Top 10+ Ways to Maximize Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

Effective Marketing Strategies: The Ultimate Guide To Building Brand Authority

April 15, 2023/in Articles, Blog, Brand Development, Marketing Strategy /by Mark Beebe

Establishing brand authority is invaluable when promoting your company, especially in the early stages. However, you need effective marketing strategies to pull this off.

The modern consumer relies on research, opinions, and reviews before purchasing a product. But when a customer trusts your brand, they become more receptive. This means they are open to repeat purchases with minimal marketing efforts –bridging the trust-loyalty gap.

Building brand authority requires resources, commitment, and planning. However, some strategies can prove more effective than others. Typically, marketers should focus on creating an image that resonates with their prospective customers. When consumers trust your brand, it’s easier to sell, cross-sell, and upsell your services or products. Here are some of the most effective marketing strategies to help you establish brand authority.

Launch a Responsive Website and Keep It Updated

website updates

Your website is a powerful and effective asset in your marketing tools arsenal, forming the foundation of your strategy. When people search for products and services, they start with online research. Therefore, a website creates the first impression of your brand.

It’s essential to set up a responsive website that ticks all the boxes to help your audience find the site. Once the search engines notice your website, potential customers can find your products and services. However, optimizing the website to ensure maximum user experience is prudent.

Simplify navigation and download for a seamless experience and ensure related products are easy to find. Similarly, the content must be authoritative and informative to ensure it covers all user queries. And since most people use mobile devices, compatibility is a critical consideration. But if you want to increase trust and recognition, include testimonials from past clients.

Video Marketing

Video is an in-dismissible marketing and sales strategy in the digital age. Video marketing uses motion pictures to promote your brand. Unlike written content, video educates the audience, boosts engagement, and helps your brand stand out from competitors.

You are missing a powerful marketing opportunity if your marketing strategies don’t include video. Studies show that 92% of businesses consider video a must-have strategy that ensures lasting results.

You can create virtual tours of your business or happy customers enjoying your products or services. Regardless of your choice, focus on quality and relevance to ensure maximum impact.

Strategic Digital Content Marketing

Content marketing is a vital and effective strategy for your business. However, creating high-quality content requires expertise, but it’s worth the effort. If you don’t have an in-house content team, you can outsource the service to third-party creators with a track record of delivering stellar results.

Besides helping search engines rank your site, quality content can convert prospects to loyal customers. Serious customers don’t need irritating popups or irrelevant information –they want to fulfill their search intent.

Most prospects on your website want relevant, high-quality, informative, and engaging content. Unless you ensure the content resonates with your target audience, visitors won’t spend much time on your website. Therefore, the content should grab visitors’ attention quickly and encourage them to interact with your site and learn more about your brand.

Ideally, the content should focus on the persona’s pain points and how your products can solve the problem. Similarly, avoid overemphasizing your brand and instead focus on the offer.

Leverage CRM Tools to Nurture Relationships

CRM software helps build and manage relationships with your customers. Businesses receive multiple leads from various sources, including phone calls, walk-ins, referrals, emails, social media, and websites. Building a great customer relationship ensures recurrent revenues from return customers.

Since every lead is a potential customer, it’s critical to group, monitor, and track the leads. Having a reliable system to nurture and manage leads throughout the funnel can improve efficiency.

Besides automating customer data and tracking the customer journey, CRM can provide insights and simplify follow-up management. Depending on your business needs, you can find appropriate CRM software to supercharge your marketing strategy.

Email Marketing

Email marketing offers a channel to communicate and engage with your customers. While inbound marketingis about building and nurturing relationships, email marketing establishes the relationships in your customer’s inbox.

But this doesn’t mean spamming your audience. You only send valuable emails to people who have granted you permission, and they can opt out of your email list.

While most email marketing tools are excellent, you need to plan and schedule your email broadcasts depending on the prospect’s position in the sales funnel.

email marketing

Since consistency is golden in email marketing and sales strategy, creating evergreen sequences is essential to engage customers at different stages in the sales cycle. You can start by offering freebies to establish and nurture relationships. Offering valuable information without asking for anything builds trust and makes your prospect receptive to future offers.

The emails should go out on a specific day of the week throughout your marketing strategy to ensure consistency. This helps demonstrate professionalism and discipline when delivering on your promise.

