Directors Archives - Page 20 of 52 - Stevens & Tate Marketing

How To Tell Your Brand Story Using Personas

October 17, 2022/in Articles, Brand Development, Brand Story Telling, Directors, Inbound Marketing, Storybranding /by Dan Gartlan

When considering how to tell your brand story, you must think of the role of the audience as well as that of the storyteller. Stories create wonder, excitement, and engagement in the world they create. Through storytelling, your business can engage with its audience on a much more emotional level. Connecting with your key audience is vital, and can be achieved through the creation of buyer personas.

What Is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional character that represents the behaviors, goals, and needs of your current and potential customers. Once you know who they are, the problems they are facing, and what they want from life, you can begin to see how to tell your brand story in a way that reaches them and provides the answers they are looking for. The more thoroughly the buyer persona is fleshed out, the more focused your brand storytelling can be, and, consequently, the more effective.

Where to Start with Your Buyer Persona

As with any storytelling element, you start with what you know. Who are your current customers? What age group do they fall into? What gender are they? This information can be gleaned from login details, email lists, and customer feedback. If you make use of social media platforms, the data your customers share publicly provides a wealth of knowledge. You will find that specific characteristics are more common than others, providing you with the basis for your persona. It is essential, however, to create more than one persona, or you could have too narrow a view of your potential audience.

Using Your Brand Story To Reach Millennials In Business

Putting the Flesh on the Bones

Once you have these details, you can begin to ask further questions that allow you to fill in the gaps and create fleshed out individuals. Give your buyer persona a name, age, and gender. Determine their marital status and flesh out the details of their immediate family. Don’t forget to consider their level and type of education, as well as how long they have been out of school. All of this is important because how you approach a single millennial will differ significantly from how you tell your story to a married member of generation X with a mortgage and a family.

Give your personas a career, responsibilities, and challenges. How do you think they approach these elements in their life? How do these aspects affect their levels of trust, loyalty, and their approach to taking risks? These are again all crucial elements in how you tell your brand story and what image of your company you create.

Don’t forget to consider their social life as well. Your buyer personas need to be as human as possible. As well as helping you to create a connection between the audience and the story, this helps you understand where they spend their disposable income, and what you can do to redirect more of that spending towards your brand.

If you are ever unsure of the next step to take with how to tell your brand story through a buyer persona, just imagine a conversation between them and your brand persona. If it is a long pleasant conversation that finds solutions and answers questions, then you are on the right track. If it ends in an argument or, even worse, still silence, you probably have to revisit your brand storytelling strategy from the top.

How To Tell A Better Business Story

October 10, 2022/in Articles, Directors /by Dan Gartlan

A critical key in modern marketing is storytelling. Now, anyone can generate and tell a story. For it to be effective, however, it needs to convey a meaningful message to your audience. Simply put, you need to tell a better business story.

The Meaning Behind the Story

There is some question as to why you need to tell your story in the first place. Who is interested in the history of your company? Your target audience, that’s who.

Connecting with your target audience requires making an emotional connection. That connection builds excitement and encourages loyalty. Storytelling is one way to do this. Humans have connected to their culture and history through storytelling for millennia. It stimulates the mind and it invokes deep emotions. It provokes empathy, engagement and perspective. And all of that promotes an emotional connection.

Visual Storytelling Techniques That Will Take You To The Next Level

Crafting a Better Business Story

How can you make your business story more engaging and exciting?

Tell your audience how your company is changing the world. When you opened the doors, you had a vision on what you wanted to accomplish. That vision may have changed a bit since you started, but you still have a vision. That is part of what you need to convey to your audience through your business story. You want that audience to see that vision and to embrace it as part of your brand.
Show your audience why your company matters. Part of what you need to convey is what makes your company different from your competitors. Telling your story gives you the opportunity to highlight what makes you different and why your customers choose your brand. This differentiation needs to be an integral part of your story.
Be authentic. Today’s consumers have the ability to check the facts. When you are telling your business story, you need to stick to the facts and avoid embellishing the truth. If your story sounds a bit boring, try a different angle. Even the most boring story can sound interesting with the right storytelling.
Focus on your audience. Your story needs to create an emotional connection with your audience. You don’t want to throw details into the story that clutter your message. When crafting your story, be sure each highlight you include invokes or enhances that critical emotional connection.
Be courageous and audacious. Brainstorm and explore all avenues of how to convey your business story. You may have a few bad ideas, but if you explore the inspiration behind those bad ideas, you may find the perfect angle for telling your story. Or you may find the right details to set your story apart from the competition. The bolder and more audacious you are, the better your story will be in the end.
Tell, refine, retell. The first time you tell your story, it will sound hesitant and awkward. You may not have the delivery smooth and the details are rough. But, that is only the first time. Refine your story, smooth out your presentation. Tell the story again. And again, and again. The more you tell it, the more you refine it, the better it will end up.

