Strategies for Website Redesign

Website Redesign: Key Strategies For Revitalizing Your Digital Front Door in 2024

Website redesign can be a pivotal step in refreshing your brand’s online presence. As you plan your redesign in 2024, keep these best practices and trends in mind to ensure your website is both modern and effective.

1. Learn from Your Current Website

Before starting a website redesign, it’s crucial not to disregard the wealth of insights your current site holds. Analyzing existing user data and feedback serves as a foundational step that uncovers the strengths and weaknesses of your website. This will effectively inform your redesign strategy. Delving into analytics to examine user interactions and behaviors is key. Metrics such as page views, bounce rates, and conversion paths shed light on what aspects of your site engage users and which areas need enhancement. Additionally, reflecting on past design decisions that may have fallen short is essential. Recognizing and learning from these mistakes ensures they are not repeated. This sets the stage for a more informed and successful redesign. This approach not only preserves valuable elements but also transforms insights into actionable strategies for improvement.

2. Understand Your Audience’s Website Needs

  • Investigate the reasons people visit your site: Understanding why users come to your site is crucial. Are they looking for information, a specific product, or service? Tailoring your redesign to meet these needs can enhance user satisfaction and engagement.
  • Ensure your redesign meets visitor needs and removes obstacles: Your redesign should focus on streamlining the user experience. Identify any existing barriers to conversion and address them. A user-friendly design encourages longer visits and more interactions.
  • Use the LIFT model: This model helps refine your website’s value proposition by focusing on clarity, reducing user anxiety, minimizing distractions, and adding urgency where appropriate. Applying these principles can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your redesign.

people walking towards target3. Focus on Customer-Centric Website Design

When designing, it’s important to prioritize the needs and preferences of your target audience over the temptation to solely highlight product features or technological capabilities. An overly product-centric approach can lead to designs that don’t fully resonate with users. To avoid overlooking crucial elements that matter to your audience, actively engage with them through surveys, interviews, and other feedback mechanisms. This direct interaction uncovers what users genuinely value and expect from your site. Incorporating insights gained from these engagements into your redesign ensures that the outcome is not only aesthetically pleasing but also functionally in tune with what your audience seeks. This user-centered approach to design makes for a more effective and satisfying user experience.

4. Integrate Copy and Design from the Start

  • Avoid a design-first approach: Integrating copywriting and design from the outset ensures coherence between your message and visual elements. This collaboration can lead to a more cohesive and compelling user experience.
  • Engage copywriters early: Involve content creators early in the redesign process to ensure the textual content aligns with design elements, enhancing the overall narrative and user journey on your site.
  • Ensure the copy is persuasive and complements the design: The right words can elevate a good design to a great one. Ensure your copy is compelling, clear, and effectively guides users toward desired actions or conversions.

5. Be Cautious with Metrics

When considering metrics, it’s essential to select those that meaningfully signify success. Instead of relying on superficial indicators like bounce rates, it’s beneficial to delve into metrics that truly mirror user engagement and satisfaction. Metrics such as conversion rates, average session duration, and user feedback are more indicative of the overall user experience. They can provide a clearer picture of how well a site meets its users’ needs. Prioritizing these metrics, which closely align with business objectives and user satisfaction, can offer valuable insights into the redesign’s effectiveness and its return on investment. This focused approach ensures that the metrics used are not just numbers but valuable tools in assessing and enhancing the website’s impact and performance.

website design SEO laptop6. Clean Up SEO and Enhance Accessibility During Your Website Redesign

  • Use the redesign as an opportunity to improve SEO and website accessibility: A redesign is the perfect time to audit and enhance your site’s SEO and accessibility. This ensures your site is discoverable and usable by a wider audience, including those with disabilities.
  • Consolidate content and use clear, keyword-rich URLs: Streamlining your content and optimizing URLs can boost your SEO efforts. It makes your site more navigable for users and search engines alike.
  • Ensure the website is accessible to all users: Compliance with accessibility standards is not only ethical but also expands your audience reach. An accessible site provides a better experience for all users, including those using assistive technologies.

