Last week I participated in a webinar focused on B2B Marketing run by @CopywriterTO. Unlike a lot of marketing webinars that I have attended, this one addressed new concepts, ideas and tips on what tasks to implement in order to enhance your marketing efforts. After looking at my notes from the webinar, I noticed there were three main concepts I took from CopywriterTO:
Think About Sales When Thinking About Marketing
Know Your Buyer Personas
Every individual is different and therefore, so is every buyer. Know what kind of person you are targeting and arrange your marketing efforts to suit different kinds of people.
Ask Customers What they Want
This is where social media performs at its finest. Ask your customers for feedback on your product/service or ask them for ideas on what they would like to see. By doing this, you are not only developing a strong relationship between buyer and seller, but you are gaining interest of prospective customers.
Correspond Your Content to Your Lead’s Position in the Buying Cycle
The information you market to your prospects is going to be different depending on whether you are prospecting or negotiating.
What is Content marketing and Why do we Use it?
Content Marketing is the art of communicating without selling.The thought process behind content marketing is that if we deliver ongoing and consistent information it will ultimately result in sales. The information needs to be useful to your customers and provide value to their problems/questions pertaining to your solutions.
Example: Using the content space on your website as a marketing platform, not just a place to promote your business)
Five Benefits of Content Marketing:
- Generate Leads. Provide information that is useful to your prospects and use their interest to turn them into a customer
- Shorten your sales cycle
- Have your company recognized as an industry leader
- Increase search engine rankings
- Gain an advantage over competitors
No matter how old you are, everyone has something to learn. Use educational pieces on your website to give a play-by-play of how your product/service is useful to your customers. If we look at a webpage dedicated to an educational piece, 90% should be educational, while 10% is marketing (Include a small side banner with a call to action).
Social Media is a Key Factor in Any Marketing plan.
Interesting fact: 96.9% of B2B marketers plan to increase their social media efforts this year
There are three ways to make your marketing “social”.
- Maintain a consistent social media presence. Tweeting once a week or once every few weeks will not make the cut
- Understand your target audience. Know who your product/service is for. If your target market is not on Twitter, neither should you
- Think of all your marketing as social marketing. Remember to stay social with your audience, have a conversation, listen to what they are saying and don’t drop off the face of the earth mid-conversation (i.e. Leaving Twitter because there just isn’t enough time in the day)
If you’re looking to get started on your marketing efforts, or enhance the ones you already have in place, feel free to reach out to our team to find out how VA Partners can help.
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