Each of these tips will help you craft a better business story. Remember, you are not going to get it perfect at first. But, the more you tell it, the more you refine it, the more authentic it becomes. And that is how you make that emotional connection with your target audience.

6 Effective Call To Action Examples

October 7, 2022/in Articles, Directors, Inbound Marketing /by Dan Gartlan

Great content is essential to building brand authority, attracting leads, engaging with leads, building trust, and more. However, good content will only take you so far. If you want your leads to take action once they’ve read or viewed your content, you’ll need to end with a convincing call to action. Without calls to action, your leads won’t know what you want them to do, which will make it more difficult for you to capture them. The following call to action examples will give you an idea of how to create a call to action that is effective:

1. Be Clear And Concise

Your call to action should only be a sentence or two long. If your call to action is too long, your intention may get lost. The last thing you want is for a lead to read your call to action and forget what it was that you were attempting to get them to do by the time they get to the end.

2. Highlight Benefits

You can’t tell a lead what to do unless you offer them something of value in return. For example, you can’t just say “sign up to our newsletter,” if you don’t provide a reason for them to do so. Otherwise, what’s the point in them taking action? Take the call to action examples of Ikea, one of which asks leads to sign up to their newsletter:

Sign up here to get IKEA promotions, news and exciting design ideas for your house and workplace delivered right to your inbox!

This call to action is very clear about what the benefits are to signing up to their newsletter, all while keeping it short and sweet.

3. Emphasize A Lack Of Risk

One of the reasons why it’s so important to build your brand authority is so that you can build trust with your leads quicker. The more people trust you, the more willing they will be to follow your calls to action. However, even if you have managed to establish your brand, people tend to be hesitant about providing their personal information. Because of this, you should emphasize the low risk of following your call to action. Netlifx has a great example of this:

See what’s next. Watch anywhere. Cancel anytime.

Not only does Netflix highlight the benefit of signing up (watching anywhere), they also emphasize the lack of risk (cancel anytime).

4. Use A Sense Of Urgency

Create a sense of urgency with the words you use. This has a psychological effect on leads, helping to encourage them to take action sooner rather than later. If they decide to wait until later, they may forget about your offer, after all. Words that incite urgency include “now,” “today,” “instantly,” and “hurry,” to name a few.

50 Most Powerful Call-to-Action Phrases

5. Consider Two Calls-to-Action

Because you should keep it simple, it’s usually better to stick to one call to action at a time. However, in some cases, two may be appropriate. For example, if you offer two versions of your service, such as free and premium, or if you have a trial available, in which case you may want to have sign up buttons for the service itself and for a trial to that service. Spotify does this with their call to action, which includes two buttons:

Get Spotify Free

Get Spotify Premium

This can be effective since people who try free versions or trial versions are often more likely to sign up for the paid service as a result.

6. Make It Stand Out

Make sure that your calls to action are easy for leads to spot. Instead of just using regular text that blends into the text of your content, consider using buttons that are of different colors than your background. Many successful call to action examples also use visual images. Lyft, for example, uses an image of a driver and his passenger, who is enjoying the ride, as an image that provides an immediately positive impression of their service.

The stronger your calls to actions are, the more leads you’ll convert. These call to action examples should give you a good idea of how to make calls to action that will help improve your conversion rate.

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.

Real Estate Marketing Trends You Should Implement Into Your Marketing Strategy

September 26, 2022/in Articles, Directors, Marketing Strategy, Real Estate Advertising /by Mark Beebe

The real estate industry has seen a lot of change over the past decade. It wasn’t that long ago when a homebuyer would reach out to a real estate agent through their office the moment they became interested in buying a new home. These days, the majority of homebuyers do their househunting online, which means inbound marketing has become a vital part of the real estate business.

