6 Must-Have Online Marketing Tools for Your Small Business Posted on July 25, 2016August 5, 2022 by Jessica Lunk Want More Powerful Online Marketing Results? Check Out These Tools Call me Captain Obvious, but it’s no secret to entrepreneurs like yourself that running a small business is hard work. You have lots of irons in the fire and an ever-growing to-do list. And to top it off, what may be the most important part of running your business often feels like the hardest one to do consistently and well. What part is that? You guessed it. Marketing. It doesn’t matter how well you run the rest of your business if it doesn’t have customers. Marketing done right helps you get more customers. Sounds pretty important, right? Legendary direct response marketer and copywriter Dan Kennedy thinks so. To paraphrase Dan, “focus less on being the doer of your business and more on being a great marketer of the thing you do”. So yes, marketing matters. A lot. And to be a great marketer in the modern online business world, you need the right tools. Today let’s talk about some very useful marketing tools you might not be aware of. These will all be tools you can use without the help of an expert. They will be either free or quite inexpensive. One of the most powerful aspects of digital marketing is this: You can test and tweak and optimize it. If part of your approach isn’t working, you can change it. Since copywriting and content marketing are so important to your success, let’s start with a tool that can help you do these crucial tasks better. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer Your content and copy headlines and titles are crucial. They determine whether or not readers will go on to the next part of your content. Whether your headline arouses a sense of curiosity in the reader or it hints at one or more strong benefits you offer your customers, you want it to pack a punch. You want it to strike an emotional chord with readers. Simply copy and paste your headline into the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer. It will return a numeric score and will give suggestions on how to make your headlines stronger. Google Analytics Google Analytics is a web-based tool through which you collect and analyze data about your website visitors and their activity on your site. Chances are you’ve heard of this powerful tool. You may even have it installed for your website. But are you using it and harnessing its power to help improve your online marketing results? Doing so can greatly improve your website’s user experience and your conversion rates. CrazyEgg CrazyEgg is a heat mapping tool that gives you solid insight into what your visitors are doing on your website. It tells you where they are scrolling, clicking, etc. It can be extremely useful as you work to optimize your website. And remember, your website is your online marketing hub. So optimize it! CrazyEgg delivers a number of key benefits. Bottom line: It can help you enjoy better site visitor engagement and more conversions. Optimizely Optimizely helps you efficiently run simple A/B tests on your website, landing pages, etc. So what is A/B testing and why do you want to do it? A/B testing, sometimes called split testing, allows you to compare to different versions of a webpage to determine which one is performing more in line with how you want it to. Rather than guessing at how your pages are performing, you can use A/B testing to gain valuable, accurate insight that can help you make specific changes for the better. Just about any element of online marketing can be tested these days, including font types and sizes, call to action button colors, image placement and selection, content headlines, and on and on. Here’s an important tip: Test one thing at a time. For example, put up two versions of a landing page. Make them identical, but give each with a unique headline. Measure your results. Implement the better-performing of the two headlines on all your landing pages and then test something else. If you change multiple items all at once, how will you determine what was responsible for your results? So once again, A/B test one thing at a time. Lander Landing pages are one of the most critical tools for successful online marketing. Whether you are running an online store or are using content marketing along with email to “sell” downloads of your latest free whitepaper, you want to use landing pages to help you “seal the deal”. Lander offers an inexpensive, easy-to-implement landing page service with clean, simple design. The page templates are engineered to help small businesses enjoy a higher conversion rate. Lander enables you to run A/B tests on your landing pages, and the platform integrates easily with PayPal. Hootsuite Small business owners who are savvy marketers treat social media as an important tool in their marketing toolbox. They also understand that social media can quickly become an unmanageable nightmare. Hootsuite can help you tame the social media beast. It is a social media management tool that allows you to quickly and easily schedule updates in advance. Perhaps best of all, you can use it to “listen” to what people are saying about your company. It will help you respond quickly. The topic of free or inexpensive online marketing tools is way too big to cover in one brief article like this. You have so many tools available to help you improve your digital marketing results, it can seem overwhelming. Hopefully this article will give you some clarity and guidance. And when you are looking for simple sales and marketing software designed to help small businesses like yours stay organized and on track as you do the important task of marketing and selling, consider how Hatchbuck can help you. Click here to learn more! Featured image credit: https://ukessay.com/blog/analytical-papers
How to do Market Research on a Small Business Budget Posted on July 22, 2016June 20, 2018 by Jessica Lunk As a small business owner, you’re continually looking for ways to grow your business. What better way to do so than to launch new products and services? But how do you know if those products and services are needed in the marketplace? Or if your current product is meeting the needs of your customers? The answer is to do your homework through market research. Yes, we know that you’re not a millionaire (wouldn’t that be nice, though?), and don’t have a lot to spend, if anything, on your market research, which can cost up to $30K to $60K for some companies. So, how can you gather the information you need when you have a smaller budget? Here are 4 tips for tapping into your audience and find out where to improve, where to innovate and where to discontinue your product and service offering through market research: Tap into Your CRM Your current small business CRM is hopefully filled with prospects and customers you can connect to for market research. With solid data, you can segment your contacts by their contact status, title or position, and interests to get the feedback you need about your products and services. With a well-organized CRM, it’s easy to pull relevant lists of contacts and email them for feedback, such as a survey or interview request. Leverage Your Contacts NPS Here’s a tip for helping you slice and dice the feedback you receive from your customers: leverage their Net Promoter Score (NPS). The NPS helps companies gauge the loyalty of their customers on a scale from 1 to 10 by asking one simple question: How likely are you to recommend us? Customers who give you a 9 or 10 are your promoters. They are raving fans of your business, and you can leverage them for referrals, driving growth. 