Developing the Perfect Omni-Channel Marketing Strategy

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The buyer’s journey has changed a lot over the years. This is a result of the consumer’s ability to explore multiple channels online and to engage in multiple ways. There is no distinct path that takes them from point A to point B in order to make a purchase. While one customer might begin doing research through a search engine like Google, another might ask their followers questions on social media to identify solutions to their problems, while yet another might stumble on an ad for one of your products in a magazine. Basically, every buyer’s journey is unique.

As such, it’s important that you have a presence on multiple channels and that you integrate all of your channels, processes, and strategies so that you can help meet the needs and nurture your leads at any stage of their buyer’s journey no matter where they are. This is known as omni-channel marketing. The following are a number of tips that you should consider implementing that will help you strengthen your omni-channel marketing strategy:

Be Consistent With Your Marketing Efforts

Consistency is incredibly important when it comes to omni-channel marketing. This is because your leads are likely jumping from one channel to another. A lead may see a commercial on TV, then visit your Facebook page, then go to your website. If your branding is different (for example, if your message is different, your tone is different, or even the overall aesthetic of your marketing is different), you’re going to confuse consumers and you’re likely going to lose leads.

 Remove Siloed Organizational Structure

Because consumers may be at different stages of the buyer’s journey while exploring different channels, it’s important that your sales, marketing, PR, and customer service departments a

ren’t siloed. You need to make sure everyone has access to customer and prospect data at every stage and on every channel. This ensures that everyone is on the same page when it comes to identifying leads, engaging with them, nurturing them, and closing them.

Create Content For Every Channel

The more content you make available on different channels, the more successfully you’ll be able to reach consumers wherever they are. For example, if you only have a website, then you’re missing out on a lot of leads who use social media to find product or service recommendations. Make sure that you create content for every stage of the buyer’s journey and that you post it on a variety of platforms, including your website as well as social channels such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and whatever other platforms your customers use.

Similar Article: How To Create Content For Each Sale Funnel Stage

Optimize Everything For Mobile Use

All of your online content needs to be optimized for mobile use. This is because many consumers may explore your website while on their smartphone or tablet. This is especially true if they are engaging on social media and follow a link back to your site, or they see one of your commercials on TV and decide to do a search for your company (more and more consumers use their mobile devices while watching TV these days). If your online content isn’t properly optimized for mobile use, then it may not load properly or be displayed properly.

 Put Together The Proper Marketing Stack

Because you’ll be collecting data on leads and customers from a variety of different platforms, you’ll want to make sure that you have the tools needed to organize the data and to put it to good use. To do this, you’ll want to build a marketing stack using tools such as CRM (customer relationship management) software, CMS (content management system, analytics and data visualization tools, and marketing automation.

Omni-channel marketing is essential if you want to attract and nurture modern day consumers through their unique buyer’s journeys. These omnichannel marketing tips will help make it easier to reach consumers at every point of their buyer’s journey no matter where they are.

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What’s Trending in Marketing For April 2019

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Staying current on recent marketing trends is an excellent way to reflect and verify whether your marketing efforts are harmonious with what’s going on in today’s ever-evolving marketplace. We’re aware that keeping up with these trends can often be difficult. The following articles come from popular marketing blogs and highlight current marketing trends that we think are worth paying attention to:

Noteworthy Marketing News

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Google Launching Policy Manager in Google Ads

Coming in April, Policy manager will be the central spot to manage policy violations.The new dashboard will show any policy-related issues affectingyour ads, keywords or ad extensions. You’ll be able to view and manage disapprovals across your account.You can currently get more details about why an ad got disapproved by hovering over it. Google said, this year, it will continue to add details about why ads were disapproved. Get more information about this at Marketing Land. 

Marketers Say They’ll Adapt to a Changing Facebook

Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision for the company’s coming privacy-focused, unified messaging and social networking platform. The CEO said, in the coming years, Facebook plans to rebuild its services and platforms around the following six  principals: private interactions, encryption, reduced permanence, safety, interoperability and secure data storage. Marketing Land goes in to greater detail concerning how marketers will adapt. 

