brand awareness

Six Cost Effective Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Brand

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Most companies, from business start-ups to established brands, recognize the importance of marketing. However, some may stray away from marketing tactics because they view them as costly. In reality, many cost-effective marketing strategies require little investment. Here are six of them:

Six Cost Effective Marketing Strategies

1. Blogging

Blogging is among the simplest yet most effective ways you can market. Google’s ranking mechanisms highly rate blogs that are frequently updated with relevant, quality content. According to HubSpot, there is a positive correlation between blogging frequency and visitor traffic. If you can manage I6 or more blog posts a month, you will get you 3.5 times more traffic as compared to blogs that publish 0-4 times in a month. Blogging is inexpensive because you can have your own staff create the content, and hire freelancers if you need extra help.

Read About: How Businesses Can Use a Blog To Strengthen Their Online Marketing Efforts

2. Mailing lists

Mailing lists are also an effective and inexpensive way to generate leads. Email lists can be used to remarket to customers you have already interacted with, as well as market to new contacts. Target your audience effectively by mailing content that offers solutions to the problems they may be facing. Remember to regularly update your contact lists.

3. Online marketing sites

Today, online platforms such as social media and websites are a crucial part of marketing. Depending on your business, different sites can be more effective than others. A site like Yelp allows you to create a profile for visibility and reviews, while TripAdvisor does the same for hotels, restaurants, etc. Mogul is a marketing site specifically designed for female business owners. A safe marketing strategy is to start by using less expensive websites, and then expand to others once you learn the ropes.

4. Calls to action

Once you know what kind of content your target audience is looking for, use calls to action to generate leads and position your company as the solution to their problems. Call To Action Phrases are so important. You can Create CTAs through HubSpot and use action words like “contact us”, “subscribe”, and “download” to get potential clients to click on your CTAs.

5. Press releases

It may take time to obtain the right press contacts, but once you do, press releases can be powerful marketing tools. Press releases are a cheap and reliable way to update your target audience on your successes with clients, and can be written by staff members or clients. Press releases can also be used to announce awards/accolades you have received, launch new products, announce company changes, launch promotions, etc. Overall, press releases will improve your image in the eyes of potential clients.

Also Read: The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Press Release

6. Videos

By 2024, it is estimated that video traffic will drive 82% of of IP traffic this year. Video production can be outsourced to qualified creators with high quality equipment, or you can develop them in-house at a lower cost. Video marketing is well worth the price because videos will increase your brand’s visibility, help you retain existing customers, and engage your target market while driving lead generation.

With these cost-effective marketing strategies, you can attract and convert your target audience without breaking the bank. Employing these tactics should increase your revenue in the long run, so the sooner you get started, the better. We wish you the best of luck!

MAXIMIZING YOUR MARKETING BUDGET
lead nurturing

Lead Nurturing During the Buyer’s Journey

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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.

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

Organic Growth Business1

7 Organic Growth Business Strategies You Should Adopt

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Every company’s goal is to succeed and in order to succeed, it has to grow. A business that doesn’t grow won’t succeed in the long run. There are two ways that your business can grow: organically and inorganically. Inorganic growth is driven by capital; for example, via a merger or acquisition. Organic growth is driven by the resources your company already has, such as your experience, relationships, knowledge, visibility, reputation, and more. For example, expanding the amount of business you do with existing customers or obtaining new customers are forms of organic growth.

As you can imagine, organic growth is essential to your company, especially if you’re in the starting stages of your business. However, there is no right path to achieve organic growth. In fact, you can follow more than one path to achieve organic growth. With that in mind, the following are a few organic business growth strategies that you should consider adopting:

7 Organic Growth Business Strategies

1. Define Your Company’s Niche

When you define a niche, it will make it easier to meet the needs of a specific audience. Not to mention, your competition will be a lot smaller. Cornering that niche can help you increase your market share and drive growth to the point where you can expand your products and services beyond that niche when the time comes.