7s & 8s are your passives. They are satisfied with you, but aren’t going to go out of their way to promote your business, and are susceptible to competitors. Detractors give you a 0 -6. These customers are less than happy with your service. These are the grumblers who actually detract from your business because they have negative things to say. Who would you rather please? The detractors who may never be happy with your products and services because they aren’t a good fit to begin with? Or your promoters – your most loyal customers who are responsible for generating more new business? When gathering data from your customers, it helps to take NPS into account, so you can ensure you’re listening to feedback from your promoters, helping you to attract more raving fans who are just like them. Conduct a Survey Use a survey tool like, SurveyMonkey or SurveyGizmo, to collect insight from your audience. With these tools, you can ask specific questions about your audience’s challenges and solutions. You can also ask qualifying questions upfront to help segment responses and make sure you are getting valid insights. Even better, you can use skip logic, or branch logic, to guide survey takers down a specific path. For instance, you can ask “Are you a current customer?” to separate your actual customers from prospects in your audience. Then, you can ask your customers “How likely are you to recommend us?” to get their NPS, while skipping that question for those who aren’t customers. When it comes to surveys, the more responses you receive from your audience, the more statistically valid the responses are. So how many people do you need to survey to get solid feedback? SurveyMonkey has a great chart to help you gauge how big of a group you should survey. So, what if you need 300 survey responses to be statistically valid, but only have 100 contacts who have completed your survey? SurveyMonkey and SurveyGizmo also offer the ability to purchase survey responses from an audience similar to the one you’re trying to target. It’s affordable for small businesses – and completely worth it in the quest to get your product-market fit right on the money. Host a Webinar If you want to really find out if there’s a market for your new product or service, create a webinar about it. You can do at least two or three iterations of the invite for this webinar — changing up the product name, description, and features — in order to see what will resonate best with the target audience. Then, once that webinar and the invites have been created, promote the heck out of it to your target audience through email promotions to your database and through social media posts and see what level of interest is generated. Webinars are a great platform to share your ideas. At the same time, they can also be valuable to getting feedback from your audience. Use a Q&A session after you’ve presented to gauge how successful your new ideas might be. If only a handful of people show up, but they are promoters who have lots of positive feedback, you might have a great product for your niche. Ask and Listen on Social Media Just as you’ve promoted the above webinar through social media, you can also post polls and straight out ask your audience what they like best about your company and what areas they’d like to see change. This will also give you insight into exactly what people who buy products like yours are interested in. On the flip side, use social listening to make sure you’re hearing what your audience has to say about your business and your industry. On the flip side, you can use social listening to make sure you’re hearing what your audience has to say about your business and your industry. Hootsuite is a great social listening tool for small business. You can set up feeds to search mentions of your business as well as relevant keywords. That way, you can stay in the know about the pain points in your company, product and service offering, and in the industry as a whole. Offer an Incentive While doing market research is a big benefit to you, your participants will probably be asking, “what’s in it for me?” You can absolutely offer a reward to people that fill out your survey, register for your webinar, or answer your questions on social media. You don’t have to give away anything extravagant. Even a $5 Starbucks gift card is enough to say “Thanks for your feedback, have a coffee on us.” A little incentive can help broaden your reach and deepen your insights into your market and target audience.
10 Dos and Don’ts for Writing Email Subject Lines that Work Posted on July 21, 2016 by Katie Culp Email marketing is still one of the best ways to turn cold leads into raving fans of your business. But if you’ve been in your inbox lately, you know how much noise and clutter there is. With so many people and businesses clamoring for attention through email, how can you make sure that your email subject lines work? To prevent your emails from heading straight to the “delete” bin with hundreds of others, you need laser-like focus on your email subject line. Read on for 10 tips for writing subject lines that will generate interest, opens, clicks and customers: Do incorporate personalization by using the person’s first name as the first word in the subject line or the company the person works for in the subject line. You will quickly gain their attention with this method and stop them from scrolling past. Don’t click “send” on a personalized email before making sure that you have the first name or company name for everyone in your customer relationship management (CRM) database. You do not want to be the company that sends out emails with the dreaded <FIRSTNAME> showing up in the subject line instead of the person’s actual first name. Do include a number (a la “10 Tips” or “5 Ways”) at the beginning of the subject line. Due to today’s Twitter and SnapChat mentality, readers want to get their information in little chunks that are quick and very easy to digest. So, titles with numbers in them that show that there’s a list in the asset, or a certain number of tips, appeal to readers who don’t have much time to read, which is pretty much all of them. Don’t put a number in the subject line and then not have those actual 5 ways listed in the email or — even worse — in a piece of content you’ve gated (put behind a registration form). You’ll quickly lose credibility with your customers and potential customers and you’ll wind up with a lot of unsubscribes. Do incorporate scare tactics into your subject lines when possible. For example, a subject line of “Is there a virus hiding on your computer?” will motivate someone to read to find out the answer. Just please don’t use clowns in your subject lines. They’re the ultimate horror show and would cause me to delete without opening it in case there’s a picture of Pennywise included. Do keep it to the point. Your subject line should be from 60 to 70 characters in length. (For reference sake, that previous sentence contains 64 characters.) Don’t include your company’s name or your product’s name in the subject line if you’re promoting a general checklist or industry research report. The focus there should be on the topic itself and how it can help your customer… not on your company. Do include your product name if your email is offering a discount on your product or specific tips on how to use your product. Don’t send out your emails without spell checking your subject line (and the rest of your email, but that’s a whole different post!). You want your company to look professional and there’s no better way to make that first impression than with a subject line that’s correct and doesn’t include text-speak, like using “4” for “for”. Just don’t. Do testing, testing and more testing on how your subject lines are performing with the help of A/B split tests through your marketing automation system. A/B split tests are your friend, and subject lines can be, too, when they’re written correctly! What subject lines have worked well for you in the past? Share your subject line tips with @gethatchbuck on Twitter.
