Tue, October 27, 2020 | Author: Mike Lieberman, CEO and Chief Revenue Scientist|
Just Like The Wide Variety Of Candy Available
On Halloween, You Have To Pick The Best Ones
Hundreds of marketing tactics are at your disposal. But not
all marketing is created equally. Some tactics work better than others in
certain companies, and there is no real way to know for sure which ones are
going to work well for you.
However, at digital agencies, we have the benefit of running
hundreds of programs for a wide variety of different businesses. While you have
expertise in one or two companies, we have expertise with close to a thousand
companies.
First, we’re going to show some more challenging
tactics – the ones that take longer to produce results, require
deeper expertise and need a more sustained investment. Since Halloween is this
weekend, we’ll consider those tricks. It’s not that they’re bad, but we think
there are better options.
Next,
we’ll show you some of the tactics that work faster, require less investment
and take less work to produce even better results. Keeping in the spirit, we’ll
call these treats.
Enjoy the sweets!
The
Tricks
The tactics in this list typically take a little longer,
produce less consistent results and require more investment over a longer
period to produce results. I’ll restate that these are not bad or tactics that
should be ignored. Rather, they’re tactics that tend to trip people up — tricks
instead of treats.
Email Marketing – Back in 2003, when we
started the agency, we ran almost all of our campaigns entirely with email.
Today, it remains a backbone tactic, but with so many people sending emails,
the open rate, click-through rate and rate at which emails turn prospects into
leads is low and has been consistently low for years.
Worse, you can spend an entire day working to optimize an email campaign and only see a
modest improvement. Going from a 20% open rate to a 22% open rate or moving
from a 3% click-through rate to a 4% click-through rate is positive, but was it
worth an entire day of work? What else could you have been doing that would
have produced better results or a bigger lift?
That list is long, so because of these factors, we consider
email to be a trick in 2020 and in 2021, too.
SEO – Again, you need to be ranked on Google
for your keywords, phrases and questions, but do you know where the best place
to hide a dead body is? On the second page of Google! Ha!
Seriously, SEO lands on the trick list simply because of how
hard it is and how long it takes. Plus, Google changes its rules every couple
of months. Google kind of tells everyone and then you have to figure out what
the rules mean to continue optimizing website pages to rank.
Look, you need to rank,
and organic rankings do drive visitors. But it’s a slow up and to
the right at best. Again, I just think there are many more tactics that produce
better results faster. So for us, it’s a trick tactic in 2020 and will remain
one in 2021.
Paid Google Ads – Everyone thinks this is
the end-all and be-all of marketing. Dump $10,000 into your Google Ads budget
and let’s generate leads. It rarely works like that. Paid Ads on Google is another one of
those tactics that still takes planning, testing and time.
If you want to do this right, you have to test keywords, ad
copy, ad offers and budget. Remember, you are competing with your top
competitors for those ranking slots. The more they spend, the more you’ll have
to spend, and as soon as you stop spending, you’re invisible again.
Not to mention, we’ve had a number of clients that never made
it out of the testing phase. Their prospects weren’t searching, and when they
were, they weren’t clicking on paid ads.
It’s not an easy button, so for us, it’s a trick instead of a
treat.
Paid Social – Similar story here, but
it might be worse. Today, everyone wants a Facebook Ads campaign. Many agencies
are promoting lead generation via Facebook, and some are even guaranteeing
results. But read the fine print, because there are no guarantees in marketing.
The same story holds true here. What looks like an obvious
tactic doesn’t always pan out, and you should never base your entire marketing
strategy on a single tactic, like advertising on Facebook.
Facebook does offer some remarkably interesting campaign
relate options, like formless conversions, lookalike audience targeting and an
amazing segment targeting engine. But even with these technology tools, this
isn’t always an option for every company, which is why it falls into our trick
category for 2020 and 2021.
