you are no stranger to tapping into the needs of other audiences and publications. Plus, you never know where a great guest posting opportunity is going to come from. By maintaining other avenues of content sharing, you give yourself a better chance of connecting with the right brand. 3. Carefully Choose Online Publications You Want to Contribute To To really maximize the thought leadership potential of becoming a guest contributor, you want the right audience to be able to find you. Pitching your content without a thought to who’s reading it and what sorts of problems they have is a waste of time for everyone. So instead, research and pitch publications that pertain to your industry. Those are the ones your audience is reading and that you are most qualified to contribute to. Guest content is great top-of-the-funnel content, meaning it’s also a way of generating leads for your company. To get the best quality leads, ones that are most likely to actually need your services, you have to be contributing to publications that your audience is reading. 4. Prepare Your Pitch Email Pitching a guest contribution is just like pitching any other piece of writing. You need to be mindful of your recipient, and optimize your pitch to ensure that it doesn’t get overlooked. Your outreach email should contain all of the key components of a successful pitch: A solid subject line. An engaging intro. A summary of your article. How your article will appeal to the publication’s audience. If you’re pitching an idea instead of a specific piece, explain it as fully and concisely as possible. Make sure you convey why it’s a fit for their audience and what makes it unique, original, and high quality. Show that you’re flexible and open for collaboration by ending your pitch stating you welcome feedback or adjustments. A word of wisdom: always research a topic or idea before pitching it to ensure that your pitch is truly original. It doesn’t need to be a never-before covered concept, but to establish true thought leadership (and to get your pitch picked up), you’re going to need to be able to say something new. 5. Follow-Up Editors are only human. And when they get busy, things tend to get lost in the mix, including your pitch. Don’t hound editors, rather follow-up in a timely manner. Make a point of not coming off as abrasive or inpatient. Simply check-in to ensure they received your pitch and to ask if they have any questions. If you’ve sent a couple of follow-ups with no reply, it might be time to move on. Understand That Rejection Will Happen Rejection is just part of the process when it comes to guest posting. If it wasn’t, there’d be a lot more of it and a lot less value to it too. Not every editor is going to go for your pitch or your articles. Don’t let it get you down, though. A rejection now doesn’t mean you can’t wow them later with a different idea. If an editor decides to pass on your guest post pitch, be gracious, request feedback, and be sure to ask if they’re open to allowing you to continue pitching them in the future. If you’re already creating stellar content with original ideas, then you should have no trouble finding publications that are willing to bring you on as a thought leader. You just need to put in the time and effort of seeking these publications out. Good luck!
7 Unique Social Media Ideas to Engage Your Audience Posted on June 23, 2020February 10, 2022 by Natalie Slyman Social media marketing is all about engagement. More than 3 billion people around the globe use social media; many of them on a regular basis. That’s a huge opportunity for your brand to connect and grow. This form of communication and outreach breaks down a lot of the barriers that stand in the way of traditional outbound marketing, opening you up to a massive audience of potentially interested individuals, many of whom could go on to become leads and customers if you play your cards right. With so much potential, it pays to invest in strategies driven toward increasing engagement on your social channels. Chances are, there is a lot more that you could be doing on a day to day basis to engage your audience and give a glimpse into your brand and the people behind it. Below, we’ll cover some unique ways to get the ball rolling. 1. Highlight Your Team Marketing is about forging connections. When you highlight your team members, you show your followers that you’re not just a logo — you’re a real group of people working hard to make your brand and product special. Create a series that showcases each of your team members so your social audience can learn who they are and what they do for the company. Create a Typeform survey with fun questions for your team to answer. Ask things like, “As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?” or “What’s one item on your bucket list?” These kinds of questions will pull answers that will make your team’s personalities shine. Then, ask them to provide a photo of themselves so you can post their answers with it. It could also be fun to have them provide an awkward photo from their childhood for added humor. Either way, a strategy that highlights your team, like this one, will turn your brand from a faceless entity to one with many people behind it, all of them relatable. 2. Create Hashtags Hashtags can provide structure to your posting strategy and create a way for interested subscribers to follow along with the content that really piques their interest. At BenchmarkONE, we post a marketing stat or highlight from one of our blog posts every Monday with the hashtag #MarketingMonday. In addition to boosting engagement among followers, other brands can follow suit and tag you in similar posts with the same hashtag. It makes for a fun and effective way to tap into other audience pools and engage with both followers and peers. 3. Share Your Company Culture Your company is more than just a product or service; it’s a wonderful place to work (hopefully). Social media is a great place to show what your company culture is like. Share with your followers images and news from team events, outings, parties, and lunches. This gives them an idea of what it’s like to work at your company and, just like your employee surveys, provides you with an opportunity to showcase the real, fun, interesting humans behind your brand. This strategy that will almost certainly entice more engagement. Sharing this kind of stuff is also great for your recruitment strategy. Oftentimes when job seekers are in the process of vetting a company, they’ll look at the company’s social media channels to see if there’s any indication of what the environment is like. And with most millennials valuing a company’s culture over salary, showcasing your company culture has never been more important. 