November 2022 - Stevens & Tate Marketing

Using The Right Media Mix During Each Stage Of The Buyer’s Journeys

November 29, 2022/in Articles, Directors, Marketing Strategy, Media /by Nicole Wagner

Not all buyers are created equal, and depending on what stage in your sales funnel a buyer lands can dictate the type of marketing they’re ready to receive. And while old marketing practices preached broadcasting a message to the masses, using a media mix to nail down a lead at a specific point along their buying journey is crucial and proven to be more effective to converting leads into sales.

Inbound marketing is about just that: tailoring exactly the right content to your buyer precisely when they need it. In order to accomplish this, though, you must know exactly who your buyer is, where they are in your sales funnel, and what content they need. To do this, you must first understand your buyer personas. From there, you can begin crafting a targeted, personalized, and efficient marketing campaign keeping your buyers in mind.

In order to find the right media mix for your buyers, though, you need to better understand your buyer’s journey stage by stage.

Awareness

Awareness is just the beginning of your buyer’s journey. At this stage, potential buyers are becoming aware they have a problem and begin their search for a solution. This is a perfect opportunity for your brand to be the first thing they see, and plenty of juicy, easily-consumed, educational content will satiate their desire to learn more about their problem.

The awareness stage is at the top of your sales funnel, so buyers are most likely ready to receive a media mix of keyword-focused and successful blogs, PPC and SEO to drive traffic to your site, and mass media to get your message across. Essentially, your buyers will become information consumers and it’s your job to be the content expert they turn to during this initial information gathering phase through your sales funnel.

Your buyer’s awareness of having a problem, incidentally, coincides with your own company’s brand awareness which is the cornerstone of helping curious buyers find their way to your content. Learn how to build that foundational content in the second part of our attraction marketing series: How to Drive Brand Awareness.

Consideration

Once a buyer has been made aware of their problem, the consideration stage of their buying journey begins. At this point, buyers truly begin to shop around for a solution to their problem and it’s extremely important for you to deliver authoritative, trusted solutions as they matriculate through your sales funnel. Here your brand becomes more distinguished from your competitors.

This is where granular, tailored messages begin to take on a new life and a new role for your buyers media mix, typically in the form of targeted emails that trigger actions from the buyer. Drip emails and lead nurturing campaigns (when used correctly) will become the staple media mix for these buyers entering the middle of your sales funnel. From those emails, a buyer should be able to download content, sign up for a webinar, or read a case study.

Naturally, once a potential buyer filters their way into the middle of your funnel, they must be nurtured in a way that will keep them thirsting for more content and information about your brand. The third part of our attraction marketing focuses on exactly that: Using Lead Nurturing During the Consideration Stage of the Buyer’s Journey.

How do you create great content with the help of the buyer’s journey?

Decision Making

This is where the rubber meets the road for your marketing and your buyer’s journey. If your buyer has made it this far, then you’re on their short list and it’s time to make all of those hard-fought marketing efforts deliver by closing your lead into a sale. Now, you should prove why your brand is above and beyond your competition and establish an emotional connection with your prospective buyer.

At the bottom of the funnel, the best types of mix media marketing for your lead are retargeting and one-to-one connections. Retargeting is where you reconnect with your site visitors and offer a fresh look at your brand while one-to-one connections make a personal connection with your buyer through emails, phone calls, or customized demonstrations of your products or services. These are make-or-break tactics, and implementing them very well could make the difference in making a sale.

For some marketers, picking up the phone and calling a prospective sale can strike fear into their hearts at first glance. Nevertheless, the final piece of the attraction marketing puzzle comes by Using Personal Selling During the Decision Making Stage. Here, we will discuss how to successfully make those personal connections and close your qualified leads into sales.

Your Company’s Core Values Play a Role in Developing Your Brand Story

November 25, 2022/in Articles, Brand Story Telling, Directors, Storybranding /by Dan Gartlan

When vetting brands, consumers often look far deeper than the simple surface messages that portray a company. In today’s age, more than ever, customers are choosing brands based on their set of core values–a major player in a brand story–in an effort to better understand the people behind the logo.

