This year, marketing needs to be 20/20
Over the past decade, marketing has become more personal, more ubiquitous and more immediate. Here’s how to stay ahead in 2020.
As the 20s begin, it’s easy to think that we’re about to see the dawn of a whole new kind of marketing. With artificial intelligence, chatbots and hyper-targeting now part of mainstream marketing, it’s easy to feel that the marketing landscape has changed irrevocably since the Millennium.
In many ways, it has. But there are also a lot of “ye olde” marketing wisdoms that will see many organisations right into the 2020s. That’s why it’s so important to have a complete view — looking both forward and back — as you put together your marketing strategy for the months ahead.
This year, it really is a case of needing 20/20 vision when it comes to the conversations you have with your current and prospective clients. So, here are some of our thoughts on what to make of marketing today…
1. People will always love great content
asabell has been around for over 15 years, so we’ve seen plenty of trends and technologies come and go (imagine offering a client a promotional CD nowadays!). But, something that has never and (we’re going to be bold here) will never, disappear, is the power of great content.
Let’s face it, marketing is about telling stories that connect with your audience, that pique their interest and make them take notice. And that’s what great stories have always been — because they have a solid foundation in great content.
Ultimately, every organisation has a story to share, a solution to provide and an audience they need to reach. No matter what the technology of the day, that’s the core of great marketing. That’s why the first step to making your mark in 2020 is to make sure that your message is compelling.
2. Yes, technology’s changing again
On saying that, getting your great content heard/seen/swiped/scanned means that you also need to have a good grasp of the technologies that are going to help you reach the people you need to connect with.
From voice search, to artificial intelligence, augmented reality and blockchain — there’s a lot going on behind the scenes when it comes to today’s marketing trendsetters. Luckily, for many organisations, it’s not vital to be a pro at these developments (yet).
This is particularly important because, regardless of the average age at your organisation, B2B buyers overall are getting younger. That means a high-quality digital marketing experience is no longer a “nice to have”, it’s vital to make sure that your organisation stands out from the crowd. Simple changes can help with this, like optimising your web copy, updating your digital channels regularly and making sure that you have a strong, consistent brand message. From there, the latest technologies are going to herald some changes, but for many B2B organisations, it’s worth watching how things like chatbots or AI perform in the B2C market before rolling them out across your own channels.
3. You’ll need a clear overview of your lifecycle marketing
In B2B marketing particularly, an ad hoc approach doesn’t work — no matter what year we’re in. B2B buying is well known to have a long decision-making process prior to purchase, often requiring the input and approval of numerous people. It’s this long, complex lifecycle that means your organisation has to remain front and centre in your potential customer’s mind for weeks or months, as opposed to grabbing their attention once or twice in the way B2C campaigns can successfully do to close a sale.
This is one of the reasons that social media will remain a key part of B2B marketing strategy well into the 20s. But the key point to remember is, you do need a strategy — the odd update won’t cut it anymore. As Forbes recently pointed out: “Include these platforms in your new social media strategy to build better brand recognition and solidify authority in your niche. However, it is essential to understand that B2B companies must take a strategic approach and execute their social media marketing campaigns with precision to be successful.” To add to this, there’s a trend towards younger individuals with buying authority in B2B organisations nowadays (yes, the Millennials have taken hold of the purse strings). This audience came of age with social media, so they’re savvy about how to use it and who’s doing it well. To not only hold their attention, but also convince them that your organisation is a professional, on-trend and well-equipped business, you need to make sure that your social media reflects this with strategic, accurate and regular updates.
4. Conversations with clients will remain key
Just like great content, most of us enjoy a good conversation — and that’s something technology doesn’t change. Interestingly, though, when it comes to B2B marketing, a “good” conversation (i.e. one that leads to customer engagement and, ultimately, purchase), can require slightly negative language…
In fact, Air Canada recently performed a marketing experiment that found engagement was boosted by 3 per cent when using anxiety-based language, as opposed to a 5 per cent drop when using exclusivity-based language. That’s why it’s vital to make sure that the professionals are creating your content, based on both experience and research about what works when it comes to engaging customers.