2. Establish Your Unique Value Proposition

MAXIMIZING YOUR MARKETING BUDGET

Whether or not you’ve defined a niche, you need to have a unique value proposition. This is what will help you stand out from your competitors. Without a unique value proposition, your products or services will seem generic and customers will be more likely to choose similar products and services from competitors who do have a unique value proposition. When you have a unique value proposition, your market share will most likely begin growing at a steady pace as a result of being able to offer something your competition can’t offer.

3. Don’t Ignore Existing Customers

Your existing customers are an invaluable source of organic growth. Many businesses make the mistake of focusing too much on obtaining new customers to the detriment of keeping their old customers. Don’t just assume that because they are customers that they will continue to purchase your products and services. You need to continue to foster the customer relationships you’ve built. Doing so will help reduce customer churn and build trust and loyalty. This will help to ensure that they not only continue doing business with you, but that they expand the amount of business that they do with you over time.

Enjoy Article: Micro Moments: A New Consumer Behavior in Marketing

4. Focus More On Relationships Than Sales

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is to focus on the sale. Focusing on a sale is a short-term view. Instead, focus on building a relationship with your prospects so that once they do make the purchase, you have a relationship in place that you can continue to foster throughout the future. If you focus too much on the sale, you may also lose prospects due to the fact that you were focused too much on your business instead of their needs.

5. Optimize Your Website For SEO Organic Growth Business2

SEO (search engine optimization) is an inbound marketing strategy that will help drive long-term organic growth. When your website is properly optimized for SEO, your pages will be more likely to be indexed by Google and ranked highly (as long as the quality of the content is good). As a result, your pages will appear higher up on Google’s SERP (search engine results page). People who search for the terms you’ve used as keywords when optimizing your website will see your website displayed.

Keeping your site properly optimized will, as a direct result, help to drive organic growth over time. Proper SEO requires a technically sound website, positive social signals, high-quality backlinks, and the use of relevant and competitive keywords, to name a few ranking factors.

6. Develop A Content Marketing Strategy

Your SEO strategy won’t do you much good with content to optimize. Additionally, Google’s ranking factors are all meant to help identify the quality of a webpage’s content. As such, your content marketing strategy needs to revolve around regularly producing high-quality content that’s relevant to your audience and that’s properly optimized for SEO. Part of your content marketing strategy should also focus on the promotion of new content.

7. Establish SMART Goals

You will want to monitor organic growth so that you can make adjustments that help to enable and enhance it. To do this, you will need to establish SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely) goals to help you monitor and analyze your marketing and sales efforts.

These are 7 organic business growth strategies that you should consider adopting. By implementing these organic growth strategies, you will help to drive the organic growth of your business over time.

visual storytelling

5 Storytelling Techniques You Should Avoid

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Storytelling is an integral part of marketing your brand effectively. It allows you to convey your message and your values to your audience, all while making it easy for them to relate and connect to you on a more personal level by capturing their interest and inciting specific emotions. However, storytelling isn’t as easy as you might think it is.

Top 5 Storytelling Techniques You Should Avoid

There are several mistakes that brands commonly make in their attempt to tell a story that can cause your audience to lose interest. The following are five storytelling techniques you should avoid:

1. Making Your Brand The Central Character

One of the biggest mistakes that brands make is to think that the story they’re telling is about them. How is your audience going to relate to such a story? You need to make the story about them instead. Position the customer as the main character. They are the hero on the hero’s journey. As the brand, you should be the mentor that helps the hero overcome their problem.

2. Not Knowing How To Tell a Good Story

There are two essential components of a good story. The first is to have a point. If the story you’re telling doesn’t go anywhere, it’s not going to have much of an impact on the audience. You need to have a primary message that you’re trying to get across or else the audience won’t know what the point of your story is.

The second is pacing. Good pacing is extremely important. If your story is too long, your audience grows disinterested. Keep your storytelling succinct and avoid going on tangents — stay on point.

3. Providing Too Much Information

Many companies have a habit of trying to provide their audience with as much information as possible. Although you want your audience to be as informed as possible, trying to over explain is going to cause your story to become overwhelming. Keep it simple.

4. Only Showcasing Your Successes

Only showcasing how effective your brand is and how well your products or services work isn’t going to come off as very authentic. Don’t be afraid to highlight some of your failures. Tell your audience how you overcame your failures in order to obtain success. Showing this kind of vulnerability is much more authentic and relatable.