7. Manage Tech Changes Carefully

If you’re thinking about making changes to both the design and underlying technology of your platform, proceed with caution. Undertaking changes in both areas simultaneously can result in user confusion or technical complications, potentially disrupting the user experience. To ensure a seamless transition, it’s important to maintain continuity in user-facing elements so they transition smoothly into the new environment. These user-facing elements include login credentials and personal preferences. To further mitigate risks, you might want to separate the implementation of design updates from changes to the backend or platform technology. This staggered approach allows for the isolation of issues, making them easier to identify and resolve, thereby minimizing the impact on users and enhancing the overall update process.

8. Prioritize User Research

Grounding your redesign in thorough user research rather than merely chasing the latest trends ensures that your website aligns with the real needs and preferences of your target audience. By letting user feedback and research insights steer your redesign efforts, you can tailor your site to meet the specific requirements of your audience. This focus on what truly resonates with your users can lead to a significant boost in engagement and satisfaction, making your site not just aesthetically pleasing but also highly functional and user-centric.

9. Avoid Overhauling Everything at Once

  • Focus on the redesign without making drastic changes to other aspects of your digital presence: A focused approach allows you to monitor the impact of your redesign more accurately without the noise of other simultaneous changes.
  • Allow time to establish a new baseline: After implementing your redesign, give it time to settle. Monitor key metrics to establish a new performance baseline, which can then inform further optimization and updates.

Elevating Your Online Presence

As you embark on redesigning your website in 2024, remember the importance of building on past insights, prioritizing your audience’s needs, and integrating content and design harmoniously. By focusing on meaningful metrics and making informed changes, you can elevate your online presence and better serve your visitors.

Factors That Influence Consumer Purchasing Decisions

What Are Marketing Qualified Leads And Why Do They Matter?

How are you handling your marketing qualified leads (MQLs)? Once you have a lead at the top of the sales funnel, you can’t just stop marketing and hope that initial lead turns into a sales-qualified lead (SQL). You need to keep your eye on that in-between stage where your MQLs are. You should nurture and engage with them while they are in this stage.

marketing qualified leads sales qualified leads blocks

What is a Marketing Qualified Lead?

A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a type of lead in which the potential customer will engage with your brand which you have provided to them through your marketing efforts.

Don’t Forget the Lead in the Middle

Prospects, also known as contacts and leads, are the consumers at the top of your sales funnel. They have an initial interest in your product or service and might provide an email address or first name, in exchange for a report or other premium offer. However, they are only at the browsing stage and are definitely not ready to make a purchase yet.

At the bottom of your sales funnel are your sales qualified leads, also known as SQLs. These leads are ready to make a purchase. This stage is when your sales people need to be in contact with them, ready to provide additional information and incentives to finalize the sale.

There is plenty of room between the prospect and the SQL. This stage of transition between browsing and making a purchase is where the marketing qualified lead (MQL) sits.

An MQL has moved beyond the browsing stage and is seriously evaluating whether your product or service meets certain criteria. The are looking for detailed information, like customer testimonials and product specifications, to aid them in making the best decision. MQLs are looking at your competition as well, assessing how you measure up. They are getting third-party opinions and reading product reviews to choose the option that best suits their needs. This is when your marketing needs to shift. Nurture your MQLs by following up with them regularly. Tailor content like whitepapers and case studies to them. This tailored content should show your MQLs how and why your product or service is best for them. MQLs need detailed information about your products and services. They also need to know how you differ from the competition. Having a strong brand identity can help set you apart. This information will help the MQL move towards the decision-making point.

Read More: How to nurture leads with email marketing

How Can You Tell if a Lead is Marketing Qualified?

To tell when a lead is moving from the prospect stage towards the MQL stage, you need to gather pertinent data from the lead and monitor his/her activity on your website. Then, compare this information to past sales opportunities to determine what direction the prospect is moving towards. Ideally, they are moving towards becoming an SQL.