Often, in the B2B lifecycle, this means having conversations that heighten your customers’ awareness of competition in the market — and how your organisation can help them to stay ahead. The channel you’re using to communicate with customers isn’t always as important as how well you’re using it, and whether you’re speaking to customers in a way that encourages them to engage.
5. Get a foot in the door using insights
It’s a trend that’s well entrenched in B2C marketing, but B2B is taking its time to catch-up. Getting ahead of the curve could really pay dividends for your organisation though, as 72% of business buyers expect vendors to personalise engagement, using marketing communications to address their specific requirements.
This is one of the areas where a powerful story and powerful technology converge — using technology to gather insights about a customer and then turning these insights into a compelling story that directly targets your customer’s needs.
As B2B buyers increasingly become Millennials, there’s greater need to personalise communications. It’s important to make sure that you’re targeting these potential customers with messages that genuinely relate to their needs, or you’ll never stand out from the marketing bombardment they receive daily. Making sure that you have a professional team in-house, or outsourcing your marketing to an agency that can provide this is really important.
6. The customer’s still king (so respect their privacy)
Fail to respect your customers’ privacy and it can have huge consequences, something many organisations have discovered over the past few years. Ultimately, when it comes to providing a great service to customers, the customer is king, and your marketing function needs to reflect this.
Whether this relates to how you use the data you have, how you share it, the security measures you have in place, or your adherence to regulations like GDPR — remember that your reputation and the goodwill of your current and potential clients is on the line. B2B marketing is about playing the long game and you need to make sure that you treat your clients’ data carefully throughout.
2020 vision for your marketing
Knowing what’s happening in B2B marketing isn’t the same as being able to capitalise on it. It’s important that you make sure you have a great marketing strategy in place in order to stay ahead of your competition and keep your customers engaged.
If you need help with this, or would like to speak with a member of our team about your marketing, please get in touch.
In today’s climate, where content rules the world and SEO rankings can make or break your business, marketing is becoming an attractive venture for many entrepreneurs.
This also means that marketing agencies have quickly become ten-a-penny. Suddenly businesses have thousands of digital and content marketing agencies to choose from, all offering broadly the same set of services and all promising the same impressive results.
Finding a diamond in the rough can be an exhaustive process and often involves stubbing your toe on a number of glamorous-looking rocks.
To make the process a little less arduous, we’ve written a quick guide featuring our top three indicators that sit outside the realm of standard service-offerings and suggest that your marketing candidate can deliver on your business goals.
Walking the walk
The first, and arguably most important, feature you should be looking for in a marketing agency, is irrefutable evidence of their successful relationships with clients and sound methodology.
Imagine stumbling across an agency’s website — their web design is eye-catching, and their service pages are packed with attractive offers: “Your business will see massive sales increases! Huge outreach capabilities! All for an almost unbelievably reasonable price!” But just because they’ve written this, it doesn’t mean they’re going to give it to you.
If you find yourself trawling through a website to find any evidenced examples of an agency’s good relationships with previous clients then, the chances are, they haven’t got many.
When the smokescreen of salesy jargon and lofty claims clears, you need to see genuine testimonials from satisfied customers and not just the promise of success.
Talking your talk
You’ve found an agency with gleaming testimonials — what’s next? Well, a huge part of the marketeer’s job is to capture your business’ core messaging. They need to take your internal expertise and broadcast it. Without a true grasp of your business’ subject matter, your materials will lack authenticity and the impact will be lost.
Making sure an agency has the capacity to navigate your route to market is really important. Have they spoken your language before and, if not, do they have evidence of industry-versatility? You need a team that will work hard to understand your industry, your challenges and your customers, and you need them to get there fast.
Taking stock of an agency’s capability to reflect your company’s messaging and services is a great way to narrow your options further and build your confidence in the agencies that remain.
Conversation sells
Let’s say you’ve gone through the stages above and narrowed your options down to three agencies. They have one final hurdle to clear. Do they pick up the phone when you call? Did they respond to your email within 24 hours?
Responsiveness isn’t just about manners. It’s the ultimate indication for the nature of any future business you may do together. An agency that’s at the end of the phone when you need them is an agency that you can trust to be there throughout your partnership.