As such, it’s important that you stay up to date with the latest real estate marketing trends. While some come and go, some of these tactics could end up making a huge difference in terms of standing out from the competition and attracting new clients. The following are some of the latest real estate marketing trends that you’ll want to incorporate into your marketing efforts:

Establish a Blog

While businesses, in general, have realized the benefit of blogging years ago, it’s taking realtors a surprisingly long time to catch up. According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), 77 per cent of Realtors did not have a blog in 2018. This means that by setting up a blog, you’ll have an immediate leg up on your competition. Regularly publishing helpful and relevant content on your blog helps to build authority and authenticity, which will make it easier for potential clients to trust you. Having a blog will also help with SEO, thereby increasing the exposure to your real estate business and bringing in more potential clients.

Be Mobile-Friendly

It’s absolutely essential that all of your online content is mobile-friendly, including your website. This is because homebuyers are doing the majority of their research on their smartphones or tablets. For example, if a potential homebuyer is driving around a neighbourhood and they see a house for sale, they may visit the website displayed on the for sale sign on their smartphone while they are there. If they have problems viewing it on their phone, they are likely to just give up on it.

Offer Virtual Tours

Because homebuyers are doing the majority of their research online, they are less likely to visit a property in person unless they are absolutely sure that it could potentially be something that they are interested in. You can drum up interest in your properties by offering virtual tours online. This makes it easier for homebuyers to get an idea of what the property looks like. This can help convince potential buyers to get into contact with you in order to see homes in person.

How Will Inbound Marketing Help Me Sell Custom Homes?

Social media is one of the best ways to reach potential homebuyers. Join Facebook groups and contribute to discussions about real estate advice to potentially connect with buyers. If you give out good advice, buyers are more likely to reach out to you. Social media channels like Instagram are also quite helpful for real estate agents since they provide you with a platform to post pictures of your properties on that can be easily shared. You can also use social media to draw attention to certain events, like open houses. If you’re not using social media at this point, you’re missing out on a huge audience.

Find Influencers

While building your brand authority through a content strategy and a social media presence can be effective, one of the most effective ways to gain instant trust is through the use of influencers. Influencers within your industry, which include previous clients, popular real estate bloggers, and other trusted industry experts, wield an enormous amount of influence within the community and can be extremely beneficial in recommending your services to homebuyers. Connect with such influencers through social media and build relationships with them. B2B website

Create Video Content

People tend to prefer consuming video content over reading text online–especially if they are on a mobile device. It’s why you should create video content, such as videos of your properties, videos of open houses, testimonial videos, and more. Such videos are more engaging, provide better insight, and are more shareable than other forms of content.

Staying up to date with the latest real estate marketing trends can help you improve your own marketing strategy, so keep these current real estate marketing trends in mind.

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

September 23, 2022/in Articles, Attraction Marketing, Directors, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Strategy /by Dan Gartlan

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

Attraction Marketing Strategy and Story

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

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

Get Found and Be Seen

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

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

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

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

Thought Leadership

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

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

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

Lead Nurturing Throughout the Buyer’s Journey

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

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

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

The Nitty Gritty: Why Attraction Marketing?

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

Does Direct Marketing Have A Role In Inbound Marketing?

September 11, 2022/in Articles, Directors, Inbound Marketing /by Dan Gartlan

With the proven success of inbound marketing, you might be wondering if there’s a point to some of the traditional marketing strategies you may have once leveraged–for example, direct marketing. A lot of brands assume that direct marketing, which is the strategy of sending leads newsletters or flyers through the mail, no longer has a place in today’s marketing world, especially since email marketing is so effective.

However, you would be mistaken to dismiss traditional forms of B2B marketing such as direct marketing. The following are a few reasons why you shouldn’t abandon traditional marketing strategies, such as direct marketing.

1. Build Trust With Potential Leads

Direct mail has a higher trust level than online marketing. Online, anyone can send you an email, including scammers. It takes a lot more time and money to produce a direct mail campaign that’s a scam. This means that potential leads are more likely to take the direct mail they receive much more seriously than an email, especially if they don’t recognize your brand.

2. Target More Specific Demographics

When it comes to direct mail, you know exactly who you’re sending it to. A lot of inbound marketing requires that you implement numerous strategies (such as SEO) in an attempt to position yourself to be found by your target audience. This means that you can achieve a greater level of demographic specificity in a direct mail campaign. All you have to do is to rent lists of businesses that match your buyer persona.