  • Demographic data from the lead, such as location, industry, and business size, makes a difference. Also, how much money do they want to spend? Is your product or service within their budget needs? If it is, the lead is more likely to become an MQL.
  • What types of actions are they taking on your website? Frequent visits combined with downloading whitepapers, requesting demos, or other interactions with content is a good sign that the lead will become an MQL.
  • How similar are they to your past sales opportunities that have already transitioned from leads into MQLs? Similarities can help you predict the likelihood of the lead becoming an MQL. If your typical customers are established companies with a large budget, a start-up with a limited budget may not be a good fit. However, that doesn’t mean the start-up won’t make a purchase, it just means that it is less likely to happen.

marketing qualified leads notebook

The exact definition of what an MQL means to your company is something only you can define. But, no matter how you define MQLs, you cannot forget them in your marketing process. Forgetting them means less SQLs, which means less final sales. And that defeats the purpose of marketing in the first place. The next step is learning how to engage marketing qualified leads until they move to being an SQL.

inbound marketing

The Top 10 Strategies for Mastering Inbound Marketing

The inbound marketing methodology stands as a cornerstone for businesses aiming to attract, engage, and delight customers online. The benefits of inbound marketing can be a game changer for your business. By focusing on creating valuable content and tailored experiences, you can draw potential customers to your brand organically. Here are ten efficient ways to leverage inbound marketing for your business’s advantage.

1. Content Creation and Blogging

Creating informative and engaging content is at the heart of the inbound marketing methodology. Blogs, articles, and white papers that address your audience’s challenges and questions attract traffic. Additionally, they establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry.

  • Starting a blog is a strategic move that allows you to disseminate industry insights, current trends, and effective solutions. This platform serves as a beacon, drawing in those seeking knowledge and expertise in your field, thereby enhancing your brand’s visibility and authority.
  • Implementing SEO strategies is fundamental in ensuring your content reaches its intended audience through search engines. By carefully selecting keywords, optimizing meta tags, and crafting quality content, you can significantly improve your online visibility, making it easier for potential customers to discover your offerings.

2. SEO Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial for enhancing your online visibility and must be included in your long term strategy. By optimizing your website and content for search engines, you can increase your chances of appearing in top search results, therefore making it easier for potential customers to find you.

  • Conducting thorough keyword research is a pivotal step in understanding the search behavior of your target audience. By identifying the terms and phrases they frequently use, you can tailor your content to align with their inquiries as well as their interests, thereby increasing your content’s relevance and visibility in search results.
  • Optimizing your website’s meta tags, headings, and content with relevant keywords is crucial for search engine visibility. This practice ensures that your site’s elements are aligned with what your audience is searching for, enhancing your chances of ranking higher in search engine results pages and attracting more qualified traffic.

3. Social Media Engagement

social media inbound marketing blocks

Social media platforms are powerful tools for implementing the inbound marketing methodology. They allow you to engage directly with your audience and share valuable content, in addition to building a community around your brand.

  • Actively sharing your blog posts and insightful content on your social media profiles can significantly enhance your online presence. This approach not only boosts engagement but also directs a wider audience to your website, enriching their understanding of your brand and offerings.
  • Promptly engaging with your followers by responding to their comments and messages on social media reinforces your brand’s commitment to customer engagement. This timely interaction fosters a welcoming community atmosphere, encouraging ongoing dialogue and strengthening customer relationships.
  • Consider partnering with prominent social media influencers that can exponentially increase your brand’s reach. These influencers, with their vast amount of engaged followers, can effectively convey your message, therefore driving awareness and potentially increasing your customer base through their trusted endorsements.

4. Email Marketing

Email marketing remains a highly effective tool for nurturing leads and keeping your audience engaged. By sending personalized and relevant content directly to your subscribers’ inboxes, you can build stronger relationships and encourage repeat business.

  • Develop a segmented email list to send more targeted and relevant content.
  • Use automation tools to send timely follow-ups or educational series to nurture your leads.

5. Lead Magnets and Landing Pages

Lead magnets, such as ebooks, webinars, and free trials, offer value to your audience in exchange for their contact information. Therefore, landing pages dedicated to these offers can significantly increase your conversion rates.

  • Create compelling lead magnets that address your target audience’s pain points.
  • Design landing pages that clearly communicate the value of your offer and include a straightforward call-to-action (CTA).

6. Customer Testimonials and Reviews

Leveraging customer testimonials and reviews is a powerful way to build trust in addition to credibility. Positive feedback from satisfied customers can persuade potential buyers to choose your brand.

  • Feature customer testimonials prominently on your website and in your marketing materials.
  • Encourage happy customers to leave reviews on relevant platforms.

