Effective marketing is key to standing out in a competitive market and growing your customer base. While there are many angles to take and activities to do when it comes to marketing, focusing on the foundations can help you elevate your organization’s competitiveness very effectively. If you’re looking to enhance the essential elements of your organization’s marketing strategy, planning and activities, check out the five tips below!
1. Buyer Persona Tip: Get Clear on Your Target Audience
At the core of effective marketing, a business needs to be clear on who they are trying to reach or sell to. To effectively create buyer personas, you need to identify their key characteristics, pain points and goals, and go into detail on them! Ensure that they are as in-depth and accurate as possible as they are representations of who your buyers are. In B2B small business marketing, buyer personas generally include:
- Company Information: Size (by people or revenue), industry segment, location(s), their end customer profile
- Demographic information: Gender, age, location, role in the company, involvement in purchase/decision making
- Key drivers: Responsibilities in their role, common goals, key challenges in their role
Accurate buyer personas drive messaging and marketing efforts because when you have a clear picture of a prospective buyer’s needs and pain points, you can tailor your messaging and marketing to reach them.
2. Messaging Tip: Be Consistent
Effective messaging can help your organization differentiate its products, solutions or services from the competition and connect with prospective customers by highlighting what makes the company’s offerings unique and valuable. Then, by using messaging points consistently across all marketing channels, you will guide your target audience to the behavior that you want them to engage in and help them find the specific solutions they have been looking for.
Messaging and content work closely together. When your messaging is consistent, informational and has a purpose, it will connect with your audience. In fact, organizations that present their brand consistently across platforms can increase revenue up to 23%.
3. Content Strategy Tip: Outline and Document Your Strategy
Content marketing is a tried-and-true mainstay for generating leads and a must for any business in the digital age. For many, it serves as a cost-effective gateway to introduce potential audiences to an organization and how its products, services, or solutions address their needs and pain points. It is also extremely impactful in supporting marketing and sales efforts all the way through to driving increased business.
As shared by Demand Metric, content marketing generates over 3x as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less. With content providing such a key role in marketing, having a clear, outlined content strategy and plan can help your organization focus on the content efforts that will deliver the most value.
4. Content Marketing Tip: Create Various Types of Content
To support marketing efforts, there are many types of content that can be created. From blogs to articles, videos and eBooks, several options can help to generate leads for a business. While some are more essential than others, it’s important to understand the time and resources available to create effective content. What, and how much, content an organization can create relies largely upon those two factors. Knowing what your specific audiences enjoy can help determine what content to focus on creating in the short- and long-term. Here are key categories of content to consider in the mix:
- Ungated Content: Content that is accessible to anyone at any time without restrictions (blogs, infographics, podcasts, short videos are examples of this type of content).
- Gated Content: Content that requires completion of an online web form or similar step to capture users’ contact information before allowing access to it (ebooks, guides, whitepapers, webinars, research reports, benchmark studies, product demos are examples of this type of content).
5. Lead Generation and Nurturing Tips: Engage Effectively
Capturing the attention of your audiences is the first step of forming a valuable relationship. Strengthening that relationship relies on how effectively you nurture, or engage, them. Here are some tips to help with lead generation and lead nurturing:
- Move people from site visitors to leads: Marketing activities such as social media posts, blogs and webinars are great ways to generate awareness of your brand and offering. This awareness can bring more people to your website and get to know who your organization is and what your offering is all about. Once on your website, having forms to download gated content, or to subscribe to tips and tricks or industry insights newsletter can help you turn a site visitor into a lead, which you can then continue to market to.
- Nurture leads in your database consistently: Lead nurturing is the progressive process of building a relationship with leads through different interactions over time to ultimately convert the leads into buyers. Nurture activities are based on where a lead is in the buyer journey.
- In the awareness stage (or at the top of the sales funnel): Periodically emailing thought leadership and educational content like blogs and articles is useful. The goal is to extend opportunities for each lead to deepen their interest and strengthen the relationship.
- In the consideration stage (or the middle of the sales funnel): Here people are often beginning to evaluate options for addressing their needs or pain points. Here, more in-depth content that talks about how to address common pain points, or a white paper or eBook showing key considerations when making a purchase decision is appropriate.
- In the decision stage (or the bottom of the funnel): Here people are evaluating and finalizing their selection for a product, solution or service. Providing a case study that showcases the success of others who use your product or service or sharing product comparisons that show how your brand stands above others are suggestions.
Building on The Foundations of Marketing
It is crucial to understand that building a strong marketing foundation can be a difference-maker in the future. Establishing a content marketing strategy and plan, implementing authentic, consistent messaging, creating accurate buyer personas and generating awareness and leads are all foundational elements. Without these elements, your marketing plan can be unclear and pose challenges in the future.