5. Not Knowing Who You’re Telling The Story To

To tell your story effectively, you need to know who your audience is. Otherwise, how can you ever present a character and a problem that your audience can relate to? Identify who your audience is before you begin crafting your story.

Storytelling not only allows you to inform your audience about how your business can help solve their problems, it can also help them to relate to your brand on a more emotional level, making engagement easier sometimes called emotional advertising. However, there is an art to storytelling, which means some storytelling techniques work better than others. Make sure to avoid these five storytelling techniques and you’ll be on the right path.

5 Storytelling Techniques You Should Use For Your Marketing Efforts

Learn The StoryBranding Process

holiday digital marketing

What’s Trending in Marketing For November 2023

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Welcome to our November 2023 edition of “What’s Trending,” where we bring you the most relevant marketing trends and insights. Stay informed and ahead of the game with our curated collection of marketing trends and reports in winter 2023.

Noteworthy Marketing Trends and News

The Guardian view on festive marketing: stop spending like there’s no tomorrow

In 1998, a British newspaper introduced “Black Friday” as a post-Thanksgiving shopping phenomenon in the US. Today, global spending on advertising during the festive season is predicted to reach a record £9.5bn. However, the environmental impact of promoting overconsumption is a growing concern. The Guardian explores the idea of banning or regulating ads to address misleading environmental claims. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is criticized for its lax approach, with only a small fraction of environmental ad complaints investigated. Tightening regulations is proposed as a step toward aligning advertising with the urgent need for climate-conscious practices.

Microsoft Advertising Shares Holiday Season Marketing Playbook

Elf A SelfieMicrosoft Advertising provides insights in its Festive Holiday Marketing Playbook to help businesses enhance holiday sales. Key points include understanding the timing of revenue peaks around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, leveraging deal-seeking behaviors among consumers, and capitalizing on search for online and in-store purchases. The National Retail Federation predicts a 3-4% increase in US holiday spending. Advertisers are encouraged to align strategies with the ‘Cyber-5’ period and utilize search for targeted advertising. 

Popular cereal gets Bud Light treatment after sneaky marketing campaign

Kid Rock’s anti-Bud Light campaign, sparked by the beer brand’s association with a transgender model, has now shifted to target Kellogg’s-owned Froot Loops in Canada. The cereal faces a boycott after promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion on its boxes, urging kids to practice pronouns. Social media users criticized the move, with some accusing it of “woke indoctrination.” Froot Loops’ digital library, tied to the promotion, offers diverse topics for families. The backlash reflects an ongoing trend of brands facing criticism for perceived political messaging, following controversies like Bud Light’s partnership with a transgender model and Target’s transgender branding frenzy.

Find these articles interesting? You may like: Creating Successful Holiday Marketing Campaigns

Learning Marketing Trends and Ideas

Micro Moments: A New Consumer Behavior in Marketing

Successful businesses understand that consumer behavior in marketing does not stay the same. Consumer behavior changes based on a variety of factors, including new tools and ways of using those tools. The smartphone drastically changed consumer behavior in marketing. This happened somewhat recently, yet people already spend roughly 3.5 hours a day on their phones. The way that a person interacts with their phone is much different than how they interact with TV, magazine ads, or their computer. As a result, marketers must expand the ways in which they engage with consumers in order to continue capturing their attention. Continue to read here. 

Essential Website Updates for Senior Living Communities

According to a study by the Pew Research Center, as of 2021, 73% of adults over the age of 65 in the United States use the internet. This number has been steadily increasing over the years, highlighting the importance of a strong online presence for senior-focused businesses. This article will explore key website updates that senior living communities should consider. The goal is to stay relevant and provide the best possible experience for their audience. Continue to read here. 

The Brand Loyalty Of Generation X

Consumers like certain brands. They develop a trust that the brand’s products are of the right quality and a good value. That trust, along with other positive emotions, causes consumers to develop brand loyalty, where they tend to buy certain products from particular brands now and into the future. How brand loyalty works depends on many factors, age and status in life being two. It is critical to understand how a particular generation develops brand loyalty. The insights gained by this understanding make marketing to the generation in question much easier. Let’s look at Generation X for example. Continue to read here.