Comprehensive List of 33 Marketing Automation Terms to Make You a Pro Posted on July 20, 2016June 18, 2018 by Jeanna Barrett Keeping up on marketing to your new and existing customers can be really time-consuming — especially if you’re a small business owner. It’s sometimes hard to squeeze the full-time job of marketing between managing employees, financial tasks and generally running your business operations. Luckily in the age of technology and software as a service (SaaS), automating your marketing tasks is possible by standardizing processes to save you time. The term “marketing automation” refers to the software platforms that can help you do this. Generally speaking, marketing automation platforms help you create a wide net to scoop up prospective customers on the internet and then work to convert them to a paying customer. But the act of marketing automation, and often each platform from Hatchbuck to HubSpot to Marketo, has its own terminology. If a marketing consultant told you to ‘create content mapped to your buyer’s journey to capture leads and nurture them with drip campaigns and CTAs to convert,’ you might ask yourself, “What the heck does that even mean?” We’ve put together a handy, quick guide to 33 standard marketing automation terms for you to refer to if you ever feel a bit lost in this new age of marketing automation. Inbound Marketing: Inbound marketing is the act of bringing visitors and leads to your website through content, search engines and social media. Instead of having to go out and get leads (outbound marketing), they come to you. Lead/Demand Generation: Demand generation is a style of marketing that refers to the process of creating demand in a product. This is typically done through content that solves a prospects needs, captures their information, then nurtures them to become a customer. Anonymous Visitor: An anonymous visitor is someone who has visited your site but your marketing automation database does not have an email address to associate with their IP address. Known Visitor: A known visitor is someone who has visited your site with an email address associated to their IP address because they’ve filled out a form or opened/clicked an email you sent them and your marketing automation platform started tracking them. Contacts: Contacts are everyone in your marketing automation database. Each of these contacts will have a different lifecycle stage. Lifecycle Stages: A lifecycle stage is a way to categorize your entire database of contacts based on where they’re at in the sales funnel. The lifecycle stages are often subscriber, lead, MQL, SQL, opportunity and customer. A lifecycle stage should determine how you interact and communicate with each contact. Subscriber: A subscriber is someone who has opted-in to receiving email communication from you, but has yet to fill out a form with more information. Leads/Prospects: Leads are a group of people who are potential customers whose information you have captured via a signup form on your site. Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): MQLs have shown more interest in your product, so they are more qualified than general leads. You use your own scoring criteria to determine what might make someone an MQL. Oftentimes it’s based on certain pages they’ve viewed on your site, the amount of pages they’ve viewed, number of emails they’ve opened, etc. SQL: SQLs have met specific criteria laid out by your sales team, which makes them worthy of a direct sales follow-up. Opportunity: Opportunities are contacts who have become a real sales opportunity in your customer relationship management (CRM) database. Personas: Personas are one-page guides that explain who your target customer is. Many businesses will have more than one persona. They dig into the demographics of your target customer, what type of person they are and the problems they need to solve. Personas will help you create content that reaches your customer. Buyer’s Journey: A buyer’s journey is the process of looking at the different stages of your customer — awareness, consideration and decision — and thinking through customer behavior, information needs, key search terms and types content that make sense for each stage. Creating a buyer’s journey is important to do before you start creating content to capture leads. Gated Content/Offers: Gated content, often called offers or lead magnets, are generally pieces of content that your leads want to download. This content is often longer and more in-depth than just a blog post, therefore it makes it premium and prospects are willing to give their personal information to download it. Examples of this type of content would be an ‘Ultimate Guide,’ a webinar, a vendor comparison page, etc. Landing Pages: Landing pages are static web pages you can create from within a marketing automation platform without the help of your technology team. They often host a form to download an offer. Form: The form on your landing page that has questions like email, industry and phone number. A visitor to your website must fill out a form before accessing the information they want to download or before subscribing to a newsletter list. Calls-to-Action (CTA): A CTA is a button or banner on your site or in an email that asks your website visitors to take an action. Like, “Visit our Resources Center,” “Register for this Event” or “Download this Guide.” Conversion Rate: A conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who actually converted. Landing pages have conversion rates and oftentimes businesses are thinking about how they can optimize for conversion, meaning get more visitors to convert. Conversion Optimization: Conversion optimization is the process of testing and changing landing pages, buttons, CTAs, language, images and more to see if you can raise the conversion rate. Oftentimes even the smallest change, like a button being green instead of blue, can increase a conversion rate. Progressive Profiling: Progressive profiling refers to the process of swapping in new questions on forms once questions have already been answered by leads. For instance, if a lead fills out their name, phone number and email, then the next time they fill out a form, those questions will not be there and will be replaced by new questions. Progressive profiling assures you’re not asking your leads to fill out 20 questions on their first form, which will likely affect conversion. Nurture Campaign/Lead Nurturing/Drip Campaign: All of these terms refer to the same thing: an email campaign that nurtures a prospect to become a customer. Nurture campaigns should be the length of your ‘days to close’ and give your prospect additional content and information to help their decision. Segmentation: Segmentation is the process of separating your contact database based on criteria in their personas and lifecycle stage. You use segmentation to create smart lists. Smart List: A smart list is a dynamic list that automatically adds contacts to it based on criteria you set out. For example, you could want a smart list of blog readers from California. You would create a list that would automatically add anyone from California who has visited your blog. Static List: A static list is a list of contacts that you upload one time, and it doesn’t update automatically after that. For instance, you might have attended a tradeshow and captured leads to download into a CSV. You can upload this list to your marketing automation platform. Static list membership can be part of