Guest post by Mary Bane
Among all reasons why marketers fail in the current climate, these are the most common ones:
- They are overwhelmed with all the information they have to explore. The Internet enables them to discover the needs of their audience, as well as the strategies of their competition through different methods. However, new flow of information is available every single day, so it’s difficult for a marketer to make sense of it.
- Lack of time to conduct the needed analysis and take all-important actions for marketing. For operators juggling the many demands of managing a portfolio of workspaces, marketing can feel like a time consuming and daunting challenge.
- Lack of persistence, which makes the key difference between successful projects and failures. The online environment demands ongoing activities that don’t always produce immediate results.
Fortunately, all of these issues can be partly solved with proper implementation of the right tools.
There are enough different marketing technologies available today to make your head spin, and workspace marketers have the devil’s own job of deciding which ones to go with. To help you whittle down the options, we have put together a list of 5 most essential marketing technologies that will help implement your marketing strategy with the help of content marketing specialist, Mary Bane. Let’s take a look at them.
Sales Force Automation
Being able to gain insight into new opportunities and track clients’ activity is one of the cornerstones of modern marketing. Although plenty of it can be done manually, smart marketers rely on their CRM in order to keep up with client behavior, as well as manage and complete their sales more effectively. This aspect of marketing provides a direct connection between your campaign and your revenue.
Old-school marketers make a mistake when assuming that sales force automation makes the marketing process impersonal. In fact, it can give you the information you need to improve the personal connection with your audience. When you automate the tasks of order processing, information sharing, contact management, order tracking, customer management, and employee performance, you will have more time and energy to focus on the actual connections.
Sales force automation is also a meeting point with sales teams, which rely on your CRM to communicate with you and receive all the information, tools, and content in order to be able to get signatures.
If that didn’t convince you, maybe these numbers will: businesses that rely on marketing automation for the purpose of nurturing prospects experience an increase of 541% in qualified leads.
Social Media Marketing
With social media being all the rage these days, you cannot have an effective marketing strategy without it. And it’s so easy too, because you already know where your audience gathers online. The key is to distribute your content to your target audience using the right social media channels, expand on your readership, and ultimately, drive them your website.
Not only will you be able to gauge the impact your content is having on your audience by looking through the total number of shares, likes, and comments, but you will also be able to receive real-time feedback and take part in actual discussions with prospects and clients, which will help you improve the quality of your content and make your marketing strategy even more effective.
In addition to this, social media analytics tools can help even further. You need these tools in order to identify the types of posts that perform well in terms of likes, comments and shares, monitor the growth of followers on a monthly basis, and evaluate the overall social media marketing campaign.
Given that 50% of online adults are present on two or more social media platforms, it’s safe to say that social media marketing shouldn’t be based solely on Facebook.
Marketing Automation
We’ve already brushed on tracking customer activity and its significance to your marketing efforts. This is where you should rely on marketing automation if you are keen on achieving maximum results. With marketing automation and analytics tools, you will be able to keep your finger on the pulse of your audience and figure out which fraction of it is close to the point of purchase, by analyzing their actions which indicate clear intent.
In addition, you can use marketing automation tools to persuade those leads and opportunities which aren’t ready to make a purchase, but may be willing to do so in the near future. That can be done by sending automated emails that present the products, services, and content your potential customers may be interested in.
Although marketing automation software is an important part of a successful marketing campaign, many companies are still resistant to that trend. Only 3% of non-tech companies have adopted marketing automation methods in their practices. When you want to develop a progressive business, you can’t allow yourself to lag behind.
Your Website
It goes without saying that having your own website is crucial, because this is where the separation process between those willing to make a purchase, and those who are not, take place. In addition to essentials like a home page, registration forms, and pricing plans, your website should also contain content your audience might find useful, such as blog posts and tools. This should help educate them on the benefits of flexible workspace and solve problems – such as how it meets their business needs, how your pricing plans work and what they can expect.
Remember: all text on your website is part of your overall content marketing campaign. It should contain the right keywords that people use to search Google, but they need to be implemented completely naturally into the logical flow of the text.
These days, people aren’t into being fed ads, but into doing their own research, and you need to make sure that they reach your website. Once they find something of value there, they will be more willing to talk sales.
Valuable content is only one aspect of the website, though. The way you present that content is equally important. If you give people 15 minutes to go through content, two-thirds of them would prefer reading something beautifully designed than plain text. That’s why it’s important to master the color scheme at the site and use visual elements such as photographs, graphs, infographics, presentations, memes, and comics.
Content Marketing
The emergence of content marketing software is sound proof that content plays a key role in attracting readers, generating opportunities, and closing deals. However, content marketing software, as well as all of the other tools we have discussed above, needs content in order to show its effectiveness, because that’s what drives potential buyers to your website, generates buzz on social media, and provides value for the reader.
In addition to distribution and management of your content, content marketing software can also provide you with analytics tools so that you can see what works best.
According to the fresh report by the Content Marketing Institute, 80% of B2B marketers have a content marketing strategy. That information should be enough to convince you how important content is in the overall marketing process.
Each of these five tools represents an essential piece of the puzzle that is your marketing strategy. Once you manage to put them all together in the appropriate order, you will be able to reap the benefits of marketing efforts and, eventually, maximize your revenue. You can also build on these with numerous other tools, but these five should be the foundation that will bring your marketing strategy towards success.
Mary Bane is a content management specialist at a British company, she provides up-to- date advice to modern marketing specialists.