Social Media – Our last trick tactic
is social media. Again, if all you want to do is publish your content to social
and show an active social account, then this takes little thought and little
work. But if you want to use social media to drive visitors to your site, turn
those visitors into lead and then those leads into sales opportunities, social
media might not be a top tactic for you.
Social media is about engagement with
your audiences – your friends on Facebook, your followers on Twitter and
your connections on LinkedIn.
To drive engagement, you have to create compelling
conversation starters. This is different than simply posting your blog articles
once or twice a week. You have to be active. Every day (and perhaps twice or
even three times a day) you have to post something that generates a response.
It can be a question, an opinion or content worth sharing.
You could run a poll, post a video and ask your audiences to comment, share
their opinion or participate in some other way. This approach takes work. Is
this going to double your audience in a week? Not likely.
Again, we love social media, and it has its place, but not as
a tactic that will produce results in the short term with limited effort. That
makes it a trick in 2020 and beyond.
The
Treats
The tactics in this list are the ones that generally make it
into our quick wins plan. These are easier to plan, set up and optimize. They
almost always produce results in days, not weeks or months. These tactics take
advantage of assets that already exist and can be easily tweaked to produce
even better results once we get some live prospect data.
As treats, these should be part of everyone’s marketing
tactics plan through the end of this year and into 2021.
Chat And Conversational Marketing – One of the big reasons
we love chat is because it optimizes the experience for the people already
coming to your website. No matter how many visitors you get each month, some of
them want to talk to you now and don’t want to fill out a form or call you.
We also like chat because it can be turned on almost
instantly, especially if you’re using a marketing platform tool like HubSpot.
Turn it on, place the app on the appropriate pages, design a short chat- and
bot-enabled experience and assign someone to handle the live questions. Just
like that, you’re generating leads.
One of the aspects of chat we like the best is that prospects
who want to chat are usually further along in their buyer journey, meaning
they’re ready to buy, they’re not opposed to talking to someone and they’re
happy to provide information that helps you prioritize and score them. More on
lead scoring later.
The simple fact that chat generates leads on day one makes it
a major treat for us and our clients now and well into 2021.
Content Marketing – Yes, an old reliable
tactic made it into the treats list. Content, specifically educational content, continues to
be the lifeblood of lead generation campaigns. I’ll go so far as to
say the more content you create, the more leads you’ll generate.
But you have to be smart. Content takes time. You need a
process that allows you to create the right content in the right format that
answers the right questions for the right prospect at the right time in their
buyer journey. That is a big task. Without a process, we see companies missing
the mark here very often.
Plus, content creation is expensive, so you want to do it
efficiently. You want to create long-form content, then harvest short form-content
from it and micro-content from that. You want to make sure you content is SEO
optimized to keep that SEO engine humming. You’ll also need an entire website
and conversion optimization effort to ensure that content gets deployed on your
site in a visitor- and conversion-friendly way.
Despite the complexities, content marketing continues to be
the Hershey’s bar of our list of treats – always good, always sweet
and always appreciated when we find it in the Halloween basket.
Podcasting – This might be new to a
lot of you, but podcasting isn’t new across marketing. Did you know there are over 850,000
podcasts and over 30 million podcast episodes? But there is
room for another podcast show, and your company should be working on producing
one.
First, the reason many shows exist is people love listening
to podcasts. Smartphones allow people to carry their podcasts with them on
runs, in the car, when waiting for the train, while cutting the lawn and in any
place they have time to listen and be educated.
Next, they have become easier and easier to produce. Today
it’s simple to spin up a podcast, collect the audio, edit it, produce it and
publish it. Almost anyone can do it.
Podcast content helps you in so many other areas.
You can publish it on social. You can use it to rank pages on your website. You
can send specific episodes to prospects. You can use the audio transcript to
help with search. You can integrate podcasting into your account-based
marketing (ABM) campaigns.
Since it contributes in so many areas, is easy to create and
helps you make long-lasting connections, we’re calling podcasting one of the
newest and most effective treats in 2021.
