It goes without saying that strong, on-message branding of your company or product can have a significant positive impact on your market visibility, customer base and sales. Branding is vital to your future business success, and is just as important for small businesses as it is for bigger brand names. Many small business owners already understand that branding is essential to their business, but many do not know why, or how to create strong branding.
Categories: Branding, Marketing
The phrase “Content is king” may have turned into something of a cliché, but clichés become clichés for a reason – they speak a fundamental truth.
In the past, content marketing was a tactic deployed only by the most forward-thinking companies, who understood early on that they could set themselves apart from competitors by providing audiences with insightful, entertaining and relevant content that added value to the overall brand.
Categories: B2B Content Marketing, Blogging / Vlogging, Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, SEO, Social Media
Smart companies know that investing in their business doesn’t cost – rather, it pays.
However, when it comes to investing in good design, there is often a reluctance to find the budget – despite the huge value of professionally presenting your marketing and communication material with great design.
It is so often the case that when times get tough or when savings need to be made, it’s the creative budget that faces the first cuts.
Categories: Branding, Content Marketing, Design, Marketing
Today, non-executive directors (NEDs) are playing an increasingly important and influential role in how businesses develop and grow. Indeed, the NED’s role itself has evolved over the past few years from its historical focus on corporate governance, to a more active, advisory involvement in everything from operations to strategy – and their input can be simply priceless for a company’s growth.
An NED is able to bring an outsider’s unbiased perspective to the business, helping it focus on the most optimal path forward, rather than allowing it to be steered exclusively by executives who may have a much narrower view as to which direction it should be going in.
Categories: Benefits of Interim / NED Roles, General
Content marketing is fast becoming one of the most widely used marketing tactics in the B2B realm. Today, 88% of B2B organisations use content marketing – a practice defined by the Content Marketing Institute as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
However, despite high adoption rates, it may (or may not) surprise you to learn that, according to the B2B Content Marketing 2016 report, only 30% of B2B marketers say their organisations are effective at content marketing – down from 38% in last year’s report.
Categories: B2B Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Marketing
Last time, we discussed what a contact strategy is and why the modern business needs one.
We concluded that a contact strategy is a plan for delivering personally relevant communications to the right customers at the right time on the right channel, and that businesses need such a strategy to support overarching business objectives, such as converting prospects to customers, meeting cross- and up-sell targets, lead nurturing, and customer advocacy.
Categories: Contact Strategy
A contact strategy should be at the heart of your marketing planning process. Why? Because it is your contacts themselves that are at the heart of every piece of your larger marketing and sales strategy.
No matter if you have a short spreadsheet containing just five contacts, or a huge database of 5,000 or more, you need to be thinking about how you manage and communicate with your contacts in order to marry your business goals with your sales and marketing tactics.
Categories: Contact Strategy
Long gone are the days when traditional forms of advertising – TV and radio commercials, newspaper ads, cold calls, etc. – were enough to satisfy consumers’ demands for company and product information. Today, your customers want to be engaged and even entertained as they embark upon the buyer’s journey from product discovery through to purchase – a journey that now takes place primarily online.
However, what’s engaging and entertaining for one customer may not be so for another – and that means that brands need to find ways and means to connect with their customers on an individual level.
Categories: Blogging / Vlogging, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Website
Content marketing. It’s become the marketer’s weapon of choice over the past few years. 86% of B2C organisations now use content marketing, according to the latest figures from the Content Marketing Institute, as do a massive 91% of B2B organisations.
(Image source: contentmarketinginstitute.com)
Why are so many companies committed to content marketing?
Categories: B2B Content Marketing, Blogging / Vlogging, Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Marketing, SEO, Social Media
B2B organisations have long based their marketing strategies around campaigns that cast the net far and wide in an effort to appeal to as many companies as possible in the target market. While this is often a successful approach, over the past three or four years an alternative has emerged that is proving to be the hot new kid on the B2B marketing block – account-based marketing (ABM).
Categories: Account-based marketing, B2B Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Marketing, Sales and Marketing : One Team
