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IN WITH THE NEW: THREAD’S TOP 7 MARKETING IDEAS TO IMPLEMENT IN 2018

By  Brandy McCarley   |  

Set your team up for success

A lot can happen in 12 months, especially in the context of a digital landscape laden with new technologies. While your 2017 marketing strategy may have been on-point, you can take it up a notch by getting a jump-start on 2018. Adopting marketing ideas that help your brand rise above the noise and equip your marketing team to do more with less effort can lead to increased brand awareness and higher revenue for your organization. Here is an inside look at what experts see coming down the pipeline.

1. Growth Hacking

If you’re like many companies, you may not be confident in the ROI of your marketing efforts. With the multiple tactics you’re employing, revenue growth can be difficult to attribute to a specific marketing initiative. Similarly, it can be difficult to pin down where your efforts may be coming up short.

“Growth Hacking” in simple terms, means implementing marketing processes that are fine-tuned to increase revenue. Consider your highest-potential contacts and leads ─ those who are nearly ready to buy. How are you reaching them? How are you filling your new business pipeline with high-value prospects? Inbound Marketing and a sophisticated SEO strategy are two tactics to consider:

  1. Inbound marketing – Instead of pushing your message to recipients who may not be good prospects, you can use inbound marketing to attract customers to you, naturally. The principle: offering information about a solution to a specific problem your customer faces in exchange for contact information from them. As potential customers research their problem, looking for both a better understanding and solution, you want them coming to you for the answer. Your website can offer an article or downloadable white paper hidden behind a simple lead-generation form that collects email addresses and other basic contact information. If the material you offer is valuable enough for them to fill out the form, boom, you have a new lead. From there, you can continue to nurture that lead until it is ready to hand-off to your sales team. Inbound marketing is a “growth hacking” technique in that you are targeting people who are already interested in your product.
  2. SEO – Search engine optimization is a simple component of inbound marketing that you can implement quickly. It takes much less effort than producing regular content offers. With a little keyword research and some rewriting of your website content, customers who are already searching for what you offer will be able to find you and your products more easily through improved search rankings.

2. Artificial Intelligence

Blogging robots? Not quite. In the marketing world, artificial intelligence (AI) involves the automated delivery of highly-customized content based on audience personas and lifestyles. For example, a highly-customized marketing email for a music streaming service could use AI to include artist or album names that a specific user has previously shown interest in. Alternatively, it could use other customer data to guess what types of music that customer might like. Think of the limitless possibilities: AI could assess the time of day, what region of the world the user is in, even recent social media activity to take an educated guess at that person’s mood, activities, and desires at the time the email message is sent, thus multiplying the chances for engagement.

Think of AI as a way to ramp up efficiency and personalization to get more work done without burdening teams. Your team is already conducting research to optimize content delivery, but it can be extremely time consuming. Alternatively, computers can analyze big data in an instant and make informed suggestions that it would take people much longer to handle.

Exactly how can you use artificial intelligence? SocialMediaToday gives examples of AI usage such as optimizing email; telling you how, what, where, and when to publish, as well as optimizing email send times. Should your company choose to use an automated marketing tool such as HubSpot, you will have access to the AI components already built into HubSpot:

  1. Content Strategy can utilize machine learning to understand what themes search engines associate with your content. It will recommend topics for your company to write about and publish to increase your relevancy.
  2. Predictive Lead Scoring scores every contact in your database, telling you who is most likely to buy. Since the HubSpot CRM is connected to dozens of sources, it requires no setup and incorporates mounds of data into its calculations automatically.
  3. Coming soon: Chatbot. Looking to the future and the extensive usage of instant messaging widgets on company websites, marketing experts say that having a chatbot will soon be an essential component to great customer service. With its recent acquisition of Motion AI, HubSpot is developing chatbot technology for its Sales Hub now.

3. Personalization (with a check)

Personalization continues to be a major factor in the success of marketing campaigns and follows the mantra of “more is better.” It’s a no-brainer that a personal touch helps your brand cut through the onslaught of other voices bombarding your audience. Today, thanks to advances in personalization tools, we can now “personalize smarter.”

According to Digital Marketing Institute, companies are so convinced of the value of personalization that two-thirds expect a 6% increase in annual revenue from personalization in 2018. Sectors such as apparel, financial services, and technology anticipate increases of 10% or more. Sure, adding a name or phone number with a database token is a quick, essentially effortless way to tip your hat to personalization, but it can smell of automation for savvy readers.

Instead, consider setting up email strategies that personalize interactions with your brand in a way that truly makes an impression on your leads (and turns them into customers). Thanks to HubSpot’s technology, once a contact is in your database, their interactions with your brand’s website and social media networks can be tracked and recorded in the CRM. For example, if a sales-qualified lead reads a blog post on your company website, the CRM will note it. In your company’s next email communication, the sales rep can reference that specific blog post and speak more directly to the reason the lead is seeking your services. In addition, email templates in HubSpot include both personalization tokens and fill-in-the-blank areas. These features allow you to reuse content and increase your team’s efficiency while maintaining a customized message.

  1. Personalization tokens allow the CRM to populate database data such as contact name, company name, or location.
  2. The fill-in-the blank areas add an element of humanity and take personalization to the next level. This is where you can fill in the title of the web page, blog post, or content offer your customer last interacted with. You could also reference details from previous conversations you’ve had with the contact.

But be careful! Too much content, no matter how personalized, can be overwhelming. Take care to recognize when the additional detail or outreach might be perceived as too pushy. Instead, surprise and delight your customers with the right mix and this seamless connection will increase their confidence that your organization is the right match for their needs.

4. Live streaming and mobile video

An eye-opening stat from Smart Insights states that up to 51% of web visits are now from mobile devices. That’s a 25% increase year-over-year. Imagine the families consuming media on public transportation, while waiting in line, and even at home while moving about the house. Even more intriguing, viewers watch live streams 3x longer than pre-recorded video.