Bing Ads brings 3D ads to Search with Samsung

Users can interact with the desktop ad format to inspect product features and details. In a first for search advertising, Samsung has begun running a 3D ad format on Bing.com to promote the new Galaxy S10 phone. Full screen ads in search results. The format is the result of months of coordination between Bing, Samsung and agency Performics, a unit of Starcom. The ads display in desktop search, and exclusively on Bing. When users search for the Samsung Galaxy S10 or Samsung S9. The 3D unit expands the size of the screen and users can interact with it by rotating and zooming in on the product image to explore features. Users can also click on an image to see product details about the device. Read more about Bing’s 3D ads at Search Engine Land. 

Does Direct Marketing Have A Role In Inbound Marketing?

Improving Your Marketing Program

Buyer's JourneyLearn About the Buyer’s Journey

The general goal of every business is to attract consumers and turn them into customers. The process that a consumer goes through before they make a purchase is the buyer’s journey. As a business, you will need to meet the needs of the consumer as they move through their buyer’s journey. You’ll need to be able to do this at every stage of their journey in a passive manner until they are ready to be engaged.

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

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

Read About The Difference Between the Buyer’s Journey and Customer Journey Customer Journey vs Buyer Journey

You’ve probably heard a lot about consumer life-cycles, and the different terms used to describe said life-cycles such as buyer journey and sales funnel. Terms like buyer’s journey and sales funnel can be overwhelming.  You might even wonder why some terms seem to describe the same thing, such as buyer journeyand customer journey. Don’t be fooled–the buyer journey is very different from the customer journey and it’s important that you know what the difference is.

Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and Trends

Expect More Instagram Branded Content Ad Opportunities in 2019

Instagram confirmed it is exploring more ways for brands to amplify content from influencers. The company has tested a new branded content ad format since last year. It will allow brands to turn posts created by influencers into ads on the platform. “We got great feedback from the brands that participated that this ad product is helping with some major limitations that can come with organic branded content including targeting and scale,” said an Instagram spokesperson. Read more about Instagram branded content at Marketing Land. 

Amazon Adds Customer Acquisition Metrics for Sponsored Brands Campaigns

Amazon Featured ImageThe “new-to-brand” set of metrics are aimed to help brands understand how well their campaigns convert first-time buyers. Amazon has introduced new metrics that capture insights on new customers that converted from seller’s ad campaigns. The “new-to-brand” metrics are available for Sponsored Brands ad campaigns — the search-triggered ads that showcase several products and formerly called headline search ads — as well as video and display ads. Find out more about Amazon’s new customer acquisition metrics at Marketing Land. 

Public Google+ Content Gets Archived for Future Generations

Google’s failed social media network could have been a huge step towards internet domination, and thanks to the Internet Archive, we’ll always get to look back on it.As the April termination date for Google’s social network approaches, attempts are being made to preserve public content for posterity.The fatal combination of low user engagement and security flaws characterized the end of Google’s foray into social media. Marketing Land has more information about Google+ content getting archived.

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Eddie Bauer’s “Release the Fleece” Ad Campaign

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Eddie Bauer’s recent ad campaign has put an interesting twist on a common seasonal item that many are familiar with: fleece. In their recent “Release the Fleece” campaign, E.B. focuses on the uses of emotional appeal, photography, and typography to draw their customers in and transforms this every-day product into a must-have commodity.

Emotional Advertisementad campaign

Ads that end up making people buy and share can usually be linked back to one word: emotion.

This should come as no surprise. According to Psychology Today, studies show that people rely on their emotions, rather than just information, to make final brand decisions. Emotional responses to ads are more influential on a person’s intent to buy than the content of an ad.

In Eddie Bauer’s case, their “Release the Fleece” focuses on sporty, adventurous, and smiling adults. This is the demographic E.B. is trying to grab the attention of. By showing customers what their fleece products look like “in action” on relatable and similar types of people, this further entices the potential customer to invest in a fleece product.

What Every Creative Advertising Agency Needs To Know To Endure The Digital Transformation

Photography

The power of visual communication has reached an all-time high with the rise of digital and social marketing. This is media that modern marketers use to promote their content and brands. Because of this, photography is becoming even more vital to the promotion of a product than ever before. It catches a customer’s attention, improves understanding, calls for action, and most importantly: it drives sales.