We’ve spoken to a number of frustrated clients who’ve walked away from agencies that would take upwards of a week to respond to a simple enquiry.
Using your initial contact experience with an agency to forecast their reliability for the future is a great way to help you finalise your decision.
A step in the right direction
All these factors are important when it comes to taking the leap and outsourcing your marketing. But for us, the most important thing is that it feels as little like a leap as possible. A guided step won’t keep you up at night.
Our team at asabell have a vast array of experience marketing in the languages of multiple industries and sectors. What’s more, there’s always a friendly voice at the end of the phone, ready to discuss your marketing options.
Visit our website or give us a call to find out if we pass our own test.
Crystal-clear marketing: bringing your project into focus
Have you ever stared at the same spot for so long that you completely lose focus? You find yourself facing a blurred smudge and struggling to recall what you were looking at in the first place. We often see this effect in B2B marketing.
It’s common that our clients are passionately involved in their projects and put so many hours into them that they find themselves too close be able to identify the pitfalls that may be holding them back. That’s where we come in. As an external agency we have the advantage of being able to step into your project with a fresh pair of eyes and guide you towards the most productive way forward.
When you reach out to us, we’ll begin by using this detached perspective to explore alternative approaches that may have been lost in one of those all too common ‘can’t see the wood for the trees’ scenarios. Of course, we’ll always adhere to your brand guidelines and overall vision, but we come ready to challenge your ideas to find the best route towards achieving your desired outcome. Having crafted and delivered marketing strategies for countless companies across many varying industries, we’ve seen our fair share of different directions.
From global telecommunications corporations, energy and utilities companies, multi-national food service companies, right through to construction consultancies, we’ve seen it all. We love the fact that, with each client, we find and deploy bespoke marketing strategies that can often be carried through to benefit our work with our next client.
As well as being well-versed in the languages of many different industries, we’ve also developed a full toolbox of marketing capabilities. We offer a comprehensive service that means you’ll only have to outsource your campaign to one agency — us! From in-depth competitor analyses right through to crafting and testing the finished project across your digital channels, we’ve got you covered.
If you’d like to see what a team of well-focused and unbiased eyes can do for your future projects then give us a call.
You’re at your desk staring down a mile-long list of high importance emails. You’re on the verge of launching a new initiative. At the top of the list, a pretty daunting marketing campaign awaits you…
With no in-house team to back you up and financial strains weighing in from every angle, ensuring your content reaches all the right places seems impossible. That’s exactly why we’re here to help.
We know that budgets are becoming increasingly tight and, more than ever, clients are eager to see exactly where their money is going. This is why, from the get-go, we promise to estimate your costs fairly and keep you in the loop with budgeting and timescales right through to the finished product.
In fact, our clients are pleasantly surprised by just how cost effective it is to work with us and love it even more when the final project comes in under budget, leaving money in the pot for their next endeavour:
“I found working with asabell a rewarding and painless experience, they understood the brief, delivered when they said they would, came in below budget (which is always a pleasant surprise), and were extremely flexible and professional at all times.” Sue Coughlan, Digital Content Manager, BT
How do we achieve this? Well, we’re a company built on expertise and highly-personalised marketing. We’re not writing to you from a London office block whilst reclining on a plush leather sofa, cradling a flat white and watching our pet clown fish swim on by. Our office needs are simple and this keeps our overheads low. What we lack in expensive trappings, we make up for in finely-tuned skills. We work on your campaigns in small, closely knit teams comprised of sharp copywriters, innovative graphic designers and impeccably-organised account managers. For us, carefully-targeted precision and efficiency trumps mass-marketing, meaning we can keep our overheads and consequently your costs low.
You’ll find that it makes a lot more financial sense to bring us in to guide your campaign as and when you need us, rather than funding a full-time resource internally. In fact, our quick responsiveness means we’re effectively part of your virtual team. The difference is, you pay for our services only when you need them.
Discover what’s kept the same clients coming back to us for over fifteen years and get in touch so we can start your journey too.
