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This year has proved to be an exciting one for marketing. With the year coming to a close, marketing experts across the globe have been weighing in on the trends most likely to become even more valuable in the new year. Today, we’re highlighting a few of these trends and sharing resources you can use as you prepare your marketing efforts for 2017.
More strategic use of landing pages, A/B testing
We’ve gone through the benefits of A/B testing many times on our blog — and for good reason. A/B testing on landing pages consistently boosts conversion rates and will continue to provide value for organizations looking to improve their site design in 2017. However, A/B testing can only benefit conversion rates on landing pages that exist in the first place, and a surprising number of B2B organizations still don’t use landing pages as extensively as they should.
This trend is starting to take on a greater role in B2B marketing efforts. While only 56% of clicks to B2B sites go through a custom landing page first, we believe this number will skyrocket in the new year as organizations look to create custom content and better use it to convert prospects. If your organization is one of those adding landing pages and directing more traffic to them in 2017, it’s time to review the best practices for A/B testing and put it to use to make your landing pages the best they can be,
For more insights on A/B testing, take a look at our blog posts: How A/B testing can transform your B2B marketing and The truth about A/B testing.
Marketing automation
Marketing automation is another trend to continue to watch in the new year. Automation ensures that new leads have the best chance of being nurtured into sales and accounts for a 14.5 percent increase in sales productivity. If your organization hasn’t implemented a marketing automation system yet, you are likely sending many leads to sales that are unqualified. For those looking to boost sales in 2017, this can’t go on. Organizations who invest in marketing automation see a 451 percent increase in qualified leads.
With numbers like these, we certainly expect this trend to continue to grow in 2017, and expect to see many more B2B (and B2C) organizations investing in marketing automation platforms. Will yours be one of them?
To learn more about marketing automation, read How marketing automation manages your lead-to-revenue lifecycle.
Targeted marketing
It’s no surprise this makes our list. Targeting made significant improvements in 2016 and we expect this personalization to reach new levels in the upcoming year. We’ve written before about the psychology behind consumer decision-making and many marketers are looking to gather increased insights into customer behavior. From there, marketers will look for and develop more new ways to put this personalization to use in campaigns. We expect software to advance further in the new year to provide even more targeted options for B2B.
Read our post, Getting started with PPC: keywords and targeting, for more insights on one area in which you can improve your targeting.
This will be our last blog post of 2016, but that doesn’t mean you have to wait to read more. Browse our past posts for more marketing insights for your B2B or healthcare organization.
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The end of the year marks a time of reflection, so we’re taking a look back at 2016 and some of the top marketing trends. Their importance lies not only in their impact this past year but also in their opportunities for the year to come.
Each of these themes is currently changing how we reach target audiences, leads and consumers — and moving forward, they have the potential to grow and change the ways we communicate and work. It’s time to stay informed, learn more and consider how you can best apply these trends to your own marketing plan.
Marketing automation meets media buying
Automation is a hot topic in marketing, but in 2016, it had a significant impact on the area of media buying specifically. Programmatic media buying allows marketers to buy ad space in two ways: across a variety of sites through automated real-time auctions — what’s known as “programmatic RTB (real-time buying)” — or through specific media publishers via a more automated, simplified and targeted process than traditional buying — what’s commonly referred to as “programmatic direct.”
While many brands are still learning about programmatic media buying, its growth in 2016 makes it something marketers need to pay attention to. This year, U.S. programmatic digital display ad spending is expected to reach over $22 billion, representing 67 percent of total digital display ad spending and an increase of 39.7 percent over last year. And in 2017, that number is predicted to grow to $27.47 billion, making up 72 percent of the total digital display spending. Mobile, specifically mobile video programmatic spending, is driving much of this growth.
Opportunities to connect and interact with audiences expand
Consumers are watching more online video, expanding their mobile usage and even starting to venture into the world of wearable devices — all creating an environment of increased connectivity and interactivity and an opportunity for marketers to reach them in new ways. While tactics like interactive content and livestreaming have been around for awhile, especially in the B2C world, this year saw more brands experimenting with these channels and expanding their presence.
