March 2020 - Stevens & Tate Marketing

5 Reasons Why You Need A Mobile Marketing Strategy

March 23, 2020/in Articles, Directors, Mobile Advertising /by Mark Beebe

Has your marketing campaign lost its edge? Maybe it’s because you haven’t introduced mobile. Mobile Marketing is proving to be the fastest, easiest, and most accessible form of marketing today. Seniors, adults, and even teenagers have had experience dealing with mobile marketing in some shape or form. As a result, nearly every company can benefit from a mobile marketing strategy—here are just five reasons why.

1) Text Messages See Results

When you have a call to action that needs to drive results and drive them fast, text messages are a great option to have. That’s because 99% of text messages are read and responded to within 90 seconds of receiving them. This puts text messaging at a higher end of the spectrum in regards to reading and response rates.

Time was a crucial element when the Sierra Club wished to inform supporters of last-minute rallies. With less than a day to act, Sierra Club used text messaging to organize its supporters. Over 2,500 people texted in within a matter of hours! These kinds of instantaneous results are a hallmark of mobile marketing. Text messaging’s high open rates help ensure that your mobile campaign will be a more efficient communication channel.

2) Shoppers Rely on Mobile-Based Searches

These days, 40% of consumers utilize their mobile devices in order to make decisions about who to buy from. Most look at a cluster of review websites before making final choices about which supplier to purchase goods or services from. Reviews are so easy to find online and they help consumers decide between a plethora of suppliers and providers.

The smartest way to put your best foot forward is to register your business website with an array of consumer promotion websites. Also, encourage your loyal clients to leave reviews of your business on these websites. The more positive the online review, the more likely you are to get sales from customers. Specifically, those who shop around online via their smartphones, tablets, notebooks and iPads.

Related Articles to Read: The Benefits of Mobile Marketing Automation

3) Virtual and Augmented Reality Offers New Possibilities

Virtual and augmented reality are two of the newest opportunities in digital marketing, and in some cases, all a user needs is a smartphone to enjoy it. Besides emerging as a key resource for both mobile ads and shopping on social platforms, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are a preserve of native apps in terms of performance and functionality.

According to statistics, virtual and augmented reality will be an $83 billion dollar industry by 2021. Whereas virtual reality simulates entire environments through a smartphone; augmented reality literally “augments” the appearance of what’s in front of a user when they look through their mobile screen. Numerous companies have already taken advantage of this technology to offer branded experiences to their customers and even help them make better purchase decisions.

4) Apps Are Incredibly Popular

Statistics demonstrate that adults in America spend an average of 91 hours a month using apps on their mobile devices. So creating your own app will be a great way to connect with new and loyal customers. With just a few engineering resources, you can attract your audience through app marketplaces native to various smartphones. You can also customize the app, depending on the goals your company is trying to achieve.

Apps can be informative, entertaining, or both. There are app creation software packages available, which are pretty affordable and easy to use. While you spend more on custom app design, doing so should be an option as an app has the power to strengthen your brand in a powerful and long-lasting way.

5) Mobile-Friendly Email Gets Results

While texting offers the fastest and the best response times, it’s safe to say that email still gets results. This is why sending out promotional emails that are mobile-friendly will add tons of value to mobile marketing campaigns.

Effective and responsive email design is all about creating messages with shorter line lengths, pre-header text, concise copy, few or no images, and calls-to-action, which appear early on in emails. Something to keep in mind is that mobile is responsible for at least 50 % of all email open rates. So, make sure the email newsletters you deliver to your subscribers are on most mobile email platforms.

Email Marketing Metrics You Should Keep In Mind & What They Mean

March 12, 2020/in Articles, Direct Marketing, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Terry Becker

Email marketing was one of the earliest forms of inbound marketing — and it’s continued to be one of the most widely used due to how cost-efficient and effective the strategy is. If you’re implementing an email marketing campaign, then it’s important that you keep track of certain email marketing metrics so that you can judge how your campaign is performing and identify what is and isn’t working so that you can make strategic adjustments as necessary. The following are some of the most important email marketing metrics that you should be following:

Click Through Rate

Click throughs refer to how many recipients are clicking the links in your email. The higher your click-through rate is, the more enticing your content was to your recipients. A poor click-through rate means that you’re not connecting with your readers. A/B tests, which help find new ways to get more clicks in your emails, also make use of CTR’s.

