It’s time to get thinking about your digital sales and marketing ecosystem to help ensure that your strategy and program are fit for today’s buyers. It should excite and inspire your target audience, rebuild demand – create leads and engage and nurture them to become delighted customers. Here are our top 10 marketing tips designed for business growth.
Take an inbound approach to lead generation and sales conversion
Before we dive into the specifics, it’s important to understand the fundamentals of inbound marketing and sales. Inbound marketing and sales are built around helping the right customer find your brand and make the right purchase choice. It is a continuous cycle across the entire customer experience that consists of:
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Online search and targeted advertising
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Website content
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Website lead capture mechanisms
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Nurturing lead readiness to buy
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An exact handover point to sales
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The sale
- Post-sale experience, repurchase and advocacy.
Effective inbound marketing and sales are enabled by:
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Customer understanding
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A compelling brand
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Channels – the right mix of communication channels to attract the right buyers
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Content – content that provides the right message to the right person
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Technology – smart, flexible, robust, secure and affordable
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Automation – workflows that direct the right content to the right person at the right time to ensure the highest possible level of contextual relevance to the buyer
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Measurement – metrics that cover the leading indicators of success, conversion rates and return on investment fuel continuous improvement.
Now that we’ve covered the basics of inbound marketing and sales, here are our 10 tips for effective marketing.
10 tips for effective marketing
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Contact strategy
Your contact strategy identifies the places or media channels where you can most effectively and efficiently connect with your target audience. There’s no shortage of choice. Never has media been so fragmented. For more, read our blog on how to create a winning marketing mix. -
Content strategy
Your Content strategy defines the messaging and nature of content that will be developed for each channel. -
Make Videos
Video is now the most vital content pillar. The multi-sensory nature of video makes it highly engaging and memorable. Did you know 88% of marketers report that video content marketing delivers a positive return on investment? Play the video below to learn more. -
Podcast it
If you’ve got something interesting to say, podcasts can be a great way to create brand followers and position your business as a category thought leader. According to the News and Media Research Centre, podcasts are listened to by over half of Gen Z and Y news consumers, and for Gen X, it’s 31%. Listen to our Podcast to find out more. -
Say it with Infographics
The information-rich imagery of infographics makes them memorable and effective. -
Get Blogging
Despite the rise of video and podcasts within content marketing, blogs remain vital in the content marketing mix. Blogs make a significant contribution to SEO performance. According to SEMRush:
Search is the number one traffic source to blogs across all industries
Articles that are greater than 3,000 words get three times more traffic, four times more shares, and three and a half times more backlinks than shorter articles. -
Be Social
Social media channels are a vital part of every marketing plan. They facilitate the amplification of your messages to followers and provide a range of high-reach, precisely targeted advertising solutions.
The social media landscape is evolving, with new platforms surfacing each year and new features added to long-standing platforms regularly.
The top three social media platforms in Australia are Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. For more on social media, and how to get started, read our blog.
Source: Australian social media use 2022. Sources: Hootsuite, SEM Rush, NapoleonCat, Yellow Sensus. -
Email is essential
Email marketing isn't spam, and it's not a personal message either. It's something in between. It is an essential channel that's used to build an authentic connection with your leads and customers.
Creating emails that build relationships and business results takes planning and skill. You've worked hard to convince people to hand over their contact details, so you want to get it right.
Subject lines drive email opens. Content and offers drive clickthroughs. A/B testing helps to refine your emails to maximise returns.
During the pandemic, we have seen email engagement increase by 80%, according to HubSpot.
Personalisation is the most common tactic used to increase engagement. The next level is to use separate emails or smart content blocks designed to increase relevance to different segments. Segmented email campaigns achieve around 15% higher open rates and double the number of clickthroughs.
You should use email to build upon an existing relationship with your subscribers and leads by providing relevant, valuable information to help them act on their goals. -
Get your website ready for business
If the customer is the focus of your business’s approach to marketing, sales and customer experience delivered, the website is the nerve centre. Much of what advanced businesses do today to attract and service clients now centres on the website experience. In technical parlance, the website is called a Content Management System (CMS). It's helpful to look at your website through that lens. The best websites perform as a sales generating machine by:
Helping your target audience and existing customers at every stage of the journey to purchase and their customer experience
Helping your target audience to find your website through online search
Motivating user engagement and registration of contact details so that you can send more useful content to them
Being easy to use, laid out logically, and are fast
Work well across both mobile and desktop.
Read our blog for 10 tips on how to convert your website visitors into customers. -
Optimise your Website and Content for Online Search
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) performance is how well your website ranks against relevant search queries. The aim is to appear as high as possible on the first page. It is a product of several factors.
Google aims to provide a useful and straightforward experience. They want to deliver relevant results and send people to a website that performs well and satisfies the user's search query.
SEO is a logical process driven by factors that boils down to the level of online authority your website holds, and fewer penalties applied for performance and usability. It boils down to:
How well Google can interpret your content, so they are confident in its ability to satisfy search queries.
The online authority of your website. This is influenced by inbound links from other authoritative sites, the quantity of content, and the quality of user page engagement.
The performance of the site, as measured independently for mobile and desktop versions of your site. Today, mobile performance is vital.
As the sophistication of Google's algorithms advances, the main SEO drivers are becoming more about content and website performance, and less sensitive to the traditional technical aspects of SEO. How your website is set up, how it performs, and its content, all impact how well your SEO performs.
Need some help on how to get found online with Google search? Check out our blog for insights and tips.
About Poignand Consulting
Poignand Consulting is a strategic marketing and sales enablement consultancy that exists to unlock customer value for your business. We do this by helping enrich the customer experience at every point of contact – from the first seed of awareness to enquiry, purchase, and the post-sale relationship.
It pays to step back and assess this from time to time. Help is available. If you would like to review your current marketing effectiveness, we would happily arrange an obligation-free chat.