As consumers look for a greater authenticity and transparency from brands, livestreaming offers an opportunity for marketers to show a “human face” or a behind-the-scenes look at their business, culture and people. For B2B marketers, livestreaming is a great way to share information, including product announcements, demos, how-tos, webinars and events. Interactivity comes into play when brands invite the audience to participate in real-time Q&As, but the videos can also be saved and repurposed for broader reach.
Interactive content, such as calculators, quizzes and interactive infographics, has a number of benefits. It grabs attention, boosts engagement and provides a personalized experience—and thanks to the interactive element, it can even gather consumer information and generate leads. B2B brands in industries from healthcare to mining are now getting on board and creating unique pieces of interactive content.
Data helps build relationships between consumers and brands
We’ve all heard about data and how it can help marketers to better target audiences, predict consumer behavior, assess performance and use marketing budgets more efficiently. But data has a unique role in allowing brands to build relationships with consumers, an impact that more marketers are noticing and utilizing to encourage even more data-sharing.
As brands use data to understand consumers’ preferences, needs and habits, they can then create value for those consumers, whether that’s in the form of personalized product recommendations, special incentives or a new service feature. The result? Happy customers who develop a deeper trust in that brand or business. Because marketers are providing value and building a relationship, consumers become more open to data-sharing. They see the value in it and have confidence that the brand will protect their information and use it in positive ways to benefit their consumer experience.
At a higher level, these three marketing themes — automation, interactivity and data — are not necessarily new, but the ways marketers are using them has changed and grown in 2016. And the three are closely tied as they each relate to real-time exchanges, information sharing and increased connectivity. As we move into 2017 and keep an eye on the growth of these trends, we’ll be better positioned to build relationships with key audiences and deliver the messaging, content and value they want.
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You’ve captured contact information from prospects. But how do you turn those contacts into qualified leads and ultimately customers?
A marketing nurture track will allow you to effectively manage and engage potential leads. It provides a series of automated email content that guides contacts through a set of logical steps to an ultimate goal.
Nurture tracks are a type of workflow that help identify top prospects, build relationships and convert leads by moving them through a journey toward a specific action. You can use workflows for different types of marketing, including content, email, social media, online PR and search. Today, we’re looking at how to create an effective email nurture track to share content and engage leads.
How to plan a nurture track to effectively nurture leads
Start with the end in mind. What action do you want your contacts to take once they’ve completed the nurture track? This goal should be concrete and measurable, and will likely be something like signing up for a program demo or requesting a sales call. It may also be focused on receiving a high enough engagement score based on your lead scoring framework to qualify for sales outreach.
Once you have set a goal, identify which contacts to add to the nurture track. You can segment your contacts based on the actions they’ve taken — for example, submitting a form, signing up for your newsletter or attending an event — or based on information they’ve shared, such as demographic details, company size and type, job title and other key attributes. Exclude contacts that are current customers, competitors or would find the action the nurture track will promote to be irrelevant.
Next, map out the steps in your nurture track. How will you guide these contacts toward completing the goal action? Outline each email you’ll send and the order in which contacts will receive them. This sequence shows how contacts will move through the nurture track, and what actions will trigger new emails to be sent.
The number of emails you send will depend on your contacts and your nurture track goal. How much time to build in between email messages should be based on the contacts’ email habits and any industry-specific standards.
The content within each email should be concise and relevant to the action the contact took immediately before. Educational content, such as useful tips, company news, your brand story or differentiating qualities will communicate value and build trust. When possible, personalize the content to the specific audience. Include links and calls-to-action, such as informative blog posts or your newsletter sign-up form, to engage contacts further.
Contacts can move through the nurture track differently based on whether they open an email, engage with the content or answer a call-to-action. Whether they do or do not take a defined action will determine the type of content and the specific message they will receive next.
