Dive into the latest in B2B growth marketing, from HubSpot tips to SEO best practices and strategic planning. We share our expertise to help you turn marketing insights into business results.
If you went to the coffee shop this morning and didn’t post a picture on Instagram, did it even happen? Whether you like it or not, social media has quickly taken over our lives whether you work in social media marketing or not. Everyone now has the power to voice their opinion on any topic at any time on any social media platform, and businesses are under more scrutiny than they were a year ago.
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Publishing content continues to be one of the most popular and effective forms of lead generation in digital marketing today. Though many companies have adjusted their digital marketing plans to include content development, a lot of companies in the industrial and B2B industries are still struggling to generate leads from the content they are producing.
Earlier this year, there were 1.4 billion active Facebook users around the world. The easy access to so many users’ timelines makes Facebook the perfect place for businesses to engage with their audience. Over the past few years, businesses using Facebook have begun holding interactive promotions and contests as a way to engage with their audience, grow their customer base, and inform their customers of important events, sales, and giveaways. With so many businesses holding these promotions, how do you stand out?
Would you be willing to read something you didn’t understand? Let’s say I worked for a security company – would you read my case study about the connection between home security and insomnia? You would most likely scan the body of the text first, keeping an eye out for tone of voice, reading level, bulleted lists, and a form of media. What your audience enjoys reading is in-line with their buyer persona and what type of content they are searching for is parallel to their buyer journey.
You can’t Google “marketing strategies” without coming across at least one or two posts about the importance of the Millennial consumer. Millennials are being hailed as one of the greatest consumer and workforce powers in the world today. That’s right – the kids who grew up with the Macarena, AOL Instant Messenger, and Harry Potter are all old enough to begin making their own purchasing decisions and begin their careers. Scary, isn’t it?
“How does posting a picture of a cat in a panda costume help me sell products?” "#Halloween is coming soon - need #shoes to match my #pandacostume" The simple answer is that it doesn’t. But the intention of social media marketing is not necessarily to create leads from a single social message. The purpose of social media is to create a brand identity, generate loyal followers, and nurture current customers. Basically, when someone says your company’s name, you want the responses to be something like:
So, your marketing team has formed a buyer persona that's really thorough and specific. After delving into stats and demographic information on current buyers/leads and using their understanding of your company’s product or service, marketing has formed these fictitious customers that detail the ideal candidates for your products or services. Everything from age and job position to how these customers find answers to their problems are detailed in these personas. The marketing department has done an excellent job, and there’s no need to change or alter anything about them, right? I mean, how could we possibly get more specific information?
Defining the Buyer Persona Remember when you were a kid, and your favorite thing to do was play house, or school, or army rangers? Any kind of pretend game was fun because it allowed you and your friends to be an imagined form of a person you admired and wanted to emulate. Buyer personas are essentially the same as playing pretend, only a more “grown-up” version. HubSpot defines a buyer persona as “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers." But just how does this help your digital marketing efforts? Well, let’s play pretend!