It might seem like a daunting task to manage an ecommerce website if you are an online retailer. There are many other tasks to be done, including inventory management, digital marketing, customer service, and advertising. Is a blog that important?

It is undeniably true.

Your blog will make your products and website more visible to potential and current customers. Your brand will be more trusted, your industry is more respected, and customers are more likely to choose you for a purchase.

However, managing an ecommerce website can be time-consuming and difficult. This is why we have created this comprehensive guide to help you get started. We'll be covering why a blog is so important for your business, how you can use it as a growth tool, and how to manage it efficiently on a daily basis.

Let's get started.

Quick Take-Aways

• Companies should consider ecommerce blogs because they can increase brand visibility, trust, authority, and credibility with their target audience.

• Your blog should be easily found on your website.

• Visual content can make your ecommerce blog articles more interesting and shareable.

• Content calendars are a great way to drive strategy. They keep you on track and accountable.

• You can save money by outsourcing content creation and create a more powerful blog.

Why is ecommerce so important?

Rankings for search engines

People will search for products online in 2021 using search engines. Search engines are responsible for 93% of all online searches. Search engines are the best way to rank your website and brand.

The best way to improve your search engine rankings is by maintaining an active blog. It is important to maintain a blog. Hubspot research found that blogs have 4434% more pages indexed than websites without them (and 55% more visitors).

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Brand trust builds

When deciding whether to purchase, trust in a brand is one of the most important considerations. Research has shown that trust is second to price in deciding whether to purchase new brands or to remain loyal to existing brands.

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It takes a lot of time and effort to manage an ecommerce blog, but it shows potential customers that you care about their needs beyond the products you sell.

Customers can build trust in your brand through blogs. They get to know you and engage with high-quality, consistent content.

Brand authority

Brand trust can be built by establishing brand authority. Your audience views you as an expert in the industry when you have brand authority.

You can build your authority and blog on your website by covering products and topics that are relevant to your customers. Customers will trust you to provide reliable information and solutions as you continue doing this over time. When it comes to making a purchase, they will know you are at the top.

Brand authority can also be contributed to by your blog in other ways — some of these we have already discussed. Your website ranking high on Google is a sign that your company is a leader in your field. Blog posts are shared frequently on social media channels. This builds social proof and shows potential clients that you're an expert.

Your ecommerce blog can be summarized as a way to show customers that they can trust you and also rely upon you to give accurate answers and expert insights.

Brand visibility increases

Ecommerce businesses benefit from blogs by increasing brand visibility. This is achieved in two ways: shareable content and search engine rankings.

We all know how important it can be to appear on search engine result pages (SERPs), so let us now focus on sharingable content.

It is content that people are likely to share via other channels. This is done by sharing it on their social media channels but also by sharing it with others in their networks when they find it useful or recommend it.

This is because people trust testimonials and recommendations of buyers more than brands. Your blog can be leveraged to build brand advocates that will voluntarily promote your products. A total no brainer.

Engage customers with ease

You have many ways to interact with your customers through blogs. When you share content they enjoy and interact with, you build trust. You can also interact directly with your readers via comments and social media posts that feature your content. This will make customers feel more connected to you and your brand, while also creating a sense of community within your audience.

The Complete Guide to Running an Ecommerce Website

We now know the reasons why an ecommerce website is important. Let's move on to managing it. We'll first discuss how to leverage your blog to grow your brand. Next, we'll discuss how to maintain your blog on a daily basis.

Make your blog a business tool

It's easy to find

Your blog should be as easy to locate as possible. Here are some surefire ways to achieve this.

Your blog should be placed on the main navigation of your website. The navigation on your site is what visitors use to navigate your content and decide if you can meet their needs. Make sure your blog is visible on your landing pages. This can be done by creating feature posts on your landing page that highlight popular or recent articles.

This is how Marketing Insider Group does it:

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It may seem like you feel that a blog on your main navigation, or landing page, could distract from other places where customers are being sent (e.g. to your ecommerce store for purchase orders), but most people spend only 15 seconds on your website and 95% of them will not return after their first visit. There is no perfect path to customer conversion.

It is better to make sure that visitors continue to visit your website. High-quality, relevant and interesting blog content is a great way to do this. To keep users on the right track, you can add CTAs or other conversion strategies to your content.

Make sure that it represents your brand's personality

This is an easy one — don't be boring! What is your brand's uniqueness? What makes customers want to purchase your products? What is your brand's tone? What are some of the most interesting things you can say?

When you build your blog content, ask yourself these and other questions. Your blog should not be used to rank high. Your brand should be represented on your blog. This should reflect in the topics you choose, your writing tone (ex. formal vs. informal or funny vs. serious), as well as your blog layout.

Make sure you are creative in creating ecommerce blogs that truly showcase the uniqueness of your brand.

Use lots of visual content

Visual content is one of the most popular and easily shared types of content on the internet. Consumers love video content. These are some statistics to be aware of:

• Cisco stated that video will make up 82% of all internet traffic by 2022.
• Videos have 53 times the chance of ranking on the first page of SERPs than any other SEO tactic.
• 84% of consumers were convinced to purchase a product by watching a video.

These are difficult numbers to ignore. Here are some insights on visual content.

• Infographics can be shared 3x more than any other visual content.
• Images on social media get 2.3 times as much engagement as posts that are text-only
• Images get 94% more hits than articles without images

This is the key takeaway: Engaging, high-quality, and shareable visual content is essential for all ecommerce blogs.

It should be promoted on your social media channels

You can be your brand advocate! You can grow your brand advocates army, but you shouldn't leave it to them to share your amazing content. For maximum visibility, post your blog articles to your company's social media channels. Encourage your employees to share them.

Day to day management of an ecommerce blog

Decide who is responsible

If it is an afterthought, managing an ecommerce website won't work. Make sure you have a clear idea of who is responsible for managing your blog. Effective communication is key to ensuring that the blog is a top priority for your team. Your blog will soon fall through the cracks, and you'll lose steam.

To stay on top, use a content calendar

Businesses use content calendars to manage their entire content strategy, including the ecommerce blog. There are many benefits to using them, including:

• It will help you stay organized and more accountable.

• This will give you a better understanding of your content. Instead of focusing on the next blog post, you will gain a greater understanding of your content trends and themes over time.

• It helps you to identify opportunities – A content calendar can help you identify potential collaborations and source content ideas from outside of your company.

• Better content leads to better results. Your content will get better over time if you plan it better. Higher marketing ROI means better content. Better content equals higher engagement.

Plan for larger business initiatives

Your company schedule is a great place to start looking for content ideas. You can plan content around key events such as product launches and sales.

If you have to outsource,

Did you know that 70% of brands outsource content creation to specialized agencies?

You probably don't have the time or energy to manage your blog strategy and write blog posts if you are a business owner. You might not be able to hire staff in-house.

Outsourcing can take care of what you cannot do in-house.

Partnering with professional content strategists and creators can help you build a more powerful blog without the need to go through all of the costly and time-consuming trial and error that comes with business blogging.

Outsourcing allows you to pay only for the services that you require and scale up or down as needed. You are more flexible and ready to pivot.

Get an ecommerce blog to boost your business.

Marketing Insider Group is here to help you make blog content a key part of your marketing strategy. Marketing Insider Group has a team that includes SEO writers and experts who will work together to provide you with ready-to-publish content every other week for a whole year. ).

Take a look at our Content Builder Services, or book a consultation to get started.

Content marketing is constantly changing. Content marketing is not something that you can set and forget in this digital age. Because of its effectiveness, content has been the foundation of branding, lead generation and sales campaigns across both inbound and outbound channels.

You may be able to fine-tune your content marketing approach by having more data access and better understanding your buyers' preferences.

We're sharing the most popular trends in content marketing that have been growing in popularity recently. These trends are relevant to digital marketing trends for next year. Find out why they are important and how to incorporate them into your content marketing strategy.

Here are top content marketing trends for next year.

1. Personalized Content
2. Brands go niche with content
3. How content marketing sounds with voice search will evolve
4. Content must be concise, not TL;DR
5. Diversified Content Brings in New Audiences
6. UGC continues to rock
7. Influencer marketing is evolving
8. Embracing Live Video
9. Interactive Content
10. The Written Word Speaks Louder
11. Automated Content Creation
12. AI-Powered Content Marketing Strategy

Trend #1: Personalized Content

You need to communicate with a sophisticated customer. One that is more personal and speaks to them on an individual basis. Because buyer expectations have changed, it is important to communicate with them in a way that is relevant.

Personalization gives you an advantage over your competitors. Demand Gen's study found that personalized lead nurturing can increase sales opportunities by 20%.

Because of its popularity, it is being called a trend. According to Forrester, 92% of marketers reported an increase in personalized advertising.

