Top 10+ Ways to Maximize Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

How To Develop A Solid Inbound Marketing Strategy

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

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

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

Read More About The Benefits Of Inbound Marketing

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

1. Create website goals

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

2. Create a Persona

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

Read more on Why Buyer Personas Are So Important

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

3. Get to know your persona

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

Download A Free Template For Developing Personas

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

Baby Boomers Represent A Wealth Of Opportunities For Homebuying

Marketing Real Estate to Baby Boomers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Critical Customer Relationship

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

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

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

The Top of the Sales Funnel

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

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

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

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

The Bottom of the Sales Funnel

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benefits of Newspaper Marketing:

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

Why Should You Trust Newspaper Marketing?

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

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

Why Should You Consider Newspaper Marketing?

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

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

4 Tips To Keep Sales & Marketing On The Same Track

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

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

Keep constant communication

Home Builder Marketing Tips To Drive Traffic And Sales

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

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

Drive On-Site Traffic With An Event

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

Learn How To Tell Your Partner’s Story

Capitalize On A Strong Media Partnership

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

Target The Right Audience

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

Build Credibility Through Public Relations

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

Reap The Rewards

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

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

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

Types Of Marketing Videos You Should Use

April 11, 2021/in Articles, Content Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Video Marketing /by Terry Becker

Year after year, video marketing grows in importance. Video has never been easier to consume for Americans, especially when considering the increasing quality of smartphones and tablets. Video is also the easiest way for people to absorb information. Additionally, according to a prediction by Zenith Media, the average person will spend around 100 minutes a day watching videos in 2021. The pandemic certainly had an impact on these numbers as well. People have more time on their hands to watch video content, especially those who have switched to a work-at-home environment. Because of this increase in video consumption, a video marketing strategy is an absolute must. The following are some of the different types of marketing videos that you should consider producing this year.

1. Educational videos

Educational videos should be used to help inform your audience about a particular subject. No video marketing strategy will be successful without them. This is because the more informed your audience is, the more confident they will be in making a purchasing decision down the road. Educational videos provide them with the knowledge they need to understand your business and the solutions you offer. There are several types of educational videos, including:

Demo videos – Videos that demonstrate how your product or service is used.
Explainer videos – Videos that showcase why your product or service is needed.
How-to videos – Videos that provide step-by-step instructions on how to do a specific task.
Animated videos – Animated videos are a fantastic way to deliver information in an entertaining way, whether they’re explainer videos or how-to videos.

2. Interview videos

Interviews are an excellent way to provide detailed information about certain subjects to your audience while also providing a personality to engage with. You can film interviews with both employees and upper management as well as experts that are relevant to your industry. What’s great about interview videos is that they are incredibly easy to produce.

3. Event videos

Certain events, like industry tradeshows, conferences, fundraisers, and round table discussions, can reveal a wealth of information. Film these events and edit them into event videos for your audience to enjoy.

Leveraging Video Marketing During COVID-19

4. Case study and testimonial videos

These types of videos focus on customers and their experiences using your product or service. Not only can you use them as social proof that your products or services work, but they make it easier to build trust with your audience. Potential customers are much more likely to relate to and believe what previous customers have said, after all. Using case studies and testimonial videos, you give customers the chance to explain what their challenges were and how your product or service solved those challenges.

5. Behind-the-scenes videos

A big part of creating a successful brand identity is presenting your company as being relatable. You don’t want your audience to think of you as a big faceless corporation, after all. Creating videos that depict your company behind the scenes is a great way to do this. It shows that there’s a human element behind the business. There are tons of ways to go about creating behind-the-scenes videos. A video of the day-in-the-life of the typical employee or a video of the manufacturing process of a product are great examples.

These are five different types of marketing videos you should consider creating in 2021. As you develop your video marketing strategy, remember that the quality of your content matters — and so does the audience that you’re creating it for. Always keep viewers in mind to ensure that your video marketing efforts are relevant.

Integrating Story Branding With Your B2B Marketing Strategy

April 11, 2021/in Articles, Attraction Marketing, B2B Marketing, Brand Development, Brand Story Telling, Directors, Marketing Strategy, Storybranding /by Dan Gartlan

Marketers have realized that their audiences’ attention spans are getting shorter by the day. In an effort to get it back, they resort to anything to engage them: humor, sex, etc. However, it is one thing to get involved in a commercial and another to get involved in a brand. Successful brands market by forging a deeper emotional connection using story branding which is a part of attraction marketing.

In a technique called The Hero’s Quest, they create a story with a hero, a conflict, and a resolution. The hero has a certain drive like love that leads him to action past certain barriers and eventual conquest. Generating emotional connection with the story is what sells. To be successful in B2B marketing strategy, make your brand the hero of your own story.

