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The Importance of Leading with Your Marketing Strategy
The Importance of Leading with Your Marketing Strategy
I’ve heard people advise businesses to “Go out and pinpoint what you like about competitors’ (or even non-competitors’) branding and marketing content and duplicate their tactics as part of their marketing strategies. It’s not all bad advice. Seeing what your competitors are doing is critical to figuring out how to differentiate your brand. And looking to your favorite brands for inspiration is also a good idea. However, when it comes to flat out imitating another business, we disagree entirely.
Every business should tailor its marketing strategy and ensure that it is truly unique to their business, rather than relying on industry “best” practices or the latest marketing trends. That’s why one of our mottos here at Gray Matter Marketing is “Strategy Over Tactics.”
Instead of going off a checklist of tactics or throwing a bunch of tactics at the wall and hoping something sticks, we create a custom marketing plan
based specifically on your needs, audience, resources, budget, and goals.
Maybe you’re not convinced yet. After all, if another business, specifically a competitor, has success, shouldn’t you? Unfortunately, the answer is a resounding “No,” and here’s why:
No two businesses are alike
Even if you and your competitors sell the near-exact product or service to the exact same people (which is highly unlikely), your businesses are still supremely different. Your culture and people, your relationships with the marketplace, your internal resources (i.e., budget, tech, and staff), and the assets you’ve developed will vary widely.
Before you compare yourself to everyone else and try to copy their marketing approaches, remember:
- If your business is brand new, you likely don’t have the email database or social media followers of a more established business, so digital marketing may not work the way it does with your competition.
- If you are a startup or small business, chances are you don’t have the budget to compete with a larger or established brand in the same capacity. You simply can’t do what they’re doing—but that’s not even the best reason to skip the imitation tactics.
How you interact with your customers may be different
Wendy’s restaurant is notorious for being savage on Twitter, particularly when it comes to dragging major competitor McDonald’s. And the slang, sarcasm, and pithiness appear to work for them. They have millions of followers and decent engagement. Still, try that approach with an older, more conservative customer base, and that tactic will backfire big time.
Gain a clear understanding of who your customers are, their expectations and challenges, and how they like to consume information. Then go where they are. For example, if they’re more likely to read blogs, write blogs, but if they are big consumers of social media, invest there. While you don’t want to rely on just one strategy (i.e., email), it’s not necessary to have a presence on every social media platform or use every channel out there.
Our best advice: Start small, ensure that you can maintain the consistency and frequency of whatever it is you do, whether that is posting to Twitter or blogging, and then grow from there. Be sure to monitor the results of anything you do. If something isn’t gaining any traction, let it go so you can focus on tasks and projects that generate results. And don’t be afraid to ask your current customers (and don’t forget your sales force) how they want to receive information and tweak your tactics and marketing dollars on this information.
You need to understand and communicate your differentiators
People are inundated with messages, so you want to stand out from the rest. That means showcasing how you are different, and being unique, not mimicking what someone else is doing. So, if anything, look to competitors for what to do differently or better, not for what you want to adopt.
If you have a value proposition (your promise to your customers about how you will provide them with a value differently from everyone else), you may want to revisit it once a year and determine if it’s still viable based on the competitive landscape. If you don’t have a solid pitch, I’d recommend developing one ASAP.
So, imitation is out – now what?
Build a custom strategy tailored to the specific needs of your business and your customers. If you want to develop your brand identity and build a marketing strategy that will help you reach profitability faster, we can help. Learn about our services here.
Why Understanding Your Unique Differentiators Is Essential When Marketing
On behalf of the entire Gray Matter Marketing team, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
Marketing is a dynamic field where businesses must continuously adjust to keep in touch with their audiences. Falling too far behind can easily result in the demise of a once-popular brand, as competitors move ahead. Trends are often a result of emerging tools and technologies, but they can also arise from unforeseen circumstances such as the COVID-19 pandemic. It can be difficult for a business to effectively keep up with all these new marketing trends, but they can test most of them before deciding which are likely to deliver the highest ROI. Check out the below sales and marketing trends to watch out for in 2023. Greater Synergy with Internal Departments The most significant advantage to creating synergies between sales and marketing is the ability to get a clearer picture of customers. Marketing teams can research customer hobbies, interests, and demographics, which can then be shared with Sales. Sales teams can also provide vital information on their current and potential audiences to Marketing while validating the data that the marketing teams develop. Creating clear information pipelines between these two departments (as well as others within an organization) will go a long way to grow revenue and improve internal respect and morale. This might even contribute to the difference in market share movement in 2023. Short-Form Video Marketing Short-form video content has taken the marketing world by storm, mainly because it resonates with today’s shorter attention spans. TikTok remained the most downloaded app on the Google App Store for the second year. Platforms, such as Twitter, have also introduced a feature akin to Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. More brands will integrate short-form videos into their content strategies for 2023, for both B2C and B2B marketing. However, this content doesn't eliminate the need or even the power of longer videos and live-streamed content. Brands will still look to create live-streamed events because of the higher engagement levels they draw. Long-form videos deliver more profound insights into product features or other matters. SEO Strategy Search engine optimization (SEO) remains an essential ingredient in the marketing strategy mix. SEO is no longer just about simple-to-write content for Google Snippets. Companies are investing in experts to help them understand search insight reports. Brands should take any opportunity to optimize their content and ensure that you're titling YouTube videos, TikTok hashtags, and much more correctly. Mobile Optimization The fact that more than half of all web traffic today is via mobile devices is not just a mere statistic. It means that developers must build their websites and apps with a mobile-first mindset. Websites need to be responsive to offer a seamless experience regardless of the device used to browse. Businesses that are still relying on old and unresponsive websites run the risk of losing customers because of the poor experience. Continued Use of Influencer Marketing The use of influencer marketing is not new. However, those already investing in influencer marketing indicate they will continue doing so. In addition, there is an increased focus on working with micro-influencers. These are not A-list celebrities but typically have a community of thousands of followers with whom they highly engaged and are well-trusted. Working with these influencers can increase the brand's visibility, awareness, and sales. Micro-influencers also sometimes focus on one or two niches, such as travel or fitness. Working with several micro-influencers is sometimes more effective than relying on one major celebrity. User-Generated Content An often effective but underutilized strategy is user-generated content, which can create more trust than what’s coming directly from a brand. In 2023, companies can take advantage of unboxing videos, branded hashtags, and other reviews to increase their mentions, visibility, and trust in the user community. User-generated content is also not expensive to create and helps a brand appear authentic. Experiential Marketing After taking a forced break because of COVID-19, brands are back to creating experiential marketing events. These events give an immersive experience to users either physically or using AR/VR gear. The great thing about such events is that they can be scaled according to a brand’s budget, meaning that even smaller companies can still create events for tens of customers. When this content is shared across social media, it is a powerful way to introduce new products, new features, or iterations of a product. Native Ads Native ads look and feel natural within the platform in which they are shared. On a platform such as Twitter, a native