Digital Advertising Trends!

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Regardless of its niche or size, every business must position itself in the market to become profitable. And with digital advertising trends coming up every now and then, it takes considerable effort, time, and resources to design an ideal marketing strategy that will work for your unique business.

As a marketer or business owner, digital advertising is crucial to the continuous growth of your products or business. But many do not know that keeping up with the most recent digital marketing trends often means spending your resources to update processes, upskill employees and acquire new systems and inventories. This explains why marketing takes a significant portion of the budget in most companies.

If you are considering updating or revamping your digital advertising strategy this holiday season, there’s a lot you stand to gain. Besides staying ahead of the competition, you also have the potential to reach new customers while building brand awareness. Here are some digital advertising trends you can implement in your business.

Personalization is Key

Before advertising any product or reserve, you must know who you target and why. Most businesses often run their digital advertising campaigns in silos without a keen understanding of their business, customers, and marketing goals.

For instance, if you advertise some digital products, you must first highlight the goals you want to accomplish. These goals should complement your overall marketing goals and be detailed enough to show who you want to target, when, and how often.

To streamline your digital advertising campaigns, you should have a personalization plan. Personalizing your digital ads means giving your prospects what they want when they want it. This helps optimize your campaigns and increase the chances that your prospects will take the desired action.

But how can you incorporate personalization into your digital advertising? Here are a few tips to consider:

  • Create in-depth customer profiles. Before you can target any of your prospects, you should group them accordingly. You can use AI technology to implement lead scoring and effectively segment your target market for proper personalization.
  • Leverage user data. A lot is nested in the user data collected in the various prospects’ touchpoints. A simple site visit, for example, can give many clues and insights into how the prospects interacted with the website and what needs improvement. You can then use these clues to create a winning video advertising campaign.
  • Use dynamic retargeting to re-engage your audience. Modern personalization techniques allow marketers to show certain ads to certain visitors, increasing the accuracy and effectiveness of digital advertising.

Video Ads are On the Rise

Video ads don’t particularly fall into the category of digital advertising trends since it’s been on the market for quite some time. However, this isn’t to say that video advertising is no longer relevant. In fact, recent statistics from Wyzowl show that 91% of businesses will use video as a marketing tool in 2023, up from 86% in 2022.

If you are wondering why the numbers favor video ads, you must first note that videos have a higher engagement than any other piece of content. Most people love visuals, and marketers are rethinking their digital advertising strategies to reflect this trend.

It’s worth noting that video advertising isn’t simple and often involves lots of creativity and expertise if it’s to make a huge impact. Here are some video advertising tips you can deploy to take your marketing to the next level.

  • Ensure the videos are relevant. You can have the best video ads in the world, but if they are irrelevant they will not convert. Relevancy in the digital advertising niche means different things to different people. But you can simply put it – the videos should speak to your prospects’ problems in a relatable, timely, and persuasive way.
  • Use user-generated video ads. Incorporating user-generated videos into your ads may seem impractical, but it’s easier than you think. All you need to do is ensure the video is edited for length and relevancy.
  • Use first-person experience videos. As the name suggests, first-person videos do away with voiceovers and spokespeople, centering the experience on the customers, business owners, founders, etc. The goal is to showcase some sense of presence, ownership, and authenticity of the brand.

Mobile Optimization

Mobile optimization is one of the digital advertising trends of 2023 that’s proving quite effective in the content marketing niche. With more people using their smartphones to access the internet, it’s becoming increasingly necessary for marketers to adapt their techniques to reflect this trend.

The other reason why a mobile-first marketing strategy is crucial is that new technologies such as AR and VR are predominantly app-based, making smartphones and mobile experiences the absolute winner.

By optimizing content for mobile, marketers and business owners can increase the visibility of their products and brands, helping drive the conversation. Using video content as an example, here are a few mobile optimization techniques you can implement:

  • Use square and vertical videos. Most videos with an aspect ratio of 4:5 are ideal for smartphone users and would work best for social media channels like Facebook and Instagram. For YouTube videos, an aspect ratio of 16:9 is ideal.
  • Keep the videos short. The video ads should be short and engaging.
  • Feature the brand or product message early. Since the video is short, ensure you feature the brand early enough. This ensures prospects know what you are promoting as soon as the ad plays.

Make Digital Advertising a Breeze

Digital marketing is one of the highly dynamic fields, and as a digital marketer, you need to stay up to date with the latest digital advertising trends. The three tips we highlighted above are just a few of the many, so feel free to research and try different techniques before picking the best.

Besides being on the lookout for new digital marketing trends, it’s crucial to constantly review your digital marketing strategies to know whether they are effective. You can seek expert help when monitoring your digital marketing strategies to ensure you have the upper hand.

 

Dan Gartlan helps companies of all kinds drive their business initiatives and achieve their goals. He does this with strategic marketing programs that deliver results. As President of Stevens & Tate Marketing, he has over 20 years of experience across various industries. He continues to share and build brands nationwide.