the criteria you use to build a smart list, however. Workflow/Automated Program: This is the magic to marketing automation. By setting up a workflow or automated program, this is the act of automating your marketing. You can setup an email to trigger when someone fills out a form, visits a page and more. You can automate adding someone to a smart list, or changing their lifecycle stage. You can automate alerting your sales team when someone has become an SQL. Personalization: Personalization or dynamic content refers to the ability to customize what each visitor to your site sees by using their demographic or behavioral data to swap out things like cover images, downloadable guides and more. Days to Close: Days to Close is the timeframe it takes for your contacts to convert from a lead to a customer. Once you have a database of contacts who’ve converted, you can do the math to determine, on average, how many days it took them to become a customer. Lead Source: Lead source is the location or method that your lead came to you. This can be social media, organic search, paid search, etc. For example, if someone clicked on Hatchbuck’s ‘marketing automation platforms’ ad in Google, landed on our marketing automation landing page, and converted to a lead by filling out the landing page form, their lead source would be Googe Adwords. Sales Enablement: This is the process of the marketing team empowering your sales team to interact better with prospects by providing them with critical data and information on your target customers that allow for more meaningful conversations that have a higher likelihood of converting to a sale. CRM Software: CRM software is a database of records and processes to organize conversations and relationships. The most popular CRM is SalesForce, but there are others. Marketing automation platforms usually include their own CRM, or integrate with a CRM already in place. Demographic Data: This is the demographic data for your contacts collected by a marketing automation platform such as company, job title and location. Behavioral Data: This is behavioral data that a marketing automation platform tracks such as emails opened, pages visited and webinars attended. Lead Score/Scoring: Lead scoring is the process of creating a rating system for your leads based on criteria. The lead score is used to identify how qualified a contact is for the sales team. Generally lead scores are built from demographic and behavioral data. We hope this list gets you a little closer to becoming a marketing automation expert. Did we miss a term that you think we should add, or that you’d like to know? Reach out to us on Twitter @gethatchbuck.
How to Write Powerful Words That Help Your Product Sell Like Hotcakes Posted on July 19, 2016 by Jessica Lunk “Copywriting that sells…”. Let’s face it: Those words are redundant. Why? Because by definition, copywriting is supposed to sell. It’s the art and science of selling through the written word. And if you are going to enjoy the high degree of online marketing success you want, and your small business needs, you have to have persuasive copywriting. No nifty new tool will take its place. For example, although not new, we hear a lot about video marketing. Well guess what? Video marketing won’t sell just because it’s using a popular technology. You still need the right words. So how do you go about writing the right words? I’m excited to talk about this, but first, understand this: You won’t read one article and become a competent copywriter. Copywriting is a specialized skill that take time and effort to develop. Done right, it bears little resemblance to the papers you wrote in high school English. And even having an English or journalism degree is inadequate preparation to produce great copy. So you may want to invest in the services of a professional for your copywriting needs. But even if you do, you will benefit from having a basic understanding of marketing copy that sells. So here we go… Make It About Them. Not You “No one cares about your product except you” David Meerman Scott – Author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR Business owners, marketers and even professional sales reps often make a crucial mistake. In their efforts to try and persuade their potential customers, they talk on and on, in print or face to face, about themselves. About their company. And about their wonderful product or service. But that’s not what your readers want to hear about. They want you to talk about them. They care about their wants and needs. To the extent they do care about your product or service, it’s only because of what they hope it can do for them. They have a pressing problem, and they want you to help them solve it. So to get their attention (always a challenge in this crazy, fast-paced digital world) talk to them about them from the get-go. Talk in emotional, empathetic terms about their problem and how you can help them solve it. Simple Rules The Day You can forget about using complex words and sentences and long paragraphs. Using the jargon and vernacular your audience uses. Write to them in a fairly basic way. Incorporate lots of white space – space on the screen not cluttered by text. Keep your sentences short. Make your copy easy to read. If it’s drudgery to get through, how successful do you think it will be in helping you make sales? Will readers even finish it? Doubtful. Don’t just make your message easy to read. Make it crystal clear. There should be no doubt what you are trying to say. If your reader is scratching his head while trying to figure out your message, it doesn’t bode well for your sales results. WIIFM? (What’s In It For Me?) Here’s something else important, and it closely relates to making your message about your reader instead of you. Don’t ramble on and on about your product’s features. Talk instead about benefits. Tell your reader how she will benefit from buying and using your product. But here’s a catch: Make sure it’s a benefit your reader cares about. Let’s say you are selling a workout program readers can follow at home. Your reader cares about looking good and being active. Your workout can help with both of these. So mention them. Let’s say also your program can lower high blood pressure. That’s a benefit. But if it’s not a benefit your reader cares about, don’t mention it in your copy. If you do, don’t make it a priority. In other words, you have to know your reader well. And speaking of benefits, don’t just list the benefit. Go a step further. Paint a vivid word picture – write a story in which the reader can see himself not just enjoying the benefits of your product, but experiencing the wonderful lifestyle it enables. Prove It! Remember that people make buying decisions emotionally first, then justify their decisions with logic. Once you’ve poured on the emotion by talking to them in a way that drives home how frustrated they are about their problem, once you’ve painted your emotional word picture of them enjoying your product, you need to offer some logic to help them justify their decision to buy. This could be in the form of a no-risk money back guarantee. It could be in the form of a detailed explanation that shows how they will save money by investing in your offering. And by all means, offer proof, especially social proof. Have reams of testimonials, especially video testimonials, on your site. Want Their Business? Ask For It! As I said earlier, copywriting is selling through the written word. A big part of