Account Based Marketing - Get accelerates B2B business with marketer planning

Account Based Marketing - Get accelerates B2B business with marketer planning

   November 25, 2015       prabhakardalvi

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{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B, Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}

As the speed of business accelerates, B2B marketers and CMOs are faced with growing challenges in identifying their top (&best) customer/accounts, leads as well as streamlining sales and marketing co-ordination.  Add to this, they are still in dilemma whether to target accounts or leads, not sure which account(s) they need to target or they don’t know which accounts in their database are best fit to target and  uncertain about content to be conveyed .

Here comes Account Based Marketing (ABM), hot topic among B2B marketers right now.

ABM is the ‘panacea’ for the above mentioned problems and is gaining traction every day. This topic is keenly discussed and analyzed over events, webinars, blogs, forums and social media.

ABM advocates the philosophy of quality over quantity as echoed by David Ogilvy – Father of advertising.

In this blog series, we will try to unravel what exactly is ABM, why ABM is gaining traction, strategy to be adopted, business benefits of ABM and way forward for ABM.

Part one of the blog series deciphers ABM in its simplistic form and part two focuses on best practices of ABM.

Various marketers have different interpretation of ABM. However ABM in its simplest form:

“Strategic approach/methodology adopted by marketers to identify and define their best or top strategic accounts, then channelize all their entire marketing campaign, content deliverability with compelling messaging with dedicated focus on selected accounts, and then measure the impact/progresses to ascertain the success.“

Although, ABM is graining traction now, this has been there since early 1990 as an alternative to mass marketing and this was supposed to be grandma’s antidote.

However this was not pursed with vigor. But now things are better with advances and innovations in various marketing technology stacks and B2B buyer journey/cycle has become more complex coupled with rapid decay in B2B data.

These have driven marketers to look forward to panacea in the form of ABM. Add to this, various big enterprises like HP and XEROX have embraced ABM in a big way and reaping the benefits.

Through ABM methodology, B2B companies can reach out to select key accounts/leads through targeted content, ads, and messages instead of blindly following each and every account. This in turn will enable them to close more deals and usher in sales and marketing synergy. 

• ABM – Best practices ( Infographics ) - November 9, 2015
• Account Based Marketing (ABM): B2B marketer’s panacea! - November 4, 2015

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Why Marketing Strategy must include Video in competitive market

Why Marketing Strategy must include Video in competitive market

   November 25, 2015       prabhakardalvi

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Today my B2B marketing tip features the need for video in your marketing strategy. It is said that visual memories are the stronger memories, then imagine what message a video can send to your potential customer or prospects. Video gives you a platform to present your company’s message in a way that makes your business feel more human to viewers.

Creating video may not be an easy task, but that doesn’t mean you can’t tackle the job internally and/or under budget. Here are some useful tips that can help you through this process:

1. Keep it short: – Researchers say, 50% more people will watch a 1 minute video than a 2 minute video. So keeping your video short and to the point, will help customers to receive your message more clearly.

2. Make a video script: – You should always take some time and write out what you want to convey in your video. Make sure you gather some feedback around the script by reading it out loud to others, as reading it loud will allow you to hone your message to right length and tone.

3. Include some fun elements: – I hope you guys know that you are not launching a rocket, so why can’t you have some fun elements while you are trying to sell your vision. Show your potential customers or prospects that you have real humans working for you. Showing your human side can go long way in building trust within your audience.

4. Do not self-promote too much: – Tone of your video is very important. You need to make your potential customers or prospects feel comfortable. Tell a story instead of just pushing your viewers in the direction you want. Have them follow along instead of telling them where they need to be.

The most important thing that you as marketers need to keep in mind is that once your video is created it will not be seen by millions of people right away so it doesn’t make it a failure. View count is not the only metrics you should look at while measuring the success of your new video. To know more on metrics to track your video success STAY TUNNED!!

{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B, Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}

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Effective ways of Lead Generation through Content Marketing

Effective ways of Lead Generation through Content Marketing

   November 21, 2014       prabhakardalvi

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Content marketing plays an important role in Lead Generation. In today’s world B2B buyers have changed a lot. B2B buyers have lot of information available online at their fingertips.

So most likely B2B buyers prefer getting product/service information online rather than approaching a person. So as it is always said that every coin has two sides, on one side it provides an excellent opportunity for marketing team but on other side it can also lead to information overload where many brands, products and services get lost.

