Archives for April 2022

Marketing planning seems complicated and abstract, but it’s actually deceptively simple. Follow these 4 steps to make it easy!

1. Start by identifying your target market: Who is your ideal customer? What kind of person do they tend to be? What are their needs and desires – both in general and as they relate to the product or service that you offer?

2. Next, create a list of the different ways that you can reach your target market – where do they spend most of their time online and offline? What channels are they likely to respond best to? This might include ads on Facebook or Google, PR outreach to industry publications, and email marketing campaigns.

3. Once you’ve identified your target market and the channels you’ll use to reach them, it’s time to start thinking about your message. What are the key points that you want to communicate? How can you make sure that your message is relevant and engaging for your target audience?

4. Finally, put together a plan for how you’ll execute your marketing campaign. When will you launch each element of your campaign? How will you measure its success?

By following these steps, you can create a marketing plan that is both effective and easy to execute. So what are you waiting for? Get started today! And to give you a great start – check out the Smart Marketing Planner

Long gone are the days of websites being simply a digital brochure. Websites are now the hub of all things digital business. They integrate with the apps that you use, manage e-commerce, account data and for B2B company’s the most important thing a website will do is produce quality leads.

You can’t accomplish this without FIRST, creating a lead strategy and integrating the proper marketing technology behind it.

Creating an Effective Lead Strategy

First you need to ask yourself… where to my best leads come from? If you don’t know this answer off-hand, you may need to learn this through some market testing trial and error. Don’t invest your entire budget into testing right off the bat. Often you can even go back in sales records to identify you key zip codes/cities/demographic/etc that make of 80% of your yearly sales.

Next, it’s time to better understand those customers, by creating a lead persona profile for each general customer segment. Hubspot created a great worksheet on this that I reccomend. Once we have our customer personas created its time to think about content.

Content is King

You may have heard this over and over or never at all.. but it’s worth repeating… Content is King. Why? Because it’s (part of) what helps bring you into the search results, engages your propects and can help turn those website browser into real leads.

One you have your Customer Personas created its time to think about what content will get them excited and taking action.

Good Content is NOT Selling

Good content informs, entertains and downright delights your target audience. Good Content is NOT Selling. So if you aren’t telling them about your products and services what could you POSSIBLY have to talk about?

Reverse Engineer Your Content

Make a list of every question you can ever remember a client asking. Likely, new customers may ask those same questions. Prioritize this list from most commonly asked question to least and that is your new list for content development.

Become Your Customers Best Ally.

Starting with the most frequently asked questions, begin to write content that will help provide potential customers with the info they need to help them make purchase decisions/ plan/ use your product or service. It is so important that in the process of doing so you aren’t blatently trying to sell them. They will see right through it and move along to the next product/firm.

Go Beyond Just Answers

The amount of resources you can create in any niche is almost never ending. From each of those questions on your list you can not only create blog post to provide information, but you can create checklists, how-to guides and so much more.

Pairing Words with Video

While written content is crucial for SEO and for an audience that may not be as in tune with video platforms, don’t ignored the video format to help share information. Even a few helpful videos are way more helpful than nothing or tons of videos that do not directly help your target customers with your specific area of expertise.

But What About the Leads?

Okay, we did mention something at the beginning of this article about leads, didn’t we? Once you have created a few crucial pieces of content for your most popular questions, then it’s time to add some marketing technology magic to generate leads.

Give your Website some Swagger

Content is king, but it’s only half the story. Your website needs to have the right user interface to help guide yur customers to the places they can find their answers and also take the actions you want them to take. In most instances that means filling out a form or calling you.

Forms are your Friend

Forms on websites are used for a variety of reasons, but reason #1 is that they can grow your potential customer database. Effective forms are easy to fill out, don’t overwhelm your customer and give you the info you need to effectively market to them. Not every customer wants to be contacted right off the bat or will be ready to buy, so while a Contact Us form is a must have, it should not be your only form. You will also want to have forms for gated content, such as your checklists and other free resources. You may even want to have a short form for name and email just to get them added to your email marketing lists.

But Where Do These “Magic Forms” Go?

Ideally you would have a Customer Relationship Database (i.e. Salesforce) but if you are just starting out an excell spreadsheet maintained with a good sales/marketing strategy will do just as well until you grow large enough to have a sales team and in which case a CRM is highly advised.

Spreadsheet Magic

If you are using a spreadsheet, the form data should go to a point person who will then import that data into the spreadsheet. We advise asking for name/address/city/state/zip/email and any business areas of interest you might want them to select.

Email Sign-ups

To save the hassle of manually adding sign-ups to your email list, companies like Constant Contact have plug-in form that you can create within your CC account and them add them to website for any email only form this is a great way to go.

More with CRM

Using a CRM like Salesforce can give you the capabilities to create forms and manage all the data that comes in without major manually imports. HubSpot also offers a great solution for gated content/forms and customer data management and sales follow-up.

Hiring Help

While creating content may be an easy part of this process, for most business owners, who have many hats to wear, creating and maintaining a website lead platform can be overwhelming. At minimum you may want to see help to initially get you going and then maintaining lead data, reaching out to have them connect web pages and forms to your CRM as you develop fresh content. Essentially this process can be as simple or complex as you want to make it, but most importantly it should work to scale with the sales goals you are trying to achieve.

Never Stop Creating

Eventually leads start coming in and you might be tempted to pat yourself on the back and say “Job well done!,” but never ever stop creating content. There will also be more questions to answer and stories to tell (And Leads!). As your business grows and serves new areas you will need to create content for that as well.

But. What. About. Google?

Think about your lead pipeline as your company’s personal reach, but if you really want to expand the bandwidth of that pipeline… you need Google. The first step to getting ranked in search results is to create great content which you will do by creating answers and resources for your prospective clients. The second part is a bit more technical and it helps if you have a web company or consultant that can help make sure Google’s bots find the things they are looking for when it scans your site. There are no written rules (ironically you can Google SEO all you want but Google will not give out their written rules on this called algorithims, which is what Google uses to rank websites). But if you create great content for your human audience and have a well developed backend structure for the bots, you have the best chances to make Google happy. There’s ALOT more then this summary and for more on SEO you can check out this article.