Blog - Page 10 of 12 - Braveheart Digital Marketing

Inbound Marketing ROI Unlocks Budget

A 2018 study from Hubspot illustrates that companies see higher ROI as a result of their inbound marketing practices.

A survey of over 6,200 marketing and sales professionals in 99 countries showed that over 53% of marketers see a higher ROI from inbound marketing tactics than from outbound.

The higher ROI is resulting in higher budgets, with 46% of teams have higher budgets in 2018.

Where are marketers spending this increased budget? One area is video channels

However, what is really interesting is the difference in enthusiasm around video the C-Suite to individual contributors but also the difference in opinion about what are the best distribution channels to use.

The Inbound Sales Process

The first step to understanding your inbound marketing ROI is to understand what your sales funnel looks like. A typical client inbound marketing funnel looks like this:

Identify

Identifying the right business opportunities from the start can be the difference between a thriving business and a failing one. Knowing what to look for also helps salespeople create a predictable, scalable sales funnel.

Connect

Inbound salespeople connect with leads to help them decide whether they should prioritize the goal or challenge they’re facing. If the buyer decides to do so, these leads become qualified leads.

Explore

Inbound salespeople explore their qualified leads’ goals or challenges to assess whether their offering is a good fit.

Advise

Inbound salespeople advise prospects on why their solution is uniquely positioned to address the buyer’s needs.

For the three areas (identify, connect and explore), use your analytics data to determine what your average conversion rate is for each category then compare it to the tangible fourth category—advise.

As you go through this process, working backward in some cases, you’ll discover a dollar expenditure that applies to each bucket into which you can split your inbound marketing efforts.

After that, demonstrating ROI is as simple as comparing those numbers to the amount of sales those efforts generated. If the number is positive, then the budget should be increased.

Contact us today and let us work with you to measure the ROI of your inbound marketing efforts.

Creating Killer Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are representations of your ideal customers. They help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) and make it easier for you to develop content tailored to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of your ideal customers.

The best buyer personas are based on market research and insights you gather from your actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, etc).

Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas or as many as 10 or 20.

Buyer Personas include:

Buyer personas are not:

While we develop a buyer persona that represents your ideal customer, we also develop a negative persona representing undesirable customers. Negative personas may include potential customers who are not economic buyers of your services.

How do you use buyer personas?

Buyer personas allow you to personalize or target your marketing for different segments of your audience. For example, instead of sending the same email to everyone in your database, you can segment by buyer persona and tailor your messaging according to what you know about each audience member.

How do you create buyer personas?

Gather information:
Ask your best customers either in person or over the phone what they like about your product or service.
Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain seekers or customers find and consume your content.
Ask your sales and service team for feedback on the potential customers they are interacting with most.

Buyer Personas Example:

Background (job/family/career path/education)

Head of Human Resources
Worked at the same company for 10 years; worked her way up from HR Associate
Married with 2 children (10 and 8)

Demographics: M/F/Age/Income/Location

Skews female
Age 30-45
Dual HH Income: $140,000
Suburban

Identifiers: Demeanor/Communication preferences

Calm demeanor
Probably has an assistant screening calls
Asks to receive collateral mailed/printed

Goals: Primary goal, secondary goal

Keep employees happy and turnover low
Support legal and finance teams

Challenges: Primary challenge, secondary challenge

Getting everything done with a small staff
Rolling out changes to the entire company

What can we do? To help them achieve their goals and overcome their challenges

Make it easy to manage all employee data in one place
Integrate with legal and finance teams’ systems

Real quotes:About goals/challenges etc

“It’s been difficult getting company-wide adoption of new technologies in the past.”
“I don’t have time to train new employees on a million different databases and platforms.”
“I’ve had to deal with so many painful integrations with other departments’ databases and software.”

Common objections: Why wouldn’t they buy your product/service

I’m worried I’ll lose data transitioning to a new system.
I don’t want to have to train the entire company on how to use a new system.

Marketing message: How should you describe your solution to your persona?

Integrated HR Database Management

Elevator pitch: Sell your persona on your solution

We give you an intuitive database that integrates with your existing software and platforms, and lifetime training to help new employees get up to speed quickly.