ad will appear just as any organic tweet on the user’s timeline. Native ads can be contrasted with banner ads on websites or advertisements that play before a YouTube video starts. Users are more likely to look at native ads because they do not feel that it’s intrusive or disruptive to their experience on the platform. Due to the higher ROI, we expect that native ads will become more popular, and more dollars will be invested here over other forms of paid advertising. Conversational Marketing Brands will continue to make use of conversational marketing as another way to interact with customers on their websites. Traditionally, brands would use lead forms to capture information from website visitors who were interested in their products or services. With this asynchronous form of communication, possible leads could wait for days for someone from the company to call them back or send an email. Conversation marketing leverages AI chatbots to engage customers in real time while they are still on the website. With natural language processing, it’s possible to understand what website visitors are interested in, answer their questions, and even make product recommendations. Real-time conversations are more likely to result in a conversion than back-and-forth email communication. In 2023, more companies are set to integrate this form of customer engagement on their websites and mobile applications. Blogs and Case Studies Will Still Be Around Just because video content is the newest thing doesn’t mean that other forms of content will disappear. Blogging is still a great way to keep audiences engaged and develop new leads. Blogs provide a way to create keyword-optimized content to improve website discoverability through search engines. Blogging remains a sound long-term strategy to position a company as an authority in a particular space. Case studies detail how a company’s product solved a client’s problem. They are great because they explain how the company approaches clients’ issues and customizes solutions to fit the case at hand. Decision-makers often rely on case studies when deciding whether to entrust a company with a significant assignment. Companies can also use case studies to explain the impact of work they could be/are doing in the community as part of their social responsibility campaign. Case studies can be used to justify these continued investments and help shareholders agree with the board’s decisions on community involvement projects. You can always repurpose blogs and case studies into easier-to-consume forms such as infographics, which can be shared across multiple platforms, with links to the longer form content to generate increased traffic. Designing Sales and Marketing Strategies Over the coming months, there will be dozens of sales and marketing trends. What’s important is for companies to develop a coherent strategy with tactics to actualize it. With social media, companies should pick perhaps four or five platforms to share content and engage with customers. It’s worth noting that customers see social media platforms as stronger avenues to access customer care services. Therefore, if a company commits to using a communication platform, they should deploy enough well-trained resources to serve the customer-base efficiently. Gray Matter Marketing is a full-service marketing, branding, and events management company. We help craft and implement marketing and sales strategies for clients and deliver messages authentically, using different avenues for communication. Reach out to us for a conversation on your sales and marketing strategy for 2023.
Conversational marketing is a B2B sales cycle approach that leverages chatbots, live chat, voice, and video calls to engage with potential buyers. Most of these tools are deployed on a company’s website to reduce buyer friction, increase lead conversion, and increase the sales cycle speed. Typically, a B2B sales cycle can take six to 12 months. The process is often drawn out because companies rely on lead capture forms, emails, and other one-way communication tools to prospect for new clients. In many cases, the drawn-out process leads to losing out on potential sales because a customer may fail to see or respond to an email or a call from a sales representative. Friction in the Sales Cycle Picture a potential client on a website with questions before signing up for an SaaS subscription service. Without a chatbot or live chat, they may be forced to write an email or fill out a form to request a call back from the company. This wait time may lead to losing interest in the service altogether. Another common problem is when clients cannot find the right content to help them understand a product better. Without the proper knowledge, they may not appreciate the value of a product or even be able to ask the right questions. It’s important to understand that filling out forms feels like work for most people, especially when they are not yet sure they want to sign up for a service or buy a product. The people charged with making purchase decisions on behalf of their companies are also human. The goal should be to make the purchase and onboarding route as smooth and natural as possible. The Value of a Conversational Marketing Strategy What happens when you implement a conversational marketing strategy? Better Website Conversions Perhaps the first thing you may realize is an increase in the conversion rate. More of the visitors to your website will become leads, and this will eventually translate into revenue. When people can find answers to their questions and the content they are looking for, they will be more open to filling in lead-capture forms or setting up calls with a sales representative. A significant bit to remember is that people want to feel like your company is accessible. Therefore, if you set up a call with them, it should happen as quickly as possible, if not immediately. Authentic Relationships with Clients Conversational marketing is a great way to build strong relationships with customers. When someone is always at hand to answer questions or give recommendations, people will see your business as being responsive and friendly. B2B relationships can last long, and a handful of clients can be a strong foundation for expansion. It, therefore, makes sense to set up pipelines for continuous conversations long after the initial contract has been signed. Freeing Up the Sales Teams Implementing chatbots on your website means that not every query needs to be handled by a human. Using AI technology, chatbots have become so good that they can decipher and answer frequently asked questions appropriately. The sales team is only engaged when more complex questions are asked or when a lead sets up a call. This approach increases the overall productivity of your sales team. Keeping up With Target Preferences Millennials are now part of the decision-making teams in companies. This generation and those younger than them are less drawn to making calls, instead leveraging texting and other methods of communication. They also prefer real-time interaction as opposed to waiting a few days for mail. By implementing chatbots and live chat on your website or app, you are catering to their preferences. One reason for the chatbots option is their 24-hour availability. In an increasingly remote-work world, both your staff and clients are likely to be scattered across multiple time zones. A chatbot on your website ensures visitors can still have their questions answered outside your official working hours. This round-the-clock availability can have a massive positive impact on revenue. Acceleration of the Sales Cycle Shortening the sales cycle ranks relatively high when enumerating the benefits of conversational marketing. Customers can quickly lose the sense of urgency and pain they had when they initially sought your product. By eliminating back-and-forth communication channels and using more real-time interactions, a business can reduce the time it takes to close new B2B deals. You can complete the deal quicker with real-time interaction before that urgency fades. Setting up Conversational Marketing Strategy Successful implementation of a conversational marketing strategy requires careful thought and choice of tools and brand voice. Audience : First, you must define your buyer persona. You must be clear about their pain points and how your product or service eases that pain. Being clear about your value proposition determines what you talk about when selling. For instance, is your most significant selling point the price or is it a particular feature? Are you comparing your product with that of a competitor, or is yours a blue ocean strategy? All these questions determine the kind of content you will create on your website, such as the FAQ page. Brand Voice : Your buyer persona also dictates the kind of brand voice you choose to adopt. In most cases, B2B interaction is formal. Context is also crucial because directness and formality vary depending on the industry. For instance, in the entertainment and events industries, B2B conversations are more likely to be relaxed compared to the legal services field. The Channels : One goal of conversational marketing is to direct as many qualified leads as possible to a sales representative and put them on a track to becoming customers. This should be done early during the interaction. You should therefore pick only the best channels that will bring in high-quality leads. For instance, you should have a chat on