selling is asking for the business. So in your copy, ask for their business. Ask your reader to specifically take the next step you want him to take. This will usually involve clicking a link to go to another page, perhaps an email signup form or a landing page to download a special report or other type of content you are offering. But don’t just say “Click Here” in your call to action. Be more persuasive and compelling. Imply that he will benefit by clicking your call-to-action button. Say something like “Click here to begin your journey to better health.” A Marketing Misconception That Has To Die In the online marketing world, “conventional wisdom” that is loaded with misconceptions and half-truths abounds. Something many believe, that is not true is this: No one reads long-form copy or content anymore. Not true. If your reader finds your message compelling, interesting and entertaining, if it is giving him hope for a solution to a problem he is tired of struggling with, if it is focused on him in an empathetic way, he will read it. The word count doesn’t matter. Remember that copywriting is selling through the written word. Would you send a sales rep to an appointment with instructions to “use this many words and no more”? Of course not. You want her to speak as many words as are necessary to make the sale. The same goes for your copywriting. Copywriting is too broad and detailed a subject to be handled by one brief article. There are plenty of free resources that can help you learn more. Want one of the very best? Copyblogger is loaded with valuable insight that can help you learn more about the all-important business skill that is copywriting. Happy Selling! By the way – Are you looking for simple, easy-to-use sales and marketing software that can help small businesses like yours turn emails into conversations, website visitors into handshakes, and customers into raving fans? Click here now to find out more!
This Simple Contact Management Tip Will Enhance Customer Relationships Posted on July 18, 2016July 21, 2016 by jmiller In a digital world, it is easy to think of contact management as something that has become complex and difficult. What used to be as simple as thumbing through a rolodex, or scribbling a note on the back of a business card has morphed into entire applications dedicated to tracking and managing customer relationships. While CRM software might seem intimidating, the truth is that the heart of contact management has remained the same: maintain personal relationships, collect information, and leverage your knowledge. Despite these fundamental truths, many businesses drop the ball on contact management because it has been hard, time-consuming work. However, marketing automation means it no longer has to be. Integrating with marketing automation is one simple step you can take to enhance these 4 areas of contact management: Optimizing Customer Interaction Of course, customer interaction is at the heart of contact management. Not only does interaction with the customer provide a chance for you to learn valuable information about them, but it provides a sense of reassurance to clients that they are more than just another account. Marketing automation makes customer interaction easy by providing an opportunity to create more customized points of engagement that make customers feel unique. Best of all, this automation can be done quickly and with little specialized training. For instance, you can automatically add a customer to an email campaign after they visit a specific page on your website. Or, you can email a promotion to all of your customers who are interested in specific solution category you offer. Marketing automation tracks customer behavior on your website and tracks their interactions with your emails as well. This gives you plenty of data points to provide customized messaging and timely offers. As a result, the customer feels special and you improve conversion efficiency. Making Sense of Contacts and Relationships Anyone who has been in business long enough has encountered a unique problem: managing a huge amount of contacts. A combination of regular business and networking (both traditional and social) can lead to a digital address book that runneth over. Even if you have a handle on your contacts, sharing your bank of knowledge on each contact with your employees can also be a challenge. Fortunately, one of the best parts of automation software is how it enhances your contact management. The first obstacle to managing contacts is getting their information in one place. With marketing automation, it’s easy to collect and organize contacts. Not only can you capture the basics – like name, title, email address and company – you can automatically append important info to their record. For instance, you can track which lead sources your contacts are coming from. As your relationship continues, marketing automation can keep a record of correspondence with contacts. Ultimately, more automated data means there is less room for human error. Everyone – from you to your sales person and your marketing assistant – has the information they need to leverage contacts and relationships in profitable ways. As with other automation features, this simplifies a process that would otherwise consume much time, allowing you to focus more on the big picture. Calibrating Communication Frequency When it comes to communicating with your contacts, determining how much – or how little – to contact them is of paramount importance. After all, if contacts feel annoyed by constant emails, they are as likely to ignore your emails as they are to trash physical junk mail. But if your contact with them becomes too sporadic, you lose that vital feeling of a shared relationship. This is where marketing automation can be a big help: Not only does it let you set specific contact frequencies for specific segments of your contacts, but it allows you to better determine where the customer is in the sales funnel. Marketing automation allows you to identify, for instance, who is in a “buying” cycle and who is in a “maintenance” cycle and to customize both the frequency and content of your communication accordingly. Learning From Customers Another cornerstone of contact management may as well be the first commandment of sales: never stop learning from your customers. Every casual lunch or shared elevator ride, for instance, provides an opportunity to gain new insight that you can leverage at a later time. As more and more communication becomes digital, marketing automation provides an opportunity to learn more than ever before. Instead of only knowing what a client vocally shares with you, you will be able to get detailed information about the emails they respond to and the pages they visit. Ultimately, this lets you gather enough information to create distinct segments of customers and to target them with information, tools, and services that are immediately relevant to their needs. Marketing automation is a powerful tool when it comes to contact management. But how do you get the two systems to work together? If it’s time to upgrade your CRM or you’re looking into CRM for the first time, consider options that integrate both CRM and marketing automation in one app. Contact management has evolved to meet the digital habits of consumers, but the heart of it is the same. When you add marketing automation to the mix, you can build more lucrative and satisfying relationships with your leads, prospects and customers.