Now what’s the right way to do it? It’s time to get more relevant and precise. We have to change the concept of one-size-fits-all mentality and should realize that every time we need to customize our content for every buyer at different levels.

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Metrics for E-commerce Retailer with Content Marketing

Metrics for E-commerce Retailer with Content Marketing

   July 03, 2014       prabhakardalvi

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Online retail marketers spend a significant amount of time and money attracting visitors to their stores, converting these visitors to customers and retaining them as customers over time. Content marketing helps at each stage of the marketing funnel.

Right at the top of the funnel, content marketing in the form of blogging, visuals, videos, guides, articles and media engagement all work to drive relevant traffic through to a store as well as kick off brand awareness. When visitors start to browse through products in your store, content marketing in the form of product videos, quality reviews (user generated content), FAQs, product description and images come to play with converting traffic to sales. Finally, customer loyalty efforts geared to generating more repeat customers are largely fueled by an email marketing strategy that imperatively connects with your brands overarching content marketing strategy.

It is vital to measure the effectiveness of these measures as a guide to future efforts. 

The word “metrics” is on everyone’s lips in the content marketing world, as metrics are a gauge on the effectiveness of marketing spend. There is, however, a slew of different metrics available to marketers. Which ones merit scrutiny?

1. Returning visitors

This is an important metric from a content marketing viewpoint because visitors who return to your site directly — who aren’t funnelled there by other marketing channels — are a guide to how useful people found content from your site the last time they came.  In other words, it’s a measure of how good your content is!

The quality of your content matters because it increases the “stickiness” of your site, and because it increases the likelihood of turning visitors into customers. Furthermore, high quality content that delivers return visitors is one of the means by which you can build relationships with your “top 1 percent” customers.

Ideally, what you want is your top 1 percent customers returning often, rather than many “bottom 90 percent” customers returning once or twice. That’s about targeted content and fragmented phased-out content that stimulates audience suspense similar to TV sitcoms.

2. Pages per visit

The average number of pages a visitor looks at during a browsing session. This figure provides some indication of site engagement in broad terms. If visitors read only one page, it indicates they aren’t finding the site very useful. If they stay and read 10 pages, they’re obviously seeing value in what your site has to offer. In e-commerce, this is a vital metric because visitors are most likely “window-shopping” on your site. The longer a visitor spends on your site, the more engaged they are and more likely they are to buying.

A vital part of this is bounce rate – how many visitors simply bounce right off the site after viewing only one page? Factors known to increase bounce rate include page load times, as well as a poor connection between content marketing and site content. If your content marketing attracts visitors who are basically uninterested in what you do, they’ll bounce. This is worth looking at in isolation as well as part of the whole picture provided by pages per visit metrics.

3. Time on site

Time on site indicates the amount of time a visitor spent doing anything at all on your site. As such, it indicates interest, engagement and likely purchase. As a general indicator of site performance, this is key. It’s also important because more engaged customers are usually better customers. Comparatively high time on site is an indicator of commitment to your brand – a feature of the “top 1 percent” customer. You can break down the time on site figures to see which people are spending more time with you, allowing you to optimize your content for the customers who make the biggest difference to your company.

4. Increased traffic

Increased traffic is the basic aim of content marketers. From social media to your blog to your sales pages, good content marketing should increase your traffic.

For e-commerce, more people coming in through the door means more sales and more revenue. Again though, it’s wise to differentiate between more traffic and more useful traffic. More visitors who display lower secondary conversion, lower pages per visit and so on, are not necessarily what you should be looking for. Boosting traffic should be seen as a way to increase the number of potential top 1 percent and top 10 percent customers coming to your e-commerce store. That’s about targeted content.

Engagement Metrics

5. Sharing content

How much of your content gets shared across social networks? That’s a key metric for content marketers in any sphere: it’s a measurement of how many people think your material is good enough to show their friends or pass on to professional contacts. It also feeds into your social marketing strategy: knowing which channels your content is shared on lets you know which channels to concentrate on, and which to optimize your content for.

From an e-commerce standpoint, sharing content is another indicator of the engagement of your top 1 percent customers. Higher engagement from this group is disproportionately rewarding in terms of sales and per-sale revenue. called “comments per post,” and it measures the number of times visitors post responses, feedback, reviews or any other form of commentary. This is a key metric for content marketing because it’s a measurement of engagement. This can provide insight into the topics that customers want to engage with.

