Using Marketing to Manage Business Growing Pains
Marketing is an investment in the long-term success of your business — but like any investment, how and when we engage in it heavily impacts ROI. One of the reasons continuous year-round marketing is worth the money, especially during busy or difficult times, is because it helps us transition more smoothly through business growing pains. With a consistent marketing strategy, companies can better manage lead flow, employee turnover, and expansion when it matters most.
Manage Lead Flow With Marketing Strategy
Continuous marketing, even during busy times, prevents “feast or famine” business cycles and the stress that comes with it. When lead flow is more predictable, it’s easier to make additional investments in new facilities, equipment, and talent with less risk and worry. For businesses contending with the challenges associated with new growth, this particular benefit is key to making that growth sustainable and retaining loyal customers through difficult transitions.
A well thought-out marketing strategy also gives businesses the opportunity to plan ahead instead of trying to market from a place of panic, which is typically when you have the least amount of time and resources to allocate to marketing. Better planning results in better execution — making it possible to increase the return on your marketing investment simply by making it a part of regular business operations.
Another way that continuous marketing eases business growing pains is by streamlining the sales process and increasing the confidence of sales staff. Updated, well-targeted marketing materials can save your sales team time, and helps them take advantage of unique opportunities in the moment. It also enhances their communication with individuals who are more visual than auditory in the way they learn new information. By better accommodating the way potential prospects want to communicate with your sales staff, we can shorten sales cycles and improve the morale of your sales team.
Manage Recruitment With Marketing Strategy
Marketing for recruitment is very different from marketing for lead generation, and both are necessary to adequately manage business growing pains. This means that even if your business already has a handle on your lead generation marketing, it’s not time to get complacent. You will also need to put together a solid strategy for recruitment in order to manage the increase in workflow that will likely result from successful lead generation marketing.
Hammering out a marketing strategy for recruitment before crunch time hits is key to funneling qualified team members to your business as needed, without suffering through periods of being under or overstaffed. Just like lead generation marketing, giving yourself time to develop a recruitment strategy improves the ROI of your investment in talent acquisition, streamlines overhead, and avoids sinking resources into failed campaigns.
Continuous recruitment marketing during busy times also helps increase your capacity to take on new customers — but finding the right talent is often easier said than done. When competition in the labor market is high, businesses need to work that much harder to reach the talent they desperately need. The smarter and more calculated you are in creating and executing a recruitment marketing strategy, the more sustainably you can grow even when economic barriers and labor market conditions create roadblocks.
Business growing pains are a natural part of building a successful company, but that doesn’t mean we have to completely surrender to them. To learn more about using marketing to manage growth, connect with a 360 Direct team member via our Contact page.
Successfully Engage Your Audience, One Event at a Time
Ways to Engage
Whether you’re hosting an event, or simply participating in one, there are plenty of ways to engage your potential customers. Event marketing not only acts as another avenue for brand recognition, it gives prospective customers something to get excited about with your company. As a B2B company, the true success of an event is how many hot leads or actual sales you get from it and engaging your audience effectively is the key to pulling those leads further into your sales funnel.
If You Build It, They May Come
The first step of pursuing event marketing is deciding what type of event you want to do. It’s important that you focus on the wants of your target audience and where you can find them in order for your event to perform successfully. A popular event is only beneficial to you if it’s popular with your target audience. In some cases, a smaller event with a more narrow appeal will work better for you.
Once you figure out the type of event you want to pursue, how do you plan on getting the word out? Events are great opportunities to not only gain the interest of people you haven’t connected with yet, but also to engage with your existing contacts. Through the use of free and inexpensive tactics (examples listed below), there is potential for the marketing of your event to garner tremendous reach.
- Press Releases – This is a free way to push the relevant information about your event to publications and on your website.
- Website Landing Pages – Having an event-specific page on your website that has all the details and a contact form for more information is perfect for tracking how many potential leads are interested. Use this in your press releases, emails, and on social media to make sure it garners the attention it needs. Also, using Google Analytics, you can see precisely who your website page is attracting.
