10 Tips for a Perfect Retargeting Campaign Posted on August 16, 2018October 7, 2022 by Jessica Lunk So you’ve spent your valuable marketing dollars to attract more leads to your website. But not everyone who visits your site is ready to commit to you on their first visit. They need to be reminded, regularly and in different ways, of what your business can really do for them before they are ready to buy. With each additional reminder, they grow more likely to remember you — and to take action. This is the goal of remarketing, which literally means marketing again. Just one retargeting ad could increase your conversion rate by an incredible 70 percent. And according to a survey by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, 92% of marketers found retargeting to outperform search, email, and display advertising. However, remarketing is vastly underused. It may be a lack of knowledge about effective retargeting. Or it may be a side effect of today’s highly data-driven landscape in which executives expect to see a direct ROI tied to marketing spend. Remarketing can be more of an art than a science where impression after impression drives an action that isn’t always directly attributable to one channel. Regardless of the reason, retargeting might be one thing you can do right now to get incredible results. Here are our top 10 tips for crushing it with your next remarketing campaign. Retargeting Tip #1: Retarget high-value prospects. Part of successful retargeting is knowing exactly who to retarget. Some of your prospects are going to be more valuable than others, so use your existing demographic data to find out who those people are. If the majority of your sales come from men in the restaurant industry who are between 18 and 24, craft your retargeting campaign messaging for them. Retargeting Tip #2: Don’t be annoying. Set a frequency cap for your retargeting ads so you don’t run the risk of displaying the same ads over and over to the same people. In the same vein, be careful with remarketing to your existing customers. The last thing you want is to drive a loyal customer away with incessant ads across the internet. Retargeting Tip #3: Plan your campaign around user behavior. If you have a group of prospects who visited a blog post about cloud-based software for restaurants, use language and images involving that topic in your remarketing. Likewise, if a group of prospects lingered on your “Home” and “About” pages, retarget them with more general information about your brand and what you do. By segmenting your audience into groups based on their interests and behaviors, you can craft a retargeting campaign that speaks directly to their position in the buyer’s journey. Retargeting Tip #4: Watch technical tutorials. Because the technical details of retargeting vary depending on the advertising platform, it’s helpful to watch tutorials on installing pixels or other bits of tracking code required for your remarketing campaign. Here are links to tutorials for Google Ad Network remarketing (includes YouTube, Gmail, Google Display Network, Remarketing Search Listings Ads, and Google Apps), Facebook remarketing, and Amazon remarketing. Retargeting Tip #5: Use both onsite and offsite retargeting. You may think of remarketing as advertising to customers on social media and on other websites — and this is a huge part of it. But don’t neglect onsite remarketing, either. Onsite remarketing makes an irresistible offer to users who are about to leave your site, in an attempt to keep them on your site. According to MonsterInsights.com, onsite remarketing can increase conversions by 2 – 4 percent. Retargeting Tip #6: Bid wisely. Bid more for customers more likely to convert, and less for all others. Here’s an example of how this might play out: imagine you have a customer who visited your site today and spent ten minutes reading your content, and another customer who did the same thing two weeks ago. Your business is “fresher” in the first customer’s mind, and so it’s this type of customer that deserves a higher bid. Here’s a list of ways to categorize your customers, so you can manually adjust your bid amounts for each: By frequency of site visits By recency of site visits By stage in the buyer’s journey By people who viewed a specific product or page By customers who have already purchased from you Retargeting Tip #7: Don’t forget your call to action. Just like in your initial campaign, your retargeting campaign needs a strong call to action. The call to action will vary depending on how ready your target is to purchase, but do everything you can to break down walls and combat objections by making your call to action clear, easy to do, and valuable to your audience. Retargeting Tip #8: Don’t skimp on creatives. As always, hire a professional designer and copywriter to craft a compelling message. You’ll likely be restricted to a certain image size and character count, so every bit of your campaign content matters. And another side note: if you’re retargeting users across the world, it’s worth it to hire a professional translator to make sure your message retains its meaning in other languages. Retargeting Tip #9: Set up burn pixels to conserve budget. A “burn pixel” is a tracking device that stops delivering ads to a customer after they’ve taken a specific action. This can help you conserve your ad spend, but it can also help with our tip #2 (don’t be annoying) by preventing the same ads from running to converted customers. A burn pixel can also serve as a tripwire to move a customer into a new campaign. Retargeting Tip #10: Run A/B tests. The trick to effective A/B tests is to only change one element between each option. This might be the photo you use in your ad, the call to action, or the first line of copy in your text (the “hook”).
