Brand Ambassador Programs

How Businesses Are Using Brand Ambassador Programs To Increase Brand Awareness And Trust

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Generating brand awareness and building brand trust are two major marketing goals all businesses have. One of the most effective ways to achieve these goals is by encouraging loyal customers to increase brand awareness and trust on your behalf. This is because positive word-of-mouth can be incredibly powerful, and because consumers tend to trust one another when it comes to brand recommendations. As a result, many businesses have established brand ambassador programs in order to turn their loyal customers into official ambassadors.

What are Brand Ambassadors?

Brand ambassadors are consumers who work closely with you to advocate your brand. Companies generally choose loyal customers who already have a history recommending your brand, and also have some online influence. Someone with tens of thousands of followers on Instagram is going to be more effective as a brand ambassador than someone who only has LinkedIn and a handful of connections.

Having brand ambassadors can influence their followers by recommending your products or services, incite conversations about your brand, and create content on your behalf. For example, a brand ambassador on Instagram might post a picture wearing a jacket your company sells.

To take advantage of brand ambassadors, you’ll want to establish a brand ambassador program. You’ll need to do a lot of research to identify individuals who will make good brand ambassadors. Consider making the program membership exclusive. People are more likely to take their brand ambassadorship seriously if they know that not just anyone can be one of your brand ambassadors. Additionally, you’ll need to provide some sort of compensation, whether you actually pay them or you give them free products. Many companies will provide their brand ambassadors with new products before they’re even available to the masses.

Examples of Successful Brand Ambassador Programs

The following are some of the most successful brand ambassador programs launched by some of the biggest companies:

• Red Bull – Red Bull’s brand ambassador program is called the Wings Team. They focus on students who have an exciting lifestyle to turn their brand into a lifestyle brand. Because their ambassadors are students, they are able to reach a college audience much more effectively.
• Lululemon – Lululemon essentially uses its brand ambassador program to sponsor local athletes, yoga instructors, and influencers. They provide incentive by partnering with their ambassadors to support their local philanthropic projects and initiatives.
• American Express – American Express has a brand ambassador program filled with social media influencers. They target travel and lifestyle influencers in particular since they showcase a luxurious lifestyle — one that obviously benefits from the extensive use of a credit card. They not only showcase the use of their American Express credit cards, but the rewards that they can obtain from their regular use as well.

Even the biggest companies in the world recognize the value of a brand ambassador. If you have loyal customers, then you should encourage them to become brand ambassadors by implementing a brand ambassador program. Use these three examples as an inspiration to set up your own brand ambassador program today.

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Customer Benefits

What Are the Real Customer Benefits of AI?

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming more prevalent in the technology of today, from virtual assistants, such as Alexa and Siri, to Google’s self-driving cars. AI also sorts through massive amounts of data for businesses of all sizes. This technology can also eliminate repetitive tasks. Thought the benefits of using AI are apparent for business, it may not be as obvious as to how the customer benefits. The following are a few ways that the use of AI can help your customers:

Improve Customer Service

As much as you would like to have somebody waiting to speak with every person that comes to your website, that’s going to be impossible to do. A queue of users could build up waiting to speak with someone, which could harm their customer service experience. Not to mention that people will visit your site after business hours as well. Chatbots address the questions and concerns of your customers immediately. Chatbots can be programmed to answer basic questions, thereby preventing users from abandoning your site or waiting for a response.

Personalize Your Interactions

Not only can you segment your email list by the information that users have submitted to you, but you can further personalize emails through dynamic content, ensuring that the content users receive will be tailored to their specific needs and actions. You can even personalize interactions through your live chat or chatbots feature by tracking user behavior.

Help Customers Find What They Need

You can trigger certain product or service recommendations based on users’ purchase history or what they’re looking for. AI helps your customers discover relevant products or services they may not have known about.