By developing buyer personas, you focus on the objections and challenges that your target audience has. This allows you to clarify your marketing message and elevator pitch so you can more effectively communicate with prospective clients. To get started with your buyer personas and your digital marketing program, contact us today.

Understanding Your KPI (Key Performance Indicator)

When it comes to increasing revenue, we don’t believe in guessing. That’s why we pay close attention to our key performance indicators (KPI’s). By understanding our KPI’s, we sold over $1.5 million dollars worth of sports tickets in twelve months.

Here’s how:

1. We Knew the Value of Each Website Visitor:

Consider these numbers:

Knowing the positive correlations between these rates helped us project what we needed to do in order to meet our revenue goals. The question was no longer “how do we sell an additional $100,000 online next year.” Instead, we asked “how do we drive an additional 1 million visitors to the website next year” which—when answered—answered our original question.

2. Know the Value of Each Visitor From Each Marketing Channel:

In addition to enabling us to calculate revenue per visitor, knowing our KPI’s allowed us to test our partner channels to see where we monetized the traffic. Through analytics we could tell how much traffic we sent to partner sites and the number of sales and revenue we made from those partners. We were able to track the revenue in order to compare different traffic sources (organic, social, referral) to determine which channel proved the most profitable. We quickly realized that having a partner with the highest commission rate was not as important as a partner with a high conversion rate. With KPI’s on our side, we tested, planned, and executed a strategy that enabled us to sell over $2 million worth of sports tickets worldwide in one year. Do you know your KPI’s? Do you know the value of a visitor to your website? Ready to find out?

Four 2019 Digital Marketing Predictions The Experts Got Wrong

As I was starting to work on my 2020 digital marketing predictions, I decided to take a look see how accurate the 2019 prediction were from industry leaders. The results were frankly disappointing.

Predictions from Google

● Multi-channel will grow into omni-channel
● The importance of the mobile experience
● Voice services will boom
● Breakthrough chatbots
● Personalization through data-driven marketing
● The value of custom content will increase

Lenovo offered up:

● AI Starts to Transform Marketing
● Privacy Laws Disrupt Ad Sales
● Voice-Based Marketing Enters Mainstream
● Digital Communication Becomes Personal

Jeff Bulas said:

● Omnichannel Marketing
● Artificial Intelligence
● Chatbots
● Personalization
● Video Marketing

Convince and Convert has similar views saying:

● Omnichannel Marketing
● Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
● Voice Search
● Personalized Marketing
● Video Marketing and Influencer Marketing
● Visual Search

It was clear in the minds of the experts that 2019 would be the year of: ● Omnichannel marketing ● AI/ML ● Voice Search ● Chatbots

As we look back at these predictions with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that not only did many of these channels and tactics fail to live up to the hype but, for the Small- and Medium-Sized businesses, they had little or no impact on their 2019 digital marketing efforts.

Omnichannel Marketing

Convince and Convert defines Omnichannel marketing as “a type of marketing that connects the dots between multiple channels, ensuring a consistent user experience and encouraging the consumer to engage with your brand at every touchpoint across multiple channels.”

The ideas behind this prediction made sense a year ago. In B2B, it takes 8 touches to make an appointment today, with many of those touches taking place across multiple platforms.

Business owners and CMO’s understand the importance of omnichannel marketing. The challenge is attribution. How do you track these multiple touchpoints–which is an issue at the Fortune 100 level, never mind the world of Small and Medium Sized businesses? The recent CMO survey showed that CMO’s expect to double their analytics budget in 2020 from 7.2% of marketing budgets in 2019 to 11.6% of budget by 2022.

This growth in analytics is fueled by marketers trying to understand the performance of Omnichannel Marketing. But marketers also struggle with measuring the impact of Omnichannel Marketing–only 40% of marketers report having the right quantitative tools to demonstrate the impact of marketing spend on company performance. The silver lining is that this is the highest reported level of use of quantitative tools in the history of The CMO Survey.

Omnichannel Marketing will continue to be important to marketers, regardless of the size of the company. But attribution tracking is a big hurdle to overcome, and that will impact how diversified a company’s digital marketing strategy will be in 2020 and beyond.