Personalization is almost entirely dependent on data. The more information you have about your customers the better it is to create meaningful messaging. It is up to you to determine what information you require, such as demographics, preferences, preferences, objections and how they use the products you offer.

It is not necessary to have a lot of data in order to start. A lead may give you their name and email address to provide you with one piece of content. You'll also know the prospect's interest in a topic by contacting third parties.

Create a campaign with a name, email address, and topic. This will allow you to offer additional content via email to those who meet this criteria. You'll then be able track whether they open the email or click on any links. You can personalize your emails based on how they interact with you brand.

Trend #2: Brands go niche with content

Content saturation is a problem regardless of your vertical. This is because most companies in the same industry publish similar content. It will become increasingly difficult to rank higher for certain keywords in search engines.

Some brands have chosen to be niche-oriented in their content in order to address this problem and stand out. This niche is usually found by combining a service or product you are good at with a particular industry. Instead of focusing on reasons to outsource app development, consider why healthcare should outsource app design.

One of the reasons our clients invest heavily in employee activation is because they know that it works. Do you have employees who are passionate about cats? Let them write about cats. Do you have employees who enjoy playing dungeons or dragons? You have employees who enjoy playing dungeons and dragons?

Recognize the diversity and stories of your employees!

Trend #3: Voice search will change the way content marketing sounds

Millions of people use screenless search every day. Asking a digital assistant a question is enough. They don't even need to use a smartphone or a PC. At least 20% of all searches are done via voice search and this number is increasing.

This will result in a change in content, as our writing and speaking styles are not always the same. It is important to take the time to adapt content for natural language search. This means asking questions and answering.

This style requires that you include full sentences and complete questions. Longtail keywords should be used in headers and titles. Optimize the natural language of pages and posts that you rank for using these search terms to take advantage of “near me”.

Trend #4: Content needs to be concise, not TL;DR

While the average word count in blog posts is increasing, the attention of the rest of humanity has fallen. Although longer content is more effective in organic search, users will not stay on page one of a search engine's results pages. This content is essential, but you cannot expect it to be long enough for all buyers, especially those who are connecting with your brand via social media.

For millennials, who are the largest generation of buyers, shorter content is more effective. A Demand Gen study also found that millennials prefer infographics and videos to other content when making decisions. These formats are vibrant, have movement and tell a story.

This trend can be leveraged by using more infographics and video on social media, and channels that target the millennial audience. Use your whitepapers, ebooks, and blogs as inspiration for creating new content.

Trend #5: Diversified Content Brings in New Audiences

If you only have one type of content, users will become bored. This is not the way things work anymore. Instead, you should expect your site to use different media types, including infographics, videos, podcasts and galleries.

This does not mean you have to diversify your skills (or your team's), but it can bring benefits. You won't have to spend as much creating new content if you diversify the way you present content. It is quite common to take content that has been successful in one media and put it in a new jacket. Then, you can show it again in another medium.

This is because users all have their preferred media consumption method. They may prefer audio, video or text. This means that they might prefer video, audio or text. The vast majority of people won't notice they've seen the media before. You have new ideas and present information in a different way than those who already know.

Trend #6: UGC continues to rock

UGC is now the core of ecommerce content market. This is an amazing statistic: 85% of people trust content created by others. This is a huge number and something you should take advantage of. How can you achieve this? You make it possible for users to create content that they can share on your website.

There are many benefits to this.

1. It will be a big hit with newcomers as long as it's positive.
2. This will give users the impression that they are being heard and listened to.
3. It will build a community.
4. You will get content absolutely free!

It is a great way to bring your audience deeper into your site by providing them with new content they are interested in and likely to trust. Plus, people will return to your website to check out their friends' blogs and see what they have to say.

This strategy was used by Harley Davidson to great effect. They have weathered every storm because of it. You can take their advice and apply it to your content marketing campaign.

Trend #7: Influencer marketing is evolving

Brands have seen great success with influencer marketing. Buyers are so dependent on social proof. It is more important than any other influence factors for buyers. Nielsen actually found that 92% buyers trust individual recommendations over brands.

Influencer marketing's core concept will not change. It will all come down to how brands use it. The focus of brands is shifting away from quantity to quality. It may have been the common thought to get as many endorsements in the past. It should now be about the quality of the influencer and their trustworthiness.

You will need to establish the criteria that an influencer should meet to be a part of your brand's influencer marketing. Next, create a campaign to target these influencers in order to grab their attention. Keep doing this and building relationships with those who respond. To ensure that the investment was worthwhile, track your data once influencers are involved in campaigns.

Trend #8: Live Video is Embracing

Brands are clearly using video content marketing. Every day, millions of videos are created on just about every topic possible. Although videos aren't new in the world, live video is an emerging sub-category of videos that works for some brands.

Live video allows for the possibility that something could happen next that isn't scripted. When your brand is traveling the world, live video can make a big difference. You can live stream from your booth at trade shows. If it's relevant to your brand, you can also show something out in the field. You have unique options that can be very engaging with live video.

These are just a few content marketing trends that will continue to grow throughout the year and into next year. These trends aren't going to make huge changes. These trends can be used to increase your content marketing to attract leads and potential new business.

Trend #9 Interactive Content

It's becoming increasingly difficult to reach and engage consumers today with so many content, so little time and a shorter attention span. Interactive content is a popular way for brands to leave a lasting impression and drive engagement.

Interactive content is at the heart of two-way conversation. It allows audience members to actively engage in the content instead of passively reading it. Interactive content, such as quizzes and tests, calculators and polls, allows consumers to get tailored insights or results on a topic or challenge they face, and has the potential to have fun while interacting with the content.

Tourism Australia's website uses compelling interactive content to engage potential tourists and convert them. The website offers 360-degree virtual reality tours that can be viewed with a VR headset. This allows people to virtually experience many amazing adventure spots in Australia. These include swimming with whale sharks and climbing to the SkyPoint Climb, the highest building in the country, for its stunning view of the Gold Coast.

Trend #10: The Written Word Speaks Louder

While Instagram and Snapchat are both exciting and cool, content marketing relies on the written word. Anyone who pays attention to the problem is that writing is often poor.

Many marketers have never been trained in fine art, slash science of writing. It is not reasonable to expect them to write exceptional content.

This could be the year that technical aspects of writing are finally recognized and online blogging and management services get the attention they deserve.

Trend #11: Automated Content Production

Marketers are constantly looking for better ways to create content than their freelancers. As these technologies improve and become more sophisticated, marketers may soon be able to create content using robotic algorithms. Automated algorithms are creating simple content in a variety of industries including finance and journalism.

A new software tool will soon be made available that allows marketers to compile and create content from the data shared by social media users all over the globe. This was demonstrated by Twitter's Project Lightning which creates stories from the images, videos, and other content that users share in tweets.

Trend #12: AI-Powered Content Marketing Strategy

Artificial intelligence-driven content marketing may be the most important and game-changing trend.

Changes in the search algorithm mean that semantic and long-form content are more important. Google's Knowledge Graph is one example of how Google's Knowledge Graph helps search users find better results for long-term queries. Google is now taking this to the next stage by using AI to improve matches for search queries via its RankBrain algorithm.

What will we do if AI tells you what to make and where it should be distributed? This future is closer than you might think.

Many B2B companies spend a large amount of their marketing budget on customer acquisition. While this is a great way to help your company grow, it isn’t the only way to keep your business and products or services top-of-mind.

One area companies often neglect to invest in is customer marketing. Making sure customers are successfully using your product or service and are satisfied after they’ve signed the contract can be a valuable way to ensure they stick around for the long haul. And many modern marketers know this.

But if you’re just learning about customer marketing, we’re here to help you understand the far-reaching benefits it can provide. In this blog, we share how you can build trust using a customer marketing strategy.

What is Customer Marketing?

Let’s start by defining customer marketing. Customer marketing is a type of marketing that’s focused on helping you keep your existing customer base engaged with your company. Rather than a transaction-based approach, customer marketing utilizes a relationship-based approach. This relationship-based approach encompasses the entire customer journey, but primarily focuses on building high-quality relationships through adoption, retention, expansion, and most importantly—advocacy.

This unique methodology helps ensure that your customers get the most value out of your products and services as possible. Delivering value over the course of a customer’s relationship with your company will drive loyalty, and ultimately, advocacy.

Marketing Automation and Customer Relationships

Marketing automation tools like HubSpot enable you to continue developing relationships and keep providing value long after the sale. Some tools even allow you to automate onboarding processes and nurturing emails, while also giving you opportunities to measure engagement. Leveraging marketing automation tools helps you better understand the needs of customers, gauge their satisfaction, and get feedback on your products or services.

Benefits of Customer Marketing

Increasing Customer Loyalty and Retention

Increased customer loyalty and retention is one of the primary goals of customer marketing. After all, you want to make the customer experience as enjoyable as possible, right? Doing so can increase the likelihood of customers being loyal to your company, increasing retention rates and driving overall success.

