Blog Archives - Page 9 of 14 - Stevens & Tate Marketing

5 Website Redesign Tips That Will Generate More Phone Calls

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

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

1. Make your phone number visible

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

2. Use effective calls-to-action

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

Why are call-to-action phrases so important?

3. Add click-to-call options

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

4. Use a Responsive Web Design

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

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

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

Creative Real Estate Marketing Ideas for Homebuilders

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

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

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

1. Video

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

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

2. Optimized Landing Pages

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

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

3. Use Marketing Automation

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

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

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

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

5. Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

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

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

6. Retargeting

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

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

7. Content and Inbound Marketing

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

5 Inbound Marketing Resources Every Marketer Should Know About

8. Email Marketing

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

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

5 Digital Marketing Tactics For Senior Living Communities

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

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

Digital Marketing Tactics for Senior Living Communities

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

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

Blogging

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

Check out these tips on How to Have a Successful Blog

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

Social Media

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

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

Online Advertising

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

How Brands Use Feelings to Get People to Buy

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

How Data Driven Creative Is Shifting The Advertising Industry

October 3, 2022/in Advertising Agency, Articles, Blog, Directors /by Mark Beebe

It wasn’t that long ago that businesses had limited data to use for their creative. Marketing campaigns were often built using subjective creative instinct and little else. However, now that advertisers have access to significant amounts of data, including personal customer information as well as audience behaviors, creative decisions are being informed by their data. The use of data allows businesses to make much better use of their resources, thereby making your data driven creative efforts more successful as well as more cost-efficient. The following are just a few ways that advertising agencies use data driven creative tactics to influence your marketing campaign for the better.

1. Develop More Accurate Buyer Personas

Arguably the most important facet of any marketing strategy that you implement is the audience you’re targeting. If you’re targeting the wrong audience, your efforts will fail. This is why developing buyer personas is so important — and the most effective way to do this is through the use of customer data. You can use the data you have from previous customers as well as data from the leads you’ve captured in order to identify exactly who your audience is, which will help inform the creation of your buyer personas.

For example, you can track the behavior of your customers by viewing what pages they visited and what actions they took before making a purchase. Information like what they’ve purchased and when they purchased it will be very helpful in being able to reach your audience as well. Many businesses will also create post-sale surveys for customers to fill out that provides valuable information as well. Additionally, you can gather information from your email opt-in forms as well as from your social media followers.

2. Locate Where Your Audience Is

Knowing who your audience is won’t help much if you don’t know where they are. There are countless social media platforms on which you can target your marketing campaigns. If you choose a social channel on which your target audience isn’t present, your campaign will fall on deaf ears. Figuring out what platforms your audience uses is the first step towards reaching them, and your data can help you pinpoint where they are. For example, you can look at the social media data of similar companies to determine where they have the biggest reach, or you can add social share buttons to your content and then identify which platforms your content is being shared on most.

You can also set up business pages on several social platforms and link to them in your email campaigns and on your website. You can then track which pages receive the most follows, which will tell you which social channels you should focus your marketing efforts on.

3. Personalize Your Ads

The amount of data that you have at your fingertips should allow you to personalize the experiences of your customers, especially once you’ve created your buyer personas. For example, retargeting customers using PPC (pay per click) ads highlighting items that they added to their cart but didn’t end up purchasing can be a very effective way to close a missed sale opportunity. Personalized experiences in general, whether it’s personalized CTAs (calls-to-action) or personalized emails, have a big impact. A recent study even revealed that consumers are twice as likely to click through ads for brands they were unfamiliar with if it was tailored to their preference.

4. Create More Relevant Content

By using your buyer personas and by collecting and analyzing how your visitors engage with the content you produce, you can fine tune your content strategy to better target your audience. By tracking several metrics, including time spent on a page, engagement with the content (comments, social shares, likes, etc.), click-throughs, bounce rate, lead captures, and more, you can identify what content performs at the highest rate. You can then craft new content that’s aligned with what type of content performs well. For example, if you noticed that short-form content in list form performs well but long-form content without bullets or numbers does not, then you should have a pretty good idea of what future content should look like.

