September 2021 - Stevens & Tate Marketing

How To Develop Content To Build Customer Loyalty

September 28, 2021/in Articles, Attraction Marketing, Content Marketing, Directors /by Debbie Szwast

Today, online content plays a critical role in marketing your business. It showcases the products and services that you offer, as well as positions you as an expert in your industry or niche. But, did you know that it is also critical for building customer loyalty? Online content can help you convert prospects and bring customer back. Additionally with attraction marketing, what you put out there affects how you look. Here is a step-by-step guide to creating content that will increase customer loyalty:

Attract:

Attracting new prospects is critical if you are hope to increase your online traffic in the future. Well-written, targeted pieces of content rank well in search engine results. which brings in traffic naturally. Sharing content on social media helps drive even more traffic. Remember, every new prospect is a potential customer, so your content needs to make a good first impression and build trust.

Convert:

Once you have your website traffic flowing, the next step is to convert this traffic into leads. You can use content to do this in a few different ways. Here are two to get you started:

Case studies:
- These showcase how your business helped a customer with a specific problem. The study outlines what problem the customer was facing, how the company helped solve the problem, and the final results along with the customer’s feedback. It offers a glimpse into how your company can help the prospect and how current customers view your brand.
Thought leadership:
- This positions you as an expert in your industry or niche. You share expert information that is useful to the prospect as well as answer any questions that arise. Prospects can see the value you bring forward, which helps build trust and loyalty.

Leads do not instantly become sales. You have to nurture each lead through the sales funnel from evaluating products, to making a decision, to making a purchase. Additionally, a lead at the evaluation stage requires different marketing than a lead closer to making a purchase.

A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead who has gone beyond browsing and is starting to evaluate options. That person is not yet ready to talk to a salesperson, but they are looking for more details on certain products or services.

After evaluating the options, leads will move towards making a decision. This is when they become an SQL, or a sales-qualified lead. Now a salesperson can step up to answer any remaining questions the SQL might have and help them make a final decision.

[Read About How To Delight Your Customers]

Close and Delight:

Closing a sale often takes a dozen or more touches. That is why every piece of content you post or send must work to build customer loyalty.

Once you convert a prospect to a customer, your job is not done yet. The final step to building customer loyalty is to delight the customer.

Send focused email campaigns to keep your brand in the customer’s mind.
Use customer-only promotions to improve retention.
Ask customers to provide feedback or fill out a survey to demonstrate that you value their opinions.
Offer product updates at a special discount for returning customers.
Use video to provide product demonstrations, tutorials, and customer stories.

Don’t Let Your Blog Become an Afterthought:

Your company’s blog should be a centerpiece in your content strategy. It is a place where you can share just about anything you want. Here is a short list of what you can include in your blog:

How-to posts
Industry and company news
Accessories for popular products
Services offered along with products
Helpful FYIs
Customer stories
Tutorials
Professional resources

Consistency is critical when it comes to updating your blog and with sending emails . Regular updates with new content will keep customers interest, in turn building loyalty and promoting your brand.

There is one tried and true adage you need to remember: it costs a lot less to retain a customer than to attract a new one. With this in mind, building your content strategy will keep customers coming back for more. Customer loyalty will help you build a successful business long-term.

8 Important Questions To Ask When Hiring Inbound Marketing Agencies

September 24, 2021/in Articles, Directors, Inbound Marketing /by Nicole Wagner

Inbound marketing is a force to be reckoned with. For businesses, that lack the time or adequate resources to take care of their own inbound marketing, these agencies offer a solution. Inbound marketing agencies work on search engine optimization, social media campaigns, and all-around content marketing. They do all the heavy lifting so that your business can focus on important details.

There are many agencies on the market that can offer you with professional inbound marketing solutions. Selecting the best agency to provide these services can be quite confusing. Below are some of the questions you can use to identify if an inbound agency you are considering will be apt for the direction that your business is headed. Let us explore these case study questions:

Areas of expertise and experience?

Your prospective inbound marketing agency should be able to work with different types of businesses. Take time to understand the scope of their services. Most agencies should be able to handle B2B or B2C solutions with ease.

What service packages are available?

When looking for an agency to fill your marketing solution shoes, you need to take wholesome packages into account. These packages usually cover the basics. If you want more specialized solutions, you need to be sure the agency can satisfy your order. The prospective inbound marketing agency should take care of lead generation systems and SEO optimization among other things in the package.