What to Expect When Using Marketing Automation Software Posted on July 15, 2016January 17, 2020 by Jessica Lunk This blog post was last updated on January 16th, 2020. Marketing automation is a wonderful tool that is meant to make the lives of marketing and sales teams easier. It helps you generate more warm leads for your business, improve follow-up with prospects, and better manage customer relationships. It’s a super powerful tool, but you must know exactly what to expect so you can get the most out of the software you’re using. Maybe you’re beginning to look into marketing automation for your business, or you’re unsure you’re currently using the right software. Whatever your situation is, there’s a ton of unknowns to clear up. So, to reduce any “gotcha” moments, we’re going to cover precisely what you’re getting yourself into when you use marketing automation software. 1. You’ll Need a Website – and Traffic If you don’t have a website or online traffic, there’s no need to invest in marketing automation. After all, the whole point of marketing automation is to better engage with people who visit your website and to nurture your leads with emails that drive them back to your website, where they will eventually convert into a customer. So, if you’re a brand new business with little to no web traffic, investing in marketing automation today may be jumping the gun a bit. Instead, focus on building a professional-looking website that converts. Then find ways to drive quality traffic to it, which brings me to the next point. 2. You’ll Need an Inbound Marketing Strategy Marketing automation software is like an engine; it needs the right kind of fuel to make it work. For marketing automation, inbound marketing is the fuel. Before you can capture a new subscriber and nurture a lead with email marketing, you need to drive them to your website. In the past, top-down advertising methods like radio, TV, print, direct mail, and cold calling pushed messages from brands to consumers. But the game has changed, and these traditional marketing methods are easily tuned-out. With so much information available online, consumers are doing most of their research before connecting with a salesperson. If you can reach your audience while they’re still in the investigation mode, you have a much better chance of earning their business when they’re ready to buy. Inbound marketing helps you get found online through channels and content like SEO, social media, guest-contributed articles, press mentions, and paid online advertising. So, instead of going out and finding new leads, inbound marketing helps new, quality leads find you, driving them to your website where marketing automation takes over. 3. You’ll Need To Implement Email Marketing One of the primary ways marketing automation helps you convert your leads into customers is by sending them personalized emails. And while all of your emails can be sent from your marketing automation tool, it’s the Email Service Provider that determines if your email will stay out of the spam folder. When it comes to bulk emails, you’ll find you have to adhere to the rules of the game to prevent your emails from being marked as spam or blocked. You’ll start thinking about things like: Will sending an email to this cold list hurt my sender reputation? How can I make sure to keep bounce rates in check? Do I have a way for new subscribers to “opt-in” to my email list? Can I tweak my subject line to boost open rates? Do I have a good word to image ratio in the body of my email? Do I know how I’ll be measuring success? Learning how to keep your emails in the inbox and out of the spam folder can make a big difference in the performance of your email campaigns. Ultimately, following email marketing best practices can increase the number of leads you can convert into customers. 4. You’ll Need to Send Your Leads Personalized Content Segmented email lists and individual email campaigns are the most effective personalization tactics. Therefore, it’s essential to analyze the position of your leads in the buyer’s journey and then nurture them accordingly. However, gathering the right data to sort and segment leads would require excessive amounts of time and energy from your marketing team. Instead, marketing automation systems gather information and do all the sorting for you, putting your leads in the right buckets. And once your leads are segmented, you’re on your way to nurturing them with personalized content. Marketing automation tracks your leads’ activity and determines their sales potential every step of the way. With leads properly segmented, you can meet each lead where they are in the sales funnel and take the right steps to direct them toward conversion. You’ll be able to automatically nurture your leads by sending them personalized content they value instead of slamming them with sales tactics and generic taglines. 5. You’ll Need to Create a Sales and Marketing Process By automating workflow, tasks, and follow-up, marketing automation is an excellent tool for fixing any holes in your sales and marketing process. That being said, you need to have a solid sales and marketing process in place before you can automate it. When you’re setting up your marketing automation engine, you’ll be thinking a lot about your process. For instance: Where do your marketing leads come from? What’s the difference between a hot prospect and a cold lead? When should marketing pass a hot prospect to the sales arm of your business? What are the most critical conversion points to track in your sales process? How long is your sales cycle? Asking yourself these questions will help guide your process and help you compare marketing automation products so you can figure out which features you need. 6. You’ll Need Training and Support Website design, inbound marketing, email marketing, sales, and marketing process – there’s a lot that goes into using marketing automation effectively for your business. Because of this, you might need help that goes beyond learning how to use the software. For instance, you may need help with the software, like learning how to import a list of contacts from another system. But you may also need help on the strategy side, like understanding how to create compelling content for an email campaign. When comparing marketing automation tools, make sure that the software you choose includes the training and support you need to be successful. Take advantage of what you’re offered by attending one-on-one training, signing up for webinars, and digest any online onboarding materials to ensure that you get the most out of your investment in marketing automation. Remember that customer service and support are just as important features of your software as website tracking, forms, and email tools. If you can’t get the help you need, your investment in marketing automation won’t pay off as it should. 7. ROI May Take Time – But, Your Patience will be Rewarded! Inbound marketing isn’t a race. It creates a longer sales cycle because you’re focused on educating and nurturing your leads to a sale, instead of pushing them towards a sale. The latter just isn’t appealing anymore, and with consumers being as knowledgeable as they are, they want time to make a decision and gather information. With that said, businesses who nurture leads make 50% more sales at a cost 33% less than non-nurtured prospects. There is profit to be had, but you have to be patient to see it. Too often, when a new tool is implemented, companies think they should see immediate results. It is important to realize that the ROI is measurable and real, but it may take time to create the kind of impact that moves your audience towards purchase decisions. In the long run, this is a short-term investment that will pay out in a great way for the company if implemented correctly. 8. You’ll Lower Your Costs When companies apply a nurturing strategy and automate mundane processes, they save money. Employees don’t have to do the mindless work of sorting through lead behavior. Instead, they can focus on answering questions and cultivating relationships. Allowing the work to be done automatically means a faster and more efficient process for everyone. Forrester Research found companies that excelled at marketing automation were able to generate 50% more leads ready for sales at a 33% lower cost. When a software system can do the busywork, your employees are freed up to work on tougher tasks that have a more significant impact on your business. Well, there you have it! This is everything you need to know before embarking on the wonderful and magical world of marketing automation. To help you get started, set up a free demo today, and learn how our software can help you meet your marketing goals.
