What is Attraction Marketing And How Can It Set Your Business Apart

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Attraction marketing is the culmination of your marketing efforts to draw customers to you and your brand. As with any marketing strategy, attraction marketing focuses on setting your brand apart from your competitors by making your company attractive to potential buyers. This is accomplished through developing your brand marketing strategy by evaluating your marketing goals, evaluating how your are performing, and adjusting your plan using metrics.

Attraction Marketing Strategy and Story

Attraction marketing is all about making your brand more attractive to your buyer personas as well as attracting them to you through inbound marketing. The two work hand-in-hand and should be a pillar of your marketing efforts, and it all begins with your attraction marketing strategy or strategies as the case may be — there is no one “right” way to market your brand but there are many tried and true ways to do it.

Strategy alone, however, doesn’t necessarily flow through to your customers but your story does and storybranding is how to give your brand an enduring and lasting impression on your clients. Be careful though, as storybranding and storytelling are two different animals.

Get Found and Be Seen

Your brand story sets up the foundation for who you are and what you do and, if done right, will be the thing that your buyers admire as they meander through your sales funnel. Of course, all of that magnificent storybranding will be for naught without a quality website and some killer SEO which is exactly why you need to shore up your website: to be seen.

We’re talking, of course, about your internet presence and how it affects your attraction marketing campaigns. The gateway to your brand story and to your attraction marketing as a whole goes through your website which may very well be your most valuable sales asset. Most importantly, it puts you on a level playing field with your competition through the necessary exposure of the internet.

Getting folks to that site comes down to search engine optimization which spans both organic and pay per click by optimizing your website for greater results. While SEO is an intrinsic tool to have, the quality of the content you provide on your site is what keeps buyers there and hooks them in to your sales process.

Want to learn more about how to create quality content? Read this article on how to create content for each sale funnel stage.

Thought Leadership

Possibly one of the most useful parts of attraction marketing for your business is that you become the thought leader in your industry. Buyers as well as industry leaders will turn to your brand to help solve their problems as you make them more aware of the issues they face.

Thought leadership though is more than simply having quality content and making that content relevant to your target audience. It deals with the entire suite of broadcasting your brand, who you are, and what you know about your industry and the solutions you have available across many different avenues. Social media, trade shows, marketing metrics, and lead nurturing all make up vital pieces of your thought leadership toolset.

More than that, the importance of thought leadership for your brand is to continue to set yourself up on a higher plane than the rest of your competition by delivering what you already know and conveying it in a way that attracts people to you.

Lead Nurturing Throughout the Buyer’s Journey

Once you’ve got a lead whether from a trade show, through your inbound marketing, or through social media, it’s time to nurture them through your sales process and guide them through their own buyer journey.

While there are many ways to nurture leads, keying in on how your specific buyer responds to different stimuli is necessary for landing sales. Tactics including drip emails, lead nurturing campaigns, and remarketing are all tools that should be part of your lead nurturing tool box. Additionally, towards the end of your buyer’s journey, your sales and marketing staffs should be on the same page for sales-ready leads.

Finally, you’ll need a way to evaluate your marketing efforts. Inbound marketing software, analytics, and metrics can certainly help, but having a strong OODA loop within your organization will aid in making decisions. Remember, it all starts with data.

The Nitty Gritty: Why Attraction Marketing?

The question you’re undoubtedly asking is why attraction marketing is useful to your business which is a very valid one. Think of attraction marketing as the magnet that draws customers to your brand at large. The deeper aspects of attraction marketing such as your content, thought leadership, and brand story make your brand something that sticks with them.

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How Using Data Can Inspire Great Marketing Campaigns

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One of the biggest benefits of online marketing is that it allows you to collect valuable data about your customers as well as your target audience in general. It also gives you a chance to pinpoint what is and isn’t working as far as your marketing efforts are concerned. However, collecting all this data is useless if you don’t leverage it to your benefit. In fact, the information you have can help to inspire creative ideas to help craft great marketing campaigns.

How Data Can Spark Creativity

Data doesn’t just help you figure out what’s working and what isn’t, it can help drive creative decisions that allow you to create great marketing campaigns. A good example of this is Netflix. Everyone knows that Netflix has an absolute treasure trove of behavioural data from their subscribers. They leverage this data to inform the content that they produce.