Unique Opens

Unique opens refers to how many people open your emails. If you don’t have many unique opens, it means that your subject lines need work — or you may not be timing your emails properly and they’re getting buried in the inboxes of your recipients so that they don’t see them.

Forward Rate

Forward rates weigh the percentages of recipients who share your posts. A high forward rate is a good sign that you’re doing something right. It means you’re providing content that recipients believe is helpful and informative. As a result they then forward it to friends, family members, or coworkers.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate measures how many subscriber email addresses didn’t receive your email. A soft bounce means that the email address is valid; but the inbox was full or the server was down. A hard bounce means that the email wasn’t valid. To avoid a high bounce rate, periodically update your email list and remove old addresses.

Similar Article:Exploring The Differences Between B2C and B2B Email Marketing

Deliverability Rate

The deliverability rate refers to the percentage of emails that reach your recipients’ inboxes. Factors that may prevent your emails from being sent include email addresses that don’t exist or no longer exist or emails that are spam.

Clicks Per Link

Click-through-rates only refers to how many times your links were clicked. However, Clicks per link is a more detailed metric. It shows which links get more clicks on your campaign; not counting how many times each recipient has clicked on the link .

Conversion Rate

Your conversion rate, will assess how many people click on the link and then complete a specific action. A low conversion rate means that your content isn’t connecting or your calls-to-action aren’t effective. Similarly, conversion rates give unique insight into your return investment. When you know how much you have spent, and how many subscribers have converted, it easier to determine whether or not the money you put in has paid off.

Unsubscribes

The higher your unsubscribe rate is, the more likely it is that there’s something wrong with your email campaign. There are two potential causes for this — you may be sending out too many emails to the point where your recipients are unsubscribing because you’re filling up their inbox or the content of your emails isn’t relevant to your recipients.

Once you’ve launched your email campaign, it’s important that you track how it does. You can make adjustments to your email marketing efforts throughout the campaign, after all. If things aren’t working, you won’t want to just let it fail — you’ll want to right the ship. To track how your campaign is going, be sure to keep these email marketing metrics in mind.

Download Our White Paper Guide To Learn How To Perfect Buyer Personas For Your Business

5 Reasons to Use HubSpot

March 9, 2020/in Articles, Brand Development, Directors /by Nicole Wagner

There are a lot of marketing platforms out there that can be incredibly helpful when it comes to creating, managing, and tracking your marketing and sales efforts. Out of these platforms, HubSpot is one of the very best. The following are five reasons to consider using HubSpot as one of your main inbound marketing tools:

1. HubSpot Functions As An All-In-One Marketing Platform

One of the biggest advantages of HubSpot is that it’s much easier to build a holistic marketing strategy because it allows you to do so many things. With it, you can monitor your contacts, nurture your leads, or track your performance. Not to mention that you can do all of this for the majority of your marketing strategies. This includes SEO, email marketing, CRM, content marketing, marketing automation, database management, and more.

Few marketing platforms are this comprehensive. Typically, businesses have to use multiple marketing tools to oversee their campaigns. Using HubSpot makes things easier, more efficient, and often less costly.

2. Use HubSpot To Create And Manage Your Contact List

One of the big challenges facing many businesses is managing an unorganized database that’s not directly connected to their sales or marketing strategy. You can segment your contact list with HubSpot, ensuring that your contacts receive information that they want to engage with.

Because you’ll be able to manage all of your marketing efforts from the HubSpot platform, you’ll be able to segment your contacts based on where they are in the sales funnel. This makes it easier to nurture leads and identify which leads your sales team can engage with.

