12 Essential Small Business Marketing Strategies Posted on August 4, 2022July 26, 2023 by Jonathan Herrick Let’s face it: there are a million and one small business marketing strategies out there, but if you’re like most business owners, you don’t have the endless budget and time to find the hidden treasures that lead to results. Also, determining which marketing strategy is most effective can take months of testing and evaluation. After growing businesses, testing plenty of marketing campaigns, and helping our small business customers grow, I have come up with the 12 marketing techniques for small businesses that you can use to help your small business flourish. 1. Audience Research Marketing is about sending a relevant message to your target audience to persuade them to buy your product or service. If you don’t know your target audience, you risk focusing your attention too broadly or on the wrong people, which is a catastrophic error in the age of personalization. Successful marketing begins with target audience research — a data-backed process that culminates into elaborate audience persona(s). An audience persona is a profile or visualization of the person you’re trying to reach. It outlines traits such as geographical location, career, gender, motivation, pain points, budget, and more. Audience persona is your “north star” for creating and launching successful marketing strategies, from content marketing to word-of-mouth. It lays the foundation of your marketing strategy and informs the best channels to use for effective marketing. 2. Word of Mouth Advertising Once you’ve laid the foundation, you can get your marketing strategies rolling. One of the most cost-effective small business marketing strategies is to tap into the voice of your customer by getting them to talk about their experience with your business. That means building a great product or service first and then delivering it in an amazing manner to your customers. Encourage customers to talk about your small business on social and professional networks and to share their opinions. This will boost your chances of getting new customers in the door. Typically, people trust their friends and value their opinions. That is why it’s critical to tap into your customers who are willing and able to share your excellent products/services with their tribes. 3. Content Marketing If marketing is the engine that propels your business, content marketing is the gas in the tank. It’s a fantastic way to bring you leads through search engines, but it also works well to educate your customers on best practices. Content marketing is about creating interesting material that your audience is likely to engage with, be it text, video, or audio. It entails the creation of content for publishing on your homepage, blogs, product pages, landing pages, advertising channels, and social media. Content marketing allows you to show that you’re a top expert in your field. This means creating fresh content based on your audience’s biggest challenges and curating content that is relevant to your visitors/readers. Once you have created highly-relevant content, push it out where your audience is engaging, such as Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Your content distribution methods are the only way to harness the full potential of your content marketing strategy. 4. Search Engine Optimization Great content without search engine optimization (SEO) has a low chance of ranking on top of search engine results pages (SERPs). When you create highly-relevant content, you have to optimize it for search engines to increase its visibility when people search for keywords and terms relevant to your products or services. As a small business, it’s tough to compete with the rankings of larger companies when it comes to highly competitive keywords. Start by focusing on keywords with low competition but high commercial intent and search volume. . Once your blog or brand builds authority, throw your hat in the ring for the high-competition keywords. That said, SEO is a multidisciplinary strategy that transcends keyword targeting. Other important SEO aspects you should prioritize include: on-page SEO, local SEO, and site speed optimization. 5. Company Website Every component of your marketing plan is going to come back to your website. Don’t cut corners. It’s where your visitors find out who you are, what you believe in, and what makes you unique. Ultimately, your website exists to convert visitors into leads, and the quality of your leads will improve if you have a great website that attracts the most relevant buyers. Once you get visitors to your website, you’ve got to build a conversion strategy. You’ll want to make sure that your company website has plenty of opportunities for site visitors to provide you with their information. Add sign-up forms to high-traffic pages and landing pages to direct traffic. These pieces will enable you to collect site visitors’ email addresses and add them to your lead nurture campaigns. 6. Blogging Just as your website is the guiding light for lead gen for your small business, the same holds true with your blog. And if you’re not already blogging, you should be. Why? Brands with an active blog generate 67% more leads than those without one. To generate leads, add a call-to-action on each of your blog posts asking readers to take a desired action, be it buying a product, subscribing to your newsletter, signing up for an upcoming webinar, or downloading a whitepaper. But your blog is more than just a lead gen tool. It’s a canvas to share your thoughts and perspectives, to truly position yourself as a thought leader while connecting you to your audience. It’s also part of your SEO strategy. Create pillar posts on your blog and set up an internal linking strategy so your readers can easily find and engage with similar content. 7. Email Marketing Email has come from a basic communication channel to a powerful platform to achieve your marketing goals. Its power is undeniable – for every dollar you invest in email marketing, you see an impressive $36 return on investment. Email is also a great way to build your contact list for your small business. A good strategy to build your list is to simply create valuable and relevant content. Offer that content to site visitors in exchange for their contact information. As long as you promise to share high-quality, valuable insights, your site visitors will think the exchange is worthwhile. As a small business owner, you probably wear many hats and have to juggle multiple tasks to keep the business moving smoothly. A marketing automation tool will help you facilitate effective email nurture so you can do more in less time, saving you hours that you can devote to other important tasks. An easy-to-use tool, like BenchmarkONE, lets you automatically capture visitors from your website and send the right message to them at just the right time. Doing so improves the effectiveness of your marketing strategy while helping you make the most of your marketing budget. 8. Social Media If your small business doesn’t have profiles on top social media sites, build them today. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Each one offers a different format, but all allow you to connect and talk to your customers and would-be clients on a channel that they’re already engaged on. Using social media marketing is a must to ensure that your brand and your customer base grow. Most importantly, keep your fingers on the pulse of the tilting social media landscape, which includes joining new platforms. If your brand is yet to lay a mark on TikTok, you need to move swiftly to ride the wave of the highly-creative and playful channel. With over one billion monthly active users globally, TikTok presents an opportunity to build brand awareness, promote your products, and engage potential customers, particularly the younger generation. 