The Value of a CRM & Automation in Account-Based Marketing Posted on August 14, 2018August 14, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick Account-based marketing (ABM) allows companies to generate more business within individual accounts. Rather than producing general marketing for a particular industry, ABM involves marketing to individual companies with specific offers and value propositions related to their needs. Traditionally, this method was used by large enterprises where the size of the deal justified the amount of energy focused on marketing to only one business or account. But with the help of a customer relationship management (CRM) tool and automation, small- to medium-sized business can also engage in account-based marketing to increase their sales and generate value with individual customers. Creating your ideal buyer persona Using the data in your CRM, you can build your ideal customer profile (ICP). Your ICP describes the kind of company that is an ideal fit for your product or service. In this way, you can identify which companies are worth account-based marketing efforts, so you don’t waste time and energy on businesses that have a low chance of generating significant revenue. Identifying which companies are the money makers With a CRM, you can quickly determine where most of your money is coming from. If you notice that a huge portion of your monthly recurring revenue (MRR) comes from a handful of companies, you can develop ABM strategies targeting those businesses. Alternatively, your CRM will show you which customers require a significant amount of attention, but only bring in a small amount of revenue, allowing you to adjust the amount of effort you expend on them accordingly. Understanding the problems and interests of your key accounts Not only will your CRM identify who your money makers (aka key accounts) are, it’ll also help you understand what problems, solutions, and topics your marketing should focus on. If you’ve used your CRM effectively, you’ll know what those customers buy, what content they tend to consume, and the nature of their conversations with sales associates. In this way, you can reevaluate your digital marketing efforts to focus on these themes. Setting up automated social media posts Once you know what kind of content you need to produce, it’s as simple as creating it and pumping it out regularly. Automated social tools allow you to schedule this content, so it’s automatically pumped out throughout the day on all of your social media channels. You can also use these tools to pick up on what day and times your target accounts interact with your content the most. Syndicating your content effectively If you decide that you need a little bit of help drawing the attention of your target accounts, you can enlist the help of content syndication networks. The fact that you’ve already compiled a list of your key accounts means that you can make these arrangements as results-oriented as possible by setting up an arrangement to only pay for content distribution to accounts that meet the exact same criteria as those listed on your key accounts list. Setting up automated workflows If you have a large number of key accounts you’d like to target, automated workflows help you ensure that none of these accounts fall by the wayside. Using marketing automation tools, you can set up automated workflows that are triggered based on different criteria. For example, an email workflow might be triggered by a key account downloading specific pieces of content, like an ebook or a whitepaper, letting your automation tool know they are far enough down the sales funnel to justify sending product offers. Account-based marketing can be lucrative if used effectively and appropriately. A CRM can help you identify the ideal customers for account-based marketing while marketing automation tools can help you execute an ABM strategy efficiently.
The Differences Between Proactive and Pushy Emails Posted on August 10, 2018August 10, 2018 by Jessica Lunk Walking the line between proactive and pushy in your email marketing can feel like walking a tightrope blindfolded. First, there’s the challenge of perspective. One customer’s idea of “pushy” might be another customer’s idea of energetic or enthusiastic. Then, there’s the cold, hard reality of remarketing: if you aren’t reaching out to prospects multiple times (i.e., being a little pushy), your email marketing campaign is almost guaranteed to fall short. We’ve compiled some tips for ensuring your email marketing copy is more proactive than pushy. Give these a shot, and see how it impacts your next campaign. Tip #1: Be careful with subject lines. Avoid aggression or defensiveness in your subject lines. Though these tactics can certainly be effective in terms of open rates, you’re far more likely to get that hallowed click-through (and avoid being seen as pushy) with a bit more decency and candor. Proactive: Is it something we said? / I know you’ve been busy. / We miss you! Pushy: Why haven’t you opened your emails? / Why are you avoiding me? / Where have you been? Tip #2: Space them out. There’s nothing that will turn your prospects off faster than pummeling them with daily emails (except, maybe, twice- or thrice-daily emails). According to a State of Digital Marketing report, most marketers contacted their subscribers between 2 and 5 times a month. Very few (8 percent) of respondents sent more than eight emails per month. But if your subscribers have signed up for a series of trainings, for example, sometimes you can’t avoid sending frequent emails. The solution? Be transparent about it. Proactive: If you’re sending out a series of related emails, let them know it’s a series — either in the subject line or in the body content. Tell them what to expect: will they be getting daily tips for one week? A two-weeks long video series? Be transparent, and you’ll most likely come across as proactive. Pushy: By contrast, blindsiding your new subscribers with more than they bargained for is a surefire way to turn them off. Tip #3: Keep it real. When it comes to email copywriting, the more you can mimic real-life speech, the better. First, remember the stuff you learned in high school: don’t use all caps, don’t use extra exclamation points or question marks, and get to the point right away (no fluff). When you’re writing, imagine you’re speaking to a friend. It may even help to say what you want