Eddie Bauer’s photographs in their fleece campaign are all outdoors. Whether the models in the fleece are hanging out along a coastal beach, casually strolling in the city, or hiking up the mountains, they make the fabric look modern and chic. This type of fabric is for cooler weather. E.B. intentionally chose the month of February to send out this ad campaign. This helps reinforce to customer that there are only a couple months left to wear fleece.

Typography

When it comes to optimizing conversion rates, marketers are more than familiar with testing various colors, images, and buttons to see how they will affect customer turnover. But what about something as seemingly insignificant as choosing a typeface? You may believe you’re in the clear as long as you’re keeping away from Comic Sans, but typography matters more than you realize. It can add that “human touch” that customers are looking for.

In Eddie Bauer’s “Relase the Fleece”, typography was kept very minimalistic. It is very easy to read in sans serif. The colors of the typography are a cool, mint green and ocean blue, both of which have spring connotations. In fact, the ocean blue hue matches the color of Eddie Bauer’s logo.

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What’s Trending in Marketing For March 2019

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Staying current on recent marketing trends is an excellent way to reflect and verify whether your marketing efforts are harmonious with what’s going on in today’s ever-evolving marketplace. We’re aware that keeping up with these trends can often be difficult given the abundance of information thrown at us every day. The following articles come from popular marketing blogs, and they highlight current marketing trends that we think are worth paying attention to:

Noteworthy Marketing News

The 5 Best Ads of the 2019 Super Bowl

Bud Light, Burger King, HBO, Amazon and Hulu commercials kept things the most interesting during this year’s SuperBowl. These brand’s video ads were the ones to get the most laughs, and they got positive reactions from viewers at home. Watch the commercials and read more about the success of these commercials at AdWeek.

Google+ to Close after 7 years

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Learn About Using HubSpot Lead Flows to Improve Conversion Rates

A strategically placed pop-up can actually make it easier to convert your leads. In fact, a recent study showed that pop-ups convert 1,375 percent better than traditional opt-in forms. If you do decide to use pop-ups in an attempt to convert leads, then you should be sure to use HubSpots’s Lead Flow feature.

Check Out the Importance of Implementing Marketing Dashboards

At this point in time, most businesses realize how important data is, and how analyzing the data that they collect can provide valuable insight into the performance of their marketing tactics. The challenge lies in making those metrics easy to access, and easy to read for everyone in your company so that everyone can act on them appropriately. Fortunately, tracking data is easier than ever with the use of dashboards.
Sales lead

Read About a Guide to the Awareness Stage of the Buyer’s Journey

When it comes to addressing the buyer’s journey, making sure that you have content available that addresses the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey is vital if you expect to draw in potential customers. If you try to skip this stage, you will end up losing a substantial number of potential leads.  These leads are still looking for basic information and aren’t ready to make a purchase yet during the awareness stage.

Does Direct Marketing Have A Role In Inbound Marketing?

Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and Trends 

Visual and Voice Search Are Revitalizing The Role of SEO

The basic parts of a successful search engine optimization (SEO) strategy may have remained consistent for the past couple decades. However, their definition and purpose have changed entirely. Driven by trends like visual search and voice search, the industry’s scope has expanded and evolved into something more dynamic. This delivers on a genuine consumer need. According to a report from Slyce.it, 74 percent of shoppers report that text-only search is insufficient for finding products. Read more about visual and voice search at Search Engine Land.

Nielsen buys Sorensen Media, boosting Addressable TV

Nielsen logoRecently, Nielsen announced that it will acquire Sorensen Media as a a means of providing an all-encompassing addressable TV ad delivery solution. Addressable TV advertising allows marketers to “address” specific consumers with customized advertising messages. By the year 2023, it’s estimated nearly 250 million Smart TVs with addressable capabilities are expected in the market. As read in Marketing Land, Nielsen plans to combine Sorensen Media’s addressable TV platform with its Gracenote automatic content recognition (ACR) technology to “help deliver on the promise of addressable TV advertising.”

Digital ad spending to top traditional for first time

Digital ad spending in the U.S. will exceed traditional ad spending in 2019, according to a recent forecast. Much of that share will come from Google and Facebook, with Amazon gaining speed from behind. The report predicts that digital ad spending will make up more than two-thirds of total U.S. media spending by 2023. Find out more about the growth of digital ad spending at Marketing Land.