7. Video Marketing

Video content is highly engaging and can convey your message in a dynamic way. Whether it’s explainer videos, customer testimonials, or behind-the-scenes glimpses, video can enhance your inbound marketing efforts.

  • Create instructional or educational videos related to your products or services.
  • Share your videos on your website, social media channels, and YouTube to reach a wider audience.

8. Influencer Collaborations

Partnering with influencers who align with your brand can help you reach a larger, more engaged audience. Influencers can introduce your products or services to their followers in an authentic and trustworthy manner.

  • Identify influencers who share your target audience and brand values.
  • Collaborate on content creation, product reviews, or sponsored posts to tap into their audience.

9. Interactive Content

interactive computer content

Interactive content, such as quizzes, surveys, and polls, can increase engagement and provide valuable insights into your audience’s preferences and behaviors.

  • Use interactive content to gather data about your audience’s interests as well as their challenges.
  • Tailor your marketing strategies based on the insights gained from interactive content.

10. Continuous Analysis and Optimization

The inbound marketing methodology thrives on continuous improvement. Regularly analyzing your strategies’ performance and making data-driven optimizations is key to maximizing your inbound marketing efforts.

  • Use analytics tools to track the performance of your content, campaigns, and website.
  • Adjust your strategies based on the data to improve your ROI and meet your marketing goals.

Want to know the difference between inbound and outbound marketing? Read here. 

Harnessing Inbound Marketing for Growth

Inbound marketing offers a holistic approach to attracting, engaging, and delighting customers in a way that feels personal as well as intuitive. By implementing these ten strategies, you can build a robust inbound marketing framework that not only draws potential customers to your brand but also nurtures them into loyal advocates. Remember, the key to successful inbound marketing is to provide consistent value and to remain adaptable, always fine-tuning your approach based on feedback and performance metrics.



How To Nurture Your Leads With Email Marketing

How To Nurture Your Leads With Email Marketing

Despite some claims that email is dead, it is still a highly effective way for marketers to connect with consumers. It is an integral part of inbound marketing as well as attraction marketing, and is a great way to send nurture leads throughout the buying process.

Nurture Your Leads With Email Marketing

What is Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing is a strategic approach in marketing and sales that focuses on developing and maintaining meaningful relationships with potential customers throughout their buying journey.

Here are a few email best practices that will help nurture your leads.

Segmentation

The segmentation of your contacts database will help define your audience into categories. If you are unfamiliar with buyer personas, read about them here, as they will be extremely useful in segmenting your contacts. Segmenting be done in terms of geographic location, company type, role within that company, behavior, marketing intelligence, or any other category that could be valuable to your company. Use segmenting to your advantage by targeting those different groups with useful content based on their specific needs.

Read more

professional web design1

The Importance Of Having A Professional Web Design Service For Your Business

It doesn’t matter how big or small your company is, you need a website. If you don’t have a website, you’re without a doubt going to lose out on a lot of potential customers. This is because simply having a website is one of the most effective ways to generate awareness of your business. However, just having a website isn’t enough. You will want to have a professionally designed website to ensure that it’s technically sound, visually appealing, and user-friendly. While you might consider building your website yourself in order to save money, the following are a few reasons why it’s worth investing in a professional web design:

Importance of Professional Website Design Service For Your Business

1. Build A Unique Website

Building a website from the ground up is something few companies have the resources to do, which means that they end up using basic website templates. A professional website design service will be able to customize your website by tailoring it to your specific needs. As a result, you will be able to provide a unique website experience to your visitors that will help your business stand out. Additionally, they will be able to create a consistent aesthetic that accurately reflects your brand, thereby helping to strengthen your branding efforts.

2. Prevent Technical Issues

Professional web design services know what they are doing. They have massive amounts of experience and technical expertise. As such, when they develop websites, they ensure that there are no technical issues that will cause your website to crash or to function poorly. Even minor technical issues, such as slow loading times, can hurt your marketing efforts significantly. A technically sound website reflects positively on your brand as well. Additionally, a professional service can monitor your website for potential issues and address them before they have a big effect on your visitors.

3. Ensure Site Securityprofessional web design 2

Website security is incredibly important. If you’re taking personal information from your visitors, such as their names and email addresses, then you have a responsibility to ensure that this data is secure. If you have an e-commerce page through which customers are providing their credit card information, then this is even more critical. A professional web design service will keep your website secure using all of the latest website security tools and practices, including HTTPS protocol.