For example, many critics were bewildered when they gave Adam Sandler a huge four-movie deal. Saying that his movies are panned across the board is putting it mildly, after all. However, according to their data, his older films were streamed an absurd amount. They knew that even if critics didn’t like his films, their subscribers certainly did — and that’s why they signed him to produce Netflix-exclusive films.

Netflix will often look at subscriber viewing habits and look at where they overlap to find a niche that they can fill with their original content. For example, the popularity of older series on Netflix has often resulted in revivals, such as Fuller House and Arrested Development.

Another good example is Equifax. Using their data, they realized that the average person’s credit score depended heavily on how old they were. They used this data to create a great marketing campaign that provided tailored benefits information to people at different stages of their lives.

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How To Use Your Data To Inform Your Creative Marketing Campaigns

How you use your data to influence your creativity and create great marketing campaigns depends heavily on the specifics of your business. However, the following are a few basic ways data can help you connect to your audience on a more emotional level when creating new marketing campaigns:

  • Learn what your audience connects with

    Look at how your audience engaged with previous campaigns. By looking at what worked and what didn’t work, you can figure out exactly how your audience was able to engage with you on an emotional level. For example, maybe certain types of content posted on social media were commented on and shared much more than other types of content. This will give you a better idea of what your audience is looking for, which can give you better direction on how to reach your audience on a more personal level during future campaigns.

  • Learn what your audience’s needs are

    You can figure out what your audience wants by analyzing certain sets of data. For example, you can compare two PPC ads promoting the same product in two different ways. You can then use the conversion rates of both ads. The ad that converts more leads is probably presenting a solution that fulfils a need that your audience has more effectively than the other. This information can be used to reach your audience more successfully with future ads.

  • Continually improve your campaign

    Once you launch a new campaign, don’t just stay the course if it’s obvious something isn’t working. You should continually track the results of your campaign based on your specific goals. The data you gather can help you figure out whether your creative decisions are having an impact on your audience or not. If they aren’t, you can make adjustments even as your campaign is ongoing.

When building new marketing campaigns, make sure that you make use of the data that you have. Your data can be the difference between creating great marketing campaigns and failed marketing campaigns.

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers

marketing dashboard

The Importance of Implementing a Marketing Dashboard

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At this point in time, most businesses realize how important data is and how analyzing the data that they collect can provide valuable insight into the performance of their marketing tactics as well as into how their audience behaves. The challenge lies in making those metrics easy to access and easy to read for everyone in your company. Fortunately, tracking data is easier than ever with the use of dashboards.

What Are Dashboards?

Dashboards are apps or platforms that collect all of your KPIs (key performance indicators) and critical metrics onto one easy-to-read display. The information is pulled from multiple data sources, often both internal and external. The data displayed on a dashboard can be viewed at any time and in real time. Essentially, they act as real-time reports, eliminating the need to wait until the end of the month to receive an analytics report from your marketing department.

Tactics

marketing dashboard for social media

There are tons of different tactics dashboards out there that you can integrate into your system. This can range from email dashboards and website dashboards to search dashboards and social media metric dashboards. While these types of dashboards are often effective in displaying certain metrics, they don’t typically paint a whole picture. They may show you how your tactics are performing individually, but they don’t show you how they are impacting your company’s revenue cycle. It’s why you should implement a marketing dashboard.

The Benefits Of Using A Marketing Dashboard

Tactics dashboards can be useful in that they showcase soft metrics (engagement, awareness, interactions, etc.). However, you’ll want a dashboard that can also display hard metrics (such as the internal rate of return and the net present value of your current campaigns) along with online marketing metrics (such as bounce rate, total visits, click-through rates, etc.). It’s why you’ll want to use a marketing dashboard. The following are just a few more reasons why integrating a marketing dashboard will be hugely beneficial for your business:

The Power of an Influencer Marketing Strategy: How and Why It Works

Customize your dashboard to your needs

Instead of being limited by tactics dashboards, a marketing dashboard allows you to customize which metrics are displayed. You can then pull what you deem to be the most important of your social media, email, and search metrics so that they are visually represented on one single display.

Track the performance of your marketing efforts

A properly optimized marketing dashboard will make it easy to see how your marketing efforts are performing in real time. This can be from engagement on social media to lead generation on your website. Not only can you identify how individual tactics are faring based on your KPIs and metrics, but you’ll get an idea of how well your overall strategies are performing as well.

Keep your team on the same page

One of the challenges of running a business is that many of your employees aren’t always on the same page. If everyone has access to your marketing dashboard, everyone can see what’s working and what isn’t. This makes it easy for company-wide communication to take place. This can result in more effective adjustments to marketing and sales strategies to improve performance.