to say out loud and transcribe it, then edit it from there. Email copywriting is more like text messaging than like formal writing, so it’s helpful to think out loud when you’re doing it. Proactive: Hey! I know it’s been awhile since we last spoke, so I thought it would be the right time to reconnect and share this fantastic offer for subscribers just like you. Pushy: It’s been TWO WEEKS since we heard from you. How are things going??? If you want this great new offer, you have to act NOW. Tip #4: Know where your subscribers are in the customer journey. More often than not, pushy emails are simply those that ask for the sale too soon. If you have a brand new subscriber, you’ll need to spend plenty of time “courting” them before you ask them to open their wallet. Start by sending them valuable information pertinent to their interests, or providing offers with a very low barrier to entry — like free resources, trials, or tutorials. Another great way to avoid being pushy is to segment your emails as narrowly as possible. A prospect is far more likely to feel aggressed when they’re receiving content unrelated to their interests than when they’re getting highly targeted messaging. Proactive: Thanks so much for subscribing! I have something extra special: I’m giving away a free copy of my eBook, “Become an Email Marketing Genius,” to new subscribers like you. Follow the link to download. Otherwise, have a great day, and I can’t wait to help you rock your email campaigns! Pushy: Thanks so much for subscribing to my marketing newsletter! Today (and only today) you can get a copy of my book, “All About Blue Whales” for $14.99 instead of the usual $19.99. Click here now to redeem the offer! Have a great day, and don’t forget to claim that offer today or you’ll miss out! Tip #5: Don’t overuse timely offers. You’ve probably been told that adding a time limit is a great way to trigger your prospects’ FOMO (fear of missing out). And a deadline for your CTA can dramatically increase conversions. However, relying on timeliness can become tired and overused if you employ it constantly. To avoid sounding pushy, don’t use time limits to create a sense of urgency — use them only when it really matters, and pair them with the value you’re providing. Proactive: LAST CHANCE: Claim your seat at the conference before midnight, and get one-on-one access to the best marketers in the country. Pushy: THIS IS YOUR FINAL CHANCE: The sale on conference seats ends at midnight tonight!! ACT NOW! A final tip is to merely trust your gut. You’ve likely been subjected to pushy advertising in the past – take a moment to think about what in particular put you off, and avoid those tactics in your own copywriting.
6 Creative Employee Incentives From Thriving Businesses Posted on August 9, 2018January 6, 2021 by Jonathan Herrick Once your organization has found the right talent for your team, how do you keep them? While all businesses these days offer the standard holiday pay, sick pay and other health benefits, companies are now looking for ideas over and above the norm to hold onto their employees for longer periods of time. If you’re looking to do something a little out of the ordinary, consider taking modeling your employee incentives after these organizations. Fully Paid Employee Vacation FullContact actually pays for their employee vacations. In fact, they offer their staff $7,500 each year as an encouragement to take a holiday, and insist on a minimum of three weeks’ annual leave every year. There is, however, one stipulation; staff must fully disconnect, and that means no work-related emails, phone calls, or texts – no work, period! Image credit: FullContact Other companies offer similar packages to incentivize holiday breaks. BambooHR reimburses their staff for up to $2,000 a year to cover vacation expenses, and Evernote pays its employees $1,000 a year to take five consecutive days off in a row, whether you travel or not. 401K Match-Up Google has many perks which benefit the employee, but one in particular which people appreciate, is the 401K match-up that matches 50% of the employee’s contributions up to a maximum of $8,250. This not only ensures that their employees are looked after today, but they are also supported when they do eventually decide to retire. If your company is considering doing a 401K match-up such as this, then make sure you do your homework so you can see how it will benefit your company, and the lives of your employees. Apple matches up to 6% of an employee’s eligible pay, while Southwest Airlines will match employee contributions dollar-for-dollar up to a range of their eligible salary between 8.3-9.3%. Image credit: Southwest Airlines Paid Employee Activities Many companies will put their hand in their pocket at the end of the year for an annual Christmas party or an afternoon of bowling offsite. However, GoDaddy goes one step further and offers off-site activities for their employees every month without exception during work hours. And there is seemingly no limit to the events they organize as past activities include trapeze classes, gold panning, and white water rafting. Chatmeter also hosts team quarterly outings and monthly team allowances to support work-life balance. As stated in one of their job descriptions, they provide, “wicked fun happy hours, catered Thursday lunches, and awesome company outings on the San Diego Bay.” On-Site Fitness Centers Finding time to get to the gym during a standard workday can be difficult, and that is why many companies operate fitness centers or their equivalent on site. Yahoo offers onsite yoga, Pilates, golf courses and cardio-kickboxing from the comfort of their own offices. Square provides personal training as well as massages, acupuncture and chiropractic care, and Google’s Mountain View headquarters hosts basketball courts and a bowling alley. OpenDNS holds rooftop yoga sessions, while Chesapeake Energy has an indoor climbing wall as well as a 72,000 square foot fitness center with swimming pool and a sand volleyball court. Even if you can only fit a ping pong table into your premises, it is bound to motivate those who work for your company. Pet-Friendly Offices Animal lovers, and in particular, dog owners, will appreciate this one! Airbnb operates a dog-friendly office, as does Build-A-Bear Workshop who celebrates Milford, the Chief Executive Dog’s birthday by throwing a party for all the other dogs every