Social media is more than a modern broadcast tool; at least 73% of businesses consider social media an effective marketing strategy. It’s an effective platform where you can interact with your prospects on a personal level and build lasting relationships.

Social media helps establish a bond with your followers and broadcast valuable content. Most importantly, you can interact with influencers in your industry. Collaborating with influencers can boost your content reach and brand visibility since you leverage a wider network.

Influencer social sharing can attract inbound links from other websites, which increases your domain authority. High-ranking domains get a higher feedback loop since you get more organic traffic.

Most social media platforms provide users with data about their followers. Similarly, social media analytics tools can offer deep insight into the best content for your audience based on their preferences and habits.

Bottom Line

Effective marketing strategies identify your target audience and prospective customers. Once you understand the buyer persona, you can create messages that resonate with their needs and demonstrate why your brand is better than the competition.

However, you’ll need patience and consistency before getting meaningful results. Regardless of your industry, you can implement proven strategies to boost brand recognition and authority and improve your bottom line.

Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing Automation

April 14, 2023/in Articles, B2B Marketing, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Dan Gartlan

Marketing automation offers a company the chance to centralize most of its marketing activities into a single software platform and to automate it to an extent. This centralization appeals to both B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer) companies. However, the way B2B and B2C marketing automation works is different due to fundamental differences between the two groups.

Why Is Marketing Automation Between B2B and B2C Different?

Effective marketing addresses each customer’s individual goals and needs. This remains true whether the customer is B2B or B2C. Because these groups have differing goals and needs, the way you market to them has to be different. As a result, the following differences remain when you use marketing automation:

The marketing focus differs:
- With B2B, the focus is on generating leads and keeping their subscribers engaged throughout the longer sales cycle.
- With B2C the focus is on building the brand.
The tactics used are different:
- B2B marketing delivers content that positions the company as an industry leader, while nurturing the lead in the sales process.
- B2C marketing is about the customer journey and making data-driven recommendations for products or services.
The tone of the messages is different:
- B2B messages are to targeted groups at different stages of the sales cycle.
- B2C messages are more personal and highly relevant to the individual.

Top 5 Benefits Of Marketing Automation

How B2C Marketing Automation Differs From That of B2B

With all the differences between marketing to the B2B and B2C groups, it’s easy to see why their marketing automation needs differ as well.

Communication channels. While both B2B and B2C businesses rely on email for marketing, the B2C use other channels as well. Text messaging, push notifications and retargeting are just a few examples. The B2C marketing automation solution needs to handle these additional channels.
Data used. B2B consumers are businesses that have specific needs. Marketing data for this group would include approximate company size, industry, point of contact and specific needs. B2C consumers are individuals with specific tastes. Marketing data for this group includes age, gender, purchase history and frequently visited product categories.
Features needed. B2B companies need help with nurturing their leads through the sales cycle. They want features like lead scoring and integration with their CRM system. B2C companies want to retain the customers they get, so they want features like reputation management, retargeting and retention marketing.
Marketing focus. B2B marketing focuses building the one-on-one relationship. B2C is more about building the brand and building mass appeal.
Pricing. B2B automation is priced based on the number of contacts managed within the system. B2C automation is priced based on the volume of data. It is not uncommon for B2B automation to have only 100 contacts in the system while B2C has thousands.

Differences Between B2C and B2B Email Marketing

The differing approaches of B2B and B2C marketing lead to their different marketing automation solutions. Trying to substitute one strategy for the other is difficult, due to different features and pricing structures. If you need help finding the right solution for your business, contact us at Stevens-Tate.

5 SMART Goal Example For Business Development

March 21, 2023/in Articles, Directors, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Strategy /by Dan Gartlan

A smart goal is basically what the acronyms from the name suggest. It is specific, measurable, attainable, and relevant and time bound. The Smart Goal process provides a frame where you can create a long term goal. It also provides a time limit for you to work on the same goal. By doing this business’ are 70% more successful in achieving their goals thanks to regular check-ins, updates and group accountability. Below are a few smart goal examples for business development that will help you understand the system better and enhance your business.

Smart Goal Examples for Business

“I Want To Increase My Profits”
“I Want To Improve My Response Time to Customer Complaints”
“I Want To Improve My Employee Retention”
“I Want To Be More Efficient In My Business Operations”
“I Want To Grow My Business Operation”

“I Want To Increase My Profits”

Specific: I will increase revenue while cutting down on expenditure. Moving to a more affordable premise that will cut my rent by 7% will reduce the operational costs.