Specifically for e-commerce, a reviews section provides an important guide for future customers. Customers and prospective customers take reviews extremely seriously, and they make a major difference to sales. From personal experience buying running shoes online, I value reviews from customers in specialist running online stores against reviews from behemoths such as Amazon or eBay because my inclination is that specialist store customers would be more discerning and knowledgeable. Online retailers should create a stimulating experience that encourages reviews and user-generated content in general — there is so much value to be had here.

7. Time

Most social media management tools offer metrics that let you find out what time of day and which days your posts see the most engagement. Obviously, you’d expect different demographics to have different engagement profiles – if you sell products aimed at middle-aged fishermen you’d expect to see a lot less action at 2 a.m. than if you sold concert tickets to youth-oriented events, for instance. Checking out when your audience is active lets you build your posting schedule around those times. You can take that information and measure it against your conversions at your store.

Suppose you get the most social media engagement at 9 a.m. on Thursdays, and most of your sales are at 9:30 on Thursdays. A link that fast seems unlikely to be causal. But what about secondary conversions? A spike in social engagement, followed by a spike in traffic, followed by a spike in sign-ups, all suggests that your social and other content marketing is working extremely effectively.

Business Metrics

8. Conversion rate

In online retail, sales are primary conversion metrics. Drawing a direct link between content that you create at each stage of the marketing funnel and your sales can be tricky, but multi-attribution modeling helps establish a link to sales conversions more easily. Also consider measuring “secondary conversions” such as email list subscriptions, buyer guide downloads and any form of engagement that requires commitment on the part of the visitor. Growing an email list is a vital conversion metric to measure.

It is a vital metric because it indicates a wider spread of visitors who might not be buying yet, but they’re interested enough to download material, to sign up or to otherwise indicate their interest. Additionally, higher engagement is a characteristic of the top 1 percent of your customers – the ones who actually contribute the most to your success.

9. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value is a measure of how much a customer is worth to your company overall, across the time of their association with your company. The average customer is going to make around two purchases throughout their association with you. The top 1 percent of your customers will, measured across their CLV, be worth around 30 times more than the average – reason enough to concentrate on these high-value customers.

Analyzing customer lifetime value lets you see whether you’re getting the customers you want. It’s actually more efficient to appeal strongly to a smaller number of customers than to appeal weakly to a larger number of less engaged, less interested customers who will, ultimately, spend far less with you. If you’re appealing to high value customers, your content marketing strategy is working!

10. Revenue

Finally, what it’s all about. Revenue is the most important metric, for obvious reasons: you can’t pay your employees with click-through, or make a house payment with secondary conversions. But how do we look at revenue from a content marketing perspective?

One way is to track purchases through the whole process, and see what content they viewed prior to the purchase decision. If a visitor viewed three pieces of content on your website and then made a €90 purchase, each piece of content is worth €30, right? Sort of. But that’s too simplistic for such a complex picture. It doesn’t take into account social marketing, or repeat customers – in their case, you’d need to factor in the content they looked at last time too. Use purchase value/pieces of content viewed as a rule of thumb, but remember how vague it is. It will give you an average at best.

Another way of looking at revenue is to measure conversion value. It’s a broader approach that looks at all the costs involved against the sales value and it usually means looking at the mass of sales.

Conclusion

The most useful metric for tracking success overall is customer lifetime value measured against the aggregate cost of customer acquisition. Customer acquisition costs include all marketing costs, not just content marketing. But content marketing costs will be significantly reduced per customer if those customers have high lifetime value, because high lifetime value customers are interested in more of your content, so less of it “misses.”

{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B., Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}

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Good Content to Increase Engagement for Covert Business

Good Content to Increase Engagement for Covert Business

   June 11, 2014       prabhakardalvi

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Good Content to Increase Engagement for Covert Business

Engagement is the end game for content marketing. Getting people interested in and involved with your product is half the battle in making a sale. When your customers know that they can look to you for stellar insights and advice about the industry, you’ve succeeded. But achieving this goal is not easy. It takes a lot of time investment to create the high-quality content you’ll need.

Below are Some tips on how to use content to increase your audience’s engagement.

• Create Gated Content 
• Run a Live Q&A Based On of a Controversial Piece of Content  
• Include Calls to Action at the Bottom of Content 
• Ask Questions at the End of Blog Posts to Increase Comments
• Be Consistent at Something

Create Gated Content for SE ( Search engine )

“Gated content” refers to information or whole sections of your web site that are only available to people who agree to provide something in return. Gated content creation can be tricky to execute, but when used well, it’s a great way to not only pump up engagement but also to generate leads. For marketing purposes, that “something” is usually contact information, such as:

1. Geographic location
2. Name
3. Email address
4. Phone number
5. Company information

Gated content may also require payment for information, such as whitepapers or exclusive video, but generally speaking it’s just another rung on the sales funnel.