Download Our White Paper Guide To Learn How To Perfect Buyer Personas For Your Business

Recent Marketing Trends, Reports, and Updates

2024 B2B Tech Marketing Trends: The Year Of Authenticity 

As 2024 approaches, marketing trends point to a shift from traditional content to richer experiences, a return to genuine human interactions amid automation, and a move beyond numerical dominance in analytics. AI’s role may bring humorous hiccups, emphasizing the value of human intuition. Niche specialists are expected to dominate the influencer landscape. Return on investment will extend beyond financial metrics, and marketing strategies will shift away from linear funnels to dynamic customer journeys. Hyper-personalization is seen as a double-edged sword, requiring a balance between relevance and privacy. Success in 2024 involves revisiting core values and creating meaningful connections.

Ogilvy reveals key influencer marketing trends for 2024

The report cites how live streaming across social platforms will continue to be a critical medium. Sixty six percent of brands already report that creator-led content delivers more ROI than traditional ads. Influencers could see revenue opportunities through live streaming over traditional subscription models as more platforms integrate payment schemes. 

Predicting the top 5 digital marketing trends for 2024 

Over the past year, significant changes occurred in the digital marketing space: the DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit against Google finally going to trial, Apple’s iOS 17 introducing more privacy-centric features that upended the tracking status quo, the EU issuing multi-million-dollar fines against Criteo for GDPR violations, streaming TV overtaking linear TV in viewership, the collapse of MediaMath, Amazon’s impending launch of ads on Prime Video, and—finally—Disney and Spectrum agreeing to a revolutionary new model for linear TV programming and the ways that content providers and multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) work together. See the top 5 digital marketing predictions.

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

smart goal examples

How To Incorporate Smart Goals Into Marketing Plan Development

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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?

DOWNLOAD OUR GUIDE TO SUCCESSFUL TRADE SHOW MARKETING
relationship marketing strategy

5 Ways To Improve Your Relationship Marketing Strategy

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It may seem obvious, but building a business is a long-term effort. As such, it requires a long-term strategy. You can’t succeed by only making quick sales. You need to build a customer base — it’s the only way to not only grow, but to survive. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses assume that once someone has made a purchase, that customer is part of their “customer base.” This is not how it works — they usually do not become loyal to your brand after one purchase. You need to nurture them past the point of the sale, which is why you need to implement a strong relationship marketing strategy.

What is Relationship Marketing?

What is Relationship Marketing? Relationship marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on building long-term relationships with customers, rather than simply making individual sales.

The Importance of Customer Retention

Keeping your existing customers is essential to your company’s success. As such, it’s important that you continue to build the customer relationships that you’ve established. If you don’t, they’re less likely to feel a sense of loyalty to your brand and will be more likely to jump to a competitor. If that’s not enough of a reason to put some effort into keeping existing customers, consider the following:

  • Repeat customers spend an average of 67 percent more per purchase than first-time customers.
  • It can cost up to 25 times as much to close a new customer than to keep an existing customer.
  • Increasing your customer retention by as little as 5 percent can boost your revenue by as much as 25 to 95 percent.
  • Existing customers will refer other leads to your business.

As you can see, customer retention is important. The best way to increase customer retention is by implementing an effective relationship marketing strategy.

Similar Article: Improve Your Marketing Strategy By Asking These 4 Questions

How To Improve Your Customer Relationship Marketing Strategy?

The following are a few tips to help you strengthen your relationship marketing strategy for increased customer retention.

1. Improve Your Customer Service

Poor customer service is going to result in a poor customer experience, making customer retention more challenging. Providing good customer service should be the foundation for any relationship marketing strategy. If your customers have questions, concerns, or even complaints, your customer service should be able to engage with them immediately to provide a solution or to provide helpful advice.

Besides making sure your customer service reps are friendly, respectful, and know how to handle every kind of situation, they also need to be easy to reach. There’s nothing more frustrating for a customer than being unable to reach customer service. Make it easy for customers to reach out through multiple channels, including phone, email, text, social media, and a live chat feature on your website. You want to be able to help your customers no matter where they are.

