lead nurturing

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.

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.

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.

SEO Concepts

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:

trends in social media

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.

improve brand recognition

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.

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

website updates

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.

email marketing

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.

social media personas

Establishing Your Brand Personality Through Social Media Personas

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When setting up accounts and profiles on various social media platforms to promote your brand, remember that your competitors are also on social media. Simply posting content on multiple platforms isn’t enough to get your brand at the forefront, especially without a clearly defined social media persona.

Customers are nowadays looking for content that resonates with their needs. Research shows that 90% of consumers buy products from businesses that advocate for a cause they can identify with.

People love associating with brands that provide a personal, human touch. They would prefer to associate with a business that delivers on its brand’s qualities and values. If your business demonstrates reliability, commitment, loyalty, honesty, and longevity, it can better succeed in the competitive business landscape.

However, if your posts still miss the mark and don’t help your brand effectively reach its target audience, it may be because you haven’t clearly defined your social media persona. The persona sets you apart from the competition and gives your brand a voice.

It guides your social media marketing strategy, engagement with your target audience, and the content you post. This post will explain how to create a buyer persona to boost your social marketing strategy.

What Is Social Media Persona?

Social media personas are fictional profiles you can develop to represent your brand and target your customers. They combine qualities and characteristics that give your brand a distinct personality, including character, tone, voice, and approach. These factors are critical because they influence how customers interact with your brand.

Remember that your customers don’t read statistics about your brand’s performance and probably don’t care how many awards you’ve won. They care more about who you are and what your brand stands for, not your logo.

How to Create Your Social Media Personas?

Creating social media personas can help establish a consistent and familiar presence on your social media platforms. These personas must be authentic and align with the values of your organization. The process doesn’t have to be complicated, and you can find and build the perfect persona for your brand in a few steps.

The best practices to consider while creating these personas are:

 Identify Your Target Audience

The first step to creating a successful social media persona is to make the “ideal customer.” Who is it that your brand targets, and what are their demographics? It would help if you established the following factors:

  • Their gender
  • Age
  • Employment status
  • Income levels
  • Location
  • Home types
  • Relationship status

You may also want to research more information like their hobbies, goals and motivation, purchasing triggers, pain points and fears, and personality traits. For a more comprehensive persona, it would also help to find out the social media channels they actively use, the influencers they like to follow, and the hashtags they respond to regularly.

You can research this information through the following:

  • Your existing customer data available on your CRM, email lists, point of sale systems, and customer support systems
  • Your social media analytics, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and your website analytics
  • Collecting customer feedback through social media polls, emails, or surveys.

The goal is to create a brand persona that appeals to every segment of your target audience while aligning with your business niche.

Stay True to the Values Which Your Brand Wants to Convey

Once you have all the information you need to develop your brand’s perfect social media persona, determine the values you want to convey to your customers. Your content creation strategy should revolve around the following:

  • The unique selling proposition that sets you apart from other brands
  • How you want to portray your brand
  • What you want to offer your audience on social media
  • The kind of tone that typically resonates with your audience

Once you have answers to these questions, brainstorm a list of adjectives to describe your brand’s voice. Think of terms like professional, candid, passionate, authentic, relatable, bold, honest, and trustworthy. These will guide your brand’s personality when approaching the above factors. Staying true to these values is the easiest way to maintain consistency across all your social media platforms.

Choose Visual Elements Which Align with Your Brand Identity

In maintaining consistency across your brand, you also must include visual elements that resonate with your brand. Studies prove visuals are more effective in passing your brand message than words. Photos, videos, illustrations, and infographics can strengthen your brand and boost engagement with your audience.

Choose visual elements that embody your brand’s personality and create a strong brand image. Some tips for creating compelling visual elements that your audience easily recognizes are:

  • Creating a visual guide to ensure consistency, including colors, sizes, fonts, and file formats
  • Using unique visuals such as custom illustrations as opposed to stock images
  • Repurposing content such as customer feedback, product images, and blog posts

Stay Consistent Across All Platforms

Inconsistency is one thing that can kill your branding efforts on social media. Strive to stick to the persona you created across all your social media platforms. If your business description, tone, values, messaging, or brand image differs across the platforms, your customers will likely perceive your business as multiple entities. The result is lower engagement and fewer sales.

