brand development

What is Brand Development and How Does It Work?

A successful business depends on your ability to strengthen your brand reputation and generate brand awareness. To do that, you need to develop a strong brand. Your brand consists of a lot of different elements. Those elements combine to create a brand identity that separates your business from your competitors. Brand development is the ongoing process of creating and maintaining that brand identity.

What is Brand Development Exactly?

Brand development is a process of creating and differentiating your company’s image, products, and services from your competitors. It is like creating a promise to customers, and consistently delivering on that promise. With that in mind, the following are steps you should take to develop your brand:

1. Determine Your Brand’s Purpose

If you don’t know your purpose, neither will consumers – and that’s not going to help you when it comes to generating brand awareness. In order to set brand goals and to evaluate how your brand is performing over time, you will need to have a clear understanding of what your brand’s purpose is. Exactly why does your brand exist? What problems does your brand solve? Why should consumers care about your brand? A strong brand needs to have a well-defined purpose.

2. Differentiate Your Brand From Your Competitors

One of the things that define the strength of your brand identity is your ability to differentiate it from other competing brands. If consumers can’t tell the difference between you and your competitors, it means your brand is weak. Develop your unique selling proposition to help your brand stand out in a crowded field. Doing so will also help you craft your message. Being able to stand out is arguably one of the most important facets of a successful brand.

Read More: Developing A Brand Marketing Strategy By Determining Your Company’s Make Or Break

3. Identify Your Audience

The success of your brand will depend on whether or not you reach an audience that engages and relates with your brand. However, if you’re targeting the wrong audience, you will fail massively when it comes to building a strong brand identity and establishing a stellar brand reputation. If you don’t target a specific audience (as in, you attempt to reach everyone), your message won’t reach the right people. If you know who your audience is, you’ll be able to create content that’s more helpful and relevant to them, which will only help to boost your brand awareness and brand authority.

There are many ways that you can identify who your audience is. Use the information that you’ve collected from your opt-in forms and from previous customers. Use your social media data. Request customer feedback. All of this information can help you figure out the demographics of your audience as well as their wants and needs. Use this data to develop buyer personas, thereby allowing you to address every different segment of your target audience.brand development

4. Implement A Unique Voice

Your brand needs to be relatable to your target audience. As such, you need to incorporate what you know about your target audience’s demographics to develop your brand voice. The voice is the personality that you create for your brand to communicate with your audience. For example, Uber’s brand voice is considerate and direct. Old Spice uses a masculine and humorous voice. Nike has an inspirational voice. As you can see, the voice a company uses in all of its marketing and communication efforts defines a big part of its brand identity.

5. Create A Distinct Brand Aesthetic

The look of your brand needs to be recognizable as it will help to make your brand identifiable. The log is an important part of this. Some of the most successful brands in the world are recognized by their logo. For instance, the Nike swoosh or Apple’s apple with a bite taken out of it. These logos are so well known that they don’t even need the company name to accompany them. Keep in mind that aesthetic doesn’t just refer to the logo — it also refers to the type of font used to display your company name as well as the color combination associated with your brand. For instance, Facebook is associated with blue and McDonald’s with red and yellow.

6. Maintain Consistency Across Channels

The biggest mistake you can make is to make adjustments to your branding based on the channel you’re on. For instance, taking on a more serious tone on LinkedIn and then using a more informal and joking tone on Twitter. Or using different visual elements on social media than you use on your website. Such inconsistency will hurt your brand identity because your audience will become confused over who you are.

The importance of Brand development plays a pivotal role in the success and sustainability of a business. These are the steps that you will need to take to develop your brand. Keep in mind that brand development is a long-term strategy. Every marketing decision you make affects your brand and contributed to your brand’s identity, reputation, and awareness. As such, you need to take these steps to ensure that your brand development starts off with a strong foundation.

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What’s Trending in Marketing for July 2024

Welcome to our July 2024 edition of “What’s Trending,” where we bring you the most relevant marketing trends and insights. Stay informed and ahead of the game with our curated collection of marketing trends and reports in summer 2024.