Read More Related Article – The Use of Inbound Marketing in the Manufacturing Industry

3. Supplement Your Inbound Efforts

Direct mail can be extremely effective in helping to supplement your inbound marketing efforts simply because of their level of trust and the ability to achieve greater demographic specificity. Once your mail is in the hands of your potential lead, you can direct them using a call-to-action to go to your website or to sign up for a newsletter. You can offer them free downloadable content if they go online and even add a QPR code to your mail to make it easier for them to engage with your brand online immediately.

4. Keep Brand On Top Of Mind

Even if the lead you’re sending your direct mail to is familiar with your brand already but doesn’t follow your call-to-action, direct mail will help to keep your brand at the top of your mind. This is actually a bigger advantage than you might think–many businesses have given up on direct mail completely and are purely focused on email marketing and other inbound techniques. This means that direct mail is an excellent way to stand out from the crowd.

These are a few examples of how direct marketing can continue to be a relevant part of your marketing strategy. Although inbound marketing is one of the best ways to reach your audience, don’t just abandon all of your traditional marketing efforts. Traditional marketing can still play an important part in your overall marketing efforts.

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

How Will Inbound Marketing Help Me Sell Custom Homes?

September 8, 2022/in Articles, Directors, Inbound Marketing, Real Estate Advertising /by Mark Beebe

As a home builder, you might assume that traditional marketing efforts are all that’s required to find new clients. Building homes is not something that’s done on the Internet, after all. However, you shouldn’t discount the importance of inbound marketing and the benefits that it can offer. The following are a few ways that implementing inbound marketing to your overall marketing strategy can help you to sell more custom homes.

1. Make It Easier To Be Found Online

Setting up a website is the first step toward being found online. There are many potential clients out there who are thinking about building a custom home. They are likely to start their research online before they even know who you are. They will begin looking for information on building custom homes and will look for home builders in the area that they want to live in. If you don’t have a website or pages on social networks, odds are they will stumble upon your competitors first.

However, setting up a website isn’t the only part of being found. You’ll want to optimize your website and all of the content you produce for your site using SEO. This means using strong keywords and earning links from outside sources to boost your SEO rankings, which, in turn, will help make it easier for people to find you when doing Google searches.

2. Increase Awareness Of Your Home Building Business

The bigger a presence you build online, the more awareness you’ll generate for your home-building company. For example, if you regularly produce content for a blog on your website, your regular readers will be more likely to share that content on social media. This is a great way to generate more awareness for your business. That one person who shares your blog post on Facebook, for example, may not end up using your services. However, that content will be exposed to their social circle. Someone in that social circle may take note of your company and may, in fact, be looking for a home builder themselves.

You can also use PPC (pay-per-click) advertising to generate awareness for your company on Google’s SERP (search engine results pages).

Read More Related Article – The Silent Generation & Senior Real Estate Marketing

3. Improve Your Authority As A Custom Home Builder

Reputation matters. By producing high-quality content that’s relevant to custom home building on your website on a regular basis, you’ll soon establish yourself as an authority. This is especially true if other websites begin linking to your content. Brand authority is important because it helps strengthen your brand identity as well as build trust throughout your audience. When you’ve established yourself as an authority, potential clients are more likely to choose to work with you because they trust that you will do a good job.

4. Engage Directly With Potential Clients

The ability to speak directly with potential leads to answer any questions that they may have is invaluable. By establishing a presence on social media and regularly interacting with your audience, you can do just that. Social media will allow you to post questions, articles, links, and more. You can even join various discussions that are relevant to the home building industry to make connections with potential clients as well as business partners. Social media channels like Twitter make it easy for your audience to get in touch with you in a convenient manner as well.

5. Nurture Future Clients

Not everybody that interacts with you on social media or that checks out your website will be ready to begin the home-building process. They may be on the fence, or it may be a while before they will be able to begin the home-building process due to a variety of reasons. You can use inbound marketing tactics, such as regularly posting blog content to keep you at the top of your mind or by regularly sending them email newsletters, to nurture them so that when they are ready, they’ll reach out to you.

As you can see, the use of inbound marketing can be incredibly effective for home builders. By leveraging inbound marketing as a major component of your overall marketing strategy, you can increase awareness, improve your reputation, and attract more potential customers.

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.