Turning Customers into Advocates

When you succeed at developing a loyal customer base, the next step is to turn these key customers into advocates of your brand. A loyal customer advocate will speak highly of your products and services and enthusiastically refer new customers to your company. Advocates are highly valuable because they advertise your company using one of the most trusted, effective tactics: word-of-mouth (WOM). Recent statistics show that WOM is directly responsible for 90% of all purchases, meaning now is the time to start turning your customers into advocates if you haven’t already considered it.

Collaborating Across Departments

By implementing a customer marketing strategy, you can also improve collaboration across different departments within your company, including marketing, sales, and customer support. Customer marketing requires alignment between each of these departments, and facilitating increased collaboration can bring big benefits to processes in other important areas. Overall productivity may improve over time, too, as opportunities for collaboration can provide a morale and motivation boost.

Increasing Revenue

The biggest benefit you can achieve with a successful customer marketing strategy is increased revenue. Through the careful development of relationships with existing customers, you can encourage them to continue supporting your company and reap the rewards of improved retention rates. These loyal brand advocates can help you gain additional customers through referrals and WOM, further increasing your overall revenue.

Creating the Perfect Customer Marketing Strategy

The perfect customer marketing strategy starts with a plan.

Tailor Your Marketing to Each Client

Once you have your customer marketing strategy created, it’s time to implement analytics and start using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to harness your customer data so you can develop personalized messaging. When you take the time to tailor your marketing to each client, you boost response rates. So personalize, personalize, personalize.

Track Results from the Start

Customer marketing focuses on different metrics and tactics than marketing for acquisition purposes, so it’s important to include these in your existing marketing plan to ensure they’re captured. Some customer marketing activities you may want to include in your strategy are events for existing buyers, outreach for testimonials, user groups, and others.

You’ll also want to pay attention to cross-sells and upsells to track any revenue generated from them, along with renewal (or churn rates) and overall customer satisfaction. These results can tell you a lot about what’s working and what’s not. When all of these metrics are achieving positive results, you should ultimately be seeing increased referrals from trusting, loyal brand advocates.

Finding Success with Customer Marketing

So, how does it all come together? How do you build trust with a customer marketing strategy? As we’ve touched on, focusing on delivering value throughout the entire relationship and providing a great customer experience are great starting points. Customer marketing can often be overlooked, but it can provide tremendous benefits if you invest the time and effort needed to build trust.

Ready to create your customer marketing strategy, or need support with another area of marketing? Sagefrog can help. Let’s talk!

What are you thinking about when you hear the words “laundry soap”? What about soft drinks, too? Fast food? Computers? Cars? Most likely, your answers were something along the lines of: Tide. Coca-Cola. McDonald's.

This is brand awareness at work.

In today's digitally crowded marketplaces, brand awareness is the ability to identify and recall your brand. Every hour of the day, consumers are bombarded with brand messages and advertisements.

You won't be able to build brand awareness in your industry without constantly fighting for their attention.

How do you determine if your company is well-known? How can you increase it? This article will discuss 4 methods to measure brand awareness and provide actionable steps to increase it.

Quick Take-Aways

• Brand awareness is one of the most important elements brands use to evaluate marketing strategies. This includes organic traffic, word-of mouth marketing, and word-of mouth marketing.

• A higher percentage of organic traffic than paid web traffic is an indicator that high SERP rankings have created brand awareness.

• A high volume of branded searches is a sign that people are specifically searching for your brand.

• Organic share of voice is the measure of how visible your brand appears in SERPs for keywords and topics that are brand-relevant.

What is brand awareness? Why is it important?

Brand awareness refers to the degree that consumers recognize your brand. Brand awareness is measured by looking beyond the established customer base to determine how well your brand is known within your industry and in the wider consumer market.

Consider the examples at the beginning of this article. It doesn't really matter if your Apple, Tide, Coca-Cola or McDonald's customer. You know the brands, both their logos and names, and what they offer.

Truth is that brands won't be able to achieve the brand recognition these examples have enjoyed over many decades. You can, and should, achieve this in your niche market and within your industry. The brand awareness drive organic traffic, conversions and sales. It is ultimately a driving force behind your company's continued growth.

Businesses across all industries recognize the importance of brand awareness, and are incorporating it into their strategic plans. According to digital marketing platform Bynder, 43% of marketers listed “growing brand awareness” as their top goal in 2020 State of Branding Report.

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It is important to regularly measure your brand awareness to ensure that it grows and stays high. You'll be able to identify gaps and opportunities, and then implement the best strategies to grow your brand awareness over time.

Four Ways to Measure Brand Awareness

Comparison of organic and paid search traffic

Organic search traffic refers to web traffic that is not generated by paid advertising. This traffic comes directly from algorithmic searches that are achieved via content marketing and SEO web strategies. This is a great way to gauge brand awareness by analyzing how your rank on search engines.

What is the importance of search engine rankings for brand awareness? Search engines account for 93% of all online interactions. Search engines are the first place people go when they search for brands. To gain consumer recognition, brands must be found in search engine results.

Comparing organic and paid search traffic is the best way to gauge brand awareness. Higher organic search traffic means better brand awareness.

Although organic traffic is a variable percentage across industries, BrightEdge research has shown that it drives about 53% of all web traffic.

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Even if your organic traffic share is low there are still ways to increase it. Organic traffic is driven primarily through search engines. The best way to increase organic traffic is to create content that is compatible with Google's ranking factors.

Some quick tips:

• Your content should be keyword-driven

• You should focus on topics and content that have high value for your audience.

• Mobile optimization: Optimize your content

• Attention to site structure and user experience

Volume of branded searches

Branded search volume is the number of searches generated by branded keywords. This means that branded search traffic is generated from specific queries related to your brand.

Branded search volume is a sign that people are familiar with your brand and will look for it when they need similar products or services.

It's like this: People search online for answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. Consumers who are searching for your brand do these things already know what you do. This is why you can establish brand awareness.

To find out how much brand-related search traffic you are getting and what it is doing to increase your reach, you can do a branded audit. You can then take steps to increase brand traffic by organizing your keywords and capitalizing upon high-intent keywords.

Here's the way Wayfair did it (really well).

Surveys to increase brand awareness

Surveys that measure how consumers perceive a brand can help businesses gauge brand awareness. These surveys target a group beyond the current customer base. It could be the general population for some brands, while others could define it by geography (especially local brands), or by products and/or services for others.

A multinational wine company might, for example, survey wine drinkers who are of a particular type (e.g. A multinational wine company might survey wine drinkers of a specific type (e.g. red vs..white) or at a certain age which falls within their target customer base. Local breweries may conduct a survey of beer drinkers in one specific region. To get accurate results, it is important to target the right group.

Unaided questions, such as “What brands do you think of when you think about X product?” are the most common way to begin brand awareness surveys. Then drill down to aided questions, such as “Which of these brands have you heard of in relation to X products and services?”

To get started, you can use these brand awareness survey templates (such as the one below).

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Organic search share of voice

One of the best ways to gauge your brand awareness is to understand your organic share. It tells you how visible your brand is in search results when you use a particular set of keywords.

You are more likely to rank higher for branded keywords because you are your brand. It is better to use non-branded keywords to calculate your share of voice.

There are many keyword research tools, such as Ahrefs and SEMRush that can help you find share of voice.

Great content can increase brand awareness

Most metrics used to measure brand awareness are based on great content. High-quality, consistent content drives more organic traffic to your site and improves search rankings.

Marketing Insider Group's writers can provide ready-to-publish content every week for a whole year. While your business is focused on its core priorities, you can rest assured that your brand produces content that delivers.

To learn more, or to schedule a consultation, visit our Content Builder Service.

Your blog introduction, aside from the headline, is what will make or break whether someone actually reads your article. The average time spent reading a blog post takes 15 seconds.

What are you waiting for? !

It's not hard to see how we all have been there. When you search Google for what you are looking for, you will know exactly what it is. After just a few sentences, you can easily determine if a specific article is going to provide that information.

Introductions should not be used to fill in the gaps between the actual content and the fluff. If you want people to continue reading, they must be engaging and clearly demonstrate the value of the article.

There are many proven ways to ensure you hit the mark. Our ready-to-use guide will show you how to create a blog article introduction that is flawless.

Quick Take-Aways

• Blog introductions that address customer pain points are more relatable to your audience.

• Asking questions in blog introductions stimulates readers to think.

• It is important to find a balance between telling the reader what to expect and not giving away everything in the intro.

• Blog introductions that are effective emphasize the benefits and value of the article.

• Your blog introduction must make sure that your content delivers on all promises.

8 proven methods to create a blog introduction that is professional-quality

Be relatable

People search for content that will help them solve problems or accomplish important tasks. It could be completing a difficult project at work, organizing their home better, or understanding complex situations happening around the globe.