An effortless way to maintain consistency in your message is to develop a comprehensive voice and tone guide for your brand. It should appear on your blog, company website, social media platforms, email newsletters, and other touchpoints relevant to your business.

Your Social Media Personas Can Boost Your Marketing Impact

Creating a social media persona for your brand can take time. It also requires that you have the right tools and leverage teamwork for the best results. Once you do the groundwork, you will have a valuable tool to create compelling content.

That way, you can meet your customers right where they are and communicate effectively. Besides, you will improve your social media strategy for more personalization to increase overall conversion rates. A digital marketing agency like Steven & Tate can help you get your social media marketing strategy right. Talk to us for a consultation.

 

How to Improve Your Social Signals for SEO

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Social media has become a critical part of our lives, and businesses are taking notice. Today, the platform isn’t just a place to share memes and cat videos – it’s also a powerful tool for digital marketing. One key social media aspect often overlooked is its impact on SEO. Over the years, social signals have significantly impacted search engine (SE) rankings, and ignoring them could hurt your site’s visibility.

In the sections below, we’ll take a closer look at social signals, including how you can use them to boost your SEO efforts.

What are Social Signals?

These are people’s reactions to online content they interact with on social media channels. They include views, likes, dislikes, comments, shares, tweets, etc. The more responses a post receives, the more mainstream and popular it becomes.

social signals

Remaining visible on the internet is key to gaining more reactions. From an SEO standpoint, social signals can improve SE rankings and help individuals or businesses establish their identity, popularity, and reliability.

It’s worth noting that different platforms use different metrics to measure or categorize social signals. Before seeking user engagement and reactions, you need to understand how a given social media platform works.

Social Signals and SEO

Social signals tell more about a brand’s popularity and relevance on social media platforms. They play an important role in SEO optimization as they indicate the quality of content and generate traffic, which ultimately helps in ranking higher on search engines.

And while social signals are not an official ranking factor for Google, they do indirectly impact SEO performance. Social engagement, such as comments, likes, and shares, can increase the visibility of social posts, resulting in higher traffic and better SE rankings.

To improve social signals for SEO, you need to focus on visibility and brand awareness while posting on social media. You should also engage with your audience, share valuable content, and optimize your posts with relevant hashtags and keywords. We have covered these and more below.

Ways You Can Utilize Social Signals to Boost SEO

While social signals are just one factor in SEO, they are still an important aspect of any digital marketing strategy. Investing time and effort into social media engagement and optimization can improve your online visibility and ultimately drive more traffic to your website. Here are some crucial steps you can take today to improve social signals for SEO.

One obvious and most common way to improve your social signals is to link your site to all the social media pages. Linking your website to your social media pages will improve your online visibility and user experience.

By making it easy for users to find important URLs related to your brand, you’ll increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.

To ensure a smooth connection, place links to your social media pages in the footer of your website. This way, users won’t be distracted from your call-to-action buttons or lead-generation forms.

Publish Consistent Content Across Social Channels

Another less common yet effective way to boost your social signals is to stay consistent across social. Consistency in your brand voice and communication style allows you to build brand recognition and a loyal following.

updating social media

Understanding your audience’s demographics and interests will help you choose the right tone of voice and content that resonates with them. When creating and sharing content, aim to be relevant and authentic and ensure you verify the accuracy and ethics of the information you share.

Consistency in your posting schedule and visual aesthetics can also maximize your organic reach, helping you reinforce your brand identity and leave lasting impressions on customers.

Ensure Your Content is Shareable to Social

Adding social plugins is one way to ensure that your content is easily shareable. These plugins allow site visitors to share your content with friends and family on their social media accounts.

For instance, you can add social icons that stick as the user scrolls through blog posts. That way, you encourage users to share your content, increasing your site’s visibility and reach.

Remember that consumers are more than five times more likely to make a purchase recommended by a trusted friend or family than as a result of seeing an ad or influencer endorsing the product. So optimizing your content for social and making it more shareable can increase reach, brand awareness, and trust.

Stay Active on All Social Media Channels

To make the most out of social media marketing, you should stay active on all social media channels. Responding to comments and shares is a great way to show your followers that a real person runs your profile. This also makes them feel more connected to your brand.

