If your resolution for 2019 was to improve your company’s marketing efforts, you need to adjust your marketing strategy from 2018 and put your best foot forward to keep up with current and future marketing trends. Making your adjustments now rather than later is more important than you think. Due to technological advancements, the capabilities at your disposal are changing extremely rapidly -- failing to keep up with them will make your business fall behind.
Businesses everywhere are learning what many cultures have known for millennia: one of the most powerful tools for creating a lasting impression is a simple story. In our Telling Stories series, we’ll explore why stories are such a powerful inclusion even to a B2B marketing strategy, and how you can incorporate them more into your own efforts. Here in Part 1, we’ll examine the benefits that story-based content can bring to a business-to-business initiative.
For a lot of the things you do as a business, you probably have specific processes to follow, and general plans if certain situations happen. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t for your marketing. And, in all actuality, you’ll be much better off if you do have some sort of plan to follow.
It’s easier than you think for small businesses to fade into obscurity. It’s been reported time and time again that 20% will fail within their first year, 30% within their second year, and 50% after five years of operation. You don’t want that to happen to your MSP. So, what can you do to make sure that (1) your current clients stay with you, and (2) you continue to bring in new clients?
The best thing to do is to never stop marketing.
With marketing, there are so many methods that you can possibly utilize to promote your MSP and its service offerings. So, what SHOULD you be doing?
In a recent survey of small business owners, the most frequent response to the question regarding the biggest challenge to running a small business was marketing.
So, what are the best marketing strategies for small businesses who are just starting out marketing themselves? What about for small businesses who are struggling to achieve a positive ROI with the marketing they are currently doing?
As a company with a business-to-business delivery model, your marketing is very different than that you see on television. You may feel as though you’re speaking different languages - and yet their messages are the ones that stick in your head. Don’t worry, there’s a very good reason that this is happening, and a way that you can give your own marketing a boost with it as well.
Whenever a major holiday is coming up, you’re likely confronted with multiple reminders of it in your daily lives. You may see commercials on TV, receive emails from companies, get flyers in the mail. You’ll see specialized packaging for brands you buy every day that reflects the upcoming holiday. It makes sense why companies are doing this - holidays celebrated by the general population give a business an excuse to get in contact with the consumer. And, this often leads to an uptick in sales.
You’ve just found out that the senior decision maker of one of your current clients will be stepping down in favor of retirement - they’ve earned it, after all of their years of hard work. To fill that position, their company will be promoting someone internally to fill that role.
Time is important to business. It’s even more so in regards to your marketing: an improperly timed campaign will fall on deaf ears, no matter how great your offer is. Your ongoing marketing efforts can suffer as well if you fail to take into account when your audience is prepared to digest your marketing materials. If you are sharing these materials at inopportune times, they will get lost amongst the various other marketing communications that your clients and prospects are receiving from other businesses, including those from your competition.
To make sure that doesn’t happen, you need to consider when you market, not just what you are marketing.
Failure.
We’ve all experienced it. It can be discouraging when it keeps happening. This is especially true with your marketing: you invested a lot of time, effort, and money into researching, designing, and implementing what you believed to be a stellar marketing campaign. But, you come to find that you failed to reach whatever benchmark(s) you set. It’s even worse when you keep failing again...and again...and again….and again.
Marketing collateral is a collection of media that is used to support the sales of a company’s products or services. The primary purpose of marketing collateral is to showcase your business’ products and services in an informational but attractive way, while at the same time expanding your credibility. The collateral you use should support your overall marketing efforts.
A marketing strategy is the building block of a marketing plan. It lays out a clear, well-defined big picture plan to attract customers to your business by specifying long-term objectives, actions to be taken, and marketing tactics used to achieve marketing goals. B2B marketers often struggle to develop successful marketing strategies. 40% of the least effective marketers have no defined marketing strategy, and 56% of B2B marketers in the United States find it difficult to build their brand through the strategies they create.
For those new to marketing, it can be hard to formulate a plan. You’re starting from the bottom, behind all of your local competition who have been marketing their products and services for years. Where should you start? What do you need to do to make yourself noticed? Here are some places to begin.
Time is often a key ingredient for things to turn out well. The longer cheese ages, the better it is often considered to be, and the longer a 401k has to build and mature, the better off one will be later on. In many ways, an effective marketing campaign works in the same way - it takes time to build up and optimize your efforts before they’ll crystallize into successful conversions.
When we talk about building a marketing strategy, we’re not talking about what combination of individual initiatives that you’re going to be using to market your services and solutions. Rather, we’re focusing on what should take place before you begin selecting initiatives when you’re developing your overall marketing strategy.
One of the most important metrics to any marketing strategy can be one of the trickiest to calculate: Return on Investment (ROI). Along with more tools to help you calculate it, digital marketing has seen ROI undergo some extreme changes. While the principle this metric has been around for a very long time, it’s only in the past decade or so that data became easier to collect and analyze. is easy to collect the data required for an accurate ROI.
There are many benefits to creating a marketing plan before you launch an initiative. A plan serves as an invaluable tool for thought organization and helps establish a course of action for the company to follow. What’s more, it provides you with valuable insights and knowledge to draw from as you design your campaign, starting with an improved perspective of your market.
There are many approaches one may take in their marketing. Each approach has different levels of efficacy in different situations. For long-term and sustainable growth, a compound marketing strategy is best.
As time passes, seasons change, and with those changes come different avenues and opportunities that you may use to your marketing advantage. Simply put, some marketing tactics are just better suited for different times of year. Even so, they’ll still require a thoughtful and deliberate implementation.
A large part of running a successful initiative themed around a season is to understand the climate, in a manner of speaking, of your area. As you plan your initiative, you must be familiar with trends in society and business and their tendency to shift with the seasons. This means that you must be aware of a variety of variables as you plan out your marketing strategy. For instance, as the holiday season winds down, the use of seasonal B2C marketing is fully apparent. However, with a few changes in approach, there is no reason that B2B marketing can’t leverage similar factors in their approach as well.