Measurable: I will increase sales over the next 3 months by signing in 5 more potential clients.

Attainable: I will improve my current customer relationships and promote the business through referrals, networking and through social networks. This will help me find more leads and therefore see to an increase in revenue for the business.

Relevant: moving to a cheaper establishment will reduce the operational cost of my business and therefore give room to the growth of profits.

Time-bound: I will have increased my profit by the end of the coming three months.

“I Want To Improve My Response Time to Customer Complaints”

Specific: I will improve the response time to customer complaints by increasing my customer service staff from 3 to 8 in the next one year.

Measurable: the increase in customer service staff is scheduled to take place within one year. It should bring the number to a total of 8.

Attainable: as I plan on moving to a new establishment I will ensure the place has enough room to accommodate the additional staff members I intend to have in the next one year.

Relevant: I will find ways to manage the complaints meanwhile in order to maintain the customer base I have and strive to grow the client base even further to match the additional customer service staff.

Time-bound: I will have hired the customer service staff by the end of one year

“I Want To Improve My Employee Retention”

Specific: I will improve the employee turnover by 15% in 90 days by putting up training for the new employees to let them know what is expected of them and have a program for them to get used to the operation systems. I will also have one-on-one meetings with employees so that I get to know what challenges they could be facing.

Measurable: the improvement in employee turnover is scheduled to be by about 15% and should take place within 90 days.

Attainable: trainings and one-on-one meetings will ensure the employees are prepared for what is expected of them when they get into production. It also give me a hint of what’s on their mind concerning general operations of the business.

Relevant: outstanding employees will be put up for a reward system. For the ones that might be having a difficult time, there will be motivation trainings for encouragement.

Time-bound: employee turnover will have improved within 90 days

“I Want To Be More Efficient In My Business Operations”

Specific: I will improve my efficiency in business operations by challenging my sales department to increase their closing ratio from its current 45% to at least 60%. They could also work on improving the delivery time from 72hours to at least 12hours maximum.

Measurable: the sales people are supposed to increase their closing ratio from 45% to 60% and the delivery time improved to 12 hours from the initial 72hours

Attainable: I will conduct a survey to find out what both the clients and the sales team think about the idea. I will implement it as soon as the idea passes as valid.

Relevant: increasing the number of motorbikes and pickups that will do courier services for us will help make the plan a success

Time-bound: this should happen in one year.

“I Want To Grow My Business Operation”

Specific: open three more branches countrywide within five years

Measurable: the objective is to increase operations and revenue for the business. This will, in turn, facilitate the growth to three more branches.

Attainable: increasing my current selling space by 25% will mean more production. This can help me save for the planned growth to 4 branches countrywide.

Relevant: increasing production, operations and revenue will mean a larger client base thus the need for more branches will not be a wasteful idea after all.

Time-bound: establishing the branches should be within the next five years.

How Smart Goals Should Align With Your Business Goals

As much as an organization will work to ensure that its business goals are smart, they will never be flawless. It is, however, essential to ensure they give their teams tasks within their capability and make decisions using accurate data from their past operations while setting new smart business goals. The rest will work out just fine.

6 Best Practices For Using Facebook Video Ads

February 21, 2023/in Articles, Directors, Marketing Strategy, Social Media /by Mark Beebe

As you may already know, Facebook Ads can be a very effective advertising platform, especially when you consider its overall cost-effectiveness (it’s a pay-per-click advertising platform, after all) and the ability to target audiences based on a variety of criteria (from demographics to location to interests and more). Facebook Ads has a lot of features that you’ll want to take advantage of, including their Facebook Video Ads feature.

6 Practices For Using Facebook Video Ads

The following are six Facebook Video Ads best practices that you should be sure to implement:

1. Get Your Message Across Immediately

Don’t just assume that your viewers will stick around until the end of your video ads. According to Microsoft, around 19 percent of online viewers lose interest in video content after 10 seconds. Keeping this in mind, it’s a good idea to get to the point as quickly as possible so that your viewers know why they are watching. Try to get your message across in the first ten seconds.

