People don’t like to hear me say it, but the truth is:
There are no shortcuts or overnight fixes for good marketing.
A strategic marketing plan that works is a long-term play that requires day-in-day-out execution. You need to commit to your plan for at least a year, tracking analytical data the entire time, making tweaks and changes as needed, in order to see results and understand what’s working and what’s not.
It all starts with the goals your marketing should be working to achieve: building your audience, capture new leads and referrals, following up on those prospects, and staying top-of-mind with your whole audience. In a B2B company, you can accomplish all of these goals with content-driven marketing running across a modern website, engaging emails, and LinkedIn. The beauty of this approach is that it leverages the same content across all of those channels, and we’ve seen it produce remarkable results over and over again.
Your website is your biggest and best sales rep, working for you 24/7. The experience a prospect has when visiting your website is crucial to their retention, so it needs to be optimized for mobile since that’s where the majority of your fist-time incoming traffic is going to come from, and it needs to be focused on the customer journey, giving those prospects exactly what they’re looking for, leading them step-by-step. Search engine optimization (SEO) will make it easy for your word of mouth and organic prospects to easily find you. We talk about SEO and how to build a long-term strategy that works for you in episode 6 of our B2B podcast, “Why Old School SEO Doesn’t Work.”
Your website should also be great at capturing new leads and referrals by grabbing the most valuable piece of information you need from a prospect: their email address. To increase your capture rate significantly, you need to offer a high-value reward in exchange for an email address – something that makes you almost uncomfortable to give up.
If your business is the real deal, but you’re not seeing the growth that makes sense, then it’s time to get the word out. You may not be looking for a MLB contract, but you are looking for a steady stream of new contracts with new clients, and more contracts with existing clients.
Of course, it’s not enough to just collect email addresses. Once they’ve subscribed, they should be immediately added to your email database or CRM where they should start receiving email campaigns. At boomtime, we start new subscribers with a nurturing email series called ENGAGE that introduces your brand or business, transparently states how you do business, and highlights testimonials from your clients to build trust and authority for your new audience. Thereafter, these subscribers are funneled into our BUILD series, regular, 2-3 monthly emails that give your audience insight-driven, valuable content that helps your audience understand how you are uniquely positioned to help them solve problems they are facing.
All this great content you’ve got should be sent out to as many channels as possible; think about it as a 90/10 rule: 90% of your efforts should go toward creating great content, and 10% should be sent distributing it. If there’s one place you need to make sure this content is going outside of your prospects’ inbox, it’s on LinkedIn. It’s a B2B gold-mine with the ability to scale your audience and drive continual traffic to your website while positioning you as a thought-leader in your industry.
Great marketing requires effort, energy, and time – there are no shortcuts or quick solutions. That said, there are ways you can increase your efficiency and overall effectiveness, and that’s what we provide at boomtime through our fuse platform, the first automated marketing-as-as-service platform that leverages everything you’re doing right and amplifies your word of mouth.
To learn more about fuse and how boomtime can help you grow your business, visit our website at www.boomtime.com.
All the best,
Bill Bice
CEO