These are just a few ways that data driven creative can work and why it’s changing the way the advertising agency operates. Using the significant amount of data that you have access to in order to drive your creative marketing decisions will make it easier to successfully identify who your target audience is and how to reach them in a cost-efficient manner.

Using a Website Redesign Checklist

August 29, 2022/in Articles, Blog, Directors, Website Design, Website Growth Driven Design /by Nicole Wagner

When it comes to redesigning your website, there are a lot of different elements you’ll need to address, which is why you should use a website redesign checklist. The following website redesign checklist will help you gather all of the data you need as well as address the most important aspects of your website’s design:

Analyze your current website

If you’ve committed to investing in a complete website redesign, then you probably know what you want to improve. However, you should use analytics to diagnose your site’s issues so that you know exactly what’s wrong. For example, if you’re visitor conversion rate is lower than you would like, look at data such as bounce rates, page load times, CTA click-throughs and shopping car abandonment rates to pinpoint where your issues lie. Other metrics you’ll want to pay attention to include:

SEO rankings for important keywords
Total number of sales generated
Number of visitors
Number of unique visitors
Domain authority
Number of new lead form submissions.

Establish your goals

If you don’t know what you want your website to accomplish, then you won’t know what direction to take your website redesign in. Without goals, you won’t know what to focus on, nor will you know whether your website redesign is successful once it’s up and running. Make sure that when you set your goals, you can tie them to measurable results. For example, if increasing your brand authority is your main goal, then track metrics such as:

The number of unique visitors,
Time spent on page
Social signals (shares, likes and comments)

Determine what works

Just because your current website might have a few issues doesn’t mean that there aren’t elements that work really well. For example, maybe you’re redesigning your site because you want to update its look; however, your content is actually very effective at drawing in visitors and capturing leads. More specifically, you’ll want to make sure that high ranking pages are kept in place. When auditing your site, take note of what you think is successful as well as what needs work.

Analyze your competitors

In addition to auditing your own website, you should audit the sites of your main competitors. Take note of everything you like and don’t like about their site. Your aim shouldn’t be to just copy what they do but to get an idea of what they are doing so that you can create a superior website experience.

Identify your UVP

Your unique value proposition (UVP) indicates exactly what your business does and what makes your services or products unique. A UVP helps you stand out from the competition. You need to know what your UVP is because it will inform all of the content that you create for your website.

Keep buyer personas in mind

Your website should appeal to your target audience. Your visitors need to be able to connect to your brand’s messaging, after all. To make sure that this happens, all of your content should cater to your buyer persona. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer created using the available data you have from current and past customers, such as:

Demographics
Past purchases
Online behavior
Motivations
Needs
Wants
Concerns
Personal histories
Income

Here are the reasons why buyer personas are so important to a business

Map your buyer’s journey

Every visitor that comes to your website is going to be at one of three stages of the buyer’s journey. The first stage is the awareness stage, in which the buyer is seeking information that helps to define their problems or needs. The second stage is the consideration stage in which the buyer defines their problem and is searching for solutions. The final stage is the decision stage, in which the buyer chooses a solution. Your website needs to cater to visitors at every stage of the buyer’s journey in order to attract their attention, keep their attention and, finally, to convert them.

Set benchmark metrics

The goals you set should be general yet measurable. For example, the goal to increase brand authority is a long-term goal that doesn’t end. Because of this, you should set benchmarks so that you can judge your site’s performance. For example, social signals are a good metric for measuring brand authority. You could set benchmarks for how many shares you want to average per blog post by a certain date. If your metrics meet this benchmark by this date, then you know that your redesign is working and you can set the goal posts even further. If you don’t meet this benchmark, then you may need to make more adjustments.