- Digital Advertising – Google Ads and Facebook Advertising are both inexpensive yet highly effective options for pushing event promotion for your company. The reach can be extremely targeted and it is important to utilize channels that your audience is using for professional and personal use – just make sure that you make use of things like these fb reporting tools! You’ll want to make sure that you are using Facebook effectively and correctly. Use these tools to your advantage and you should be good to go, just make sure to keep an eye on things. You could look into hiring a facebook ads agency to help you with promotion and upping you ROI at the same time.
- Email – If you utilize email marketing, another simple way to get your event information out to your audience is to include a section in your monthly or quarterly email newsletter on your event. This could simply be a graphic with a description and call to action to learn more on your website landing page.
- Social Media – Creating an event page on Facebook. This is easy, free, and increases the visibility and reach of your event.
Using tactics like these, you can potentially reach thousands of prospects while re-engaging with your current customer base and keeping them informed of your progress. Targeted landing pages and digital advertising are especially helpful with events because of their trackability and reporting capabilities to analyze the success of the event.
What to Offer – The Importance of Incentivizing
You now have a chance to be creative with your prospects so that they willingly give you their information and stick around to learn more about your company. When you are asking a prospect for their email or phone number, they’ll be much more likely to comply if they receive something of value in return. You can raffle a prize, or you can dig deeper and offer them something that relates directly to your company, like a trial of your product or a consultation. That has the added benefit of being typically lower cost to you, and moving them further into your sales pipeline.
SWAG items are often popular. While they aren’t often enticing enough to get a contact point in return, they are a useful tool in keeping your brand in front of your prospects. In order for it to be worth the cost, the SWAG item needs to be of interest or of use to your prospect. How many stress balls does an executive have on his desk?
Need Help Putting it All Together?
Engaging your event audience is crucial to the success of your marketing efforts, especially if it’s executed with trackability and consumer value in mind. Whether you’re unsure what event could be right for you, or have ideas but need help putting everything together, visit our Contact page and get in touch with one of our marketing experts today. Our team has the tools and expertise you need to help you engage the audience you want.
How To Make Your Next Marketing Campaign Succeed
Launching a marketing campaign doesn’t have to be a nail-biter. Set yourself up for success by covering fundamental campaign bases using a little preliminary market research, tactical coordination, and strategy.
Employ Multiple Tactics To Achieve Your Goal
Every campaign needs to start with a focused goal. Not all of your marketing campaigns will necessarily have the goal of immediately resulting in new sales. Many are designed to help prospects a little further down the sales funnel, making them easier to convert. Motivate your prospects to move down that funnel by providing value to them at each touchpoint using a clear call to action. For instance, if your goal is growing your email newsletter, offer coupons or free downloads when they provide their email address. Or, if you’re trying to get their emails in store, offer them a free Custom Water bottle and the coupon, as well as your brand logo, can be on the water bottle’s label. Nearly all customers love freebies so using them is a great way to attract attention.
Whatever your goal is, you aren’t likely to reach it without taking a multi-tactical approach to a marketing campaign. It can take up to seven touchpoints for a lead to convert, meaning a one-off radio ad or single sponsored social media post will not generate overwhelming results on their own. Instead, stay in front of your audience with a series of corresponding tactics for better total ROI.
Know The Audience Of Your Marketing Campaign
The success of a marketing campaign can be dictated by how well you know your target audience. Narrow down your demographic and craft language, imagery, and offers that speak to their needs and values. The preliminary research is worth the effort, because dollars spent on anything ineffective is still wasted resources, even if the marketing tactic is low cost. To ensure your marketing efforts aren’t going to waste you’ll want to deeply understand your audience insights and play to the requirements and behavior of your existing customers.
In that same vein, choosing ad platforms and mediums that your audience frequents or will respond positively to is essential to the success of a marketing campaign. The tactics you choose depend entirely on how your target market wants to be approached, which may require mixing both traditional and digital marketing tactics in the same campaign.
Follow Through On Your Marketing Campaign Tactics
It isn’t enough to simply execute your tactics and expect your leads to convert. Following through with your marketing tactics requires coordinating each one in a timely way, tracking them, and touching base with new leads at the end of the campaign.