Web Design

6 Web Design Principles to Increase Conversions

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Putting thought into your web design is a must if you have any ambitions to grow your business. While the content that you host on your site and the strength of your SEO strategy will help you attract leads, your web design will play a big part in your ability to convert leads. Keeping that in mind, the following are six web design principles for conversions:

1. Use A Responsive Design

If you’re not using a responsive design, it means that although your website may load properly on desktops, it may not be displayed correctly on smaller screens, such as those on smartphones and tablets. If your website doesn’t load properly on a smartphone, it will require the user to not only scroll up and down but also left to right — and to zoom in and out. Few mobile users will have the patience to deal with a site like this, which will lead to a significant bounce rate. Use a responsive design so that you don’t lose your mobile leads.

2. Ensure That Your Pages Load Quickly

Even if your site does load properly, few visitors will have the patience for pages that load slowly. It should take no more than one to two seconds for your site to load. If it takes three or more seconds, you’re in trouble. Leads will get frustrated and will likely abandon your site. Test your page speeds to ensure that they load quickly.

3. Don’t Include Too Many Choices

Too many choices can make it difficult for visitors to figure out what they want or to find what they’re looking for. For example, a navigation menu is a great addition. It lets visitors find your blog, contact page, product page, etc. However, if you fill up that navigation menu with dozens upon dozens of links, it becomes overwhelming. Not only will it actually be more difficult for visitors to find what they’re looking for, but too many choices requires them to commit more of their time to make a decision. To capture leads, you need to help guide their decision making–offering too many choices does the opposite. Keep it simple.

Why are call-to-action phrases so important? Learn more by clicking here!

4. Use Negative Space

The visual design of a page should be kept relatively simple to prevent visitors from becoming overwhelmed. The last thing you want is a page covered in text, links, images, videos, and more. This makes it hard to find anything amidst the clutter. To avoid this, make sure that there’s plenty of negative space throughout each page. Negative space helps reduce clutter, gives your site a clean and elegant look, and makes your page easier to scan.

5. Choose Colors Carefully

The way you use color is psychologically important. Colors evoke different emotions and reactions from your visitors. For example, blue indicates trust, which is why it’s a color often used for CTA buttons. However, the colors you choose should reflect the content on your page as well as your brand in general. Just make sure you keep your colors consistent and that you don’t go overboard using colors. You should stick to a few main colors and their variations. Typically, it’s best if you choose one color along with a second that offers some contrast.

6. Use An F-Layout

Studies have shown that the attention of users is focused in an F-pattern. This means that when they first come to a page, they will be most focused on the top left and top right parts of your page. This slowly diminishes as they work their way down, which means the bottom right of a page gets the least amount of attention. Designing your pages so that they display information in an F-layout is therefore a good way to ensure that the information you want to convey is consumed by your visitors. For example, having the bulk of your content on the left side, positioning important links on the top right side, and then adding your CTA to the bottom left will create an effective F-layout.

The design of your website is essential to not only keeping your visitors engaged, but to keep them on your website for as long as possible. The longer you’re able to keep your visitors on your site, the better of a chance you have of converting them. These are six web design principles for conversions that you should consider implementing.

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Soft Sell Advertising: What it is, Why it works, and How to Execute

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When it comes to advertising, businesses as a whole tend to be aggressive. They let you know exactly who they are, what they do, and why you should buy from them. Even in inbound marketing, companies will try to tie the topic of conversation in with their products or services in some way. However, this isn’t the only course of action. You can also reach your target audience and successfully engage them by advertising in a more subtle manner. Such a strategy is known as soft-sell advertising.

What Is Soft-Sell Advertising?

Soft-sell advertising is a more subtle form of advertising. The goal behind soft-sell advertising is to evoke a positive emotional response. The idea is that the customer will then subconsciously connect the response they had to the brand that invoked it. Businesses that implement soft-selling marketing will often create ads that are warm or humorous, as these tend to be the ads that invoke the most positive feelings.

The History of Soft-Selling

The idea of soft-selling first emerged in 1914, when Theodore MacManus published an ad that would become the model for the soft-sell. The ad was essentially an essay on the burden of being the best in one’s field. The ad was for Cadillac, yet Cadillac wasn’t mentioned a single time. Nor was there an illustration that ran with the ad. Yet the ad was incredibly successful.

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The Benefits Of Soft-Sell Advertising

The following are some of the reasons why you should incorporate soft-selling advertising into your marketing strategy:

  • Less pressure on customers – Because soft-sell ads don’t push products or services, customers will feel less pressure to buy. The pressure is apparent in hard-sell ads, and it’s often off-putting. Using soft-selling ads, you give your audience the ability to discover your brand and make a purchasing decision on their own time.
  • Increase brand awareness – Even though you’re not pushing your brand into their faces, audiences will be more likely to share your content. The reason? People don’t share ads, they share content. When you create a soft-sell ad, you have to focus on the quality of the content and not on the sale. If you are able to create high-quality content that invokes a positive emotion, your audience will share that content. People will share content that elicits a positive reaction to their friends, thereby increasing your brand awareness.
  • Build more trust – Another result of having to focus on content quality is that you’ll build more trust. You’re basically offering your audience something of quality without asking for something in return. This shows them that you care about more than just sales. As a result, they’ll be more likely to explore your brand further. Not to mention that building trust is essential to building long-lasting relationships.

