2020 has certainly been a challenging year for everyone. With several countries still in lockdown and businesses going haywire, it is time to sit down with some experts to see what they have to say about Web design leads and B2B lead generation, content, and other important aspects of marketing in times of crises. We will also be talking about strategies that can help you improve your sales, remote work arrangements, and more.
How can you improve hiring at this time of the pandemic when more people are literally being told to work at home?
According to William Tyree of ringDNA, it’s important that we don’t change what works. Businesses should focus on what has already been working and refine that so businesses are not laid by the wayside.
According to William Tyree: “We have onboarded several employees in Marketing during the COVID-19 era, and we use the same role-specific onboarding document containing product education milestones, company cultural education milestones and project deliverables they need to achieve.”
“We are very cross-departmental in terms of collaboration, so the primary difference right now is that new employees need to invite people they don’t know to Zoom meetings instead of in-person meetings.”
Managing a remote work team is also important, and there is an increased need for better data reporting and management. Tyree continues with:
“Fortunately, our own software is remote by design, making it easy for the entire team to work from anywhere on Earth. Beyond that, we have pivoted our content strategy to be especially helpful to address needs that are particularly timely.
For example, some sales managers have never managed a remote team, so we publish reports and actual original data showing what the trends are and what is working. We put a significant amount of educational resources on our blog and via our Sales Enablement Podcast with Andy Paul to give expertise to our customers in areas they may need it most.”
How important is ABM and how does this change the landscape of B2B lead generation?
In an interview, Justin McDonald form Terminus shares his insights about the rise of ABM platforms and how it is succeeding in filling the gap between consumers and businesses.
“Buyers are more educated than ever. Traditional “spray and pray” strategies to drive high lead volumes just don’t work anymore. ABM enables teams to target and engage with a company’s highest value customers, and does so in a highly-personalized manner.
An ABM platform with chat means Marketing, Sales, customer success, and any function engaging directly with customers can do so at any point in the customer lifecycle. Chat also provides lead qualification and data autonomously and connects all Marketing activities to Sales conversations from one single platform,” says McDonald.
As we have discussed elsewhere, there is a continuing need for all businesses, including those that rely on Web design leads, to adopt multiple approaches to fulfilling customer needs. ABM or account-based marketing is one of them. ABM is a powerful and strategic method of focusing on high valued accounts.
In digital marketing, there are several layers when we look at consumers and the like, and ABM allows businesses to nurture the layers that provide the highest ROI. It has actually been around since 2016, and continues to help marketing teams identify the best possible opportunities for sales, and it also helps create metrics to understand how success can be accomplished even more, especially during these trying times.
There are several key differences between ABM and B2B lead generation. With B2B lead generation, you are mainly focused on casting a wide net and pulling into your net as many people as you can to make them prospective customers. ABM is more focused on outbound marketing – to past accounts or current accounts.
So what this means is the focus is narrower, and there is more space to maneuver because you already have existing data from your current accounts, and you are also monitoring specific platforms for feedback. These channels can be LinkedIn, email and the likes. ABM is also not focused on generating more leads – that’s the job of traditional B2B lead generation. What ABM does is it utilizes cross-selling and upselling to extract more profit from your current customer base. ABM focuses on keeping your current customers too, and ensuring that they are happy with what your business has to offer.
A successful and ideal ABM program should follow these guidelines:
Your sales team and your marketing team should be focused on attracting the interest of current accounts or customers so that they can be engaged further. The goal is converting them. There should also be a long-term goal to measure the progress of the shift in the marketing tack.
The focus, again, should be on the valuable accounts and customers that you already have. Your best friend will be your data, and technology like predictive analytics. These will help you identify the accounts that will have to be targeted for upsells and cross-selling.
Your current mass of customers should also be examined, so you can find new opportunities to market your business to them.
Your teams should be able to produce lists of focused, targeted accounts so that there will be more sales and more refined marketing efforts.
There is a need to develop a lot of insight into the accounts that you have identified. We must not lose sight of the buyer journey (the individual journeys count) and it is important to deliver the right kinds of experience to each of the customers or accounts that you are engaging.
And finally, there is a need to create highly personalized messages for the accounts in questions. The volume of outbound marketing should increase significantly once the target audience has been identified.
What is the value of SEO in 2020?