No matter what the topic, blog introductions can help you keep your readers interested by telling them “Hey, we relate!”

Let's see:

Let's say that a user is looking for ways to increase conversions through their content. Instead of focusing on the steps they should take, you could start by saying things like “Converting customers can be difficult” or “Many businesses create great contents but struggle to get customers the next step.”

These statements create a bond between you and your reader. It makes them feel connected because they are understood. They realize they are not the only one suffering from this problem. They will also realize that understanding the problem makes it more likely for them to offer a solution.

This type of content that is focused on customers' pain points has been proven to be extremely effective in keeping customers engaged. It starts with a clear mention of the topic in your blog introduction.

You can use keyword research to identify user pain points. Also, you can engage with customers to directly ask them questions. You can also conduct your own exploratory research. This article will provide a deeper look at how to identify customer pain points and what your products or services could solve.

Ask a question

Engaging people in blog introductions by asking them questions is a great way to get them thinking. It's also possible to use questions to highlight the content of your blog posts (more information on why this is important coming next).

You can ask questions about your customer's pain point. This is a great way for the user to either execute the previous tip or get curious about the content of your article.

To use the customer conversions example, you could ask: “Are your visitors driving traffic to your site but not converting paying customers?”

The question addresses the user's pain point in such a way that they ponder.

You could also use a question to see how your article will benefit you.

Your customer will be more inclined to read your article because they know they'll find the answer in your article. It is your responsibility to ensure that it is there.

Let people know what to expect

The thing is that people want fast answers. Particularly on the internet. They won't stop until you get to the point 1000 words later.

As we said, you have about 15 seconds to get people interested enough that they will continue reading. Blog introductions that leave customers in the dark will not work.

You don't have to include everything in the first few sentences. Instead, provide a quick and concise summary of what your customers will find in the article, without going into detail.

Example: “In this article, we'll cover eight effective tactics that you can use in order to convert paying customers using your content.” We'll then give you concrete steps to follow in order to implement these strategies immediately.

Your user now knows exactly what they will find if they decide to continue reading, but they still need to be able to understand the value of your article.

Value is what you should be focusing on

Content marketers must be able to distinguish between benefits and features.

This is a simple example to illustrate the concept.

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If they don't know the benefits of the product, people won't care much about its features. Blog articles are the same.

It's not enough to simply list what you will include in your article. It is not enough to simply list what you will include in your article.

Talking directly to your readers is a great way to achieve this. Let's go back to the example. As we said, we will tell our readers what to expect from the article.

“In this article, we'll discuss 8 effective strategies you can use in order to convert paying customers through your content. We'll then give you concrete steps to follow in order to implement these strategies immediately.

Notice how the second person is used. Imagine if we said: “We'll cover eight tactics that increase customer conversions in companies.”

You might argue that this still provides the same information. Although it is true, it does not directly address why I find it important. Both “You can use” or “implement them immediately” tell our users that the content is theirs and they will benefit directly from it.

I may add something to make it even more powerful: “Successfully applying these tactics will result in higher conversions, sales, and revenue for your company.”

My reader now knows I am sensitive to their pain and is clear about how I will address it in my article. They can also see how it will directly benefit them.

Provide a unique perspective

Google searches typically yield millions of results. Even the first page of Google searches, which is where most people are looking, has 10 results for every query. What can you do to stand out from all the other content? You can do this by offering a unique perspective on the subject you are covering.

Consider this: How many times have we searched for the exact same thing only to find several articles with similar content? It's not helpful.

A blog introduction with a unique approach can grab your readers' attention. Even if you have specific topics to cover, you can still be original by writing in a different style or showcasing your brand's personality.

It's possible to take a completely different position on a topic that has become repetitive or stale in your industry. Let's take, for instance, the blog title and intro to our article on personas. We argue that “Personas” are awesome. Except when they are a sham!

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Huh? Personas don't suck! Personas are the best way to get to know your customer. Right?

They don't have to be done correctly. This article is one of our most popular, due to its challenge to the common opinion about a marketing tool that brands use.

While I do not advocate being always the contrarian, it is important to be against the grain when necessary (and emphasize it in your blog introduction) to attract people.

Do not give away everything

Now, let's talk about balance. We've already covered the importance of telling readers what to expect from your blog post. This is absolutely true.

You should not give away everything in the first few sentences. The blog introduction should give a hint of what's coming. Your blog introduction should be a teaser for what's to come.

Let's look at our customer conversions example one more time:

“In this article, we'll discuss 8 effective strategies you can use in order to convert paying customers through your content. We'll then give you concrete steps to follow in order to implement these strategies immediately.

We let our readers know that they will find 8 tactics but don't give details about those tactics. We wouldn't want our readers to go on their own and Google each one. Instead, we encourage them to continue reading to learn more about them and how they can be used.

Last, write the blog introduction

Although it might not be intuitive, I promise you that writing your blog introduction first will save you time and make your intros more interesting.

If you blog, you'll quickly realize that you cannot predict the content or direction of an article's content until it is complete. As you write, inspiration strikes, new ideas emerge, as well as the evolution of your content. It's almost certain that your blog introduction will be written before your article's body.

Write the article first so you can get an idea of the main points and overall tone. Writing your intro will be much easier.

Deliver what you say

Last, but not least – I cannot stress this enough – always keep your promises in your blog introduction.

It's easier to lose trust in your readers than telling them that you will give them something, and then failing to do so. Articles with great hooks but no follow-through will go a long way in convincing readers to trust your content.

Blog content that produces results

Blog content can be published to jumpstart your entire content strategy. Marketing Insider Group has a team that includes SEO experts and writers who can provide you with ready-to-publish content for a whole year. ).

To learn more, visit our Content Builder Service.

Your company's website is your window to its services, values, and capabilities. Your website is your first impression.

Your website should be optimized to attract and qualify leads. Prospect generation is the first step in sourcing potential prospects and opportunities. It also involves nurturing relationships with prospects to turn them into clients and clients into loyal brand advocates.

This can generate steady revenue streams that businesses with a track record of success need to stay operational.

Key Takeaways

• You want to ensure that you have the information of any potential leads who visit your site. This is where a healthy mix of pop-ups and lead generation forms will be your best friend.
• To build brand trust and show your reliability, you can use testimonials or trust seals to help your company.
• To template or not template? Website templates are easy to use, but they can be difficult for tech-savvy users.

These are five tips to help you optimize your website for lead generation.

Optimize Lead Generation Forms

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Your forms should be easy to use and accessible so visitors are more likely to provide their personal information. Optimizely.com's example is great. It's short and sweet, but to the point.

It asks simple questions, yet gives the company all the information they need. Once a lead has filled out this form, you will have a way to contact them. You also know their address and job title. You can now create an email that is personal and meaningful.

People are reluctant to give out their personal information from the beginning. Too many fields can cause problems. Your company should be trusted before they sell you their soul.

Visual cues can help you increase your lead generation efforts. To further hook users, you can include a compelling and hard-to resist offer.

To increase social proof, include testimonials

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A testimonial page is a great way to show potential clients that you are satisfied with the products and services of your customers.

Testimonials not only validate your business but also show brand loyalty to the public. Your potential customers will be more likely to trust you if they know others who are like them. Social proof is a powerful tool.

Adding visuals, such as a photo or video, to testimonials will help you prove your reliability. Casper Mattresses' example shows social media quotes moving in a carousel. This motion catches the eye of the viewer and sparks their interest.

These visuals will have a greater impact on viewers and increase your chances of capturing qualified leads via credibility and trust.

Learn the Art of Pop-up Forms

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Pop-ups can be irritating. It's good that Google agrees with this user experience.

Pop-up forms are another way to retrieve lead contact information. Google can be very harsh on you, so make sure to not fall for it. Google doesn't like popups that appear too often or early. Google will punish you if it is intrusive.

Google's core update of July 2021 is partly responsible for this.

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Pop-ups work, it's true. Pop-ups can have a conversion rate as high as 9.3%. Pop-up forms are not without their challenges.

This image shows various pop-up forms that are commonly found on the internet. Pop-ups such as the welcome mat can be annoying. There are exceptions to these rules, but the welcome mat is probably not your best option.

Banners are a great choice for websites that users might spend a lot of time on. These pop-ups remain at the top of the page until they are dismissed.

Test a pop-up form on your landing page to find out if it is a good fit for your audience. For a month, place a popup form of your choosing on the landing page. Then remove it.

To determine if pop-ups are right for you, analyze the user experience and take a closer look to your response rate. These methods can be used to test different pop-up forms in order to create the best user experience for your company and highest conversion rate.

Use Trust Seals for Your Website

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Consumers who are tech-savvy and want to learn more about your products and services often turn to their smartphones for information. This initial exposure to your social media and online platforms can often make the first impressions.

Trust seals can help you gain their trust faster. When possible, choose trust seal companies that offer a guarantee to consumers.