Customers Want to Know What’s in Products

Consumers in the United States have been paying more attention to health and wellness in recent years, especially when it comes to the products they purchase. Concerns regarding the safety of unknown ingredients and the health risks that come with some additives are on the rise. The shift towards cleaner cosmetic and food ingredients is called the “better-for-you” (BFY) trend. This change in the behavior of consumers has caused some retailers to come up with BFY products or revamp old products with the BFY trend in mind. The BFY trend gives companies the chance to earn or increase customers’ trust by offering BFY products. The BFY trend also means that companies must make sure their products are clean before it becomes too late. Read more.

Virtual Fragrance Experience 

L’Occitane en Provence worked with the leading virtual reality technology company, Emperia, to create L’Occitane Greenhouse. L’Occitane Greenhouse is a virtual environment that showcases the L’Occitane en Provence summer fragrance collection over three spaces: a main hall for women’s fragrances, an additional room for men’s fragrances, and a Middle East oasis. Read more.

Brands Partnering with “Deadpool & Wolverine”

The third DeadPool movie, “Deadpool & Wolverine” hit theaters on July 26th. Prior to the film’s release, many brands partnered with the movie for marketing purposes. These brands include Jack in the Box, Heineken, and Heinz. Jack in the Box added Mini Chimi Bang Bangs to their menu because the character Deadpool likes Chimichangas. The Heineken ad showed the two superheroes settling their rivalry. Heinz compared ketchup and mustard to the two superheroes’ costumes. Read more.

Improving Your Marketing Program

Up Your Email Engagement: Consumer-Oriented Strategies

Learn how to use consumer-oriented strategies to boost your email engagement. Use these six tips to keep your leads engaged, setting you up for successful email marketing. Read more.

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Marketing Blog Tips to Supplement Your Digital Strategy

Discover why maintaining a blog is crucial to your success as a company. Learn how to build and maintain a successful blog, and how to keep your blog in front of your audiences’ eyes. Read more.

Three Videos Every B2B Website Should Have

Video content adds personality, digestibility, and context to your website. Learn which three types of videos to include in your B2B website to increase sales with an effective digital marketing strategy and beat the competition. Read more.

Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and Trends

B2B Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is gaining popularity in the B2B sector. B2B influencers are followed by professionals within their industry, and are typically industry thought leaders or experts on industry subject matter. B2B influencers showcase their industry knowledge by engaging in webinars, case studies, and discussions. While B2C influencer marketing concentrates on sales and short term engagement, B2B influencer marketing is centered around credibility and creating long-lasting relationships. Read more.

TikTok Marketing

Despite some marketers not knowing how to market their brand using short-form video content, or thinking that TikTok is only for Gen Z, you can expect more companies to utilize TikTok soon. TikTok has over one billion users. It also has a high rate of user engagement. Google and Meta are now seeing competition in TikTok’s ad platform, which now includes many ad targeting categories. Read more.

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Extreme Personalization

The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) is allowing marketers to tailor digital experiences to individual consumers better than ever before. This personalization through AI will allow marketers to give consumers inclusive experiences. AI can also assist marketers in understanding their audiences and delivering content to consumers in local languages. Read more.

Client-Agency Relationship

Fostering a Better Client-Agency Relationship to Grow Your Business

There are many benefits to working with a professional marketing agency, no matter how big your business is. A marketing agency can help develop, execute, monitor, and analyze your marketing strategy, thereby assisting in the growth of your company. As a direct result, you’ll also reduce the amount of time, money, and resources you need to throw at your marketing efforts, allowing you to focus on other business-related tasks instead.

However, it’s critical that you build a close working relationship with your agency. You’re entrusting them with your company’s future success, after all. You’ll want to make sure that they’re tailoring your strategy to meet your company’s needs. Keep in mind that a strong relationship is one that both sides work to develop. As such, the following are a few important elements of a successful client-agency relationship that you should be aware of:

1. Clear Expectations for the Client-Agency Relationship

An agency needs to know exactly what you’re expecting from them, both in terms of what services they are providing and what metrics you’re expecting them to achieve. If you don’t lay out your expectations from the get-go, then they won’t know whether they’re on the right track. You should establish milestones and standards. On top of that, make it clear that you expect clear communication and transparency so that if there are any issues, the agency will share them with you and explain their course of action. Otherwise, they may just go at it alone without your input.

Five Reasons To Hire An Advertising Agency Versus Staffing In-House

2. Open Communication

Any relationship, whether in the business world or not, relies on open communication to work. Make yourself available to the agency if they ever have questions or if there are ever any issues. Request the same of them. You’ll want to be able to reach your team leader with ease if there is anything you want to discuss or if you have any questions that need answering. It’s a good idea to have points of contact in place so that both sides know who to reach.

By demonstrating that you expect clear communication, you’ll also make the agency more comfortable in knowing that they can reach out when needed. There are many businesses that will just leave the agency to their own devices and who won’t want to be bothered. Additionally, some agencies may operate in the same way. However, this is a poor way to manage what should be a long-term relationship.

3. Transparency

An agency needs to understand what you’re looking to achieve with your marketing, both in terms of short-term and long-term goals. It also helps to understand what your business goals are so that your marketing strategy can reflect that. If you withhold information such as this, itfostering a better client-agency relationship will be more difficult for the agency to tailor your strategy to your specific needs. In fact, monitoring and evaluating marketing performance will become much more difficult as a result.

4. Honest Feedback in the Client-Agency Relationship

Establish from the outset that you expect the agency to provide feedback when needed. This way, if you’re not providing the information that your marketing team needs or you’re not getting back to them quickly enough, they will actually let you know. As a result of straightforward feedback, you can not only strengthen your relationship over time, you can keep it from deteriorating (which will only hurt your marketing efforts). The same goes for your side: if the agency’s marketing efforts are not meeting expectations, you need to let them know. You may even want to consider implementing a mutual evaluation at specific dates.

5. True Partnership

Don’t think of an agency as a service provider. Instead, think of them as a partner. After all, their success relies on your success. If you go into the relationship with the idea that you’re partners, you’ll be much more likely to find yourself on the same page as the agency you’re working with. By treating the relationship as a partnership, the agency will have greater success meeting your company’s specific needs.

These are the factors that contribute to a strong relationship between a business and a marketing agency. It’s important that if you outsource your marketing to an agency that they make an effort to develop a trusting relationship with you; however, remember that a good relationship depends on both sides. As such, you need to meet them halfway for the partnership to be a fruitful one. Here at Stevens & Tate, we pride ourselves in not just the work we do, but the relationships that we build with all of our clients.

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Perfect Your Inbound Marketing Strategy With Lead Nurturing

When it comes to marketing, many businesses focus on trying to attract as big of an audience as possible. The more awareness you generate, the more potential customers you’ll have, after all. However, it’s crucial that you don’t skip a step when it comes to generating leads. Just because your marketing efforts have successfully attracted new leads doesn’t mean that they’ll automatically convert into sales. Most of the leads you generate will need to be nurtured before they’ll convert into customers. As such, no inbound marketing campaign is going to be complete if you don’t implement a comprehensive lead nurturing strategy.

What Is Lead Nurturing?

People who discover your brand are going to be doing so at various points of the sales funnel. Everyone is going to be in a different place. For instance, some leads will be in the awareness stage, which means that they are still doing research about their problem. Others may be in the consideration stage, which means that they are looking for solutions to their problem. Then there are those that are in the decision stage, which means that they are comparing solutions from various brands and are in the process of making a purchasing decision.

Lead nurturing is all about meeting the needs of your leads. The goal is to present them with the information and guidance that they need to move through the sales funnel. However, lead nurturing is also about building a relationship through your marketing and communication efforts that not only educates leads and builds trust with your brand, thereby creating a connection that lasts beyond the first sale.

Also Read: Lead nurturing is an important aspect of marketing

The Benefits Of Lead Nurturing

It’s not just about moving your leads through the sales funnel so that you can close a sale. The following are a few of the additional benefits of a strong lead nurturing strategy:

  • Increase ROI of marketing efforts – Leads that are nurtured are more likely to make a purchase. As such, your marketing efforts are going to result in a greater return if you implement a lead nurturing strategy.
  • Build brand authority – By presenting content that addresses the needs of your leads at every stage of the sales funnel, you’ll establish yourself as a brand authority, which will boost your brand reputation and trust.
  • Generate loyalty – Customers that were nurtured throughout the sales process are going to have a deeper connection with your brand than those that weren’t. As such, they’ll be more likely to remain loyal and may even refer your business to others as a result.

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Ways To Nurture Your Leads

The following are a few tips on how you can successfully nurture your leads through the sales funnel:

  • Develop buyer personas – Your leads all have different needs and motivations. To be able to build relationships with your leads, you will need to understand who your audience is. Develop buyer personas so that you can target every part of your audience.
  • Create high-quality content – Avoid over-promotional content. Instead, focus on creating content that educates your leads. Make sure that you create content that not only addresses every stage of the sales funnel, but that also targets each one of your buyer personas.
  • Personalize emails – Email marketing is a great way to nurture your leads since it allows you to directly send them content that can nurture them. However, it’s essential that you make sure your emails are relevant. You can do this by personalizing them. For instance, segment your email list using the information you’ve gathered on every lead (such as the data provided in your opt-in forms and from their purchasing history).
  • Use email drip campaigns – Email drip campaigns can nurture leads that you’ve captured over a specific period of time. They are designed to slowly nurture leads through the sales funnel by sending emails over a few weeks to encourage leads to make a purchase.
  • Implement lead scoring – Using a lead scoring tool allows you to track at which point in the sales funnel your leads are. This is incredibly useful as it gives you the opportunity to engage your leads at the right time so that you can successfully nurture them through to the next stage.

Implement A Lead Nurturing Strategy Today

Effective lead nurturing is the best way to increase your chances of converting new leads into customers. It’s also important to note that it is essential to building long-term relationships with your customers. The more time and effort you put into developing leads, the more likely they’ll be to return as repeat customers.

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6 Email Marketing Tips (Expert’s Advice)

Millions of people have email accounts. Email marketing is a popular form of marketing still today. When sending emails, it is important to make sure it looks good. It is important because people receive many emails a day. In order to have your email opened and read, it needs to stand out. Here are 6 email marketing tips.

Email Marketing Tips

1) Right person, right time

Before sending an email, it is important to determine who the audience is of the email. Segment your contacts by buyer personas. This way you know who each group of your contacts is and what emails they should be receiving. Make sure you are sending out your emails at the right time. It is best to determine what time the people you are reaching are most likely to check their emails.

2) Content

Content is highly important and has so much value. If an email doesn’t have value then it shouldn’t be sent to people. A good way to determine if your email has value is to ask the question, “Would I be excited to read this email?” If the answer is yes, then the email has value.

3) Lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with prospects with the goal of earning their business when they are ready. This process involves a series of emails. With lead nurturing, the goal is to turn a lead into a customer. Email marketing is a great way to nurture leads.

The Right Lead Nurturing Strategy Can Help You Stay Top of Mind 

4) Title

The title is what the people are going to read first. Usually, if the title is interesting and eye catching, the email will be opened up. If the title is boring, it will be passed over and not opened. Therefore, the title needs to be attention grabbing and interesting so that the email will be opened.

5) Personalization

Make sure each email you send it personalized. By personalized I mean at the beginning of the body of the paragraph, include “hello” followed by the person’s name who is receiving the email. What this does is that instead of the person being on an email list and just another name getting an email, it is directed specifically to that person and that person will most likely be more pleased with the email they are receiving.

6) CTA

Emails are a great place to include a CTA or call to action. By including a call to action with a link to relevant information regarding the email, you are providing a link back to your company website.

Also Read: 6 Effective Call To Action Examples

As you can see, these are just a few tips to help emails. These tips can help you execute some great emails to those people you are trying to reach. Something to remember, whenever you receive an email, think, “What is good and bad about this email?” That way you can evaluate emails.

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Hubspot

Hubspot vs Mailchimp

There are hundreds of different tools available for every aspect of online marketing. Such tools can be used to automate basic tasks, provide aesthetic options, analyze performance, and much more. However, choosing the right tool can be difficult, especially when it comes to email marketing. For instance, two of the main email marketing tools currently on the market include HubSpot and Mailchimp. Both have a stellar reputation for user-friendly interfaces, customization options, and automation features. But how do you choose between HubSpot vs. Mailchimp? The following is a breakdown between HubSpot vs. Mailchimp:

What Is HubSpot?

