Psychology and sales have always gone hand in hand. Those subtle, little cues that brands use to encourage us to part with our money - we seem to fall for them time and time again.
Quite rightly, you might associate the psychological side of selling with B2C brands, but many of the same principles can be applied to the B2B conversion process.
Great copywriting is the oil that greases the cogs of your marketing machine. It keeps everything moving smoothly, swiftly and efficiently.
The higher the quality of that oil, and the more consistent you are with your application, the longer your machine will last.
But it’s not uncommon for marketers to underestimate the need for quality copy.
Marketing is multi-faceted and no two journeys will be the same.
A great copywriter will address this.
The word community can mean different things to different people.
A sense of community can be brought about by religion, place of origin or background. Or your community might depend on where and how you live.
Lots of well-known, successful brands have harnessed this sense of community, and created armies of loyal advocates who engage and interact with each other based on a set of shared experiences, interests and challenges.
Meta descriptions and alt tags. How much time should you dedicate? How long should they be? How often should you use keywords? Are they even a ranking factor?
The world of metadata can be confusing; best practice seems to change from week to week. Adding fuel to that confusion are recent updates from Hubspot, in which their portal now recommends meta descriptions are less than 150 characters.
I'm not going to preach the importance of customer retention. We all know this by now. And we all know how much easier (and cost-effective) it is to retain and nurture an existing customer than to acquire a new one.
If you've read any of Equinet's latest content, you'll understand by now that the content marketing industry is in the midst of a disruption. If B2B businesses are to thrive in this new climate, they need to stop marketing and start publishing. But this requires new strategies, new processes and in some cases, new employees.
Read the following sentence:
‘If people want to become more productive and efficient at work, they should implement the following habits into their working day.’
Let’s change one thing:
'If you want to become more productive and efficient at work, you’ll need to implement the following habits into your working day.’
Notice the difference? Which is more engaging?
Let’s rewind for a moment.
It’s 2008 and blogging is 'the thing to do' in business marketing. Helping to generate website traffic, improve SEO and promote your business, the concept slowly, yet gradually, starts to gain traction.
With little competition (at least back then), it was highly effective. Simply adding pages to your site while demonstrating a sound understanding of a subject and its keywords was enough to rank.
That was of course, before the activity evolved into what we know today. And the complexities and competition in blogging now make it far harder to rank by blogging alone.
Content marketing is evolving yet again with some of the world’s biggest brands adopting a publisher's mindset.
In the wake of content saturation, audiences are switching up their media consumption and this is something we, as marketers, must embrace rather than fear.
More importantly, this is why brands need to shift the focus from content towards 'media'.
Finding an agency that's a good fit could be the difference between your best year and your worse: the make or break project, the campaign that gets you recognised (for the right reasons or the wrong...), the money well invested, or the money wasted.
Ultimately, it will be one your most important working partnerships.
But when you're partnering with a different organisation - with new people, new values and new ideas, how to do you know if this one is the right fit?
As marketers, data analysis takes a firm seat in our weekly schedules. But so many of us are just skating across the surface of what can be achieved.
By shifting the focus from output toward outcomes, a business can maximise its performance and potential.
Your output is the avenue you take to achieve outcomes; it’s the daily activities you use to generate exposure, connect with prospects and promote your business. Your output includes your newsletters, your emails, your website, your blogs.
The flicking cursor taunts your tired mind and you find yourself doing everything and anything to avoid writing. Another pointless email, a quick snack... oh go on, one more coffee - then I'll make a start.
Hours later, you return to your blank page and question whether this blogging malarky is really worth it.
Sound familiar?
We've all been there. Whether you blog for your own business, outsource to a professional writer, or rely on your employees to come up with streams of remarkable, relevant and consistently well-written blog posts, burnout doesn't discriminate. Even the most talented and experienced writers suffer the dreaded yet inevitable 'bleurgh'.
