Last week, we introduced the concept of 7 Habits of Highly Effective Marketers, based on the principles listed in Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. According to the best-selling author, each habit is made up of a unique set of knowledge, skills and desires, which when practiced contributes to personal and professional success. In this post, we’ll discuss Habit #2: Begin with the end in mind.
In his best-selling book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen Covey, outlined the traits of successful individuals. According to Covey, our character is a collection of habits, which have powerful role in our lives, including for effective marketers. Habits consist of knowledge, skill and desire. Knowledge allows us to know what to do, skill gives us the know-how and desire provides the inspiration.
When a customer purchases a product or service from a company, the nature of the relationship changes. While it is not the beginning of a relationship, all the hard work a salesperson did to get the business needs to be redirected in order to retain it. Ideally, the relationship will become more symbiotic, as the salesperson and others who interact with the customer continually earn the trust and respect of the buyer. This is the beginning of the process to build brand ambassadors.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, has influenced marketing strategy since the dawn of the internet. SEO is the practice of increasing the quality and quantity of inbound website traffic via organic search engine results. Today, 51% of online traffic arrives at websites via organic search. However, if you’re not staying on top of SEO trends and updates, your website likely isn’t optimized for today’s search algorithms.
Creating a marketing plan without a marketing budget is like building a house without a roof. The undertaking is unfinished and will not serve the purpose for which it was intended. Yet, many companies invest valuable time and personnel resources to craft a well-defined, strategically-sound plan that lacks the dollars necessary for implementation.
LinkedIn is a powerful tool for connecting professionally, looking for employment opportunities and sharing content. In addition, LinkedIn is considered the number-one platform for lead generation. The platform has 560 million professionals with LinkedIn profiles and an estimated two new profiles are created every minute. The outreach possibilities are endless.
Whether writing an email, article, blog post, white paper, press release or any other type of communication, the quality of the content comes first. Right behind that is the quality of the writing. Even savvy writers need to practice, fine-tune and hone their writing skills on a regular basis. Here are 10 tips to help you turn good writing into great writing.
Gone are the days when public relations was limited to reputation management, press release distribution and media outreach to newspapers, radios and television. With the introduction of the Internet and additional communication channels, opportunities for PR are increasing dramatically. While companies still use press releases to spread their news, businesses and agencies have adopted newer and faster ways to get the word out about their organizations. To remain competitive, marketing and PR professionals need to adapt to these changing marketplace dynamics.
The use of social media to enhance customer engagement can provide a competitive advantage. One social media platform readily used by companies is Twitter, which is used for marketing by 67.2% of companies with 100+ employees. Recently, it was estimated that there are 330 million active Twitter users. Approximately 6,000 tweets (Twitter posts) are sent via Twitter every second.
How do buyers make purchase decisions? If more salespeople understood the answer to this important question, sales productivity would increase. To begin, recognize there is an emotional and logical component to every buying decision. The emotional component has to do with two factors: 1) Does the buyer like the salesperson? and 2) Does the buyer trust the company and the brand? The logical component represents how buyers think.
A true professional embraces life-long learning. Fortunately, there is an ideal platform to make ongoing education an easy habit to develop. That platform is webinars. Since their inception, webinars have taken the B2B sector by storm. Today, over 61% of B2B companies create and host webinars.
Most companies are looking for ways to better connect and engage with their target audiences. One way to do that is to increase the frequency and quality of published content on your website, via social media and in the magazines, newspapers and journals read by people who buy your products and services. To accomplish that goal, it’s important to develop an editorial mission statement.
We’ve all been on the recipient side of gatekeepers as they size up our worthiness to get through to decision makers. Essentially, the gatekeeper is a closed door between you and the person with whom you need to speak. On the plus side, we understand their role: to keep the wrong people away from busy executives and allow the right people the chance to speak with them. On the negative side, gatekeepers may not have the information, knowledge or business acumen necessary to make an informed decision about which callers to put through. Frustrating as it might be, we need to figure out how to work with them so we can move beyond them.
With the continual pressure to do more with less, everyone is on overload. For that reason, it’s easy to go on automatic. When this happens, we tend to do what we’ve always done, rarely thinking about whether we’re on the right path to business growth. Yet more productive ways of conducting business can be right around the corner.
When you hear the phrase “corporate communications,” what do you think of first? Do you think of lead generation? Client outreach? How about investor relations? The bottom line is that corporate communications consist of a wide variety of formats and initiatives that drive engagement between the company and its many stakeholders. However, one stakeholder group that tends to be forgotten in the process is employees and contracted representatives.
Marketing obstacles are a reality. While they vary from industry to industry, some pain points exist across the board. Here are the most common ones we’ve identified through the years along with some tips on how to overcome them.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a strategy companies use to build relationships with specific prospects or customers. Unlike traditional B2B marketing that casts a wide net to capture as many leads as possible, ABM focuses sales and marketing resources on a clearly defined group of target accounts. Often, these accounts are assumed to be high-yield and represent the best fit for the organization and its products and services.
What’s considered the gold standard of marketing measurement? Analyzing the impact a marketing campaign has on the bottom line. When dollars and resources are tight, companies want to make sure they are getting a solid return on their investment. The ROI on blogs and other types of content marketing is among the highest in communications projects.
Content creation, syndication and consumption platforms are like every other aspect of business. They are constantly changing. Ensure your content represents the quality and achieves the results you want by using this checklist of B2B content platforms.
Often, a company’s website is the first interface in establishing a business relationship. In fact, 48% of customers cited a website’s design as the number one factor in determining the credibility of a business. That initial impression either invites them to learn more or turns them away completely.
Although the internet dramatically changed the publishing industry, the dust has settled and many magazines, journals and other news sources have reinvented themselves to compete in a digital economy. While it’s true that the number of print magazines has declined, B2B publications have evolved into multi-platform brands that service their audiences in new ways. By offering new platforms including webinars to tradeshows to research databases, savvy and forward-thinking publications have survived and thrived in the face of rapidly changing technology.
et’s be clear. There is a distinct difference between customer service and the customer experience, also known as CX. Customer service entails everything a company does to “respond” to its customers. “Respond” is the key word. While fixing mistakes with a smile, saying “yes” even when it goes against company policy and diffusing disgruntled or unhappy customers efficiently and effectively are all important and can contribute to the customer experience after the fact.
You may have heard of it, but how much do you know about influencer marketing? The phrase has been popping up more and more in the past year with headlines gracing Forbes, Entrepreneur and other national business publications. As more companies make influencer marketing a strategic priority, it’s becoming more important to investigate whether this is a passing trend or a vital initiative. Let’s start by asking the right questions.
Content creation is a must for any business to increase brand awareness. It’s also an important method for communicating with your customers and prospects. In fact in a survey of marketers, 86% of marketers report they are planning to increase the amount of content they publish in 2018. Generating marketing content and distributing it appropriately