Hubspot

HubSpot is essentially an all-in-one marketing platform. As such, email marketing is just one of its components. The HubSpot ecosystem also includes inbound marketing, analytics, CRM, and sales tools. Using their email marketing service, you will be able to segment your email lists and use a variety of automation features to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your email campaigns. Although HubSpot’s most basic plan starts at $45/month, they do offer free tools, including email marketing tools.

What Is Mailchimp?

Unlike HubSpot, Mailchimp’s primary focus is on email marketing. They have built a reputation as one of the premier email marketing services on the market. Like HubSpot, MailChimp does have a free service that includes their marketing CRM, form and landing pages, website builder, and creative assistant. However, access to additional email marketing features, such as custom branding, A/B testing, and more, requires a paid plan (plans start at $9.99/month).

What Are The Differences Between HubSpot vs. Mailchimp?

As email marketing tools with a large set of customization capabilities and automation features, HubSpot and Mailchimp may seem very similar. The following is a closer look at some of the differences between the two, which should help guide you in making your decision:

  • Price – Although both HubSpot and Mailchimp offer free plans, you’ll likely want to pay for access to more email marketing features. Mailchimp is going to be cheaper at every tier. HubSpot’s plans range from $45 to $3,200/month, while Mailchimp’s plans range from $9.99 to $299/month. Of course, you’ll be getting a more comprehensive marketing suite for the price if you go with HubSpot.
  • CRM – Both HubSpot and Mailchimp offer list segmentation tools, as well as pop-up and embedded forms. However, HubSpot also offers standalone and collected forms. On the other hand, HubSpot only allows up to 60,000 contacts compared to Mailchimp’s 100,000 contact limit (although 60,000 is arguably more than enough).
  • Email Building Features – Both tools offer drag-and-drop features along with customizable templates and A/B testing. HubSpot does have a design manager that makes its tool particularly user-friendly for building your emails.
  • Automation Capabilities – Automation is essential to any successful email marketing campaign. Mailchimp’s automation features include data-based and behavior-based automation, welcome messages, product recommendation, and retargeting emails, as well as in-depth multi-step automation (such as pre-built journeys). HubSpot offers most of these features in addition to complex branching logic, follow-up campaigns, multi-channel automation, score leading, workflow templates, and more. However, access to these features on HubSpot requires their professional plan.
  • Analytics – Mailchimp includes a dashboard with real-time performance and analytics. Additional features include ROI tracking, a click map, advanced audience insights, and more. HubSpot has arguably more comprehensive email analytics capabilities, including up to ten reporting dashboards and custom reports for their starter plan. Higher tiered plans include more dashboards and report options. HubSpot’s data analytics are more detailed as well.
  • Landing pagesLanding pages are essential to building your email list. Not to mention that they are also needed for your emails to convert. HubSpot has an easy-to-use landing page builder that allows you to choose from various customizable templates. However, this feature is not available in their free plan. On the other hand, Mailchimp doesn’t have a landing page builder at all. Instead, it offers integrations with other third-party tools that you can use to build your email landing pages.

Also Read: 5 Ways to Revamp Your Email Marketing Strategy and Increase ROI

Both HubSpot and Mailchimp are excellent options when it comes to email marketing tools. However, when taking into account the differences between HubSpot vs. Mailchimp, we believe that HubSpot does edge Mailchimp in terms of its quality and capabilities. On top of that, HubSpot has an entire ecosystem of marketing tools and platforms, making it easier to integrate all of your marketing capabilities and to run your efforts from a single hub. As such, you should strongly consider HubSpot for your email marketing needs.

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Brand Reputation

Marketing Blog tips to Supplement your Digital Strategy

Ask any business, big or small, and they’ll tell you how important digital marketing is to their overall marketing strategy. When it comes to digital marketing strategies, most prioritize social media, SEO, and email marketing. While these strategies can be very effective, it’s critical that you don’t dismiss the importance of maintaining a digital marketing blog. For many businesses, their blog isn’t nearly as big of a priority as other digital marketing elements. However, a digital marketing blog has an enormous impact on the overall success of your digital marketing efforts. In fact, a successful blog can have a huge impact on how effective your SEO and social media strategies are.

