Top 10+ Ways to Maximize Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

Understanding Consumer Expectations Around Omnichannel Approach

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

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

What Is An Omnichannel Approach?

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

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

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Omnichannel Vs Multichannel Marketing

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

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

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

What Does It Mean To Take An Omnichannel Approach?

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

Know your audience

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

Have an omnichannel presence

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

Make sure your branding is consistent

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

Be easy to contact

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

Meet consumers at every stage of their journey

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

The Benefits Of Omnichannel Marketing

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

Create a seamless customer journey

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

Increase your brand loyalty

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

Better insights into customer behaviour

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

Improve your brand recall

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

Generate more long-term revenue

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

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

Brand Marketing Strategy: Community and Advocacy

May 13, 2022/in Articles, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Nicole Wagner

Most companies will have a brand marketing strategy. A great way to use a strategy is to work with the community and advocacy. Having advocates and engaging with community will help your brand grow. Advocates are customers, employees, fans, and influencers. Brand advocates are dedicated fans whom the company should build closer relationships with. The best way to advertise is through word of mouth and advocates in the community will do that.

When it comes to social media, it is important to engage, grow and leverage the audience. Some ways to grow your social media audience include providing an incentive (gift card), reaching out to the offline community, asking the right questions, and finding people who are advocating your brand already. Engaging your social media community can include having a welcoming environment, timely responses, and reciprocity. Make sure to monitor your community space.

How Brands Market To the Different Generations

Engagement with Influencers and Advocates

Engaging with influencers and advocates can bring value. The influencers are bloggers, speakers, and authors. A good idea is to invite these people to an event. Influencers and advocates are the ones spreading information about your company through word of mouth. When building a brand advocacy program, it is important to have program goals, criteria for selection, a plan for onboarding and a continued engagement plan. With an advocacy program, it is important to remember the 3 R’s: relevance, reach and resonance. With an employee advocacy program, it is important that both employees and high up exec people post and share company content on social media.

Growing Community Across Social Media

Social media platforms include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Snap Chat.

Twitter is for using hash tags, monitoring keywords, hosting events and having chats.
Facebook is for having interactions (comments), and using events to create buzz.
LinkedIn is for creating groups, and posting content related to business.
Instagram is for visuals, finding community, engagement, and boosting brand visibility.
YouTube is for collaboration, anonymous comments, healthy debates and connecting with viewers.
Snap Chat is for having a unique snap code, ghost codes and direct engagement (reaction snaps to followers).

Each social media platform is unique and has its own purpose.

Measuring ROI

Metrics for ROI are community growth, engagement and brand love. Quality over quantity. You can use the spot check method and randomly select a few followers and look at their profiles to see what kinds of people are following your company. Engagement can include the number of likes for a post. Brand love is positive testimonials from third party blog posts.

Paying attention to your community is important. By reaching out and engaging with advocates, will help your brand. Reaching out and engaging in all the social media platforms will help as well. The more you put into getting your brand out there, the more your brand will grow. You can have a very successful brand marketing strategy. Community and advocacy are two ways to help your strategy.

Telling Your Brand Story To Baby Boomers

October 18, 2021/in Articles, Brand Development, Directors, Marketing Strategy, Storybranding /by Dan Gartlan

The only thing in the world that is constant is change, and not many changes in recent history can compare to the way baby boomers have redefined how we approach everything in life, marketing and spending included. The baby boomer generation controls 70% of disposable income in the United States, and represent 44% of the US population. That is a considerable market share and one that you can tap into by telling your brand story in a way that appeals specifically to this generation.

The Importance of Experience

How your customers think is influenced by their unique life story, current circumstances, environment, and worldview. It is also influenced by their experience and the wisdom they have gained as they have progressed through life. Your brand story needs to take these elements into account and reflect the knowledge, experience, and interests of this age group. Your brand story needs to use language in a way that celebrates this wealth of life experience.