4. Optimize Website For SEO

Optimizing your website for SEO (search engine optimization) involves a lot more than just throwing a few keywords in your content. A good website developer understands this and will build a site architecture that supports strong SEO. For example, they will build a site map that makes it easy for Google to crawl through your pages and to index them. Without an effective site map, search engines may miss pages when crawling through your website, which means that they won’t be ranked on their SERP (search engine results page). Additionally, proper keyword use in URLs, effective internal linking, and a lack of technical issues all contribute to good SEO.

Similar Article: 6 Web Design Principals to Increase Conversions

5. Update Your Website

New technology is continually emerging, especially when it comes to websites. A brand new website can become outdated within just a year. A professional web design service can keep your website updated and implement new features that can improve the website experience over time. For example, it wasn’t that long ago that chatbots were first developed and now it’s not uncommon for a website to have one. Trying to add new features to your website on your own can be quite difficult and can cause issues with other parts of your site, which is why it’s best to let a professional do it for you.

6. Save Time

The amount of time that it takes to create a website cannot be overstated. Whether you’re building a website to completion or implementing a growth-driven design, it’s going to require a significant amount of time to do. Not to mention that the website will need to be regularly monitored and updated as well. By letting a professional web design service take care of your website, you will be able to focus your time on growing your core business.

7. Save Money

Many companies attempt to build their websites on their own because they think that they can save money this way; however, they’re more likely to lose money in the long run. Website design requires a lot of different skillsets, which means that you would have to take on more employees. Since running a website is a long-term strategy, these employees would have to be permanent. It’s more affordable to outsource to a professional web design service.

Ultimately, your website is a reflection of your business. If it’s of poor quality or appears unprofessional, potential customers will second guess the quality of your products or services. With that in mind, it’s worth investing in a professional web design.

lead nurturing

Lead Nurturing During the Buyer’s Journey

Using Lead Nurturing During the Consideration Stage Of The Buyer’s Journey

The consideration stage of your buyer’s journey begins a pivotal series of events for your buyer and your brand. Once your buyer has been made aware of their problem, searched through your content, and become a lead, their true “shopping” experience begins. This is where delivering solutions in an authoritative way will start to differentiate your brand from competitors offering similar products and services.

That differentiation starts with a shift in your marketing towards your potential buyers in the form of lead nurturing: granular, tailored messages focused on the information you’ve gathered through them during the awareness stage. Email marketing and marketing automation are the primary avenues for marketing to your buyers at this point.

What is Lead Nurturing?

Lead Nurturing is a process in marketing and sales to cultivate relationships with potential customers over time. It is providing relevant information to leads at various stages of the buying journey to guide them towards making a purchase decision.

Drip Emails

Drip emails deliver content to your prospective buyers over time. With time being virtually the only factor affecting how and when messages are sent. While customizing in the sense of what content is delivered, it offers very little in the control you have of the content against the information you’ve gathered about you lead over their buying journey.

Drip emails certainly have a place early in the consideration stage for offering further education, keeping your brand present and in front of your potential buyers. They can also be very broad campaigns announcing new products, brand updates, and showcasing the highlights of your company. Drip email marketing and lead generation, however, have a mutual independency on one another for a successful marketing campaign.

Lead Nurturing Campaigns

The goal of lead nurturing as part of your buyer’s consideration process is to deliver the right information at critical points in their journey through your content. The beauty of marketing automation is that you can build the campaigns tailored to your buyer personas and design those automation steps to deliver perfectly timed content.

Through marketing automation, lead generation collects data about your buyer’s behavior and helps guide them through the buying process. The actions your buyers take on your website will trigger certain actions on behalf of your lead nurturing campaign. Attending a webinar, downloading a certain piece of content, or visiting a page a certain number of times can trigger an email.

While drip emails can be effective at points during the consideration stage and certainly keep your brand at the front of your audiences, lead nurturing campaigns are a “smarter” way to go. Lead nurturing is smart in the sense that it leverages the information your inbound marketing software collects about your leads and uses it to tailor the right content to your leads.