At the completion of the nurture track, those contacts who completed the goal could move to a “welcome” campaign or another nurture track. Those who did not convert could be enrolled into a new nurture track that aims to re-engage them. Because nurture tracks segment your audience and deliver targeted, timely messages, a successful one will make your marketing communications more efficient and effective.
Marketing nurture tracks work best when they are a part of a broader marketing and communications plan, and we believe all organizations can benefit from an outside integrated communications partner. Read our newest white paper to learn why: Don’t try this alone — why integrated communications planning deserves an outside perspective.
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Defining a clear target market is key to developing any successful marketing campaign — but it’s not always so simple to nail down your ideal customer. The good news is that recent advances in data collection and segmentation have made it much simpler to create robust buyer personas that will help you better understand your audience.
Let’s take a closer look at how your organization can use buyer personas to ensure your marketing efforts resonate with your customers’ needs.
Introduction to Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are defined as “semi-fictional representation[s] of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” When your team creates these representations, the end result will be about 3 to 5 buyer personas that will translate to the target market segments that make up about 90 percent of your overall sales. Depending on your industry, this number could be even larger.
Assessing your current buyers will be step one when beginning to create your buyer personas. These are the people you can most easily gather qualitative research from, which 90 percent of top-performing companies use to better understand their existing customer database. A marketing partner can help you conduct this and broader market research to gather robust insights about your audience. Once you’ve gathered this information, it’s time to put it to use in your buyer personas.
Refine Your Message
Ask yourself, what common threads have you found in your research? Does it turn out that your customers and other members of your target market tend to get their information from the same trusted sources? Do they all tend to have similar budgets to spend on your services? How do these factors differ by job title or industry? All of these insights should contribute to your buyer personas, by determining the ways you can group your audience and the messaging that will resonate with each group. Ask yourself: should you create separate messages for each persona? Or will more than one persona respond well to the same message?
We’ve written before on the importance of A/B testing, which can also be used to help you make pointed choices on whether your buyer personas are likely to behave in similar ways. A/B testing messaging on your website will allow you to track the buyer’s journey in real time, which will give you quantitative data necessary to refine your message. In fact, mastery of just the online messaging different audience members are likely to respond to can result in a staggering 900 percent increase in visitors’ length of time on site — and this accounts for only a portion of buyer personas’ overall effectiveness.
With stats like these, it’s no coincidence that top companies are investing in the creation of detailed buyer personas. If you’re interested in learning more, contact us here.
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You know SEO is important. It helps your ideal audience find your website and connect with your content. But when there are so many factors that influence your site’s rankings, it’s tough to know which areas to focus on — and where you might be going wrong. Watch out for these three common mistakes that can lower your ranking in search results and hurt your site traffic.
Over-optimizing your site
In an effort to improve your site’s SEO, it’s possible to go overboard. Today’s search engines recognize keyword stuffing and link spamming. Whether it’s intentional or not, adding too many keywords or including irrelevant links can penalize your site ranking.
The key to avoiding over-optimization is to create content for humans — not algorithms. Make your site user-friendly and provide value to readers with clear, compelling content. While you should look to incorporate keywords in your website’s metadata and page copy, make sure you’re using those keywords with purpose.
Overlooking the importance of (legitimate) backlinks
Links from other sites drive traffic to your content and establish site authority, which in turn contributes to higher rankings. Backlinks — or incoming links to your site — are a top factor in Google search rankings. But they need to be relevant in order to help.
How do you earn quality links? The best way is to create content that is “linkable” or shareable. Build relationships in your industry or market, especially with other sites that your ideal audience may already be visiting. If you have great content, those sites will naturally want to link to it.
Not staying on top of technical details
With so much to monitor and adjust, it’s easy to let basic SEO maintenance fall by the wayside. But seemingly small issues can have a negative impact on your rankings. The biggest violators include duplicate content and meta descriptions, missing ALT tags on images and broken links. Slow site speed can also weaken your ranking.
Tap into site audit tools to help identify these problems, and then work to eliminate or correct them so your site performs at an optimal level. These updates not only improve rankings and traffic but also the user experience.