By actively engaging with users, you create more opportunities to share relevant links to your website and increase traffic. If you’re too busy to manage your social media accounts, consider hiring a marketing manager or outsourcing your social media tasks to an agency.

Don’t forget to listen and digest what people say about your brand. You should also respond constructively to any criticism you receive.

Foster partnerships By Sharing Other People’s Content

In today’s digital age, building strong partnerships is one of the organic growth strategies you should adopt. One way to achieve this is by sharing other people’s content. Here, you not only show support for your peers, but you also establish yourself as an active member of your community.

If you do this properly, i.e., retweeting, thanking, and reposting content on social you can form partnerships and increase engagement with peers. In turn, this could lead to more shares and likes from the same accounts in the future, ultimately growing your reach and strengthening your business relationships.

Get Started Today

Taking your SEO game and the overall digital marketing strategy to the next level takes time and effort. The strategies we have highlighted above aren’t exhaustive but will give you an idea of what to tweak to boost your social media marketing.

Before taking any action, ensure you set realistic goals and have some means to monitor your efforts and track the results. As long as you are doing the right thing, it’s never too late to act.

Using HubSpot Lead Flows To Improve Conversion Rates

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There’s a common misconception that some businesses that pop-ups are always a bad idea. While it’s true that pop-up ads can be annoying, especially if they are disrupting the visitor’s website experience, they can also be very effective if you know how to implement them properly. For example, you’ll want to refrain from having pop-ups on every page of your site as this will probably annoy your visitors.

However, a strategically placed pop-up can actually make it easier to convert your leads. In fact, a recent study showed that pop-ups convert 1375 percent better than traditional opt-in forms. If you do decide to use pop-ups in an attempt to convert leads, then you should be sure to use HubSpots’s Lead Flow feature.

What Is Lead Flow?

Lead Flows are HubSpot’s version of pop-up ads. Lead Flows can be accessed in both free and premium versions of HubSpot and allow you to create custom pop-ups that will help you to engage visitors, increased web leads, and reconvert returning visitors. Not to mention that through the use of Lead Flows, you’ll also be able to collect contact insights and analytics, making it easier to nurture the leads that you’ve captured.

What Types Of Lead Flows Are There?

There is more than one type of pop-up, and Lead Flows offers a variety of different types that you can customize to fit your needs. This includes the following:

  • Traditional Pop-Up Boxes – Traditional pop-ups are the best way to immediately get the attention of your visitors and are a good way to promote new content offers, grow your email list, highlight specific pieces of content on your site, and to promote your social presence.
  • Drop-Down Banners – Drop-down banners appear as thin, full-width bars near the top of your page. Although direct, they aren’t as disruptive as pop-up ads. They’re great for sales and special offers, growing your blog subscribers list, and promoting upcoming events or webinars.
  • Side-In-Boxes – Side-in boxes are ads that slide in at the bottom left or right side of your page. They’re more subtle than other types of Lead Flows and are effective for promoting content offers or growing your blog subscribers list.

What Are The Benefits Of Using HubSpot Marketing Automation Tools?

What Are The Lead Flow Triggers?

Instead of just having ads pop-up on every page, you can trigger your Lead Flows to appear based on certain actions that the visitor takes. This allows you to pinpoint what actions are more likely to result in a conversion, thereby allowing you to strategically present the visitor with a Lead Flow at an appropriate time. The following are the three types of triggers that you can set for your Lead Flows:website redesign process

  • Browser Exit Trigger – You can trigger the execution of a pop-up Lead Flow when a visitor exits their browser window. This gives you a last chance to capture leads who haven’t converted as they leave your site.
  • Elapsed Time Trigger – You can also set certain Lead Flows to trigger based on how much time the visitor has been on a certain page. The minimum amount of time you can set a Lead Flow trigger to is seven seconds.
  • 50 Percent Page Scroll – Last of all, you can trigger your Lead Flows when a visitor has scrolled past the halfway mark of a page (which shows that they are interested in the content of that page and are more likely to convert as a result).

There are plenty of other customization options available. For example, while pop-ups may be effective for website visitors, they may hurt the experience of mobile users. As a result, you can disable your Lead Flows for mobile visitors. By using HubSpot’s Lead Flows, you’ll also be able to track the leads who have filled out your Lead Flows. This makes it easy to follow up and to develop your strategy to ensure that your leads are being nurtured.

