How to use a B2B blog to generate leads
Our last post on business blogging looked at seeding and distribution and how to get people to your blog.
However, the end goal of a business blog (or any customer facing content asset) must be to stimulate demand and generate enquiries.
In this final post of this business blogging series we look at how companies can use blogs to drive demand generation. For more information you can see our demand generation definition.
Create a compelling call-to-action
There needs to be a compelling call to action to take a visitor's fledgling interest in your business to the next level.
It is commonly accepted that it takes time to build traffic to a blog, and even longer for people to interact with it. So, assuming it is almost impossible to encourage blog visitors to engage with a corporate blog, how can you keep them there and get…
Our interview with Jim Conning, the head of Data Services at Royal Mail
I spoke to Jim Conning, Managing Director of Data Services at Royal Mail about how marketers need to master the use of customer data to deliver the right message at the right time
Q. Personalised messaging based around customer’s life events is a great way to cut through the noise and reach customers in a way that is meaningful to them. Can you give some idea of what capabilities marketers need in place to be able to achieve this kind of messaging?
First and foremost, marketers need to understand the value of their customers’ life events, and what life events are relevant for your business and products. For example, moving home represents a major opportunity for the utilities providers because around 65% of consumers switch…
Looking to use video marketing as a tool to grow your business? Use these 10 tips and strategies
By 2017, video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic, according to a study done by Cisco.
Video is the future of content marketing. That is, if it's not the here and now. YouTube currently receives more than 1 Billion unique visitors a month and is the second largest search engine after Google. Video can give you access to a huge audience but video marketing is frequently an afterthought while it's value demands top priority in your content marketing plan.
Online video is quickly becoming a key means for people to satisfy their information and entertainment needs, businesses that fail to include it in their online marketing strategy will do so at their peril.
In this article we'll dive into 10 actionable tips to increase your YouTube presence so you can…
Using video content on your blog will make you a search engine favourite
Ranking on search engines is the top-most priority for all content creators. Chances are you’ve landed here to read this article to learn what more you can do to outshine others in the SEO-race.
Extensive keyword research, targeted topics and flow of link-juice to your articles is what you’ve all been doing for a while. Right?
However, with evolving audience types and decreasing attention span, diversification is important. You cannot just stick to the written word.
This is where video content comes in. Accompanying the text with a high-quality video makes it stand out. Almost 80% of users recall watching a video in the past month, and 46% report taking some action on it! This alone is the biggest reason why you should start creating video content.
A video not only lends credibility to your message, it also showcases authority to the…
Online Video is maturing, and often delivers higher ROI than TV ads.
The way people consume media is changing. Traditional TV is down, desktop is plateauing. People are canceling their cable TV subscriptions, but are signing up to streaming services like Netflix or Amazon prime in droves. Mobile is exploding and online video is enjoying a huge surge in popularity. YouTube has over a billion users, and that number is growing over 40% per year, with revenue growth up an even more impressive 50% over the same period.
This is starting to mean that YouTube is becoming more effective (or at least more cost effective) than TV when it comes to video advertising. A dutch brand called Landliebe, which focuses on dairy products, studied it's ROI on both TV ads and YouTube ads, to discover which form of video advertising was more effective.
A 20-second spot ran on several German TV channels, while…
Diversify your brand narrative with a multi-platform marketing campaign strategy
“The attention economy is not growing,” asserts CRM Essentials’ co-founder, Brent Leary, and many marketing strategists would agree. In today’s fast-paced mobile world, it’s become increasingly difficult to make an impression with traditional marketing techniques, as ever-more sophisticated methods - incorporating multiple formats and publishing platforms - take hold and make their presence felt.
This is known as nonlinear marketing, and in this article we’ll explore how and why the use of such abstract strategies can be so successful, and how you can start to incorporate nonlinear into your narrative.
The value of video
Cisco has predicted that 80% of all Internet traffic will be video content by 2019, revealing a growing trend for smartphone streaming that has put advertisers the world over on hot alert. There are many other reasons to embrace video marketing, and I’ve gone to the trouble of collating…
Out with the old and in with the new
The idea of scheduling all your appointments on large excel sheets or overfilled diaries is a thing of the past. Small businesses are now gradually switching to digital calendars and online appointment scheduling and in turn improving their business output as customers have the ability to make appointments online, anywhere, anytime.
To get to this stage, it is recommended to follow the next 7 steps for success as a small business.
7 methods for a small business to boost adoption of online booking
1. Promotion, Promotion, Promotion
When committing your business to a CRM / Online booking system you need to “go big or go home”. Meaning, you need to promote the fact that you are now accepting new appointments through online booking.
This should be advertised anywhere your customer has most interaction within your business. For example, good places to advertise would be next to your cashier,…
Wordpress offers a host of opportunities for marketers. Here are seven essential techniques for managing your Wordpress site.
The primary goal of every online marketer should be to achieve maximum visibility for the site they’re promoting, while also facilitating an optimal conversion rate, in the most efficient way possible. To do this, many marketers have begun using robust, open source content management systems like WordPress to streamline and simplify site creation, search engine optimization, and ongoing content publishing. Wordpress is particularly popular for company blogs, but has suitable functionality and quality for other sites including SmartInsights.com!
Whether you've recently made the decision to jump aboard the WordPress bandwagon, or have been using it for years, there are most likely a few tips, tricks, and principles that you may have overlooked in your haste to keep up with the fast pace of online marketing.…
Marketers need to learn how to master data science to stay ahead
Twenty years ago, marketing was a whole different ballgame. You’d buy a magazine ad or a billboard and hope for results.
Today, marketing looks much more like a science; it’s data-driven, precise, and numerically grounded. For example, it’s possible to know how many people landed on your company’s latest blog post last Wednesday, what city each person was located in, and how long each visitor stayed on the page.
But just because that information is available doesn’t necessarily make it useful. The current marketing dilemma isn’t in gathering data; rather, it’s sifting through the mountains of minutia without getting buried in a veritable landslide. The challenge of marketers is now fishing for concise, actionable insights in a stream of scrap data.
Symptoms of Analysis Paralysis
CMOs want quantified, useful information about how customers…
A checklist for digital marketers, bloggers and writers to create content that brings traffic and turns visitors into subscribers or customers
80% of B2B marketers and 70% of B2C marketers used content marketing for their businesses last year. The number of digital marketers who use content creation and distribution in 2015 is close to 90% from total.
Being a very significant part of successful marketing strategy, online content is developing and improving constantly; it's not enough for content writers to take a laptop, create a 500-word article on a particular topic, add a bright or funny image, and post it to their business blogs in hopes for great traffic and conversion rates. This tactics doesn't work anymore: top-notch content calls the shots, and online writers should abide by the rule of the game if they want to make their business more visible and recognizable online, as well as monetize their traffic.
According to…