SEO is not something you can set and forget. Once you address these common missteps, you’ll have to continue to optimize your site and add rich content to simply maintain your ranking. Even with plenty of effort and attention, you may at some point stop seeing improvement — which is a great indication that it’s time to change up your SEO tactics. Expand your keywords, create a new type of content or target different audience segments. Through it all, think about how to keep your site fresh and functional.
Looking for more advice on how to improve your marketing? Visit our white paper library.
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By now, you are likely aware of various ways that search engine optimization can improve your online presence. What you may not know is how to improve your existing SEO efforts if you’re not seeing the results you want.
The benefits of a strong SEO campaign are difficult to discount, with leads from SEO obtaining a 14.6 percent close rate, while outbound leads trail behind at 1.7 percent closed sales. Today, we’ll be walking through the ways that you can start improving your SEO efforts and ultimately improve your lead generation.
Keyword research
Identifying strong keywords is the first step in improving your SEO efforts. One of the biggest mistakes marketers make when selecting keywords is failing to take the time to study their competitors. Seventy-five percent of users never move past the first page of search results. That means if you don’t choose a keyword that has a chance of ranking on the first page, most of your audience won’t ever find your site through organic search. Instead, run some internal tests on search terms that relate to your product and see how your competitors are ranking. Owning similar terms will help you carve a niche in your industry and work to improve leads generated.
Development of content strategy
After the keyword research phase, it’s important to ensure that these terms are worked into the copy throughout your website, as well as integrating linked keywords throughout your website. Depending on the complexity of your website, this will likely be the most time consuming portion of solidifying your strategy. This is something that can either be done in-house or outsourced to a marketing partner like Movéo.
One tip to maximize your efforts is to update your keywords retroactively, throughout content pieces, past blogs and meta text. B2B companies that blog as part of their content strategy report 67 percent more leads per month than those who go without, which is something to keep in mind when building your content strategy.
Pay-per-click
Have you ever heard the phrase, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”? This holds true in the early stages of your SEO efforts. Despite popular misconception, SEO is not a quick fix and you shouldn’t expect to see immediate pay off unless you invest in a short-term paid strategy. PPC works to remedy this slow start, as utilizing these two strategies in tandem can result in a 25 percent increase in link clicks. The good news is that even small amounts of money in the first few months can help your site rise in search engine ranks and ultimately make your SEO campaign more effective.
Decide on a metric
This is the simplest step on this list, but can be tricky for organizations to determine before launching an SEO campaign. Before your campaign gets up and running, it’s important to define what success means to your organization and set an expectation for monthly site traffic volume. While a company that sells a premium product, like radiology equipment, may see less site traffic than a company that sells office supplies, this doesn’t mean that the radiology company is worse off if they can turn over more high-value sales. Deciding on a metric beforehand will allow a company to realistically obtain their goals and compare results month-to-month.
Remember, the most successful SEO campaigns never truly end and will need to be kept up in order to maximize results. For more information on optimizing your SEO strategy, contact us.
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If you’re in search of a B2B marketing partner for 2017, you’ve probably come across the term “account-based marketing” (ABM). Account-based marketing is an integrated approach grounded in the efficiency of targeting specific organizations.
This strategy has received a lot of praise in the past year, with 92 percent of business-to-business companies recognizing value in ABM for the upcoming year. However, 47 percent of these same companies have cited inability to execute ABM in-house as a top reason for the lack of implementation, leaving many to forgo it entirely. Today, we’ll walk through the benefits of outsourcing ABM and what you should look for when selecting an account-based marketing partner.
What is account-based marketing?
As we noted in our blog post on consumer psychology, ABM is a strategic approach that involves your marketing partner making the deliberate decision to pursue accounts that fall in line with their existing customer base. These will be high-value accounts that align with existing customers in terms of size, industry and geographical characteristics. ABM can also involve pursuing deeper engagements with existing customers. ABM is heavily integrated with the sales process, resulting in an extremely targeted approach that has one of the highest ROIs of any B2B strategy.