Why Maintaining a Blog Is So Important

The following are some of the reasons why you should maintain a blog on your website:

  • Keep new content organized – Digital marketing requires regular content generation to be effective. A blog allows you to publish and organize all of your content in one place, making it easy for leads to find information that they’re looking for. Leads will also know where to go to find new content, keeping leads engaged.
  • Educate and nurture your leads – A regularly updated blog allows you to continually educate new leads and to nurture them through the buyer’s journey. The more informed your leads are, the more prepared they will be to make a purchasing decision in the near future.
  • Generate website traffic – Having a blog makes it easier to improve your website’s SEO. When you routinely publish relevant, highly optimized content on your blog, you’ll end up boosting web traffic. As a result, you’ll bring in more new potential leads.
  • Build brand authority – A blog full of high-quality content will help position your brand as an authority within your industry. The more you build your authority, the more brand trust you’ll create. It will also help you build your audience on social media as followers will be more likely to share your blog content with others.

Brand Storytelling Examples to Learn From

Tips For Maintaining A Successful Blog on the Website

Now that you have a better understanding of why a blog is so vital to your overall digital marketing strategy, the following are a few tips to help you build and maintain a successful blog:

  1. Know who your audience is – If you don’t know who your target audience is, then you won’t be able to create and publish content that’s relevant. Two of the main goals of a content strategy are to build authority and attract new leads. Neither will occur without an understanding of who your audience is. Develop your buyer personas so that you know who your blog is for.
  2. Perform content research – Once you know who your audience is, you can figure out what kind of information they’re looking for. Do research on trending topics that are relevant to your audience. You should also look at the blogs of various competitors to see what type of content they’re publishing.
  3. Publish new blog content regularly – To maintain your audience, you need to publish new content on a regular basis. This means posting new content to your blog on the same days of the week, at the same times. Doing so ensures that your audience knows exactly when to visit your blog for new content, thereby helping keep your brand at the top of mind. Digital Marketing Blog
  4. Monitor the performance of your blog – Use analytics tools to track how your blog posts are doing. You can learn a lot about your blog content this way. For instance, what types of content get the most views, engagement, click-throughs, and conversions. This data is invaluable when it comes to adjusting your content strategy for success.

Keep Your Blog in the Front of Your Audiences Eyes

  1. Publish different types of content.– Make sure you vary the type of content you post so that you keep things fresh. In addition to written content, create and post infographics, SlideShares, and videos
  2. Keep your content interesting – It’s okay to post promotional content to your blog once in a while (such as a product announcement or a sale announcement), but it’s better to stick to educational content so that your blog doesn’t feel like a giant advertisement. However, this doesn’t mean your content should be purely informative. Your content should also be entertaining to keep your audience’s interest.
  3. Optimize your blog for SEO – Proper optimization through the use of high-quality internal and external links and relevant keywords will improve your chances of ranking. By ranking well, you’ll attract more traffic through Google and other search engines.
  4. Promote your blog – Don’t rely solely on SEO to attract an audience. Promote new blog content by posting links in your email newsletters and on social media. You can even use PPC ads to promote specific blog posts you want to showcase.

Building and maintaining a blog is essential to a successful digital marketing strategy. Be sure to use these eight tips to maintain a successful digital marketing blog on your website.

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marketing automation software

Top Key Benefits of Marketing Automation vs. Email Marketing

It is a common misconception that marketing automation and email marketing are essentially the same thing. In email marketing, you build an email list and then start sending out emails to market your business. You get statistics back showing how many people opened the email and which ones clicked through to your offer. While the information that email marketing is important, it pales in comparison to the features and benefits of marketing automation.

Marketing Automation vs. Email Marketing

How Marketing Automation Benefits Your Business

Email marketing systems have a very limited scope when compared to marketing automation systems. The email systems allow you to send mass emails out to your marketing list. Then, you get reports on how well the emails worked. But, that’s really all there is to it.

A marketing automation system gives you those same features and so much more.