However, just as importantly, your brand storytelling must reflect on the role that this wealth of experience plays in the changing buying habits of the Baby Boomer generation. Worldviews change as you age and gain new information and perspectives. These changing views reflect in how this customer segment process information, and how they make decisions about products and services.

Life becomes more about relationships, developing positive relationships in particular, rather than categories. Family, friends, and nostalgia, play a significant role in the decision-making process. Choices are not black and white and are more likely to be emotionally led.

Check out this similar article about Brand Storytelling

Changes in Storytelling Style

When considering how to tell your brand story to Baby Boomers, you also need to recognize that the changes are not just emotional, but also physical. As the brain ages and its functions change, you must adapt your storytelling to communicate efficiently with this generation. While the younger brain wants unambiguous, precise details and facts, the brain of this generation is more intuitive and emotionally led. It is also more attuned to sensory images, meaning that your storytelling needs to use words in a multi-sensory manner to create these pictures.

Metaphors are an essential part of this creative process. They aid in the brain’s comprehension of a subject and help to make it more vivid. If you cannot paint pictures with words and metaphors, you risk losing the customer’s focus and interest in your story.

Luckily for you as the storyteller, the Baby Boomer generation as a whole loves stories. So, the stronger the story, the more likely you are to attract Baby Boomers to your brand. However, your stories need to be emotionally charged. If it just contains line after line of facts and statistics, it will quickly lose its appeal. As with any customer segment, good writing, detailed characters, and engaging content also remain essential to reaching the Baby Boomer generation.

Improve Your Marketing Strategy By Asking These 4 Questions

August 5, 2021/in Articles, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Dan Gartlan

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Sun Tzu – The Art of War

Often in business, we feel like we’re on a good marketing strategy. But, as we move further away from when that strategy was defined, we’re really just going through the motions. Activities are being completed, but we lose sight of why we are doing them and what they are supposed to accomplish. In addition, there can be changes in the marketplace, competitor’s messaging, consumer concerns, and even the methods of communication.

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Most companies review their strategies at year-end, but the best businesses are updating and improving their strategy more often than annually. By more frequently updating your marketing strategies and refocusing your activities, you will stay on track, get through all of the noise and reach your audience.

How about a summer strategy tune up?

Make sure that you’re staying on track to achieve your goals. Ask yourself these four questions:

Does your media mix properly address the ever-changing ways your target audience consumes information?
Is your messaging strategy corresponding with your current competitive advantages?
Does your social media have a strong strategy that echoes your brand yet reaches beyond?
Are there measurements to track whether or not your tactics are executing your strategy?

Stevens & Tate is a full-service advertising agency specializing in strategic creative thinking. Contact our team to discuss your marketing strategy today.

How To Develop A Solid Inbound Marketing Strategy

June 28, 2021/in Articles, Directors, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Strategy /by Nicole Wagner

Do you have a favorite sport? Maybe it’s something popular like football or hockey. Perhaps a more dignified pastime such as golf or horse racing better suits your style. Whatever your preference may be, do you ever wonder how your favorite athletes (hopefully!) win more than they lose? Most likely they are playing with a strategy. It may seem obvious, but strategy – even in a sport like racing – is essential to victory.

The same is true for your business website. Without a strategy, your website will fall behind the competition. Don’t let this happen! Many companies fall into the trap of creating a website for nothing more than an “online presence.” With inbound marketing, websites can do so much more than they could 20 years ago. With inbound marketing, businesses are seeing more online traffic that results in more customers and sales. But without a strategy, even inbound marketing has its limits.

Read More About The Benefits Of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing benefits from a well-developed strategy. There are three aspects to creating a well-developed inbound marketing strategy.