Improve Customer Experience

There are AI tools that can not only collect user feedback so that you can identify ways in which you can improve their experience, but that can also track user behavior to identify problem areas on your site (for example, maybe a significant amount of people are abandoning their shopping cart without checking out). You can use this information to improve your customer experience.

The use of AI is growing in all facets of life. AI can be especially useful when it comes to providing customer benefits. These are just a few of the ways you can benefit your customers through the use of AI.

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marketing trends

What’s Trending in Marketing for July 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. They highlight current marketing trends that we think are worth paying attention to:

Noteworthy Marketing News

Microsoft Just Dealt A Blow To Google’s Ad Blocking Plans

Google announced their plans to restrict ad blocking Chrome extensions. This means that ad blockers, like uBlock origin, won’t work on the Google Chrome browser. This update will come in the upcoming months and some Chrome users have made it clear that they’ll move to another browser if Google carries out that plan. Microsoft has responded by reaching out to their users to see if they’d like Ad Blockers built into the new version of the Microsoft Edge browser. You can learn more about this story on Forbes.

Instagram advertisers can now convert organic influencer posts into ads

Instagram confirmed in March that it’s testing a new ad format. It’s going to be possible for brands to create ads using organic posts from the influencers they have relationships with. Marketing Land writes, “Before brands can use influencer posts as ads, the content creator must grant their business partners (the brands they have relationships with) access to promote their posts. Once the creator — or influencer — has done this via their Advanced Settings page, brands will see the influencer’s posts in the Ads Manager under “Existing Posts” and can run the content as an ad within the Instagram newsfeed or Stories format.”

Comcast partners with Charter, Cox to advance targeted advertising

Comcast launched an advertising strategy that will target audiences better in an effort to lure more advertisers away from digital platforms like Facebook and Google. The initiative is called “On Addressability” and the aim is to target advertisements to certain households based on their interests. So far, this has only been done on a small scale in TV advertising. TV is the best way to reach a lot of people at once, but it lacks the big data that digital platforms use. Learn more about this story at Yahoo.

Improving Your Marketing Program

Emotional Advertising: How Brands Use Feelings to Get People to Buy

Informing your audience is important. You want potential buyers to understand what their problem is, and how your products or services can solve that problem. Unfortunately, people don’t generally make purchases based on information alone. It turns out that people are more prone to making emotional purchases than informed purchases. It’s why commercials consist of much more than an explanation of a product’s use. Instead they use emotional advertising to target the viewer. It’s effective, and it’s why connecting with your audience on an emotional level will benefit your marketing strategy.

Simple Ways that Small Businesses Can Use Data to Build Better Customer Relationships

In this day and age, it’s pretty difficult for consumers to not be inundated with dozens of advertisements. As such, targeting your audience has become more important than ever, especially when it comes to running a smaller business. The most effective way to target your audience is to make use of the consumer data that you have access to. Knowing how to use the data you have can go a long way towards building customer relationships.

However, having consumer data is a lot different than knowing how to make it actionable, which can make the data you have very intimidating. The following are the three steps that you should take to so that you can leverage your data to build strong customer relationships.

What Are Behavioral Biometrics and How Do They Fit Into Marketing?

Companies often hold focus groups in order to get direct feedback about products, services, and even website experiences. The only drawback to such focus groups is that people often aren’t sure how to articulate what they feel about certain things. However, new biometric technology, such as eye-tracking software, has made it easier to determine exactly how someone feels about a website experience at any given moment–and they can allow you to do so without holding a focus group.

Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and Trends

Almost 70% of digital ad spending going to Google, Facebook, Amazon, says analyst firm

Google, Facebook, and Amazon are collecting more than 2/3rds of all digital ad spending. Between the 3 companies, this is about $73 billion. Amazon owns 38% of e-commerce, which is down from almost 50% a year ago.

These numbers matter greatly as the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice will begin antitrust investigation of Facebook, Google, and Amazon in the upcoming 12-18 months. More about this story can be found on Marketing Land.