12 Actionable Marketing Tips for Marketing Agencies Posted on July 14, 2016March 26, 2024 by Jeanna Barrett When running and owning a marketing agency, it can be easy to get caught up in the time it takes to build wow-worthy marketing campaigns for your clients and forget to market your own business. But, with hundreds of marketing agencies out there and more cropping up every day, it’s important to spend time every month on tasks that will make your company excel and stand out from the pack. Why would a new client choose your agency over all the others? With a few online marketing and thought leadership tricks, you can ensure a stamp of approval — and a paycheck — from potential clients. Here are 12 ways I’ve seen the best marketing agencies promote their services: Guest Blog Make it a top priority to contribute thought leadership blog posts to another company’s blog that has the same target audience you’re trying to reach. This will position you as knowledgeable in your industry and open up your reach to a whole new customer segment, for zero cost. It’s easy to email editors or content marketers and pitch a story idea because everyone is looking for quality blog content these days. Another great strategy is to get a content placement on a top tier marketing media site such as Social Media Today, ProBlogger or Moz. These sites have a high volume of traffic, and chances are your post will get shared a lot, driving a good amount of traffic back to your business through a placed link. Don’t forget that every time you guest blog, it’s a quality backlink to your site that improves SEO. Word of Mouth Marketing People trust recommendations from friends and family more than any other source according to a Nielson study on consumer trust in advertising. The study found that 84% of consumers say they either completely or somewhat trust recommendations from family, colleagues, and friends about products. There are two key areas where you can excel that will leave your customers raving—results and service. Make sure you’re producing results that will leave customers telling all their colleagues that they need to hire your agency, too. And, make your service shine with surprise and delight moments. Send thank you cards, never miss a deadline, be warm and communicate often with your customers. Business Cards Despite being an age-old tactic, business cards still work in the digital world. You never know when you’re going to meet someone who starts talking to you about their business and how they’re in need of good marketing advice. Whether at dinner or on vacation in the Caribbean, the ability to hand out a business card and give someone a reason to contact you later is never a bad idea. However, if you prefer having everything saved digitally, you can also give digital business cards a shot. Networking An entrepreneurial friend of mine who owns his own video marketing business once gave me great advice on how to grow a business. “Make a point to schedule two networking events a week,” he said. Whether it’s attending a networking event or reaching out to someone you haven’t seen in awhile or have never met, these are all great opportunities to talk about your business and how you might be able to collaborate. Chances are the next time that person hears about someone in need of marketing advice, they’ll think of you and the connection you made over a cup of double brewed Sumatra. Professional Website When someone hears about your marketing agency, they’ll likely do a search for you online and visit your website to research more about you. Because you’re in the marketing world, the face of your brand is everything. Take the time to put together a thoughtful brand and a cohesive, professional website. You can find top-notch templates for SquareSpace and WordPress that’ll make your site appear as if you spent thousands on developers. If your agency’s website shines online and features your best client work in a portfolio, it’ll be an easy choice for new potential clients to sign on the dotted line. Testimonials & Case Studies Keeping in line with how important word-of-mouth marketing is, testimonials and case studies highlight what your customers think about you. This helps potential clients build trust with your brand and make a decision to hire you. Don’t be afraid to ask clients after you’ve finished a project to provide a sentence or two for your website. Even better—ask them to recommend you or your company on LinkedIn, and then you can take out pieces of each recommendation and use them later as a testimonial quote on your site. Client Logos Featuring the logos of brands you’ve worked with on your website helps build credibility for your agency. When potential clients see other big brands who have said, “Yes” to you, they’ll feel comfortable saying yes too. Take the top six brands you’ve worked with who are the most well-known, and feature their logos in a client list on your home page. You can see an example of this on Hatchbuck’s home page. Awards & Accreditation When your marketing agency wins an award, it is a stamp of approval from the credible sources who hand out these awards. This goes a long way in selling your marketing agency as the best in the business since you’d likely beat out other agencies for the award. Enter campaigns you’ve created for your clients in the Shorty Awards or Content Marketing Institute’s yearly content awards. Also, look around online for accreditations that can also highlight that your agency is knowledgeable. A great accreditation to have is the Google Analytics certification that tells others you’re a whiz at tracking and understanding how online marketing is working for your customers. Becoming a Hatchbuck Partner is another great accreditation to have, especially if you serve smaller clients. Guest Speaking Opportunities Just like the thought leadership guest blogs, speaking at conferences makes you stand out as a thought leader in marketing. Thousands of people attend marketing conferences each year to gain knowledge. If you, or your agency’s employees, lead a talk at a major marketing conference, people will Tweet about it – expanding the audience that looks to your agency for advice when they need it. Social Media – Twitter Lists Social media is a powerful tool, and far too vast to go into all of its capabilities in a paragraph in this blog post, but you should definitely start building social