Optimize your site for SEO

Implementing a strong search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is vital to consistently attract new visitors. Google takes into account a variety of factors, including keywords, link juice and social signals. You’ll need to do keyword research to identify unique keywords relevant to each page. These keywords should be used naturally in your titles, headers, body content, anchor text, alt image tags, HTML tags, meta tags and title tags. External links are earned by promoting and linking to your website’s content via social media, submitting your website information to local directories and by writing guest blogs. Social signals are earned by getting visitors to engage with your content, such as by liking, sharing or commenting on it.

Optimize your site for mobile use

Many people use their smartphones and tablets to browse the Internet. This means that your website will need to load and display properly no matter how small the screen size is. The easiest way to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly is by using a responsive design. You can check to see if your current site is mobile-friendly by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Just type in the address for each webpage and it will determine how mobile-friendly it is.

Find opportunities for conversion

Calls-to-action should be used on every page to encourage visitors to convert. Without calls-to-action, visitors won’t know what you want them to do. Not only should you use relevant CTAs on every page, you need to offer something of value to visitors in return for opting-in. Depending on your what your business offers, this could include downloadable eBooks and white papers, email newsletter subscriptions, product discounts, free trials, free consultations and more. Unique landing pages should be crafted for every call-to-action that focus on the visitor’s needs, your UVP and how what you’re offering can benefit them.

Implement a content strategy

Whatever your goals are for your website, their success will depend on your content strategy. You need to provide high-quality content that is relevant to your buyer persona’s needs and concerns and that is informative, helpful and unique. The best way to do this is through a website blog. Additionally, you’ll need to regularly publish new content to keep your audience engaged and to make sure that they return to your site. While writing good content is important, you’ll need to market it as well. An important part of your content strategy is establishing exactly when you publish your content (it should always be on the same day at the same time) and where and how you promote your new content.

Continually improve

Don’t assume that once you’re done with your website redesign that you’re finished. A good website design is one that is always being improved. You should track your metrics and make adjustments to your design whenever needed. If you meet your goals, you should establish new ones. Move your goal posts further so that your website can continue to grow and improve. Additionally, you should always be uploading new content to keep your website fresh, thereby maintaining or improving your search engine rankings.

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

How Using Data Can Inspire Great Marketing Campaigns

August 26, 2022/in Advertising Agency, Articles, Blog, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Mark Beebe

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

How Data Can Spark Creativity

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

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

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

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

How to Incorporate Email Marketing into B2B Campaigns

How To Use Your Data To Inform Your Creative Marketing Campaigns

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

Learn what your audience connects with

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

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

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

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

Why You Should Consider Using YouTube Videos For Senior Living Marketing

May 27, 2022/in Advertising Agency, Articles, Blog, Digital Media, Directors, Senior Living Marketing, Video Marketing /by Nicole Wagner

When it comes to choosing what platforms to leverage in order to reach senior living audiences, you may have skipped over YouTube assuming that this particular platform is aimed at younger audiences. However, this is actually not true. You may want to give YouTube another look as it turns out YouTube videos are an excellent way to reach older audiences. The following are just a few of the reasons why you should incorporate YouTube videos into your senior living content marketing strategy:

1. Seniors Use YouTube Frequently

The idea that YouTube is for younger generations is a misconception that simply isn’t true. In fact, YouTube is the number one video platform of choice for the Baby Boomer generation. According to YouTube’s Trends Dashboard, more than 60 million Baby Boomers over the age of 55 view content on YouTube every month. In fact, four times as many Baby Boomers visit YouTube than people under the age of 18. This means that creating YouTube videos is actually an excellent way to reach your target demographics.

By 2013, there were already 39 million people 65 and older that were using Facebook, Twitter, and Skype. At the time, this made them the fastest growing age demographic for these social channels. Considering the fact that there are more senior citizens than ever, incorporating social into your content marketing strategy is a must–and YouTube is a social platform. When you create YouTube videos, you can post them to Facebook, after all. Seniors can then comment, like, and share your YouTube videos, helping to increase brand awareness amongst their social circles, which are likely to be filled with family members as well as friends in the senior citizen age range.