highly trafficked web pages on your site. These are pages where customers land when they are highly interested in your products. These might include the pricing, blog, or product pages. You can have the chat experience on the campaign landing page if you are running any campaigns. Revenue Measurement : To keep improving your conversational marketing campaign, you must keep measuring the results. The first metric to track should be the website conversion rates. These are the proportion of your website visitors that become leads by sharing their contact information on chatbot or live chat with an agent. You should also track the revenue growth from month to month to see your strategy's influence. Features For Your Conversational Marketing Engine Certain features are considered a must-have on your chat engine to get the most out of your conversational marketing campaign. First, you must route chats to the right sales representative. Immediately, a prospect fills out a form that briefly describes their issue or product of interest. They should be automatically linked with the right person to converse with. Another powerful feature is visitor deanonymization, which helps to understand who your visitors are and what they might be interested in. This allows you to sift through the visitors and only continue engaging with those likely to convert into business. Third, chat services allow you to conduct A/B testing to see which of two greetings or responses to questions leads to better conversion rates. It’s also paramount to think about what happens when prospects want to quickly sign up for service or have a product shipped to them. You can build the onboarding process on the platform your sales rep uses to serve customers. They should be able to share quotations with customers in real time, further shortening the sales cycle. Implement Conversational Marketing Today Conversational marketing is a powerful tool because it allows you to have the full attention of your audience. While the client gets to direct the conversation by asking questions they have, you have the power to curate an excellent experience for them using the right content and brand voice. To learn more about conversational marketing and how to leverage it for your B2B revenue growth, reach out to Gray Matter Marketing. We are a full-service marketing company that helps businesses research, strategize, and implement marketing campaigns.
Grassroots marketing is a non-conventional method where brands target a specific niche audience to inspire them to share the Company's message organically. To conduct an effective grassroots marketing campaign, a brand must research and define what the audience wants or cares for and develop a message accordingly. One of the most famous and successful grassroots marketing campaigns in recent years was the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, where participants would share a video of a bucket of ice being poured over them. Participants who accepted the challenge would also donate to the ALS Association. The viral challenge helped raise money while creating awareness about the ALS condition. Running a Grassroots Marketing Campaign The first step before starting a grassroots marketing campaign is to identify your target audience and what they care about. You can then zero in on a pain point you want to address through your movement and determine how your product can address the pain. You must also settle on the right channel to share your message. Engaging marketing professionals to develop the message is essential, especially when addressing a sensitive topic. Many well-intentioned messages were misconstrued and ended up being a PR crisis for a brand. For instance, when supporting a social cause or sending a message of support for an ongoing conversation, it’s essential to appear genuinely authentic. Audiences are very discerning and will not hesitate to call out a brand for sending or sharing raw, tone-deaf, or insincere messages to gain publicity. As you’re developing the strategy, you’ll need to determine how to gauge the success of the campaign. This might be based on the number of views a video has received or the number of times it has been shared. Grassroots marketing is seldom pushy or salesy. Therefore, it's hard to quantify their direct impact on sales, especially for brands that have existed for a while. For a new business, though, a viral video can directly lead to increases in sales. Why Is Grassroot Marketing Still Relevant In an age where people, on average, spend more than three hours a day on a smart device, grassroots marketing is an essential tool for brands to increase their visibility and endear themselves to audiences. Grassroots marketing can offer other advantages. Cost-Effective: Grassroots campaigns rely heavily on the audience to organically spread the message. Because the brand is not paying for visibility, more resources can be directed toward the content creation process. A prime example would be a brand hiring professional photographers and a film director to produce a short film to deliver a message in the most powerful way possible. High-quality content is more likely to have the intended impact. Such content is also more likely to enjoy longevity. Secure Feedback: Ads on traditional media do not allow audiences to provide feedback. At least not directly to the brand. When grassroots marketing material is shared on social media, it will spark conversations around a given subject. However, the feedback can often be about the content itself and how it could have been done differently. This feedback is crucial in enriching future grassroots marketing ideas. Targeted Messaging: Grassroots marketing is a good fit when you want to appeal to a highly defined target audience. A good example is minority college students or women trying to return to the labor market after taking a break. Narrowing in on an audience allows a brand to send a nuanced message. This increases the impact of the campaign. Boost Brand Loyalty: Over time, grassroots marketing can help build the profile of a business while also increasing customer loyalty. Campaigns that consistently create inspiring content and define their brand values have benefited immensely from this. People start to believe in the brand and become advocates. Overall, this competitive advantage can allow a brand to charge a premium for its products. Grassroot Marketing Ideas Grassroots marketing allows a brand to be expressive and let people know what they are about/stands for. When brainstorming for ideas, multiple angles are more likely to lead to the right campaign. Pull on the Heartstrings Appealing to emotions will always be a great way to connect with an audience. Feelings are essential in purchase decisions, even though people attribute their purchases to rationale. When a message is emotionally appealing, people are likely to share it with friends, family, and even on social media. Dove ran a successful grassroots marketing campaign on ‘Real Beauty’ that went viral because of the emotional appeal. They got a forensic sketch artist to draw sketches of women based on their descriptions of themselves. The artist then sketched the women based on other people's descriptions; in all cases, the second sketches were more beautiful than the first ones. The "you are more beautiful than you think" campaign video has more than seventy million views. Identify Causes to Support Another form of grassroots marketing is supporting charitable causes. However, a brand must be careful when selecting the kind of cause to get involved with. It must be a cause the brand managers genuinely believe in and are well informed about. Donating and posting about it on social media may not be enough. Certain matters call for a more surgical approach. For instance, if a brand supports a charity that gives meals to school children in a poor community, a one-time donation may not be enough. The managers may want to educate themselves on how comprehensive the problem is and what sustainable solutions could be implemented. This takes much more work than a donation and still-pictures for optics. However, when a campaign is implemented for a year, and tangible results are seen, this creates excellent grassroots marketing content because the brand is now truly a part of the community. On the choice of causes, careful selection is vital so that the brand does not involve itself in sensitive matters that result in a deviation from the primary business of the brand. Political matters are often a no-go zone for brands owing to the complexity of issues. Being Active on Social Media As a brand that wants to bank on grassroots marketing, it’s imperative to be active and develop a community of followers on social media. Interaction with your followers allows a brand to understand the different profiles of its customers. They might realize that certain new pockets of audiences are interested in a brand. These can be prime targets for a grassroots marketing campaign. Being active on social media allows a brand to develop a persona in the eyes of the audience. This ensures they do not appear inauthentic when they comment on current issues. Gray Matter Marketing can help you better understand your audiences and create authentic and current content for the perfect grassroots marketing campaigns. We are an end-to-end marketing company and will see your ideas from creation to implementation. Reach out to us for a consultation on your grassroots marketing needs.
Digital marketing is an important but hard to master art for many businesses. It goes beyond having a website and social media handle. It’s easy to make mistakes or have your message get swallowed up by the noise from other content that is available online. Effective digital marketing is a product of perfecting numerous skills, including research, search engine optimization (SEO), content writing and sharing, copywriting, web and graphic design, and so much more. This means there is a significant chance of making a mistake somewhere along the path. Potential Signs Fortunately, there are signs you can look for that might tell you that your digital marketing strategy isn’t effective enough and requires some adjustment. For instance, your marketing spend needs to result in a tangible return-on-investment (ROI). If the metrics you are tracking suggest that there isn’t a positive ROI, continuing with the current trajectory can result in a cash burn. This is often the case in start-ups that exhaust marketing budgets before achieving brand traction. Another sign that a marketing strategy is not working is when the current messaging is attracting the wrong audience or isn’t focused enough. Everything done by the marketing team should be strategic and deliberate. Each action should be designed to elicit a clear reaction from the target audience. Trial-and-error isn’t the ideal marketing approach. If you are leading a marketing team, here are seven mistakes that you must avoid when crafting and implementing a digital marketing campaign. Failing to Set Goals and Track Metrics Digital marketing must have clear goals and should be part of your overall strategy. Establishing smart (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely) goals, each with clear KPIs, should help you determine the communication channels that will be used. Each marketing campaign should have a period during which it will run. The marketing effort must also be in tune with the available budget. The digital marketing team should break down specific tasks to be carried out during the campaign and assign responsibilities accordingly. In many cases, marketing teams hire consultants or agencies for their expertise. When outsourcing any work, the deliverables must be specified in the contract to ensure the company gets a tangible ROI. A lack of accountability often leads to paying for retainer services without any demonstrable results. Failing to Create Buyer Personas Every brand should understand who their buyers are and how their personas impact decision-making. In cases where a company sells multiple products under one name, it must be clear to whom each product is targeted. This is extremely important in marketing because it affects pricing decisions, communication channels, and messaging. Buyer personas should be a product of empirical research and not developed from assumptions. You must know the profile of your target audience in terms of their interests, buying habits, incomes, hobbies, and other factors that determine how well they relate to a product. The voice of your brand should be relatable to the appropriate audience. Bad Website Design Your website design makes an important impression about your brand. Audiences extrapolate a clean and easy-to-navigate website to mean that your services or goods are equally impressive. Today, users expect to navigate a website as easily on a mobile device as they would on a computer, leading to the phrase ‘mobile-first development’. It means that websites should be responsive so that users get a seamless experience across any internet-enabled device. If your existing website wasn’t designed with mobile users in mind (and you don’t have an SSL assigned to the site), you are probably hurting your digital marketing strategy. You might have great content, but it isn’t converting because users do not enjoy being on your website. Once you sort that out, ensure that the website loads fast, and users can easily navigate it. This means that your call-to-action buttons as well as navigation links are easy to find. Poor Search Engine Optimization SEO refers to adjusting your content, website, and other channels so that your audience can find your brand more easily in a general web search. The primary part of SEO is ensuring that pages on your website are well linked to enable search engines to crawl and index your content. Further, when developing content, you should have your target audience in mind. Keyword research is necessary so that you find out which types of information or questions your audience is asking. Your content ought to be geared towards answering these questions. A good organic content strategy, born from proper keyword research, can lead to a steady stream of customers who see your company as an authority in a specific field. In addition, high-quality content lives a long time, and you might only need to refresh it every few years. SEO also applies to content you provide via other platforms, including YouTube and LinkedIn. Proper titling, descriptions, and inclusion of links to your other platforms are just as important as the actual content. Too Many Strategies at Once There is nothing wrong with having multiple objectives and strategies. However, if you do not have sufficient resources to pursue them all, you risk spreading yourself too thin. For instance, a small company with a marketing team of two people probably can't pursue a multi-pronged strategy that includes content production, social media posts, and paid advertising. The chances are that one strategy will not be pursued effectively, leading to a waste of resources. It’s better to focus resources in areas of strength and then spread organically. One way to combat this problem might be to outsource some marketing service to a consultant/agency. This way, you have a set monthly budget with clear deliverables. You can run this consistently for a pre-determined period and examine whether you achieved the intended results. Ignoring social media Social media is an important space today, whether you’re selling directly to end-users or to other businesses. As highlighted, your brand does not need to be visible on every platform, but it should instead go where the majority of your target audience is. Developing a brand presence on social media creates awareness for new customers but also improves affinity to the brand for existing customers. It is essential that you have consistency and professionalism in your messaging, are posting on a regular basis, are engaging with customers, and are including your employees so they understand your strategy. It is equally important to produce quality visual content because this reflects positively on the brand. It also protects the brand from legal or reputational damage from plagiarizing the content of other creators. Having a social media strategy is also important because customers will undoubtedly give some negative feedback or criticism on your products. The social media team should know how to respond to such feedback so that the brand doesn’t appear aloof or insensitive. Not Nurturing Leads Failure to understand the customer buying journey is a major reason for ineffectiveness in digital marketing. A lot of communication is aimed at increasing awareness of a brand’s existence to specific people. However, you need to invest more thought in how to use the goodwill the brand has to secure a final purchase. Brands need to recognize leads and keep in touch with them until the point of conversion (and even after if appropriate). One common way of doing this is by collecting emails and remarketing to these people. The company can send customers educational materials about the product or service they asked about. Another way to cultivate leads is through blogs that go deeper into explaining how the company’s products solve real customer problems. Other strategies of lead nurturing include sending samples to customers or inviting leads to try out a free trial of a subscription service. All these must be decided at the onset of the marketing campaign. Avoiding Mistakes Understanding the ins and outs of digital marketing can be a difficult task even for experienced marketing teams. As new communication channels emerge and audience demographics change, marketing teams must adjust. Drastic changes are rarely necessary, especially when current marketing channels and strategies are delivering a good ROI. However, exploring the opportunities that lie in new channels is always important. If your brand wants to craft and implement a robust digital marketing channel, you can reach out to the Gray Matter Marketing team. We offer customized marketing, branding, and event services. We help clients define how they want their brand to be perceived, then craft an effective strategy to achieve it. Reach out to us for our first conversation about your brand.
As we start to wind down 2022, companies are preparing their 2023 marketing budgets. By looking at surveys from different industries, we see multiple approaches to the budgeting process. One approach is the bottom-up method where the planned activities for the year determine how much the marketing department requests as part of the company’s annual budget. The second approach is top-down, where the marketing budget is determined as a percentage of the target revenue. Other companies use a hybrid of these. A more simplistic method is to use the previous year’s budget and adjust for inflation and expected additional costs. However, many industry experts think that using the top-down approach is the best way because it is forward-thinking and considers marketing to be an important driver of revenue. According to Gartner, marketing spends, as a percentage of revenue targets, fell to 6.4% in 2021 following the pandemic. This shows that there was a pull-back from spending by companies whose revenues were affected in 2020. However, in 2022, the allocation seems to have increased so that marketing budgets were at 9.5% of revenue targets for the surveyed companies. Economic Realities and Today’s Business Context Heading into 2023, companies are faced with a different kind of reality. There are growing fears of a global recession and inflation is at an all-time high in countries once considered to be strong and stable economies. In the UK, for instance, the pound fell to a 40-year low against the dollar in September. This makes imports more expensive and real inflation is thought to be in double figures for the first time in decades. According to several probability models, there is a 100% chance of a global recession in the next year. Companies might face a situation where employees demand higher compensation to cushion themselves against inflation. This might force companies to cut down margins on their goods and services to protect their markets and marketing budgets typically take the biggest hit (which can be a huge mistake). Spending by Channels Customer journeys are changing and it’s no longer viable to limit marketing communication to just a couple of channels. Currently, online channels are gobbling up 56% of marketing spend and this figure is only set to grow. Currently, social advertising is taking up 10% of companies’ marketing budgets , a sign that new media has wrestled the power away from traditional media. Search advertising remains strong at 9.8%, despite being around longer than social advertising. These two together with digital display and video advertising seem to the most preferred paid channels for marketing campaigns. The unpaid channels include funding search engine optimization (SEO) efforts through the creation of content and website conversions. Email marketing is still taking up 7.8% of marketing spend while messaging and organic influencing are 7.8% of marketing spend each. Increased Ambiguity The abundance of marketing channels might cause a company to spread its resources too thin thus compromising effectiveness. To combat this challenge, companies may prefer to work with external marketing experts to design a focused marketing strategy supported by a sound budget. Marketing experts will be more adept at scenario planning and adjusting the budget as markets change. These experts also understand nuances such as demographic changes and how they affect spending. In many cases, this might require conducting research or relying on studies published by reliable sources. When selling in multiple markets, marketing experts help fine-tune the message to suit local audiences. Whether you’re an in-house marketing team or are working with an external consultant, you should look at implementing best practices as you prepare your 2023 marketing budget. Align Marketing with Company Goals It’s imprudent to prepare a marketing budget without a strategic plan in place. The former should support the latter and marketing budgets ought to have a theme. For instance, if the company feels that it has been losing customers because of poor experiences, the marketing budget should include campaigns that show how you’re making improvements, such as onboarding, customer care, and feedback collection, improving the UI on its app or website, etc. Drawing a clear connection between planned marketing activities and revenue will be key. If you can conduct research to find out the most accurate way to segment customers, this might lead to the discovery of gaps for which the company may need to develop new products. The marketing function can be influential in developing an agenda in all the other functional departments by unlocking insights into the customers’ needs. Pay Attention to What is Working Marketing can quickly drain a company’s resources if there isn’t a plan and there’s a careless and experimental approach to how dollars are spent. Companies should gather objective data on the output of each channel currently being used. At least 60% of the marketing budget should go towards the best performing channels. Another 20% should go to emerging and promising channels with an intent to grow this spending if they result in success. Only 10% of a company’s spend should go to experimental channels no matter how popular they appear to be. This approach explains why offline channels still get 44% of all marketing spend today. It means that objective data shows they are still an effective way to connect to certain consumer segments. Study Your Industry Keenly Your marketing budget must be alive to the key trends in your industry. If you are the market leader, there may be a threat of new entrants in the market. In those circumstances, you need to figure out ways to assert your competitive advantage, through pricing, more efficient distribution and delivery times, or a brand awareness campaign. If you are the new entrant in the market, the goal might be to carve out a niche by identifying an underserved market and using marketing to make your audiences take notice. Be Aware of Trends As highlighted, 20% of your spend should go to channels that show potential for not only boosting revenue but also helping position the company strategically in the market. Creating content, both video and audio, can help achieve your positioning goals. Brands are using content to grow engagement with their target customers and spark dialog. For instance, investment companies producing educative content are driving conversations to help audiences think more critically about planning for their futures. Podcasts have become a way for people to make informed decisions on serious matters, such as where to go for college, holiday destinations, or a choice of an event planner. It's important for a brand to study how emerging channels are influencing customers' journeys and decide whether they too should invest in them instead of just following what everyone is else is doing. Don’t Forget Your Internal Audience As you develop your overall marketing budget, be sure to include dollars to support the growth and operations of your marketing team. Marketing technology, training sessions, team building events, and certifications will help ensure you are keeping up with the latest trends and are prepared to quickly pivot if markets and/or audiences change. In might also be a good idea to poll the sales department to determine if anything has been forgotten, such as launch parties, sales kits, etc., which will be important when educating the sales forces on new marketing and branding initiatives, campaigns, and messages. In-person sales is still important, especially as Covid restrictions have passed. Return-on-Investment To get the most out of your marketing budget, leadership needs to adopt the mindset that marketing is indeed an investment. This means availing sustained support for the marketing efforts so that sudden budget cuts do not undermine efforts. For instance, a brand awareness campaign might need to go on for more than one financial year. To quantify the return-on-investment, companies should invest in data analytics to get objective measures of the impact of marketing efforts. All this points to the fact that marketing is a major operation that requires surgical precision from the setting of objectives, budget projections, scrutiny, approval, implementation, evaluation, and finally adjustments. If your company is seeking a marketing partner to help craft and implement a marketing strategy and budget, reach out to the Gray Matter Marketing team. We are a full-service strategic company, handling marketing, branding, and events for our clients. We can help maximize the impact of your marketing budget through the development of a customized plan suited for your specific industry audience.