Contrary to what naysayers have been saying, SEO is not dead and the Google Webmaster Central Blog has a lot to say about the best industry practices, and here are some of them. Referring to the SEO efforts of Saramin, which is based in Korea, we learn that Saramin began its SEO efforts by focusing on the Google Search Console. Five years ago, they used the various tools available on the platform to identify the problems that they had on their websites. They spent twelve months trying to fix crawling issues on their website.
One year may seem like a long time, but not if you are conditioning your website for success. According to the SEO Manager of Saramin, Moon Tae Sung, the process was relatively easy (compared perhaps to the other requirements of website upkeep and implementation), but he said that when they succeeded in fixing the majority of the bugs, that effort along resulted in a 15% increase in organic traffic. The increase in organic traffic will of course result in an increase in ROI, so Saramin continued investing in SEO because they wanted to replicate the same results, which could hopefully provide an added boost to their organic traffic. This also prompted Moon to delve further into the developer’s guide of Google Search, as well as the informative Help Center articles from Google itself. Google remains the biggest mountain to surmount when it comes to search, so it makes full sense that they went into the heart of the issues that could be holding back their success.
“I started following the SEO Guidelines more closely and implemented more changes. The goal was to make changes to the site so that Google Search would better understand it,” said Moon. The SEO Manager of Saramin also made sure that they remove unnecessary clutter in their code, and they also did so many kinds of testing using the following tools: PageSpeed Insight, AMP Test, Mobile Friendly Test, Structured Data Testing Tol, and the like. According to Moon, all of these tools and tests provided their team with important feedback and information to make critical decisions as to what they must continue to improve with their website. “”We are very happy about the traffic increase, but what’s more exciting is it also accompanied improvement in the quality of the traffic. We saw a 93% increase in the number of new sign ups and a 9% increase on the conversion. We believe this means Saramin’s optimization work was found delightful by our users,” Moon said.
How can you maximize the benefit of having video content on your website?
Video marketing should always be on your agenda if you want to strengthen your ability to tell stories – and storytelling is the number one thing right now in digital marketing. Video marketing allows you to easily capture your customers’ attention and keep them in the loop as you provide the information and insights needed so they can make the most important decision, which is to make a purchase. If you want to succeed with video marketing, it’s important that you set your goals.
What is the point of all your efforts right now? What kinds of videos are you putting out and why? The goals have to be specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant, too. Let us place extra emphasis on the need to be relevant, because relevance has to be measured in two ways: relevance within the business itself (alignment with business values) and practical relevance to your consumers. Often, businesses miss the right alignment because they are not creating content based on consumer needs. How well do you know your target audience? Can you get into their head in terms of what they need, and what solutions they are looking for, currently?
When you finally understand the needs of your customers, it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty of video publishing. Just uploading your videos is not enough. Your videos have to be crawlable, they have to have the right tags and titles, and your website also has to have its own video sitemap. Video sitemaps helps search engines find your videos and record the context of the content. Context is important for large search engines because they are continually working to de-clutter their search engine results. According to Kendall Waters of Vidyard, there is a need to optimize videos for search, and the process isn’t as different from the effort needed to optimize text content for the Web. According to Kendall, the written copy that surrounds your video and the transcript of the video play crucial roles in SEO and surfacing on Google and other search engines. One of the biggest things that you can do right now that can have an immediate impact on your video content is captioning. The relevant keywords that appear in the captioning file of your video can be picked up by Google, and this information can be used to improve the search engine’s knowledge about what your videos are really about.
The next thing that you should focus on is the video thumbnails. Apart from the eye-catching title people are going to flock to your videos when your thumbnails are healthy. What healthy means in the context of video thumbnails is:
– The thumbnails have been manually decluttered
– Focus on expressing emotions and the faces of the people in the videos
– Do not upload thumbnails that have not been edited or fixed yet
– Go for animation if you can
– Don’t forget to add your branding
– Avoid clickbait thumbnails
– Upload the highest resolution possible
And finally, don’t forget to include calls to action or CTAs to your videos. Each video should have a relevant and meaningful CTA. If you can’t make heads or tails of this then your videos are not relevant to the marketing effort that you are making right now. Just think of Coca Cola advertisements anywhere. The CTA is always “drink more Coca Cola.” The rely on simply core messaging, but they are able to do it because their videos and other content are integrated with the main branding goals.