2. Optimize Videos For Lack Of Sound

A lot of people watch videos with their sound off. You want your videos to not only get the message across even if they’re silent, but to engage the viewer to the point that they will turn the sound on. To optimize for the lack of sound, show captions, add text overlay, and be sure to use powerful, moving images.

3. Keep Mobile Videos Short

Although some viewers may be more willing to watch a longer video ad on their desktops, this is not so for mobile users. Mobile users are often on the go, which means that they’re not going to have the patience to watch a video that’s minutes long. Try to keep videos under 15 seconds long to help ensure that mobile users actually watch your whole video.

5 Types Of Marketing Videos You Should Think About Using

4. Customize Thumbnail Images

Many Facebook users will turn off autoplay on videos. However, just because some people won’t see your video ads play automatically doesn’t mean that they won’t watch them. You need to spark their interest by choosing a thumbnail image, which is a static image representing your video. Facebook will provide a number of options of still images that it pulls from your video ad. However, you’re not limited to these options–you can also upload a custom thumbnail instead. Make sure the image you use is of high quality and that it’s relevant to your ad.

5. Test Your Video Ads

To make sure your Facebook Video Ads perform to the best of their ability, perform A/B testing. You can create several versions of your video ads through Facebook by changing the creative, the placement, the product set, optimization events, and the audience. Test your ads for three to 14 days to get the most accurate results. Use the results to optimize your video ads so, thereby increasing their chances of performing successfully.

How Facebook Advertising Helps You

6. Analyze Performance

Make sure to analyze your video ads as you run them. The data you collect should help you when it comes to creating future video ads. For example, track which video ads had the highest levels of engagement, what times of the day your audience engaged with your videos, how many viewers visited your landing page after viewing a video ad, which videos were watched from beginning to end, and more.

Considering how effective video marketing is in general, you should be sure to take advantage of Facebook’s Video Ad feature. These are six Facebook Video Ads best practices that you should be sure to take note of before launching a video ad campaign on Facebook.

How Creativity and Data Driven Marketing Help Develop Marketing Campaigns

December 30, 2022/in Advertising Agency, Articles, Blog, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Mark Beebe

Not long ago, businesses simply didn’t have that much information to leverage when it came to crafting marketing campaigns. They could only draw conclusions about their audience from in-store information — as in, information on who bought what. Mostly, they just advertised to the audience that their products or services were initially intended for. A lot of their marketing effort came from the instincts of their advertising agency’s creative team. These days, advertising agencies have access to a wealth of data, which has led to data driven marketing. However, knowing how to use that data properly is important as well. It’s the agencies that merge data and creative to form the foundation of their marketing campaigns that tend to be the most successful.

How Using Data Can Inspire Great Marketing Campaigns

How Data Driven Marketing Can Support Creativity

Although it’s difficult to argue that data hasn’t been hugely beneficial in terms of identifying who your audience is and how to reach them, a lot of people within the industry are scared that the use of data is restricting creativity. They believe that the increased use of data and automation is going to reduce innovation in marketing campaigns. There’s certainly some truth to this – but only if your marketing agency isn’t using your data properly. You don’t want your creative decisions to be solely based on numbers, after all.

However, you also don’t want to use your data as an afterthought either. For example, maybe you’ve produced both long-form and short-form blog content. Using analytics, you’ve found that your long-form content is performing better. You won’t want to try to take your short-form content and extend it so that it’s longer as this kind of strategy is akin to trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Instead, you should keep this data in mind for future campaigns.

Data driven marketing is about creating a balance between the data you have and your creative. Take video content creation as an example. Video has become one of the most effective forms of content in the past few years as it’s become easier and cheaper to produce as well as easier for consumers to watch. According to recent stats, Facebook users are more likely to engage with your video if it draws them in within 1.7 seconds. When creating video content for Facebook, you’ll want to keep this in mind. It might seem restricting at first — but limitations are often what helps to drive creative solutions. Instead of looking at data as something that restricts the creativity of your marketing campaigns, look at it as a way to drive innovation.

While some critics fear that an over-reliance on data could ultimately hinder creative efforts, in reality, the use of data can help inform creative efforts to bolster the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. In this day and age, advertising agencies who do not leverage data to their advantage in order to influence the direction of their creative marketing decisions will quickly fall behind the competition.