It’s estimated that more than 40% of the world’s population uses at least one form of social media. That’s 3.5 billion people. This number will only continue to grow, and business owners understand the impact that social media can have on their revenue. Businesses run campaigns on social media for reasons such as new customer acquisition and brand awareness. However, to truly understand the power of social media, a deeper dive is necessary. Today, brands can be omnipresent on all social media platforms to complement in-person meetings, conference attendance, etc. They can also direct their message to specific groups thus reducing overall spend while increasing the return-on-investment per marketing dollar. Brands do not need to spend millions of dollars to be as recognizable as Coca-Cola. In fact, the best and most common examples of successful social media marketing are small business owners who’ve built communities that form the core of their customers. There are also cases of social media posts going viral, leading to a big break for small businesses. While not every campaign will go viral for your business, there are several reasons to start using social media for your business today. 1. Build Credibility In today’s environment, people research brands or specific products before making their first purchase. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a hotel they intend to book or an investment account they want to open with a bank—people want to hear the experiences and opinions of other people who have interacted previously with the brand. A social media presence can be important so that prospective customers can see your interactions with customers and success stories. Having active social media handles also gives prospective customers the assurance that they can always request support through these channels should they run into issues while using your products. Quick responses on social media tend to be taken as a reflection of your customer service quality. 2. Grow Your Audience Producing social media content is one of the most popular ways to grow your following (both existing and prospective customers) online. The content, however, needs to be engaging, meaningful, and deliberate and should be part of a well-thought-out content strategy that is geared towards attracting a certain audience. A following is important because these people are drawn to your brand and represent low-hanging fruit in terms of conversion into customers or ambassadors for your brand. An audience also makes it easy to introduce new products to the market. From your audience, you can draw samples to test new pricing, new packaging, blends, colors, and so on. However, to quickly grow and maintain an audience that engages with your business, you need to be consistent with content production. 3. Generate Brand Awareness Increasing your audience online helps to make your brand more recognizable. People who already easily identify your products in physical and online stores will also identify your other campaign assets such as billboards, brochures, and posters. Familiarity matters in purchase decisions. Brand awareness is one step on the purchase decision journey and it’s on your marketing team to take new audiences from the awareness stage to the purchase stage as quickly as possible. 4. Track Social Listening With billions of people online every day, there is a chance that your customers are talking about your brand. It’s important to be aware of such conversations and if possible, share useful information when called upon. Social media listening involves tracking mentions of your brand, and other keywords in online conversations. Social media listening tools also provide the ability to tell the general sentiment about your brand. Such insight is important because it can inform decisions that can save your business from loss of clients. For instance, social media mentions about poor customer service can lead to retraining sessions. Complaints about the complexity of an app can lead to the redesign of the app’s user interface. Social media engagements with customers are an opportunity for the business to come out as authentic or “human” by accepting feedback and criticism and making noticeable changes. 5. Measure Marketing Efforts All major social media platforms provide an analytics section that can help you assess the impact of your marketing efforts. You can look at organic metrics such as the number of followers gained. You can use listening tools to look at mentions of your brand name to assess whether you’re creating a buzz through your campaigns. For organic marketing, social media companies sometimes provide an estimation of earned media value (EMV) to determine how much you would have spent to attain the reach you’ve received organically. With paid marketing on social media, you’ll always be able to see the number of impressions or reach of individual posts. They also monitor the click-through rate when your campaign is meant to redirect people to an external website. 6. Drive Though Leadership Social media is not just a place to promote a brand’s products. Too many outright sales posts will fatigue your audience and they might lose affinity for your brand. A more organic strategy keeps them engaged. Thought leadership posts are opinion pieces created by people within your business where they share expertise on different issues. Social media is a great place to determine questions that the audience has, as well as concerns, challenges, or things you may be unaware of. Opinion pieces might address these questions and issues as well as emerging issues in an industry, market, or even a country. Sharing opinion pieces consistently places a brand or the specific writer as a provable expert in a field. In the B2B business space, this can lead to new speaking opportunities as well as new business leads. It’s a great way for the company to stay top-of-mind in the decision-making circles in an industry. 7. Increase User-Generated Content Producing regular, engaging social media content can be difficult for a brand. For instance, creating one or two marketing posts a week is considered as enough most times. However, conversations by your followers are a great way to get recognition from new audiences. User-generated content also includes replies to your posts, shares, and retweets. In fact, user-generated content is a far more effective marketing tool because it is unbiased, whether positive or negative. Therefore, by being on social media, you create a spark for user-generated content that helps to scale the magnitude of your marketing efforts. 8. Personalize Interactions One major difference between social media and other paid media is the fact that audiences can now share their feedback after seeing a post. This is very important for users today because it makes the brand accessible to them. More importantly though, it’s a chance for the business to personalize interaction with users. For instance, when a user asks a question, the brand can personalize answers. Personalized interactions present opportunities to create new leads for the business. For instance, based on a user’s location, prospective leads can receive invites to a company’s offices or follow-up calls to ensure their issue was solved or questions were answered. Other Benefits of Having a Social Media Presence When we hear the term social media, our minds will immediately think of the largest platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. However, there are opportunities to tap into other non-mainstream channels that help you focus on a particular audience. For instance, LinkedIn presents an opportunity for companies to share what life is like working at their company. This can be especially beneficial in attracting new talent. LinkedIn is also quite popular for sharing thought leadership articles on industry and HR matters. Best Practices When Creating Social Media Strategy Several things will help your business get the most out of social media activities. Having clear objectives is crucial so be sure to set key performance indicators to help you along the way. List down your objectives and rank them according to priority so that you allocate your resources appropriately. Another important best practice is to be clear about who your audience is. What kind of language do they use? Your social media copy is important in ensuring you engage your audience properly. Also, make sure you develop your company’s brand voice and stay consistent with your value proposition and messaging. Without a specific voice, your messaging will be all over the place and not effective in building an audience. Be sure to engage your employees when developing your social media presence and campaign. They can help expand the reach of your posts to their followers as well and can provide feedback on your content as they are talking to customers all the time. Working with Experts If your business wants to use social media effectively, working with an experienced marketing consultancy is the right place to begin. At Gray Matter Marketing , we work with clients to develop and implement an online brand strategy that’s fitted to suit their objectives. Whether you want to grow an audience or develop more affinity for your brand, we will craft a strategy for you. Reach out to us today for a consultation session .