9. Event or Trade Shows Trade shows and special promotional events are fantastic strategies for launching a new product or service, driving brand awareness, and getting in front of your target audience. If you are attending a trade show, swap out a sponsorship package for an opportunity to speak on a topic relevant to your audience. It will keep your cost down and elevate your status as a thought leader in your niche. Bonus tip: Don’t forget to capture the full ROI of your event! Be sure to connect with prospects on social media and capture email addresses so you can run pre, during, and post-show campaigns. 10. Online Advertising One of the fastest ways to get in front of potential buyers that are actively searching online is online advertising. With PPC advertising, such as Google Adwords and Bing, you can set your budget for the keywords that your audience is searching for and measure the cost per conversion. Remember to not just set it and forget it. For example, adding negative keywords will eliminate unwanted clicks, keeping your spending down. You should also test new keywords to ensure you are optimizing your spending wisely. Also, if you are looking to increase brand exposure, remarketing is a great way to do it. Remarketing allows you to hyper-target visitors that have been to your site that you would like to bring back, with the goal of converting into a customer or sign-up. 11. Free Promotional Tools Budget constraints could limit the options you can use as far as marketing goes. One way to cut overhead is to use free marketing and promotional tools. Evaluate your strategies and determine which activities require premium tools and which ones you could do with free software. For example, if you’re only just getting started with content marketing, you can use free keyword research tools to guide you through the initial phase. Once you scale and your strategy gather momentum, you can turn to paid keyword research and content optimization tools. Sign up for BenchmarkONE’s free plan today! 12. Networking and Partnership Building Finally, always work on networking to promote your business. This is perhaps one of the most valuable ways to grow your expertise and showcase your skills to would-be partners and customers. Networking is a cost-effective way to drive sales leads and opportunities for strategic partnerships. All of these approaches are effective but don’t forget that In the spirit of cutting overheads, it’s okay to only focus on strategies that you know will bring the best results. Start small with your strategies and experiment with different aspects to determine what works. Channel your resources, effort, and time toward sustainable methods of generating revenue. Good luck incorporating these 12 essential small business marketing strategies into the way you promote and operate your business. Doing so will help you spend less time looking for solutions, so you have more time to devote to what you do best.
3 Reasons to Update Email Marketing with Marketing Automation Posted on August 17, 2016March 6, 2020 by Jessica Lunk This blog post was updated on February 21, 2020. It seems like a new hot marketing tactic is popping up every day (do you need to be on Snapchat? Should you invest in video marketing?). So it’s easy to overlook email marketing – the old standby that businesses have used for decades to reach potential customers. However, email is still a very powerful and effective marketing tool for turning contacts into customers. In fact, according to McKinsey & Company, “E-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media—nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined.” So how do you harness the power of email? Email marketing software for small business has come a long way from the “batch & blast” email systems of the past. Today, email marketing software with integrated marketing automation technology helps small businesses to dynamically respond to the individual needs of their prospects and customers. Here are three reasons to embrace an all-in-one email marketing and marketing automation software as a critical component of your company’s toolbox: 1: Make the Most of Email Marketing Data Stand alone email marketing software tracks basic metrics like clicks and opens. While click-through and open rate indicate how effective your emails are, they don’t do much in the way of guiding your contacts to the next step in their customer journey. Marketing automation software is a tool that lets you do more with your email marketing data. Marketing automation tracks which email links your contacts click on, which pages they visit on your website, and even which forms they fill out. This data paints a picture of what your contacts are most interested in, allowing you to focus your marketing campaigns accordingly. 2: Provide Context to Each Email Send One of the reasons that many people overlook email sent from different businesses is that it feels generic. That is, the company is trying to cast such a wide net and reach as wide an audience as possible, but it leaves those who receive it feeling like the business sees them as anonymous walking wallets. However, email marketing software for small business allows you to add contextualization to every aspect of the email marketing experience. In a stand alone email marketing software, you might have lists like “Customers” and “Prospects” that you manually import from your email client, spreadsheet or database. When you use marketing automation, however, you can create dynamic lists. You can pull an up-to-date list based on your contacts’ interests, their demographics, or their contact status. By creating distinct groups of customers, you can send targeted emails to the groups likeliest to respond to these particular messages and offers. You can also set up triggered email that helps to follow up on earlier interest a customer may show. You can create entire nurturing email campaigns to organically move customers through the sales funnel while letting you monitor where they are at each step of the way. By sending relevant resources and solutions to those who need them, you show your contacts that you understand their needs, building trust – and eventually sales. 3: Take Advantage of Autoresponses and Transactional Emails When it comes to email marketing, naturally, the focus is building marketing emails and campaigns that drive conversions. However, transactional emails are opened far more than marketing emails. Think about it. When you send a marketing email, you’re pushing a message out to your audience – whether they’re ready for it or not. When it comes to transactional emails, however, you’re sending an email in response to an action from your contact (like paying for a service, or requesting more information from your website). Transactional emails therefore have higher engagement, giving them the potential to generate far greater revenue than marketing-focused emails. Transactional emails are the perfect opportunity to make a lasting impression on your prospects and customers. Personalize where it makes sense. Make sure they are in-line with current company branding. Opt for friendly language. Buffer, for example, does a great job of making a run-of-the-mill invoice into an opportunity to showcase their company culture: Not only is the Buffer email super personal, but the “P.S.” also provides a touch point with the customer – an opportunity to be heard. Marketing automation can help you offer a next step in your transactional emails to make prospects and customers feel more invested in your business so you can capture additional revenue. For instance, if a prospect fills out a form to receive an e-book from your website, send a thank you email with a link to the e-book they requested, but also take the opportunity to help them to learn more about your services. Ask them to check out a related video, for example, guiding them further down the path to conversion. Marketing automation software can monitor engagement with transactional emails. As with marketing emails, you have an opportunity to see what works and what does not and to make even this once-perfunctory part of your company communication more in line with customer expectations. Marketing automation is a powerful way to utilize email marketing to its fullest so you can squeeze every opportunity from your list of prospects and customers. With marketing automation, you send more personalized messages, building trust and nurturing relationships into more sales for your business.