3. Seniors Prefer Visual Storytelling

The best way to reach senior citizens is through the use of visual storytelling (according to multiple studies on the subject). There’s no more effective way to tell a story in a visual manner than through video. For example, you could use video to tell the story of a resident and their journey to find a home at your senior living facility. By making a resident the main character in your video, you would make your content more relatable to your audience.

4. YouTube Videos Allow Pre-Roll Ads

Pre-roll ads have become quite common on YouTube videos. They are the 5 to 30-second spots that run before the video and that usually can’t be skipped until 5 seconds in. While they can be a real annoyance for a lot of viewers, they can actually be very effective if they are relevant to your video content. This is especially true if you already have video content available on your site.

Read More Related Article: 4 Senior Living Video Marketing Ideas That Will Improve Engagement

You can create effective pre-roll ads by cutting short 15 or 30-second spots out of existing video testimonials or video tours of your senior living facility. This way, when someone watches one of your YouTube videos (especially those that are instructional or informative and not promotional), your pre-roll ads will showcase your senior living facility so that they know who you are.

5. YouTube Videos Can Drive Traffic

YouTube isn’t just a platform to host videos. It can be used to help drive viewers to your website for more information. Curate your YouTube page so that you have a lot of YouTube videos audiences can go through, but make sure that it’s obvious that it’s your senior living facility’s page and include a link from your YouTube channel to your website. You should also add links to your video descriptions and clickable links embedded within the videos themselves towards the end. Doing so can help drive a significant amount of traffic to your website.

YouTube videos can be extremely effective at reaching a senior living audience, which is why you should incorporate YouTube into your content marketing strategy. It’s also worth mentioning that YouTube is owned by Google, which means that properly optimized YouTube videos can help to boost your SEO as well, thereby increasing your page rankings and helping to drive more organic traffic to your YouTube channel as well as your main website.

Understanding Consumer Expectations Around Omnichannel Approach

May 23, 2022/in Articles, Blog, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Dan Gartlan

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

What Is An Omnichannel Approach?

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

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

Read Our Article About Types Of Advertisement Opportunities For Popular Streaming Services

Omnichannel Vs Multichannel Marketing

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

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

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

What Does It Mean To Take An Omnichannel Approach?

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

Know your audience

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

Have an omnichannel presence

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

Make sure your branding is consistent

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

Be easy to contact

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

Meet consumers at every stage of their journey

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

The Benefits Of Omnichannel Marketing

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

Create a seamless customer journey

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

Increase your brand loyalty

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

Better insights into customer behaviour

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

Improve your brand recall

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

Generate more long-term revenue

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

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

How To Create Content For Each Sale Funnel Stage

June 25, 2021/in Articles, Attraction Marketing, Blog, Content Marketing, Directors /by Dan Gartlan

Even though you may not realize it, you go through a process before buying something, unless, of course, you are an impulse buyer. This process is called a sale funnel. It refers to “the buying process that companies lead customers through when they are purchasing products.” But for any company to succeed, its process must have quality content. Having quality content is having leadership, which is a part of attraction marketing. Here is how to create quality content:

Phases of a standard funnel

Top of the funnel (TOFU): awareness stage

At this point, your followers do not know they have a problem or are just now realizing they do. TOFU involves driving traffic to you as well as providing free surface information with “how to”, “improve”, and “prevent” content.

Middle of the funnel (MOFU): consideration stage

When a potential buyer gets here, they graduate to a potential lead. They need the best solution for their problem and are willing to make possible future purchase commitments. For this stage, begin providing deep content with a wide coverage of topics.

Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): decision stage

Here, someone is making a final purchase decision. Still, there is no guarantee. A little nudge from the right content and assistanced from a call to action will win the customer over.