Not every company is comfortable with using gated content. Some are wary of alienating potential customers who are not ready to establish contact, or sending them to competitors who do not have gates. It’s best to reserve gated content for premium information; be sure to leave product descriptions and blogs free to navigate for any visitor.

For instance, a site such as Gate to Garage, which sells a wide variety of furnishings and décor, would not benefit from walling off its product listings to visitors. But it might consider requiring potential customers to submit an email address for future contact if they want to see a how-to video or white paper.

One thing to keep in mind, don’t gate all your content. Leave blog posts and info graphics as free material for everyone. That free material will drive traffic to your site and then special gated content can be used to increase engagement and build an email database.

Run a Live Q&A Based On of a Controversial Piece of Content  

Live chats have a colorful history on the internet. They’re one of the earliest ways that companies engaged with their customers, dating back well before the age of social media. Though they’ve evolved over time, they still remain a great way for businesses to gauge opinions about not only their products but also their industry. The smartest way to draw people in is to play off a piece of content that’s gotten a lot of attention.

This type of content will inspire strong opinions on both sides, which will draw people into the conversation. Be sure to promote the Q&A beforehand, but don’t just rely on live questions to fuel the discussion. Solicit questions and topics beforehand via social media, and keep things open-ended so that you can engage as many people on as many aspects of the issue as possible. If you’re doing the chat on Twitter or Facebook, look over your analytic beforehand to decide what the best time is to hold the conversation.

Last year Paper.li, an online content curation service, sponsored a live Twitter chat to promote awareness for bloggers, who make up the hottest area of its community. The success of the Q&A surprised even the company’s community manager, who personally heard from more than 200 people after the chat via email and on Twitter asking for help and offering their input. The chat also reached people in other countries, a bonus Paper.li hadn't expected.

Include Calls to Action at the Bottom of Content 

Sometimes when you become engaged in a great piece of content, whether it’s a whitepaper, a blog post or a podcast, you’ll forget how you stumbled upon it and your true purpose for looking into the subject. Don’t let that happen to your potential customers. While you don’t need to hammer them over and over with sales pitches, you do need to gently remind them as they reach the end of their time with your content that there’s something they need to do. That may mean registering for something, buying a product or filling out a form.

Whatever it is, make sure your call to action is clear and concise so that you don’t lose your fish from the hook. On the blog for Writers Relief, an author submission service, posts end with reminders that the site can help make writing dreams come true and a link to their submission page, a succinct but effective call to action.

Ask Questions at the End of Blog Posts to Increase Comments

This sounds like an obvious way to increase engagement, but a surprising number of sites do not try to interact with their readers this way. They’re missing out on a huge opportunity. Once you've finished discussing the topic at hand, ask your readers what they think. Many blogs put a daily question at the bottom of a blog post in bold, training readers to look for these queries and answer them, thereby increasing engagement.

Don’t just get people to comment, though. Interact with them in the comments section and see how you can further engage them. For instance, the Gawker network of web sites have perfected this approach. Writers interact with readers, exchanging ideas — okay, and often insults — in such a way that the comments sections themselves have become must-reads.

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Inbound marketing focuses on leads instead of searching for customers

Inbound marketing focuses on leads instead of searching for customers

   May 21, 2014       prabhakardalvi

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Inbound marketing focuses on being found by potential leads instead of searching for customers.

Traditional marketing methods such as paid TV ads, direct mailings, cold calling and trade shows are costly. Inbound Marketing is not only effective and less expensive but the results are better tracked.

1. Search Engine Optimization

The primary way that inbound marketing works is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  SEO is a method to get your website to rank high on search engines for specific keywords.

When a potential customer does a web search, they are actively searching for your product or service. So as a marketing firm your audience might type in “Marketing San Antonio,” if you’re website is listed on page 1 of Google, Bing or Yahoo search engines you’ll be likely to receive more quality leads.

Help your business get visibility online with these SEO marketing tips.

2. Content Marketing

Content marketing is creating valuable information to display on your site to increase customer interest. Often businesses will attract customers by delivering a blog or a tips area on their website that provides relevant content making  their company a trusted and helpful resource.

Ways to provide valuable content:

• Educational Ebooks
• Training  or How To Videos
• Whitepapers
• Webinars

Tip: don’t forget to provide a call to action in your content to convert sales.