Your brand story and your company’s core values dictate exactly who you are and can give you a significant competitive advantage by outlining the age old question, “Who are we, what do we do?” In other words, you put your “why’s” and “how’s” on your proverbial sleeve. This level of transparency makes brands more human, more approachable, and more connected with their target market.

Core Values in a Nut Shell

In short, your core values tell your target buyers why you do what you do and must be at the epicenter of your brand story as well as the focus of your day-to-day business functions. Another way of looking at core values is character: who you are, how you go about your business, and the name you carry into your daily tasks, but these values must come from the heart and should stand out in the marketplace.

These core values are what connects your brand to your customers on a “human” level. Evaluating your core values can be a little more in depth as it truly resonates through the drive within your business. That evaluation begins by asking why your business exists, what your purpose is, and what obstacles you face to deliver on that purpose. All of these “outer layer” questions should point back to your “why” and should be able to justify what lies at the center.

Be a Storybrander, Not a Storyteller

The most iconic and memorable brands imbed their beliefs, core values, and emotions into your psyche. Storybranding is how memorable brands generate an enduring, lifelong value or belief system that stays with their customers and engages their buyer personas. In other words, companies are characterized by their ideals and personified through them. Storybranding is an attraction marketing tactic that marries your company, its belief system, and the beliefs of your customers.

There are some important differences between storybranding and storytelling, though. Storytelling allows your brand to make a connection with your customers through current events or marketing. This allows consumers to better identify with what’s happening in your business. Storybranding, however, seeks to put your brand’s beliefs and deeper meaning before your customers in order to evoke stronger emotions therefore generating stronger bonds.

How do you build a brand story? Learn the process here.

Be Your Story’s Hero

The key to your brand story is to highlight the hero within it. Of course, with every hero in every story, there is something relatable, pure, and honest about that character. In the case of storybranding, that hero is you–is there a more perfect script for your brand?

With our protagonist identified, it’s super important to tell those why’s and how’s of the story. This is where your core values come in.

Speak to those core values and instill them in your customer’s mind. Make sure they know the heart of their hero and can relate to exactly what your brand stands for. Once you’ve made that emotional attachment, begin to outline the how’s of your brand story by outlining the competitive advantages you have over others in the market. This is what truly seals the deal, but without a reason, your brand simply can’t speak as loudly as it could. In other words, keep your core values close to home.

Furthering Your Brand Story

Your brand story is completely unique. No one else can say it the way you do and no one else can replicate the pillars you stand on as a company. If you need a little help, consider a free marketing consultation where a marketing professional can help you develop and say your brand story the way no one else can!

Click here to learn all there is to know about telling your brand’s story.

What AI means To B2B Marketing Strategies

November 21, 2022/in Articles, B2B Marketing, Blog, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Nicole Wagner

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a concept explored through pop culture; it’s a very real thing that has become increasingly prevalent throughout society, even in the creation of B2B marketing strategies. In fact, the use of AI is practically commonplace now. For example, the use of AI is what allows Amazon to recommend personalized products based on your buying and browsing habits. It also allows your GPS to provide you with the best possible route. For business owners and marketers, AI has also become essential to improving B2B marketing strategies.

The Benefits of AI in B2B Marketing Strategies

The following are just a few ways that the use of AI can help to improve B2B marketing strategies:

Improve the customer experience via personalization

Businesses no longer directly interact with brands when they are doing product or service research. This means it can be difficult to mine information from potential clients or business partners. The use of AI technology can help you collect data that provides insight into the behavioral patterns of both existing and potential clients or partners. This means that your marketing efforts no longer have to be limited to certain sectors, you’ll be able to target specific businesses with messages designed to provide solutions to their specific needs, thereby improving the customer experience as well.

Improve your marketing strategy

The use of behavioral analysis and machine learning can help you to better understand what the pain points of your target audience is. Behavioral analyses also allows you to craft a more effective marketing strategy to reach and convert that audience.

Find out how to build your brand story with your B2B marketing strategy.

Save money by saving time

The use of AI technology means that you don’t have to spend hours analyzing data. This type of data can be collected and analyzed by AI programs for you. It will allow you to dedicate more time to other aspects of your business.