What marketers should know about Hulu’s new ‘pause’ ads

A few weeks ago, Hulu unveiled a new “non-intrusive, viewer-initiated” ad type that is displayed when viewers pause their content. Hulu is currently testing the ad with Coca-Cola and Charmin.  Hulu expects to make it available by next quarter. Read more about “pause” ads at Marketing Land.

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

Stevens & Tate Named a Top Integrated Marketing Company by Design Rush

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Here at Stevens & Tate, our goal is to help businesses of all sizes to improve their marketing efforts in a substantial way so that they can not only achieve their marketing goals, but so that they can set their sights on even bigger goals that they may not have previously thought possible. As such, we are incredibly flattered to be recognized by Design Rush on their Top 25 Integrated Marketing Companies list.

The Top Integrated Marketing Company List

Being named as a top integrated marketing company by Design Rush is an incredible honor. In order to make the list, companies have to demonstrate an exceptional ability to create cohesive digital marketing strategies by blending communication strategies that reflect a consistent message across both online and offline marketing channels. Only the very best integrated marketing companies from around the country are named to the list, so as you can imagine, it’s quite a thrill to be named to the list.

Award Winning Integrated Marketing Services

Although we are very proud of the recognition we have received from Design Rush, it’s not the first time that we’ve been awarded for the services that we offer. We have regularly received recognition as a top ad agency by Clutch as well. Clutch is a third-party company that regularly ranks B2B service providers as a service to businesses who are looking for compatible marketing partners.

Starting 2019 Strong: A third award from Clutch

These rankings are based on the work that ad agencies have done with their clients in the past. Clutch gets into contact with these clients to collect feedback and accurately review the work that was done. We currently have a perfect five-star rating on Clutch, which has earned us three awards as one of the top advertising firms in Chicago. We were also ranked as one of the top 30 advertising and marketing companies by Clutch’s sister website, The Manifest.

Our Commitment to Excellence

We understand that the recognition that we’ve received recently from Clutch in the past and from Design Rush more recently wouldn’t be possible without the strong relationships that we’ve built with our clients over the years. We strive to provide the best possible services to our clients–their marketing success is our success, which is why we will always be committed to maintaining a high standard for excellence.

To find out why we’re recognized as a top Integrated Marketing Company on Design Rush, be sure to check out their website and to take a look at what some of our clients have to say about the work we’ve done and the relationships we’ve built with them over the years.

MAXIMIZING YOUR MARKETING BUDGET

What’s Trending in Marketing For February 2019

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As you begin launching any new marketing campaigns at the beginning of the year, it’s a good idea to check out some of the latest marketing trends. While some marketing trends come and go, many of them have the potential to influence your own marketing efforts for the better, not to mention that the industry certainly latches onto certain marketing trends, which means you won’t want to fall behind. The following are a few of the marketing trends that we recommend looking into this February:

Noteworthy Marketing News

Gillette Takes a Social Stance And Goes Viral

As Nike showed us last year, taking a social stance helps make your company more relatable and can have a huge effect on brand awareness. Gillette recently published a video directly addressing the Me Too movement by commentating on toxic masculinity. Consumers obviously took note as the video racked up over 11. 5 views on YouTube within three days. Watch the Gilette video and read more about it at Marketing Land.

Living Coral Named Pantone’s Color Of The Year

Every year, Pantone names a color of the year. The entire design industry takes note as Panton names the color of the year based on careful analysis of the year’s color trends. This year, living coral–a shade of pink–was named color of the year after its use by Airbnb and Apple. Read more about Pantone’s color of the year at Adweek.

Army Implements New Recruitment Strategy For Generation Z

While marketers continually focus on the Millennial generation, a new generation has already begun to mature–Generation Z. Because recruitment has dropped significantly over the past year, the Army has decided to change their strategy to connect with Generation Z more effectively–by going digital, expanding recruitment to urban centers, and by getting creative. The Washington Examiner goes into greater detail concerning what the new Army recruitment strategy entails.

Improving Your Marketing Program

Learn How to Prepare This Year’s Marketing Strategy

Now that it’s 2019, reviewing last year’s marketing campaigns and planning this year’s marketing strategy ahead of time will help ensure that you hit the ground running. We’ve outlined eight steps that will help you to prepare your 2019 marketing strategy, including reviewing last year’s strategy, reviewing your target audience, and creating new SMART goals.