Drive Website Conversions Throughout the Buyer’s Journey

Re-marketing

As you probably know, marketing doesn’t necessarily always go according to plan. Sometimes a marketing qualified lead (MQL) who has already dug deep into your content, fallen into a workflow, and even triggered actions based on your lead nurturing campaigns goes cold. This is where some clever re-marketing coupled with lead nurturing can rejuvenate those once-promising leads.

Re-marketing is a multifaceted and very versatile way to bring leads back into your lead nurturing campaigns. We say multifaceted, because various avenues can be used to reinvigorate your buyer’s interest including paid social media promotions, smart CTAs, and smart lists as part of your lead nurturing. While re-marketing may seem like a last resort in your buyer’s journey it’s actually an integral part of how you keep your brand relevant to prospective buyers especially those who may have slipped through the cracks.

Core Difference Between Buyer Journey vs. Customer Journey

The Marriage of Sales and Marketing

No matter what degree of marketing your brand engages in, marketing without sales will not meet the results your company is seeking: ROI. In the inbound world, we call this “smarketing”, and it’s that partnership between your sales force and marketing department that ultimately tips a buyer in your direction. As we have moved down the funnel, hopefully you’ve seen how vital integrating sales with your marketing practices truly is.

Both the consideration stage and decision making stage of your buyer’s journey rely on that smarketing relationship and the symbiosis therein helps make that transition from a simple lead to a sales qualified lead more fluid. In our next article, we’ll discuss how the personal touch from your sales team can help your sales qualified leads turn into actual sales.

real estate marketing

Six Types Of Real Estate Video Marketing Ideas For Homebuilders

There is a good reason why YouTube has become the second biggest search engine – digital video is the new home of action for marketers. Through real estate video marketing tips, homebuilders and other real estate professionals have discovered an easy way to engage with the audience and increase conversion rates online. You can use videos for every marketing effort for your property, from neighborhood guides to virtual tours.

As a homebuilder, there are several types of videos you can use in your real estate video marketing strategy. Here are some few essential ones you should consider.

6 Real Estate Video Marketing Ideas For Homebuilders

Listing videos

Listing videos have become the go-to videos in real estate marketing. Showing off all the properties that you are selling in an engaging video is a great way to impress new leads that are just learning about your offers. Additionally, you will grab the attention of prospects in the middle of your sales funnel who are considering picking a unit from you. Fortunately, recent technology has enabled the creation of videos that showcase the units without embedding slideshows in the sidebar.

Interview videos

Buyers who have purchased from you in the past, sales teams that have sold your units, and other professionals in the real estate arena can make suitable candidates for your interview videos. The key to making highly effective interview videos is to ensure that all your interviewees provide information that is relevant to your target audience.

Live question and answer sessions

You can hold periodic Q&A sessions with your followers on social media, as well as prospects from your email marketing lists. They can send their questions through online chats, and you can answer them through live sessions. You can also use past webinars as bait to attract more people to register for your live sessions.

Home buyer advice videos

You can also have short videos where you explain different ways that homebuyers can save when purchasing their next home. Some ideas for video topics include ways to determine a good mortgage provider, how to researching a neighborhood, and how to get the best deals. You can intertwine your message, or ways you offer solutions to buyers as a homebuilder, with your sales promotion

Special offer videos

Special offers are used as a means of getting people to take action, such as register for your email marketing or free consultation on a number of home buying issues. Incentives that special offer videos may include are a chance to buy a home at a discounted offer or an additional fixture for the winning home buyer. Also, be sure to include a call-to-action in your videos to generate leads.

Neighborhood videos

Every buyer is concerned with the neighborhood’s access to amenities, infrastructure, and security among, other things. As a result, neighborhood videos provide a preview of these factors by visually taking the audience around the neighborhood.

New construction model video tours

It is helpful to show your potential clients model video tours of the units being built. The model tours show the floor plans, expected roofing, and other fixtures that will be in the home. The potential client will not have to leave his or her desk to obtain detailed information about the house being constructed.

Virtual house tours

Virtual house tours are simulations of a house that showcase the features, spaces, and fittings of the house. It is much like having an open house on the Internet. Potential clients are able to go through every detail of the house like they are moving from room to room. Virtual tours makes it easy for you to reach as many people as possible and create a high engagement with prospects without requiring them to come view the house.