AI/ML

Using the definitions from Convince and Convert, once again: Artificial intelligence (AI) is the branch of computer science that is all about teaching the machine to think and act like a human being.

Machine learning is usually what runs behind AI algorithms. While AI is basically all about teaching the machine to replace human beings, machine learning is about teaching the machine what a human brain cannot grasp, e.g. complex data mining and future predictions based on current patterns.

Two of the best examples of AI-empowered marketing are: ● Amazon: Using AI to analyze each particular buyer’s decisions and suggest products to them they didn’t even know they want or need. ● Netflix: Using AI for content recommendations and beyond. Netflix successfully applies AI for product development too. They have analyzed years of viewer data to create successful products of their own, including the hit “House of Cards.” Put simply: thanks to AI, Netflix knows what people want before they do.

A post from Quora Creative said that 85% of consumers end up selecting the products that Amazon suggests, which creates a huge advantage that the retail giant has over it competitors. Most SMB’s don’t have the ability to provide that kind of AI-driven personalized marketing. But they can take advantage of AI/ML when running paid ads within the Google platform. ML/AI allows Google to optimize your ads and bidding strategies in real-time to make the campaign more effective–something you cannot manually do today.

But for the majority of SMB’s, ML and AI is still several years away from having an impact on their digital marketing efforts

Voice Search

We have all seen the stats about how strong the growth is in voice search: ● 55% of households are expected to own smart speaker devices by 2022. That’s a 42% jump from today’s household ownership numbers (Source: OC&C Strategy Consultants). ● Voice commerce sales reached $1.8 billion last year, per OC&C Strategy Consultants. They’re predicted to reach $40 billion by 2022.

Did voice search live up to the hype in 2019?

That depends on which industry you are in. According to seoClarity, nearly 20% of all voice search queries are triggered by a set of only 25 keywords. These consist mainly of question words like “how” or “what” and adjectives like “best” or “easy.” These are informational searches, not the type of search that drives revenue.

Some of the most speculative statistics around are about the ecommerce (or v-commerce) impact of voice search. The most quoted study on it was produced by OC&C Strategy Consultants, which predicted that voice channel will grow from a $2 billion channel in 2018 to a $40 billion channel by 2022. That is a huge jump, and before that can happen, the payment issue needs to be fixed.

The challenge here lies in voice payment authentication, where currently the prevalent modes consist of either a biometric authentication (e.g. fingerprint of Apple’s TouchID) or a four-digit PIN code to be read out loud.

The data does not show that revenue from voice search, or voice search itself, is growing as fast as predicted 12 months ago.

Chatbots

Definition from Wikipedia: A chatbot is a piece of software that conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. Such programs are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner, although as of 2019, they are far short of being able to pass the Turing test

According to Gartner, by 2020 85% of such interactions between consumers and brands will take place via chatbots, without human participation. In order for Gartner’s prediction to come true, consumers have to be willing to engage with a bot, and the data suggests that they don’t want to.

According to Statista polls, only 34% of respondents prefer chatbots to traditional channels of communication with online retailers.

One reason for the reluctance of consumers to fully embrace chatbots is that bots are only as good as the playbooks that they are built on. Most chatbots that answers questions have been programmed to provide an answer to a specific question. Which means they are only as good as the database of questions and answers they have. When a consumer asks a question whose answer is not in the database, the bot stops working.

Which is the second reason why consumers prefer chatting with real people. We don’t think linearly like a machine. Instead we jump from one topic to another, which is difficult to program a chatbot to handle.

Also, we like personalized attention from our favorite brands, and the chatbot experience is the opposite of that. For a lot of companies that had chat on their site in 2019, the chat feature was simply a fill in a form where someone would get back to you, or it redirected you to the right department like an auto attendant on a phone system. It has not AI or ML, which is why is impact has been less that predicted, especially amongst SMB’s.

Conclusion

Predicting trends, even for the next 12 months, can be a daunting task. However, it is clear that the enthusiasm in 2019 for Omnichannel marketing, AI/ML, Voice Search, Chatbots was a little early. Will these channels and tactics be influential in 2020? Stay tuned for my 2020 digital marketing predictions.