Examples of Soft Sell Advertising

Soft sell advertising has grown in popularity, both in regards to inbound marketing and outbound marketing. The following are a few examples of effective soft-selling ads:

  • Yeti – Yeti is a company that sells coolers and outdoor accessories. They filmed an entire series of videos called Hungry Life showing a well-known chef spending time in nature, where he picks plants, goes fishing, and prepares his meals outdoors. Although Yeti’s coolers do make an appearance, they are never showcased or talked about. Yeti is obviously targeting a specific audience by showcasing a specific lifestyle. That audience will then make an emotional connection between that lifestyle and the Yeti brand.
  • Burt’s Bees – Burt’s Bees uses their founder as the spokesperson. This is perfect because he essentially represents their main buyer persona. The Nature of Burt video introduces Burt, who explains who he is. He’s likable and funny, and their target audience can relate to him. What makes the video so effective is that it builds an emotional connection between the viewer and Burt, all without ever promoting the brand or its products.

Implement a Soft-Sell Advertising Strategy Today

Because many companies focus many of their marketing efforts on generating brand awareness, they tend to be overly aggressive. However, soft-sell marketing can be incredibly effective in terms of engaging your audience and building trust. As such, you should be sure to include soft-sell marketing tactics in your inbound marketing strategy.

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Vital Factors to Consider When Implementing a Growth Driven Web Design

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A well-designed site is vital to the online success of your business. Recent studies show that at least 94% of respondents rarely trust websites with poor designs. On the other hand, a growth driven web design is intuitive and positively impacts brand perception and lead conversion.

Growth-driven design is a revolutionary approach to creating high-performance websites founded on analytics and designed with specific objectives for continuous improvement.

Here are some important considerations when implementing a growth driven website design.

1. Customer Needs and Wants

Develop a clear picture of your target audience’s needs and wants, and determine the best way to fulfill them.

This sets the essential foundation for a growth driven web design. Start by developing a clear, focused strategy that pivots on the needs and wants of your ideal customer. While your website will launch with a simple version, focusing on customer needs helps you plan future updates and the continuous process cycle.

Understanding your customer needs requires creating accurate buyer personas. Buyer personas represent your ideal customers and website users. They help your team determine the best ways to communicate with empathy and personalize customer interactions.

In addition, a persona establishes a common messaging tone among your marketing team since they have a clear picture of your website’s end user.

You can start by running internal and external interviews to gather information from employees and past clients representing your ideal audience. Email surveys and phone calls are common when gathering information to finetune your buyer persona.

2. Customer Journey

The customer journey charts the road map for your website users and customers seeking solutions to their problems. Growth driven web design makes it easy to identify different stages of the customer journey and provide appropriate tools and solutions to help customers make quick decisions.

Determining the exact stage in the customer journey is essential in determining appropriate offers, website features, and supporting content for optimum conversions. The goal is to get a comprehensive view of your customer’s actions throughout your sales funnels and ensure satisfaction.

3. Fundamental Assumptions

In growth driven web design, fundamental assumptions are like the foundation for a house. Therefore, you must determine the aspects that exert the most weight on the foundation.

Establishing a strong foundation is essential to ensure the website is versatile and long-lasting. Ideally, ensure the design is aligned with your goals and has the right content to guide your team.

You can accomplish this by combining personas, customer journeys, and analytics to develop fundamental assumptions to guide your design and marketing approach for the best results.

4. Short-term and Long-term Goals

This stage involves establishing goals based on buyer persona data and customer research. Each goal is anchored in business metrics and analytics to ensure the website has all the necessary features. However, it’s essential to know what you want to achieve with your growth driven design web. Your overall business objectives guide the process by creating a clear road map.

In addition, you can brainstorm a wish list of things that might improve your website’s impact on your business and customers. Think about additional integrations, modules, features, and functionality.

This process starts by identifying elements that create the highest impact. Typically, it involves identifying the must-have and nice-to-have elements so you can cross out anything that can be added later. This process allows you to identify the core purpose of your website.

Most importantly, it helps finetune your strategy blueprint for the perfect design based on your business needs. However, your team’s collaboration between the strategist, designer, and project manager is essential to ensure the strategy aligns with your business objectives.

5. Content Development

Effective content strategy is among the key elements of a robust online presence to achieve business goals. While the minimum viable design aims at launching a functional site, it’s critical to determine the ideal content to answer user queries and move customers through the sales funnel. Ideally, you should create memorable content that connects with users and solves their problems.

ReportsThe information should be simple, well-organized, and easy to understand. Visual hierarchy helps in content structure to ensure it’s logical and meaningful. This ensures that important information gets the most emphasis while less important information gets the least emphasis.

You can achieve content hierarchy by implementing visual techniques like contrast, color, white space, size, movement, and alignment. Content hierarchy improves information digestion and guides users to find important information quickly to fulfill their intentions.

6. Process Cycle

Once you’ve launched the website, it’s important to review its performance to determine the impact on your business goals. The process involves stakeholder feedback to gain insights into traffic sources and visitor behaviors. Real user data is invaluable at every stage as it gives you a clear picture of website activity.