Real estate video marketing is the new medium through which to capture leads and engage customers. You should strongly consider having video marketing as part your marketing plan.

Ready to learn more about real estate marketing? Check out this article here.

smart goal examples

How To Incorporate Smart Goals Into Marketing Plan Development

Now, most of us have heard about how to develop SMART goals. But, how do you incorporate them into your marketing plan development?

A quick recap: SMART goals are those that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. This format makes it easier to see where you need to go and how to measure your progress. That’s why it’s perfect for your marketing plan development.

Making Your Marketing Plan SMART

Every plan must have at least one objective. In the world of marketing plans, the objectives usually include building demand for a product or service, maintaining current demand or shortening the sales cycle. The actual plan you put together works towards obtaining those objectives.

Setting high objectives sounds great on paper. But, when they are not specific, measurable, attainable, relevant or time bound, they become nothing more than marks on a page.

To avoid making paper goals, your marketing objectives themselves must be SMART. For example, let’s say your objective is to gain a 50% increase in market share in the next 12 months. That is definitely specific and measurable, but may not be attainable due to lack of resources or stiff competition. Relevancy depends on the size of the available market and how fast it is growing or not. Being able to grow that much in 12 months may or may not be possible depending on the market.

5 Smart Goal Examples For Business Development

Incorporate Smart Goals Into Marketing Plan

All of your objectives should be stated in SMART terms. Let’s say you want to increase the number of visitors to the Thingamajig product page on your website.

  • Specific: To increase the number of visitors to the Thingamajig web page by 25% over last quarter’s total.
  • Measurable: The total visitors last quarter was 2000, so the goal this quarter is to achieve a total of 2500 or more visitors.
  • Attainable: Increasing the number of visitors is definitely doable with increased spending in PPC ads and referral incentives for existing customers.
  • Relevant: The Thingamajig is our most profitable product. Ten percent of visitors to the website ultimately end up placing an order. Increasing the number of visitors to the Thingamajig web page has the potential of increasing the number of orders by 25% or more.
  • Time-Bound: The goal is to have this achieved by September 30th, so that we are ready to enter the Christmas season with a larger share of the Thingamajig market.

Also Read: SMART Goal Examples That Will Make You a Better Marketer

Going from a general objective to a detailed one is a major change. Here is what just happened:

  • General objective: “Increasing the number of visitors to the Thingamajig web page”
  • Detailed objective: “Increasing the number of visitors to the Thingamajig web page by 25%, or 500 more visitors, in the 3rd quarter, in order to generate 25% more orders and to obtain a larger share of the market during the upcoming Christmas season”

Applying SMART goal thinking to our marketing plan development will make all the difference in moving things forward. How can you incorporate it into your next campaign?

video marketing

What We Can Learn from Viral Video Marketing & Examples of How It’s been Successful

Viral video marketing entails creating and disseminating video content with the goal of broad online sharing. It is a subset of viral marketing that uses videos to generate excitement and raise interest in a specific product or service. When it comes to creating content, going viral is the ultimate goal. Unfortunately, there’s no blueprint for viral video marketing. You could spend tens of thousands of dollars on a 30-second video jam-packed with visual effects, hilarious dialogue, and well-known actors, and it still might not go viral; yet, some random person might upload a ten-second video of their cat and somehow it gets seen by a billion people within a day.

Although there’s no perfect formula for viral video marketing, there are certain things that you learn from successful viral videos from the past. Copying these videos won’t help make you go viral, but learning what made them successful can help you improve your video marketing in general. The following are a few things worth learning from some of the most successful viral videos in the past:

1. Know Who Your Audience Is

One of the most popular ads in recent years is the Dollar Shave Club video. In this video, the owner introduces viewers to the concept of the Dollar Shave Club by walking through his factory. The video is notable for its humor and extreme directness. It goes so far as to use swear words in the dialogue, and even the title of the video has a censored swear word in it. They know exactly who their audience is or else they wouldn’t have been so bold. It might turn some people off — but those aren’t the people they were trying to reach.