Where story branding and marketing integrate:

Distinction

Consumers have vast amounts of choice today but are drawn to the one they can relate to. Distinction is vital in any marketing strategy. A good, realistic brand story enhances a brand’s overall presence regardless of its competitive position in the industry. The right perception hits the audiences’ emotional quotient, tipping it in your favor. Wrapping up your brand in a more meaningful story context further adds value to it. To fellow businesses, buying your product will mean getting higher utility compared to the others in the competition.

Humanizing your brand

A successful B2B marketing strategy is one that humanizes your brand. A brand story cannot be underestimated in doing the job. Individual experiences like those of Steve Jobs, when fed into a company message, go a long way in personalizing and even achieving celebrity like status for your brand. You can use employee or your founder experience for this. Although you cannot have complete control of your story, a little positive twist helps to strengthen it by making it more interesting. Your marketing strategy is even boosted further as a result. A story should be a corporate persuasion tool that leads your audience to you.

Read more on 4 Strategies For Improving Your B2B Customer Experience.

Emotion is more compelling than a straight fact

In spoken word, good oratory skills are regarded highly and can be more compelling when they involve more emotion than fact. Arousing an audiences’ emotion can create big turnaround in your brand path. The Royal navy for example, uses stories to boost confidence and productivity where it is expected of the military to have a tough, factual approach to communication. That B2B cannot use warm and emotive storytelling is not a true rationale. Make your story more willingly received and memorable to achieve greater marketing success.

Interplay

There is a two way exchange between telling a story and marketing success. Story branding strengthens your business whereas a good, stronger business performance reinforces your story. Similarly, poor performance becomes part of your brand story just as easily. A B2B marketing strategy can be shaped but success will always depended on perception. Story branding is one way of building this perception.

3 Ways To Use Targeted Marketing To Reach Qualified Prospects

April 1, 2021/in Articles, Directors, Homebuilder Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Media /by Debbie Szwast

Imagine, if you will, walking out of a model home and before you know it…you see an ad for a builder just down the street appear on your cell phone. You think to yourself, “Hmmm…coincidence?” It’s not. With targeted marketing, you can pinpoint potential customers down to an address where they have visited.

Targeted marketing is nothing new. Agencies and companies have been doing it for years. First through direct mail, then via email, using data points such as zip code, gender, household income, marital status, and age. But now, we have the ability to narrow our scope even more to truly reach those most qualified to purchase.

Recently, a new client came to Stevens & Tate needing to attract more students to its private school. We discovered several factors that determined whether parents chose to send their children to this school. They could afford it. It was close to their home or work. And it provided the type of education they wanted for their child. To reach this very specific audience, we advertised on social media. Social media sites such as Facebook gather a great deal of information about their users from information the users provide themselves. These sites also monitor behavior patterns. As a result, we were able to do niche marketing, advertising to select neighborhoods around the school and in local employment corridors. And we focused our message on the benefits this private education offered. After the first month, the school recorded an increase in attendees to the parent information sessions.

Learn more about Effective Marketing Strategies For A Changing Economy.

Targeted Marketing On Radio? Yes.

One of Stevens & Tate’s clients needed to build ticket sales for its classical music concerts. After researching the prior season’s data, we discovered that the majority of concertgoers came from a 20-minute or less drive of the venue. So we incorporated online radio into the media mix to aim our message at those who would have an affinity for the brand. The beauty of this targeted marketing plan was that we could reach listeners with a preference for classical music. We were able to narrow down our audience not only to those who lived in a specified geographic area but also to those who exhibited classical music listening habits. The result was a 25 percent increase in year-over-year show attendance.

Hyperlocal Marketing Pinpoints Your Audience

For a Chicagoland homebuilder with a new property in the city, we wanted to reach home shoppers living near the neighborhood as well as those holding certain job titles. Rather than choose a medium to advertise on, we chose a very small group of people to reach out to. Using a digital hyperlocal marketing campaign, we were able to serve ads to a very niche market segment—including those who had recently used a home finder app. We served ads to these individuals multiple times via multiple vehicles including desktop, mobile and in-app ads; emails; social media newsfeeds; and native content based on online search history. Since launching the program, sales at the community have increased 50 percent.

These are just a few examples of the power of a targeted marketing campaign. And new digital technologies are being unveiled all the time. At Stevens & Tate, we partner with multiple media sources to devise just the right targeted marketing campaign for each of our clients. If you are looking for an agency that can help you move from a shotgun to a rifle approach to marketing, contact Stevens & Tate and see if we are a fit.

4 Tips to Lead An Agency Review to Find New Marketing Agency

March 15, 2021/in Articles, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Debbie Szwast

Do you know if it’s time to start looking for a new marketing agency? These three questions will help you understand if your team is working for you; and if not, how to look for a new agency partner.

Are you getting the results you need? Most clients and agencies set goals at the beginning of their relationship or at the start of a new campaign. For example, you may agree that success is measured by an increase in website visits and conversions, a certain number of on-site traffic or customers per store, more social media interactions and engagement, or incremental sales. If your goals are not being achieved and your marketing agency is not proactively seeking new ways to help you reach them, it may be time for a change. Read more