Depending on the analysis results, you can determine the next action based on the items on your wish list.

Possible actions may include:

  • Improving conversions by influencing users to take specific actions
  • Boost the user experience by enhancing user interaction with the site to ensure easier navigation. Periodic updates are necessary to streamline the design and content.
  • Visitor personalization by leveraging user data to implement changes that suit evolving needs, including content offers and calls to action.
  • Integrating marketing assets like signup forms, social platforms, resources, and tools to provide more value to users and enhance engagement

7. User Experience

Regardless of your site’s design and the available information, user experience determines its success. You might have invaluable resources on your website, but if the user experience hardships navigating and finding what they want, you risk losing valuable prospects.

While outstanding website usability may go unnoticed by the users, poor usability has immediate impacts. Therefore, your website design must be intuitive, navigable, mobile-friendly, and accessible. Ideally, you should anticipate visitors’ actions and help them achieve their goals effortlessly.

While visual aesthetics are essential across multiple devices, upholding a consistent brand image is critical. The website should represent your business fully and create a strong connection with users.

The Bottom Line

Most businesses are shifting from traditional designs and moving towards growth driven web design. Besides enjoying additional flexibility, the companies experience more success in lead conversion and user experience.

Instead of redesigning and launching a new website every two years, growth driven web design creates an upgrade-ready design that evolves with your business. Moreover, decisions are based on data analytics to ensure upgrades are based on real customer needs.

Creating Creative Video Campaign

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The Super Bowl is undoubtedly one of the most celebrated sporting events. It can draw millions of viewers across digital channels and traditional TV platforms. This one-day event with a history of high-profile commercials often means a lot to marketers and business owners. And while many wait a few weeks before the Super Bowl to begin working on their video campaign idea, it’s best to prepare early enough. To create the best video campaigns for the next Super Bowl, you’ll need to review and learn from previous events. That means exploring various video marketing campaigns, including the best and worst Super Bowl commercials.

In the sections below, we’ll discuss a few Super Bowl video marketing ideas and how you can use them to improve your overall video marketing campaigns.

Create a Memorable Pre-game Teaser

You’ve probably watched those super bowl ads that went on to feature in every article for the rest of the year and attracted lots of social media attention. And perhaps you know of some big-time super bowl advertisement fails. The difference between these two sets of video commercials may not be so pronounced and could lie in the finer details.

Making a thirty-seconds pre-game teaser memorable takes a lot of expertise and some trial and error. It also requires understanding emotional advertising, creativity, and proper timing. Sometimes the best ads turn out to be a complete flop, so only after testing them can you confirm the ads will work for your specific audience.

Before consolidating your resources to create a pre-game teaser, you want to focus on delivering the right message in the shortest possible time. A rule of thumb is to be unique while driving the point home. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

  • Ensure your video is relevant to the event. Super-bowl is highly anticipated; you want to capture the thrill and excitement. Everything about your video, from the visuals to the sound, should be engaging, dynamic and compelling.
  • Use suspense. There’s a lot to fit in a 30-second pre-game teaser, and your video should convey just the relevant information without being deemed boring. You can use the various elements of suspense, such as conflict, empathy, and anticipation, to drive the point home.
  • Make the video shareable. Your pre-game teaser won’t be as impactful if it’s not optimized for sharing. Consider promoting your Super Bowl teaser across various social media channels. You can leverage influencers to share your teaser and invite your audience to share their thoughts.

Utilize Humor to Make an Impact

There’s something about humor that makes it irresistibly powerful, especially in the video marketing niche. People anticipating the super bowl want to share in the fun and excitement of their favorite team engaging in a competitive sporting event that’s deeply rooted in their culture. What you don’t want to do is bring in some dull vibes and spoil their uplifted spirit.

Besides making your brand and message more memorable, humor also connects with the audience personally, making them laugh and feel good and relaxed. It also keeps viewers wanting more, it makes your super bowl commercial more sharable across social media and other platforms.

And while everyone knows that humor is critical to a successful viral marketing campaign, most marketers are yet to leverage this low-hanging fruit. But the problem isn’t using humor for video marketing, but how well to integrate humor into a 30-second commercial.

The common mistake many people make when incorporating humor into their marketing is being insensitive to their audience. A good old joke you often circulate in your department can be offensive to certain groups of people. This often comes with a hefty price and could quickly damage your brand’s reputation. Many marketers try to copy past commercials or successful Super Bowl ads, and they end up hurting their image. As much as you want to add humor to your commercial, try not to overdo it.

Leverage Social Media

Not so long ago, Super Bowl ads were meant for the big screens. Large media houses had the monopoly of showcasing whatever ads were lined up during the commercial breaks. This, however, is no longer the case. Nowadays, millions of people watch the Super Bowl from the comfort of their smartphones.

For video marketers, this means a lot as far as video marketing ideas are concerned. Instead of designing Super Bowl ads just for the big screens, you want to design them for social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

Before creating a Super Bowl ad or teaser, you must carefully plan the delivery. You must also ensure the audience can easily share the video across all social media channels. Most Super Bowl commercials that go viral are well-optimized for social media. They are short and visually stunning and appear on various social media platforms, encouraging people to share the videos and discuss what they think about the game and the video commercials.

