How to Spring Clean Your Marketing Strategy

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You’ve probably cleaned out your house countless times, but have you ever thought about sprucing up your marketing strategy?

Spring cleaning is a great tradition. After spending months cooped up indoors, it’s a chance to refresh and refocus for the second half of the year. Why not apply that same energy to cleaning up your marketing strategy as well?

Step 1: Organize Your Efforts

If your team has been winging it, take this time to meet and document your marketing strategy as best as you can. Make a list of the different efforts you want to focus on this year, and fill in as much as possible. How are you reaching you social media goals? Content Marketing? Branding? Networking?

Creating editorial calendars and written strategies that document your plan keeps focus sharp long-term.

Step 2: Polish the Important Pieces  

It’s easy to neglect your platforms once they’re set up and rolling smoothly. Don’t make the mistake of accepting “functioning” as “succeeding.” Use this spring cleaning exercise as an excuse to do a self-audit of your platforms, content and brand. 

Start by pulling all of the data you can—analytics on everything you have. Take a look at them, one by one, and ask yourself questions such as:

Social Media

  • Which social media platforms are generating engagement? Is the engagement valuable (i.e. is it leading to conversions?)
  • Which aren’t? Is it because you don’t have an audience on the platform? Is it because your audience isn’t present on that platform?

Brand

  • A brand evolves over time. Is yours still speaking to your audience? Is it still representative of your company?

Content

  • Which topics resonate well with your audience? Is your content actually useful, or is it just a sales pitch?

By cleaning up and polishing these important aspects of your business, you reboot your entire company’s vision and focus.

Take Out the Trash

Are you wasting your energy on duds? Marketing in general takes a great deal of resources, and there’s no point investing resources into a void.

Now that you’ve audited and seen the analytics, you have a better idea of what’s working and what’s not.

To invest your resources wisely:

  • Be selectively social: Having a dead Instagram account linked to your company’s homepage weakens the company’s brand as a whole. If you haven’t posted in months, let it go.
  • Go through the mail: email marketing analytics make it easy to see which email addresses are responsive to your campaigns. If there certain email addresses that always bounce or end up undelivered, delete them. This will make your analytics more accurate and provide deeper insights.
  • Back up your brand: Content that no longer speaks to your brand or provides no value to your customer is the marketing equivalent of having shag carpet in your living room: it sets a bad (and wrong) impression. Let it go. 

Stock up on Essentials

Now that you’ve figured out your plan, dusted off and re-booted your strategies and optimized your efforts, it’s time to make the rest of the year go as smoothly as possible.

Having a generous backlog can ensure that there is always quality content coming out, without having to worry about falling behind during a busy week.

  • If you have a content calendar, try to work 2-4 weeks in advance. This keeps pieces timely, yet provides enough leeway to fall behind every now and then.
  • If you don’t have a content calendar, try to make one for the next quarter or the rest of the year. Keep in mind important company events, holidays and promotions.
  • Make an email marketing idea list. It’s hard to come up with new and engaging topics every week, so having a list of fallbacks and sure-winners helps streamline the process.
  • Stock up on visual content (such as pictures and videos) that you can easily pull from to post on Instagram, Facebook or blogs.

Do You to Spring Clean Your Marketing Strategy?

Try to remember how good it feels to sit in a nice, clean room and how glad you were that you finally got around to cleaning it.

This year, focus on achieving that same feeling for your marketing strategy:

  • Organizing your efforts: make your goals easy to find and easy to maintain
  • Clean up your presence: make sure your brand and its assets are helping and not hurting you
  • Invest resources wisely: don’t keep dragging along dead initiatives
  • Keep a backlog: Having content to pull helps streamline your strategy

Different Strokes for Different Folks: Marketing to B2B vs. B2C

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How to Sell a Knife

I’ve always found Cutco’s business model fascinating. If I had to try and sell kitchen cutlery door to door, knives wouldn’t be my first choice (for various reasons). So say what you will about Cutco’s high school and college sales reps—they they know how to sell knives.