media communities for your marketing agency. Regularly share what you’re working on and awards you’ve won, and connect with all of your clients online too. The best way to build your marketing agency through social media is by being very active on Twitter. You can create public or private Twitter lists to follow potential clients, competitors, brands and more. Regularly converse with these brands, share their content and build relationships so they’ll share your content in return and help spread the word about your agency. Niche Online Communities Social media is really about the power of communities, and niche communities are the most powerful of them all. Block out time each week to participate in conversations happening around marketing in subreddits, Inbound.org or LinkedIn Groups. Not only will you likely learn something new and stay on top of trends, but you’ll start to build online relationships that will pay back two-fold when you have news to share or when they start recommending you or your brand. Content Marketing & SEO I believe the most powerful marketing tool you can use to market your agency is content marketing. It is the number one marketing tool I tell everyone to invest in. Consistently writing quality content for your marketing agency’s website does a number of things: Showcases thought leadership to website visitors Increases organic search results and targets relevant keywords, which exponentially builds traffic to your website from qualified buyers Drives website visits back to your site from social media and gives you owned content to share on your social media profiles Provides you with the opportunity to build premium content pieces that can be gated, if you choose, to collect a lead list Builds a newsletter list of customers and potential customers, which you can then utilize to spread news about your agency How do you market your agency? If you have a unique tip to share, let us know in the comments or on Twitter @gethatchbuck.
Automated Marketing: 3 Ways to Get Up Close & Personal Posted on July 13, 2016 by Jessica Lunk The notion of “automated marketing” may sound impersonal and disconnected, but it certainly doesn’t have to be. In fact, it shouldn’t be about creating a robotic standardized experience. What automated marketing is really about is cultivating relationships, nurturing leads and being the first choice when they’re ready to buy. It’s a model in which everyone wins. Your company wins more business. And your customers win by receiving a more personalized experience. If you’re still skeptical, here are three ways that automated marketing creates a personalized experience that will bring you more customers: 1: It meets customer needs Marketing often feels impersonal to potential customers because they are getting the same message as everyone else – regardless of their needs. But with automated marketing, you can leverage smart email nurturing to send the right content to potential customers at the right time. So, instead of confronting a cold lead with a sales pitch right off the bat, you can use marketing automation data to figure out what they’re interested in. Then, you can deliver helpful information that addresses that interest, or even solves a problem. As a result, you establish trust, boosting their “brand affinity” for your product. As you continue to nurture potential customers with content that resonates with their needs, they are more likely to engage with you. They’re more likely to open an email from your company and click a link. They’re more likely to pick up the phone when your company calls. When you automate your marketing, more leads convert into customers because they feel they’re receiving helpful, relevant information from a company that understands them, rather than impersonal marketing simply trying to sell them something. 2: It’s an extended conversation When automated marketing is done right, it feels like a “continuous and relevant discussion” with potential clients. Website tracking and email analytics are core features of marketing automation that track your relationship with leads, prospects, and customers. Data like the topic pages a contact has visited, or the email link they’ve clicked indicates where they want the conversation to go next. And, when you pull that helpful data into a CRM where you can add your own notes on each contact record, you have a wealth of information to get every conversation just right. It works whether your marketing assistant is pulling a list of relevant leads to send a special promotion to. And it works when your sales person is making a follow-up call to a potential customer. Your contacts feel like they are being heard during the customer experience because they can see your sales and marketing efforts adapt as their needs and interests evolve. With automated marketing, you can collect, organize, and use data to continue the conversation with your contacts – without losing that human touch. 3: It lets you keep more customers in play According to research, only about one in four leads “is qualified and ready to buy when marketing first receives them.” Of course you want to be better at identifying and contacting the leads that are practically ready to go and do business with you today. However, while research revealed that 25% of leads are ready to go and another 25% are never going to buy your product, and that still leaves 50% of potential clients who are on the fence. I guess you could just ignore 50% of your leads – but I imagine you probably want to make the most of every lead that you worked hard to acquire. So instead of letting these leads go to competitors – or never make a purchasing decision at all – nurture them. Creating a lead nurturing campaign allows you to stay top of mind with potential customers whenever they think of your kind of product. Building an automated marketing campaign for leads that aren’t ready to buy allows you to further their interest and trust in your business as they move closer and closer to making a purchase decision. It’s hard to get attention these days, and it’s hard to give everyone the personal attention they deserve. Automated marketing is your secret weapon to meet the current needs of potential customers, keep the conversation going, and nurture leads that are on the fence until they’re ready to buy. When it comes to providing a personal touch, marketing automation delivers.