Allow for more informed decision making

Being able to see how your marketing campaign is performing in real time allows you to make adjustments to your strategies and tactics on the fly. In theMarketing Dashboardpast, simple reporting would only tell you how you’ve done. The use of marketing dashboards gives you the chance to make more informed decisions on a daily basis. In turn, this can reduce the cost of your marketing efforts and improve their impact on your revenue cycle.

While a marketing dashboard can be considered a real-time report of your marketing activities, it’s much more than that–it’s a decision-making tool. The potential success of future marketing campaigns depends heavily on your ability to collect and analyze your company’s most important metrics and KPIs and determine how your marketing efforts are affecting your revenue cycle. The best way to do this is by integrating, customizing, and optimizing a marketing dashboard.

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visual storytelling

Visual Storytelling Techniques That Will Take You To The Next Level

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Not only has video content become incredibly easy to consume due to the quality of smartphones and tablets, but it’s become much easier — and affordable — to produce as well. Considering the fact that 72 percent of consumers would prefer to learn about products or services via video and that the average consumer watches around 1.5 hours of video a day, your marketing campaign needs to have a video content marketing strategy.

However, your video content will only be effective if it’s of high quality. The following are ten visual storytelling techniques and promotion tips that you should keep in mind:

5 Storytelling Techniques You Should Use For Your Marketing Efforts.

  1. Maintain a single POV

    Make sure that your video focuses on a single idea or message and that you don’t stray off topic or else you’ll lose the attention of your viewers.

  2. Be human

    Use emotion to connect with your audience. A video full of dry facts with no personal point of view isn’t going to be very engaging. Additionally, showcase actual people in your videos so that your viewers have someone to relate to.

  3. Be memorable

    If there’s nothing memorable about your video, then it will fail to impress. Viewers are less likely to share video content that hasn’t made much of an impact on them as well, so strive to make content that is memorable in some way.

  4. Be more visual than verbal

    Video is a visual medium, so instead of just showing a talking head explaining your message, tell your message in a visual manner. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words.

  5. Start with what’s real

    It can be easy to get wrapped up in the visual style of your content, but substance will always trump style. Begin with what’s real and use that as the foundation for your video. The video’s style should be the unique way in which you convey that message to your viewers.

  6. Make it compelling

    Remember who your target audience is in order to create video content that they will find relevant and interesting. If you aren’t targeting the right audience, your video content won’t end up being compelling, no matter how well produced it is.

  7. Optimize your videos

    Don’t forget to optimize your videos by using strong keywords and links in your titles and descriptions.

  8. Use strong CTAs

    Just like written content, video content should have calls-to-action at the end to encourage your viewers to do what you want them to do.

  9. Use YouTube

    YouTube has over 1.8 billion monthly users. You can’t ignore an audience that big, so be sure to post your videos on YouTube.

  10. Share your videos

    Promote your videos by sharing them on all of your social channels to help attract more viewers.

Using visual storytelling techniques will help audiences connect with your video content and make them more likely to engage. Just remember that all the visual storytelling techniques in the world won’t work if your videos aren’t being watched, which is why promoting your video content is important as well.

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The Power of an Influencer Marketing Strategy: How and Why It Works

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We’ve all been through it—you’re scrolling through your social media feed when suddenly you come across an individual passionately endorsing a product or service. What’s more? They have a massive following. You notice this is different from the typical celebrity endorsements. That is because the individual you are seeing is a social media influencer, which makes the premise of an influencer marketing strategy so much more unique.

As a true millennial who’s seen its effects, I can attest to how important it is to be leveraging social media to enhance your marketing efforts. The following is an outline of everything you need to know about Influencer Marketing. This includes how much it costs to hire an influencer, the top social media platforms to run an influencer campaign, how to measure the success of this marketing strategy, and examples of how it’s been done successfully.

What is an Influencer?

An influencer is somebody who has the ability to “influence” potential buyers by endorsing the offerings on social media. There are several factors that indicate whether or not someone is an influencer. However, the most telling one could be that the individual’s followers fit into a particular niche, and there is active engagement between them and the actual influencer.

Rather than just being “marketing tools”, influencers are assets to a company’s social relationships with whom they can collaborate to accomplish their Marketing goals. This is what makes a social media influencer entirely different from a celebrity endorsement, and perhaps, more successful.