How to Use Email to Leverage the Promise of Video Marketing Posted on May 2, 2016June 1, 2016 by Jessica Lunk If you aren’t already leveraging video marketing in your emails, you’re behind the marketing curve. In a 2013 ReelSEO study, 93 percent of respondents said they were incorporating video in their marketing campaigns — and 60 percent claimed to use videos specifically for email marketing. Since then, the prevalence — and sophistication — of these video marketing efforts has only increased. The reason for the rise in video marketing is simple: it’s effective and affordable. Research from Diode Digital indicates that video marketing is 600 percent more effective than print and direct mail efforts. However, the wrong strategy can compromise your entire marketing campaign. Harness the power of video and keep the following essentials in mind as you incorporate rich media into your marketing emails: Map out your strategy for using video in your emails. If you have a smartphone, you have the ability to create a marketing video for your business. However, there’s a lot more that goes into video marketing that capturing two minutes of footage. It takes time to script out your video, plan for your shoot and edit your video post-shoot. Then you have to figure out where to host your videos and create the emails that deliver video to your audience. Having a strategy in place before you start production will ensure that you get the most out of the time and resources you put into your videos. Here are some tips for mapping out your strategy early on: Define the goal of your email campaign Decide who your videos are for and the purpose they serve. Goals like: Engage top-of-the-funnel leads. The strategy may be to create a how-to video series or email course – check out our email course for inspiration. Create a sales tool. Your strategy might be to record a product demo or to produce an interview series with your key employees. Re-engage customers. A strategy may be to enhance your customer knowledge base with how-to product videos. Choose a video host Your overall strategy might influence how you decide to host your videos. For instance, YouTube is perfect if you want to reach a large audience and allow others to share and embed your videos. A host like Vimeo is ad-free and offers privacy settings – which may be ideal if your strategy is to create a new revenue stream by offering a video email course. Wistia video hosting tracts engagement stats and allows you to add a call-to-action link at the end of your videos – a great option if your strategy is to create a product video with a call to action at the end. Map out your campaign With your goal in mind, chart out your email strategy. Is it a simple drip campaign that visitors can sign-up for on your website? Or are you adding a video to an existing campaign to boost engagement? Mapping out the email strategy from the beginning can help clarify how to shape video content – which is super important, because you only have 10 seconds to capture your audience’s attention (according to Video Brewery). Keep short attention spans in mind. Email recipients must wade through dozens or even hundreds of messages. They have no time to spare for lengthy videos, but they will set aside a minute or two for a concise clip. The ideal email video is, at most, two minutes long. If you struggle to fit your entire message in just one short video, consider creating a series of videos, with each lasting between 30 and 45 seconds. These short videos can quickly hook email recipients and get them excited for what’s to come. Be sure to let viewers know that they should expect follow-up videos in the near future. Be authentic, but edit yourself. The quality over quantity cliché definitely applies to video-based email marketing. A short video will be completely ineffective if it includes blurry footage, shaky camera work, unnecessary noises coming from offset, or distractions in the camera background. Expensive recording equipment and a dedicated studio are not required, but good video and audio equipment can definitely make a difference. More important, however, is your message, so be sure to edit out any awkward moments. Stay true to your personal brand and your company brand by editing out things that distract from the purpose of your video and your overall message: Avoid unnecessary distractions – like a barking office pet or water-cooler discussion getting picked up in the background. Take note of your surroundings – if filming in your home office, for instance, get that laundry basket out of the shot. Deliver value – Know your message backward and forward and don’t dance around the point you want to make. If your video goes on too long without delivering value, viewers are going to tune out. Now that you have their attention, tell your audience what to do next. Merely linking to video in your emails is not good enough. Your should also feature a call to action, ideally within the actual video or, at minimum, in the email’s text. Video-based calls to action are especially effective, as they encourage viewers to check out other videos, thereby further exposing them to your brand. The easiest video-based calls to action are verbal, with the subject encouraging viewers to click provided links or view follow-up videos. However, brands with more developed YouTube channels can achieve greater response rates by editing in annotations. When clicked, these annotations lead viewers directly to the next video. Additionally, video-based calls to action can include links that encourage viewers to subscribe to your YouTube channel or check out your social media pages and official website. Create your email for the 99%. Now that your video is ready to go, it’s time to add it to your email. With the latest HTML 5 standards, you can technically embed a video in an email that will play right in the recipient’s inbox. And while that seems like a simple solution, keep in mind that email clients are a fickle bunch. What looks great in one email client may appear wonky in another. Email clients are notoriously hard to please, and getting your emails to render correctly across all of them is always a chore. In fact, email delivery service, SendGrid, advises to not embed video into emails. Video hosting service, Wistia, also has some solid arguments against embedding video into your email. Instead, SendGrid, Wistia and most others with authority on email and video recommend simply using a thumbnail or GIF link to your video. As a bonus, when you use a link to your video in your email, you can track who has clicked to watch your video. If your goal is to cultivate a dedicated following, using video in your email marketing strategy can transform any run-of-the-mill email into an effective tool for increasing customer engagement.