TRUSTe seal is one of the most trusted trust seals. There are many types of seals available. This seal will increase the trust of potential customers in your company. Although they may have believed you were legitimate, now they see that you are not a fraud.

Instead of using a ready-made template, invest in a well-designed website

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You can use free software in many business areas, but website design is not one of them.

Cookies created by cookie cutter websites will not inspire confidence as visitors will see that they have not been produced with a lot of money or time.

Although a website template is quicker than a custom-made one – you simply need to enter your information and then go – you will not have much control over what your website design can look like. Let's say you want to add dynamic movement to your homepage and testimonials. Your design app would limit you to the existing templates.

These free templates are not meant to be a universal solution. It's better to invest a bit more to improve the design of your website. A unique website will allow you to be creative and stand out from others.

Your purpose should be clear and communicated clearly to your designer. You want users to be drawn to the most important parts of your website. A well-designed online hub will increase customer trust and greatly improve your chances of capturing qualified leads.

You have optimized your website. Now what?

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You should keep track of any changes to your website so that you can monitor the impact on lead generation. Every change, from testing pop-up forms to updating your web design, is important.

You will be able to make the most out of these strategies if you have a clear understanding of your current lead generation landscape. This will allow you to compare and contrast what works with what doesn't. You can use the data to improve future campaigns.

Keep your eyes on the positive, keep improving your message and editing ruthlessly to remove elements that aren't adding value.

Now that your optimized web page is complete, it's time for you to add some content! Next, optimize your content creation. You can get more exposure and traffic to your website with great content at a fraction the cost of paid advertising. Your website design is amazing and your content is even better. Watch your ROI skyrocket.

Your website is your first touchpoint for potential customers to get to know you. Your first impressions can be the difference between a successful and unsuccessful relationship. Make sure you put in the effort to make your brand stand out!

Are you ready to get involved in the content aspect of your business? Get a consultation with our Content Builder Service today and get a free quote!

Listening to experts is a great way to learn about content marketing. Here are 5 of our favorite content marketing videos.

These videos cover everything a brand needs to know about content marketing, from its history and unpredictable future to connecting with customers through empathy, building brand advocates, and other topics.

Quick Take-Aways

• The internet has eliminated the traditional intermediary between brand owner and consumer, and created a unique platform for accessibility as well as scale.

• Smart content marketers aren't just focused on numbers. They also consider the real value and connection that they create for their customers.

• A loyal customer base is one of the best ways to build brand awareness and trust.

• Empathy is the cornerstone of content marketing success. Brands should focus on the customer's perspective, and solve their problems.

6 of the Best Content Marketing Videos Ever

The Rise of New Marketing: The Story of Content

Content Marketing Institute

The Story of Content is a documentary by the Content Marketing Institute that will help you to understand how content marketing works. It is a compelling documentary that takes you through the history of marketing from the “golden ages”, in the middle of the 20th century (as Mad Men), to today, when content reigns supreme.

This video shows that content marketing is not new. John Deere uses it successfully through their magazine, The Furrow since the 19th Century (you read that right).

It has a huge capacity for speed and scale that is unimaginable before the internet.

These new technologies offer huge opportunities for brands that are willing to take advantage of them. Blendtec started making videos on “Will it Blend?” using a YouTube site that was months old. This helped them increase their sales by 1000%. They now have hundreds upon millions of views. Red Bull was on the right track when they created video content that appealed to people's passions and not their demographic data. Red Bull now has a whole media arm.

Greg McCoy from Procter & Gamble, Senior Archivist, said it aptly in this video: “You can either try to sell or tell your story.”

Consumers are more informed than ever, and they can tell when they're being marketed to. Smart brands don't want to sell every interaction. Instead, they look for opportunities to tell their stories, create valuable content and build trust with customers to establish long-lasting relationships.

Being a content marketing animal

Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vee isn't for the faint-hearted, but he knows his stuff. Online Marketing Rockstars 2015 is his well-known talk on being a Content Marketing Beast. He discusses how marketers place too much emphasis on data analytics, without considering the true value and the customer connection.

Gary says that Samsung is the best, and he apologizes to Samsung. He wanted to keep up with the impending New York Jets trade. Instead, he clicked on a banner ad every time he visited the sports website.

According to Gary's story, Gary clicked 8 times on the ad. The metrics must have been great for the brand that ran the ad. What is the truth? Gary cursed (literally) at having to click out of it constantly. The true ROI was 0. Gary, for example, didn't even look at the ad before they clicked the X.

Marketers have an enormous platform to share their brand messages in 2021. Problem? So does everyone else. Great content is the key to success for brands.

Gary says content marketers will not win long-term in playing numbers with data metrics. It's important to balance the qualitative and quantitative — to include “both the brain AND the heart.”

Here are some specific strategies to do this:

Stop disrupting the work of others

Social media ads work well because they appear naturally in users' feeds. This means they don’t interrupt their activity.

Be aware of emerging technologies

Once trends become saturated, it doesn't make sense to jump onboard with them. Gary gives the example of Gary's 1990s days as an email marketer pioneer. He was able to get open rates over 90%, which is a pipedream in today's marketing environment.

Continue to work towards building a long-lasting relationship with your customers

You shouldn't put all your eggs in the same basket (i.e. tactic, technology, etc.) In a world that is constantly changing, this is a bad idea. Instead, make content that is authentic and consistent across all channels.

Content Marketing Strategy 2030

Joe Pulizzi

Rewind to 2010. Think back to 2010. What were you doing in marketing? How did you imagine the future of marketing? The truth is that Instagram, Tik Tok and iPads aren't technologies that exist today.

Joe Pulizzi, a Content Marketing World 2019 keynote speaker, helps you to plan your strategy for 2030.

This doesn't mean that we can predict technology or know what the future might look like in ten years. Joe's talk outlines the strategies Joe uses to make content marketers more responsive, proactive, and sophisticated.

Internal buy-in

Your organization's leaders should be educated. Teach your leaders about content marketing and the value it brings. Stop using archaic marketing techniques and instead focus on providing real value to customers through your marketing strategy.

Multi-income streams can help you sustain yourself

While marketing goals are important, you should also consider other revenue streams. Joe gives the Cleveland Clinic as an example. Their Health Essentials series has tripled its earnings revenue between 2016 and 2019, and is now a major driver for new patient acquisition.

Learn how to acquire content

Smart brands buy brand assets and media channels from other businesses to expand their reach and increase their brand offerings. Joe uses the example of Raspberry Pi buying tech magazines, and Arrow Electronics purchasing UBM's media collection.

Do something great

It's impossible to do it all at once. You can't do it all at once. Instead, succeed at what you are good at and don't force anything that isn't working. Then, build on your successes incrementally to achieve greater results.

The Best Marketing Strategy That No One Is Focusing on

Pat Flynn

Although this talk by Pat Flynn was only presented in October 2021, it is already on our all-time top ten because it focuses so much on creating brand advocates from your loyal customers.

Content marketers often focus too much on customer acquisition and miss the best (and most cost-effective!) way to market our brand. This is having customers do it for our brand. Pat says that we must “create superfans” within our active audience.

How do we do it? Community building is the key. Peer reviews and other consumers are more trusted than direct brand messages today. If you create a loyal customer base that feels connected to your brand, and to each other, they are more likely to share your brand on social media.

Brands must make customers feel valued in order to achieve this. They will share the great experience with others when they do.

Empathy: The human connection to patient care

Cleveland Clinic

Although this video isn't as engaging as the others, it has a powerful message about empathy. Successful content marketing is built around empathy, which refers to the ability to see and feel through another person's eyes.

People don't look for specific products or services, they are looking for solutions to their problems. Brands that see their customers as more than a number will find better connections and a higher content marketing ROI.

Cleveland Clinic demonstrates empathy in patient care. Content marketers (and all humans) can learn from this video and use it to their advantage.

Confidence is key to executing your content strategy

These content marketing videos should have provided you with plenty of inspiration. Marketing Insider Group can help you launch a winning strategy and produce consistent, high-quality content. Our writers are available to deliver publish-ready content every week for up to a year, and we can work with you to develop a custom content calendar. ).

For more information, visit our Content Builder Service. Or book a quick consultation!

The internet has been a huge platform for brands to share their content with their target audience for years. Is your brand maximizing its potential?

Web analytics should be integrated into all aspects of your content marketing strategy.

Google Analytics and other web analysis platforms offer so many data it can be overwhelming to use. Some brands do very little analytics, such as tracking web traffic numbers or not using it at all. It is no surprise that 91% of brands use content marketing today, but only 9% are satisfied with the results.

9 percent? !

This doesn't mean you have to be in that category. You can use web analytics immediately to improve your content marketing strategy by using the focused, simple tactics we have covered in this article.

Take-outs

• Web analytics can optimize your most-performing and least-performing content for more traffic and better conversions.