How Is Advertising Different From Marketing?

I had an interesting conversation with a business owner the other day and he made the point that business owners in his market often did not distinguish between advertising and marketing.

This is not a new topic. I found a Businessweek article from 2003 titled Marketing vs Advertising asking the same question.

So what is the difference between marketing vs advertising? There are a lot of different definitions of advertising and marketing, and many of them are almost interchangeable with each other.

But the best one I found was on marketingprofs.com where they used this definition from Kathleen Micken, assistant professor of marketing for the Gabelli School of Business at Roger Williams University.

“Marketing might be defined as everything an organization does to facilitate an exchange between itself and its customers/clients. Advertising is just one of many marketing activities.”

Kathleen Micken

Assistant Professor of Marketing for the Gabelli School of Business at Roger Williams University,

Steven R. Jolly, owner of SRJ Marketing Communications, a marketing and design firm in Dallas adds,

“Marketing is the sum total of all impressions and advertising is part of the impressions that must be managed. And, of course, advertising has a hard dollar cost associated.”

To put it another way, advertising is a single component in the overall marketing process, it’s a tactic. It’s part of an overall strategic marketing plan. Advertising is an ad, a commercial, a billboard. Think Mad Men. Advertising is typically a brand message delivered in a passive way to consumers, with the goal of raising their overall awareness of a brand, product or service. If you are trying to educate a mass audience about your brand, that is advertising.

Marketing on the other hand is delivering a targeted offer to a differentiated audience for a specific result. So if you are trying to generate actual leads, for a specific offer, from a defined audience, that is marketing. And I would argue that MOST small and mid-sized business owners do not know the difference. So why does that matter?

The most compelling argument for using marketing vs advertising is because marketing has a better track record of consistently producing results. Several times I have met with business owners who think that by buying an ad in the local newspaper, industry magazine or billboard in town that they have a marketing plan. They do not. They are just advertising.

Rarely do those tactics lead to first three stages of a successful inbound marketing campaign; Traffic Generating, Lead Generation and Customer Acquisition. Instead we have found that clients have a much better ROI when they use email marketing to present a specific offer to a segment of their customer base, or they offer a webinar that solves a problem that many customers are facing.

Is your currently marketing plan generating all the leads that you want? If the answer is no, check out our free marketing assessment offer.

Are You Failing To Reach 83 Percent Of Your Target Audience?

Earlier this week I came across this great infographic from Andrea Stenberg at the Baby Boomer Entrepreneur on how to repurpose your content. Her tag line is “Create it once, use many times”.

What struck me about the infographic was the number of different ways that content can be delivered to your target audience.

Andrea identified six ways to take a blog post and repurpose the content into different formats. They are:

● Original blog post – Written

● Use image)s) from blog and post to Pinterest or Instragram – Image

● Create powerpoint presentation and upload to Slideshare – Presentation

● Turn slideshare into video and share on YouTube – Video

● Take audio of video and turn into podcast – Audio

● Turn presentation into Infographic – Image

The vast majority of marketers only take the first step, which is creating the blog post. But the takeaway from the list is that if the written version is the only version you produce, you will miss out on reaching 83% of your target audience.

The BEST Way To Generate Leads In 90% Of Industries

A new report from Bizible analyzed more than 480,000 leads through its Salesforce marketing analytics platform and the data showed that Search does a better job of generating leads than any other marketing channel.

A Hubspot report last season showed that SEO provides the best ROI of any inbound marketing channel, and the Bizible study reinforced that data. There is a subtle difference between the two reports as the Hubspot report was able to track both SEO and PPC separately. In the Bizible study they combined both organic and PPC under the single search umbrella.

The Bizible data showed that when looking at first touch, Search drove 56% of leads generated. When looking just at last touch, Search accounted for 41% of the leads generated.

Not a surprise then that the combination of Search first touch and Search last touch was the most productive channel for lead generation, accounting for 37% of all leads from first/last touch combinations.

For those marketers who believe that search will not work in their market, Bizible refuted that. The data showed that Search was the leading channel for 9 out of 10 of the industries measured for generating leads by first touch. The software/SaaS sector was the only sector in which search did not drive the majority of first touch leads.