Plant Email Seeds This Spring For Customer Growth Posted on April 18, 2016May 27, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Email still rules when it comes to the most profitable marketing channels for small businesses. And no wonder. Next year it’s estimated the number of adult email users in the U.S. will exceed 203 million. That’s all the more reason to do some springtime seeding of your email list with the goals of harvesting new customers. The best way to grow a garden is to group the same types of fruits and vegetables together, so you can give each group what it needs to be successful, whether that’s more sun or more shade, special food, physical space, fertilizers. Similarly, segmenting your email list into groups allows you to give your leads what they need to turn into high-quality customers. Why segment? You can answer that question with a quick peek into your own email inbox. It’s crowded in there, and every one of those emails is vying for your attention. Segmenting your email list gives you a better shot at overcoming the fierce competition happening in your subscriber’s inbox. There’s also data. According to eMarketer 39% of marketers that practice list segmentation see better open rates and 28% see lower opt-out and unsubscribe rates. Nearly a quarter see better email deliverability, increased sales leads and higher revenue. When it comes to segmenting your email list, the criteria that can be used is seemingly endless—demographics, psychographics, behavior, preferences, and more. But no matter how you divide things up the goal, ultimately, is to make a better match between your email campaigns and your subscribers. Of course even if you have the most sophisticated segmentation, execution is just as critical; all that targeting won’t make a difference if the message isn’t right, so make sure the emails you send are both sharply written and fit the targeted group. One group might be at a certain place in your sales cycle and the right email can nudge them to make a purchase, but an email to a different segment might be nurturing, appealing to their future wants and needs. Keeping in mind that not every plant in your garden needs the same thing, here are some of the most useful segmentation categories: Demographics Whatever demographic information you can collect could serve as a segment, whether that’s gender, age, education level, income, marital status, occupation, religion and more. Any measurable characteristic of a population is a demographic and depending on your objective, using one or several together can be very effective. For instance, if you sell a product for families with young children, it may make sense to focus on the under-40 set, or the under-40 female set. On the other hand, with a different message you could focus on the over 65 set—grandparents wanting to buy something for their new grandchild. If you sell high-end accessories for sports cars, however, it probably makes sense to segment using several criteria, for example gender, income and age. Psychographics Here’s the part where you get inside your target customer’s head. Psychographics look at characteristics that are harder to measure, like lifestyle and personality, and includes a person’s attitudes, aspirations, interests and opinions. If demographics explain who your customers is, then psychographics explain why. This is helpful when targeting potential customers based on how they see themselves and how they want others to see them. If, for instance, you sell an all-natural, low-sugar granola and are targeting parents, you can parse those that shop at organic food stores or recently bought an electric car, as they likely see themselves as the kinds of parents that would feed their children all-natural, organic, low-sugar snacks like your granola. Geography This is important if you’re a brick-and-mortar business, because you don’t want to send in-store offers to those living outside the area. And if your business has several locations in different areas, segmenting by zip code ensures you’re not incentivizing customers to visit locations that are further from them, and that they are less likely to patronize. Job Title and Industry This is especially important if your sales are B2B. If your potential customer has a long sales cycle and a large, bureaucratic organization, you’ll need to target them differently than, say, a solopreneur who makes the purchasing decisions. Managers have very different perspectives than senior executives and each has their own concerns that need addressing. Segmenting by job title or function will help you gear emails to the right person at the right time in the sales process. Shopping Cart Abandoners Market research has shown that at least half of shopping carts are abandoned before a purchase is made. That means a potential buyer was very interested and then suddenly—not. You can target this group with incentives like discounts and special sales. Good Customers Customers that purchase regularly or refer others to your business should be nurtured and appreciated. They are your best brand advocates. Target them with referral discounts, exclusive offers, loyalty programs and make them part of a select group you tap into for opinions about new products or services you want to roll out. Spring is the perfect time to take a look at your email list and refresh its segmentation. Targeting that way is one of the most effective strategies for boosting the effectiveness of your email marketing. You’re planting and fertilizing email seeds that will grow into customers and keep your small business growing too.