Political Ad Spending Will Approach $10 Billion in 2020, New Forecast Predicts

A new report predicts that spending on political advertisements will reach a new high in 2020. According to the forecast, political ad spending will total $9.9 billion in 2020. In 2016, $6.3 billion was spent on political ads. Political ad spending in 2018 accounted for 2% of total digital ad spending in the US and it’s projected to increase to 2.2% in 2020. Learn more about this story on WSJ.

Survey finds 89% of marketers seeing increased sales using location data

700 U.S. based mobile marketers from 536 consumer brands and 164 agencies took part in this 2019 survey. The survey found that about 9 in 10 marketers plan to use location data in the future to increase sales. However, of those surveyed, only 24% are using or plan to use location data for store visitation or offline measurement.

This report shows that location data is becoming a popular horizontal tool for audience segmentation and targeting across channels. Learn more about this report at Marketing Land.

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What’s Trending in Marketing for June 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. They highlight current marketing trends that we think are worth paying attention to:

Noteworthy Marketing News

Spotify tests interactive ads that listen for your voice

Spotify is testing interactive ads that can be controlled by users voices. The idea allows a user to say “play now” when hearing a voice controlled ad, which would then take them to the piece of relevant content. Two ads are currently running, one for Unilever’s Axe products and the other for a Spotify podcast called Stay Free: The Story of the Clash. Saying the key phrase during whichever ad is playing will direct you to an Axe-branded playlist or to the advertised podcast. This is just one way digital content allows for the development of new ways for consumers to interact with advertising content. You can read more about this story on The Verge.

LinkedIn refreshes Sales Navigator homepage to put focus on alerts

This is a change to increase Ease of Access when using LinkedIn Sales Navigator. The big news with this latest update to the Sales Navigator platform is that the homepage shift. It is transforming from a newsfeed format to focus on alerts.  Knowing the full-breadth of features offered by LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps marketing teams contribute added value to their sales organization. These insights allow companies to take full advantage of their social media advertising platform and investment. Learn more about this update at Martech Today.

Facebook is getting a redesign

The main takeaway from the new Facebook redesign is that groups will continue to dominate the Facebook marketing space. This is an interesting redesign that comes off the heels of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing how a lot of users have started using groups and more private ways for sharing content.

Social Report writes, “But this is no new trend. We’ve been huge proponents of Facebook groups since Facebook changed its algorithm to prioritize content from groups and other “content that matters” on the Newsfeed last year.When Facebook changed its algorithm, it plummeted organic reach for Facebook pages. At the same time, however, Facebook gave groups more organic reach—even if they’re run by a brand. This groups-focused redesign shows us that Facebook is continuing its commitment to Facebook groups, and that we’ll continue to see the platform prioritize content from them indefinitely”.

Improving Your Marketing Program

Developing the Perfect Omni-Channel Marketing Strategy

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. You should integrate all of your channels, processes, and strategies to help nurture any stage of their buyer’s journey. This is 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.

Factors That Influence Consumer Purchasing Decisions: Rethinking the Marketing Funnel

In order to continue attracting your target audience, you need to keep up with the wants and needs of customers. This can be a real challenge if you don’t understand the factors that influence consumer purchasing decisions. Those factors are a lot different than what they used to be, which means that the customer journey has changed a lot as well. This updated journey is referred to by many as the consumer decision journey (CDJ). What makes the CDJ so different than traditional marketing funnels is that each consumer’s CDJ is unique. Keeping that in mind, the following are three of the biggest factors that influence consumer purchasing decisions in today’s digital age.

How to Outshine Your Competition with Effective E-Commerce Website Marketing 

While not all businesses have an e-commerce page, many do. If you’re selling products or services online, make sure you have an e-commerce marketing strategy in place. If you don’t, it’s going to be difficult to stand out from all the other e-commerce sites out there. Through the use of digital marketing strategies, you can build awareness of your e-commerce page to generate more traffic. Thereby, you can improve your chances of closing sales. The following are a number of e-commerce marketing tips that will help you do just that.

Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and Trends

Mobile to become the preferred platform for video ads by end of 2019

A new report from PubMatic stated nearly 50% of video ads were viewed on mobile devices0. That is up from from 40% in 2018. Video ads are expected to exceed $29 Billion globally according to this same report. This trend follows the amount of content being consumed on mobile devices versus any other device. With 5G on the horizon, content accessibility will only drive increased impressions and ad dollars. More about this story can be found on Marketing Land.

Universal Measurement Standard for video

For years, media companies have tried to develop a universal standard that allows advertisers to compare video metrics across all visual media. The Media Rating Council is getting closer to implementing a single standard for measuring video across all platforms. A standard metric allows marketers to have an effective tool to independently prove how effective ad performance.

Sarah Fisher from Axios writes, “Last week, the MRC finished collecting dozens of comments in response to its long-awaited draft proposal for the new cross-media audience measurement standard, which imposes stricter rules for digital companies reporting video impressions and stricter rules for how TV report commercial viewership.”

Time spent on Facebook, Snapchat remains flat, but Instagram sees growth

A recent study from eMarketer looked at some of the key players in social media. It’s findings offer an interesting glimpse into what 2019 holds for Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. eMarketer reports the average amount of time people will spend each day on Facebook this year will remain unchanged from last year at 38-minutes. That number is expected to drop to 37-minutes per day by next year. This is a downgrade from the figures eMarketer released during the third quarter of 2018.

Overall, eMarketer reports the average amount of time people spent per day on social networks in the U.S. dropped by nearly 1.5 minutes last year. That number will remain “virtually” unchanged this year according to eMarketer’s forecasts. Learn more about this study at Marketing Land.

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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.

25 Website Must Haves For Driving Traffic, Leads & Sales
b2b marketing

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

Google Plus

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
mobile marketing

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

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

Preparing Your Marketing Strategy for 2019

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Successful marketing is based on your ability to continuously improve your efforts on a year by year basis. This means that now that 2018 has come to an end, you’ll want to take into account the previous year’s marketing successes and failures as well as new trends and needs when preparing your marketing strategy for 2019. The following are the steps that you should take to do just that:

1. Review your 2018 marketing strategy and tactics

Start by looking back at what your marketing goals were for 2018 and whether or not you were able to achieve them. Take a careful look at the various tactics that you implemented to determine which ones had a positive effect on the achievement of your goals and which ones fell short. You should use what you’ve learned to craft your new marketing strategy.

2. Review who your target audience iscompetitive advantage

Odds are you already have a good idea of who your target audience is, especially if you believe that your marketing efforts in 2018 were successful overall. However, audiences change over time. Make sure that you review your target audience and your buyer personas. You’ll want to make sure that you know exactly who you’re trying to reach as this will help to drive the different tactics that you implement this year (such as your content strategy and your social strategy).

3. Create new SMART goals for the year

You can’t have a marketing strategy without marketing goals or else you’ll have no idea whether your strategy is performing successfully or not. To make sure that you can judge the performance of your goals, make sure that they are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely). You can use what you’ve learned about the previous year’s goals (whether you achieved them or not and how realistic they were) to create this year’s.

5 Examples for Great Social Media Branding

4. Determine how you will achieve those goals

Once you’ve set your goals, begin coming up with ideas for how you can achieve them. You may want to reuse some of the same tactics you used last year, especially if they were effective. Those that did not work need to be replaced by new tactics. A good way to brainstorm new tactics is by looking at some of the recent marketing trends as well as marketing tactics suggestions made by industry professionals for this year.

5. Establish your marketing budgetmarketing strategy

Make sure that you establish your budget and take note of your resources before you begin creating your marketing plan. You may not be able to implement all of the tactics you’ve thought of–at least not right away, which means you’ll need to prioritize your strategy.