Easy first steps to personalising your B2B communications
A personalised approach in B2B marketing enhances relationships and increases the likelihood of sales. But how do you get started?
What does it take for people to give away information?
One of the first challenges you face in B2B marketing is finding out information about your target audience. It’s a conundrum — people want to feel the company understands their needs and is addressing them on a personal level, but they’re reluctant to part with the information about themselves that will make a personalised approach possible. Fifty three per cent of B2B marketers state a lack of data is the reason they don’t personalise their content.
No one wants to put their personal information on a website without having some sort of connection to the product or company. Yet, in order to build that investment and trust, people need to feel they’ve received something from the company first. It’s a cycle that seems unbreakable, yet you can control this by making the first move.
Get going with personalisation.
The first, all-important steps to personalisation involve collecting essential data from those who visit your website. The more you learn about your visitors, the more you can personalise further contact with them.
Ideally, you’ll build up an initial picture of your visitor through the following data: name, email address, company name or website, company size and budgetary plans. However, it would be a very tolerant and trusting visitor who would give you all that information straightaway, so you’ll need patience and an effective strategy.
Take it step by step to build trust.
Start by creating a compelling piece of content such as a white paper or an eBook and ask visitors to share their name and email address in return for access. Remember the requirements of GDPR and include consent to use the data in an approved format. Then, put together a lead nurturing campaign, using those details, to strike up a dialogue. Remember always to offer something in exchange for more data. More great content expanding on the topic that sparked contact is ideal for this — perhaps offer a webinar as a second step, and to access it, your lead needs to enter their company size and URL.
Further content could unlock further information, until you have a comprehensive picture of your customers and prospects. It’s important to stay focused on achieving a deep understanding of your target audience and not get side-tracked into a profiling exercise. By breaking up data collection in this way you build trust and learn valuable information that you can weave back into the development of your website, for example, fine-tuning your CTAs.
The information that will allow you to create person-centred content and approaches is easily accessible, it just takes patience and the right strategy. If you’d like some more pointers on how great content can unlock your sales potential, then get in touch.
The past few years have seen a trend towards bringing marketing support in-house, often taking the form of creating an ‘agency’ hub within the business. It sounds like a great idea, having agency skills sitting just a couple of desks away — fabulous for stress-free working and rapid turnarounds.
But what happens when your internal resources are at capacity and requests for work are backing up? Lead times get ridiculous and you really start to feel the bite as you can’t get going on important marketing activity.
What if you could just pick up the phone and kick off a project then and there, knowing that you’ll get the fastest possible turnaround?
We treat every client as though they are our only client, with the responsiveness to match. The first thing we do is to allocate a dedicated account manager to you, someone who will make sure your work is prioritised and completed to agreed timescales. And we say that fully understanding that sometimes there’s just no avoiding extremely tight timings on a project. We combine a can-do attitude with finely-honed management skills to deliver high-quality results in the shortest space of time.
You’ll want to stay close to how things are going, too. We know that running a project can be stressful, so we make a point of giving regular progress updates and always get back to you promptly. In fact, the asabell way is to work as part of your virtual team — as though our desk was next to yours and you could lean across and ask your questions as they crop up.
You want a responsive resource who can deliver great results to your timescales, and we want to support your content marketing and social media marketing needs. Get in touch to find out how we can make this happen.
Six steps to winning white papers
When it comes to getting your content marketing seen by the right people, you’re on to a winner with a white paper. Here’s how to get started.
- Define your audience.
Do you know who you’re aiming your white paper at? Create a persona that you’ll be writing for and make it as detailed as possible. Put yourself in their shoes and work out what challenges they’re up against in their business life. What work pressures are they under and what’s keeping them awake at night?
Knowing your audience will not only guide your choice of subject matter, it’ll decide the structure of your paper, too. If you’re writing for time-poor CEOs, for example, you’ll want to think about including an executive summary to get your main points across in minutes.
Defining your audience will also determine your language; after all, you don’t want to get too technical if you’re not aiming your paper at a technical target group. - Decide on your topic.