Exploring The Differences Between B2C and B2B Email Marketing

December 27, 2022/in Articles, B2B Marketing, Blog, Direct Marketing, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Nicole Wagner

How you market your brand depends greatly on who your audience is, which is why b2c (business to consumer) and b2b (business to business) marketing are very different strategies. As such, your email marketing strategy is going to depend heavily on whether or not you’re marketing b2b or b2c. The following are some of the differences between b2c and b2b email marketing to keep in mind:

Optimal Send Time

Knowing when to send your emails has a big impact on whether or not they’re opened. B2c customers are more likely to check their emails in the evenings or on the weekends since they are busy working during the day. B2b recipients are more likely to open them during work hours since they often check their work email regularly throughout the day.

Spam Filters

Spam filters work a bit differently with b2b and b2c customers. B2b customers often use filters that check for certain keywords before deciding whether to inbox the email or automatically sort it into the junk folder. With b2c customers, it’s more about building a good sending reputation with minimal complaints.

Personalization And Segmentation

While personalization and segmentation are important for both, they’re a bit different. With b2c customers, you’ll want to personalize products and content based on individual taste. With b2b customers, personalization should be a bit more subtle, such as by highlighting new stories within their industry or providing case studies that match their needs.

How Customers Respond

B2b customers buy from people, whereas b2c customers buy from brands. This means that when you send emails to b2b customers, you should expect a potential reply. Make sure that you include contact information, such as a phone number and who the email is from so that it’s easy for b2b recipients to reply. This isn’t as important for b2c customers.

The Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing Automation

Triggers

Using triggers to automate emails to your b2c customers helps to drive them back to your website. However, email triggers don’t work as well for b2b customers. Instead, use triggers for phone calls from your sales team instead.

Buying Cycles

B2b buying cycles are typically longer than b2c buying cycles. This is because you’re not just nurturing a single type of customer like you would in a b2c situation. Instead, you’re having to nurture a group of decision makers. Not to mention that in b2c situations, customers are more likely to make faster decisions based on emotion.

The Role of Content

Because buying cycles are longer in b2b situations, your customers will benefit more from educational and non-promotional forms of content, such as white papers, whereas b2c customers might be more moved to action by testimonials and case studies right off the bat.

These are some of the differences between b2c and b2b email marketing that you should know before crafting your email marketing campaign. The last thing you’ll want to do is to use b2c tactics for your b2b email marketing strategy (or vice versa) since this will hurt your ability to nurture your leads.

What Are The Benefits Of Using HubSpot Marketing Automation Tools?

December 9, 2022/in Articles, Blog, Direct Marketing, Directors, Inbound Marketing, Lead Nuturing, Marketing Strategy /by Nicole Wagner

Creating a successful long-term inbound marketing strategy requires that you tackle several different tactics on different fronts, such as optimizing your site for SEO, creating high-quality content for your website, producing email newsletters, and engaging with followers on social media. Because these tactics all require constant attention to be effective, you should strongly consider the use of HubSpot marketing automation tools as a way to simplify your workload. The following are four reasons why you should be using HubSpot marketing automation tools:

1. Collect and Analyze Data to Improve Your Marketing Efforts

HubSpot’s analytics tools can help to collect data across all of your marketing platforms and provide you with metrics that you can use to the benefit of your marketing campaign. For example, you’ll be able to see what blog posts are outperforming other posts based on metrics such as visits, social engagement, click-throughs and captures. You can use this information to determine what kind of content is more effective or what elements of your blog posts need to be changed. For instance, if you have content that is receiving tons of views but no click-throughs, it may be because your calls-to-action are poor.

6 Effective Call To Action Examples

2. Personalize Communication With Your Customers

Marketing automation allows you to segment your email list, which makes it easier to personalize your emails and send more relevant content to your recipients. This is done by gathering data from your opt-in forms and using that data to segment your email list into different groups. For example, if you run an online clothing store, then segmenting your list into male and female will prevent you from sending content about women’s clothing to your male audience, which would hurt your ability to properly nurture leads through the sales funnel. The use of email segmentation will make your email marketing strategy more efficient and effective.

3. Schedule Out Your Work Ahead of Time

One of the important aspects of a good content marketing strategy is making sure that you continually publish new content on a regular basis. Your readers are going to expect new content at certain times and if you don’t publish it on the same days at the same times, you’ll lose readers. Of course, remembering to manually publish new content, whether it’s a posting an article to your blog or sending out a tweet, is time-consuming. Marketing automation allows you to create your content and posts well ahead of time and set them to be automatically published at specific times on specific dates.