Don’t Overlook Social In Lead Generation Process

Social is a market that has really matured into a valuable inbound marketing channel in the last year of so. When Bizible looked at the percentage of closed deals that were won by first touch in each channel, social impressively came in third with a 30% win rate, despite driving just 5% of leads. Social impact on lead generation is a not widespread yet because the social leads were concentrated among two industries; Education and Finance.

Note that Direct and Search had the two highest closed rates at 56% and 40% respectively with Display having the worst at only 12%.

Social shortens the length of the marketing cycle. When Social was the first touch, the marketing cycle was 30% shorter than average.

Takeaways

Search is the most popular first touch channel for lead generation accounting for 56% of all leads acquired. Search, especially organic SEO, has to be a part of your company’s inbound marketing strategy. Whether your market is B2B or B2C, Search generates more leads, more cost-effectively. The Bizible report shows that the last touch severely undervalues the top of the marketing funnel and does not account for the buyer’s decision journey. Companies need an inbound marketing analytics program that allows for Multitouch attribution. You can’t ignore Social in B2B marketing; it has a 30% shorter marketing cycle than the average inbound channel. Social is not just for posting statuses anymore. It is also a valuable lead generation channel. The full paper “Multi-touch Attribution for Companies with Sales Teams” is available for download here.

SEO Provides The Best ROI Of Any Inbound Marketing Channel

I built my first web site in 1996. In those days I just needed to update a meta keyword tag in order to have a site rank highly in the search engines. Today’s search engine algorithms are very sophisticated and you’ve got to have deep knowledge and well-honed skills to win at SEO. SEO is still the most productive and economical way to generate qualified leads and customers. It’s also the one that Marketers say is the hardest to execute. As a result, more and more companies are letting their marketing budgets get eaten up by PPC and switching their attention away from SEO to the latest shiny toys like Instagram. SnapChat or TikTok. Despite the appeal of all these new social channels, one thing remains consistent: SEO ROI provides the best return of any inbound marketing channel.

SEO on average is 12% of a typical marketing budget, but generates 14% of leads. PPC, on the other hand, is generating only 6% of leads, despite having 8% of the marketing budget. If you are spending more of your marketing budget on PPC than SEO then your lead generation program is likely upside down.

It’s not just the number of leads generated from SEO that makes it such an important inbound tactic it is the QUALITY of those leads.

In the same study, Hubspot asked marketers for the average percentage of leads converted to sales by marketing channel. SEO leads inbound marketing conversion rates, netting 15% above the average conversion rates.

SEO continues to deliver the best ROI of any inbound marketing channel. It’s worth more attention from marketers. Don’t let the idea that SEO is hard keep you from winning the online game. The right resources will make it easy for you. Has your organic search traffic has fallen over the last couple of years? If it has then a technical site audit will uncover why the search engines are not ranking you as highly as they used to. Contact us today and learn how you can increase the ROI of your SEO campaigns.

Inbound Marketing ROI Unlocks Budget

The Inbound Sales Process

Identify

Connect

Explore

Advise

Recent Posts

Creating Killer Buyer Personas

Buyer Personas include:

Buyer personas are not:

How do you use buyer personas?

How do you create buyer personas?

Buyer Personas Example:

Recent Posts

Understanding Your KPI (Key Performance Indicator)

1. We Knew the Value of Each Website Visitor:

2. Know the Value of Each Visitor From Each Marketing Channel:

Recent Posts

Four 2019 Digital Marketing Predictions The Experts Got Wrong

Predictions from Google

Lenovo offered up:

Jeff Bulas said:

Convince and Convert has similar views saying:

Omnichannel Marketing

AI/ML

Voice Search

Chatbots

Conclusion

Recent Posts

How Is Advertising Different From Marketing?

Recent Posts

Are You Failing To Reach 83 Percent Of Your Target Audience?

Recent Posts

The BEST Way To Generate Leads In 90% Of Industries

Don’t Overlook Social In Lead Generation Process

Takeaways

Recent Posts

SEO Provides The Best ROI Of Any Inbound Marketing Channel

Recent Posts

What we do

Email us