Improve results with lead scoring

Trying to chase down every lead is typically a waste of time since not all leads are equal. The use of AI technology can allow you to score your leads using all of the behavioral data that you’ve collected. This, in turn, allows you to pinpoint businesses that are much more likely to convert. It allows for a better use of your resources since you can identify the best prospects and prioritize your most promising accounts.

The use of artificial intelligence will help to improve your B2B marketing strategies in any number of ways, whether it’s by helping you to collect and organize more valuable data that can be used to more effectively target qualified leads using personalization, or simply being able to make better use of your resources. Be sure to visit us at Stevens & Tate to take advantage of our free downloadable marketing tools, which can be leveraged to help improve your B2B marketing efforts.

For more resources on Attraction Marketing, click here.

5 Website Redesign Tips That Will Generate More Phone Calls

November 18, 2022/in Articles, Blog, Directors, Website Design, Website Growth Driven Design /by Nicole Wagner

Your website is not only useful for providing company information and generating leads, it’s also useful for getting potential customers on the phone. If you design your website properly, you can increase the number of phone calls that you may receive, which, in turn, can give you a greater opportunity to close sales. The following are five website redesign tips that will help you to generate more phone calls:

1. Make your phone number visible

The last thing you’ll want is to have a visitor to your website searching for your phone number. If they want to call you, they may get frustrated and give up if they can’t find your number anywhere. This is an easy issue to address: place your phone number on every page of your site in a location where it doesn’t overwhelm the entire page, but where it’s easy to spot. For example, the top right corner of the page. You don’t want it to dominate the page because that will make visitors feel pressured. However, clear positioning will make it easy to find at a glance.

2. Use effective calls-to-action

Encouraging leads to call will help generate phone calls. Visitors often don’t know what they want to do in terms of taking an action and will need a friendly push in the right direction. Use calls-to-action (CTA) on every page and make sure that they are relevant to the content of that page. For example, if you are running a real estate company and you have a blog post providing tips on how to stage a house, you can add a CTA at the end telling the reader to call you for more information or advice on how to sell their house. Add the number in your CTA to make things easy for them.

Why are call-to-action phrases so important?

3. Add click-to-call options

A huge percentage of your website’s visitors are likely browsing your site on their smartphone. By implementing click-to-call options, you’re more likely to generate calls from these mobile visitors. A click-to-call option allows the user to simply tap the phone number listed in your CTA. This will automatically dial the number on their phone. When it’s this easy to call, mobile users are much more likely to do so. Otherwise, they are going to have to pull up their keypad and dial the number in manually. This extra effort may discourage them from calling you right away.

4. Use a Responsive Web Design

If you’re redesigning your website, you need to make sure that you’re using a responsive design to ensure that your site is properly displayed on mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones. If it’s not mobile-friendly, mobile users may have a tough time locating where your phone number is. For example, if you put it in the top right corner and your site doesn’t display properly, they may have to scroll right to find it, making it easy to miss.

The call-back widget is useful for visitors who aren’t able to contact you right away but want to speak with one of your representatives. For example, they might be on their computer and their phone might be out of reach. The way it works is simple — the visitor will just type in their number, which you’ll be notified of. You can then have one of your representatives call them back.

Capturing leads can very challenging, especially when you’re engaging indirectly with leads via your website. It’s generally easier to close leads when you can get them on the phone, which is why you should implement these five website redesign tips.

Creative Real Estate Marketing Ideas for Homebuilders

November 14, 2022/in Articles, Blog, Directors, Homebuilder Marketing, Real Estate Advertising /by Nicole Wagner

As a homebuilder in an increasingly competitive market, getting ahead with your real estate marketing plan will give you an advantage on your competition and increase your value as a contractor. In much the same way you leverage creativity in your trade, you must be creative when it comes to your marketing.

Creative real estate marketing starts with a rock solid online presence and strategy and, once established, can be built up on the foundational level. Here are 8 creative real estate marketing tools you should be utilizing now.