9 Tips to Boost Email Conversion Rates Posted on March 15, 2016December 5, 2018 by Katie Culp Smartphones have invigorated email marketing as an important medium for Internet marketers. And just how big is mobile email use? Check out these statistics for 2015: 45% of email opens occurred on mobile, 36% on desktop and 19% in a webmail client. 67.2% of consumers use a smartphone to check their email 75% of Gmail users access their accounts on mobile devices. Gmail now has 900 million users. Mobile email click-throughs grew 22.8 percent on Black Friday, from 44.7 percent in 2014 to 54.9% in 2015. This increase is noteworthy because mobile opens were up only 2.7 percent, from 56.1% in 2014 to 57.6% in 2015. 68% of Gmail and Yahoo! users’ opens occur on a smartphone or tablet Email is used in a variety of ways and plays an integral part in any business’ model. An effective email marketing strategy keeps existing customers while expanding your prospects. So what do you do to improve your email conversion rates? The following tips will provide you with the ideas you need to make the most of this giant market: Optimize for mobile – With so many people accessing email on their device, it pays to make sure your emails look great on mobile. Use mobile-optimized email templates and test your emails using a service like Litmus to make sure everything looks good across the most popular mobile and desktop email clients. Offer an incentive – Offering coupons, discounts, contests, demos, and free downloads all serve as draws to acquire new conversions. Make sure you segregate them into a new email group once the desired action is completed. Don’t hide your subscribe buttons – Make your opt-in button large and colorful. Also, don’t hide your opt-out or unsubscribe button in your emails. Sure, it sucks when people unsubscribe, but think of it this way, you are getting closer to those who have an interest in your products or services so your open and click-through rates rise. Offer free educational content – Including lead magnets on your site offering content that is high quality, live webinars, and educational videos give you many opportunities for you to capture emails. Users feel they are getting something of value and are more prone to give back something in return. They also give you insight on what that contact is interested in. Be persistent – Many customers require multiple interactions with a business before they commit to purchasing. Develop email nurturing campaigns that links to 3 or 4 resources or blog posts that tell a story with each email round. End each campaign with a relevant call to action. Set these campaigns up in your marketing automation software to automatically move your leads through the sales funnel. @MikeKawula Tenacity, and more tenacity. And then keep trying. #BizapaloozaChat — Howard Yermish (@hyermish) March 10, 2016 Keep it simple – Easy to read, simple copy with one call to action stands out more to the reader than a wall of text and multiple links. Make it easy for your prospects to understand and follow through on what you ask them. Measure results – Email is a perfect way to figure out which of your pitches works best. Try split testing different subject lines, wording, images, videos, calls to action, etc. Having data to understand which works best for you and your audience helps you target, communicate, and convert your prospects better. Quick loading pages – With more people using smartphones to read emails, links to pages must load quickly. Be sure your site is mobile ready! Work with your site developers to test site loading speeds and make sure they are loading quick enough to keep your customers engaged. Personalize emails – Too many businesses have developed a philosophy of sending everything to everyone. This does nothing to help you create a trusting relationship with the people on your email lists or to boost email conversions. If you segment your lists, personalize email campaigns with a recipient’s first name in the subject line, and send them an offer that is relevant to their past experiences, you have the potential for a winning email marketing campaign. By employing these tips, you will boost your email conversion rates while also building up an engaged group of customers.