Following through also means staying the course. Don’t change tactics mid campaign, even if results are slow to trickle in. Remember that it takes several marketing touchpoints for a lead to convert, so don’t get discouraged by low response rates early on. Wrapping up before your marketing campaign has run its course only deprives you of useful data.
Whenever possible, measure the efficacy of your tactics by checking analytics, recording the number of inquiries received, or emails collected. This valuable insight can be used for a retargeting campaign, or an entirely new campaign down the line. The more data we have, the greater our chances for success.
For more information on how to craft a successful marketing campaign, connect with an expert here.
Email Marketing's Place in a B2B Industry
Email marketing has been a popular choice for years now, known as an inexpensive option to directly reach consumers. Emails consistently have the highest ROI of all marketing channels. But are they still working? And are they more fit for B2C companies?
The answers are, “Yes, they are still working, and they are just as fit for B2B companies!” In fact, B2B companies have a higher Open Rate and CTR than B2C companies when it comes to email. Let’s take a look at a few reasons your B2B company should employ a robust email marketing campaign.
For one, emails can help establish your business as a forward-thinking thought leader in your industry. Presenting new, helpful information to decision makers will keep you at the top of their mind when they encounter a business pain that needs a solution you already provide.
Second of all, emails have a higher rate of engagement than social media. This could be because people who sign up for your email list are already more engaged in your company than those that click “like” on social media, or it could be because people are in the mindset for reading more and deeper connections when they sit down with their email than when they casually scroll through social media channels. Regardless, emails has proved in multiple studies to be more effective than social media. Not to mention, many of your client and contacts may not be connected to you on social media!
Lastly, emails are a great way to stay in contact with clients and interested parties with long buying cycles. You are well aware that B2B sales are relationship based. Nurture and grow that relationship by providing interesting and relevant information for them in between sales calls.
So now that we’ve covered why B2B companies should send emails, what should be in them?
Email marketing is a great tool for both B2C and B2B businesses, but those emails are very different in terms of content.
A B2C email typically has a call to make a purchase, but B2B emails are best when they present new information. B2B emails should focus on being educational and informative, encouraging recipients to “Learn More” rather than “Buy More!”
This is a great opportunity for B2B companies to reach decision makers and educate them about problems they may not know about and introduce them to the solutions you provide. Rather than list your products, show them an in-depth case study so they can see how your company can affect change and solve their business pain. It’s also the perfect place to announce new products or services you offer, trade shows you will be attending, and other developments that are relevant to your clients and show that your company is constantly growing and developing.
Even when content is rich, detailed, and informative, don’t bog down the email by making it too lengthy. Post your case study, whitepaper, or product announcement on your website. The email should contain enough information for your recipient to determine if it’s information they want to learn more about, and then provide a link for them to do just that – on the company website, of course.
As with all email marketing campaigns, only send an email when you have something interesting to tell you recipients! For many B2B companies, an email a month is frequent enough. As always, monitoring your results can guide the decision making process for adjusting any marketing campaign to achieve best results.
We would also recommend you make sure that you use an Email Encryption service. It is important to send out quality information in your emails, but you want to be sure that your are only sending out the information you are aware of and not leaking private company information with emails that aren’t encrypted. Make sure you find a service that offers your the right protection and email encryption service for your business before you choose one.
While there are some differences in B2C and B2B campaigns, there are similarities as well.
Segmenting your audience to get the most pertinent information to your recipients realizes the best results, particularly for larger companies with several focuses. Otherwise, companies run the risk of recipients getting into the mindset that emails from you are not always relevant or helpful.
As always, only use email addresses that people have willingly given and opted-in to receive correspondence and give a clear opt-out option in emails. If your company is getting ready to add email marketing to your marketing mix, ensure recipients are told in their first email what your emails will be used for and how frequently they can expect communication.
Companies that take the time to develop great emails will reap the rewards in better client relationships and a great ROI. If you aren’t currently investing in email marketing, it’s never to late too begin and see how your business benefits.