2. Invest In The Production

It is possible to make video content on a small budget these days, especially when considering how affordable video equipment has gotten. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put money into the production of your content. High-quality production does not go unnoticed. Just look at the Old Spice Man video. On the surface, it’s relatively simple — a man talks to the audience in a humorous tone to sell Old Spice deodorant. However, the backgrounds are constantly changing all within one shot. He starts in a bathroom, transitions onto a boat, and ends up on a horse at the end. It’s the high-quality production of the video that sells it.

The Power of First-Person Experience Videos

3. Get Their Attention

If your video isn’t interesting off the bat, the viewer isn’t going to stick around to watch the rest of it. This means that you need to grab their attention within the first 10 to 15 seconds of your video. The Poo-Pourri video is a good example of this. For most, the idea of a Poo-Pourri ad sounds kind of boring, yet it starts off with a hilarious line of dialogue that captures your attention right away. It then transitions into a music video, at which point the viewer has likely committed to watching the video all the way through.

Types Of Marketing Videos You Should Use

4. Evoke Emotions

You want your video content to stick with someone after they’ve seen it. To make sure it’s not instantly forgettable, you need to evoke emotions from your audience. This can be in the form of humor or even in the form of empathy. Take Budweiser’s ad Someone Waits For You At Home. Within one minute, it establishes a loving relationship with a dog and its owner that everyone can relate to. At the end, the dog is waiting for its owner, who may or may not return — a message against drinking and driving. It’s a heart-tugging cliffhanger that leaves an emotional impact on the viewer.

These are a few things that some of the most successful viral video marketing examples of the past have in common. While using these tips won’t ensure that your videos go viral, they will help to greatly improve their quality as well as their effectiveness. At the very least, they’ll put your video content in a much better position to go viral.

mql vs sql

The Differences Between MQL vs SQL

One of the biggest challenges businesses face is the lack of communication between their marketing teams and their sales teams. It’s not uncommon for a marketing team to use a variety of strategies to convert a lead and then move on to the next one, assuming sales will pick up where they left off. However, not all leads are the same. Some leads need to be nurtured further and aren’t ready to be engaged. Without any kind of communication with marketing, your sales team is more likely to engage leads that aren’t ready to make a purchase yet while missing out on leads that are. This is why identifying leads as MQL (marketing qualified leads) or SQL (sales qualified leads) is important. But how exactly do you determine whether a lead is an MQL vs SQL?

The Difference Between MQL(marketing qualified leads) vs SQL (sales qualified leads)

Not all leads are of high quality. Just because someone is visiting your website doesn’t necessarily mean that they are a good prospect. You won’t want your sales team wasting time trying to engage with someone who might only have a passing curiosity in your products or services. That’s why you’ll want your marketing team to identify leads who are MQLs. An MQL is a lead that has been identified as someone who is likely going to become a customer, which means that they have value to your business.

Similar Article: A Brief Guide to Sales Lead Generation

However, just because they are likely to become a customer does not mean your sales team should engage just yet. They are likely still in the beginning stages of their buyer’s journey and are still doing research on their own. Trying to close a sale at this point may push them away. It’s only once the lead has taken actions that indicate that they are likely going to make a purchase that they become an SQL. It’s once they are an SQL that your sales team can engage with them.

mql vs sql

Determining MQL vs SQL

The most effective way to label leads as MQL or SQL is through the use of a lead scoring software. Lead scoring software allows you to designate points based on certain qualifications. For example, you can assign a point for downloading an eBook or watching a video on your site. It’s not just specific actions that you can assign points to either. You can assign qualifying points based on demographic information, company information, social engagement, and email engagement as well. You can even assign negative points. For example, if you’re a local business and the lead fills out a form that indicates they live outside of the country, then negative points can be assigned. This ensures they don’t get mislabeled as an MQL.

You will need to determine at what point total a lead becomes an MQL and an SQL. This will require input from both your marketing and sales teams. As to how to decide on how many points to assign to certain qualifications, you’ll need to make use of your analytics. For example, you might find that leads who download a specific whitepaper are more likely to go on and make a purchase. As a result, you’ll want to assign more points to this action.

 

Knowing where your leads are in their buyer’s journey is essential to knowing when to engage with them. As a result, using lead scoring to identify your leads as MQLs and SQLs will help to increase your sales team’s success rate. However, in order for your lead scoring system to be effective, your marketing team and sales team are going to have to work together.