2. Listen To Feedback


Listening to feedback from existing customers can help you improve the customer experience. Doing so will help improve your ability to nurture customer relationships in the future. Not to mention that by showing existing customers that you care about what they think and actually do something with the feedback you collect, you help build trust in your brand. Don’t just listen to complaints when customers have them either — go out of your way to ask for feedback. You can do this by asking for specific feedback on social media or by emailing surveys to customers after they’ve made a purchase.

3. Create Content Targeting Existing Customers

As far as content marketing strategies go, a lot of companies focus solely on attracting and nurturing new leads. Don’t forget about your existing customers! The content you create can still be useful to them if you actually target them. Create content that better informs them about the problems you know they have. Use it to educate them about their purchases so that they can get the most out of them.

How To Develop Content To Build Customer Loyalty

4. Embrace Email Marketing

You should have information about existing customers that you can use to improve how you segment your email lists. This should allow you to email existing customers content that is more relevant to them and to potentially identify relevant cross-selling or up-selling opportunities that you can email to them. Email is a great way to nurture your customers and to keep your brand at the top of their minds.

5. Implement A Loyalty Program

A loyalty program rewards repeat customers. This provides them with an incentive to continue doing business with your company. With a loyalty program, customers are more likely to make additional purchases and are less likely to jump ship to a competitor.

A good relationship marketing strategy is vital when it comes to customer retention. Use these tips to strengthen your relationship marketing strategy so that you can nurture existing customers, increase brand loyalty, and generate more sales as a result.

buyer persona guide for business

Maximizing Email Personalization

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Black Friday is one of the largest shopping days, where consumers buy everything from electronics and household items to software, services, and subscription plans. Whatever product or service you sell, Black Friday allows you to market your business and reach as many prospects as possible. But how can you maximize Black Friday sales? One obvious answer is to tap into the power of email personalization.

For many years, many “marketing gurus” have predicted the end of email marketing, but despite the efforts to market its downsides, email marketing remains relevant and more effective than ever. The beauty of email marketing is that you get to reach a more targeted audience. Plus, if you personalize your emails well and sell a real solution to a real problem, converting prospects to customers is cheaper and faster than the other marketing techniques.

In the sections below, we’ve discussed some of the most effective email personalization techniques you can implement to increase Black Friday sales.

Embrace Email Segmentation 

Imagine creating one generic email and sending it to 500 business prospects, i.e., without adjusting anything from the subject line to the closing paragraph. Now, suppose you categorize your prospects into five groups and create an email list for each. And for each category or group, specify the key attributes, such as what sets that group apart.

A perfect example would be categorizing prospects based on age, gender, personal preferences, location, etc. This will allow you to target each email list with a personal touch instead of using a generic email that addresses everyone.

Consider using some marketing automation tools to personalize communication with your customers. Here, you will gather data from your site visits and opt-in forms and use that input to segment your email list further or even feed more relevant information into the various relevant groups.

After successfully segmenting your email list, you can easily and conveniently target your market demographics and increase the odds that those prospects will respond to your email. From then, you can redesign your email campaigns and optimize your marketing to nurture those leads properly.

Use Personalized Content and Messaging 

Segmenting your emails and grouping prospects isn’t a silver bullet in the email marketing niche. You still need to personalize the content you’ll be sending these prospects, and that’s where the real email personalization comes in.

Creating personalized content for each group of prospects ensures you are engaging them at a deeper level. How you will target young prospects in their mid-20s will differ from how you’ll target the older prospects enjoying their retirement.

Effective email personalization lies in how the message is conveyed and the intent of that particular message. Still, personalized content doesn’t exist in silos. There’s a need to deploy other email marketing tactics, such as user-generated content, to enhance the personalization aspects of your email marketing campaigns.

Besides helping you connect easily with prospects, personalized content and messaging allow you to understand your customers better. During the research phase, you might discover that a particular group of prospects prefer certain products over others. This will save you a lot of time and money you could spend with generalized marketing tactics.