In celebrity product endorsements, there is less of an emphasis on engagement and more on capitalizing on the person’s fame and name recognition to benefit a brand. In short, the objective is to capture the attention of a broader audience, unlike the niche audience of the influencer.

The Cost of Influence

As you may assume, influencers can be costly and there is no set rate for incorporating them into your campaign. It’s a common practice for digital marketers to follow the “one cent per follower rule”. Some marketers know this as the $100 per 10,000 followers rule. Factors to consider include engagement rate, client budget, and campaign lengths. However, according to Instagram Influencer, Matt Crump (who has composed his own rates), creative mandates, production costs, timeline, and rights affect the cost of hiring him for your campaign. Crump explained that the price range per sponsored post varies based on the number of followers he has during that time period. The price can be as low as $100-$500 for 5-10k followers, and as high as $10,000 for over 1,000,000 followers.

Top Social Media Platforms

It’s important for marketers to identify which platform will bring the greatest Return on Investment for their influencer marketing campaign. According to Linqia, over 68% of marketers recognize Instagram as the most effective social network for an influencer strategy in 2019. Coming in second was Facebook with 51% with YouTube, Blogs, Pinterest, Twitter, and Snapchat following behind. The takeaway is simple: If you’re considering an Influencer Marketing strategy, Instagram is the place to start!

Similar Article: How To Use Social Media To Drive B2B Sales

How to Measure Success

Although over 60% of marketers are primarily focused on driving brand awareness, engagement, and impressions (Linqia), it’s still important to track sales generation from such campaigns as well as conversions, audience sentiment, and clicks. Since influencer marketing is an ever-evolving industry. Marketers need to consistently evaluate their measurement practices to ensure they’re held to the same standards as other media investments.

Similar Article: How To Assess Your Inbound Marketing Plan

3 Examples of Successful Influencer Marketing

Now that you have an understanding of what an influencer is, how much they cost, the top social media platforms to use for your influencer marketing campaign, and how to measure its success, it’s time to take a look at influencer marketing strategies in action. The following are four examples of successful influencer marketing:

Naked Juice –

When seeking to raise their brand awareness, even more, Naked Juice decided to collaborate with Instagram influencers, Beth Norton and Kate La Vie, through sponsored Instagram posts. Kate La Vie features images of her outfits and beauty essentials. This made it easy for the brand to strategically collaborate with her snapshots. The campaign saw much success. According to Social Bond, within 24 hours the Instagram post generated more than 2,000 likes and comments combined. Additionally, this campaign enabled Naked Juice to position itself as more of a “premium juice” brand. Following the success of the campaign, the company made $57.4 million in revenue by the end of 2017.

Sperry Boat Shoes –At the end of 2016, the popular boat shoe brand, “Sperry” collaborated with more than 100 Instagram “micro-influencers”. The key influencers here were “Sperry Enthusiasts”. To create engaging content with its audience, Sperry identified fans on Instagram who were already sharing pictures of their shoes. Subsequently, the brand invited these users to develop content for its Instagram account. The strategy worked. According to Curalate, Sperry’s most engaged photo of 2016 got 8,278 likes. How did they do this? The photo was taken by influencer Slava Daniliuk who had 4,500 Instagram followers at the time. Additionally, Daniliuk posted with the brand’s trademark hashtag, #OdysseysAwait which increased engagement even more.     

Walmart –

As proven by a successful retail company, influencer marketing can also be highly effective when promoting philanthropic incentives as well. Walmart took a “Cause Marketing” approach when embarking on its “Feeding America” mission with several influencers on Instagram. The strategy was simple: For each like, #FightHunger comment, or post share, 0.90 cents would be donated to the organization. Logan Paul’s most-liked post from the campaign generated over one million likes. Due to the success of these influencers in the #FightHunger campaign, Walmart raised close to $1.65 million in addition to boosting positive sentiment for their brand.

Similar Article: Social Media Campaigns for Attracting Prospects and Generating Leads

With the numerous advantages that influencer marketing provides, it’s no secret why so many brands are going with this strategy. As soon as you scroll through your social media feed once again, you’ll come across one of these campaigns. However, you’ll now have a better understanding of what an influencer marketer is and all of the marketing elements involved. 

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How Your Web Page Speed Effects Your SEO and Adwords Performance

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For companies that already advertise to prospective customers on mobile devices, or who have organic search presence, there are numerous elements of their online presence that need to be checked, tested, and, where appropriate, changed. Knowing how to optimize your mobile site for speed will make all the difference to your search engine rankings.