1. Video

Video is a vital piece to your marketing puzzle, especially when it comes to helping prospective home buyers visualize their future home. Whether you’re in the custom home market or not, video content is a great way to help your clients better understand what it is you do and what makes you unique.

Leveraging video by making them personable, relatable, authentic, and unique to your brand helps build brand awareness and rapport in your industry. These articles below can guide you in the right direction to make fantastic video content:

2. Optimized Landing Pages

Landing pages are where your online prospects “land” after reading through your content. This is your customer’s gateway into your sales funnel and where they are willing to enter your sales process with hopes of a return of more education about your brand or products.

Optimized landing pages improve the chances that a potential customer enters your sales funnel and draws their focus toward the important points about the offer presented them. Here are some resources on the value of optimized landing pages:

3. Use Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is far less scary than it may seem on the surface and can actually be an extremely valuable tool for identifying buying trends, behaviors, and interests of individuals and families seeking a quality homebuilder.

Marketing automation can (and should be) personalized and will help your leads matriculate through your sales funnel faster. This gives you the ability to nurture leads into sales and gives you crucial insights into individual buying behaviors. Marketing automation is more than drip emails and encapsulates a vast area of lead nurturing. Check out these useful references:

An often overlooked aspect but highly important piece of your marketing puzzle is social media. There’s a high likelihood that your customers will start their search for a homebuilder by some form of social media, and your presence there could very well make the difference between getting a lead and losing a sale.

Knowing what to do with social media requires a bit of a learning curve to someone who may be new to it as more than a social platform. Business social media in conjunction with a quality attraction marketing campaign is a slightly different animal, but we’ve got a few key posts aimed at making your social media presence a fruitful one:

5. Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC advertising may seem unfamiliar and (if put in the wrong hands) very costly; however, PPC advertising done right is a primary structural piece of your attraction marketing efforts and can greatly improve your marketing ROI.

Two of the leading platforms for PPC ads are Facebook and Google with both performing admirably for myriad industries and are critical for the awareness stage of your buyer’s journey. Take a look at these resources for leveraging PPC to your advantage as a homebuilder:

6. Retargeting

Sometimes referred to as remarketing, retargeting deals largely with resurrecting forgotten leads who have either fallen out of your workflows or to heat up a lead gone cold. Retargeting focuses largely on marketing qualified leads or MQLs. MQLs have already been qualified for sales and have entered the consideration stage of their buying journey.

This is a great time to churn up that cold lead and get it back into your lead nurturing program. Here are some ways retargeting can help your leads heat back up:

7. Content and Inbound Marketing

Often used interchangeably, content or inbound marketing leverages your expertise and online presence as a hub of information and attracts potential customers to your brand. Unlike more traditional outbound marketing where leads were often untraceable, inbound gives you the power to track your leads from beginning to end. Check out these resources for yourself:

5 Inbound Marketing Resources Every Marketer Should Know About

8. Email Marketing

As we mentioned previously, email marketing is an essential part of your lead nurturing process and can keep prospective customers in the loop with what’s going on in the housing industry and your company’s building endeavors. Like any tool in your marketing toolkit, email marketing has a place and a time in your buyer’s journey. Specifically, email marketing is geared towards the information hungry buyer during the attraction phase.

Nevertheless, email marketing is relevant throughout their journey. It can be even more critical in the middle of the funnel where leads tend to fall away. These resources below can give you a better understanding of how email marketing fits into a creative real estate marketing plan:

5 Digital Marketing Tactics For Senior Living Communities

November 7, 2022/in Articles, Blog, Directors, Senior Living Marketing, SEO, Website Design, Website Growth Driven Design /by Nicole Wagner

More and more seniors are becoming tech savvy, using smart phones and tablets to communicate with family and friends. They also use their smart devices to do their own research on where they want to live and how they want to do it. This is one reason why digital marketing tactics are critical for senior living marketing.

Digital Marketing Tactics for Senior Living Communities

Your website is one of your most important assets. It’s where consumers are going to find out more about your company. The place where you build trust. Where you show your leadership in the senior living industry. It’s where they can get more information about your community.

With your website in place, what digital marketing tactics should you employ?