1. Create website goals

What do you want your website to do for your customer? That’s the main question that should be asked before a website is developed. Without a clear goal, a website could be published without having any significant benefit to the owner or the visitor. If a website generates most of its sales after visitors view a product information page, the goal of the website should be to create more product information pages, increase traffic to these pages, and streamline the ability to go from product information to product purchase. Inbound marketing benefits from having a website with clearly defined goals. If you are wondering about your website, try having a friend or colleague take a look at it. Ask them if they felt your website had clearly defined goals. Once you’ve determined you have the right goals in mind, it’s time you ask yourself if you have the right person in mind.

2. Create a Persona

Creating a persona is a powerful way for a business to better understand its customers. Without a persona, businesses have an incomplete idea of who to market to. So what is a persona? A Persona is the ‘ideal’ customer that a business wants to reach out to. Personas are defined by many things – ethnicity, location, motivation – but what they all have in common is that they help shape the strategy used by a company to achieve its goal.

Read more on Why Buyer Personas Are So Important

By creating a strategy with a specific end-user in mind, we are better able to understand what their problems are and how we can help make their lives easier. Don’t get too attached to your persona though! You will likely find that you may need to update them as you gain more insights on your customers. You may even considering adding an additional persona. Once you have your persona or personas created, you can move on to the next step.

3. Get to know your persona

Now that you have a persona, ask yourself, how well do you know him or her? It may seem like knowing a pretend person’s upbringing and background is a little silly, but it can go a long way with customer satisfaction. By constructing your persona’s life story, you are better able to understand their motivation, needs, and desired outcome in life. If your persona is looking for a product that satisfies a long-term need but your business only sells products for immediate use, you’ve just gained valuable insight. You’ve recognized a need your typical customer has as well as an opportunity for your company to grow. By using information gathered from our personas, we can update and adapt our company strategy to best fit our customer needs.

Download A Free Template For Developing Personas

Just like in all sports, strategies continue to adapt as they encounter new problems and opportunities. You will likely find that a strategy created today might not work for you a year from now. That’s okay! Revisiting your goals, updating your persona’s attributes, changing their background and desired outcomes; these are all essential to a successful business. Just remember, inbound marketing benefits strongly from a well thought out strategy. How do you think your company’s online strategy is? If you’d like a free consultation, please check out the link below.

Baby Boomers Represent A Wealth Of Opportunities For Homebuying

Marketing Real Estate to Baby Boomers

June 15, 2021/in Directors, Homebuilder Marketing, Marketing Strategy /by Debbie Szwast

Gen Y may have surpassed Baby Boomers as the largest share of the home buying population, but Boomers age 51 to 69 still have significant influence and buying power. According to the National Association of REALTORS®, these “older” buyers have built up equity and are twice as likely to purchase a $500,000-plus home than a Millennial. This is why you should be marketing real estate to Baby Boomers.

Boomers fall into two categories—younger who were born between 1955 and 1964, and older who were born between 1946 and 1954. Combined, they make up the largest segment of home sellers and account for 39% percent of the nation’s homebuyers. Most are married but few have children living at home. They are suburbanites—half live in the ‘burbs while less than 12% choose the city. They purchased now because it was “the right time”—affordability, financing and home availability all ranked low on their reasons to buy. Read more

What Is The Difference? – CRM vs. Marketing Automation Strategy

May 7, 2021/in Articles, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Dan Gartlan

Building a relationship with each customer is essential in today’s business world. Without that relationship, you simply aren’t going to have the sales needed to remain profitable. That is why both CRM (customer relationship marketing) and marketing automation strategies focus on building that relationship.

Understanding how these strategies and systems complement one another helps businesses market and sell to their target audiences effectively.

The Critical Customer Relationship

Even with so much being done online these days, customers still want a relationship with the companies they do business with. They want to feel that a company understands their needs and that the company will address them.

How a business addresses the critical customer relationship will mark its success or its failure. Companies need to build and nurture this relationship. They do this by collecting critical data that helps them address their customers’ needs and challenges.

Learn More: How to Create Content for Each Sale Funnel Stage

The Top of the Sales Funnel

The strategies you use at the top of the sales funnel are going to be different from the strategies you use at the bottom. And these strategy approaches define the differences between CRM and marketing automation strategies.