Contrary to popular belief, pop-ups can be effective if they are used appropriately and strategically. The best way to leverage pop-ups is through the use of HubSpot’s Lead Flows feature, which provides a variety of customization options to ensure that you can reach your leads without disrupting their website experience.

Utilizing PR Tools When Growing Your Company’s Brand Recognition

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Public relation is vital for a successful business marketing campaign. While marketing involves multiple bits and pieces, public relations ensure your target audience is receptive to your marketing messages by establishing higher brand recognition.

Successful public relations strategies can boost customer trust and convert potential customers into loyal followers. However, it’s critical to understand how PR works and how you can execute a successful campaign.

Define Your Value Proposition

Building an irresistible brand requires a unique value proposition that resonates with existing and potential customers. A value proposition defines your business and differentiates it from competitors.

The USP should focus on the target market, solutions to customer problems and overall benefits of your offer compared to the competition. Typically, brainstorming the answers reveals a pattern that helps you fine-tune the value proposition. The process requires diverse input to ensure the USP is unique and appealing.

Also, every business must formalize the offer in a mission and vision statement. While the documents may seem simple, organizations should strive to create a clear picture of their ideal brand. It can be hard to develop and cultivate a positive brand image without formal documents communicating your unique value proposition.

A refined value proposition helps you develop appropriate messages to promote to potential customers. Once you have a unique message, you can earn important media initiatives and boost brand recognition.

Establish Industry Thought Leadership to Gain Trust

Getting involved in your industry is critical for any business. You can start by identifying the media outlets and social media platforms your target audience uses and establish yourself as an industry expert. This way, media outlets, and journalists will want to tell your story.

Regardless of the size of your business, you can build brand recognition by dominating the news in your industry. In addition, it’s important to identify media outlets covering your industry and reach out when you have newsworthy announcements.

Getting your business featured in a popular industry trend can boost brand recognition even when multinational corporates dominate the landscape. For instance, a small financial organization can level the playing ground by securing consistent appearances in the media.

In addition, using public relations strategies to publish featured content can elevate your brand. However, scanty appearances may not be effective, so you may need to partner with a PR company to ensure consistent results.

collaborationCollaborate With Media Outlets

Building brand awareness requires positioning your company in front of your target audience. The digital landscape has made it easier to identify markets and effective media outlets for your campaigns. You can build a list of niche publications and media outlets focusing on your target audience.

And since PR is about relations, ensure your company introduction is attractive. Whether you want to appear in digital media or traditional advertising, ensure your offer is captivating to dominate the media.

Reporters get numerous pitches and story suggestions. Whenever your correspondent is interested in your story, act quickly by scheduling an interview or providing supporting information.

The goal is to establish your reputation as a media-friendly company that embraces reporters. Most media professionals are under enormous pressure to deliver results amidst resource cuts. Therefore, demonstrating your friendliness and collaboration traits can go a long way.

When a story has a high potential of creating brand awareness and benefiting your audience, make it easy and interesting to cover. Besides targeting the pitch to appropriate contacts, establishing great media relationships can help improve your PR strategy outcomes.

Studies show that 76% of journalists prefer brand press releases, and 57% want to get expert sources and data. Also, most journalists will quickly cover a brand story with multimedia.

Ensuring outstanding media collaboration means embracing targeted outreach with concise pitches. In addition, provide data and sources to back up new information.

Use Unique Stories to Highlight Your Brand’s Strengths

Your audience loves current and unique stories. Similarly, media outlets embrace timely stories with a unique twist told to the right audience.

Every business has a positive story about how its offers connect to the consumer and the pain points they serve. Therefore, focus on your brand’s users and find opportunities to craft stories highlighting your business and its solutions.

Regardless of the content, strive to educate your audience by contributing informative content on local press and websites. In addition, you can host a special event and shed light on trends and issues affecting your industry.

Alternatively, community activity sponsorships can be cost-effective opportunities for attracting attention from local media outlets. When you choose your media outlets well, experiential marketing and other events can boost your brand reputation over time.

Bottom Line

Successful PR programs may not be an overnight sensation, but long-term commitment can complement other marketing initiatives and ensure higher brand recognition. Since branding is critical in marketing, incorporating PR in your strategy can help your business establish industry authority and deeper customer connections.