The other video marketing ideas you can implement are: posting some sneak previews and behind the scene-videos of the ads on social media. You can also source user-generated content by developing a social media challenge relating to your ad where you invite users to edit the videos for sound and graphics, with the best editor earning some prize, e.g., branded merchandise, the next super bowl ticket, etc.

Make Video Marketing Work for You

Creating an effective video marketing campaign takes a lot of practice and expertise. Unless you can create an informative, visually appealing video that speaks to your audience, you’ll have difficulty selling your products or services. Whether you are a marketer, a business executive, or a business owner, it’s crucial to understand the basics of video marketing. Combining several video marketing ideas and seeking expert advice could mark the difference between failed branding and a golden opportunity to create a memorable ad that steals the show and gets the attention you’ve been longing for.

6 Behavioral Market Segmentation Examples

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When it comes to marketing automation, few techniques are as beneficial as segmentation, which allows you to categorize your leads based on data that you’ve collected on them. This, in turn, allows you to personalize their experience more, thereby making your nurturing efforts more effective. However, normal segmentation is based on who the user says they are; often provided by the information they fill out in your opt-in forms.

Another effective form of segmentation you should look into is behavioral market. Behavioral market segmentation segments your leads based on how they behave. This behavioral data comes from analytics. The following are six examples of behavioral market segmentation that you can benefit from:

1. User Purchasing Behavior

Basic purchasing behavior can be broken down into four categories:

Complex– When the user is highly involved in both the purchase and decision-making process between two very different brands.

Variety-Seeking- In which the user isn’t that involved in the purchasing process. However, they may choose a different brand just to try it out.

Dissonance-Reducing– Where the customer is happy with their brand, but they know other options that could be better. This also happens, when the customer needs to make a major purchase, but there’s not much difference between the products they’re considering.

Habitual– When little involvement is needed and the product doesn’t vary much from brand to brand. It’s mainly just personal preference that matters. 

These behavioral market segmentation categories make it easier to identify what users are more likely to make a purchase and how you can make your product and brand stand out from the competition.

2. Occasion-Based Behavior

User behavior is sometimes identifiable by special occasions. For example, consumers often make more purchases around the holiday season or for special events in their own lives, such as birthdays and anniversaries. Occasion-based behaviors can be split up into universal occasions, regular personal occasions, and rare personal occasions. This will allow you to tailor content to all of these different occasions in a more personal manner.

Using Customer Segmentation To Improve Engagement

3. Usage Rate

Usage rate divides your users into heavy, mid-level, and light users based on how often they purchase your products or services. When segmenting your audience based on their usage behavior, you’ll be able to focus on turning light users into mid-level users and mid-level users into heavy users while keeping heavy users happy.

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4. Purchase Reasoning

Different users have different reasons for purchasing your product or service. Knowing what those motivations  will make it easier to meet their needs. For example, if you are selling business software, it may have many benefits, including ease-of-use, affordability, scalability, and integration capabilities. If you have an article about the affordability of your solutions to a user that purchased your software due to its scalability isn’t going to be an effective way to engage with them.

5. Customer Loyalty

Keep in mind that just because a customer keeps buying your product or service doesn’t mean that they are a loyal customer. Customers that are continually in need of the product or service that you offer are habitual customers. Whereas loyal customers only purchase your products and services, ignoring your competition.

They are important because they end up generating most of your revenue and aren’t that expensive to cater to. As a result, it’s important to be able to identify who your loyal customers are from your regular customers. That way  you can focus on building your relationship with them.

6. Consumer Status

Determining a user’s status will help you figure out how to best approach them. For example, non-users need to be aware of what their problem or pain point is before you can offer your product or service as a solution. Other types of consumer statuses include prospects (who are learning about your product or service), first-time buyers (who may need to learn how to get the most out of your product), regular users (who may benefit from supplemental products), and defectors (who are ex-customers that have chosen a product from a competitor whose trust you need to try to regain).

These are six types of behavioral market segmentation examples that can help you to more effectively–and efficiently–engage with your users and to continue building relationships with them over the course of their buyer’s journey.

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Using Customer Segmentation To Improve Engagement

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Once a lead has made a purchase and has become a customer, your job isn’t over. The most successful businesses are those that turn their customers into repeat customers–and this requires you to continue building the relationships that you’ve already established through regular engagement. However, as your business begins growing, it’s going to become more and more difficult to keep track of all of your customers and to meet their individual needs. To deal with this challenge, you should implement customer segmentation.

What is Customer Segmentation?

The strategy behind customer segmentation involves using the data that you’ve collected on your customers, including the information that they have provided, their general behaviour on your website, the way they’ve engaged with you, and their purchase history, to divide them into different groups so that you can effectively target different groups within your audience at a time.

For example, if you sell pet food, then sending out a promotion for new dog food to customers who only own cats aren’t going to be an effective way to encourage them to make another purchase. If you’ve segmented your customers, you can send that same promotion to a customer that actually owns a cat or that has bought cat food in the past.