Instead, you’ll focus on giving them what they want, removing too many choices for them and replacing that with specific and tailored reasons to take action. And the best part of personalizing your content and messaging? Your prospects are ready to help you succeed – In fact, 83% of consumers are willing to share data to facilitate more personalized experiences, according to a recent Accenture Pulse Report.

Optimize with Mobile

Current statistics show that nearly 6.92 billion people use their smartphones to access the internet. That is a whopping 86.3% of the world population. If your email marketing strategies are to take shape and yield positive results, you should target prospects through their smartphones.But what does that mean when you send an email not optimized for mobile? Or, even worse, send a plain email without any design considerations? Well, the results won’t be impressive, no matter how consistent you are with your marketing.

People are becoming wary of random emails and are ready to dodge any direct notifications or messages in their inboxes. And that’s especially true for poorly-delivered emails. But as much as people don’t like to be sold, they still want to buy the products and services that resonate well with them.

One way to make your products and services more appealing to prospects is to deliver them using a well-designed email optimized for mobile. Check if the email has a subject line with the right number of characters, a pre-header text, some graphics, and a great CTA.

Once you incorporate mobile-friendly emails into your overall mobile marketing strategy, you will reach as many prospects as possible, increasing the chances that they will open the email and take the desired action.

Try Episodic Content 

The term episodic content means content published as a series of posts. An example would be content about a broad topic broken down into episodes or chapters. This marketing technique often helps avoid information overload and allows prospects to choose their adventure trail.

With email marketing, you can break down your personalized content into relevant chapters. You can then deliver these chapters to your customers regularly, allowing them to learn and build relationships with time.

The goal is to build on previous emails and focus on delivering value to your prospects. With time, you’ll have greatly impacted your prospects, and they will be open to doing business with you.

Final Thoughts 

Boosting sales on Black Friday takes a lot more than running some timely email campaigns and giving away insane discounts and offers. What you need to have is an email marketing strategy that’s robust enough to guarantee success.

Depending on your specific type of business, you may need to combine various email marketing techniques to guarantee success. Remember, not all strategies will work for your unique business, so try as many options as possible before picking the best.

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mobile optimized website

The Importance of Having a Mobile Optimized Website

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More and more people are using mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to surf the web. At this point in time, more people are using their mobile devices to perform searches than they’re using computers. Roughly 60 percent of organic search engine visits occur on mobile devices in the U.S., according to Statista. This means that if you have a website, then you should consider optimizing it for mobile use. In fact, not having a mobile could actually be detrimental to your marketing efforts.

What is a Mobile Optimized Website?

You need to understand the differences between a mobile friendly site and a mobile optimized site. A mobile friendly website accurately displays on smaller screens. It usually appears as a smaller version, although it may not always work perfectly on touchscreen tablets. It should, however, still be functional. Mobile friendly websites also have features such as text-based phone numbers or email addresses that can trigger direct calls or email messages via mobile devices or slideshows and image rotators that function without Flash support.

While a mobile friendly site helps ensure your site functions on mobile devices, mobile optimization goes a step further. A mobile optimized site reformats itself for mobile devices. It not only makes sure to properly display on smaller screens, but also makes the site much easier to navigate. It reformats content, displays larger navigation buttons and optimizes images according to screen size.

25 Website Must Haves

The Benefits of a Mobile Optimized Website

Responsive design helps ensure the mobile optimization of your website. This tends to cost more to develop, but it ensures the mobile optimization of every aspect of your website. This will provide significant benefits over the long run. The following benefits result from a mobile optimized website:

Improve your user experience

User experience is essential. If you don’t provide a good user experience, visitors will leave and they won’t return. The mobile experience is much different from the computer experience. Visitors need to be able to read your web pages with ease, click links without zooming in, and navigate your site on a smaller screen. Without mobile optimization, users often struggle to read or navigate websites on mobile devices.

Improve website speed

When you optimize your website to meet mobile standards, then your website should load quickly. Websites that aren’t properly optimized for mobile often take a while to load, especially when they use Flash elements. Mobile users simply aren’t going to spend time on your site if they can’t get your pages to load. By improving the speed of your site, you’re more likely to keep visitors on your site for longer periods.