year. Salesforce has an official “Puppyforce” policy in place offering special soundproofed walls, water bowls, and dog beds. They also assist with pet insurance, dog walking, and pet supplies. Image Credit: Glassdoor Mars also has a pet-friendly culture offering pet feeding and boarding programs for traveling staff and even an annual costume category for their canine counterparts. While it was once unheard of, the number of companies who offer bring your pet to work is on the rise with companies such as Activision Blizzard, Workday, and Autodesk getting in on the animal action. Ongoing Training and Development While training should be an automatic part of any company’s offerings, some organizations go above and beyond the standard. Smucker’s, through their Smucker Tuition Program, reimburses 100% of external tuition costs with no cap, and free technical training for new workplace skills. AT&T through their aptly named AT&T University run an executive-led program focused on leadership and management development to inspire a culture of continuous learning. Starbucks also has a tuition reimbursement program that provides support for professional development including textbooks wherever you are in your academic journey or career.
The Ultimate Guide to Writing Killer Headlines Posted on August 8, 2018 by Allie Wolff Writing great content is important. But if nobody’s actually reading that content, what’s the point? The single most important component of a blog post is its title. Not only should it be effective enough to get your content found online, but it should also be catchy enough to make your audience want to click through and read more. Otherwise, your amazing content will just be sitting on your blog, taking up space and producing little to no return on your investment. So, what’s the secret to writing eye-catching headlines? There’s no magic formula or foolproof guarantee, but there are certain tried-and-true tricks of the trade that can dramatically improve your blog content’s performance. Let’s take a look. Start with a rough draft. Don’t worry about thinking up the perfect headline right off the bat. It often takes a decent amount of polishing to really get it right. So, start with a working title, based on the topic and keyword you’re planning to target in your blog post. You may need to come back after you’ve already written the blog and play around with the title until you feel comfortable with it. For instance, the working title for this blog posts was “How to write great blog titles.” Obviously, that’s not compelling enough, so we kicked things up a notch. Be sure it’s accurate. The web is inundated with clickbait these days, and people are getting more and more frustrated by the minute. You don’t want to associate your business with this type of shady practice, where your title contains a flashy statement that’s untrue just to get more attention. For instance, we wouldn’t want to title this blog post: “How to Write Killer Headlines that Are Guaranteed to Generate 150% More Traffic.” It sure sounds amazing and would certainly catch the eye of a marketer or business owner, but it’s inaccurate because it’s not something we can truly guarantee. You can certainly be bold, but just make sure you can back up your claims. In addition to being accurate, you also want to set accurate expectations for your readers. For example, if your blog post contains an interview, video or infographic, including this detail in brackets at the very end of your title can be helpful and effective. In fact, one study of over 3 million headlines found that those titles containing things – like [Infographic] or [Video] – outperformed other headlines by 38%. The bottom line is, you want your content to establish a sense of trust with your audience, so accuracy and clarification are key. Make it exciting. Now that you’ve got a working title and have verified its accuracy, the next step is spicing it up a little. There are plenty of ways to make a basic headline a bit more lively. The key here is to have a clear understanding of who your audience is so that you know what they find valuable and can find a voice and language that resonates with them. With this information in hand, take some time to play around with your title keeping the following tips in mind: Use straightforward language Make the value very clear Focus on the who rather than the why Make it visual (paint a picture with your words) Try some alliteration Keep it human (speak to the problem and position a solution) Keep it short and sweet. There’s no specific formula for exactly how long or short a headline should be. It will ultimately depend on what your particular goals are. Do you want to rank better in the search engines? If so, keep your titles to 70 characters or less so they don’t get shortened in the search results. Our friends at CoSchedule have a pretty awesome headline analyzer that can give you some tips on length and content. Are you looking for more social media engagement? And if so, which platforms will you be sharing your content through? Twitter tends to favor titles between 8 and 12 words while Facebook produces better results for headlines that are either 12 or 14 words long. To modify length, start with the title you have now and try sounding it out to see if it flows and is easily digestible for your readers. If it’s too long and clunky, play around with different variations and remove any words that aren’t really necessary. Try your best to optimize for both search and social. Last, but certainly not least, try optimizing your headlines so that they can be easily found in the search engines and will also be highly engaging from a social media standpoint. (The reason we say “try,” is because accomplishing this isn’t always possible without your headline sounding wonky.) To do this, aim to incorporate your targeted keyword as close to the beginning of your title as possible, keeping in mind word lengths for the search engine cutoff as well as the various social platforms you’ll likely be using. If you’ve tried all of these things and you’re still stumped, try brainstorming your headline options with a team member. Putting two heads together can get those creative juices flowing and generate some great ideas you may not have thought of on your own. And, above all, remember to have fun with it. It’ll make your titles much more engaging which, at the end of the day, will get you better results.