The Importance of Testing Site Speed

The changes are going to make knowing the speed of a mobile site essential. Many tools permit site owners to determine their page speed to see whether enhancements are needed. Most of the tools that are available to test speeds are free and do not require administrator access to the website in question. That means that companies can check their competitors’ sites as well as their own.

Adjusting Mobile SEO Strategy for Google’s Speed Update

One such change that companies should consider is switching to Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). An AMP works by altering the source code of the website, thus directing the standard HTML page to a minimalist version of itself, the hosted AMP page. As AMPs are still so rare, they load exceptionally quickly. In initial Google testing, AMPs reduced load time up to 85%.

Read More Related Articles – The Importance of Google Ads Quality Score

Local search should not be ignored, either. A Google Mobile Moments Study revealed that 40% of mobile searches have local intent. Companies also need to be aware that mobile search engine users enter queries differently than desktop search engine users; mobile queries tend to be much shorter.

Leveraging Search Console is a fantastic way to check in on a site’s usability. Using the following options under “Crawl Errors” can make a significant difference to usability:

  • Smartphone tab – permits users to recognize any crawl errors that might be burdening their mobile pages
  • Fetch on Google – allows users to see how crawlers view the site and adjust accordingly
  • Mobile Usability report – tells users precisely which pages have mobile usability issues, as well as the nature of the issues.

How Will Google’s Speed Update Impact Your AdWords Account?

The Quality Score algorithm, the algorithm that determines how much users pay per click to serve an ad on the Search Network, is heavily influenced by landing page experience. If a company’s site does not load quickly and does not convey beneficial information, the company will either end up paying a premium or realize that they are unable to serve an ad at all.

The AdWords documentation recommends five ways to affect positive change regarding a site’s landing page experience:

  • Include relevant, compelling content
  • Be recognized as trustworthy
  • Make navigation simple and effective
  • Reduce load time
  • Make the website faster

In Conclusion

AdWords users need to ensure they optimize for load time and landing page speed, and not just in terms of relevance. Companies should also contemplate making a move to AMP, ensure that their intent is on point, and make the most of the power of Search Console and page speed insights.

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Omnichannel

Understanding Consumer Expectations Around Omnichannel Approach

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There are many ways to engage with potential customers these days, from social media to mobile and more. While it’s important that you establish a presence on different channels so that you can reach your target audience, it’s also important that you create a seamless experience. This is known as an omnichannel approach. An omnichannel approach allows customers to engage with a brand no matter what platform they’re on or what device they’re using, whether online or in-store.

What Is An Omnichannel Approach?

The idea of the omnichannel approach is that consumers are no longer on a buyer’s journey that is strictly linear. For example, they may begin their journey by searching for a product and reading up on it by checking out your blog. But then they may check out some customer reviews by taking a look at your social media pages. Then, they may sign up to your email newsletter, where you may continue to nurture them. They may read these newsletters on their smartphone even though they had been engaging with your brand on their computer.

Finally, they may choose to go to your physical location in order to make a purchase instead of buying online. This is an example of how a customer can make use of multiple platforms and devices to go through their buyer’s journey.

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Omnichannel Vs Multichannel Marketing

Multichannel refers to the ability to engage with customers on various channels. For example, if customers can reach you on social media, a live chat feature, a phone number, or an email address, then that’s multichannel marketing. The omnichannel experience allows customers to do the same thing — but there’s one big difference. With omnichannel marketing, all of those channels are connected to create a singular experience.

For example, say a customer emails you with a question and you answer it. The customer does some more research, then engages again on your website’s live chat. The person they’re engaging with will have access to the information that was exchanged via email. As a result, the customer won’t have to repeat questions or information that they already gave.

Essentially, omnichannel marketing ensures a seamless experience across all channels.

What Does It Mean To Take An Omnichannel Approach? Omni channel

You’re no longer in charge of laying out the journey for your buyers. Consumers demand control over their own buyer’s journey, which means that you have to take an omnichannel approach in order to give them this freedom. There are several ways to do this:

Know your audience

Develop buyer personas so that you understand your customer’s needs and pain points. By doing so, you’ll be able to address those pain points across all channels. It will also make it easier to identify your customers’ buying patterns, which you can leverage throughout your marketing efforts.