In ABM, marketers and salespeople begin by working together to identify accounts to focus on. This is a prerequisite for the personalized marketing that makes ABM work. In order to drive higher-value leads, you need to gain a better understanding of the decision-making process at your target organizations, and you need the marketing-sales alignment to give your sales team the insights they need.
Hiring an ABM partner
When selecting a marketing partner for ABM, you must choose an organization who understands your target market and the tactics that will most resonate. Then, define a clear communication strategy prior to hiring the marketing partner. Your sales team will be integral to your ABM strategy’s success, and they’ll need actionable insights from your marketing partner. You should be able to get a sense of whether an organization will provide clear and regular updates before you hire them. When considering an agency to be your ABM partner, ask questions about how they will communicate with your team throughout the process.
Another trait to look for is whether or not your new marketing partner will have access to tools that will give you insight into prospective buyers, as well as help nurture prospective client relationships. According to CIO, much of ABM’s success is found in informed marketing automation campaigns and the ability to “get in front of the decision makers proactively.” If your marketing partner is unclear on the methodology behind digital campaigns and sales’ role in the process, this may be an indicator they are not the best fit.
We recommend making a shortlist of two to three potential marketing partners and reaching out to all of them for insights into their marketing/sales process. Keep in mind that your sales team will be working closely with whichever marketing partner you choose. If their processes don’t align, it will be next to impossible to achieve success.
If you’re interested in learning more, or working with Movéo, contact us here.
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At this point, we all know that display advertisements are a key feature of digital marketing. But you’ve probably also heard that display ads have limited worth. Maybe you’ve read that people don’t trust display ads, or that half their clicks on mobile are accidental. But while it’s clear that these issues are obstacles for marketers to overcome, the value of display ads remains clear: they are a necessary component of getting your message out in a world where people increasingly get all of their information online.
Fear not, there are ways for B2B and healthcare marketers to optimize display ad strategy and make this tactic a meaningful part of your quest for new and return customers. Let’s take a look at a few key elements:
What do people see in your display ads?
When you’re designing banner ads or the tall ads that run alongside content on news sites, you need to make a strong first impression on your viewers. A polished, professional look is a must, or you risk your message being lumped in with the spammy ads promising “one quick trick” for weight loss or financial gain.
Make sure all ads align with your brand standards and create a consistent brand look. Be thoughtful about the combination of text and images and avoid overstuffing an ad with small print or making it visually confusing. Remember, as with a billboard, these ads are meant to catch your viewers’ attention and draw them in. They don’t need to represent every aspect of your offerings.
Remember, brand recognition can be as important as clicks
Display ads have sometimes gotten a bad reputation for their low click-through rates, which are well under 1 percent. Sure, you should do everything possible to raise those numbers for your own advertising, but it’s important to remember that the CTR on your ads isn’t a full measure of their impact.
People don’t “click” on print or television ads either, but those ads are known to improve brand awareness and recognition, and that’s why they have a long history as an integral part of marketing. The views of your ads — if they are targeted to your audience, and retargeted to those who have already interacted with your content — are also a meaningful measure of your reach, and can help you engage prospects later on.
Use programmatic tools to increase your ROI
Programmatic ad buying streamlines the process of purchasing display ads across a range of sites. It also tends to lower prices for ad buyers and to centralize data collection. All in all, programmatic can increase your display ad ROI by helping you better reach and impact your target market. As this is a relatively new and fast-changing technology, we recommend working with a media buying partner that can advise and direct your programmatic work.
Great display ads are just one way to strengthen your brand. For more about the attributes strong brands share, read our white paper, 10 simple truths about strong brands. Contact us here to learn more.
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Understanding customer motivations and behaviors is key to building a lasting connection with your target market. While this process might start out with general campaigns on a broad scale, the most successful strategies are decidedly narrow and work to get inside an organization’s psyche.
Consumer psychology is the study of the motivations and decision strategies of individuals and organizations. What needs must they satisfy, and how do they go about fulfilling these needs? Today, we will walk through the ways consumer psychology can catapult your B2B efforts to success through custom campaigns.
