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.

 

Finding and Speaking to Your Ideal Customer

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Finding your ideal customer is crucial to business success. Once you create that buyer persona, the rest pretty much falls into place. It becomes easier to build a strong brand, target your social media efforts and create other types of targeted content.

An easy way to understand the power of a buyer persona is to compare a small table of people at lunch to a stadium with thousands of spectators. Which group do you think is easier to sell to?

Define Your Brand From Your Customer’s Point of View

The biggest mistake you can make is to build your customer base around how you want your company to be perceived.

Instead, ask yourself, what benefits do your company offer to your ideal customer? How can it solve their pain points? Then ask yourself, who does this really speak to?

That’s why the most effective way to gauge your audience in an unbiased manner is by taking a data-driven approach.

Take the NFL, for example. Historically, football has been considered a male sport. It seems to make sense for the NFL to focus on a male audience. Right?

Wrong. In 2010, the NFL learned that women make up close to 40 percent of all football fans. So they re-targeted by creating more modern, sophisticated apparel (read: not just pink jerseys) and women responded. In 2014, Super Bowl XLVIII was the most-watched television event among women.

Creating a Buyer Persona

Now it’s time to put together everything you’ve come up with so far. A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer.

Creating a great buyer persona requires:

  • Data
  • Insight
  • Understanding your customer
  • Understanding your company
  • A little imagination

It takes some work, but in the long-term personas will allow you to tailor your content, services and brand to meet the specific needs, concerns and behaviors of your potential customers.

Once you have an idea of the group you want to target, it’s time to analyze them. Are they more likely to be male or female? Are they younger or older? Are they from the East Coast or West Coast? Do they download apps? How educated are they? Some of these may seem trivial, but they’ve been proven to affect what a customer expects out of his experience.

From there, create a succinct elevator pitch that addresses all of those, and explains how your company can help.

Keep persona in age when building content. This will help you decide whether to spend more time on Instagram or Facebook, whether your emails should be more informational or witty, and whether you need more videos or testimonials on your webpage.

According to Hubspot research, using personas made websites between two and five times more effective to use.

Speak Directly to the Customer

You’ve done the research and compiled a perfect buyer persona, you have an elevator pitch that could sell ice to an Eskimo. Now what?

It’s time to put that work to good use by creating targeted content. By tailoring your content to your specific audience, you are able to concentrate your efforts and optimize your resources.

Skytap, a self-service cloud automation company, launched a tailored content marketing strategy and saw a 210 percent increase in North American traffic and that targeted personas brought in 124 percent more sales leads.

In a marketing world that revolves around social media, email marketing, and user experience, customers expect more than a generalized sales pitch.

Seamless is a great example of the powerful ads that you can create when you know your audience. In 2015 they launched a New York City subway campaign that uses witty one-liners and NYC generalizations to create effective, memorable ads.

They know their audience is the busy millennial, and they speak to that with adages such as “Cooking is so Jersey” and “Avoid Cooking like you Avoid Times Square.”

Who’s your Audience?

Finding the right audience isn’t necessarily easy, but it pays off in the long run. Luckily, experts and business owners have developed a bit of a process to help you along:

  • Define your company from the outside-looking-in.
  • Collect as much data and research as you can find about your audience.
  • Compile the information into a buyer persona that examines demographics, behavioral patterns and translates them into an elevator pitch.

Only then are you ready to sell.

How to Find The Right Brand Voice For Your Business

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I’ll never forget the time I presented a well-researched monthly social media package to a new beauty client. He took a look at the first few posts for Twitter, scrunched up his nose, and said, “Let’s avoid exclamation marks. We’re all adults here.”

First off—what does that even mean? Second, how ridiculous! This client wanted his beauty brand’s tone of voice to match what he was accustomed to (he used to work as an investor on Wall Street).

But he failed to understand a fundamental truth of branding: you market to the customer, not yourself. His target market was beauty, but he didn’t know how to speak with their voice. He just didn’t get it.

The Difference Between Voice and Brand

When you first started your business, you probably heard the word “branding” more times than you care to remember. People like to say: “The brand is the most important part of a business.” Turns out they’re right.

Your company’s brand is what races to a person’s mind when they hear your name. How important is it? Coca-Cola’s annual branding budget is more than Apple’s and Microsoft’s combined. These Fortune 500s aren’t skimping on their branding budget, so you shouldn’t either.

Then there’s your business voice, the most crucial component of your brand. Your company’s voice is how you speak to your customers.

What’s In A Voice?

Why is finding the right brand voice so crucial? Think about it this way: in an ideal world, you’d get to meet every person who visits your website and charm them with your perfectly tailored sales pitch.

Except this isn’t a perfect world. In reality, most people use the Internet as their primary source of information. In fact, 81 percent of customers conduct online research before making a purchase.

What this means is that you need to project your voice onto your website. Your site needs to sound like you’re talking to someone right in front of you.

The Value of the Right Brand Voice

It’s important that you’re creating the right brand voice, but what’s even more important is that you’re creating the right voice for your customers. For most brands, the two do not always align.

Taco Bell is a perfect example of a shift towards the right brand voice. In the early 2000’s, Yum! (which owns Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut) shares hovered below $10 a share. Taco Bell tried to brand itself as “authentic” Mexican food, even going so far as to have a Chihuahua as its mascot.

Fast forward to May 2015. Yum! Brands stock hits an all-time high close to $94. What changed? Taco Bell found its brand voice. It started talking to the right people, in the right way, and the right people answered.

Instead of going for fast, “authentic” Mexican food for families, they started talking to Millennials. They developed the concept of “Fourth Meal” and created the Doritos Locos Taco. They created a wonderfully human Twitter profile and branded their sauce packets with clever sayings.

Taco Bell rose from the dead to become better than ever by adopting a new voice that was right for its customers.

Finding The Right Brand Voice

So, how do you find your brand voice? Start by asking yourself the following questions:

  • What am I selling? How am I selling it? What are my points of differentiation?
  • Who is my ideal customer? What are their demographics?
  • How do I want potential customers to see my business?
  • What do potential customers think of my business right now?
  • What needs to change?

Once you can answer these questions, the path to finding your brand voice gets a lot clearer.

To summarize, keep the following ideas in mind:

Stay human. Too many people think as soon as their fingers hit the keyboard, they’re someone else. This shouldn’t be the case. In fact, customers are more likely to buy when they can relate.

Know your audience. Will your customers be irritated by emojis or delighted by them? Will your tagline be perceived as aggressive or confident? It depends on what you’re selling, who you’re selling it to, and where you’re selling.

Nitpick. Be thorough. When you tweet, will you use “we” or “I”? How do you feel about contractions? Acronyms? Is LOL okay? Your identity is your business and vise-versa.

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?

Continue reading…

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.

Continue reading…