Save Time with Marketing Automation Posted on February 22, 2016September 16, 2020 by Jessica Lunk This blog post was updated on February 7, 2020. Modern marketing campaigns are fragmented with different channels and lots of moving parts. An interested buyer might see your ad in a trade magazine, see your AdWords ad in a Google search, like your social media page, and subscribe to your email newsletter all before deciding to buy from you. It can get a little complicated. It’s no surprise, then, that small business owners want the most help when it comes to creating a sales and marketing process. Segmenting contacts, sending catered messages, nurturing, tracking, and converting can take a lot of manual labor and time. That’s where marketing automation comes in. Marketing automation is key to saving you time while making sure that every contact is being nurtured for your best chance to turn them into a customer and a loyal fan of your business. Let’s take a deep dive into the various features and areas of marketing automation that save you a ton of time. Tasks Marketing Automation Takes Off Your Plate 1. Lead Nurturing Wish you could regularly communicate with leads so that they’d move closer to being sales-qualified leads? One effective marketing automation functionality is a drip-email campaign. Pre-written emails are sent out to specific individuals at the right time when they perform a specific action. Once you’ve written them, your marketing automation software handles the timing and sending, allowing you to nurture leads without spending your entire day sending emails. Each customer has a path to take before making the decision to buy – whether it’s investing in new technology, partnering with a business consultant, or choosing the right insurance. That path – the buyer’s journey – can include blog content, social media, digital ads, emails, and phone calls. You can’t control exactly where buyers go, but you can help guide them in the right direction, shortening their journey. Once you’ve been introduced to a new lead – maybe from a trade show list, lead magnet or networking event – a lead nurturing process can automate the flow of information to the buyer. For instance, say you’re a travel agent who specializes in corporate incentive trips. You meet several great contacts at a networking event, including the CEO of a midsize business. After such a short introduction, it’s not the right time to proceed with a sales pitch, but you want to stay on her radar. You put her information into the CRM of your sales and marketing software and start her on an introduction campaign. The campaign automatically sends her an introduction about your company, then proceeds to send a sequence of your best blog posts regarding employee incentive programs. As she clicks blog post links and goes back to your website, she downloads your Incentive Trip Planning Checklist. The intro campaign stops, and she’s started down a more sales-focused campaign, sending a case study of businesses that have improved sales performance through your employee incentive trips. The case study is followed by a call-to-action to reach out to you for a free incentive trip itinerary. She follows through, and you’re on your way to winning another customer who has been warmed up with relevant, helpful information through the lead nurturing process. 2. Email Marketing Email marketing campaigns, quarterly newsletters, end-of-the-month sales incentives – there are a lot of emails to create. In fact, most lead nurturing campaigns include multiple emails and some can be super short, but some can include 10 or more. Email has been around forever, but it’s still the most effective digital channel for converting contacts into customers. Email can pay off, but getting bogged down in design woes can hinder your performance. Instead of reformatting every email you send, marketing automation lets you build and track email templates. Benefits include: Maintaining a consistent look and feel for every email you send to prospects and customers, boosting recognition and recall of your brand. Using merge fields to include personalized text in your emails, such as contact name, contact company, the contact’s sales rep and more. Tracking email open and link click stats for each email template Testing one template against another to see which templates perform the best. Many marketing automation systems provide an email template library of predesigned templates so you can start out with a format that adheres to best practices, giving you an even greater chance of reaching prospects and customers in their inbox. 3. Lead Scoring and Segmenting Not every lead is ready to talk to a sales rep. The quickest way to annoy your sales team is to send them the contact information of people who aren’t ready to make a purchasing decision. With marketing automation software, you can assign scores to leads based on what kinds of activities they perform. So if someone just visited your site once, they probably aren’t very interested in buying your product or signing up for a subscription. But if they signed up for your newsletter, follow your social media, tune into your webinars, and downloaded your ebook, they are clearly an engaged lead who may respond to a sales call. If you pulled a list in a standalone CRM, or even pulled up your contacts in Outlook, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell which contacts where hot prospects, and which were cold leads. Lead scoring allows you to approach marketing more efficiently by spending your time on promising prospects. When you hook your CRM into marketing automation, however, you can track contacts’ activity and tally a score. With contact scores, you know who is ripe for reaching out to, and who could use a little more information about your business or their pain-point before starting a sales conversation. For instance, you might give every lead one point for clicking an email link, five points for filling out a form on your website, and -10 points for unsubscribing from your newsletter. Lead scoring your contacts with marketing automation gives you the information you need to determine what leads are most important to follow up on. You can intelligently prioritize people to contact so that no one will slip through the cracks. It also helps you understand what kind of activities you should perform (emails, calls, etc.) to move colder leads down the funnel. Marketing automation allows you to segment your leads into respective contact lists. For example, a common pain point or interest in services. With an automated process, these emails can be drip-fed to these designated contact lists. Again, relevant content at the right time! 4. Content Management Content is valuable, be it for your brand, your clients, or both. Prospects and customers want to be targeted specifically based on their interests, or they’ll pass you up for your competition. Marketing automation can help you manage that content efficiently and save your agency time by connecting the right content with the right leads. Below are several ways marketing automation software supports your agency’s content management: Dynamic Content Dynamic Content is “smart” content. It’s also your secret weapon. It adapts to the behaviors and interests of the lead, based on website data it gathers from your leads and customers. The content can be personalized based on the lead’s request or previous visits to your website. It also allows leads to submit information back to you, which will help you gain additional information on that lead’s behavior. And better yet, updating the materials is a lot simpler and less time consuming than doing it manually. Content Amplification Take that valuable, dynamic content, and break out of the traditional organic strategies. Integrate it with paid, earned and owned tactics across multiple channels, such as websites, social media, and advertising. 