Working out what to write about involves identifying the overlap between the expertise you have, and the questions your target audience want answered. It can take time to find precisely the right angle that makes the most of what you know, but also addresses one of your audience’s distinct pain points.
Above all, you want your paper to be interesting and relevant, so try to choose a topic no one else has covered, or one that you can update with new information. Remember that white papers are more successful than other types of sales documents because of their focus on education; it’s the shift from ‘selling’ to ‘helping’ that gets your messages across. But this is only effective if you’ve chosen the right topic. - Plan your structure.
Start by creating an outline of your paper, detailing the points you’re going to make, the references you’re going to include and the shape of the argument. Circulate this to key stakeholders before you begin to write. Making sure that everyone involved is in agreement about the paper’s content before you start will save you time and stress. - Think about design from the beginning.
Alongside planning your paper’s content, you need to plan how the design can amplify the meaning of its words. Your aim is that, together, copy and design will create a strong, cohesive piece that will grab the reader’s attention and stay in their memory.
Good design goes beyond choosing a font that’s legible and large enough for easy reading. Perhaps you can use infographics or charts to break up the text and present statistical information in an interesting and easy-to-understand way. Call out boxes can highlight great quotes from sources, and imagery can bring your theme to life. Use headings and typography effectively to make your paper as accessible as possible, creating signposts that help your audience find their way around.
Get the design right and you’ll help your visual learners to retain the information, as well as giving your skimmers a way to quickly absorb points. - Create a winning title.
As the first thing your audience will see, your title needs to hook your reader into delving further into your paper. You’re looking for a title that’s informative and intriguing, that’s an honest statement about what’s within — but withholds just enough to pique interest.
Think about how you can use emotional triggers to prompt your readers to take action and to read your paper. Use curiosity (what am I missing out on?), vanity (how much do I already know?), fear and doubt (what don’t I know about?) to guide your title choice. - Think ‘problem solving’ not ‘sales’.
Your white paper is not about selling your product, it’s about providing your readers with valuable educational content that will help them solve problems they encounter in their working lives. Follow the 80/20 rule and spend 80 per cent of the paper on education, and only 20 per cent on describing how your product can solve the problem discussed. Think about how you can use case studies to demonstrate how your solution solved a real-world issue, and use endorsements from satisfied clients to further make your point.
This is just the start of your white paper journey. Get in touch to talk through how we can help you create winning white papers.
Nearly every business makes the same simple mistake on their website. Here’s how to identify whether you have, too (and how to fix it).
Building from the wrong end
Chances are, when you built your website, you started with the homepage. From there, you likely thought about all the other pages you’d need to link to. This product, that service — they all went into the mix.
Unfortunately, starting with the homepage is the wrong way to build a website. It encourages you to view your site as a warehouse of information.
Instead, you need your website to be the next step on your prospect’s journey towards a defined call to action.
Using the audio guide effect
Imagine you visit a museum. You enter the front doors, knowing there are one or two key items you want to see. But the museum is so vast that you’ve no idea where to start looking. You wander around for ages, getting nowhere. And, as your feet start to hurt, you give up and go home.
Now think about how different your museum experience would have been with an audio guide telling you exactly where to go.
Your website has to act like the audio guide — directing prospects to where they want to go.
When you leave people to find their own way around your website, there’s every chance they’ll get lost and give up. So, no new business for you…
Focusing on your message
The whole point of your content marketing campaigns is to get your prospects to take some form of action. Buy this. Read that. Get in touch.
Your website has to share this focus. After all, it’s another piece of collateral promoting your business. So, rather than simply adding links to a bloated homepage, you have to reverse engineer your site.
Just as you would with your other content, you need to start with your call to action. From here, you can create a journey through your site that gets prospects from A to B with minimal fuss. This could be straight from your homepage or involve a range of targeted landing pages.
Either way, it’s the audio guide effect. Potential customers quickly access the information they want; you get to entice them into taking action (and buying stuff from you).
Creating a clear path for prospects
Take a look back through your website, and be honest with yourself. Does it provide the quickest, clearest route to your call to action?
If not, it’s time to think about how you change your approach. After all, you could already be losing a lot of potential new business without even knowing it.