Find Out What Advertising Trends Are Going to Catch On This Year

As you begin to create your new marketing strategy, you’ll want to stay ahead of the game by keeping your eye on advertising trends that are likely to catch on throughout the year. We’ve gone over a number of advertising trends that we are starting to see within the industry and that we expect will grow in popularity as the year goes on, including a bigger emphasis on voice search, the growing importance of micro-moments, the increase in visual search, and more. Head over to our site to read more about 2019 advertising trends.

Check Out How to Create a Stronger Brand By Improving Your Package Design

The design of your product’s package has a huge impact on your brand identity. Learn how to attract the eye of your target audience and how to stand out from the competition by checking out our list of package design tips by our very own Mark Beebe.

Advertising Trends That Will Catch On In 2019

Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and Trends

Keep an Eye on Generation Alpha

Although Generation Z is the generation that’s currently maturing, some brands are looking even further ahead by targeting kids under the age of 10 that belong to Generation Alpha. Generation Alpha is the generation of tech-savvy children of Millennials that reports have shown are having a rising influence into the purchase habits of their households. Read more about Generation Alpha’s influence at AdAge.

Mobile Users Have Better Ad Awareness While Watching TV

According to Mobile Marketer’s recent article, consumers are more receptive to mobile advertisements when they’re relaxing at home, such as in front of the TV. While this does vary based on demographics, such information can be quite helpful for marketers in identifying when to best target their audience.

Twitter’s Commitment to Ensure Brand Safety for Video Advertisers

Last year, almost half of all of Twitter’s business came from video advertising. As a result, Twitter is making a concerted effort to create a brand safe environment for its video advertisers so that they can choose which publishers they are associated with or what content genres they want to be associated with. Find out more about how Twitter is creating a brand safe environment for video advertisers at Ad Exchanger.

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Mobile Marketing Trends to Keep Track of in 2019

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Mobile marketing has taken its place over the past few years as one of the most important marketing strategies that you can implement. This should be no surprise, considering the fact that mobile devices accounted for almost 50 percent of the world’s web page views last year. Because of this, it’s important that you keep your eye on mobile marketing trends that could potentially improve the success of your mobile marketing strategy. The following are a number of mobile marketing trends that have caught on that are worth taking note of:

1) Playable Ads

Playable ads help improve engagement since they allow users to interact with the ad. According to a recent survey, some 71 percent of advertisers who experimented with playable ads found them to be effective.video marketing trends

2) Live Streaming

Live streams, such as through Facebook Live or Periscope, give viewers a sense that they are part of something exclusive since they are viewing content that can’t be accessed if it’s missed. Many people will view live streams from their mobile phones because it allows them to partake no matter where they are.

3) Progressive Web Apps

Offering a progressive web app makes it easier for consumers to access your website, will make your website load quicker, and will greatly improve the user experience.

4) Mobile First Indexing

Mobile first indexing refers to your website’s mobile ranking. This is based on how mobile-friendly your website is and requires that your site load quickly, be displayed properly, and be user-friendly on mobile devices.

5) Augmented Reality

AR can help consumers interact with products or ads in real time using their smartphones. For example, using an app, you can take a picture of a food product. The app can then pull up a recipe that you can use that product in.

6) Ephemeral Content

Ephemeral content is content that lasts a short period of time before disappearing. SnapChat is a platform focused on ephemeral content. Ephemeral content can be effective because your audience won’t put off watching or reading it knowing that they could potentially miss out.

7) Voice

Voice is going to become more and more important as it replaces typing, especially on mobile devices and with the growing popularity of virtual assistants. As a result, voice search is something to keep in mind while implementing your SEO strategy.

 

8) Quick Load Times

Mobile users are often looking for specific things while on the move, which means that if your site doesn’t load quickly on mobile, your bounce rate is likely to be high. Quick load times are a must in the age of mobile use.

9) Micro Moments

Micro moments refer to the brief moments that consumers pull their phones out to look something up. Identifying your target audience’s micro moments will make it easier to target them effectively.