Have an omnichannel presence

Don’t just focus on one marketing channel. Set up a website with a regularly updated blog. Establish a presence on several social media platforms that you know your target audience uses. Engage in email marketing. Ensure your online efforts are mobile-friendly. Use pay-per-click advertising. Don’t ignore traditional marketing methods, such as TV or newspaper ads. Make it easy to be found no matter what channel your audience is using.

Make sure your branding is consistent

It’s extremely important that your branding is consistent on all channels. This means that you need to have the same message, the same tone, and even the same style. Otherwise, your audience may get confused about who you are and what you represent.

Be easy to contact

Present several options for contacting you where ever your audience is. For example, respond to comments left on your social media pages, provide an email address and phone number on your website, allow mobile users to just click on your phone number on your site, and submit your NAP (name, address, and phone number) to local online inventories, and more. You might even want to implement a live chat into your website.

Meet consumers at every stage of their journey

Make sure that consumers can advance through their buyer’s journey no matter what platform they’re on. This means having content that’s suitable for every stage of the buyer’s journey on all of your channels so that you can meet their needs and nurture them through their current stage in no matter where they are.

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The Benefits Of Omnichannel Marketing

Implementing an omnichannel marketing strategy may take some extra work, initially, but it’s well worth the effort. With that in mind, the following are some of the primary benefits of omnichannel marketing:

Create a seamless customer journey omnichannel

Arguably the biggest advantage of omnichannel marketing is the fact that it results in a seamless customer journey. Customers will be able to pick up where they left off on any channel, making it easy to nurture them through the sales funnel. Additionally, there will be fewer roadblocks to conversion, resulting in fewer lost customers.

Increase your brand loyalty

Using omnichannel marketing improves the customer experience. It does this by providing a seamless and consistent experience across all channels. As a result, the needs of your customers are met at every stage of their journey. The better their experience is, the more loyalty they’ll have for your brand.

Better insights into customer behaviour

Because all of your channels will be unified under an omnichannel strategy, it will be easier to collect and organize customer data. For example, you’ll have no problem measuring how each channel contributes to certain marketing goals. As a result, you’ll be able to make better adjustments to improve your marketing efforts.

Improve your brand recall

A major component of successful omnichannel marketing is consistency. By ensuring that your branding efforts are consistent across all channels, you’ll strengthen your brand identity. As a result, customers will have a stronger sense of brand recall. This means customers will think of your brand when they have needs or challenges that your products or services address.

Generate more long-term revenue

All of the previous benefits, from the improved customer experience and customer insight to the increase in brand recall and loyalty, will result in more revenue. Essentially, omnichannel marketing can help you improve your long-term profits.

Consumers have more options than ever before, which means that they have much higher expectations when it comes to their buying experiences. As a result, you should take an omnichannel approach in order to establish a seamless experience over multiple channels, making it easy for them to engage with your brand no matter where they are on their buyer’s journey.

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Brand Marketing Strategy: Community and Advocacy

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Most companies will have a brand marketing strategy. A great way to use a strategy is to work with the community and advocacy. Having advocates and engaging with community will help your brand grow. Advocates are customers, employees, fans, and influencers. Brand advocates are dedicated fans whom the company should build closer relationships with. The best way to advertise is through word of mouth and advocates in the community will do that.

Community and Social Media

When it comes to social media, it is important to engage, grow and leverage the audience. Some ways to grow your social media audience include providing an incentive (gift card), reaching out to the offline community, asking the right questions, and finding people who are advocating your brand already. Engaging your social media community can include having a welcoming environment, timely responses, and reciprocity. Make sure to monitor your community space.

How Brands Market To the Different Generations 

Engagement with Influencers and Advocates

Engaging with influencers and advocates can bring value. The influencers are bloggers, speakers, and authors. A good idea is to invite these people to an event. Influencers and advocates are the ones spreading information about your company through word of mouth. When building a brand advocacy program, it is important to have program goals, criteria for selection, a plan for onboarding and a continued engagement plan. With an advocacy program, it is important to remember the 3 R’s: relevance, reach and resonance. With an employee advocacy program, it is important that both employees and high up exec people post and share company content on social media.

Growing Community Across Social Media

Social media platforms include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Snap Chat.

  • Twitter is for using hash tags, monitoring keywords, hosting events and having chats.
  • Facebook is for having interactions (comments), and using events to create buzz.
  • LinkedIn is for creating groups, and posting content related to business.
  • Instagram is for visuals, finding community, engagement, and boosting brand visibility.
  • YouTube is for collaboration, anonymous comments, healthy debates and connecting with viewers.
  • Snap Chat is for having a unique snap code, ghost codes and direct engagement (reaction snaps to followers).