Increase user engagement

A mobile optimized website increases the likelihood of engaging your visitors. This is because visitors will spend more time on your site navigating through content. They will also be able to interact with your site, whether it be by liking content, clicking on CTAs, or even contributing to your comment sections.

Learn more about mobile with these Mobile Marketing Strategy

Increase average time on site

When you provide a good user experience to mobile users, they will end up spending more time on your website. The longer they spend on your site, the more likely they are to convert or return again later.

Improve your mobile SEO

A few years ago, your mobile SEO wouldn’t affect your regular SEO. However, due to how many mobile users there are now, Google has begun factoring a website’s mobile SEO into their regular SEO. This means that if you don’t have a website that’s optimized for mobile use, it will actually hurt your SEO.

Attract more local customers

Mobile SEO is extremely important to local SEO. Many people will perform search queries on the go when they are looking for a specific business. These people want to buy. If they are near your physical location and they find your website while doing a mobile search, they’re more likely to drop in and make a purchase. Poor mobile SEO will translate to poor local SEO, thereby potentially hurting your ability to attract local customers.

Grow Your Business With Mobile Optimization

Considering how many people use mobile devices to perform search queries and explore the web, the importance of a mobile optimized website can’t be overstated. If you do not optimize your website design for mobile use, you risk losing a significant part of your target audience.

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Consumer Behavior in Marketing

Micro Moments: A New Consumer Behavior in Marketing

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Successful businesses understand that consumer behavior in marketing does not stay the same. Consumer behavior changes based on a variety of factors, including new tools and ways of using those tools. The smartphone drastically changed consumer behavior in marketing. This happened somewhat recently, yet people already spend roughly 3.5 hours a day on their phones. The way that a person interacts with their phone is much different than how they interact with TV, magazine ads, or their computer. As a result, marketers must expand the ways in which they engage with consumers in order to continue capturing their attention.

For example, smartphone usage has resulted in a new consumer behavior in marketing termed “micro-moments.” If you want to capture the attention of your mobile audience, you must find a way to take advantage of these micro-moments.

What are Micro-Moments?

People regularly pull out their phones to look something up, but only spend a few seconds doing so. For example, maybe they’re talking to a friend about a movie and they can’t remember the name of the main actor. A quick Google search on their phone will give them their answer. Or if they’re trying to decide where to eat, they can do a quick mobile search for restaurants in their area. These interactions with their phones are called micro-moments because of their brevity.

Why Are Micro-Moments Important?

Although consumers may only use their smartphones for a few seconds in such micro-moments, they have a purpose that they are trying to fulfill. The buyer’s journey, which many businesses have carefully planned for in a linear fashion, is no longer linear. It’s fractured in hundreds of micro-moments that are intent-driven. They are an opportunity to shape the preferences and decisions of your target audience. As such, you need to position yourself in a manner allows you to address the needs of your audience during these micro-moments. The following are the main reasons why you need to do this:

  1. Find new customers – It’s estimated that around 90 percent of customers are not committed to any brand. This means that if they find you during these micro-moments, they may choose your product or service as a result.
  2. Beat the competition – A third of all smartphone users make a purchasing decision based only on the information provided to them in the moment that they needed it. This means you could steal customers from your competitors as a result.
  3. Boost awareness – Over 50 percent of smartphone users discover new brands during micro-moments.

How Can You Leverage Micro-Moments To Your Advantage?

The following are a few tips on how to position your brand to meet the needs of your audience during micro-moments:

  1. Know their purchasing triggers – Find out how, when, and where your audience is researching and making purchasing decisions. This allows you to create an engaging strategy for consumers during micro-moments across all channels
  2. Make purchasing easy – You want it to be easy for consumers to make a purchase the moment they’ve made a decision. If it’s not easy for them to buy right away, they may change their minds.
  3. Provide relevant content – Figure out what keywords consumers are using to create content that provides helpful answers during micro-moments.

Using the Buyer’s Journey to Create Great Content

Increasing smartphone usage has changed the way consumers behave. The new consumer behavior in marketing you must address is the micro-moment. Micro-moments have quickly become an important part of the buyer’s journey

A GUIDE TO EFFECTIVE MOBILE MARKETING TECHNIQUES