Blogging

Blogging offers you the opportunity to provide your audience with useful information while positioning you as a trusted expert. You can use your blog to provide useful information like how to downsize, how to stay healthy as you age, how to find the right senior community and how to find work as a senior. High-quality content keeps people coming back.

Check out these tips on How to Have a Successful Blog

SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) works to get your community’s website found by the search engines. It is done with keyword placement, quality content, and a dynamic website. The more you have of all three, the better your SEO results will be.

Social Media

Social media allows you to engage your audience. You can share tips, post links to new content, or share testimonials. Facebook offers a place to share as well as a place where potential residents can make queries or learn more about your community.

Email

Email lead nurturing allows you to make your community more attractive to people who have expressed interest. You can share community events, resident highlights and interesting tidbits to show how involved and engaged the residents of your community are. That makes it more attractive to those considering moving in.

Online Advertising

Online advertising positions your brand in front of anyone seeking information on senior living communities. In fact, as they search for that kind of information, your name pops up. It can give you highly qualified leads almost instantaneously.

How Brands Use Feelings to Get People to Buy

These tactics will help you position your senior living community. You can grab the attention of seniors as well as their loved ones and care providers.

Generation X Matters: How to Tell Your Brand Story to Them

November 4, 2022/in Articles, Brand Development, Brand Story Telling, Directors, Storybranding /by Dan Gartlan

Generation X, often referred to as the middle child, is the generation sandwiched between the baby boomers and the millennials. And just like the middle child, they often feel forgotten, especially when it comes to marketing. However, this generation has impressive buying power and are essential to consider when determining how to tell your brand story.

Generation X are now in their late 30’s to early 50’s, and are the generation that remembers a time before the technological, and specifically the digital, revolution. On the whole, however, Xers were young enough when it happened to have embraced the change and made technology work for them. They have a foot in both camps and are just as at home with print media, as they are with blogs, Facebook and YouTube.

Why is Generation X Important?

While, relatively speaking, Generation X is a small customer segment in comparison to baby boomers and millennials, they have immense buying power, which should not be overlooked. However, marketers are confused about how to reach a generation that has one foot in the past, and the other firmly in touch with digital technology and change. Research has shown that 62% of this generation still read print media, while at the same time 60% use a Smartphone on a daily basis.

Despite the difficulties of appealing to this generation, they are ignored at your own risk; after all, they account for over 30% of consumer spending, and not only are they buying for themselves, but many still have financial responsibility for their children as well. They are also extremely brand loyal, once they find a brand that is worthy of that loyalty.

Creating Consistency is Key

Given all of this, consistency is vital in your brand storytelling, not only within your story but also across the platforms through which you tell that story. However, generation Xer’s are also busy, often juggling children, careers, and responsibility for older family members. So, your story and your brand need to be instantly recognizable, and easily digestible. Short snippets of information combined with audiovisual formats make your story memorable and accessible. Generation X is not shy of technology, so utilizing channels such as YouTube, along with approaches such as email marketing, is vital if you are to get your brand’s story across in a meaningful way.

While busy juggling their many commitments, creating the lifestyle they want remains of paramount importance to this generation. They work hard and expect their money to work hard on their behalf, especially as there are few guarantees when they hit retirement. They respond well to offers, especially coupons that offer what they want at a price that is well within their budget. However, they are wary of trying new, untested companies, so when choosing how to tell your brand story, you need to develop trust from the very start.

Got tips? Sure we do! Check out these six tips on email marketing.

Hearing the Voice of Generation X

Generation X has strong opinions, is generally worldly-wise, and drawn to companies that are ethical, and which promote ethical goods and services. These need to form part of your brand story if you are to begin to build the trust of this generation. However, you also need to show that you value your customer, as well as the planet.

Excellent customer service is essential to Generation X. They need to feel valued and respected by your company and your brand. If they do not, you will know very quickly. This generation, more than any other, is not afraid to take the time to say what they think, and they expect you to listen. So, your story needs to focus on the customer and show that not only do you accept and listen to feedback but also that you act on it. That means that while the fundamentals of your story – your ethos, mission, and goals – may not change, how you achieve these needs to be tweaked to adapt to the changing needs of this generation.