Each social media platform is unique and has its own purpose.

Measuring ROI

Metrics for ROI are community growth, engagement and brand love. Quality over quantity. You can use the spot check method and randomly select a few followers and look at their profiles to see what kinds of people are following your company. Engagement can include the number of likes for a post. Brand love is positive testimonials from third party blog posts.

Paying attention to your community is important. By reaching out and engaging with advocates, will help your brand. Reaching out and engaging in all the social media platforms will help as well. The more you put into getting your brand out there, the more your brand will grow. You can have a very successful brand marketing strategy. Community and advocacy are two ways to help your strategy.

30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips

integrated marketing solutions

The Importance of Hiring an Integrated Marketing Agency

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There are hundreds of tactics you can use to advertise your business, whether you’re using inbound or outbound marketing. As a result, it can take a long time and a lot of effort to create and execute a successful marketing strategy — especially if you want long-term results. It’s why many companies will work with a marketing agency instead of trying to do it themselves.

However, you’ll find that most marketing agencies focus on specific types of advertising. For example, some agencies focus on direct marketing, while others focus on building websites. If you want to work with a single agency that can handle all of your marketing needs, then you should consider working with an integrated marketing agency.

What is Integrated Marketing?

Integrated Marketing Agency

Integrated marketing is the practice of making sure all of your marketing efforts are aligned to deliver the same core message. It’s an overarching strategy that uses various channels to reach people at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Integrated marketing allows businesses to deliver a consistent message across different mediums, including print and digital media.

For example, a company might use a TV commercial to draw attention to its new website. For this to work, the message conveyed on the TV ad must be consistent with the messaging on the website. If the tagline or logo on the commercial is even slightly different than what’s on your website, it will confuse people.

What is an Integrated Marketing Agency?

Integrated marketing agencies use a holistic approach to marketing. They can address all the advertising needs that a company might have. Basically, it means that they can do everything you need as far as marketing goes so that you don’t have to hire multiple agencies. For example, they can help:

  • Build your brand and design branding elements.
  • Develop a traditional outbound marketing strategy.
  • Develop an inbound marketing strategy.
  • Create your inbound and outbound marketing materials (from print ads to your website)
  • Develop a public relations (PR) strategy to engage with your target audience across many channels.

What are the Benefits of an Integrated Marketing Agency?

Integrated Marketing Agency

There are many benefits to working with an integrated marketing agency instead of an agency that has more specific focuses (such as an agency that only produces commercial videos). The following are a few of the primary benefits of using an integrated marketing agency:

1. A more cost-effective marketing solution

Hiring multiple agencies to address different parts of your marketing strategy can be expensive. An integrated marketing agency can take care of all your marketing needs, making it a more cost-effective option.

2. A more cohesive long-term marketing plan

Because an integrated marketing agency is experienced in every facet of marketing, they can audit your existing strategy. Additionally, they will consider your company’s needs and audience to develop a more unified long-term marketing strategy.

3. More personalized services

Most agencies use a general blueprint to implement their solutions. As such, their marketing efforts follow a guideline or template for every one of their clients. Integrated marketing agencies customize their marketing solutions to the specific needs of the clients they’re working with. Futhermore they will take a unified approach that will result in a comprehensive and unique marketing strategy.

4. Branding consistency across all channels

If you lack branding consistency (for example, if your messaging and tone is different from one channel to the next), it will hurt your brand identity. Consequently, people will get confused about who you are and what you offer.

An integrated marketing agency can help develop a unique branding strategy so that your business will have a consistent message across all channels. By using integrated marketing, you’ll ensure that your brand identity remains consistent.

5. A better understanding of the buyer’s journey

Integrated marketing agencies are experienced with both traditional and digital marketing. As a result, they have a greater understanding of the buyer’s journey and how to reach customers at every stage of their journey.

6. More effective cross-channel marketing campaigns

Marketing campaigns that function separately won’t be nearly as effective as if they were designed to work together. Integrated marketing agencies are more capable of creating cross-channel marketing campaigns designed to achieve a shared goal.

Our Integrated Marketing Solutions

Here at Stevens & Tate, we offer integrated marketing solutions tailor-made to your company’s needs. Not only do we take into account your business and your customers, but we also take into account your budget. With that in mind, the following are some of the integrated marketing solutions that we offer:

  • Storybranding:

We can help develop your brand and brand story by identifying competitive advantages and mission statement. We can also create a slogan and tagline, identify your value propositions, and develop your message and story.