According to research by Ahrefs , more than 90% of all website content drives little to no traffic from search engines. This is quite a stark statistic given the time and money organizations put into creating and publishing content. Some blog posts perform better than others and you can repurpose them because people are clearly interested in the topic. However, it should worry you when a big portion of your content receives no visits or drives little conversion. There could be many reasons why web content may not deliver conversions as expected. The content’s quality may not be good enough. For instance, for highly sophisticated products, potential customers may need to understand how the product works or will solve their need. The web content should perform the role of informing and convincing potential clients. If the content is not good enough, conversions will be low. Other potential reasons for poor performing content could be the UI/UX design of your website. Visitors should have an easy time interacting with web content no matter the device they are using. Third, poor on-page and off-page content optimization could hurt the website conversion rate. All these possible reasons mean that you need ways to continually improve the performance of the content. What are the right questions to ask regarding your web content performance? 1. Questioning Your Goals A major reason why some web content fails to make an impact is because the writer did not understand the purpose. Web content must always be developed with a clear goal in mind. Some content is meant to simply create awareness about a product or help educate the audience on how a product works. Naturally, the latter type of content will be more detailed. Its audience is further down the sales funnel and closer to making a purchase decision. The content should therefore have an appropriate call-to-action (CTA) to nudge the audience to make an inquiry. When attempting to find areas of improvement, it’s important to consider why readers of your current web content may not be responding to a CTA. Have you made it easy to do so? For instance, if the CTA is to create an account and sign up for something, how fast is that process. A one-click signup process is far much more effective than a multi-step one. You should also question whether your audience is suffering from banner blindness . This is a phenomenon where website visitors subconsciously ignore information that looks like an ad. Therefore, if all your CTAs are big buttons and banners, users might ignore them, which hurts your conversion rates. To get around this, you can switch some of the banner CTAs for anchor-text keywords. These are keywords you naturally use in the content you post. In fact, you can run an A/B test on both scenarios to determine whether indeed the audience ignores banners. 2. How Consistent Are You? Next, you need to assess whether you have done enough to earn the audience’s trust. A higher trust index makes conversions easier. First-time visitors to your website may be unwilling to give up private information. The best way to earn trust on the web is to deliver high-quality content consistently. While setting goals, it’s important to have this in mind. Do you have a calendar for your web content? A content calendar holds you accountable for how often you put out information. It also requires prior thinking about the type, topic, and length of content you want to put out. 3. Working with Professional Editors Another way to identify areas of improvement is to work with a professional editor. People within your organization may have great content ideas, but they may not have the ability to write it in a way that’s attractive and effective enough for the audience. It’s ok to get some help—collaborate with a ghost writer to flesh out outlines into full-length posts. The other option would be to work with an editor to help achieve the right tone through the choice of words and writing style. The other advantage of engaging an editing service is to help remove any errors in your web content that you may have missed juggling content writing with operational duties. There is always the temptation to hit the publish button immediately after you finish writing. However, it’s safer to let an editor review it. Minor errors on your website reflect badly on your brand. People will think that the carelessness in editing translates into the quality of goods and services the brand sells. 4. Checking for Outdated Content Part of the reason web content may not be doing well is that it is outdated. Search engines try to give users the latest and most recent information based on their searches. Therefore, a post titled ‘The Best Budget Phones in 2018’ probably isn't as relevant as it was four years ago. It’s important to go through your web content every so often to review such content and update it for the current season. You should not just change titles, but you must be diligent enough to carry out proper research so that the content is indeed useful in today’s content. Updating past content takes a much shorter time than researching for a new post from scratch. 5. Are You Using Enough Visual Tools? Another way to find areas to improve your content is to find opportunities to use more visual tools. These include images, charts, graphs, tables, and videos. Block content can be hard to read, especially when the content is 1,000+ words long. People have become accustomed to easy-to-snack content on social media and therefore you should emulate the same on your website. You can use visual tools within a post or use them to repurpose a well-performing piece of content. For instance, a blog post can be summarized using an infographic and shared on social media with a link back to your website. You could do a two-minute video summarizing a blog post and use it to drive traffic to your posts. More visual tools on your content will increase engagement of your posts and ultimately improve conversion. 6. Are you Leveraging Customers to Build Trust? Word-of-mouth referrals from existing customers will build trust with potential clients more quickly than any form of publicity campaign. As such, it may be useful to question how well you are leveraging the trust that current customers have in your product to win more customers. Some companies do this by including quotes from satisfied customers in the web content posted on the company’s website. But it may be more effective to find ways to get existing customers to share that content with their networks. This is why some content may have CTAs such as ‘share’ to maximize reach. Excellent Web Content Is King High-quality content is a gift that will keep on giving. It will build your brand as an authority in the sphere within which you publish. It can also win new leads and open opportunities such as speaking or writing engagements. A company that suffers from a high number of non-performing posts should look to find out the underlying reason. With more than one million blog posts being published on the web every day, only the highest quality content will have a net positive return on the time invested. If your organization needs help in crafting a web content strategy, reach out to Gray Matter Marketing . We can help craft and implement a winning web content strategy.