Customer Segmentation Examples

The following are a few customer segmentation examples to give you an idea of how to leverage your customer data to segment your customer lists:

1. Demographics

You can obtain customer demographic information via surveys and opt-in forms. This information can be helpful for segmentation for a number of reasons. For example, if your business sells a product that comes in an affordable model as well as a luxury model, knowing which customers fall within a high household income bracket will be helpful. Additionally, the way you engage with your audience may differ depending on their age. Certain types of messaging will appeal more to college-aged adults than senior citizens, for example, and they will likely have different pain points as well.

2. Geographic location

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Segmenting your customer list based on where they live can be very helpful for a number of reasons. First off, you may have store-specific promotions. If you have multiple locations throughout the state or throughout the country, then you’ll want to make sure you’re targeting customers that can actually take advantage of it. Secondly, you may have products or services that are specific to certain parts of the country. For example, you may sell heavy-duty winter clothing. Even if you’re an online retailer, targeting customers who live in warm climates where it doesn’t snow will be ineffective.

3. Purchase patterns

Knowing when your customers are making their purchases and what they are purchasing can help you segment them into groups that you can target to improve sales even more. For example, some shoppers may be hesitant and may regularly leave products in their shopping carts without checking out. You could send them a special offer or discount code to help encourage them to see the purchase through. Grouping together customers based on when they make their purchases (on the weekend, in the evenings, on certain holidays, etc.) can help you time your interactions more effectively as well.

4. Device used

Tracking what devices your customers used to make purchases or to view products can be helpful in providing the right offers at the right times. For example, customers who are using mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets, to make purchases are most likely doing it away from work since most people who browse during work hours do so on their computers.

These are just a few ways that you can implement customer segmentation to improve your ability to engage with existing customers using the data you’ve collected from them. Successful customer segmentation will greatly improve your marketing efforts as a result.

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A Brief Guide to Sales Lead Generation

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While your ultimate goal, when it comes to marketing online, is to increase sales both in the short term and over the long term, increasing sales won’t be possible unless you generate leads. As such, the success of your inbound marketing efforts are going to revolve around your ability to generate new sales leads. Without new leads, you can’t obtain new customers, which means the growth of your business will be severely stunted. Keeping that in mind, the following is a brief guide to using inbound marketing to improve sales lead generation.

What Is Sales Lead Generation?

sales lead generation for business

Sales Lead generation refers to the process of identifying, attracting, and nurturing potential customers or clients for a business’s products or services. The ultimate goal of lead generation is to generate sales-ready leads that can be converted into paying customers.

A lead is basically a consumer (or company if you’re a B2B business) that shows some level of interest in the products or services that you offer. Engaging with a lead tends to be more productive than engaging with someone who isn’t a lead (for example, cold calling people from a list you’ve obtained or trying to hand out pamphlets to people about your product on the street).

Because you have a better chance at closing a sale when engaging with a lead, you’ll want to generate as many leads as possible. To do this, you will need to attract potential leads to your brand, whether it’s to your website or to your social media page, and find a way to convert them. This is done by giving them a reason to be interested in not just your products and services, but also your brand in general, and by encouraging them through calls-to-action to sign up to your email, give you a call, or fill out a form (to name a few examples).

Once you’ve captured your leads, you can nurture them through the sales funnel, eventually turning those leads into customers (and hopefully, loyal customers).

Ways To Generate New Sales Leads

The following are a few inbound tactics you’ll want to implement in order to generate new leads:

1. Create blog content

Setting up a blog and regularly publishing high-quality content that’s relevant to your brand is an excellent way to generate new leads for a number of reasons. The following are just a few ways that content can help generate leads:

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Relevant calls-to-action can help capture leads who are reading your blog content.

Quality blog content builds brand authority, which increases the amount of trust the public has in you. This means that leads will be less hesitant to provide you with their personal information when filling out forms.

Quality blog content is more likely to be shared by your leads on social media, providing it with more exposure to more potential leads.

Properly optimized blog content can help bring more leads via organic traffic from search engines.

Related Article: How to Have a Successful Blog (Expert Tips)

2. Run PPC ads

PPC (pay per click) ads can be incredibly effective for attracting highly motivated leads. Many businesses use PPC ads on search engines like Google and Bing to find leads who are already in the advanced stages of their buyer’s journey and are looking for specific solutions to their needs or problems. PPC ads can help attract these leads and drive them to your website.

3. Offer free trials

Consumers who are looking for potential solutions to their problems or needs will be attracted to the opportunity of signing up for a free trial, especially if they are under no obligation to buy. It’s an excellent way to draw leads who aren’t quite sure what product or service they want to go with (in terms of brand) or even whether it will fulfill their specific need.

4. Engage on social media

Engaging on social media by taking part in community discussions or posting comments on relevant topics can help you attract leads. You can ev

en post contests that are relevant to your brand that require users to follow you in order to participate. Your followers are leads that you can continue to nurture through social media engagement and that you can drive towards your website via content and other offers.

5. Implement a referral program

An undervalued method for sales lead generation is by getting current customers to do it for you. You could implement a referral program that rewards customers for referring leads to your brand with discounts or other similar rewards.