For pre-recorded clips, consider incorporating brief videos that describe your company’s offering or illustrate a complicated process in a simple way. For example, this approach is particularly helpful and informative for healthcare clients as animated videos can educate patients on health conditions or on methods of care outside of doctors’ visits. On web pages where an explainer video is present, visitors are 4x more likely to watch the explainer video than to read the text on the page.

Livestreaming, however, is more effective for broadcasting events and tradeshows, announcing new products, and adding a true face and personality to your brand. One fitting example of this application was the NASA livestreams of the 2017 solar eclipse path of totality as it travelled across the United States. It is reported that over 40 million viewers saw at least part of the livestream. In addition, the use of livestreaming tools such as Facebook Live or Instagram stories adds another level of connection to your brand. When users are active on Facebook, they receive notifications when pages they follow provide a live video feed. In a similar vein, new Instagram stories are presented prominently at the top of the user interface.

5. Micro-influencers

Leveraging the social clout of well-known influencers, whether celebrities or subject-matter experts, is old news for marketers. The resources needed to uphold an influencer marketing program are frequently extensive and results can be mixed. Countless companies clamor for the attention of big-name influencers and to ride the coat-tails of their prestige; meaning your company’s voice is likely to get lost in the crowd. In addition, many online bloggers typically do not endorse products or services without monetary compensation, which can be an obstacle if you are operating with smaller budgets.

Enter the micro-influencer. Micro-influencers are public figures or industry-known names that have an audience size of between 1,000 and 100,000 followers. Surprised by the audience size? There’s data to support it: Micro-influencers are 4x more likely to get a comment on a post than are macro-influencers (who usually have ~10 million followers). The numbers don’t lie. Since micro-influencers are likely concerned with building their own brand, as well, you may be able to come to a mutually-beneficial agreement on social media cross-promotion versus monetary compensation. A win-win for both of you.

As an example, Tom’s of Maine launched an influencer marketing program that used its own customers as micro-influencers. These folks are enthusiasts of Tom’s personal care products made only with natural ingredients. Each of them had between 500 to 5,000 followers on Instagram. By leveraging this established network, the campaign boosted customer engagement by 600%.

Seeking out these influencers and building the relationship through insightful online comments and regular email follow-ups can be time consuming for many companies. Fortunately, marketing agencies are adept at managing these types of micro-influencer programs for you so you reap the benefits while focusing your internal resources on other priorities.

6. Enhance Your Brand Blog

Internet users read blogs for information, but also for fun! Attract positive attention to your brand by enhancing your blog with entertaining information, as well, to keep readers coming back. At a minimum, you should be keeping your website up-to-date and posting SEO-rich content to your company blog a few times per month. However, as more and more companies jump on the brand blog bandwagon, you may need to kick it up a notch to maintain your advantage.

The first step of enhancement is setting goals for your company blog. How many times should you be posting? What types of results should you expect to see? An article published by HubSpot comes to the rough conclusion that 16 posts per month is the magic number.

  1. B2B companies that publish 16+ blog posts per month receive 3.5 times the amount of traffic as companies that publish only 0-4 times per month.
  2. B2C companies that publish 16+ blog posts per month enjoy a whopping 4.5 times the amount of traffic as those that only upload 0-4 posts per month.

Regardless of company size, there is a significant jump in indexed traffic to go from 4 (or even fewer) to 16 blog posts a month. So, if publishing 16 posts every month seems to be a daunting task, 11 can be a more reasonable starting goal. 11 posts still shakes out to be about 3 a week, which is why many companies opt to hire agencies to supplement their own blogging efforts. If your internal team can handle 1-2 per week, you can lean on external resources for about the same number and reach that threshold.

The next question, then, is what types of topics should you cover to keep up with that volume of posting? Here are some ideas:

  1. Industry best practices tips/discoveries
  2. Relevant business trends
  3. Company updates
  4. Engaging customer stories
  5. Featured guest posts
  6. Top 10 lists

Your brand blog will amp up your SEO, draw more leads to your site, and present your company as a vibrant, expert force in your industry.

7. Integrate marketing activities into the customer lifecycle

Imagine if you could optimize your marketing strategy in a way that when a customer discovered a need that your product or service can solve, the customer received a marketing message at that exact moment. Using your carefully-crafted brand personas, as well as customer journey maps, that dream can start to be a reality. Your customer journey map already documents the steps and touchpoints a customer takes with your brand. Instead of producing the same marketing messaging for all potential customers, it is time to get smarter about meeting the needs of customers where they are in their journey by providing relevant content as the fuel to keep them moving through the funnel.

Say that your company makes orthotic inserts for shoes. Your customers are, likely, people who have experienced or are experiencing foot or knee pain. When they first notice the problem, the potential customer might not even know what orthotic inserts are, much less that they could help solve their (literal) pain point. Instead, potential customers are more likely to research general information such as, “why do my feet hurt after standing for only an hour?” or “how to tell if you have high arches”. Your company can provide them with detailed answers via a blog post explaining why different foot shapes and arch heights cause pain and how to perform an at-home test for determining arch height.

Once the lead has moved past this brand awareness stage to a product research stage, your website could then present content that compares and contrasts the orthotics your company sells. Include “Add to Cart” or other e-commerce functionality to guide them seamlessly through the purchasing process and see the revenue add up.

Conclusion

Smart planning and upfront investment can lead to great returns in 2018. Start crafting your plan of action and inventorying your resources now. If you’re struggling to determine which marketing ideas might be right for you or your organization, simply connect with one of our expert marketers who can help guide your 2018 marketing strategy.

Connect with Thread Marketing Group.

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