• Web analytics can help you target your audience more effectively.

• You can align your content strategy with user intent by matching on-site searches queries to your SEO keywords.

• Google Analytics offers automatic reports that will help you integrate data into your daily routine.

How web analytics can improve your content marketing

Leverage your best performing content

There are two important points to be aware of: First, do your know what content is performing the best? It's time to discover if you don't know which content is performing best. Do you know if it is? Are you maximizing its potential for a better ROI?

Both cases can be helped by web analytics.

Let's begin by finding the best content. You can view behavior overview reports using Google Analytics to see page views, unique page visits, and the average time spent on a page. These metrics will tell you which blog articles, landing pages and other content is getting the most hits.

Here's a screencap showing what it looks like.

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Now it is time to optimize that data. You can start by identifying topic trends to create great content about the topics that are most relevant to your audience. These pages can be used to link to other popular pages that you wish to gain more traffic.

It is also important to know what your customers do after they interact with your content. Is your customer reading the content and then leaving? Are they responding to your call for action?

The Google Analytics behavior flow report will tell you how visitors move around your site. This report contains information about how visitors arrive at your website, what they do once they leave your landing page, as well as where their most frequent drop-off points.

This is how the report looks:

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This is vital information because pages that draw high traffic, but don't push customers to the next step (like subscribing) or starting a free trial are missed opportunities. It is usually because users don't know what to do next after reading the content. Google Analytics can help you pinpoint these instances and determine the best steps to close them.

Content that is not performing well can be improved

Although it might not be as enjoyable as looking at your most popular content content, it is equally important to look at the underperforming content.

You can make changes to these pages using the insights from web analytics. It is possible to identify areas where content is not needed or is irrelevant and then remove it from your website.

You can also use them to optimize popular content. Behavior overview and behavior flow reports are useful for identifying content that is in need of a boost. Next, you need to decide which content should be updated and which can be removed completely.

The good news is: HubSpot's recent research found that optimizing underperforming content has doubled the number of leads. The number of leads generated from old posts.

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These are some of the ways that you can optimize your old posts to increase their performance.

• Add visual content such as images and videos

• Make headlines more appealing by updating them

• Improve SEO best practices

• To drive organic traffic, re-optimize using long tail keywords

• To align with the user's intent, add or update calls-to-action

Target your content effectively

Google Analytics Audience reports contain a wealth of information about users. This can be used to target your content better. You can view demographic data, location and user loyalty.

Google also offers vast amounts of user data and audience group information, such as affinity (based upon interests) or in-market (based upon recent purchase intent), that can be used to target paid ads more effectively and gain insight into which audiences you should target with your content.

Content marketers spend so much of their time trying to understand their audience with tactics such as customer segmentation or user personas. These hypotheses can be tested using web analytics to make objective, informed decisions.

To drive conversions, adopt a data-driven strategy

While engaging your audience with content can be a great way to start, your ultimate goal should be to convert customers. With a range of tools, web analytics can help drive conversions.

Are you familiar with the behavior flow reports that we spoke of earlier? These reports can help you determine which pages and content drive the most traffic to your points of conversion like email subscription forms or free trial pages.

The report can be used to identify which conversion points are most effective and how you can increase their use in other areas. You can also take a look at the most successful content to help you create even more.

Your SEO keywords should match on-site searches

A search bar feature is one of the best ways to understand the intent of visitors to your website. You can track what users search for on your website using web analytics.

This is where the Google Analytics on-site keyword search report comes in handy. This is how it looks:

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This article will provide more information about how to use on-site searches for deeper insights.

You can use this information to determine what keywords people are looking for on your site.

You can also analyze your internal search trends to see what users are not finding using simple site navigation. This information is crucial because it allows you to adjust your navigation menu, page hierarchy and content categories to make it easier to find what your users are looking for.

Web analytics can be used to routinely analyze data

Data integration is key to making your content strategy data-driven. Google Analytics makes it easy to make this happen. Google Analytics allows you to set up monthly, weekly, hourly and daily reports so that your team is always up-to date on performance metrics.

Your web analytics tracking can be outsourced

You probably don't have the time or patience to go through data and create reports if you own a business. How can web analytics be integrated into your content strategy?

Outsource.

Web analytics reporting is a core service offered by content marketing agencies. Partnering with SEO strategists and professional content creators will help you create a data-driven content strategy that is both effective and cost-effective.

You can launch a content strategy that is backed up by analytics today with our Content Builder Service.

“Strategy without tactics is a daydream; tactics without strategy is a nightmare.”

Influenced by Sun Tzu, this quote implies that there’s a clear difference between marketing strategy and marketing tactics.

It suggests that one can’t be done without the other, and to do both correctly, strategy must come first. It’s the foundation, after all.

Marketing strategy, however, can mean different things: the position or “strategy” by which your brand will go to market, and the actual way or “strategy” by which your company will create a brand to go to market with.

The second definition is what we’re going to talk about here—what your marketing department’s strategy should be for making the most of the time, energy and dollars you allocate to marketing.

The Most Effective B2B Marketing Strategies

In a new report that collected data from hundreds of B2B marketing professionals, the ways in which B2B marketing teams across the nation operate as a majority were brought to light. In this post, you'll find out how B2B marketers are planning, executing and budgeting their marketing programs, so you can be sure your strategy falls in line with or zooms ahead of your competition in 2020.

1. Have a Formal Marketing Plan
2. Partner with a Marketing Agency
3. Use Retainer vs. Project Contracts
4. Spend 10% of Revenue on Marketing
5. Consider Account-Based Marketing
6. Ride the Rise of Mobile
7. Embrace Automation and Martech
8. Create Visual Content
9. Harness the Power of Big Data
10. Create More Relevant Content
11. Go Multichannel
12. Develop Strategic Marketing Objectives
13. Identify a Senior Marketing Advocate
14. Develop and Invest in Marketing ROI Metrics
15. Build Relationships with IT and Finance
16. Create Content that Addresses Your Customer Journey
17. Create a Brand Identity
18. Align and Build Ongoing Partnerships with Sales
19. Acquire Digital Marketing and Technology Competencies
20. Create Interactive Marketing Campaigns
21. Focus on the Buyer

1. Have a Formal Marketing Plan

In a significant and encouraging shift from the data released in our B2B Marketing Mix Report, more B2B teams are using formal plans to guide their branding and marketing. 66% of B2B marketers reported using a formal marketing plan this year, taking a more strategic and proactive approach to tactics, rather than a sporadic and reactive approach to the marketplace.

Once again, there are differences between a strategic marketing plan and a tactical marketing plan. A strategic marketing plan, which we’re talking about here, combines market research with a situation analysis of your brand.

One of the most common ways to get started is by using your marketing agency or internal committee to identify your top five to ten competitors and conduct a SWOT analysis for each. Cross-reference your competitors’ SWOTs against your company’s own analysis to uncover the whitespace—areas where the market is severely lacking or strengths that only your company brings to the table.

With this information, you can develop a brand strategy and messaging platform that intelligently markets the characteristics that make your brand different and better from the rest.

2. Partner with a Marketing Agency

63% of B2B marketers report using a content marketing agency to handle some or all of their marketing program.¹ For small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that can’t afford to build out an entire marketing department in-house, complete with strategic marketers, certified specialists and subscriptions to the various tools and platforms that make a marketing program run, an agency is often the way to go. Marketing agencies give SMBs access to top-tier marketing capabilities and capacity, while using their internal resources more effectively.

“Between digital, inbound and traditional methods, there are an incredible number of moving parts, and the real art lies in not just understanding how each tool works best, but how each works best in cooperation with each other. And that requires an agency that has developed a particular kind of harmony in addition to individual expertise,” commented one of the publishers of the report.

3. Use Retainer vs. Project Contracts

The majority of outsourced marketing efforts are executed via retainers, according to the last year's B2B Marketing Mix Report.¹ More and more companies are taking advantage of retainers, recognizing that the nature of most digital marketing programs is long-term and ongoing.

Search engine optimization (SEO), for example, aims to get your company found on Google by increasing its presence in unpaid search results. But ranking in the search results doesn’t happen overnight.

It requires ongoing technical work, such as website optimization, as well as local SEO, which is the process of using a company’s geographical location to rank a business higher than its local competitors.

Link building, keyword research, optimizing copy development and more are all part of a successful SEO program, and as you can tell, these tactics are not one and done; rather, they require ongoing maintenance, attention and analytics, which are best executed with a retainer agreement.Of course project work has its place for initiatives that have a concrete start and end, such as completing a brand strategy, creating a website or producing a marketing brochure. But when it comes to implementing a complete marketing program, including digital, retainer contracts are the way to go.

4. Spend 10% of Revenue on Marketing

Senior leadership and marketers have differing opinions when it comes to the marketing organization’s goals. The management team expects marketing to lower customer acquisition costs. Marketers, on the other hand, believe it is more important to focus on developing and executing strategies that will drive brand awareness and positioning.

