SEO Concepts

A Brief Guide to Sales Lead Generation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Decision Stage

A Guide to the Decision Stage of the Buyer’s Journey

After helping consumers learn about their problem and how they can solve it, you will want to present your product or service as the best option for that specific solution. It’s at this point that consumers are in the decision stage of the buyer’s journey.

What Is The Decision Stage Of The Buyer’s Journey?

The decision stage of the buyer’s journey is the last stage, the stage in which you close the sale. However, there’s still work to be done. Although the consumer has decided on a solution by this stage, they have yet to decide on a product or service or the vendor that they will purchase from.

During the decision stage, they will be doing research into the products and services that they are considering as a solution to their pain point.  They will also research vendors that provide those products and services to determine if they are trustworthy. For example, if the consumer has decided to purchase a new computer, they may be looking to answer the following:

  • The pros and cons of different brand computers
  • The type of warranties offered by different computer vendors
  • The expected lifespan of different computer models
  • The different features of different computer models
  • Customer reviews of different computer vendors

Creating Content For The Decision Stage Of The Buyer’s Journey

You’ve done a massive amount of work to help nurture your leads through the first two stages of the buyer’s journey. You’ve done so by publishing a variety of different types of content addressing the awareness and consideration stages. At this point, you’re trying to get your leads over the finish line. This is why you need to have content that presents your brand as a trustworthy and reliable vendor and your product or service as the best option for their specific needs.

How do you drive website conversions throughout the buyer’s journey?

While this means that some of the content you’ll want to have available on various channels (from your website to social media to your emails) will need to be promotional, you can still provide more informative content as well. Types of content you’ll want to offer during this stage include downloadable white papers, case studies, use cases, which show off the benefits of your products or services. You’ll also want detailed product or service videos that include video demonstrations if possible.

Also, you will want to showcase exactly why they should choose to purchase from your business. This should be done by publishing customer reviews on your website and by encouraging reviews on social. You should consider creating customer testimonials as well–video testimonials tend to be extremely effective during this stage.

Creating Reasons to Choose Your Company

Last, but not least, give consumers a reason to choose your product or service over another brand. You can do so by offering a free trial of your product or service or a free consultation. This way they will get in touch with you. Services like Netflix and Amazon offer free 30-day trials. People jump on the chance to take advantage of such services for free and often end up purchasing the service in full at the end of their trial as a result.

The decision stage of the buyer’s journey is the third and last stage. You’ll want to encourage consumers to choose your company’s product or service by not only promoting your products and services, but also by informing the consumer about your products and services as well as about your company. The goal is to convince them that they can trust your brand. It’s also to show them that your product or service will meet their specific needs more so than any other option out there.

How Creativity and Data Driven Marketing Help Develop Marketing Campaigns

Not long ago, businesses simply didn’t have that much information to leverage when it came to crafting marketing campaigns. They could only draw conclusions about their audience from in-store information — as in, information on who bought what. Mostly, they just advertised to the audience that their products or services were initially intended for. A lot of their marketing effort came from the instincts of their advertising agency’s creative team. These days, advertising agencies have access to a wealth of data, which has led to data driven marketing. However, knowing how to use that data properly is important as well. It’s the agencies that merge data and creative to form the foundation of their marketing campaigns that tend to be the most successful.

How Using Data Can Inspire Great Marketing Campaigns

How Data Driven Marketing Can Support Creativity

Although it’s difficult to argue that data hasn’t been hugely beneficial in terms of identifying who your audience is and how to reach them, a lot of people within the industry are scared that the use of data is restricting creativity. They believe that the increased use of data and automation is going to reduce innovation in marketing campaigns. There’s certainly some truth to this – but only if your marketing agency isn’t using your data properly. You don’t want your creative decisions to be solely based on numbers, after all.

However, you also don’t want to use your data as an afterthought either. For example, maybe you’ve produced both long-form and short-form blog content. Using analytics, you’ve found that your long-form content is performing better. You won’t want to try to take your short-form content and extend it so that it’s longer as this kind of strategy is akin to trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Instead, you should keep this data in mind for future campaigns.

Data driven marketing is about creating a balance between the data you have and your creative. Take video content creation as an example. Video has become one of the most effective forms of content in the past few years as it’s become easier and cheaper to produce as well as easier for consumers to watch. According to recent stats, Facebook users are more likely to engage with your video if it draws them in within 1.7 seconds. When creating video content for Facebook, you’ll want to keep this in mind. It might seem restricting at first — but limitations are often what helps to drive creative solutions. Instead of looking at data as something that restricts the creativity of your marketing campaigns, look at it as a way to drive innovation.

While some critics fear that an over-reliance on data could ultimately hinder creative efforts, in reality, the use of data can help inform creative efforts to bolster the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. In this day and age, advertising agencies who do not leverage data to their advantage in order to influence the direction of their creative marketing decisions will quickly fall behind the competition.

b2b email marketing

Exploring The Differences Between B2C and B2B Email Marketing

How you market your brand depends greatly on who your audience is, which is why b2c (business to consumer) and b2b (business to business) marketing are very different strategies. As such, your email marketing strategy is going to depend heavily on whether or not you’re marketing b2b or b2c. The following are some of the differences between b2c and b2b email marketing to keep in mind:

Optimal Send Time

Knowing when to send your emails has a big impact on whether or not they’re opened. B2c customers are more likely to check their emails in the evenings or on the weekends since they are busy working during the day. B2b recipients are more likely to open them during work hours since they often check their work email regularly throughout the day.

Spam Filters

Spam filters work a bit differently with b2b and b2c customers. B2b customers often use filters that check for certain keywords before deciding whether to inbox the email or automatically sort it into the junk folder. With b2c customers, it’s more about building a good sending reputation with minimal complaints.

Personalization And Segmentation

While personalization and segmentation are important for both, they’re a bit different. With b2c customers, you’ll want to personalize products and content based on individual taste. With b2b customers, personalization should be a bit more subtle, such as by highlighting new stories within their industry or providing case studies that match their needs.

How Customers Respond

B2b customers buy from people, whereas b2c customers buy from brands. This means that when you send emails to b2b customers, you should expect a potential reply. Make sure that you include contact information, such as a phone number and who the email is from so that it’s easy for b2b recipients to reply. This isn’t as important for b2c customers.

The Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing Automation

Triggers

Using triggers to automate emails to your b2c customers helps to drive them back to your website. However, email triggers don’t work as well for b2b customers. Instead, use triggers for phone calls from your sales team instead.

Buying Cycles

B2b buying cycles are typically longer than b2c buying cycles. This is because you’re not just nurturing a single type of customer like you would in a b2c situation. Instead, you’re having to nurture a group of decision makers. Not to mention that in b2c situations, customers are more likely to make faster decisions based on emotion.

The Role of Content

Because buying cycles are longer in b2b situations, your customers will benefit more from educational and non-promotional forms of content, such as white papers, whereas b2c customers might be more moved to action by testimonials and case studies right off the bat.

These are some of the differences between b2c and b2b email marketing that you should know before crafting your email marketing campaign. The last thing you’ll want to do is to use b2c tactics for your b2b email marketing strategy (or vice versa) since this will hurt your ability to nurture your leads.