At the top of the sales funnel, you are capturing leads wherever they come from. They can be people with a casual interest in your product or they can be seriously in the market and just starting the research process. The problem is, there is no real way to know which category the lead falls into. This is where marketing automation and nurturing comes into play.

With marketing automation, your strategies are capturing key pieces of information and using them to nurture a lead further into the sales funnel. This could include contact information like name, email address, phone number, company name, and company size; number of visits to the website and which pages are of particular interest, or which premiums they choose.

Each piece of information gathered about a lead brings critical insight into where they are in the sales cycle. Downloading details about a particular product, for example, is a sign of interest in that product or, at least, that product group. This can trigger the marketing automation system to send targeted emails or special offers.

The Bottom of the Sales Funnel

At a designated point in the sales funnel, a lead moves from the marketing side to the sales side. This is when the data gathered indicates the lead is moving towards making a purchase decision. This is where the CRM system comes into play.

That data gathered in a CRM allows your sales force to nurture the lead into closing the sale. It offers a picture of what the customer wants and their history with the company. Your sales team can use it to schedule calls with the lead or to set dates for follow-up.

The good news these days is that there are a growing number of systems which offer both types of functionality. That way, you can leverage both CRM and marketing automation strategies without worry about one system getting out of sync.

Newspaper Marketing in 2021 is Still Valid.. Here’s Why

April 26, 2021/in Articles, Directors, Marketing Strategy, Newspaper Marketing /by Dan Gartlan

When thinking of a newspaper, you might think of a boy on a bicycle throwing rolled-up papers onto people’s yards. In other words, newspapers tend to conjure up images of the past. However, they are not a thing of the past, despite the fact that many people believe them to be. Not everybody has access to the Internet, which means the newspaper remains an important source of news for many people. As such, newspaper marketing remains an effective way to reach another target audience. If you’re not convinced that newspaper marketing is worth the cost, consider the following benefits:

Benefits of Newspaper Marketing:

Reach A Bigger Audience – Did you know that despite the fact that newspaper readership is declining, the average newspaper reaches a larger audience than the average half-hour long prime time TV show? TV commercials are still considered an effective way to reach a big audience, which means newspapers should be considered as such as well.
Reach A More Attentive Audience – You can reach a lot of people marketing on the Internet. More than you can through newspaper marketing — and by a large margin. However, the people you reach through a newspaper are much more likely to engage with your marketing materials, especially when compared to Internet users, whose average attention span is roughly eight seconds. The consumers who read the ad in a newspaper will be more engaged with the message involved.
Newspaper Ads Live Longer – One of the challenges of marketing online is that you have to get your timing just right. If you post content to social media at the wrong time, your audience will miss it. When you advertise in a newspaper, your readers will get to it eventually. A newspaper audience will read through the newspaper when they have the time — which means they’ll see your ad eventually.
Fewer Competitors – A newspaper can only hold so many advertisements. Your competition (and direct competition) will not be nearly as strong as it is when you market your business online. This also means that your ads are less likely to be ignored because of ads and clickbait.
Newspaper Advertising Is Affordable – It costs less to reach a thousand newspaper readers than it does to reach that many people through other means. On top of that, newspaper advertising tends to be very flexible, making it easier to customize your ads to meet your budget.

Why Should You Trust Newspaper Marketing?

People Trust Newspapers – There’s a major trust issue in this day and age. People no longer trust what they see on TV or what they read online. And creating brand trust, as you know, is crucial. “Fake News” as it were, has caused significant doubt to be cast over the media landscape. However, people still trust newspapers — far more than any other type of media. This might be due to the transparency of the text with no puns involved. Because people trust newspapers, they’re more likely to take your advertising seriously.
Newspaper Readers Look For Deals – Many people who subscribe to a newspaper actually go through the ads and coupons looking for deals. This means that the newspaper is a great way to advertise a special promotion or discount. Online platforms using this method are considered “spam”.
Newspapers Provide A Tactile Experience – It may not seem like anything worthy of note, but the fact that your audience can touch the newspaper makes a big difference. Studies have shown that the ability to touch the ad increases the response rate. It’s obviously psychological, but it has an impact on the reader’s purchase intent and engagement. That tactile quality is missing from most other forms of marketing, whether it’s TV commercials, billboards, or any kind of digital marketing.

