Dummies Custom Solutions

Article / Updated 11-04-2022

In today's crowded marketplace, sellers have limited time to influence customers' buying decisions. For example, in B2B sales, reps only get about 5 percent of the customer's time before making a purchase decision (The B2B Buying Journey, 2020). This means that the information customers receive before connecting with a salesperson is critical to advancing, or in many cases, getting to a sales conversation. One of the most effective ways a marketer can attract and engage prospects to them closer to a sale is content marketing. Content marketing is an inbound sales strategy that uses high-quality content published by a company that is likely to reach the target customer. The idea is that providing valuable information about the firm's products or services with little or no commitment will improve the prospect's perception of the business, brand, product, or service. In his 1996 essay, Bill Gates famously said, "Content is King," and now, nearly 30 years later, content still reigns supreme. According to HubSpot (2021), 82 percent of marketers actively invest in content marketing to answer pre-sales questions and build trust and credibility with their audience. Free and easily accessible content is no longer a nice to have but an expectation. If a prospect can't easily find helpful information about your products or services online, you have no chance of gaining them as a customer; they will simply move on. Effective content marketing is directly linked to improved results. Demand Metric found that content marketing generates three times as many leads as outbound marketing initiatives and can cost 62 percent less. Seventy-eight percent of content marketers surveyed by Semrush in 20 industries across 40 countries believe that their content marketing was very successful in 2021. All this adds up to a simple truth, if content marketing isn’t part of your strategy, you’re missing out. Today's buyer journey is not as linear as it once was. Prospects are researching your company, brand, and products long before ever connecting with a salesperson. Content marketing helps you align your messaging across the various distribution channels used by your target customer. Message consistency and cohesion are just as important as the quality or volume of your content volume. Conflicting information will confuse your customers, causing them to lose trust in your ability to help them solve their problem. As you begin your content marketing journey, here are some things to keep in mind: Identify your audience — the best content marketing strategies involve finding your audience and publishing the right content to interest the people and add value to their lives. Shift your mindset from marketer to publisher — as you create content, do so with your audience in mind and not your business goals. Establish goals and choose the best form factor for your content — content marketing is a long-term strategy, so be sure to set realistic goals, or you won’t be satisfied. You also need to consider the types of content your target audience is likely to respond best to so you can make intelligent choices. Keep one eye on the competition — don’t assume you know what the competition is doing. Look for gaps in their messaging or opportunities to distinguish yourself. This article is from the book Content Marketing For Dummies, a Dummies Custom Solutions Special Edition. To learn more, download our free eBook, Content Marketing For Dummies. If you enjoyed this article and want to learn more marketing tips, check out the rest of our “Getting Started Series” articles and free eBooks on Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Integrated Marketing, Account-Based Marketing, and Email Marketing. About the Content Sponsor Dummies Custom Solutions creates co-branded custom marketing content that helps our clients “wow” their customers. We create content that positions our clients in front of a larger, global audience, establishing them as thought leaders in their industry, driving demand, increased engagement, and more qualified sales opportunities. References Not Another State of Marketing Report. (2021). Retrieved from HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/hubfs/State-of-Marketing%20(2).pdf Salkin, M. (2022, March 29). 40+ Content Marketing Statistics to Power Your 2022 Strategy. Retrieved from Semrush Blog: https://www.semrush.com/blog/content-marketing-statistics/ The B2B Buying Journey. (2020). Retrieved from Gartner: https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey The Current State of Content Marketing. (n.d.). Retrieved from Demand Metric: https://www.demandmetric.com/content/content-marketing-infographic