So here’s our call to action. If you want a hand putting together a website that turns visitors into qualified leads, get in touch — we’d love to help.
Entering your organisation for an award can be great for business. Here are three reasons why.
How does ‘award winning’ sound to you?
Has it ever occurred to you that your business could be ‘award winning’? It’s true; no matter what industry you operate in, there’ll be at least one reputable award that you could try for.
What’s more, you have every chance of winning. Any business worth its salt will have completed work that it’s proud of — and that’s exactly what awards are looking for.
But what’s the benefit to your business (apart from the kudos, of course)? Well, there are actually three.
Three ways that entering awards is good for business.
- Market yourself.
This is perhaps the most obvious reason to enter awards — the simple power of being able to call yourself an award-winning business. It instantly tells current and potential clients that yours is a respectable, trustworthy and successful business. And remember that you don’t necessarily have to win an award in order to feel this benefit. Being shortlisted is an accolade in itself — adding to your reputation as a thought leader. - Evaluate your work.
An often overlooked benefit of entering awards is that they give you a way to thoroughly evaluate how you do things. The process of creating an entry for an award means looking at each aspect of your work and proving that it was a good idea. When finished, you’ll have a view of what you’d improve, given another chance. - Improve morale.
It should come as no surprise that employees like to have their hard work recognised. And awards are great for that. Simply entering your business, or a project, for an award lets your people know that their efforts are valued. Put winning the award into the mix and you have a potent recipe for raised morale.
How to get started.
Clearly, entering your business into awards is a good idea. However, there’s one hurdle: to win an award (or to get shortlisted) you have to write a persuasive award entry. This means gathering together all the relevant information, structuring the piece to create the most compelling story possible, and writing it all up without any errors.
If this sounds like a lot of work — you’re right, it is. But not if you get a helping hand.
We write award entries for a range of clients operating across a multitude of industries. In fact, in the last award season, two of our entries got shortlisted, and one won an award.
So, if you’d like to find out what it feels like to get recognised by your industry, then get in touch.
It’s all too easy to think that more is better when it comes to your content marketing. But here’s why it’s worth your while to slow things down.
Quantity versus quality.
According to WordPress, its users post 77 million new blog posts every month. That’s a lot of words. With that in mind, businesses need to make sure that their content can stand out from the crowd, and get in front of the people that matter.
You could create more content, upping the chances that something of yours will catch your customer’s eye. But that’s not the most effective way to bring your content to the fore.
The alternative is to carefully craft and curate your content. Making it more detailed, appropriate for your audience, helpful and better placed to reach the right people. That’s how to get your content seen, and make your marketing more effective. So let’s take a look at what this means in practice, and how to achieve it.
Five tips for creating high-quality content.
- Take your time
Publishing a hastily written blog every day will be less impactful when it comes to conversions than a well written and considered blog that goes out once a week. The more effort you put into a blog, the more your target audience will get out of it, and the more likely they are to engage with your business. So take it slow. - Think carefully about your title
Often, the title of your blog is the sole entry point into reading it. When potential customers are browsing a list of blog titles, looking for something interesting to engage with, you want them to pick yours. So spend some time crafting a title that really stands out. Make it as tempting as possible, but remember not to promise anything that the blog itself won’t deliver. - Squeeze older content for all it’s worth
Once you’ve made the decision to spend more time on your content, it makes sense to make the most out of that content. So make sure you continue to promote your older blogs. As long as the content is still relevant, and not time sensitive, then there’s no harm in continuing to use it. Just be careful not to saturate your readers with promotion for the same content over and over again. - Get it seen
It’ll feel bad if you spend a week creating a fantastic blog, and then nobody reads it. So, once you’ve created your content, make sure to get it seen. This could mean using paid promotion on social media, reworking your blog page to highlight new content, or even paying for Google Ads leading to your blogs. - Enlist help
Nothing says ‘quality content’ more than something that’s been crafted by professionals. So enlist the help of writers and designers to give your blogs that extra edge they need to really stand out.
On that note, you can contact us to talk about how we can help you improve your blogs — making sure that your content marketing delivers the return on investment you’re looking for.