6. Create your marketing plan

Once you’ve taken into account your budget, begin crafting your marketing plan. One of the best ways to do this is by dividing the year into months and listing what new tactics you want to implement on a month by month basis and which ones you want to continue throughout the year. This gives you a visual representation of all of the marketing activities you’re committing to every month that will give you an idea of whether it’s realistic or not.

7. Execute your marketing strategy

There’s no point in having a marketing plan if you don’t execute it. Schedule the different marketing activities that you’ve planned out so that you can follow your plan throughout the year.marketing strategy

8. Continually review your marketing strategy throughout the year

Don’t just blindly follow your marketing plan if it’s obviously failing. One of the huge benefits of inbound marketing is that you can make use of analytics to track the performance of various tactics, using your goals as benchmarks. If something’s not working, find a way to adjust your efforts or replace it with a different tactic so that you’re not wasting valuable resources. This ensures that your plan is not only effective, but efficiently executed as well.

Use these steps to learn from the success and failures of the previous year’s marketing efforts to put into place an effective marketing strategy that will achieve your goals in 2019.

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Content Marketing Trends to Track in 2018

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Content marketing is a long-term strategy. As such, you need to make sure that you track your content’s performance and regularly adjust your strategy. This is especially true as new content marketing trends emerge every year that could be beneficial to your brand’s marketing efforts. The following are nine content marketing trends that you should seriously consider adopting:

  1. Live video content is becoming more popular– Streaming live content provides audiences with a feeling of exclusivity since they have to tune in during the live stream or miss out. This can be a very powerful draw. Additionally, live content gives you the opportunity to show your authenticity and to build stronger connections with your audience.
  2. Content is going beyond social – While social media remains one of the most effective ways to engage with consumers, you should find ways to interact and build relationships beyond social, such as via in-person events, email marketing, membership sites, and more.
  3. Original content is becoming more important – Traditional advertisements, branded emails and sponsored posts have their place, but they are no longer as effective as they once were. This is because consumers have caught on and are in search of content that is unique and relevant to them. Producing original content will give you a competitive advantage.
  4. Content is becoming more interactive– Engagement is extremely important when it comes to content, which is why more brands are creating content that is interactive through the use of augmented reality and virtual reality. For example, both can be leveraged to demonstrate services and products in stores or at trade booths.
  5. Vertical content– When creating video content, the natural impulse is to shoot horizontally. However, because more consumers are using their smartphones to browse the Internet (more than 50 percent of Internet users are browsing on their smartphones), creating vertical content allows them to view your videos more conveniently.
  6. Formats for consumption are changing– Simply posting content to your blog on a weekly basis will no longer cut it. You need a comprehensive content marketing strategy that implements everything from copywriting to graphic design to video production across all platforms.
  7. Content is expanding beyond the screen– The Internet has already expanded beyond the screen in the form of the IoT (Internet of Things). Content creation for IoT platforms, such as Alexa, Siri and the like, isn’t far behind.
  8. Content is shifting to converged media – Content is shifting away from being solely owned media to becoming a combination of owned, paid and earned media, to the point where you can no longer tell the difference between the three. This is a result of social media’s role in content consumption.
  9. Content will become important at every stage of the buyer’s journey– Instead of focusing on content for the first stage of the buyer’s journey, you should be creating content for every stage, especially the middle-end. For example, the first stage (the awareness stage) should have content identifying the needs and problems of the customer and information on the causes behind them. The second stage (the consideration stage) should have content that addresses how the problem can be solved or how the need can be fulfilled. The last stage is the decision stage, in which your content should present your product or service as the solution. Having content that addresses each stage will make it easier to nurture your customers through the buyer’s journey.

Looking for more trends? Click here.

It’s important that you stay up to date with the latest content marketing trends so that you can adopt new strategies and adjust old ones to ensure that your content marketing is successful over the long term.

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