With an email marketing system, you have to build your landing pages and web forms in a completely different system. In contrast, you can build both within a marketing automation system. This built-in integration makes building your marketing campaign much simpler. Plus, it gives you automatic reporting that is not available with an email marketing system.

Automatic marketing systems allow you to directly integrate your email marketing with other types of marketing for your business such as direct mail and social media. This streamlines your marketing efforts and allows you to do much more without the need to replicate efforts in multiple systems.

Also Read: Interactive Email Marketing Trends

A powerful benefit of marketing automation is the power it gives you over your lead information. The software helps you avoid duplication of leads. It also helps normalize the data, making your marketing even easier. The software allows you to score leads based on any number of criteria. You can also recycle and nurture leads throughout the sales process.

The marketing automation software provides reporting on the impact of each marketing effort on your company’s revenue. It allows you to monitor website activity and even tracks IP addresses from anonymous website traffic. It can integrate various data directories to help fill in contact information.

With the data gathered and synthesized in the marketing automation system, you can provide your sales team with qualified leads who are ready to make the purchase decision. This will drastically reduce the amount of time spent talking to leads who are not at that critical point. It will also simultaneously focus your sales team’s efforts and improve your sales numbers.

Using the information provided by the marketing automation system, you can build multi-stage marketing campaigns across any number of channels with ease, You no longer need multiple tools to get the job done. This means you can get things done faster and make adjustments as needed.

These are not benefits you can get with limited email marketing software.

How Your Business Can Benefit from Marketing Automation

If you are ready to bring your business to the next level of marketing, you need to bring the benefits of marketing automation into your company. Give us a call here at the Stevens-Tate team.

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email engagement strategies

Up Your Email Engagement: Consumer-Oriented Strategies

Email marketing may be one of the oldest forms of online marketing, but it has not lost its relevance. Despite the fact that many businesses are focusing more on social media marketing and SEO, email marketing should still be a priority for any online marketing strategy. The use of email can help you deliver valuable resources and promotional offers to your audience. However, it’s vital that you keep your leads engaged in order for your email marketing strategy to be successful. Now first have a look at what is email engagement:

What is Email Engagement?

Email engagement means the interaction and responsiveness of recipients with email content. It is measured via metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. It indicates how effectively an email captures the audience’s interest and prompts them to take desired actions, like clicking on links, making purchases, or sharing content.

With that in mind, the following are a few tips to help increase email engagement.

1. Send Emails That Offer Value

The most important thing to remember when building an email marketing campaign is that your content matters. Poor content that offers little value to your recipients isn’t going to do anyone any good. Your emails have to provide value in order to engage your leads. There are two ways you can do this:

  • Provide Educational Content – Generally speaking, you should avoid sending too much promotional material through email. The more ads you send, the more likely your leads are to unsubscribe. As such, focus on creating content that is informative and helpful. Such content will help build your brand authority, thereby boosting brand trust. The more they trust you, the more attention they’ll pay to what you have to say.
  • Target Your Promotional Offers – Although you should focus more on educational content, that doesn’t mean you can’t ever promote your products or services. However, when you do email a lead a promotional offer, make sure that it’s relevant to their needs. Target your offers based on the data you have from them (such as purchase history) and the actions they take (such as the type of content they’ve downloaded in the past).

Email marketing continues to evolve with the times. Here is what to expect.

2. Segment Your Email Engagement List

It doesn’t matter how high-quality your email content is if it’s not relevant to the person you send it to. For instance, your email about what to look for in high-quality dog food isn’t going to be useful to a cat owner. Use the data you collect from your subscription forms to segment your email list. This will not only ensure that you send your emails to the relevant recipients, but also that you’re creating content that addresses every different part of your audience.

3. Personalize Your Emails

Personalizing your emails will make it easier for leads to relate and engage with your brand. Segmenting your email list will go a long way towards personalizing your emails. However, there’s more to do than just that. For instance, write in a more personal tone of voice using the second person. Use humor where appropriate. Also, send emails that are neither promotional nor educational every once in a while to celebrate a special occasion. For example, a personalized birthday email is always appreciated. You could also send out emails for specific holidays as long as they aren’t religious in tone.