[Read to learn about the importance of lead generating content marketing]

Creating sale funnel content for each stage

TOFU

Content can be in the form of an eBook, checklist, podcast, whitepaper, etc. It should be rich with key words, compelling, informational, correctly format, and delivered in a timely manner. Do not attempt to sell at this stage because the potential customer is not yet considered a qualified lead. Make your content both easy to understand and enjoyable to read. Try to obtain the potential customer’s personal contact information at this point through forms and landing pages to use later in the lead qualifying process.

MOFU

As your visitors transition to this stage, your content should transition with them. This content can be in the form of case studies, demonstration videos, trial offers, cost estimates, etc. You should offer expert, in-depth content. For example: “The Complete Checklist for a Refurbished Phone.”

As they look to expand their personal understanding, usher in lead nurturing techniques such as personal engagement and email marketing. This is usually the longest phase because potential customers need to weigh their options and research further. However, an advantage to this wait is that you can take time to filter out unqualified leads and instead focus your resources on marketing qualified leads.

BOFU

When your leads reach the final stage, you will probably be a little anxious, but don’t push too much. Offer content to make them understand why you are the best best option for them. Position yourself as a solution to their problem. Be careful not to sound too much like a sales person, and focus your content on their needs. “Guidelines For Success” or “How to Implement Inbound Marketing Strategies” are some examples of content you should provide in order to convert your leads into sales.

Defining Your True Brand Story and Bringing it to Life Online

June 11, 2021/in Articles, Blog, Brand Development, Directors, Storybranding /by Dan Gartlan

Today’s most well-known brands share a powerful marketing secret—its about connecting with customers on an emotional level and in a way that addresses their challenges. But how can you do this without pushing your ideas on prospects?

Taking a true storytelling approach is the answer. Sharing your brand’s core values and competitive advantages in meaningful, memorable way will help reach your ideal buyer and build a following to your brand. Any brand, large or small, in any industry, for any product or service, can benefit from getting past just telling advantage and benefit claims, and truly developing a unique voice that customers believe in and becomes your brand.

The Power Of A Great Story

Stories have feeling. Emotion. Honesty. A good story naturally draws people in and creates lasting impressions. Beyond showing personality, it can convey a brand’s authentic motivational core—distinguishing you from the competition. A brand story rooted in truth and experience, and not about simply speaking about your product or service facts, will communicate your values and beliefs while empowering your customers and prospects. And once you have people on board, they will instinctually want to share it with others. So you not only attract buyers, you attract followers and advocates of your brand—without forcing it.

Uncovering The Plot

As you begin to think of your brand as a story and the best ways to convey it, consider these two essential layers: your Core Values—which is the WHY you do what you do (what you stand for and believe in) and your Competitive Advantages—the WHAT and HOW you do what you do best. By aligning these two elements, you define the true essence of your brand, and develop a unique value proposition that no other company or brand can match. While one point on its own may not be the differentiating factor, in combination, they become what makes you unique and extend the belief that you do it for the right reasons.

Learn more about telling your Brand Story here!

Diving Deeper

Companies must do some internal processing to find a brand’s difference and its’ point of view. The difference is the brand’s function. The POV is the brand’s cause. Features and benefits are copied or upgraded all the time. But when a customer feels a brand shares their beliefs, when they believe in the same Core Values, they are more likely to connect with them. As they consider at different purchasing options, you will have already built an emotional connection—and trust.

Expressing Your Story

Once you capture and define your one authentic story, you must bring it to life for the world to discover. Crafting the voice and tone to showcase your personality, what motivates and inspires you, and demonstrate your values. Creating consistent, relevant and informative website content that speaks to the right prospects you are trying to attract. Maintaining a positive experience for all visitors, but shaping experiences for your key audiences to keep them coming back for more.

At the end of the day, your website’s greatest objective is to deliver prospects the information they need, when they need it, and provide clarity around how to act. When you shape it around a story that already engages, you will effectively build the following—and the sales—that lead to lasting success.