Read our article: Content Marketing Misconceptions

4. Send More Qualified Leads to Your Sales Team

One of the challenges that a lot of businesses face is having their marketing team on the same page as their sales team. Sales personnel often don’t know what state of the buyer’s journey prospects are on, which makes their job more difficult — especially if they are sent leads that aren’t qualified. HubSpot marketing automation tools allow you to collect extremely useful visitor information, including their history of actions on your website, which in turn can allow you to send more highly qualified leads through to your sales team when they are ready.

The use of HubSpot marketing automation tools allows you make more efficient use of your resources and gives you the opportunity to see exactly what is and isn’t working in your marketing strategies. You’ll end up saving a lot of time on smaller, more time-consuming tasks, which you can then dedicate to more important aspects of your marketing campaign, such as engaging with and nurturing your leads.

Using The Right Media Mix During Each Stage Of The Buyer’s Journeys

November 29, 2022/in Articles, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Nicole Wagner

Not all buyers are created equal, and depending on what stage in your sales funnel a buyer lands can dictate the type of marketing they’re ready to receive. And while old marketing practices preached broadcasting a message to the masses, using a media mix to nail down a lead at a specific point along their buying journey is crucial and proven to be more effective to converting leads into sales.

Inbound marketing is about just that: tailoring exactly the right content to your buyer precisely when they need it. In order to accomplish this, though, you must know exactly who your buyer is, where they are in your sales funnel, and what content they need. To do this, you must first understand your buyer personas. From there, you can begin crafting a targeted, personalized, and efficient marketing campaign keeping your buyers in mind.

In order to find the right media mix for your buyers, though, you need to better understand your buyer’s journey stage by stage.

Awareness

Awareness is just the beginning of your buyer’s journey. At this stage, potential buyers are becoming aware they have a problem and begin their search for a solution. This is a perfect opportunity for your brand to be the first thing they see, and plenty of juicy, easily-consumed, educational content will satiate their desire to learn more about their problem.

The awareness stage is at the top of your sales funnel, so buyers are most likely ready to receive a media mix of keyword-focused and successful blogs, PPC and SEO to drive traffic to your site, and mass media to get your message across. Essentially, your buyers will become information consumers and it’s your job to be the content expert they turn to during this initial information gathering phase through your sales funnel.

Your buyer’s awareness of having a problem, incidentally, coincides with your own company’s brand awareness which is the cornerstone of helping curious buyers find their way to your content. Learn how to build that foundational content in the second part of our attraction marketing series: How to Drive Brand Awareness.

Consideration

Once a buyer has been made aware of their problem, the consideration stage of their buying journey begins. At this point, buyers truly begin to shop around for a solution to their problem and it’s extremely important for you to deliver authoritative, trusted solutions as they matriculate through your sales funnel. Here your brand becomes more distinguished from your competitors.

This is where granular, tailored messages begin to take on a new life and a new role for your buyers media mix, typically in the form of targeted emails that trigger actions from the buyer. Drip emails and lead nurturing campaigns (when used correctly) will become the staple media mix for these buyers entering the middle of your sales funnel. From those emails, a buyer should be able to download content, sign up for a webinar, or read a case study.

Naturally, once a potential buyer filters their way into the middle of your funnel, they must be nurtured in a way that will keep them thirsting for more content and information about your brand. The third part of our attraction marketing focuses on exactly that: Using Lead Nurturing During the Consideration Stage of the Buyer’s Journey.

How do you create great content with the help of the buyer’s journey?

Decision Making

This is where the rubber meets the road for your marketing and your buyer’s journey. If your buyer has made it this far, then you’re on their short list and it’s time to make all of those hard-fought marketing efforts deliver by closing your lead into a sale. Now, you should prove why your brand is above and beyond your competition and establish an emotional connection with your prospective buyer.

At the bottom of the funnel, the best types of mix media marketing for your lead are retargeting and one-to-one connections. Retargeting is where you reconnect with your site visitors and offer a fresh look at your brand while one-to-one connections make a personal connection with your buyer through emails, phone calls, or customized demonstrations of your products or services. These are make-or-break tactics, and implementing them very well could make the difference in making a sale.