As important as sales lead generation is, it’s not always about generating as many leads as possible. Yes, the more quality leads you to generate, the better, but not all leads are of high quality. For example, you can technically buy leads. The problem with this is that the leads you’re purchasing may not even be familiar with your brand, which means that they may not even have the problem or need that your solution is attempting to address. Focus on generating your leads organically and you’ll create a much better chance of converting them.

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What is a Brand Story? Differentiating Yourself From The Competition

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With all the choices that consumers have in this day and age, just having a good product at a fair price point just isn’t going to cut it. Consumers don’t just care about the product (or service) they’re buying, they care who they’re buying it from, which is why your company’s brand identity is so important to your success. One of the important elements of your brand identity is your brand story. A lot of businesses mistakenly think that this is covered in their “about us” page on their website; however, your brand story is not the same thing as your company history but the goal of a brand story is to create a connection between the brand and the consumer, and to establish the brand’s identity in the minds of consumers. While your company history can be an important part of your brand story, your brand story involves the consumer as much as it involves your company and is absolutely essential in helping you to differentiate your company from your competition.

What Is A Brand Story?

A brand story is the narrative of your brand. It shouldn’t just provide information to the audience about who your company is, it should also tell consumers what your motivations are and should inspire an emotional reaction. For example, while the history of your company can play a role in your brand story, it’s arguably more important why you started the company than how you started it. This helps to get across your mission as well as your core values. Additionally, this allows you to address the consumer as a character in your story. The reason you started the company was to address a certain problem or need that your consumers have, after all.

Learn more about branding: Why Brand Development Matters and How it Works

There are dozens — if not hundreds — of companies that are similar to yours, whether they are competing directly with you or not. These companies may offer similar products that address similar needs to the same target audience. Simply saying that your products or services are better than theirs won’t get you far, even if you’re able to generate content that backs your statements. This is because consumers need to be able to connect with you on an emotional level. They want to relate to the brand that they choose. To do this, you need to differentiate yourself from your competition via your brand story.

A brand story makes it easier for consumers to connect with you due to the fact that storytelling has been an effective way to communicate messages and ideas throughout history. Using storytelling techniques in order to inform consumers about your company is going to make it much easier for them to stay engaged with you. There are several ways that you can do this. For example, you can position your company as the main protagonist whose goal it is to help the consumer or you can position the consumer as the main protagonist who must overcome an obstacle (a problem or need that the consumer has) with the help of your company (a solution in the form of your products or services).

When it comes down to it, creating a brand story helps differentiate your company from your competition while also making your brand more engaging for consumers, thereby making you more relatable on a personal level and more trustworthy as a result.

Creating Your Brand Story

Now that you understand what a brand story is and it’s importance, it’s time to develop your unique brand story:

  • Determine your company’s purpose

    What is your origin story? This doesn’t just refer to the date your company was founded, but why you decided to establish your business. What was your motivation? What is your mission? For example, maybe you realized that customer service within a certain industry was poor and you wanted to provide a better customer experience. Consumers want to know that there’s more to your company’s goals than just profit.

  • Understand who your audience is

    You can’t tell a story without an audience, and you need to know who you’re talking to in order to tell your story effectively. Your story should include your audience as a character, so you must know who your audience is. What are their main challenges, needs, and goals? Knowing this (along with more detailed demographic information) gives you a better understanding of how to tell an engaging story. It’s also why developing buyer personas is particularly helpful when it comes to your brand story.

  • Make sure your brand story remains consistent

    The products and services you sell need to align with your story. For example, if your main goal as a company is to provide an affordable alternative to a luxury product, then you can’t suddenly begin selling high-priced luxury items. Everything you do, from products and services to your marketing efforts, needs to align with your brand story. This means that you also need to maintain the same tone and messaging of your brand story across all platforms. A lack of consistency is going to hurt your brand identity and, in turn, hurt your trustworthiness.

  • Keep it simple

    Simple brand stories are easy for consumers to remember and make it easier for you to maintain consistency. If your story is too convoluted or long, you’ll lose the message and maintaining consistency across platforms becomes more difficult. It will also confuse your audience and help make your competitors’ brand stories appear more clear and well-defined.

  • Be authentic

    Make sure that your brand story actually represents who your brand is. Many companies try appealing to different audiences and adjust their story inauthentically to try making an emotional connection with them. This often happens if you don’t understand who your audience actually is. For example, if you run a clothing line that mostly middle-aged adults purchase but you want to break into the youth market, you might try to spice up your brand story to connect with a younger crowd by using younger slang and referring to pop culture or issues that you think they care about. However, consumers are smart — they can tell if a brand is being inauthentic and it won’t go over well.

  • Be personal

    Appeal to the emotions of your audience. You want them to feel something about your brand story. That’s why it’s important to be authentic about your motivations and your values. You should also make your audience part of your brand story so that it’s more relatable to them.

Your brand story is an important element of your brand identity and helps to emphasize what your brand’s message is. By creating a brand story and aligning your marketing efforts with that brand story, you’ll establish a foundation for who you are and what your company’s purpose is, thereby making it easier for consumers to relate and connect with your brand on a more personal level.