The fact that Cutco’s business model holds up at all is a testament to their targeted marketing. They know they’re a B2C knife company—they’re the only one I can think of—and so they market their knives differently than B2B knife brands like Shun or Zwilling that sell directly to stores.

Which brings us to the topic of this blog post.

Marketing to B2B vs. B2C

Marketing of all kinds has only one goal: sales.

The strategy used to achieve those sales, however, differs when marketing to other businesses versus directly to consumers. While B2B marketing is more relationship driven, B2C marketing is more product driven, and these factors need to be taken into consideration when creating a comprehensive framework and strategy.

Who are you talking to, again?

As we’ve talked about before, finding your ideal voice is crucial to business success. Your B2B voice should probably be mature, professional, and knowledgeable. When writing for businesses, you have to consider all of the people you need to sell your product to before reaching the decision-maker. This can include managers, directors and even the C-suite.

On the other hand, your B2C voice could be very colorful or conservative depending on who you’re targeting. After all, there are a lot more individual customers out there than there are businesses. Keep in mind that when writing for consumers, you’re typically only talking to one person—the decision-maker.

Are you speaking their language?

The right content types differ for B2B vs. B2C marketing strategies as well.

In B2B marketing, longer, more technical pieces fare better than the personable, pithy pieces that are staples of B2C writing.

In fact, according to research from the Content Marketing Institute, the most popular content marketing methods for B2C brands are:

  • Social media
  • Illustrations and photos
  • Newsletters
  • Videos
  • Blog posts

B2C tactics revolve around engaging and delighting the individual consumer. In contrast, another study from the same institute identified the most important B2B Marketing tactics as:

  • In-person events
  • Webinars/webcasts
  • Case studies
  • White papers
  • Videos

The B2B tactics revolve around creating relationships (e.g., through in-person events, such as conferences or trade shows) and developing an authoritative brand (through highly detailed thought leadership content, including white papers and videos).

Takeaway: the decision-makers at businesses make decisions based on logic, rationale, and budgets, while general consumers are more impulsive and make decisions based on their emotional state.

Are you ready to create your own strategy?

It’s not complicated to  figure out how to tailor your marketing strategy to meet your needs, even when considering B2B vs. B2C. When creating a strategy, consider:

  • Generalized vs. Tailored: B2C businesses can afford to talk to a large audience. Consumer purchase decisions are usually based off simple needs, while business purchase decisions are usually very specific, and need to fit the complex needs of an entire business.
  • Emotional vs. Logical: Decision makers at businesses are focused on budgets, benefits, and efficiency. Consumers are focused on happiness.
  • Engaging vs. Valuable: (Most) consumers don’t spend hours and hours trying to decide whether to buy from one company or another, but you’d be hard pressed to find a  business that doesn’t vet all its vendors. Businesses want to see that they’re buying from professionals that understand and care about their specific needs, while consumers want to know they’re buying from a brand that has the same values.

 

Marketing Resolutions for Your Business (and Yourself)

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It was once again mid-December, and I was once again sitting and trying to come up with a list of resolutions. While going through some of the most common resolutions: get healthy, do more for others, etc. it hit me: these are great marketing resolutions, too.

Resolutions are a great concept. They give you focus for the year and motivate you to get more done. So often our work lives overlap with our personal lives—wouldn’t it be easier to just make one set of resolutions?

Resolution #1: Lose Weight and Get in Shape

This is everyone’s perennial favorite, and for good reason: when you’re in shape, you feel at your best. It’s the same for your business. One of your marketing resolutions should be to lose dead weight and make healthier business choices.

This year, instead of indulging in every marketing tactic out there, concentrate on the ones that will strengthen your business. Does your accounting business need a Pinterest? Probably not. Do you need to 

Instead of sending out quick emails and posts that get you through the day, work on campaigns that will carry you into the future.

Resolution # 2: Think About Others

Long gone are the days where a simple HTML website was enough to impress a client.

These days, it’s all about user experience. Consumers have grown to expect a lot from companies. User experience is no longer just about how your website performs, but how it looks, as well as how well it’s optimized for mobile.