4. Use Instagram Stories With the various Instagram Ads brands that can run to the nitty-gritty engagement metrics they have access to, Instagram keeps getting better and better for brands. So why not utilize the fun features they offer? Here are some ways to integrate Instagram Stories into your social media engagement strategy: Every time you publish a blog post, share a slow reveal on your stories and then link it to the blog post in your profile so people can check it out. For special releases, use the countdown feature so people can get excited and check back with you once the countdown is over. Use GIFs, stamps, and other image icons to keep stories interesting and eye-catching. Use hashtags in your stories to get your stories content in front of people who search or follow those hashtags but don’t follow you. Use the poll feature to ask people certain questions. Use the “Ask me a question” feature to open up a dialogue. Make Instagram Stories as integral a part of your Instagram posting strategy as your standard feed, and you’ll be able to reach more people and make more of an impact once you’ve got their attention. Also, you can use third-party Instagram tools to get better engagement. 5. Create Images or Graphics for Certain Content Original imagery on your social media posts will make your content, page, and brand more compelling. For the sake of time and ease, many companies rely solely on stock imagery for graphics on blog posts and social media. This can backfire, though, and won’t necessarily be the best way to convey what a post is actually about. Instead, research design tools, hire a designer to create custom images to accompany your blog posts or create them yourself using platforms like Canva. People tend to focus on images over text, so get creative and colorful. Give people an idea of what your post is all about by making your image intuitive. 6. Show Off Customer Testimonials Peer-to-peer recommendations are one of the strongest means of guiding prospects down the funnel. Show your followers how much your customers love you by sharing testimonials on social media and create images to go along with them to add even more pop to the post. See what we’ve done with one of our clients, Scheffey Marketing. Make sure you’re asking your clients for testimonials so you can not only incorporate them into your social strategy but also add them to your website. 7. Share Articles You Find Interesting Don’t just distribute your content on social. As a relevant voice in your industry, you should also be sharing content that others are putting together that you find interesting and know your audience will find interesting as well. This helps mix up your feed while keeping the quality of the content you’re sharing high. And when you share another brand’s content out, they may just return the favor, making room for new and varied kinds of engagement. Take social by storm. The tips above will help you increase engagement for better outcomes and are a lot more effective than posting the same old stuff repeatedly.
Make Room in Your Budget for Marketing Automation Posted on June 18, 2020June 15, 2020 by Jonathan Herrick It seems like the scope of marketing just keeps expanding, with no additional hours in the day to get it all done. Feeling like you have too much to do and not enough time to do it comes with the industry. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t figure out how to overcome it to make as much of an impact as possible. Efficiency is important, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of your marketing strategy. And that’s why marketing automation is so crucial. Marketing automation saves you time and helps your team work better with the assistance of valuable features aimed at doing more with less. But what does automation success look like? These stats spell it out pretty well. Marketing automation can: Help you see a 14.5% increase in sales productivity. Result in a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. Provide more quality leads, resulting in more revenue and less effort. Of course, like most groundbreaking technologies, marketing automation isn’t always cheap. Saving time while making more money can require an investment, which is why it doesn’t hurt to create a little extra room in your budget. Here are some steps you can take to increase your budget and make room for a marketing automation solution that gives you freedom, saves you time, and increases your bottom line. 1. Determine Exactly Which Features You Need — and Which You Don’t The price variance in marketing automation platforms is due to a few different things, including features. As you might expect, additional features equal additional costs. The last thing you want to be doing is paying for a ton of features you don’t use or need. To keep your automation costs down, prioritize your needs so that you only end up spending money on the features that really support your goals and initiatives. Take a look at your existing processes and the things that are eating up large chunks of your time. Are you spending hours a week generating and scoring leads? Spending evenings and weekends personalizing emails? Your biggest time sucks are the ones that you have the most to gain from automating, and that are worth finding room in the budget to accommodate. 2. Define Your Goals as Clearly as You Can This goes hand in hand with the point above. The more you understand exactly what you’re trying to achieve with marketing automation, the more guidance you have in regards to the automation features that you absolutely must have and the ones that are nice but maybe not completely necessary. Sit down with your team and outline the goals that you want your marketing automation platform to help you with. Goals could be anything from increasing your email list and getting more sign-ups for your free trial, to seeing more downloads on your gated content. Focus on the goals that matter most to you and your bottom line, and not just the goals that you think you should be aiming for. Knowing your goals will make you a more informed shopper when selecting your automation software. It will also make it readily apparent if the software that you purchase isn’t providing enough value to warrant its cost. 3. Identify Unnecessary Expenditures in Other Areas It’s easy to fall into a pattern of spending money without even knowing it. But little expenditures can add up and be just as wasteful as big expenditures. You can probably find quite a few areas where you’re spending money without getting profitable results in return. Start by looking at the rote expenses that you don’t normally think twice about. How much value are you getting out of that yearly marketing conference? Are those pay-per-click ads bringing in as many useful conversions as you’d anticipated? Do you need to fly out for meetings that could be done over video chat? Once you start digging into the cost-value analysis of your expenditures, there’s a good chance you’ll find areas where you can cut back, leaving you with money left over for automation. Making sacrifices is worth it if it allows you to use software that helps you nurture and build your prospects and creates more time in your day for effective strategies. Regardless, marketing automation is almost always going to be worth using. Cut back on unnecessary expenses, determine your must-haves, and dig around in the couch cushions if you have to, you’ll be glad you did.