Show Me The Money: How To Measure Content Marketing ROI Posted on August 6, 2018August 6, 2018 by Guest Author “Show me the money.” That what your brand’s CEO, board members, and other shareholders are really thinking when you tell them about the benefits and value of content marketing. They might care that 90 percent of people find custom content useful or valuable, or that nearly three-quarters of people prefer to learn about a brand through articles instead of traditional ads. What they really want to know is, how is content marketing affecting the brand’s bottom line? Measuring content marketing ROI lets you easily see how much your brand earns in comparison to how much it spends on content marketing. Say your brand spent $5 to start a content marketing program. As a result of its efforts, it made $10. The return on investment is 100 percent — you earned back what you spent, then another $5 on top of that. Strangely enough, only 43 percent of B2C brands and 35 percent of B2B brands attempt to measure the return on investment (ROI) of their content marketing efforts. Of the reasons given for not measuring their content marketing ROI, the top three were that it was too difficult to do, they didn’t know how to do it, or they had no reason to measure ROI. How to Calculate Content Marketing ROI The math needed to figure out ROI is pretty simple. You divide the profit or gain brought in by content marketing (amount earned minus your initial spend) by the amount you spent on a campaign. If all is well and good, your ROI should be positive. If a campaign doesn’t earn much or doesn’t break even, you’re going to have a negative ROI. The math is simple. Figuring out what numbers to use or what metrics to look at to determine your ROI might not be. In fact, the typical metrics that content marketers look at to see if their marketing efforts are working (such as website traffic, engagement rates, and email signups) might not be worth much when it comes to ROI if you can’t find a way to translate them into concrete dollars and cents. Ways to Measure Content Marketing ROI There are two things to look at when you measure content marketing ROI. The first is what you’re spending on content marketing. How much does it cost your brand to hire people to create content? What are the costs to pay the salaries of your in-house content marketing team? How much do you pay for any software or other content marketing tools you use? The second is the number of conversions that result from your content marketing efforts and the value of those conversions. Lets say you spend $100 on content marketing. If five people end up making $100 purchases from your brand, your brand’s content marketing ROI is four to one (($500-$100)/$100). It can also be worthwhile to compare content marketing ROI to the ROI you might get from other marketing methods. Lets say your brand spends $500 on a social media ad campaign that results in the same number of new customers making the same purchases (five $100 purchases). Since the spend is the same as the amount you earned, there’s no ROI from the social media ad campaign. What Can Affect ROI? A few things can affect ROI from content marketing, both for the good and the bad. One factor is how much of your content you actually use. One survey found that 70 percent of content produced by B2B content marketers never saw the light of day. When you pay for content but don’t use it, you’re pretty much just flushing money away. Spending way more than you need on content marketing and not making the most of what you’ve got is going to pull down your ROI. Your brand’s promotion efforts can also affect ROI. Publishing a piece of content and then doing nothing to promote it is nearly as bad as paying for content and never posting it. You’re not making the most of the content, and you’re not helping it realize its full potential. Your blog post or video could be a runaway, viral hit. It just needs some help from you to get there. Some factors can be positive. A major publication or popular influencer could pick up a particular piece of your content to share. This could lead to it reaching a wider audience than you ever anticipated. Exposure of this kind will push the ROI of that content up when a greater number of people end up making a purchase. How to Improve Your Content Marketing ROI If you (or the executives at your brand) are concerned that the ROI you’re seeing from content marketing isn’t what it could or should be, there are ways to give it a boost. The first thing to do is to take a look at your content. Do you have content pieces that were created and that never saw the light of day? If you have pieces that you never got around to publishing, what was it about them that made you not want to post? Is there anything you can do to salvage them or get them ready for prime time? It’s also worthwhile to take a look at the content you have that’s done well. What types of content seem to perform best for your brand? It can be worth it to focus on that sort of content from now on, as it’s proven to provide the best ROI. Finally, take a close look at how you’re promoting your content. If you’re not doing anything, it’s time to start. Know that it will cost more money. By promoting your content through social media, influencers, or other paid avenues leads to more people taking action. Fear not, for the extra cost will be worth it in the long run. Money isn’t everything. However, when you’re trying to prove the value of content marketing to the higher-ups at your brand, ROI can be the one leg you have to stand on. AUTHOR BIO IZEA operates IZEAx, the premier online marketplace that connects marketers with content creators. IZEAx automates influencer marketing and custom content development, allowing brands and agencies to scale their marketing programs. IZEA influencers include everyday creators as well as celebrities and accredited journalists. Creators are compensated for producing unique content such as long and short form text, videos, photos, status updates, and illustrations for marketers or distributing such content on behalf of marketers through their personal websites, blogs, and social media channels. Marketers receive influential content and engaging, shareable stories that drive awareness. For more information about IZEA, visit https://izea.com.