5 Mobile Marketing Techniques To Build Your Ecommerce Brand

Keeping track of mobile marketing trends can help you discover new mobile marketing tactics that could benefit your marketing campaign. These are some of the mobile marketing strategies that are gaining steam that are worth looking into.

A GUIDE TO EFFECTIVE MOBILE MARKETING TECHNIQUES

The Benefits of Using Behavioral Segmentation

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Engaging your leads and building relationships with them is one of the most important aspects of successful inbound marketing. This becomes a lot easier when you have information about your leads that you can use to your advantage. Many marketers will take the information they gather from opt-in forms and surveys to segment their user lists using marketing automation so that they can target specific groups of their audience using more personalized content. However, segmentation doesn’t end here–you can also implement something called behavioral segmentation for even more insight into who your audience is. The following is a rundown that explains “what is behavioral segmentation?” and the benefits of implementing it.

What is Behavioral Segmentation?

While the information that you gather directly from your leads via opt-in forms and surveys (which can include things like gender, age, location, and other demographic information) is very helpful and can tell you a lot about them, knowing how they behave will give you insight into their needs that many of them can’t even provide.

The information that you collect in order to segment your users based on their behavior is exactly that–data on how they behave on your website. Different types of people will behave differently while exploring your website and engaging. By being able to identify how they are behaving (and taking into account their historical behavior on your site), you can tailor more personal content that targets them more effectively.

Check out our article: How To Use Buyer Personas For Senior Living Marketing

Benefits of Behavioral Segmentation

The following are 3 reasons why you should be using behavioral segmentation as part of your inbound marketing efforts:

marketing automation software1. Personalize your interactions more

The more you’re able to personalize your interactions (for example, sending an article that has tips on what kind of food you should feed your cat to a lead that actually owns a cat) is going to make it much easier to nurture your leads through the sales funnel. Personalization also includes knowing when to reach your leads and what channels to reach them on.

2. Predict and influence user behaviour

Tracking how your leads behave on your website or on social media gives you insight into how they are likely to behave in the future, thereby making it easier for you to influence how they behave and what the outcome will be. For example, if you notice that they watch a lot of videos, you can notify them when new video content is being published because you know that there’s a good chance they will watch it.

3. Prioritize your strongest leadsattraction marketing

Not all leads are equal. Their behavioural history will give you insight into which leads are more likely to become customers, or which customers are more likely to become repeat customers. For example, a lead that has spent a lot of time on certain product pages is more likely to take action than someone who only briefly looked at one of your blog posts before leaving your site. You can then, for example, target that first lead by sending a special offer for the product they were looking at to encourage them to make the purchase or an article detailing the benefits of that product.

Your business website and social channels offer a treasure trove of data that will reveal valuable information about the behavior of your leads. You should use this information to segment your leads so that you can more effectively target them and engage with them. If you aren’t using behavioral segmentation yet, you should be.

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Advertising Trends That Will Catch On In 2019

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A lot of new–and effective–advertising trends caught on this year, many of which you should consider looking into. However, it’s always important to keep track of the latest advertising trends even if some of them come and go. Advertising trends that pop up could end up being perfect for your specific marketing needs, and they are a good way to judge which direction marketing is going in general. Keeping that in mind, the following are a few advertising trends we expect to see in 2019:

A Bigger Emphasis On Voice Search

Personal assistants, such as Alexa and Siri, are growing in popularity because they are making life much more convenient for people. The technology of voice search has also grown exponentially over the past few years. This has led to almost a third of the 3.5 billion searches being performed on Google every day being voice searches. Because of this, it’s important that you begin building your SEO strategy with voice search in mind this upcoming year.

A Return To Print Marketing

Despite what some believe, digital marketing hasn’t completely killed off print marketing. In fact, it turns out print marketing still has an important place in the marketing world. As consumer email inboxes overflow with unopened emails, savvy businesses are using print marketing (such as flyers and newsletters) to reach their audience. Using print marketing to compliment your digital marketing is the smartest way to go.

Does Direct Marketing Have A Role In Inbound Marketing?

video marketing trendsInternet Watching Will Catch Up To TV Watching

Recent studies have predicted that the number of hours of video watched per day online will catch up to TV in 2019. This means that looking for ways to reach those audiences (such as on streaming sites) should be a part of your marketing strategy.