Read More – Benefits of Inbound Marketing

What are your performance benchmarks?

For you to understand and analyze the process that the agency will take, you have to understand how their scoring system works. How do they actually measure the performance of their marketing strategies? What scale do they use? Feel free to ask more case study questions or make recommendations so the agency can provide tailor-made solutions.

What strategies seem fit for my business and do you have the required resources?

An agency’s influence is tied to its power in resources. Your inbound marketing agency must have the ability to come up with marketing strategies and follow through with them. It is retardant to deal with an agency that always needs your financial backing. Cost should be mentioned upfront.

How much time will it take?

Depending on the agency you want to work with, the completion time for projects will vary. Look for those who will work within the time frame you have provided.

What is your client retention status?

You can tell a lot from a business and the amount of clients they retain. High retention rates indicate high turnover. You want to work with a business that is trusted and supported with a number of people.

How do you integrate your team?

As a business looking for a marketing agency, you want to be sure that everyone involved understands your goal. Work with agencies that are open to taking direction and involving you in major/minor decisions.

How is ROI measured?

There are agencies that do not provide these services or only provide these services in limited function. It is better to work with agencies that do detailed ROI measurements. This way you can easily track how your investment is progressing.

With these questions, we are confident you will be able to select the right agency for your company. Look for an agency that gives you a creative edge and allows you to focus on your sales. We wish you all the best!

How To Assess Your Inbound Marketing Plan

September 21, 2021/in Articles, Attraction Marketing, Directors, Inbound Marketing /by Nicole Wagner

Inbound marketing has become one of the most efficient ways for marketers to sell online. It is based on developing high-quality content to relevant to the prospective buyers who you can turn into buyers. This kind of marketing allows the user to determine whether the inbound marketing plan is productive or not. Marketing metrics is a part of attraction marketing and your inbound marketing plan is a part of marketing metrics.

For most business firms actual and quantifiable results are more beneficial for better business decision. By using real-time metrics it is easy to identify the best content and customize the conversion tactics for more sales. The following are factors to be considered when measuring the effectiveness of your inbound marketing plan.

The Desired Goals And Objectives

One way to measure the performance of your campaign is listing the organizational goals. Assessing available opportunities as compared to the current number of customers, allows you to ensure both marketing and sales efforts are productive. Some of the real-time metrics that can be used for this step include; the number of conversion produced, where your prospects are in your sales funnel and lastly the number of buyers in your marketing niche. By stacking the results from such a test against the organizational goals will help you know the results of your marketing campaign.

Read More: 5 Examples Of Goals For Business Development.

Competitive Benchmarking

At times comparing your inbound marketing techniques to your competitors will allow you to identify the best strategies. By selecting the tactics that your competitors are succeeding at and eliminating those that fail your competitors will help you stay ahead. The first people to use inbound marketing in their industry have the chance to create a benchmark for their competitors. For better access to the progress of your competition, online tools like Google analytics or website grader will give you more information. Some platforms like Hubspot allow the user to see traffic density and the domains linked to your site. Such data will allow you to select the best inbound campaigns.

Social Media

Social media offer a way to get maximum attention to your website. Researching carefully about the target market allows you to know what social media platform get to the best of your customers and prospects. After deciding the best social media platform, you should approach it strategically. You can start by developing a plan on how to release some posts or discussing some topics depending on the content calendar. The idea is to compare the number of conversions each post brings. If one type of content brings more conversions then you should focus on it and eliminate the ones with fewer reads. The concept behind this is to drive conversions to the website from social media community.

Financial Spending

For any inbound marketing campaign, there must be a budget that comes with it. The budget should be based on the organizational goals to be achieved and the time frame. This provides a chance to compare between the marketing campaigns that are currently running. If you have a part of the campaign that has more expenses with fewer leads yet there are other options that are more productive, it will be better to switch and focus on the productive ones. For those campaigns that use more money like free advertising and free samples, you can re-strategize and utilize inbound marketing that has more measurable ROI features.