The Top 7 Must-Have B2B Sales and Marketing Tools for Entrepreneurs Posted on August 3, 2018December 15, 2022 by Jonathan Herrick If you’re in the B2B sphere, you know the value of digital marketing. But if you’re also an entrepreneur, you’re probably working under a restrictive budget, constraining your funds on potentially risky expenditures such as new sales and marketing efforts. And more than that, you can’t afford to look unprofessional – meaning you want to avoid tacky digital watermarks, stale templates and anything else that gives off the wrong impression about your brand. And then there’s the issue of overlapping duties. Luckily, entrepreneurs are best positioned to align their sales and marketing teams and cultivate an office culture wherein both work off each other, flying in the face of traditional systems that disconnect the two. The best part? That model fits neatly into businesses running with a tight budget. So when it comes to software tools, you can tackle them from the perspective of a triple-whammy: these are the best products to align your sales and marketing teams, show off a professional front and keep things under financial control. Adobe Spark Is a full-time graphic designer too costly for your budget? Don’t want to wait for your freelancer to get back to you? Adobe Spark is a brilliant, free, easy-to-use design software that allows you to simply create memes, inspirational quotes, videos and slideshows in minutes. The developers update it frequently, and in the last year alone it’s improved vastly, with many of its initial glitches gone and a wider array of fonts and styles now available. The best part for digital marketers may be its social templates. Create a banner ad, and you can resize it for Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, making sure nothing gets awkwardly cut off on the sides. Google Analytics Obvious? Yes. Necessary? Definitely. Google Analytics is the go-to cost-free analytics software on the market right now, and it’s a savvy marketer’s dream. With Google Analytics, you can find out your website’s sore spots, hone in on weak pages, pinpoint your successful blogs, evaluate your calls to action and determine which acquisition avenue is your most successful. It’s a complex beast, but it’s hugely necessary to steer your digital presence in the right direction. You (or someone on your team) should check it every day. Unbounce If you’re in need of a landing page builder (which most businesses are), Unbounce is the best choice. This long-heralded software allows you to create well-designed, optimized landing pages with optional pop-ups, contact info, social handles and submission forms. All pages are SSL encrypted, and you don’t have to touch your website’s code. Drag-and-drop tools make the design process easy, while A/B testing and analytics encourage you to tweak it as you go. Landing pages are an absolute must for every B2B business. Unlike some of the other apps on this list, Unbounce isn’t free. But pricing starts at just $79 per month, and if you weigh that versus the costs of a full-blown web developer, it’s a no-brainer. Attach.io Ever wonder if that client ever actually opened that proposal you sent? Attach.io adopts that innate social curiosity we’re not accustomed to from platforms like Facebook Messenger and iMessage (“It says she saw this three days ago! Why the heck hasn’t she responded?!”) – and brings it into the B2B universe. This tool can track what email attachments get opened and even which pages of a PDF get read. This is a great insight, not just because it feeds into the very social anxieties that are driving us all nuts in the digital world, but because it actually tells you which of your clients or leads are engaging with you. Attach.io creates engagement reports based on the percentage of a document viewed and time spent with it open. This qualifies your leads on a whole new level. Pricing starts at $9 per month, though you’ll need a higher-level subscription for custom branding and the analytics dashboard. NetLine Having trouble finding enough leads? Automated lead-generation tools can be tricky, but some services are worth checking out if you need a boost. NetLine lets you set your overall budget and offer up a lead magnet in the form of a piece of content you’re looking to promote, and in a matter of hours it churns out qualified leads you can work with. The downside? It can be a pay-to-play tool. Since you pay for the quality of the leads, entrepreneurs with smaller budgets may find it frustrating. Like Google Adwords, NetLine can be a bit of a money pit if you don’t know the ins and outs yet. But it’s worth investigating for those moments you’re feeling lost in the sales cycle – and its adherents swear by it. Hunter.io This is a brilliant time-saver for salespeople looking for specific email addresses. Sign up for an account that costs a grand total of $0 per month, and Hunter.io will track down every associated email it can find. You can also input (again, for free) individual names and address to find that person’s email address – and if it can’t be found, Hunter.io will create a “best guess” based on the template that domain often uses (e.g., firstnamelastname@url.com). Hatchbuck Sure, we’re biased, but Hatchbuck’s integrated sales and marketing tools will make both teams’ lives significantly easier. We promise. With CRM and email automation all in one place, you can keep tabs on those leads you’re attracting and capturing with every other tool on this list. With Hatchbuck at the hub of your marketing stack, your business will have the tech tools you need to grow sales and scale.