5. Troubleshooting With an automated process, it’s more apparent when you see a glitch or bottleneck in your system. You can identify these issues more quickly and find a solution in real-time, as opposed to waiting for next month’s report and seeing discrepancies that happen too late to make changes to. Not only does marketing automation take things off your plate, but it also has built-in features that streamline your efforts and make getting things done a breeze. Here are a few of those features and how they help you save time. Marketing Automation Features You Need 1. Tagging Few things stay static these days, and keeping tabs on your database of contacts can be a chore. Tags help you dynamically segment and filter your prospects and customers into lists you can easily target with hyper-relevant communication. For instance, with BenchmarkONE marketing automation, you can tell BenchmarkONE to add tags to your contacts based on the pages they visit on your website, or the links they click in your emails. So, if you’re a fitness center, you could tell BenchmarkONE to automatically add a “Yoga” tag to any contact that visits pages on your website that have information about yoga classes. With tag rules, you can then create a rule like “if the ‘Yoga’ tag is added to a contact, send them a yoga email.” As you learn more about your contacts’ preferences and activity, you can send them messages they can relate to and help them along the path to conversion in the most efficient way possible. 2. Tasks Attracting, converting, closing, and delighting (the stages of the inbound marketing methodology) take time. It’s a process, which means there are multiple steps. But, with hundreds or thousands of contacts to keep tabs on, it’s easy for processes to break – causing hot opportunities to slip through the cracks. Marketing automation helps keep processes and people on track with campaign workflows and tasks. So, if someone makes a purchase, downloads an ebook, or subscribes to your newsletter, your marketing automation software can automatically send the appropriate follow-up email, as well as create a task for a team member to follow-up. Then, your customer-facing team – whether it be a salesperson or account manager – can easily keep track of follow-up, like meetings and calls. 3. Tracking You can track engagement, lead source, contact status, sales rep and more, giving you precious insight into what’s working, and what’s eating up valuable resources in your sales and marketing process. Other items you can track: You can tell if one salesperson is particularly good at closing big deals. You can see what your top customer lead source is. You can tell which emails are getting the most click-throughs. With data at your fingertips, you can easily turn up the dial on your sales and marketing efforts. When the daily grunt-work of tracking, tallying and analyzing is all automated for you, your sales and marketing process actually gets less robotic and more personal. With marketing automation, you can free up time and resources to focus on growing key relationships for your business. Digital marketing can seem complex, but with marketing automation, you can standardize processes, deliver a consistent customer experience and save a ton of time. Rather than focusing on manual, administrative tasks, your team is freed up to create awesome marketing content, follow-up with hot leads, and build better relationships with customers.
Hysterical Ideas That Are Actually Marketing Techniques for Small Businesses Posted on January 21, 2016June 3, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Risk-taking is best embraced in the ever-changing digital marketing landscape. Daring marketing initiatives often pay off, as they capture the attention of otherwise uninterested individuals — and make them see small businesses in a new light. If your marketing strategy could use a boost, consider drawing inspiration from these small business marketing techniques that push the envelope: Made-Up Holidays Companies requiring an extra push during the slow season can benefit greatly from made-up holidays, which if given the appropriate hype, can greatly increase consumer interest. At Hatchbuck, we talked like a pirate for a day in September. Another excellent international example involves the made-up Japanese holiday of Kurisumasu ni wa Kentakkii, in which residents skip out on Christmas altogether and instead eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken. When this influential marketing effort first launched in 1974, it seemed crazy, but it was just out-there enough to attract attention — and now it’s one of Japan’s most notable holiday traditions. Cat Craze It’s no secret that the internet loves cats, but some clever businesses have harnessed this feline adoration and used it to drive up business. The best example of this is Uber, which celebrated National Cat Day 2013 by delivering kittens and cupcakes to people living in San Francisco, New York City, and Seattle. Although the recipients were only allowed to keep the cupcakes, they had the opportunity to spend 15 minutes cuddling with kittens. Cat delivery is not an option for most companies, but any marketing efforts involving cats can foster excitement among new and existing customers. A simple way for small businesses low on funding to accomplish this is to post a picture of a cat with a branded product on Instagram and ask followers for caption ideas. Flash Mobs Although no longer as big of a craze as they were in the early days of YouTube, flash mobs still attract attention while putting smiles on the faces of both participants and observers. Often organized for marriage proposals or just for fun, flash mobs can also be used to garner greater brand awareness. T-Mobile has certainly discovered this, as its flash mob “Life’s for Sharing” advertisement won Ad of the Year at the 2010 British Television Advertising Awards. Viral Marketing Pranks Consumers love being pranked, but only if pranks come across as fun, as opposed to malicious. Although there is a lot of gray area between acceptable and unacceptable marketing pranks, those done correctly can quickly go viral, thereby creating a new and exciting social media presence for previously unknown businesses. Marketing gurus proved the efficacy of pranks while drumming up excitement for the 2013 Carrie reboot. A group of unsuspecting coffee shop visitors were freaked out by remote-controlled tables and a stunt man seemingly thrown up against a wall by a young woman with telekinesis power gone wild. If your current marketing approach is beginning to grow stale, now is the time to mix it up with a little guerrilla marketing. Take inspiration from the aforementioned marketing efforts and don’t be afraid to get silly!