Develop Your Nurturing Process

Though for most buyers if your products are amazing they will buy immediately but for some a relationship is important. Lead nurturing allows you to focus on the target market and depending on the buyer’s journey it is easy to make your sales funnel a metric. By carefully designing the sales funnel to provide the prospect with motivation to buy and include clear calls to action, this will provide a position of measurement and comparison. If there are certain goals to be achieved linking conversion rates with the number of new customers will give you a clear picture of the growth curve.

Conclusion

Every company has a unique business structure, meaning they have different inbound marketing approaches. The success of a marketing campaign will depend on the contributions of the company sales team, this means you should clearly state your inbound marketing plan and goals to be achieved for better measurements.

Content Marketing Misconceptions

September 10, 2021/in Articles, Content Marketing, Directors /by Nicole Wagner

Content Marketing is one of the most talked about and trusted online marketing tactics in 2021.

91 percent of B2B marketers are doing it, as are 86 percent of B2C marketers, according to the Content Marketing Institute.

It can help your business generate online traffic, expand your presence on social media, establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, and most importantly, bring in new sales and leads.

But despite its current popularity and buzzworthiness, there are still a number of misconceptions about what content marketing is, how it works and what it can do for you. We’re going to clear up some of these misconceptions and help you get a better understanding of how content marketing can help your brand in 2015.
Read more

Tips to Consider When Developing Strong Email Subject Lines

September 6, 2021/in Articles, Direct Marketing, Directors /by Debbie Szwast

Email is one of the most effective marketing platforms in the world today. Marketing is based on judging books by their covers, thus attractive email subject lines are crucial. The choice of words used in the subject line has a huge influence on the readers and determines whether the hard work devoted to writing the email is fruitful.

Investing additional time into writing a good subject line increases your open email rates. This grants you additional exposure increased contact with the target market. Here are some suggestions when it comes to writing strong email subject lines.

Use aspects of personalization

For this, use tags in the subject lines indicating the addressee’s name and locality. For most marketing professionals, this has been observed to increase open rates. Combining this tactic with some targeted automation announcement will improve the effectiveness of the strategy.

Be target specific in creating recipient lists

Though sending blast messages to every contact in your list may seem comprehensive, it may be offputting to some recipients. Due to receiving irrelevant messages, some of your recipients may feel confused and, at times, frustrated. To solve this problem, segment the list based on past experiences and observations of consumer behavior. Forms are good sources for such information because they are filled with descriptions of personal preferences.

Read More – Are people unsubscribing from your emails?

Keep it short and sweet

Around 40% of emails sent are opened in a mobile device. Assuming your readers might open emails in their mobile device, your subject line should be under 50 characters so it doesn’t get cut off. To minimize the character count, only use the most crucial words in your subject line and take away the unnecessary ones.

Avoid overuse of caps and exclamation marks

Excessive use of exclamation marks and caps lock will make your recipient feel like they’re being yelled at. Not only is the tactic disruptive, but 70% of recipients are likely to mark such emails as spam. Avoid this mistake and use action-based language to catch your readers’ attention instead.

Do not divulge the contents

A strong subject line hides the contents of the email from the reader and instead makes them curious. Additionally, you should avoid making the subject line overpromising, which means whatever is indicated in the subject line should be consistent with the contents of the email.

Ask reflective questions

Ask relevant questions in the subject line to attract the reader’s attention. Formulate a question that appeals directly to the recipient, and then provide internal links that provide an answer to the question. This is an efficient strategy that will translate to more email reads.

A/B testing

Though subject lines can be formed based on many ideas, the focus should be the target market. A/B testing involves carefully researching your target audience and experimenting with different subject lines. A successful campaign tests different subject lines on customers and adopts the ones with more reads. It is necessary to research continuously so as to remain relevant and effective.

3 Ways To Enhance Your Landing Pages

September 3, 2021/in Articles, Directors, Inbound Marketing /by Nicole Wagner

Landing pages are a great way to provide website visitors with helpful content, collect important customer information, and begin to build a relationship. They can be a great tool for generating leads for your business. But in order to convert visitors into leads, you must offer them something of value, and do so in a way that is easily navigable. Here are a few easy ways to enhance your landing pages.

Viewers should have a quick and clear understanding of the offer

People have very short attention spans, so in order to keep them on your landing page, it needs to be easily digestible within the first few seconds of viewing. Your message to your website visitors should be as clear and concise as possible. The headline should tell your visitors exactly what it is that you want them to do, and how to do it.