5 B2B Lead Generation Hacks You Can Use This Summer Posted on August 1, 2018November 18, 2022 by Jessica Lunk The summer can be a tricky time for business. Your best prospects are on vacation, and leads may seem a little harder to come by. You’re probably even more inclined to spend a free moment at the pool rather than refining your digital marketing practices. But let’s face it: if you slow down on lead generation now, you’ll be paying for it months down the road. That’s why we’ve compiled the following list of five lead generation hacks to use this summer. They’re straightforward enough that even the most unmotivated marketers can see a little more ROI without having to put forth a ton of effort (or expend a lot of budget). Lead Generation Hack #1: Tweak your homepage into more of a landing page. If you’re like most businesses, your homepage gets the vast majority of your total site traffic. But traffic alone doesn’t equate to sales – you need to convert these anonymous site visitors into leads that you can market to, again and again. The trick is to treat your homepage as a landing page. Limit the options site visitors have when landing on your main page, in order to drive them toward offering up their coveted contact info. Populate your home page with essential keywords about your core offerings. And most importantly, place a clear and irresistable call to action above the fold that aligns with your core messaging. For example, if you’re a graphic design firm that boasts quick and beautiful custom graphics, offer (in exchange for a name and email address) your homepage visitors a free course in basic design, a PDF about design secrets, or an eBook “ultimate guide” to basic design. Lead Generation Hack #2: Do one really awesome webinar. Webinars are all the rage (especially for B2B), and it’s no wonder: 20-40 percent of webinar attendees are likely to become qualified leads, according to this ReadyTalk survey. You probably already know that giving something valuable away for free is a fantastic way to capture leads, so now it’s just a matter of doing it! Keep your webinar short, simple, and focused on one thing. Your prospects will appreciate you for considering their time, and keeping the webinar focused on one subject will ensure you’re really providing something helpful rather than a broad overview that they could’ve found with a Google search. One thing to keep in mind: nothing turns attendees off faster than a dull speaker, so get excited about your topic and make sure it shows in the way you present your material. Lead Generation Hack #3: Automate it. Use a chatbot tool to create custom messages that appear when your site visitors are on different pages. The key word here is “custom”: if you’re sending the same broad offer to all of your site visitors, you probably won’t see a big jump in qualified leads. But if you extend offers that are relevant to the content your visitor is already exploring, you’re almost guaranteed to see a significant increase in prospects. Plus, once you’ve programmed your chatbot, you don’t have to lift a finger. How’s that for lazy summer lead generation? Lead Generation Hack #4: Tweak your forms. You may only need to make a couple of small adjustments to your existing forms to see a serious uptick in leads (and start generating higher-quality ones for you and your sales team). According to the latest marketing data, forms that convert most successfully share the following qualities: They’re short and relevant. Avoid using more than four or five fields, and include only what’s absolutely necessary. In many cases, this may only be a name and email address. Imagine the user’s perspective. Little details like inline error notifications (for instance, “include your area code” in the phone number field) or using radio buttons instead of drop-down menus can make things easier on your prospects and increase their likelihood of completing your forms. Provide “required” and “optional” fields. This is a good tactic to potentially capture more data about customers who are willing to provide additional info — without estranging those who prefer to only offer a name and email. Test some of these changes on your site’s forms and see if they make a difference. Lead Generation Hack #5: Use an exit popup to grow your email list. We can all agree that popups can be overwhelming and annoying at times. You don’t want a popup in your face when you’ve just arrived on a site for the first time and have no idea whether the content you’re about to read is valuable or not. That’s why it may be wise to test an exit popup that’s triggered when a user mouses up to close a tab in their browser. These can feel less intrusive than banners or popups that appear a few seconds into a user’s experience on your site, but still have all of the potential to capture an email address that you can now use in your remarketing. Most importantly, focus your lead generation efforts on one or two strategies at a time. If you spread yourself too thin you’re unlikely to see results – but if you keep focused on one thing and hone it to perfection, you can build up from there.
What is Multi-Channel Attribution and Why is It So Important? Posted on July 30, 2018July 30, 2018 by Allie Wolff Imagine, for a moment, that you’re eating in a restaurant. You’ve passed by this restaurant a few times – plus they’ve been advertising in your neighborhood and on social media – and after a couple of months, you finally decided to eat there. You order a veggie burger, and it’s pretty delicious. The decor is lovely. The waiter serves you quickly, and you tip them well. You leave the place a good review on Yelp. So, who gets credit for the review? Is it the chef, who made the meal? Or the waiter you tipped 20 percent? Or the advertisements that brought you there? Or the interior decorator who created the ambiance in the restaurant? Or the restaurant’s social media manager for catching your eye on Facebook? Or the owner of the restaurant who oversees the whole operation? When you break it down, to some respect, everyone deserves some sort of credit. It’s the sign of a well-oiled machine, where all the gears are working together to create a final product (in this case, a pleasant atmosphere surrounding a nice meal). In digital marketing, multi-channel attribution works much the same way. When your business gains a new customer, if your only analytics source is the last click-through to your site, you would (often wrongly) believe that said click was the only reason they bought something from you. You would be blind to the myriad ways they may have first heard about your business. That’s where multi-channel attribution is important. Multi-channel attribution assumes a certain percentage of credit belongs to each marketing effort that someone saw before finding your product and allows you to see the channels that are fueling your lead generation efforts. First: What is multi-channel attribution? To best understand multi-channel attribution, it helps to imagine a customer’s journey. To translate the restaurant metaphor above, let’s say someone searches for “SEO marketing agency” on Google and sees your Adwords ad but doesn’t click it. Days later, they see your banner ad when reading the New York Times. A week after that, they see a post you boosted on Facebook. The following month, once they finally have the time and extra money to devote to an SEO firm, they remember your brand, search for it, click on an organic link and sign up from there. In a typical attribution model, “last interaction” would indicate that your organic search channel should get 100 percent of the credit for this sale. But in reality, it was a combined effort over time. Image Credit: BrightFunnel In reality, there may be billboards and word of mouth involved, too, but because of the nature of marketing, we simply may never know the whole picture. So we’re limiting our analysis to the digital marketing sphere for now. What are the types of multi-channel attribution? If you’re looking for an alternative model to “last interaction,” there are several often used. There are others that attribute 100 percent of the credit to a single channel. Those three are: Last Adwords click is a sometimes useful model that, like “last interaction,” assigns 100 percent of the credit to the most recent Adwords campaign that your customer clicked before filling out a form, downloading a resource or making a purchase. If you want to determine which Google ad makes the strongest impression, this is valuable. Last non-direct click is a standard Google Analytics model, which gives conversion credit to the last channel clicked from, be it social, email or organic. It’s typically broader, but easier to understand. First interaction is, as the name implies, the opposite of “last interaction” – which is to say, wouldn’t the first impression someone has of your brand be the most important? If you want to see where your customers first discover you, this is also a useful method and can help you start building out your customer journeys more clearly. And then there are three more models that take a more nuanced approach. Rather than attributing all the credit to a single channel, they distribute it evenly among multiple channels. Linear attribution gives equal weight to every interaction a customer had before they made a purchase. It’s rarely accurate, as it’s unlikely that someone would be as influenced by a banner ad as a social campaign or Google search result, but it’s good for highlighting all the ways in which people might discover your brand. Time decay is interesting, in that it assigns a higher value to more recent customer interactions. For example, if someone saw three of your digital ads, the most recent might get 50 percent of the credit, while the one before might get 30 percent, then 20 percent for the first one. It assumes – with some justification – that repetition is the strongest way to convince someone to buy something. Position-based is the final model. It lets you assign particular amounts of credit to certain channels – Google Analytics’ default is 40 percent to the first and last interactions, and 20 percent divided among interactions in between. Typically, the first and last impressions should be the most impactful, so there’s some logic behind this; however, you can tweak this and create your own model based on your data. Which attribution model is right for you? The smartest course of action is to create your own attribution model using your own historical data. This will require a few months, or even years, of information to cull and learn from, but once you’ve established your customers’ buying patterns, you can better understand where people are dropping off in your funnel. For a B2B just beginning to build out a multi-channel attribution model, Google Analytics is a great place to get started. If you want to spend money wisely – and make it efficiently – then establishing a unique and comprehensive multi-channel attribution model is a critical step.