 

Micro-Moments Will Become More Important

Micro-moments are those small moments in which a person quickly looks something up online but doesn’t spend a whole lot of time doing so. For example, looking up an actor in a movie whose name they can’t remember during a discussion, or trying to find the nearest burger joint. On average, users experience roughly 150 micro-moments a day. Businesses will be paying more attention to these micro-moments in order to fulfill the needs of their target audience.

Visual Search Will Advance

At the moment, search queries are limited to text. However, this will soon change. It won’t be long until people will be able to perform visual searches by taking pictures of things with their phones. In fact, Google presented the work its done on visual search so far just this year in the form of Google Lens. Once visual search is implemented (the technology is still being developed), consumers will be able to take a photograph of a piece of furniture in order to find something similar on sale via visual search.

These are a few of the advertising trends that we predict will catch on this upcoming year. Be sure to keep these in mind as you begin developing your 2019 marketing strategies.

MAXIMIZING YOUR MARKETING BUDGET

5 Ways to Align Sales and Marketing in 2019

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One of the biggest challenges when running a business is making sure that you align sales and marketing with one another. It’s surprising how many companies have marketing and sales departments that never interact, leading to all kinds of inefficiencies within the marketing and sales processes due to a lack of communication. To help prevent this from happening, the following are a few ways that you can align sales and marketing this year:

1. Make Sure The Same Terminology Is Being Used

In order for your sales team to be able to take advantage of all the documents and data that your marketing team shares with them, they will need to be familiar with the terminology being used. A lack of familiarity with common terms used by marketing personnel can cause some serious misunderstandings.

For example, your marketing team may have different terms used for leads at different stages of the buyer’s journey. If your sales team doesn’t know this, they may waste resources on leads that weren’t ready to engage or miss out on leads that were. For instance, if your marketing personnel considers leads to be different than prospects but your sales team thinks they’re the same thing, you’re going to have a problem.

2. Force Marketing And Sales Personnel To Meet Regularly

In many companies, marketing and sales personnel are barely aware of one another. They might as well be foreign concepts. If you want to align marketing and sales, then you need them to be more familiar with one another. Hold weekly meetings where they can get to know each other. Discuss some of the challenges that each department has in respect to one another to try and do a little problem solving while everyone is there. If you have these meetings regularly, your sales and marketing personnel will get to know each other better and be more comfortable around each other.

This is important because it means that not only will someone from sales or marketing feel more comfortable about reaching out to someone on the opposite side for help or to provide advice, but they’ll actually know who to reach out to. Such clear lines of communication are going to benefit both your marketing and sales departments and will greatly reduce instances of miscommunication.

6 Effective Call To Action Examples

3. Align Your Marketing And Sales Goals

The most effective way to make sure your marketing goals and sales goals are aligned is by creating an SLA (sales level agreement). The SLA should outline what the goals are for each department so that everyone is aware of what everyone else is attempting to achieve. An SLA also clearly defines the roles of each department in the lead generation process.

4. Coordinate Content Strategy Between Marketing And Sales

Your content strategy is a big part of your marketing efforts. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to just leave the content strategy up to your marketing team without consulting your sales team. Encourage your marketing team to get together with sales in order to discuss your content strategy. There are two reasons you should do this:

  1. Your sales team can inform them about certain promotional events or products/services they’re going to push, which allows your marketers to create content that’s more aligned with that strategy.
  2. Your sales team can inform marketing what kind of content they tend to use in order to nurture leads. In cases where marketing and sales don’t work together, marketing often develops content that’s never used by sales, which is a waste of resources.

5. Use Effective Marketing Solutions That Improve Collaboration And Communication

There are a number of tools you should integrate into your marketing strategy that will help align sales and marketing. For example, a CRM solution, such as HubSpot CRM, provides a centralized location where both marketing and sales personnel can monitor customer data and interactions. Additionally, automation tools such as lead scoring can be very helpful in bridging gaps in communication. Lead scoring allows marketers to automatically assign scores to leads based on their actions. Sales personnel can then use these scores to identify high quality leads to engage with.

By using these methods to align sales and marketing, you’ll help to reduce the miscommunication and inefficiencies that often plague the lead nurturing and sales processes. If your sales and marketing departments are isolated from each other, make sure that you implement a strategy to align your sales and marketing this year.

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