Long gone are the days when buying ads and sending out brochures and direct mail was considered just about enough for marketing departments. Brands today are actively seeking opportunities to increase their level of engagement with customers. They are designing new, innovative touchpoints to build loyalty and collect valuable information. Customer engagement provides an opportunity to guide potential customers through the sales funnel. It accelerates the purchase process and increases the conversion rate for the business. In turn, the business gets to improve its return-on-the-marketing budget. A well-thought-out customer engagement strategy boosts the experience of the brand for existing customers and increases their loyalty to the brand. If your company wants to grow its engagement with customers, here’s several strategies: 1. Mapping Your Customers’ Journey It’s important to understand how your customers think when buying your products. Begin by identifying all the touchpoints between your brand and customers. How do they notice your brand? Are you doing enough to amplify the brand? Second, establish where they get more information about the brand. Have you put out enough content on your website, social media, print, and brochures? Could you create experiences where they can interact with your product teams to ask questions? Do you respond to queries on email and social media? The third stage in the sales funnel is consideration. At this point, you need to ask whether you are helping customers along the decision-making journey. Is your website user friendly? Can customers book a demo? Is your pricing strategy correct? After customers have made the purchase, you need to interact with them to find out their experience, keep them as customers, and determine how to grow their lifetime value. 2. Create a Loyalty Program Loyalty programs serve several purposes for a brand. First, they are a great way to ensure repeat business and boost customers’ loyalty. When you reward customers with loyalty points, discounts, and gifts, they will speak about your brand and refer more people to it. It’s a way to create user-generated content that’s often persuasive and effective in driving behavior of prospective customers. 3. Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Chatbots are a way to keep engaging with customers even after office hours. Through artificial intelligence, it’s possible to monitor user activity on an app or website and pre-empt questions they may have or a chokepoint in their experience. For instance, through the chatbot, you could ask customers whether they have found what they were looking for or suggest they check out particular products. Chatbots are also great to respond to frequently asked questions. They eliminate the need for people to interact with human support, where they would normally be required to wait on call lines or for email responses. 4. Turning Customer Interactions into Conversations Whenever a customer contacts your organization with a query, they can be raising a new issue or a recurring issue. Your support team needs a 360-view of issues, concerns, and comments that a customer is facing so they don’t feel like they are talking to different personalities. It’s a better experience for customers when they feel that the representative, they are talking to is already aware of their past issues. Your company can implement this by turning interactions with customers into conversation threads. This way, it’s possible to retrace past interactions with customers. If there is a recurring issue, perhaps a different approach should resolve it once and for all. You should also ask customers to participate in a survey after interactions with support team members. The company then records feedback on whether a particular customer was served well. 5. Personalizing Customer Experiences There are numerous ways the business can personalize offers and messages they are sending or showing customers. For instance, when sending emails through an email-marketing tool, companies should include the first name of the recipient in the salutation. This makes customers feel that the company knows them. They will be more receptive to the message. The company should also set up messages to customers on special days such as the customer’s birthdays. As a company builds up the profile of a customer, based on activity, they should use this knowledge to personalize product suggestions. Recommendation systems have gone a long way in helping businesses massively improve the way customers experience a brand. 6. Get Maximum Value Out of Analytics Your business must get the most from the data it gathers in customer engagement. Data from customer satisfaction surveys will give insights on what the company should improve. Such information is used to improve training for customer representatives so they can serve customers better. Analytics should also be used to provide insights on how users are interacting with your website. For instance, if a certain product page is getting the most attention, perhaps the product needs to be featured more prominently on the home page. If a certain page is resulting in the most queries on the chatbots, it may require an adjustment of the content to address those queries. 7. Use Competitions The use of competitions on social media platforms are great for creating short-term excitement and engagement for the brand. The brand should be careful not to use this as the sole-way to engage with customers. However, they are great when creating awareness about a new product or when the company wants to gain more traction and followers. Competitions can amplify a brand as people share an opportunity to win with their friends. 8. Visual Engagement Tools Your business may consider video-engagement tools, such as co-browsing technology, that improve the quality of interaction with its customers. In this example, the customer support representative can follow visually, but securely, the browsing activities of a customer. The representative can help customers who are stuck on filling out forms or finding a product on a website. Another tool to improve customer engagement is video chat between customers and the support team. Video chat makes the interaction more personable compared to text-based interactions. Ways to Measure Customer Engagement Once your business implements strategies to improve customer engagement, it should assess the success of such endeavors. The metrics applied to measure success should be relevant to the strategies deployed earlier. Here are a few of the metrics. Average Order Value This is a measure of the average amount that customers spend when they make a purchase. Ideally, boosting engagement with existing customers should prompt them to spend more. If your business is running a subscription model, engagement should drive customers to upgrade their packages. If you are running an online store, you should attempt to make customers put more items in their carts. Normally, returning customers spend more than first-time customers. Engagement should focus on making clients return more frequently. Social Media Metrics Social media platforms provide dashboards where you can see how customers are interacting with your brands. Likes, retweets, shares, and comments are indicators of how well your content was received. On YouTube, average watch times can reveal whether a video resonated with the target audience. A combination of data from the various platforms you use will reveal what type of content you need to focus more on. Open Rates for Newsletters and Emails Your organization should use email marketing tools that can provide reports on how well email campaigns perform. Email marketing success metrics include open rates for emails sent and click-through rates for call-to-action button links included in such emails. Your organization can use A/B testing methods to try different subject lines and copy for your campaigns. Purchase Frequency and Repeat Purchase Rates Your organization should also look at how many times customers come back for more purchases in a particular period. Has the purchase frequency changed with the customer engagement efforts? You can measure the proportion of purchases that represent returning customers. A low repeat rate means the churn rate is too high. The aim should be to grow the proportion of repeat customers. Customer Engagement Strategy Consultancy Indeed, customer engagement is crucial in attempts to grow brand loyalty, sales revenue, and customer satisfaction. Achieving high customer engagement; however, requires a strategy that’s implemented methodically. Personalizing offerings to customers and loyalty programs will help improve the lifetime value of a customer. Competitions on social media can help create short-term hype around a product or an offer. Last, every strategy requires a method of assessing its success objectively. If your organization is seeking to implement a strategy to enhance the customer engagement on its various communication channels, Gray Matter Marketing can help draft and implement such a strategy.