Article / Updated 10-21-2022

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a focused B2B marketing strategy designed to weed out less-valuable prospects and prioritize those best suited for your products or services. ABM works by creating personas based on the attributes of existing key accounts and then using those personas to strategically target companies with a higher probability of converting into customers or growing. That means that instead of blind email blasts, ABM focuses marketing resources on the customers likely to engage. The best part about ABM is that it works. ABM inverts the traditional marketing funnel where you fill the top of the funnel with lots of contacts which are then weeded out as they advance through the various stages of the journey. Rather than casting the net far and wide with ABM, the goal is to use a spear to catch the best fish for your business. According to Gartner (2021), by the end of 2020, more than 70% of B2B marketers at medium to large organizations will implement ABM in some capacity. Further, organizations with ABM initiatives see "higher win rates, faster sales cycles, and increased deal size." The concept of ABM is not new, but today's technology platforms are making it possible to target high-probability prospects with customized communications more effectively than ever before. In traditional marketing, when a lead is handed off to sales, the marketing team's engagement ends. In ABM, though, ongoing engagement between sales and marketing continues to create personalized campaigns and touch points across multiple channels. This is critical because, over time, targeting tactics must evolve based on feedback from sales teams' customer interactions. Why is ABM so important to your overall marketing strategy? Because generating quality leads is difficult and expensive! In fact, immediately after training marketing talent, developing traffic and leads is reported as the second most significant challenge facing marketers (HubSpot, 2022). Over the past decade, inbound marketing has helped reduce the reliance on costly push marketing tactics. However, despite those successes, salespeople still report that only 5 percent of the leads they receive from marketing activities are high quality (State of Inbound Marketing Trends, 2022). ABM can look different from organization to organization, and that's because there are several approaches is no settled definition. ITSMA (2017), for example, segments ABM into three types, one-to-one or strategic ABM, one-to-few or lite ABM, and one-to-many or programmatic ABM. Strategic ABM is usually reserved for an organization's most valuable customers or prospects because it requires a deep understanding of the business and close relationships with the customer. Lite ABM is generally applied to groups of mid-tier accounts that share similar attributes and business needs. Finally, programmatic ABM has only recently become practical through technology. With programmatic ABM, a single marketer could work across hundreds or thousands of identified accounts. Regardless of type, ABM has four stages: identity, expand, engage, and advocate. Here is how the four-stage approach is applied: Identify - Identify the best-fit contacts within your existing accounts by using your ideal customer profile and customer persona. Once the connection is confirmed as a good fit for your business, turning them into a full account can begin. Expand – Expand your contacts into an account. This is often the most challenging stage for marketers used to traditional lead-based marketing because it's the opposite of the narrowing down approach used in conventional marketing. Engage – Engagement is where your content comes to life by using personalized marketing to engage all the contacts within an account. The goal is to target your best-fit customers with valuable content on the channels where they are most likely to see it. Advocate – Customer advocates are the best way to generate new clients. Buyers today rely on peer recommendations and reviews more than ever. Turning your customers into raving fans is the most organic and impactful type of marketing. One study (Kapadia, 2020) reported that referral marketing initiatives in the B2B software and services sector resulted in 5X revenue growth between years 1 and 2. This article is from the book Account-Based Marketing For Dummies, a Dummies Custom Solutions Special Edition. To learn more account-based marketing, download our free eBook Account-Based Marketing For Dummies. If you enjoyed this article and want to learn more marketing tips, check out the rest of our "Getting Started Series" articles and free eBooks on Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Email Marketing, and Integrated Marketing. About the Content Sponsor Dummies Custom Solutions creates co-branded custom marketing content that helps our clients "wow" their customers. We create content that positions our clients in front of a larger, global audience, establishing them as thought leaders in their industry, driving demand, increased engagement, and more qualified sales opportunities. References Bonanno, S. (2021, March 30). How to Establish an Account-Based Marketing Strategy. Retrieved from Gartner: https://www.gartner.com/en/digital-markets/insights/abm-strategy Forsey, C. (2022, March 22). The Top 7 Marketing Challenges Faced Globally in 2022. Retrieved from HubSpot: https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33820/5-major-challenges-marketers-face-and-how-to-solve-them.aspx Kapadia, A. (2020, April 28). The ROI of Referral Marketing Revealed. Retrieved from Ambassador: https://www.getambassador.com/blog/roi-referral-marketing-revealed Munn, D. C. (2017, February 15). https://www.itsma.com/defining-the-three-types-of-account-based-marketing/. Retrieved from ITSMA: https://www.itsma.com/defining-the-three-types-of-account-based-marketing/ State of Inbound Marketing Trends. (2022). Retrieved from HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/hubfs/2022_State-of-Inbound-Marketing-Trends_V712.pdf

Article / Updated 10-21-2022

Integrated marketing is an approach to creating a unified and seamless experience for consumers to interact with a brand or business. By melding all aspects of marketing communications into a cohesive message, they can work together as a unified force to build brand loyalty, drive demand, and increase sales. An integrated strategy is a simple but effective way of connecting and structuring your content messaging so that customers and prospects have multiple opportunities to experience your brand. Why is it so important to target customers this way? Because customers are gathering data long before they ever engage with an actual person. According to (The B2B Buying Journey, 2020), in B2B sales, sales reps only get about 5 percent of the customer’s time during the buying journey. It also takes some level of persistence to get through to prospects. People are bombarded with advertising and sales pitches nearly every waking hour of their day, and they have become experts at tuning it out. A recent Harris Poll (Consumer Research Shows, 2021) revealed that three-quarters of U.S. adults are tuning out digital advertising due to the increased time they spend online. While it matters what you’re selling and who your target customer is, it can take between 7 and 13 touches to generate a qualified sales lead (Patel, 2021). Integrated marketing helps you overcome these barriers and offers several advantages to help improve the overall effectiveness of your marketing initiatives: A consistent narrative eliminates disparities in how a prospect or customer interacts with your business, ultimately leading to a better experience. Improved campaign performance through cross-promotion and allowing prospects to move laterally through the buying journey enabling you to communicate the value proposition. Reduced content development costs, repurposing content across various distribution channels. Helps optimize SEO which can improve your inbound traffic. Here are the seven steps to getting started with an integrated marketing strategy: Identify your target audience by developing personas and listening to your current customers. Determine your goals and metrics for measuring campaign success. Find which channels have the highest potential for reaching your target audience. Develop a content strategy that will reach your target audience. Be sure to refer to your customer personas and examine what types of content your target customer prefers. Create a high-level plan for each channel you decide on, utilizing the marketing tactics best suited to the specific campaign. Build and optimize a holistic, integrated strategy based on the recommendations provided in the channel strategies. Measure your campaign based on the metrics identified, and optimize your strategy to meet the goals you set This article is from the book Integrated Marketing For Dummies, a Dummies Custom Solutions Special Edition. To learn more about how to implement an integrated marketing strategy, download our free eBook Integrated Marketing For Dummies . If you enjoyed this article and want to learn more marketing tips, check out the rest of our “Getting Started Series” articles and free eBooks on Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Account-Based Marketing, and Email Marketing. About the Content Sponsor Dummies Custom Solutions creates co-branded custom marketing content that helps our clients “wow” their customers. We create content that positions our clients in front of a larger, global audience, establishing them as thought leaders in their industry, driving demand, increased engagement, and more qualified sales opportunities.