  • Marketing strategy:

We develop a comprehensive marketing strategy by implementing a meticulous process. This process includes a thorough consultation, SWOT analysis, budget evaluation, marketing plan development and execution, communications strategy, and messaging approach.

  • Research:

We perform thorough market research to help build your marketing strategy. This research includes competitive market analysis, brand audits, target audience segmentation, website analytics, customer experience research, and more.

  • SEO and social:

We can develop comprehensive social media and SEO strategies to increase brand awareness and authority. We use various tactics, including blogging, content creation, social media campaigns, PPC ads, engagement strategies, and organic search marketing.

  • Public relations:

We offer a wide variety of reputation management services integrated with your overall marketing strategy. These services include press release writing, product launch advertising, online syndication, and marketing promotions. We can also improve your reputation via thought leadership, content marketing, media relations, and more.

  • Customer experience:

We develop various strategies to help improve your customer experience. We can help with package design, brand development, contests, promotions, pricing structures, and more.

  • Digital marketing tactics:

We can plan and execute digital marketing efforts as part of your ongoing marketing strategy. These efforts may include SEO, video production, PPC advertising, social media advertising, mobile and web app implementation, content creation, and more.

  • Traditional Advertising:

In addition to digital marketing, we can also help develop a traditional advertising campaign integrated with the rest of your marketing efforts. Some of the traditional advertising services we offer include print ad design, radio scripts and audio production, photography, logo development, video production, sales brochures, and more.

Improve Your Long-Term Marketing Using Integrated Marketing Solutions

To create an effective cross-channel marketing campaign, you need integrated marketing solutions. Moreover, integrated marketing is the best way to strengthen your brand, grow your business, and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry over the long term.

Find out more about the integrated marketing solutions we offer by contacting us to request a free marketing consultation at Stevens & Tate today.

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Why Your Website Redesign Would Benefit From An Inbound Marketing Strategy

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A website redesign is the perfect time to integrate your inbound marketing strategy into the site’s very fabric. In fact, your entire website needs to be optimized and focused on furthering your inbound marketing efforts. It is an investment that will pay off in higher conversions and increased sales.

Is Your Current Website Giving You What You Need?

You are in business to make money. Your website exists to market your business. Its design needs to further your need to make money. If your current website design is not doing that, it isn’t giving you what you need.

Here are some things to expect from your website:

  • The design should remain up to date.
  • You should be able to measure ROI easily.
  • You should have updated metrics available at all time.
  • The website should totally support your marketing efforts.
  • The website should drive conversions and build your lead database.

If your current design isn’t giving you these benefits, it’s time to invest in a new design, one that will give you these benefits and many more.

20 Tips To Improve Your Website Redesign Process

Every aspect of your website redesign should feed into your inbound marketing strategy. The strategy and marketing funnel needs to be integrated into the site’s very fabric. To make this type of design work, you need a platform that is growth-driven and you need a web team that can make updates on a regular basis.

What are the Advantages of an Inbound Marketing Website?

Your business will benefit in many ways when your inbound marketing strategy becomes what drives your website design.

  1. The website will be the basis of your 24/7 marketing funnel. Your website is where you drive traffic to, host your content, convert visitors to leads, and gather marketing data. That is why your inbound marketing strategy must drive your website design.
  2. Your website will educate leads early in their buyer’s journey. Buyers these days do a lot of research before making purchases. You want your website to be a rich source of information so the buyer will continuously visit during their journey.
  3. You will see every increasing improvement in design and performance. Why wait for your next website redesign to update your website? It should happen at least once a month as you make changes to meet marketing goals and fix problems.
  4. You can prove ROI with incremental improvements. Website updates cannot just involve aesthetics. They must include and revolve around marketing changes. With each change, you can measure your ROI quite easily.
  5. Your website can help nurture leads. The more you educate a lead, the more likely that person is to make a purchase. Your website must offer clear pathways through the buyer’s journey to help him or her reach a decision point.

If you want to take your marketing to the next level, it is time to integrate your inbound marketing strategy with your website design. Once you have the basics in place, you will see steady improvements in your marketing efforts. And that makes it all worth it.

This article is on Data Captive as well.

Want more resources on how to redesign your website? Click here!

Integrating Social Media & SEO Efforts For Enhanced Search Engine Results