5 of the Best Practices for Email Marketing Subject Lines to Boost Response Posted on January 20, 2016May 27, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Whether its a white paper that helps your prospects solve a nagging problem, or a special email notification of a “secret” sale, when a customer sees something from your company in their inbox, there are two things that can happen. One, the customer will be attracted and enticed by what you have to say, or two, your email efforts will go on a one-way trip straight to the trash bin, or even worse, flagged as spam. So how do you keep your email reputation clean and effective? Believe it or not, there is one sneaky little trick that every successful business email creator knows: It is all about the marketing email subject line. This is the one-liner that shows up when a message arrives in an inbox and is potentially the only chance you have to make the best impression. There are five easy-peasy ways to make sure that the subject lines of your business emails are effective enough to encourage your customers to take that next step and click to open because they want to know what more you have to say. 1. Get Local, Vocal, and Personable If you really want to catch a reader’s attention, talk to them like you would a valued, well-known customer. Head the subject line with their first name or even mention their location. You want to exude a familiar tone that comes across as personable and personal. 2. Don’t Be Generic Don’t continually use the same subject line in your emails, no matter how tempting it may be or how logical it may seem to do so. Offer something more interesting by changing the email subject line to reflect what you are going to offer once the email is opened. 3. Straight to the Point Please Remember, you may have more than enough space to get into great detail in the subject line on your end, but when this mail hits a customer’s inbox, there is a pretty good chance that they will only see the first several words. So, keep your message short and sweet. 4. Don’t Serve Up Cold Spam Spam is no good and potential customers have no time for it. The average email inbox holder gets close to 150 emails a day, every day. They will delete almost half almost immediately. With this many emails coming in every day, the slightest hint of something spammy will land you in either the trash or flagged as spam and all future emails will be sent directly, without passing go, to the spam folder. There are some catchy little things you may be tempted to use in subject lines that must be avoided. They are: The word “free” Odd letter/number combos that look like gibberish Curse words (should be logical in business, but still worth mentioning) 5. Use Your Inbox Voice You probably know that there is a voice you should use indoors, but there is a voice that is reserved specifically for email subject lines that make you an effective communicator. This voice is low-key. This voice is not screaming in ALL CAPS and does not come off sounding like you are an over-excited car salesman who is desperate to make a sale. You should be leaning more toward the same voice you would use if a customer were standing right at your counter, which would hopefully not be yelling or filled with too much excitement. At Hatchbuck, one of our core values is “Do the Right Thing.” This value applies especially well to the inbox. Every email you send furthers a conversation, so take each opportunity to be thoughtful, creative and helpful in your subject line and email. When you focus on building relationships, rather than the aggressive sales pitch, you earn trust, respect, and the sales come naturally.
Crafting Your Email Marketing Message: How to be a Good Communicator Where it Counts. Posted on December 15, 2015June 1, 2016 by Jessica Lunk There are many benefits to email marketing for small businesses, but you know that. What’s tough about email marketing, however, is that your communication skills can make or break those benefits. Email gives you the opportunity to connect with existing and potential customers, engage them with helpful resources, and introduce them to your services or products. When done right, email marketing can increase customer loyalty, maximize your marketing ROI, and drive more sales. But to do it right, you have to be a good communicator where it counts, or your message won’t hit the mark. Keep in mind that “how” you say something matters just as much or more than “what” you say. Here are some tips on how to be a good communicator in email campaigns. Be Authentic Folks opening emails from your small business don’t want to be treated as if they’re dollar signs. Instead, they want authentic communication. Perfect your brand’s voice by talking to people on a human level. Maintain an authentic tone that relates directly to your audience. Provide meaning instead of superficial promises. Remember, the best brands are really just people that happen to be associated with your product or service. For instance, a simple check-in email from Hazel at Canva feels authentic and personal for a few reasons: Sender: The email comes from Hazel, not from Canva in general Tone: The tone is easy-going and friendly Format: It’s mostly text, giving it a friendly feel Timing: The email was sent at just the right time – when I hadn’t been in the Canva app in a while and need an introduction to newer features to pull me back in. Engage in a Conversation Tone and voice matter in emails. They humanize your brand and allow for genuine dialogue that occurs naturally. Don’t be afraid to engage in a playful email conversation that syncs with the rest of your brand. This approach expands brand loyalty. Custom Ink does a solid job of connecting with their audience on a personal level. The conversational, fun tone in this email paired with a personal message from their CEO makes their brand feel authentic, creating a customer experience that stands out in the inbox. Show Your Brand’s Personality Put a face on your small business’s brand and let its real personality shine through. You can cater to your buyer personas by posting the content they enjoy while making it relatable and fun. Cultivate a voice that delights viewers. Most folks prefer a connection rather than just information. Buffer, for example, takes something as mundane as a receipt and infuses their brand’s personality into it. The way they position their message makes the customer feel like a valued extension of the Buffer brand. A Little Transparency Goes a Long Way While you don’t have to go as extreme as Buffer does in living up to their core value, “Default to Transparency,” being real with your customers can go a long way to win their trust. A great example is this email from Magic Beans. While Magic Beans made a mistake in an email send, they took the opportunity to give customers access to the people working behind the scenes – both their Founder, Eli and their Marketing Whiz, Kate. Focus on Quality Instead of Quantity Sending strong emails that are not only conversation and on-brand, but match the interests of your audience will give your small business an edge while building trust. As a matter of fact, the quality of engagements are much more important than the quantity of engagements. So, if you’re sending out lots of emails with low engagement, take a step back from your email marketing strategy to see if you can increase the relevance and value of each email for your audience – even if it means cutting back on a few sends. Follow these tips, and your marketing message will communicate the voice and tone of your brand while keeping your readers engaged.