For some marketers, picking up the phone and calling a prospective sale can strike fear into their hearts at first glance. Nevertheless, the final piece of the attraction marketing puzzle comes by Using Personal Selling During the Decision Making Stage. Here, we will discuss how to successfully make those personal connections and close your qualified leads into sales.

What AI means To B2B Marketing Strategies

November 21, 2022/in Articles, B2B Marketing, Blog, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Nicole Wagner

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a concept explored through pop culture; it’s a very real thing that has become increasingly prevalent throughout society, even in the creation of B2B marketing strategies. In fact, the use of AI is practically commonplace now. For example, the use of AI is what allows Amazon to recommend personalized products based on your buying and browsing habits. It also allows your GPS to provide you with the best possible route. For business owners and marketers, AI has also become essential to improving B2B marketing strategies.

The Benefits of AI in B2B Marketing Strategies

The following are just a few ways that the use of AI can help to improve B2B marketing strategies:

Improve the customer experience via personalization

Businesses no longer directly interact with brands when they are doing product or service research. This means it can be difficult to mine information from potential clients or business partners. The use of AI technology can help you collect data that provides insight into the behavioral patterns of both existing and potential clients or partners. This means that your marketing efforts no longer have to be limited to certain sectors, you’ll be able to target specific businesses with messages designed to provide solutions to their specific needs, thereby improving the customer experience as well.

Improve your marketing strategy

The use of behavioral analysis and machine learning can help you to better understand what the pain points of your target audience is. Behavioral analyses also allows you to craft a more effective marketing strategy to reach and convert that audience.

Find out how to build your brand story with your B2B marketing strategy.

Save money by saving time

The use of AI technology means that you don’t have to spend hours analyzing data. This type of data can be collected and analyzed by AI programs for you. It will allow you to dedicate more time to other aspects of your business.

Improve results with lead scoring

Trying to chase down every lead is typically a waste of time since not all leads are equal. The use of AI technology can allow you to score your leads using all of the behavioral data that you’ve collected. This, in turn, allows you to pinpoint businesses that are much more likely to convert. It allows for a better use of your resources since you can identify the best prospects and prioritize your most promising accounts.

The use of artificial intelligence will help to improve your B2B marketing strategies in any number of ways, whether it’s by helping you to collect and organize more valuable data that can be used to more effectively target qualified leads using personalization, or simply being able to make better use of your resources. Be sure to visit us at Stevens & Tate to take advantage of our free downloadable marketing tools, which can be leveraged to help improve your B2B marketing efforts.

For more resources on Attraction Marketing, click here.

Powerful Call-to-Action Phrases to Increase Clicks

October 21, 2022/in Articles, Brand Development, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Nicole Wagner

Are you looking to increase your conversion rate? Call to action phrases are an essential part of the conversion process, but what kinds of call-to-actions should you put on your website? CTAs should be simple yet effective, and catch the attention of your visitors.

The formula for a successful CTA page title consists of combining such sales buzzwords as “free,” “discount,” “offer,” “gift,” “guarantee,” with action-oriented words like “click,” “download,” “request,” and “send.” Putting together a strand of words to entice clicks sometimes doesn’t get the job done, though. As a marketer, think of what strikes you as a buyer: emotion.

Humans are oddly emotional creatures and are the only ones that tie those emotions to money hence making many of their purchases subject to the emotions invoked by marketing which is exactly why call to action phrases are so important. This isn’t a secret to marketers either, but leveraging that knowledge and coupling it with your brand’s content can be a little tricky.

Call to Action Phrase Building Tips

CTAs can be as simple as “click here” and “download now,” but can have an infinitely more powerful meaning by adding a few simple words and giving the reader the benefit of what they are getting from the offer.

Include a possessive determiner such as “your.” The possessive aspect of the CTA makes the reader feel as though that piece of content or your offer is already theirs to be had and in their back pocket.
Briefly outline the benefit of the content. Add what your website visitor gets from clicking your CTA. This almost acts as a miniature landing page. For example, instead of saying “click here” use a phrase like “click here for your free white paper.”
Use action words and urgency to encourage clicks. “Limited downloads,” “limited time,” and words such as “now” and “quickly” will enhance the sense of urgency for your users to click on your brand’s CTAs.

