Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last 10 years, there is no way that you’ve missed on one of the many articles that have been written on content marketing.
But in case you did, here’s what we can teach you on the matter: content marketing is a process according to which you are to nourish your leads with useful, up-to-date and practical info about your core business, without actually trying to sell them anything. It may seem quite easy, but talking about your field of expertise to your clients and prospects without actually trying to push along your product is actually quite tricky!
And it’s no easy task either: everybody can write of course, but trying to produce frequent, updated, useful content to your target audience requires some resources, whether human or financial, and some ground research.
However, I’m gonna show you today why you should definitely give content marketing a go!
1. It will help you generate more leads
Rather than reading some boring report about your industry’s facts and figures, readers will prefer genuine writing and read about your personal professional experience! It will also bring you more legitimacy, because when you write about something, people tend to think you know about your stuff!
2. It can increase your traffic up to 5 times
In this current era where SEO is the king and a small company will have to display treasures of imagination just to stay on the front page of any Google search, you surely cannot afford to have a low traffic! Just producing regular content will give your website more chances to get on top of browser searches, and hence will make it easier for your leads to find you! Investing as little as 6h per week in content marketing can increase your web traffic drastrically!
3. It definitely turns into some cash
For every dollar spent on email marketing, $38 will show up right at your door (it’s a fact).
4.It’s not just about marketing
Not all companies have professional responsible for its creation. Small companies might not even have a proper sales and marketing budget, let alone a full-time employee working on it, despite of its many beneficial aspects! However, it is important to understand that good content can be written by virtually anyone willing to write in your company. Of course it will take some time and effort (regularity is the key!), but even one article a month can be a good start for you!
5.It will improve your brand image
68% of consumers have a more positive view of a brand after reading, watching or hearing its content. A proper content marketing strategy will improve your legitimacy, making your target audience feel that you “know about your stuff”.
Data is the key to a marketer’s heart
Data is the key to a marketer’s heart
After the 60’s mailing and phoning mass-targeting era, 80’s computer processing to target specific segments of population, and the ever-increasing consumer dependance on their cellphones, marketing has become a subtle mix of influence, brand awareness, content and most of all, data management!
Only by knowing your target’s user behavior, goals, challenges and specific requirements will you be able to efficiently cater to their needs, and one can simply now afford to go without conducting a proper “background check” on your constumers and analysing their individual responses and interactions with your brand.
On paper, almost every organization claims to be data-driven. In real life, it’s a complete different story! In order to help you with data management and utilization, we’ve established a list of whtat you should be implementing in your company in order to improve the results of your marketing campaigns:
- Personalize your campaigns: your customers need to feel that they have been adressed personally, instead of being targeted by a yet again mass-marketing campaign. In other words, you need to know at the very least their name, surname, title, and if relevant (especially in a B-to-B model), job title, company name, post code, and such.
- Find out more about your customers’ interests, and only adress them with relevant information, matching their personal needs.
- Multiply marketing channels: in this day and age, consumers need to be contacted by the same brand on multiple occasions and via multiple media before actually taking a purchasing decision: make sure to use various ways to communicate with your target audience (email, mailing, texts, ads, phone calls), and do not put all your eggs in the same basket
- Take care and nurture your loyal customers: any business needs to find new customers in order to grow, but it doesn’t mean that you should forget about your loyal customers. Research has found that it is up to 5 times more expensive to actually attract new customers as it is to keep existing ones! And loyal customers should be treated as such: special offers, dedicated senior advisor, personalized coaching: you name it!
- Make the most of customers’ feedback: especially when you are trying to penetrate a new market or launch a new product, you should be particularly attentive to what your new customers have to say on the matter, as they might be the voice of a much larger audience, and make the appropriate changes accordingly.
- Collect data wisely and use it well: while it’s imperative for your business to rely on a data that is a complete and updated as possible, do not collect unecessary data about your customers and only focus on what’s useful for your business: customers need to know how their personal information is going to be used, and why
- Do not purchase data unless it’s from an extremely reliable source: upon the arrival of GDPR, it has become increasingly hard to purchase data from external suppliers, which may be for the best! Many marketers who have recently made an attempt to data acquisition came to realize that the contact lists they would be provided with were irrelevant, outdated, or simply wrong! So instead on relying on “wild” lead acquisition, opt for “softer” lead generation methods: do not push your offer to customers, let them come to you instead!
We hope you’ve appreciated our advice, and if you need some help with setting up your data strategy straight, our team would be more than happy to help you!
The 4 commandements of event management
“The face to face interactions that take place at events are incredibly powerful”*
This quote might appear surprisingly, especially coming from Julie Hogan, Global Face-to Face Marketing Director of Facebook | Instagram. However, in a post-digital world, relying on online marketing channels is simply not sufficient to establish lasting relationships with your target audience. So if you’ve ever considered using events as your next move in order to conquer new leads, you’re definitely on the right track.
Consumers have grown tired of receiving endless emails day after day, digital ads have become white noise, cold calling has become way too time and energy-consuming to show any kind of impact. On the other hand, consumers’ increased appetite for human, in-person experiences has given a brand-new impulse for event management.
Seminars, product training, thought-leadership workshops, influencers events, meet-ups, trade-shows, executive retreats or mere cocktail parties: marketers are now able to chose from a very wide array of formats to gather and engage customers, a widely appreciated tool to say the least!
- 52% of survey respondents say event maketing drives more business value than other marketing channels, while only 8% say it drives less
- 23% of survey responsent say they can calculate a proper ROI for their events
- fastest-growing companies (30%+ revenue over the past 2 years) are investing the most in event management*
How about you? Is that something that you’ve been considering implementing in your company?
If so, here are a few things you should know before getting started:
- Know your target audience. It may seem basic, but only by knowing who to target will you (or your event supplier) be able to select the most appropriate format to appeal and get in touch with your target
- Set up realistic goals: event management is an excellent way to generate leads, not a magical one. It will quite likely help you shorten your lead acquisition cycle, but without a proper follow-up strategy, your fancy gathering will be of no use
- Get your KPIs straight: if you want to measure an event return on investment, the very least you have to do is know which KPIs to use! Among the most used KPIs, number of attendees, number of qualified sales leads, brand awareness, social press mentions and amount of sales pipeline generated are among the most common. There again: not all of them are adequate for every business, and only you can know which one to use
- Track ROI: any marketing campaign would be useless if you didn’t measure its reach, and like any other campaign, an event ROI should be carefully tracked, analysed, compared with other media, improved and replicated or cancelled according to its efficacy.
Now that you know a bit more about event management, let us know if you need any kind of additional info or share your insights below!
*Source: HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW ANALYTIC SERVICES SURVEY, MARCH 2018 | Download the whole report here