4 Inspirational TED Talks for Marketers Posted on June 17, 2020June 15, 2020 by Allie Wolff TED Talks are a great place to go when you need any sort of inspiration, and that extends to the world of marketing. You can find more than 3,000 free and ready to stream talks, including a rich selection of talks dedicated explicitly to marketing tips, lessons, trends, and experiences. Check out discussions on everything from the future of digital advertising to how to use — and trust — the data you’re working with. It’s a great hub to turn to when you want to learn something new while also energizing your team. Not sure where to start? In no specific order, here are four of our favorite TED Talks for when you want to provide a boost of inspiration to marketing professionals — or get some inspiration yourself. 1. “What Brands Can Learn From Online Dating” – Sarah Willersdorf Sarah Willersdorf is the former partner and managing director at the Boston Consulting Group, a global management consulting firm. She also did a stint as the interim chief marketing officer for fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. In her TED Talk, she outlined some of the unique and intriguing similarities between trying to catch someone’s eye on a dating app and trying to catch their eye in marketing. What we like about Willersdorf’s TED Talk is that it’s actionable. For example, just as Tinder only gives its daters five pictures and a couple of sentences to show off their best selves, Willersdorf recommends adopting a branding strategy from just five images and a couple of sentences. Her talk is a good exercise in reinforcing just how important that first impression is in marketing, and is also a fun one to watch. Watch the talk here. 2. “404: The Story of a Page Not Found” – Renny Gleeson Renny Gleeson, managing director of ad agency Wieden + Kennedy and a mentor for tech accelerators and startups, tells an interesting story in his TED Talk about internal brand failures and the negative impact these have on consumers — and how to turn them around. Trying to access a page on a website and being faced with a “404: Page Not Found” message is frustrating for visitors and a major blocked road in the customer journey. Using these pages as an example, Gleeson goes into detail about the little things marketers do that can stand in their own way, like not having a landing page where there’s supposed to be a landing page. He then offers lots of helpful tips for creative ways you can turn mistakes into marketing opportunities, and use that same “404: Page Not Found” page to strengthen your brand identity instead of harming it. Watch the talk here. 3. “How to Make Choosing Easier” – Sheena Iyengar We’re all faced with lots of choices every single day. And behind the scenes, there are a lot of mechanisms contributing to those choices. Sheena Iyengar is a proclaimed “world expert on choice,” and the S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the management department at Columbia Business School. In her TED Talk, she goes over the three consequences of offering your leads too many options and the four techniques your brand can use to limit choice overload. Not all of Iyengar’s tips are going to be practical to marketing professionals since there’s a lot of overlap with sales and product development. But there are many fantastic takeaways for guiding marketing efforts, particularly when it comes to making choice a major factor when planning and creating content. Watch the talk here. 4. “What Physics Taught Me About Marketing” – Dan Cobley Physics don’t usually come up a lot in marketing. Still, Dan Cobley, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist (and former marketing director for Google), puts down a pretty strong argument for why it should. His TED Talk is all about the overlap of physics and marketing, and how lessons learned from one can inform the other. A big point he makes is why you need to focus on what your leads and buyers do, and not what they say they’re going to do. Marketing doesn’t have to be all about guesswork. The data is there — you just have to read it. Cobley’s talk will have you digging back into your own data, searching for not just big ideas but big ideas that are supported by real, concrete, provable data. Watch the talk here. Ready to get inspired? Start with one of the TED Talks listed above, or head to the TED Talks website and start browsing. And if you’re new to TED Talks, consider just clicking on a few videos that sound interesting to you, even if they’re not directly related to marketing. Often there is plenty of insightful takeaways to gather, which can be applied, in some way, to your marketing work.