Instead of choosing website elements based off of your personal preferences or keeping certain elements because they’ve been there since day one, think of your customer. 88 percent of online consumers are less likely to revisit your site after a bad experience.

How do you prevent that? By focusing on the little things as well as the overall experience. A user experience manager for Bing credited using a specific shade of blue for at least $80 million in additional annual revenue.

You can also just listen to your audience. Have they been asking for a search bar? A better way to contact you? Give them what they want—the customer is [almost] always right. ESPN saw their revenue jump 35 percent after incorporating customer feedback in their homepage redesign.

Resolution #3: Learn from Your Mistakes and Make Better Choices

In 2016, stop sending out tweets that get no engagement. Stop sending emails that are never opened. Stop writing blogs that are never read. Start learning from your mistakes.

Marketing is a vast and complex business. What works for one company might not work for another. A very easy and practical way to figure out what works for your business is to start A/B testing.

A/B testing in its most basic form is simple: make different versions (such as a version A and a version B) and see which one does better. It’s a near-universal practice that works on social media strategy, email blasts, landing page copy—pretty much all types of content.

By A/B testing, you’ll be able to actively compare conversion and engagement rates and use that data to figure out what resonates best with your audience. A/B testing helped ComScore increase lead generation by 69 percent, and it helped Sony increase purchases by 20 percent.

Resolution #4: Write More

In 2015, businesses (both B2B and B2C) that prioritized blogging were 13 times as likely to see a positive return on investment. Don’t miss out on a statistic like that. This year, one of your marketing resolutions should be to make time to write. 

Even if you’re not a writer, you should write more. Setting aside a just a few minutes a day to get your thoughts down on paper is not only therapeutic, it’s a great way to brainstorm, organize your thoughts and come up with the next big idea for your company.

What will your marketing resolutions be?

It’s never too late to set goals for yourself or for your company. This year, try to:

  • Optimize your web, social and physical presence to make an impact. Don’t cheat yourself out of quality leads by spreading yourself too thin.
  • Revamp your website. If you’re unsure how, follow this simple philosophy: Keep it simple. Make it easy to use. Make a great first impression.
  • Decide what works for you. Create variations and analyze data to figure out the best voice, language, and even colors for your brand.
  • Make time to write. Whether you write for your blog or for yourself, your business will benefit from a little spark of creativity.

What is the Perfect Blog Post Length?

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“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead” – Mark Twain

Ulysses by James Joyce is a whopping 265,000 words and took him the better part of two decades to write. Kafka’s Metamorphosis by is a cool 22,000. Both are considered quintessential modernist masterpieces.

We’ve already discussed the merits of why quality writing matters—but what is quality writing? And does more writing mean better writing?

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The Science of Conversational Marketing

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If I had to sum up the past decade of marketing in one word, it would be “adaptation.”

Customers are just too smart. They block ads, ignore canned content, and are better read than ever before. They continue to be more and more empowered. So what’s a marketer to do? How can brands possibly react in time to shifting expectations, much less strategically?

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A Well-Written B2B Blog Will Make Your Business Money

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Chances are, you’ve read a blog this week: a how-to-guide on opening tricky jars, a comparative analysis of new smartphone cases, or some article shaming Millennials for their very existence. Blogs are everywhere. In fact, Quora believes there were somewhere around 173 million blogs back in 2011.

But did you know blogs are also one of the most cost-effective marketing techniques for businesses? They consistently drive traffic, build authority, and engage prospects.

In fact, blogs have been shown to lead to as much as 67% more leads.

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The Past, Present, and Future of Marketing

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The real skill now is learning how to pick out the useful information from all this noise. – Nate Silver

As this Entrepreneur infographic will show you, marketing has come a long way in a relatively short time.

In 1450, Gutenberg revolutionized printing. The first print magazine was published in Philadelphia in 1741. By 1839, posters were already so popular that they were banned on London properties. And less than 30 years later, in 1867, the first billboard went up.

Think about that. It took us 418 years to get from printing Bibles to renting out billboards. A glacial pace compared to the seismic shifts in today’s marketing landscapes.

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