3. Provides Excellent Reporting Features

The more control you have over being able to track the ins and outs of your campaign, the more accurately you’ll be able to judge your marketing strategies. This in turn will allow you to make more effective adjustments on the fly. HubSpot allows you to track and measure every aspect of your inbound marketing campaign by providing clear breakdowns of your social media strategies, blogging efforts, landing page success, email engagement, and much more.

In fact, their Reports Dashboard makes it easy to view these metrics at a glance. The dashboard offers the ability to see your overall performance data. You can even build custom reports that meet your company’s unique needs.

Similar Article: Choosing Hubspot CRM As Your CRM Solution

4. An Effective Long-Term Solution

HubSpot understands that most inbound marketing campaigns are long-term campaigns. As such, the marketing platform is built to oversee your campaigns over the long term. It’s scalable as well, so no matter how big your company’s marketing needs grow, HubSpot can handle them.

5. HubSpot Allows You To Obtain A Clear ROI

It used to be a real challenge to determine what your ROI (return on investment) was for your inbound marketing campaign, especially if it was spread over multiple marketing platforms. HubSpot makes it easy to obtain a clear ROI for your entire inbound strategy due to it’s ability to track and measure every aspect of your campaign. This will allow you to make more financially motivated adjustments based on your marketing budget as well.

As you can see, HubSpot addresses a number of different aspects of creating and managing an inbound marketing campaign in an efficient manner. With all its features and general ease-of-use, there are few marketing tools that can offer what HubSpot offers.

Senior Living Advertising Ideas That Avoid Stereotyping

March 4, 2020/in Advertising Agency, Articles, Blog, Directors, Senior Living Marketing /by Nicole Wagner

One of the main reasons why marketing a senior living community is so challenging is because it’s easy to fall into the trap of advertising to seniors in a stereotypical way. In fact, a recent survey of 400 seniors aged 70 or over revealed that 60 percent of respondents felt that most advertisements used stereotypes to represent seniors. Keeping that in mind, the following are a few advertising ideas to help you avoid senior living stereotypes:

Don’t Be Pushy Or Preachy

A lot of ads that target seniors tend to be on the condescending side. You’ll want to try and position yourself as an authority on the subject, but you won’t want to do so in a way that you’re telling your audience you know better than they do. This will come off as pushy or preachy, which is a tone you should avoid. Be factual and informative in an honest and respectful manner.

Focus On The Individual, Not The Demographic

One of the biggest offenses in senior stereotyping is to use actors that fit the general demographic of your audience and have them do something mundane, like smiling while they drink a glass of wine and stare out into the distance. How is your audience supposed to relate to an image like this? On the other hand, you also don’t want to deceive a senior struggling to live on their own; such as someone being helped into bed because they are too feeble to function by themselves.

Instead of trying to represent an entire demographic by the extreme ends of the spectrum, focus on the individual. What does your target audience actually want and need out of a senior living community? Highlight purposeful activities, such as actively participating in the world and continuing to pursue their passions.

Check out this article for tips on how to market senior living communities

Show Don’t Tell

Having someone speaking to the audience about the benefits of moving into your living community is a tired trope. It’s something that most seniors expect from a pamphlet. Showing is much more effective than telling. A great example of a senior living community that did this focused on showing the day-to-day lives of its residents as they dined, exercised, played pool, painted, and more — all without any dialogue whatsoever. Like they always say, an image is worth a thousand words.

Entertain Your Audience

It seems like many advertisers forget that seniors still like to be entertained and that they have a great sense of humor. You don’t need to be deadly serious when marketing towards seniors. Try to entertain them and appeal to their sense of humor — you’ll find that they’ll be much more engaged as a result.

Many senior living communities fail to market to a senior audience effectively. This is because they fall into the trap of using advertising ideas that rely on senior stereotypes. Seniors recognize these stereotypes and do not appreciate them. As a result, you will have difficulty generating interest in your community. Use these advertising ideas to help avoid stereotyping seniors in your marketing efforts.

Whats Trending in Marketing For February 2020

March 2, 2020/in Articles, Directors, Marketing Strategy, Trending /by Nicole Wagner

Being informed about current and recent marketing trends, is an excellent tool for advertisers to have. That way, you can evaluate past strategies and find new ways to stay ahead of the competition. We’re aware that keeping up with these trends can often be difficult. As a result, the following articles come from popular marketing blogs and highlight current marketing trends that we think are worth paying attention to:

Noteworthy Marketing News

Top 10 Marketing Trends to Watch for in 2020

Right now, voice searches are used for simple queries like an address, calendar reminders, or song title. But as user needs expand and grow more complex, so must voice search features, and so must optimization. Exceptional customer experience is leading the way in marketing, shifting focus onto inbound strategies for serving and retaining existing customers. When customers share their enjoyable experience or outstanding service, their reviews are more likely than ads to impact new buyer behavior and marketing trends.

Google Ads enable bids simulator for target ROAS, budget simulator for Maximize clicks, conversions

Google is extending the availability of bid and budget simulators to more smart bidding strategies. The bid simulator has only been available for manual and Target CPA bidding. It’s now available for Target ROAS campaign. The simulators can be helpful directional indicators of the potential performance impact from making bid or budget adjustments. As always, keep in mind the projections are based on historical data and actual future performance can (and often does) vary from these projections.

Facebook Introduces 3 New Ad Reporting Tools

Facebook is making it easier for advertisers to measure ad performance across accounts, channels, and publishers. With this data, advertisers can better understand how ads are performing, which demographics they’re reaching, and where the most conversions are coming from. Cross-Account Reporting, Custom Metrics, and Conversion Path Reporting are all viable options that are explored in depth as Facebook continues to evolve its measurement solutions to address the priorities of potential marketers.

Similar Article: What’s Trending in Marketing For April 2019

Improving Your Marketing Program

6 Social Media Trends To Follow in 2020

At this point in time, every business with an inbound marketing strategy should have a social media presence of some sort. Social media is one of the most effective ways to build relationships with your target audience. You can engage directly with them and learn more about what their wants and needs are. However, social media is constantly evolving. Which means that you need to keep up with all the latest social media trends, so that you don’t fall behind the competition.

6 Reasons Why Your Business Needs B2B Inbound Marketing

There are many B2B companies that continue to advertise using more traditional methods, such as TV commercials, magazine ads, cold calls, and more. While traditional marketing can be effective, it’s a good idea to implement a variety of different marketing strategies. This includes inbound marketing.

The Advantages of Using Public Relations in Your Marketing Strategy

As most know, when it comes to marketing strategy, public relations plays a key role in getting the word out.PR helps maintain your reputation through winning audience approval. It can educate all possible consumers and sway them to your point of view. It even helps to provide the target market with more detailed information than they would normally receive from other forms of marketing. Simply put, these public relations advantages should be on the forefront of every marketer’s agenda

Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and Trends

Vast majority of Amazon advertisers plan to spend more on ads again this year

According to a Marketing Land survey of digital advertisers, 81% of current advertisers plan to increase their ad spend on the platform in the coming year. Of those planning to increase their Amazon ad budgets 41% said they plan to spend as much as 25% more than the previous six to 12 months. 22% plan increases of 25 to 50%, and 10% expect Amazon budgets to increase by 50% or more.

B2B buyers consume an average of 13 content pieces before deciding on a vendor

We know that content is incredibly important for ranking in search. It’s also critical for sales support. But this report makes clear there are broad ranges of first and third party content types that are highly influential to B2B buyers. It also shows how critical the vendor website is in the buying process. Indeed, the report basically outlines a content strategy for the entire B2B buyer’s journey.

Marketers struggle to stay ahead of technology advancements

When asked how difficult it will be over the coming year to stay ahead of new technological advancements, remain competent across multiple programs and avoid long-term experience debt, 88% of CMO consultants surveyed by executive service firm Chief Outsiders said it would be difficult — with 10% claiming it will be “very” difficult.

The survey included a relatively small pool of CMO consultants. However it underscores a primary challenge faced by marketing leaders; CMOs are taking on more responsibilities while playing catch-up with the technology available to propel growth.