Video – Nothing new here, honestly. Video has
been a red-hot tactic for the past few years. According to the Social Science
Research Network, 65% of people are visual learners, and video
outpaces reading in almost every area of marketing.
What makes this such a treat today and into next year is the
wide variety of applications for video. Here’s just a partial list of
where video can be added to your marketing strategy and
where you should expect to see dramatic improvements in the results:
·
Video
on your website pages, landing pages and confirmation pages directly related to
the visitors and their objectives for visiting those pages.
·
Video
in your email campaigns drives clicks by 2X or more.
·
Video
in the sales process. Adding video from sales reps instead of long, wordy
emails improves comprehension, makes prospects feel safer and differentiates
your process from your competitors.
·
Video
to replace references reduces the sales cycle by up to two weeks, according to
our research.
·
Video
in social campaigns can increase engagement, drive shares and improve the
number of people moving from social platforms to your website. This improves
overall visitor conversions and leads.
·
Video
content, instead of or in addition to written content, increases conversion
rates and increases leads generated from content.
·
Video
has also been shown to rank quickly and highly. Google isn’t stupid; it bought
YouTube, the second-most-used search engine, because people love videos. Create
your video correctly and your content will rank better.
With so many benefits, it’s hard to not consider
video as one of the major treats in 2020 and going into 2021, too.
Lead Nurturing – I left this for last
because it is an underrated treat. Think about lead nurturing as the Milky Way
of the candy bar world. It doesn’t get the airtime Hershey’s does. It’s not as
sexy as Snickers and lacks the attitude of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.
But lead nurturing campaigns are one of the best tools in the
tool kit when it comes to lead generation. Remember, the people
getting nurtured already expressed some type of interest. Now it’s on you to
keep the conversation going. The better your campaigns, the faster they’ll move
along and the more people will turn into sales opportunities.
The biggest missing element of lead nurturing is that
understanding of the buyer journey and how to proactively move people along
with content and offers. Then there’s a scoring element that is almost always
missing. If someone reaches a certain lead score threshold, sales should be
alerted to pick up the lead and continue nurturing with an in-person experience
element.
All in all, with a map like the Cyclonic Buyer Journey™, the right pieces
of content and a solid lead scoring model, you should be able to turn
marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) into sales opportunities without having to
spend a single minute with a sales rep.
The sheer power of a solid lead nurturing effort makes this
one of our top treats this year and next. If you’re not executing lead
nurturing campaigns like this, then make this a top priority going into 2021.
Not all Halloween candy is created equally, and not all
marketing and revenue generation tactics are created equally either. On
Halloween, it’s easy to separate the Almond Joy from the Baby Ruth bars. It’s
not as easy to know what to work on, which tactics to prioritize and where to
focus your energy when lead generation is a top organizational priority.
This list of treats should help you push those tricks to the
back of the line and allow the treats to be front and center in your plan for a
strong finish to 2020 and a hot start in 2021.
Start
Today Tip: There is a theme to what we’re
recommending here. We’re looking for tactics that are easy to implement and
produce solid results in a tight time frame. Everyone wants to see results
quickly. Not every tactic passes the sniff test when it comes to producing
results quickly. Focus on the list of tactics in the treats category and you’ll
be a marketing superstar in your own right. Prioritize those treats above the
tricks and you’ll own the night instead of being haunted all night. Have a
happy, safe and healthy Halloween.
Posted By Author Mike Lieberman, CEO and Chief Revenue
Scientist
Mike
is the CEO and Chief Revenue Scientist at Square 2. He is passionate about
helping people turn their ordinary businesses into businesses people talk
about. For more than 25 years, Mike has been working hand-in-hand with CEOs and
marketing and sales executives to help them create strategic revenue growth
plans, compelling marketing strategies and remarkable sales processes that
shorten the sales cycle and increase close rates.
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