Actionable Call to Action Phrases

Actionable CTAs leverage words like “now,” “here,” “click,” etc. Actionable CTAs use an action word to draw the reader into the CTA which gives them that emotional sense of action and satisfies that human demand for immediate satisfaction. Getting content “now” versus “get it in a week” will certainly drive more clicks onto your CTAs.

Keeping in mind some of the tips above, let’s take a look at how using actionable words can make a simple CTA far more powerful. We’ve bolded some of those key terms, but have a little fun. Remove some of the bolded items and see what that does to the phrase. Keep in mind that you can insert any content type or offer in the brackets to fit your brand. Here are a few examples of actionable CTAs:

Download Your [Content] Now
Click Here for Your Free [Content]
Join Now and [Get 30 Days Free]
Download Your Free [Content] Here
Start Getting Your Free [Content] by Clicking Here Now
Click Here for Details About the Best [Service/Product] for Your Company

5 Types of Landing Pages To Increase Your Lead Conversion Rate

Urgent Call to Action Phrases

For most of us, the essence of time can very well be the thing that either helps us make a decision or turns our “eventually” into never. Your buyers are the same way, and giving them a little nudge into a sense of urgency can be just what they need to click your CTA, capitalize on your content, and ultimately buy what you’ve got up for offer. Adding some personal touches (in the right context) can further drive that sense of urgency for your buyer.

Limited time offers, limited time discounts, first time buyer discounts, and limited supply all tend to push buyers a little closer to the buy button in their shopping cart and can be great ways to improve your CTAs. In the case of content and CTAs where the downloads themselves are free, your prospective buyer has virtually nothing to lose. Here are a few urgent call to action phrases that are sure to light the proverbial fire under your buyer and increase clicks:

Download Your [Content] While Supplies Last
Act Quickly Limited Downloads Available
Hurry, This Free [Content] Offer Expires Soon
Secure Your Spot Today! Limited Spots Available
Only X Days Remaining to [Sign Up, Download, Attend]
Take Advantage of this Limited [Content] Today Only
I Urge You to Download this Limited Time Offer

Want to learn more about how to attract more leads? Click here to learn about Attraction Marketing!

Exclusive Call to Action Phrases

Adding urgency to a call to action phrase can sometimes seem a little pushy, especially to some C-level managers and business owners, but there is another equally crafty way to make your CTAs appealing to your target audience: exclusivity. Exclusive offers give readers the feeling that they are a part of or at least offered a deal that no one else is in on.

We see these sort of lead generation tactics across multiple retail platforms where deals are both confined to time and exclusive to members only. Whether or not your particular brand is a retailer or not we, as consumers, have been trained to jump on those exclusive offers available only to the elite. This can work with your CTAs as well. Here are some useful exclusive CTA phrases:

Join Our Mailing List and Get Exclusive Content
This Offer is Only For Our Subscribers
Sign Up for Exclusive Offers only Available to Subscribers
Request an Invitation to [Join, Sign Up, Get Content]
This [Content, Offer] is Only Available to [Subscribers, Members]
Download Now for Exclusive Access

Responsive Call to Action Phrases

Naturally, every call to action you create should have an overall goal of generating a response from your target buyer and while practically any of these CTA phrases we’ve outlined could be categorized as either “actionable” or “responsive” we think that it’s best to separate the two factions. Actionable CTAs lead users towards a specific action such as clicking, downloading, subscribing, etc. whereas responsive CTAs invoke a sense of two-way conversation.

With that said, the CTA phrases below will elicit a response from your potential lead: think feedback, a reply, or a point of contact. These types of CTA phrases should hopefully open up a dialogue between you and your potential buyer and give them an opportunity to start the conversation. Here are a few examples of responsive CTAs:

Talk to One of Our Experts About…
Get a Free Consultation and Talk About Your Business Goals
We’d Like to Hear from You: Talk to a Specialist Today
Let Us Know What You Think
Contact Us Today
Contact Me
Don’t Hesitate to Get in Touch With Us

For more attraction marketing resources, click here.

Craft Your Own CTA Phrases

As we’ve mentioned, the sky really is the limit to crafting attractive content-focused CTA phrases and experimenting with them is one of the great ways inbound marketing can help marketers learn more about their tactics. What’s important to keep in mind is that your buyer is the focus of any CTA or piece of content you craft, and without a doubt, targeting those CTAs is crucial for the success of your content initiatives.