4. Design Your Emails Effectively

The aesthetic of your email matters. You can’t just send a regular default text email to your leads and expect them to be intrigued by what you have to say. Use colors and images that are relevant to your brand and your content. Use CTA buttons that stick out. You can even add GIFs, which make your emails more visually dynamic and which will draw the eye. According to the results of a Dell email marketing campaign, the use of GIFs increased their click rate by 42 percent and their conversion rate by 103 percent.consumer email strategies

5. Send The Right Number Of Emails

This can be tricky to figure out. Send too many emails, and you may be marked as spam. Send too few, and your leads may forget about you. Generally speaking, it’s better to send too many than too few. Monitor your unsubscribe rate to get an idea of whether you’re sending too many. If you have a high unsubscribe rate, you may need to cut back on how often you’re sending out emails.

6. Track Performance And Optimize Your Email Engagement

Finally, analyze your email metrics to identify elements that are engaging and elements that are not. For instance, compare the performance of emails using images versus those that don’t. Compare the titles of your emails to see which results in a higher open rate. Use heat maps to figure out what parts of the email engage readers most. This information can be used to optimize future emails to boost customer engagement.

 

These are six effective methods for creating a more engaging email marketing campaign. The more engaged your email recipients are, the better your chances are of converting your leads into customers — and of converting those one-time customers into loyal long-term customers.

email marketing program
website redesign process

Do You Need to Redesign Your Website?

If your website has sat untouched for more than a few years, then there’s a good chance that it might be in need of an overhaul. Your website should be continually bringing in new leads, increasing your brand awareness and establishing your brand authority. If your website isn’t currently doing these things, then you’re not only limiting your ability to grow; you’re also helping your competitors as a direct result.

When To Redesign Website

If you’re wondering if you need a website redesign, then you’ll want to look for specific reasons that show your website needs improvements. The following are some major reasons to know when to redesign your website:

Your brand has undergone change

It’s not uncommon for a company to undergo a change in branding. This can happen if the company changes ownership or has changed direction; for example, to concentrate on a more niche market or to target a different audience. If your brand has changed, your website needs to reflect this. Keep in mind that your brand identity consists of much more than just your offerings or your logo. It’s your company’s narrative. Brand storytelling is how you get your audience to connect with you and to relate to you. Because of this, it needs to be prevalent throughout your site.

Your website ranks poorly

Every website receives rankings from Google. These rankings determine your site’s exposure on Google’s search engine results pages (SERP). Google uses its rankings to ensure that its users are provided with search results that are relevant and of high quality. The higher your ranking is, the more exposure you’ll have to people searching for topics relevant to your site. If your site ranks poorly, it means that you’re getting little exposure. This will also limit how much traffic your website will receive. Your redesign needs to implement the best practices of search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure a strong ranking.

Here are ten ways to use Google Trends to increase your SEO

Your website user-experience needs improvement 

Some of the factors that influence your website’s user-experience include how long it takes your webpages to load and how easy your site is to navigate. If your pages take too long to load or your visitors don’t know how to find what they are looking for, they’re likely to leave. Additionally, if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it’s going to affect the way that your site is displayed on mobile devices. A lack of mobile optimization makes it difficult for mobile users to browse through your site.

Also Read: The Importance of Having a Mobile Optimized Website

Your website could improve its conversion rate 

If the ratio of purchases and opt-ins to your number of visitors is lower than you would like it to be, then there’s likely an issue with how your site is addressing each stage of the sales funnel. Your website should nurture visitors at every stage, whether they are looking for information about your company or product or whether they are ready to make a purchase. You should also have calls-to-action that are relevant to each page and that help drive your leads to convert.

Your website could use an updated look 

Aesthetics matter. The look of your website is going to leave a big first impression on your visitors. Consider the look of some of the websites you use on a regular basis. Today’s websites have generally moved to a cleaner and more elegant look.

You don’t regularly update your website

Your website generates all kinds of useful data you can leverage to improve your website’s design and adjust your marketing strategies. By implementing a growth-driven design model, you can continually update your website based on your website data, which you can gather using analytics. This will also allow you to focus your resources on areas where it will benefit your brand the most and to adjust strategies that aren’t working.

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

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