Senior leadership teams also expect marketers to demonstrate ROI of their marketing efforts, but this is extremely difficult as marketers feel they do not have the proper tools to do this. For other marketers, they feel senior management needs to focus more on customer insights rather than just on products and pricing.

One of the most common questions marketing leaders get asked is, “How much should I be spending on marketing?” Informed by hundreds of marketing executives, this report found that the magic number is 10% or more of a yearly budget.

Up 5% from last year's report, the number of businesses allotting 10% or more of their company’s budget on marketing reflects the priorities of leaders facing greater competition both online and off. Advanced and automated marketing tactics, personalization, interactive content and new user experience requirements all demand a greater portion of a business’s budget to achieve. Beyond the spend that’s allocated to marketing personnel and agency partnerships, the top three tactical areas where marketers invested that 10%, as identified by the report, include website development, digital marketing and tradeshows and events.

5. Consider Account-Based Marketing

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is the practice of tailoring sales and marketing strategies to a particular account that can make a big impact on ROI. ABM doesn’t care about the thousands of followers you gained on Twitter. It’s closing the deal that matters, which helps you build your bottom line faster and more efficiently.

According to a study by SiriusDecisions, 42% of marketers claim that they have been using ABM for at least 6 months. During the Sirius Decisions 2017 Summit in Las Vegas, Lynsay Russell of Medtronic discussed how ABM proved beneficial for their organization. In their ABM approach, the average deal size of accounts targeted via ABM methods was 35% larger than that of accounts not targeted via ABM methods.

Account-based marketers don’t concern themselves with lead quantity. Rather, they pursue quality. Narrow your focus and personalize your marketing efforts to target your best accounts that have higher chances of converting. Don’t waste your resources on the smaller fish. Go for the big one.

6. Ride the Rise of Mobile

More than half of the world’s web traffic comes from mobile devices, so if you’re not implementing a mobile-first strategy, then you’re ignoring more than 50% of your potential leads.

There are over 5 billion mobile users around the world that you can potentially reach with mobile marketing strategies. Now that mobile has become a primary channel for media consumption; businesses need to take advantage of the opportunities for new traffic and data collection.

Ensure that your content is responsive on any mobile device. Since business owners and department heads are now using their mobile devices to research business solutions, make your website accessible through any device and optimize it for the biggest screens down to the smallest gadgets.

Invest in mobile apps so that you can personally reach out to your prospects and existing clients, as this will help accelerate sales and client engagement. Make sure to allot resources for mobile app remarketing since research suggests that people tend to stop using apps after 30 days.

7. Embrace Automation and Martech

A multitude of technologies and innovations are available to make the lives of marketers easier. Of course, these Martech tools can also be used to enhance existing marketing campaigns.

Marketing automation tools help you reach your prospects and personalize communications. If you’re still doing it old-school, these repetitive, mundane tasks are probably costing your business more in the long-run.

Review your approach to using marketing technologies. Audit the tools you currently use across your marketing categories. Scott Brinker, author of “Hacking Marketing,” outlines six marketing categories that you can use for your audit:

Marketing Experiences: This refers to technologies that directly affect customer touchpoints across the marketing lifecycle, including advertising, email, social media, SEO, content marketing, A/B testing, marketing apps, and other related tools.

Marketing Operations: Operations cover the tools and data for managing the “back-office” of marketing. This includes your data analytics, MRM, DAM, and agile marketing management technologies.

Marketing Middleware: Marketing middleware helps integrate marketing platforms and systems with each other. This may include data management platform, data protection, API services, cloud connectors, tag management, and the like.

Marketing Backbone Platforms: Review each of your backbone platforms separately, as each may be for a different purpose. Examples of these are tools for customer relationship management (CRM), content management systems (CMS), automation, and e-commerce tools.

Infrastructure Services: Your marketing infrastructure includes cloud computing, big data management, databases, and software development tools.

Internet Services: This doesn’t just refer to your internet provider (but you need to check that, too). Make sure the internet platforms you’re using such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other services that underlie the marketing environment are integrated seamlessly.

8. Create Visual Content

Adding images and video to your content will help promote brand awareness and brand recall. According to multiple studies, visual recall is stronger than audio or text. When people hear a piece of information, they tend to only remember 10% of it three days later. But when you add pictures to the same information, they can remember 65% of it after three days.

Additionally, 37% of marketers claim that visual marketing is their most important form of content because it greatly contributes to building trust and engagement with audiences.

Use compelling images that are consistent with your brand across all platforms. Make your content easy on the eyes and use white space to your advantage. You don’t want to overdo it and overwhelm your audience with needless distractions, so aim for visual quality over quantity.

Create graphs and charts to illustrate data and statistics. Customize your images for added relevance and branding. Experiment with short and highly educational videos. Most importantly, make sure you’re following these Top 10 Visual Content Rules.

9. Harness the Power of Big Data

Big data algorithms and advanced data analytics make it possible for marketers to deliver consistent omnichannel customer experiences across all platforms and channels. Indeed, big data is revolutionizing the way we do marketing. It increases the quality of your sales leads, improves customer experiences at every touchpoint, and helps managers make sound business decisions.

Without the necessary data, you can’t understand who your leads are and how to reach them with personalized communications. So, get on the big data bandwagon and optimize your campaigns!

Go beyond your marketing campaign execution and use big data to help make customer relationships more successful. A data analytics expert or consultant can help you with this when the numbers become too overwhelming.

Create a big data framework that’s aligned with your organizational and marketing goals. Segregate transactional and non-transactional data to determine which ones go under social analytics, performance management, decision science, and data exploration.

In a nutshell, taking advantage of data means setting up systems to collect and analyze data at every possible point in your sales process. The more you know about your business and your audience, the better you’ll be at creating the right marketing strategy.

10. Create More Relevant Content

I had a conversation with a colleague yesterday who asked me what I thought about instructing sales to get inserted the buying process as early as possible to “paint the vision.”  I asked her how many sales people she knew that were truly industry experts that could paint a vision without pushing their products?

Much of the content or discussion I have with vendors (either digitally or with their sales people) is all focused on them – their products, their services, their unique value proposition. What about the buyer? It is imperative that B2B organizations begin developing content that is much less about what they want to say and tailored to what the buyer wants to hear.

The days of selling to “the decision maker” are largely over. Multiple buyers with different perspectives and biases are all part of this process and it is necessary to speak to all of them. Consequently, this impacts the content creation process.

Marketing content should educate and create a dialogue about challenges and issues that are unique to the buyer. This dialogue must extend through to the sales conversation and it is marketing’s job to help educate and enable sales to have this conversation.

While many organizations are spending and creating more content, one must ask if this is the right content. Marketers must begin to understand the various roles that are involved in the buying process and create content specific to them. It is then that marketing will see an improvement in the value of their content and not before. More isn’t better, it’s about relevance.

11. Go Multichannel

B2B buyers use a multitude of mediums to research and explore their purchase options with the web, specifically with social media leading the way. This highlights the need for our marketing messages to be accessible across an array of mediums, not just email.

In order to determine a proper and profitable medium, it is imperative that organizations know how their buyers like to consume content and ensure their content is accessible via these channels. Too often organizations rely on social, web and email as the go-to channels and while these are often used; to just assume these are the only channels your buyers uses to consume content is a dangerous proposition. Ensure you are utilizing the channels that your buyers are using and make your content available across all of them. Think multi-channel.

12. Develop Strategic Marketing Objectives

Compared to higher revenue B2B companies (37%), lower revenue companies (57%) are more likely to view the marketing team as an extension of the sales organization, and not as a strategic asset to the company.

For high performing B2B marketing organizations, they develop digital marketing objectives, not sales plans, that inform their company’s business strategy to help differentiate their brand in the marketplace.

13. Identify a Senior Marketing Advocate

Nearly two-thirds of all B2B marketers think a senior advocate or champion will be needed to help marketing succeed in the next 3-5 years.

This person will not only represent the marketing and customer’s voice at the executive table, but will also work to influence and collaborate with other organizations to drive business strategy and sales through marketing, establishing marketing as a competitive advantage and revenue stream for the organization.

14. Develop and Invest in Marketing ROI Metrics

The ability to measure results and demonstrate that B2B marketing contributes to the company’s bottom line and enables business growth will help change the perception of marketing as a competitive advantage rather than cost center for organizations. But nearly 60% of B2B marketers say they do not have the appropriate measurement tools they need to effectively prove their ROI.

The top strategy for removing these barriers is to develop ROI metrics and invest in marketing strategies and technologies that will enable marketers to measure and demonstrate ROI.

15. Build Relationships with IT and Finance

Higher revenue B2B companies believe cultivating close relationships with other organizations within the business, such as IT and Finance, is absolutely needed to successfully drive their marketing strategies, measure performance and manage marketing spend.