Newspaper advertising continues to be an important medium for marketing. Read more here.

Why Should You Consider Newspaper Marketing?

There are plenty of reasons why newspaper marketing remains an effective way to reach an audience, even in 2021. Although many businesses are focusing a significant amount of their resources on digital marketing, it’s vital that you consider all marketing channels, both online and offline. A balanced marketing strategy is the most successful strategy, after all. As such, be sure to consider newspaper marketing as part of your advertising strategy.

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

4 Tips To Keep Sales & Marketing On The Same Track

April 20, 2021/in Inbound Marketing, Marketing Strategy /by Nicole Wagner

Sales and marketing are usually thought of as being separate. However, with inbound marketing, both departments or teams need to work together to achieve their common goal: revenue. Inbound marketing is all about helping and informing the consumer throughout the various stages of the buying process, so they ultimately decide to purchase from you. This type of nurturing cannot happen unless sales and marketing work seamlessly. Here are 4 tips to keep your sales and marketing teams on the same page.

Keep constant communication

Home Builder Marketing Tips To Drive Traffic And Sales

April 16, 2021/in Articles, Directors, Homebuilder Marketing, Marketing Strategy /by Debbie Szwast

Any ad agency executive doing homebuilder marketing has undoubtedly heard these words from her clients, “we need more traffic.” And while there’s no magic bullet for homebuilder marketing that’s going to drive a specific number of visitors to a sales center in a given week, don’t underestimate the power of partnerships and focused events.

Drive On-Site Traffic With An Event

Recently, we harnessed the weight of one of our media partners to pull off a successful grand re-opening for a homebuilder in Chicagoland. With a property that has been underway for more than 10 years, we were looking for a way to reinvigorate the community and attract new people to the site. The builder was opening new models and we used that as our launch pad.

Learn How To Tell Your Partner’s Story

Capitalize On A Strong Media Partnership

With a limited budget, we partnered with a multimedia company with a local focus to develop a comprehensive marketing plan. The media mix spanned digital, print, email, and even public relations. For two weeks leading up to the event, we dominated suburban news pages online that covered the geographic area we anticipated buyers would come from. This included high-impact interstials, overlays and page takeovers. Click-thru results were four times that of our standard buy.

Target The Right Audience

Layered on top of the digital program was an email campaign, both to past prospects and a new audience. We targeted based on geography, household income, age, gender, and even propensity to buy a home. And we didn’t forget brokers with our homebuilder marketing. We emailed them, as well, and the sales team did “boots on the ground” networking, too.

Build Credibility Through Public Relations

Publicity also played a role in the success of our grand re-opening. A few weeks prior to the event an article appeared in print and online highlighting all the benefits of the community and promoting the reasons to buy as told from a homeowner’s point of view. Then the weekend of the event, a front-page feature—complete with photos—graced the cover of the homes section of the newspaper. The message, of course, enticed people to stop by and visit the brand-new decorated model homes.

Reap The Rewards

Results were amazing. Traffic during the grand re-opening weekend was nearly 10 times that of the community’s weekly average. And, even more importantly, the builder sold more homes in those two weeks than it had the five months prior.

Of course we can’t guarantee an on-site event supported by a strong media partnership will always garner these results. But in this case, it definitely was the right combination for a successful homebuilder marketing plan.

To learn more about how a strategic marketing program can increase traffic and sales at your communities, call Stevens & Tate Marketing at (630) 627-5200 or visit our website at stevens-tate.com.