Breaking down consumer psychology
The first step in breaking down the consumer narrative is understanding the unconscious desire a consumer has to interact with your product or service. In a study by Carnegie Mellon University, marketers found that even minute differences in a marketing campaign can drastically alter results. For example, in a simple A/B test adding a $5 dollar fee on top of a free trial, the psychology behind the message made all the difference. While one test offered the trial for a $5 fee, the other test offered it for a small $5 fee. Those who received the small messaging were 20% more likely to convert into sales due to how much value its target market placed on finding a good deal.
To apply similar principles to your organization, think about the buying cycle your target market is likely to go through before becoming a customer. While many assume B2B behavior is largely logical, this isn’t strictly the case. Emotion plays a large role in B2B buying, and getting at how the leaders of an organization think and respond to your messages could provide a large ROI.
Account-based marketing
The term consumer psychology can be misleading in terms of B2B because it implies catering to a specific individual. To apply this psychology to your B2B initiatives, it’s important to understand it in terms of account-based marketing (ABM), and take into account all individuals at an organization, rather than one consumer.
ABM is a strategy that involves both engaging existing customers on a deeper level, and pursuing new accounts that fall in line with the behaviors of your existing customer base. Since you likely know what types of businesses you are eager to reach, it’s important to select tactics that will most likely resonate with your audience to get qualified users to interact with your content.
Do you want to better integrate consumer psychology into your marketing strategy? Contact us today to find out how.
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Pay-per-click (PPC) is one tactic that many marketers adopt to get in front of their target market, surpass their competitors and, of course, secure that top spot in search.
While that sounds great in theory, PPC is often executed incorrectly and has the potential to cost marketers with little return when there’s no strategy in place. Today, we’re giving you a rundown of three common mistakes marketers make with PPC ads, and how you can prevent them. Have you ever made these mistakes in your own marketing?
Misunderstanding ad groups
Running a successful PPC campaign depends on creating effective ad groups. Ad groups place your ads into designated sets so you can bid on keywords for them together. However, many marketers fail to differentiate between groups, costing them a lot more than simple organization in the long run.
Let’s say you have one campaign running where you need to reach doctors, and another where you need to reach patients. These ads need to be tied to different keywords, and lead to different landing pages. The copywriters on your team need to be able to clearly align the messaging on each landing page with the ad group it corresponds to. Your targeting for these ad sets should also be different. Mixing and matching ads that ought to be directed to different audiences will weaken your campaign and give you a lower ROI.
Failing to utilize keyword match type
When you put your PPC campaign into place, you will need to identify the appropriate keyword match types. With few very different options to choose from, many marketers fail to select the options most appropriate to their campaigns, costing them valuable dollars.
There are four match types: broad match, modified broad match, phrase match and exact match. These account for how your ads show up to the public. While Google’s default match type is broad (which shows your ad to users who might search for any word in your phrase), this isn’t always the best option. For instance, if your keyword is “smart grid technology” and you use a broad match type, anyone who searched “smart watch” would be eligible to see your ad. If you use an exact match keyword type instead, your ad will only be shown to people who search the exact phrase “smart grid technology.” To guarantee you make it in front of the correct audience, try experimenting with various match types and tracking your progress.
Not optimizing existing campaigns
Some campaigns find early success and then come to a significant drop off. Others seem to be based on solid data but show trouble early on. While it’s true many campaigns run out of steam eventually, you can take action to better your campaigns. It’s critical to optimize your campaigns regularly in order to garner top results.
A best practice to ensure your campaigns are running efficiently is to check in daily and reallocate ad spend based on performance. Sometimes, ads simply don’t resonate with your audience, or they target such a specific audience that they begin to get lower responses over time. Unusual circumstances — like a keyword developing another meaning you had not planned on — can also skew results, preventing your ads from reaching the audience you want. For these reasons, regularly checking in on your campaigns is essential to guarantee your PPC campaign’s success.
Are you looking to develop a strong PPC campaign, but don’t know where to start? We can help. Contact us today.
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