3. Email and Marketing Automation

Inbound marketing should not relying just on generating business but a balance of nurturing leads and converting visitors into customers. Email and marketing automation should contain information useful to nurture the visitor’s interest and is a great opportunity to deliver sales pitches.

How to capture email addresses:

Inbound marketing focuses on leads instead of searching for customers

Since the newsletter was actively sought, it is less likely to be viewed as spam, but it is wise to set expectations and inform how often your emails will be sent to the individual.  The optin opportunities are most effective on a landing page, above the home page fold, or on sidebars of your site.

Affordable and easy optin and email automation systems include:

• Aweber.com
• ConstantContact.com
• Infusionsoft.com

These email automation systems have customizable opt-in templates and for more creative opt-ins you may need a developer to create unique opt-in forms.

4. Social Presence 

Social Media Inbound Marketing

Using sites such as Twitter and Facebook to generate interest in a product or service are great ways to use inbound marketing strategies. Provide regular content that is engaging on your social media account to attract potential clients.

Some important factors to consider:

• Who is your target audience on social channels?
• Which social channels does your audience communicate and interact in?
• What type of content is valuable?
• Tip: don’t just self promote, give your audience useful information and encourage sharing.

Learn more why your business should get social!

5. Video Marketing

Viral Video Inbound Marketing

One of the most effective ways to convey information is through videos. People often go to popular video channels such as Youtube or Vimeo to get info to solve problems or learn about a service or product. Get in front of your audience by being visible on these video channels.

Tip: Also make sure to provide a link or phone number in the video description to ensure they will find your company.  Check out these top 5 tips to make your viral video reach more!

It’s a brave new world for marketing and it’s important for businesses to stay on top of all the current trends and directions that inbound marketing are taking. By staying current and staying focused on inbound marketing, businesses can take advantage of all the new possibilities being offered with today’s technology.

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Social Signals and Their Impact on Link Building - Brickmarketing

Social Signals and Their Impact on Link Building - Brickmarketing

   May 06, 2014       prabhakardalvi

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Social Signals and Their Impact on Link Building - Shawna Wright

There is no denying that traditional link building is getting harder and harder. Earning “natural” or “editorial” links relies heavily on your content marketing and content promotion efforts. But site owners and bloggers may be more likely to link to established industry sites and authority figures than the new kid on the block, simply because they don’t want to link out to an un-trusted and untested source. In order to earn that social credibility and authority, websites need to start building their own online community of loyal fans and followers and establish themselves as a real player in their niche.

While many search marketers are on the fence as to whether social signals will completely replace traditional links, many are confident that social Social Signals and Their Impact on Link Buildingsignals will impact the value of a natural link. As Erin Everhart pointed out, “Links will always matter, but links without social signals could easily be coming under scrutiny.” The search engines are looking to reward websites that are transparent, honest, and forthcoming with their link building efforts and a link from a website with no social presence could very easily been an unnatural link. That is not the kind of link the search engines want to place a lot of value on.

Search marketer Marios Alexandrou says that “social signals, voting in particular, allow a broader set of people to weigh in on what is good content. This isn’t a new concept and was actually described back in 2009 by Mike Grehan in New Signals To Search Engines, ‘Signals from end users who previously couldn’t vote for content via links from web pages are now able to vote for content with their clicks, bookmarks, tags and ratings.’”

While it’s getting harder and harder to fake your link profile (and not get pegged for it), it’s much harder to fake true social engagement. The search engines aren’t just looking at how many followers you have, but how many followers your followers have. Are they real people with real social presences of their own? Do they share other content, have their own opinions and points of view, or do they only exist to regurgitate your brand’s information? A real social figure sharing your content, even one with a relatively small social footprint, is worth a lot more than a bot account doing all the dirty work.

The reason that Google and Bing have relied on links for so long is links were supposed to be how one website gave their stamp of approval on another. Unfortunately the spammers took link building to the extreme and just looked for any link without regards for the quality of the site they were getting that link from. The search engines have since learned that just because a website has a lot of links it doesn’t mean it provides a lot of value. By adding social signals into the mix the search engines can weed out spam sites that just care about links for links sake and reward those sites that are providing real value to their audiences.

While a tweeted link or a link from a LinkedIn group might not carry the same weight as a traditional link from an industry website or citation (and who knows, someday it might!), those social signals do add credibility to your online presence overall because they tell the search engines you are a real brand with a real personality and a real commitment to growing your overall online presence.

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