16. Create Content that Addresses Your Customer Journey

What differentiates high performing marketing organizations and marketers from their average peers is that they develop a deep understanding of their customers, including their biggest pain points and challenges, content needs and preferences, just to name a few.

Interestingly, many B2B companies don’t have buyer personas in place today, but do plan to build them in coming year to help boost the effectiveness of their demand gen efforts. A Demand Gen Report study found that only 27% of respondents said personas were aligned to their messaging and 30% noted that there will need to be some fine-tuning of their efforts.

Often, mistargeted or irrelevant content and messaging contributes to campaign failure. Detailed buyer personas offer a fantastic opportunity for marketers to ensure content is relevant for its intended audience, on the channels they prefer.

Using the customer insights gathered, successful B2B marketers develop specific marketing strategies for each buyer persona and create as well as curate content that is relevant and valuable to consumers at each stage of the customer journey, to effectively connect, engage and convert them.

17. Create a Brand Identity and Personality via Content

The B2B companies that achieve higher revenue focus their marketing efforts on developing and driving a consistent brand identity at every online and offline touchpoint, creating a seamless, positive experience across all parts of the organization a customer touches and interacts with.

This requires marketers to develop a strong brand positioning against their competition, track and identify segments for better targeting, and communicate their insights to sales teams so they can adjust and improve their strategies accordingly.

Very important question: Does your company have a clearly defined tone of voice, or does it vary from person to person in your PR or content marketing teams? Consistency is critical in any company’s communications, so you if you don’t have a tone of voice established, it should be a new priority that all employees can weigh in on. To get started, you can:

• Think about how you communicate successfully with existing clients
• Identify what type of tone you want to express to clients in the future
• Take a look at the competition and see how they’re communicating

Checking out your competitors is key here. You’ll likely want to communicate with your audience in a similar fashion, but you need to do it in a distinct way, which is where having a unique tone of voice comes in. It’s one of the most effective ways you can differentiate yourself.

The value of creating a distinct tone for your brand also extends to how you engage with your audience on social media. Also look to B2C brands to get a feel for how they interact with their audiences on social media platforms like Twitter. The digital divide between B2C and B2B is disappearing with every passing day.

Each company has a clearly distinct tone of voice and is unique in its own way. Then, think about how you want to interact with your audience on social media. Do you want the tone to match the rest of your communications, or do you want it to vary slightly because your audience on social may be different from your email subscribers or blog visitors?

18. Align and Build Ongoing Partnerships with Sales

Silos between sales and marketing organizations continues to be one of the biggest barriers to marketing success. And over half of all B2B marketers surveyed in a joint study by ANA and GfK believe better alignment between sales and marketing will help advance marketing’s contribution and ability to demonstrate their ROI.

The research found that the top three marketing objectives for B2B marketers are to generate sales and leads, improve brand awareness, and increase customer loyalty and retention, and it is crucial for marketing to partner and collaborate with sales in order to achieve these goals more effectively and drive business growth together.

19. Acquire Digital Marketing and Technology Competencies

The wide adoption of digital and mobile by consumers will continue to accelerate, and B2B marketers believe this would require developing digital marketing and technology skillsets that most marketers currently do not have.

Only 7% of B2B marketers surveyed believe they have an effective process in place to capture data on customer behaviors, attitudes and engagement that can inform and optimize existing marketing strategies and tactics.

20. Create Interactive Marketing Campaigns

Over the past few years, marketing campaigns featuring interactive content have continued to increase in popularity. Why? Because anyone can write a blog post, and reading blog post after blog post can get, well, boring, and new types of content are always exciting.

Interactive content can be many different things—from quizzes, polls, and surveys to interactive infographics, whitepapers, and others. The goal of interactive content is simple: you want to get your audience engaged in the learning experience as opposed to simply reading an article or watching a video.

People—yes, even B2B professionals—like to participate in things. And interactive content provides a great opportunity for your audience to do exactly that. Content like quizzes, polls, and surveys also provides a unique benefit—it allows you to capture data from leads and learn more about your audience and what’s important to them. This data can then be used to inform future content marketing endeavors or guest blog posts—further allowing you to establish yourself as an industry expert and thought leader.

21. Focus on the Buyer

The buying process is becoming longer in the majority of cases, not shorter. This only underscores the need for B2B marketing organizations to move away from tactical one-and-done campaigns, to a strategic approach that maps content to this buying process and engages, nurtures and converts the buyer throughout their buying process.

What does this mean? It means that our B2B demand generation programs always have a sense of “what’s next” in terms of content. It means that marketers should not be promoting an asset, but seeking a conversation. This requires a buyer-centric strategy and without this in place, there is no way marketers will be successful in connecting through this ever-growing buying process.

For B2B marketers, the complexity and world in which we operate in a day-to-day basis will only continue to shift, change and grow with increasingly complexity. A tactical approach of spending, creating and pushing more of anything, is not the answer. There must be real transformation that enables us to get to know and engage our buyers at a deeper level and ultimately, meet them where they are in their process. It’s all about the buyer, so go figure!

B2B marketing has seen a lot of changes over the past five to ten years. To attract new customers, marketers have moved away from cold calling and sales to focus on digital content marketing strategies.

Content marketing is the driving force behind every B2B strategy. It is crucial for your company to stay on top of the marketing curve.

Here are my marketing trends, digital marketing trends, and digital marketing predictions for the next year.

These are my 2022 B2B marketing trends that your company should consider:

1. Retention Marketing

One bird is worth two in the bush. What's it worth keeping that bird healthy and happy for a long period of time? This is retention marketing.

Since the beginning of time, retention marketing has been around. Why? It's because the seller realized it was easier and more efficient for existing customers to sell than to find new customers.

Retention marketing, in short, is the combination of activities to maintain customer relationships and increase marketing ROI by continuing sales at a lower price per sale.

Retention marketing can increase the time customers spend with you and how much they purchase. This is often called cross-sell or upsell. We aim to sell more products or services to our existing customers, at higher profit and prices.

What is the profit margin? Harvard Business Review states that a 5% increase on customer retention can result in a 95% increase of profits.

B2B marketers love to talk about new customers. Retention Marketing may be a better place in 2021. Particularly if you have limited budgets.

What are the best ways to keep customers happy?

1. Education & Onboarding
2. Customer Training
3. Constant Communication
4. Ongoing customer support
5. Surveys & testimonials
6. Customer appreciation

2. Content Marketing

You can't go wrong if you try! Only committed brands will win in content marketing in 2021. It's a common refrain from brand marketers not committed to content marketing. There is so much noise! “How can I get through?”

Using this argument, you have three options. 1) Don't give up, and let your marketing team start cold calling (trust my words, I've been asked to do this). 2) Promote your way to growth. 3) Or you can commit to long-term strategic ROI through content marketing.

There are many amazing examples of brands that have built huge audiences in the space of 18 months.

What was their secret weapon? They published consistent content based on keyword research. They published both long and short forms of content. They profiled executives, customers, and partners. They were focused on building subscribers. They paid for promotion of their best-performing content.

What amount do they spend? For a predictable Marketing ROI, you will need a marketing budget of $4,000 to $8,000 per month. It's less than the salary of a Director in Marketing!

3. Interactive Content

Businesses need to make their content interactive in order to get more consumer interaction and engagement. This can be done by encouraging your followers to share your posts via social media, making interesting quizzes, filming videos, or implementing infographics.

Interactive content can increase customer attention spans by encouraging customers to subtly engage with your content. Storytelling is becoming an important feature of business success as consumers move towards interactive content.

4. Chatbots

Chatbots have been an integral part of web design for many years and will be an important part of any business in the future. 67% of global consumers have used chatbox support systems in the last year. Clients expect fast responses to their questions and 24 hour customer service. Chatbots will make this easier by matching human behavior and offering similar services.

Many industries use this tool to answer client questions and guide them through the company's website. Chatbots are a great way for businesses to provide better online services. Businesses will experience an increase in customer engagements, business relationships, and client satisfaction as a result.

5. Nostalgia Marketing

B2B marketers can use nostalgia marketing to help them connect their products and services with the rest of the world. You can help your company participate in nostalgia marketing strategies by being authentic, leveraging cultural trends, and reintroducing a product/service that was discontinued.

The value of nostalgia marketing is increasing as the world navigates these turbulent times. Nostalgia can be comforting, familiar, and safe, which is precisely what the world needs in 2021.

6. Voice Marketing

With each passing day, voice search and digital assistant usage will increase. Voice devices were initially used to create grocery lists and notes. Consumers now use voice searches to find their favorite songs, ask questions and get directions.

This tool offers marketers great opportunities as it provides us with more information about our customers and their needs. Voice search has seen a significant increase in usage with Google Home and Alexa. It is crucial to ensure your company has all the necessary tools to compete successfully with other companies using advanced technology.