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Effective Marketing Strategies: The Ultimate Guide To Building Brand Authority

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Establishing brand authority is invaluable when promoting your company, especially in the early stages. However, you need effective marketing strategies to pull this off.

The modern consumer relies on research, opinions, and reviews before purchasing a product. But when a customer trusts your brand, they become more receptive. This means they are open to repeat purchases with minimal marketing efforts –bridging the trust-loyalty gap.

Building brand authority requires resources, commitment, and planning. However, some strategies can prove more effective than others. Typically, marketers should focus on creating an image that resonates with their prospective customers. When consumers trust your brand, it’s easier to sell, cross-sell, and upsell your services or products. Here are some of the most effective marketing strategies to help you establish brand authority.

Launch a Responsive Website and Keep It Updated

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Your website is a powerful and effective asset in your marketing tools arsenal, forming the foundation of your strategy. When people search for products and services, they start with online research. Therefore, a website creates the first impression of your brand.

It’s essential to set up a responsive website that ticks all the boxes to help your audience find the site. Once the search engines notice your website, potential customers can find your products and services. However, optimizing the website to ensure maximum user experience is prudent.

Simplify navigation and download for a seamless experience and ensure related products are easy to find. Similarly, the content must be authoritative and informative to ensure it covers all user queries. And since most people use mobile devices, compatibility is a critical consideration. But if you want to increase trust and recognition, include testimonials from past clients.

Video Marketing

Video is an in-dismissible marketing and sales strategy in the digital age. Video marketing uses motion pictures to promote your brand. Unlike written content, video educates the audience, boosts engagement, and helps your brand stand out from competitors.

You are missing a powerful marketing opportunity if your marketing strategies don’t include video. Studies show that 92% of businesses consider video a must-have strategy that ensures lasting results.

You can create virtual tours of your business or happy customers enjoying your products or services. Regardless of your choice, focus on quality and relevance to ensure maximum impact.

Strategic Digital Content Marketing

Content marketing is a vital and effective strategy for your business. However, creating high-quality content requires expertise, but it’s worth the effort. If you don’t have an in-house content team, you can outsource the service to third-party creators with a track record of delivering stellar results.

Besides helping search engines rank your site, quality content can convert prospects to loyal customers. Serious customers don’t need irritating popups or irrelevant information –they want to fulfill their search intent.

Most prospects on your website want relevant, high-quality, informative, and engaging content. Unless you ensure the content resonates with your target audience, visitors won’t spend much time on your website. Therefore, the content should grab visitors’ attention quickly and encourage them to interact with your site and learn more about your brand.

Ideally, the content should focus on the persona’s pain points and how your products can solve the problem. Similarly, avoid overemphasizing your brand and instead focus on the offer.

Leverage CRM Tools to Nurture Relationships

CRM software helps build and manage relationships with your customers. Businesses receive multiple leads from various sources, including phone calls, walk-ins, referrals, emails, social media, and websites. Building a great customer relationship ensures recurrent revenues from return customers.

Since every lead is a potential customer, it’s critical to group, monitor, and track the leads. Having a reliable system to nurture and manage leads throughout the funnel can improve efficiency.

Besides automating customer data and tracking the customer journey, CRM can provide insights and simplify follow-up management. Depending on your business needs, you can find appropriate CRM software to supercharge your marketing strategy.

Email Marketing

Email marketing offers a channel to communicate and engage with your customers. While inbound marketingis about building and nurturing relationships, email marketing establishes the relationships in your customer’s inbox.

But this doesn’t mean spamming your audience. You only send valuable emails to people who have granted you permission, and they can opt out of your email list.

While most email marketing tools are excellent, you need to plan and schedule your email broadcasts depending on the prospect’s position in the sales funnel.

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Since consistency is golden in email marketing and sales strategy, creating evergreen sequences is essential to engage customers at different stages in the sales cycle. You can start by offering freebies to establish and nurture relationships. Offering valuable information without asking for anything builds trust and makes your prospect receptive to future offers.

The emails should go out on a specific day of the week throughout your marketing strategy to ensure consistency. This helps demonstrate professionalism and discipline when delivering on your promise.

Establish Social Media Presence and Connect With Your Audience

Social media is more than a modern broadcast tool; at least 73% of businesses consider social media an effective marketing strategy. It’s an effective platform where you can interact with your prospects on a personal level and build lasting relationships.

Social media helps establish a bond with your followers and broadcast valuable content. Most importantly, you can interact with influencers in your industry. Collaborating with influencers can boost your content reach and brand visibility since you leverage a wider network.

Influencer social sharing can attract inbound links from other websites, which increases your domain authority. High-ranking domains get a higher feedback loop since you get more organic traffic.

Most social media platforms provide users with data about their followers. Similarly, social media analytics tools can offer deep insight into the best content for your audience based on their preferences and habits.

Bottom Line

Effective marketing strategies identify your target audience and prospective customers. Once you understand the buyer persona, you can create messages that resonate with their needs and demonstrate why your brand is better than the competition.

However, you’ll need patience and consistency before getting meaningful results. Regardless of your industry, you can implement proven strategies to boost brand recognition and authority and improve your bottom line.