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.
“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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
References: