dhtc2378f13

Why Understanding Your Unique Differentiators Is Essential When Marketing

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 02:30:45 GMT

Why Understanding Your Unique Differentiators Is Essential When Marketing

When developing your marketing strategy, your message should be concise and explain the value and brand promise that your product offers to consumers that is different from your competition.

Defining your unique product differentiator is a critical task for brand managers and marketers, and usually comes in different forms.

Before we mention these forms, it is important that they fulfil certain requirements.

Let's look at some common ways to differentiate products and brands from your competition.

Specialization in a segment: A brand can choose to focus on a particular segment in an industry and brand themselves as the specialists. A good example would be a hospital opting to brand itself as a pediatric hospital.
Differentiation through Unique Technology or Process: Businesses that invent new ways to solve problems more efficiently quickly gain an advantage because their value speaks for itself. The market is already there and growth in market share happens rather quickly. Take, for instance, a company that builds a machine that harvests olives from a tree within a minute without destroying the tree. The machine not only saves time, but also protects farmers’ trees.
Differentiation through Culture: A brand can position itself through its corporate culture with a clear target audience in mind. This is quite common in the service industry where things like how the company staff dresses, store and office layouts, brand colors, and fonts have a bearing on the clientele the company pulls.
Differentiation through Distribution: A company’s distribution strategy can be a unique differentiator. A company may decide to set up in locations where the competition has not, and yet market data shows that opportunities exist there. A company may decide to work with small shop owners to expand the reach of its products in low-density population areas instead of relying on large chain stores only.

There are many other forms of unique differentiations including location, pricing, business model, and packaging. Businesses can incorporate a blend of differentiators when developing a product for a specific target market. Perhaps the more important question is why do these unique differentiators matter in marketing? Why don’t companies simply copy one another and essentially create perfect competition?

Perceived Value

Consumer purchase decisions are complex, although theories attempt to generalize them into measurable steps. Income levels, personal taste, culture, religious beliefs, and affiliations to different social groups are just some of the things that go into purchase decisions. Unique differentiators are meant to tap into these influences to create value for consumers.

A product that is certified as green or sustainable appeals to a segment of consumers that want to spend money on environmentally conscious brands. Another product might purport to give a certain percentage of their sales revenue to a particular cause. Such a campaign, regardless of intention, sets itself apart from the competition for the duration of the campaign.

Unique Differentiators Help Move Away from Price Competition

A company with a strong set of unique differentiators faces less pressure to compete on price. In fact, if a company can continue to build new features into its product, it can continue to charge a premium. This is often the case for flagship tech-hardware products, where each year, companies announce new features that justify an upward bump in process for new iterations of products. Service companies, such as banks, tend to differentiate themselves on qualities such as reliability, security, innovation, and simplicity of their services as opposed to price.

Marketers will often prefer differentiation and non-price competition as opposed to price-based competition, which can result in shrinking of total market revenue.

Increased Company Loyalty

Successful communication of your unique differentiators can lead to a strong affinity to a brand if consumers can verify the authenticity of all claims of uniqueness. Brand loyalty correlates with a high net-promoter-score (the likelihood that someone would recommend a company, product, or a service to a friend or colleague). Unique differentiators, which are delivered consistently in a brand, can build trust and in the long run, a company will not have to spend as much as competitors on awareness marketing. Indeed, product differentiation plays a role in product recognition. The latter also bears a positive correlation with sales revenue.

Case Studies in Unique Differentiators

The value of well-thought-out and executed unique differentiators is visible though certain globally renowned brands.

Tiffany & Co.

The jewelry company is close to two centuries old, but it has been consistent in positioning itself as a high-end brand that targets only a particular segment of customers. Their prices are high, but they also back this up with unique and handmade designs. Their brand color and packaging are easily recognizable. They are a household name in popular culture, yet not everyone can afford their pieces. This creates a sense of prestige among those who can buy them or receive them as gifts.

Happy Socks

Happy Socks is a Swedish company that was able to turn an everyday, functional clothing item into a fashion accessory. The company created funky designs for their socks and the trend caught on quickly because of viral social media marketing. The company brings tens of millions of dollars in revenue selling socks mainly. Their unique offering was that they were not selling socks, but instead, a feeling of being upbeat about starting your day. They also packaged their products in ways that made socks a reasonable gift for friends or loved ones.

Lush

Lush is a UK-based cosmetics field that has managed to carve out a niche as a seller of sustainably made, handmade, and vegetarian products. Lush’s product packaging is a big part of its differentiation strategy because it makes the products easy to recognize. In addition, the packaging also captures the story of what the company is about through imagery: sustainably produced products and giving back to the community. The company runs a charity campaign called The Charity Pot, which directs money to causes such as animal welfare, conservation, and human rights. The company does well to document its CSR activities.

Apple

Apple was originally focused on one thing: allowing you to put your life in your pocket. Since then, they have managed to position themselves as the manufacturer of the best hardware in the mobile phone and computer market. The elegant design of products, visual appeal, and the reliability of its products drives brand loyalty. Apple’s operating system also differentiates its hardware from other hardware manufacturers that rely on Android for mobile devices and Windows for PCs. Apple also prices its products at higher price points than competitors to convey that their products are premium products.

Getting it Right

All these companies have taken time to meticulously decide how they want to be known. They know their audiences well and there is congruence between their marketing message and the actual product. Thinking through your unique differentiators is a complex undertaking because of the trade-offs involved. Promising the highest quality of product might mean a higher production budget. A wider distribution network might require further investment in logistics, whether in-house or outsourced.

At Gray Matter Marketing, we help clients think through their branding and marketing strategies comprehensively. If your company plans to develop and launch a new product in the market, our team can help put together a proper marketing mix, including the product features, pricing strategy, distribution, and messaging. For more information on our comprehensive marketing services, reach out to us through our website.

Happy Holidays

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 18:18:47 GMT

On behalf of the entire Gray Matter Marketing team,

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Sales & Marketing Strategies Every Company Should Be Embracing in 2023

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 13:00:02 GMT

Marketing is a dynamic field where businesses must continuously adjust to keep in touch with their audiences. Falling too far behind can easily result in the demise of a once-popular brand, as competitors move ahead.

Trends are often a result of emerging tools and technologies, but they can also arise from unforeseen circumstances such as the COVID-19 pandemic. It can be difficult for a business to effectively keep up with all these new marketing trends, but they can test most of them before deciding which are likely to deliver the highest ROI. Check out the below sales and marketing trends to watch out for in 2023.

Greater Synergy with Internal Departments

The most significant advantage to creating synergies between sales and marketing is the ability to get a clearer picture of customers. Marketing teams can research customer hobbies, interests, and demographics, which can then be shared with Sales. Sales teams can also provide vital information on their current and potential audiences to Marketing while validating the data that the marketing teams develop.

Creating clear information pipelines between these two departments (as well as others within an organization) will go a long way to grow revenue and improve internal respect and morale. This might even contribute to the difference in market share movement in 2023.

Short-Form Video Marketing

Short-form video content has taken the marketing world by storm, mainly because it resonates with today’s shorter attention spans. TikTok remained the most downloaded app on the Google App Store for the second year. Platforms, such as Twitter, have also introduced a feature akin to Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.

More brands will integrate short-form videos into their content strategies for 2023, for both B2C and B2B marketing. However, this content doesn't eliminate the need or even the power of longer videos and live-streamed content. Brands will still look to create live-streamed events because of the higher engagement levels they draw. Long-form videos deliver more profound insights into product features or other matters.

SEO Strategy

Search engine optimization (SEO) remains an essential ingredient in the marketing strategy mix. SEO is no longer just about simple-to-write content for Google Snippets. Companies are investing in experts to help them understand search insight reports. Brands should take any opportunity to optimize their content and ensure that you're titling YouTube videos, TikTok hashtags, and much more correctly.

Mobile Optimization

The fact that more than half of all web traffic today is via mobile devices is not just a mere statistic. It means that developers must build their websites and apps with a mobile-first mindset. Websites need to be responsive to offer a seamless experience regardless of the device used to browse. Businesses that are still relying on old and unresponsive websites run the risk of losing customers because of the poor experience.

Continued Use of Influencer Marketing

The use of influencer marketing is not new. However, those already investing in influencer marketing indicate they will continue doing so. In addition, there is an increased focus on working with micro-influencers. These are not A-list celebrities but typically have a community of thousands of followers with whom they highly engaged and are well-trusted.

Working with these influencers can increase the brand's visibility, awareness, and sales. Micro-influencers also sometimes focus on one or two niches, such as travel or fitness. Working with several micro-influencers is sometimes more effective than relying on one major celebrity.

User-Generated Content

An often effective but underutilized strategy is user-generated content, which can create more trust than what’s coming directly from a brand. In 2023, companies can take advantage of unboxing videos, branded hashtags, and other reviews to increase their mentions, visibility, and trust in the user community. User-generated content is also not expensive to create and helps a brand appear authentic.

Experiential Marketing

After taking a forced break because of COVID-19, brands are back to creating experiential marketing events. These events give an immersive experience to users either physically or using AR/VR gear. The great thing about such events is that they can be scaled according to a brand’s budget, meaning that even smaller companies can still create events for tens of customers. When this content is shared across social media, it is a powerful way to introduce new products, new features, or iterations of a product.

Native Ads

Native ads look and feel natural within the platform in which they are shared. On a platform such as Twitter, a native ad will appear just as any organic tweet on the user’s timeline. Native ads can be contrasted with banner ads on websites or advertisements that play before a YouTube video starts.

Users are more likely to look at native ads because they do not feel that it’s intrusive or disruptive to their experience on the platform. Due to the higher ROI, we expect that native ads will become more popular, and more dollars will be invested here over other forms of paid advertising.

Conversational Marketing

Brands will continue to make use of conversational marketing as another way to interact with customers on their websites. Traditionally, brands would use lead forms to capture information from website visitors who were interested in their products or services. With this asynchronous form of communication, possible leads could wait for days for someone from the company to call them back or send an email.

Conversation marketing leverages AI chatbots to engage customers in real time while they are still on the website. With natural language processing, it’s possible to understand what website visitors are interested in, answer their questions, and even make product recommendations. Real-time conversations are more likely to result in a conversion than back-and-forth email communication.

In 2023, more companies are set to integrate this form of customer engagement on their websites and mobile applications.

Blogs and Case Studies Will Still Be Around

Just because video content is the newest thing doesn’t mean that other forms of content will disappear. Blogging is still a great way to keep audiences engaged and develop new leads. Blogs provide a way to create keyword-optimized content to improve website discoverability through search engines. Blogging remains a sound long-term strategy to position a company as an authority in a particular space.

Case studies detail how a company’s product solved a client’s problem. They are great because they explain how the company approaches clients’ issues and customizes solutions to fit the case at hand. Decision-makers often rely on case studies when deciding whether to entrust a company with a significant assignment.

Companies can also use case studies to explain the impact of work they could be/are doing in the community as part of their social responsibility campaign. Case studies can be used to justify these continued investments and help shareholders agree with the board’s decisions on community involvement projects.

You can always repurpose blogs and case studies into easier-to-consume forms such as infographics, which can be shared across multiple platforms, with links to the longer form content to generate increased traffic.

Designing Sales and Marketing Strategies

Over the coming months, there will be dozens of sales and marketing trends. What’s important is for companies to develop a coherent strategy with tactics to actualize it. With social media, companies should pick perhaps four or five platforms to share content and engage with customers.

It’s worth noting that customers see social media platforms as stronger avenues to access customer care services. Therefore, if a company commits to using a communication platform, they should deploy enough well-trained resources to serve the customer-base efficiently.

Gray Matter Marketing is a full-service marketing, branding, and events management company. We help craft and implement marketing and sales strategies for clients and deliver messages authentically, using different avenues for communication. Reach out to us for a conversation on your sales and marketing strategy for 2023.

Five Ways Conversational Marketing Improves B2B Sales Conversions

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 13:00:09 GMT

Conversational marketing is a B2B sales cycle approach that leverages chatbots, live chat, voice, and video calls to engage with potential buyers. Most of these tools are deployed on a company’s website to reduce buyer friction, increase lead conversion, and increase the sales cycle speed.

Typically, a B2B sales cycle can take six to 12 months. The process is often drawn out because companies rely on lead capture forms, emails, and other one-way communication tools to prospect for new clients. In many cases, the drawn-out process leads to losing out on potential sales because a customer may fail to see or respond to an email or a call from a sales representative.

Friction in the Sales Cycle

Picture a potential client on a website with questions before signing up for an SaaS subscription service. Without a chatbot or live chat, they may be forced to write an email or fill out a form to request a call back from the company. This wait time may lead to losing interest in the service altogether.

Another common problem is when clients cannot find the right content to help them understand a product better. Without the proper knowledge, they may not appreciate the value of a product or even be able to ask the right questions.

It’s important to understand that filling out forms feels like work for most people, especially when they are not yet sure they want to sign up for a service or buy a product. The people charged with making purchase decisions on behalf of their companies are also human. The goal should be to make the purchase and onboarding route as smooth and natural as possible.

The Value of a Conversational Marketing Strategy

What happens when you implement a conversational marketing strategy?

Better Website Conversions

Perhaps the first thing you may realize is an increase in the conversion rate. More of the visitors to your website will become leads, and this will eventually translate into revenue. When people can find answers to their questions and the content they are looking for, they will be more open to filling in lead-capture forms or setting up calls with a sales representative.

A significant bit to remember is that people want to feel like your company is accessible. Therefore, if you set up a call with them, it should happen as quickly as possible, if not immediately.

Authentic Relationships with Clients

Conversational marketing is a great way to build strong relationships with customers. When someone is always at hand to answer questions or give recommendations, people will see your business as being responsive and friendly. B2B relationships can last long, and a handful of clients can be a strong foundation for expansion. It, therefore, makes sense to set up pipelines for continuous conversations long after the initial contract has been signed.

Freeing Up the Sales Teams

Implementing chatbots on your website means that not every query needs to be handled by a human. Using AI technology, chatbots have become so good that they can decipher and answer frequently asked questions appropriately. The sales team is only engaged when more complex questions are asked or when a lead sets up a call. This approach increases the overall productivity of your sales team.

Keeping up With Target Preferences

Millennials are now part of the decision-making teams in companies. This generation and those younger than them are less drawn to making calls, instead leveraging texting and other methods of communication. They also prefer real-time interaction as opposed to waiting a few days for mail. By implementing chatbots and live chat on your website or app, you are catering to their preferences.

One reason for the chatbots option is their 24-hour availability. In an increasingly remote-work world, both your staff and clients are likely to be scattered across multiple time zones. A chatbot on your website ensures visitors can still have their questions answered outside your official working hours. This round-the-clock availability can have a massive positive impact on revenue.

Acceleration of the Sales Cycle

Shortening the sales cycle ranks relatively high when enumerating the benefits of conversational marketing. Customers can quickly lose the sense of urgency and pain they had when they initially sought your product. By eliminating back-and-forth communication channels and using more real-time interactions, a business can reduce the time it takes to close new B2B deals. You can complete the deal quicker with real-time interaction before that urgency fades.

Setting up Conversational Marketing Strategy

Successful implementation of a conversational marketing strategy requires careful thought and choice of tools and brand voice.

Audience : First, you must define your buyer persona. You must be clear about their pain points and how your product or service eases that pain. Being clear about your value proposition determines what you talk about when selling. For instance, is your most significant selling point the price or is it a particular feature? Are you comparing your product with that of a competitor, or is yours a blue ocean strategy? All these questions determine the kind of content you will create on your website, such as the FAQ page.
Brand Voice : Your buyer persona also dictates the kind of brand voice you choose to adopt. In most cases, B2B interaction is formal. Context is also crucial because directness and formality vary depending on the industry. For instance, in the entertainment and events industries, B2B conversations are more likely to be relaxed compared to the legal services field.
The Channels : One goal of conversational marketing is to direct as many qualified leads as possible to a sales representative and put them on a track to becoming customers. This should be done early during the interaction. You should therefore pick only the best channels that will bring in high-quality leads. For instance, you should have a chat on highly trafficked web pages on your site. These are pages where customers land when they are highly interested in your products. These might include the pricing, blog, or product pages. You can have the chat experience on the campaign landing page if you are running any campaigns.
Revenue Measurement : To keep improving your conversational marketing campaign, you must keep measuring the results. The first metric to track should be the website conversion rates. These are the proportion of your website visitors that become leads by sharing their contact information on chatbot or live chat with an agent. You should also track the revenue growth from month to month to see your strategy's influence.

Features For Your Conversational Marketing Engine

Certain features are considered a must-have on your chat engine to get the most out of your conversational marketing campaign.

First, you must route chats to the right sales representative. Immediately, a prospect fills out a form that briefly describes their issue or product of interest. They should be automatically linked with the right person to converse with.

Another powerful feature is visitor deanonymization, which helps to understand who your visitors are and what they might be interested in. This allows you to sift through the visitors and only continue engaging with those likely to convert into business.

Third, chat services allow you to conduct A/B testing to see which of two greetings or responses to questions leads to better conversion rates.

It’s also paramount to think about what happens when prospects want to quickly sign up for service or have a product shipped to them. You can build the onboarding process on the platform your sales rep uses to serve customers. They should be able to share quotations with customers in real time, further shortening the sales cycle.

Implement Conversational Marketing Today

Conversational marketing is a powerful tool because it allows you to have the full attention of your audience. While the client gets to direct the conversation by asking questions they have, you have the power to curate an excellent experience for them using the right content and brand voice.

To learn more about conversational marketing and how to leverage it for your B2B revenue growth, reach out to Gray Matter Marketing. We are a full-service marketing company that helps businesses research, strategize, and implement marketing campaigns.

Grassroots Marketing: Why Is It Still Effective?

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 13:00:01 GMT

Grassroots marketing is a non-conventional method where brands target a specific niche audience to inspire them to share the Company's message organically. To conduct an effective grassroots marketing campaign, a brand must research and define what the audience wants or cares for and develop a message accordingly.

One of the most famous and successful grassroots marketing campaigns in recent years was the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, where participants would share a video of a bucket of ice being poured over them. Participants who accepted the challenge would also donate to the ALS Association. The viral challenge helped raise money while creating awareness about the ALS condition.

Running a Grassroots Marketing Campaign

The first step before starting a grassroots marketing campaign is to identify your target audience and what they care about. You can then zero in on a pain point you want to address through your movement and determine how your product can address the pain. You must also settle on the right channel to share your message.

Engaging marketing professionals to develop the message is essential, especially when addressing a sensitive topic. Many well-intentioned messages were misconstrued and ended up being a PR crisis for a brand. For instance, when supporting a social cause or sending a message of support for an ongoing conversation, it’s essential to appear genuinely authentic. Audiences are very discerning and will not hesitate to call out a brand for sending or sharing raw, tone-deaf, or insincere messages to gain publicity.

As you’re developing the strategy, you’ll need to determine how to gauge the success of the campaign. This might be based on the number of views a video has received or the number of times it has been shared. Grassroots marketing is seldom pushy or salesy. Therefore, it's hard to quantify their direct impact on sales, especially for brands that have existed for a while. For a new business, though, a viral video can directly lead to increases in sales.

Why Is Grassroot Marketing Still Relevant

In an age where people, on average, spend more than three hours a day on a smart device, grassroots marketing is an essential tool for brands to increase their visibility and endear themselves to audiences.

Grassroots marketing can offer other advantages.

Cost-Effective: Grassroots campaigns rely heavily on the audience to organically spread the message. Because the brand is not paying for visibility, more resources can be directed toward the content creation process. A prime example would be a brand hiring professional photographers and a film director to produce a short film to deliver a message in the most powerful way possible. High-quality content is more likely to have the intended impact. Such content is also more likely to enjoy longevity.
Secure Feedback: Ads on traditional media do not allow audiences to provide feedback. At least not directly to the brand. When grassroots marketing material is shared on social media, it will spark conversations around a given subject. However, the feedback can often be about the content itself and how it could have been done differently. This feedback is crucial in enriching future grassroots marketing ideas.
Targeted Messaging: Grassroots marketing is a good fit when you want to appeal to a highly defined target audience. A good example is minority college students or women trying to return to the labor market after taking a break. Narrowing in on an audience allows a brand to send a nuanced message. This increases the impact of the campaign.
Boost Brand Loyalty: Over time, grassroots marketing can help build the profile of a business while also increasing customer loyalty. Campaigns that consistently create inspiring content and define their brand values have benefited immensely from this. People start to believe in the brand and become advocates. Overall, this competitive advantage can allow a brand to charge a premium for its products.

Grassroot Marketing Ideas

Grassroots marketing allows a brand to be expressive and let people know what they are about/stands for. When brainstorming for ideas, multiple angles are more likely to lead to the right campaign.

Pull on the Heartstrings

Appealing to emotions will always be a great way to connect with an audience. Feelings are essential in purchase decisions, even though people attribute their purchases to rationale. When a message is emotionally appealing, people are likely to share it with friends, family, and even on social media.

Dove ran a successful grassroots marketing campaign on ‘Real Beauty’ that went viral because of the emotional appeal. They got a forensic sketch artist to draw sketches of women based on their descriptions of themselves. The artist then sketched the women based on other people's descriptions; in all cases, the second sketches were more beautiful than the first ones. The "you are more beautiful than you think" campaign video has more than seventy million views.

Identify Causes to Support

Another form of grassroots marketing is supporting charitable causes. However, a brand must be careful when selecting the kind of cause to get involved with. It must be a cause the brand managers genuinely believe in and are well informed about. Donating and posting about it on social media may not be enough. Certain matters call for a more surgical approach.

For instance, if a brand supports a charity that gives meals to school children in a poor community, a one-time donation may not be enough. The managers may want to educate themselves on how comprehensive the problem is and what sustainable solutions could be implemented. This takes much more work than a donation and still-pictures for optics. However, when a campaign is implemented for a year, and tangible results are seen, this creates excellent grassroots marketing content because the brand is now truly a part of the community.

On the choice of causes, careful selection is vital so that the brand does not involve itself in sensitive matters that result in a deviation from the primary business of the brand. Political matters are often a no-go zone for brands owing to the complexity of issues.

Being Active on Social Media

As a brand that wants to bank on grassroots marketing, it’s imperative to be active and develop a community of followers on social media. Interaction with your followers allows a brand to understand the different profiles of its customers. They might realize that certain new pockets of audiences are interested in a brand. These can be prime targets for a grassroots marketing campaign.

Being active on social media allows a brand to develop a persona in the eyes of the audience. This ensures they do not appear inauthentic when they comment on current issues.

Gray Matter Marketing can help you better understand your audiences and create authentic and current content for the perfect grassroots marketing campaigns. We are an end-to-end marketing company and will see your ideas from creation to implementation. Reach out to us for a consultation on your grassroots marketing needs.

Seven Digital Marketing Errors and How to Fix Them

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Sun, 13 Nov 2022 01:46:52 GMT

Digital marketing is an important but hard to master art for many businesses. It goes beyond having a website and social media handle. It’s easy to make mistakes or have your message get swallowed up by the noise from other content that is available online.

Effective digital marketing is a product of perfecting numerous skills, including research, search engine optimization (SEO), content writing and sharing, copywriting, web and graphic design, and so much more. This means there is a significant chance of making a mistake somewhere along the path.

Potential Signs

Fortunately, there are signs you can look for that might tell you that your digital marketing strategy isn’t effective enough and requires some adjustment. For instance, your marketing spend needs to result in a tangible return-on-investment (ROI). If the metrics you are tracking suggest that there isn’t a positive ROI, continuing with the current trajectory can result in a cash burn. This is often the case in start-ups that exhaust marketing budgets before achieving brand traction.

Another sign that a marketing strategy is not working is when the current messaging is attracting the wrong audience or isn’t focused enough. Everything done by the marketing team should be strategic and deliberate. Each action should be designed to elicit a clear reaction from the target audience. Trial-and-error isn’t the ideal marketing approach.

If you are leading a marketing team, here are seven mistakes that you must avoid when crafting and implementing a digital marketing campaign.

Failing to Set Goals and Track Metrics

Digital marketing must have clear goals and should be part of your overall strategy. Establishing smart (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely) goals, each with clear KPIs, should help you determine the communication channels that will be used. Each marketing campaign should have a period during which it will run. The marketing effort must also be in tune with the available budget.

The digital marketing team should break down specific tasks to be carried out during the campaign and assign responsibilities accordingly. In many cases, marketing teams hire consultants or agencies for their expertise. When outsourcing any work, the deliverables must be specified in the contract to ensure the company gets a tangible ROI. A lack of accountability often leads to paying for retainer services without any demonstrable results.

Failing to Create Buyer Personas

Every brand should understand who their buyers are and how their personas impact decision-making. In cases where a company sells multiple products under one name, it must be clear to whom each product is targeted. This is extremely important in marketing because it affects pricing decisions, communication channels, and messaging.

Buyer personas should be a product of empirical research and not developed from assumptions. You must know the profile of your target audience in terms of their interests, buying habits, incomes, hobbies, and other factors that determine how well they relate to a product. The voice of your brand should be relatable to the appropriate audience.

Bad Website Design

Your website design makes an important impression about your brand. Audiences extrapolate a clean and easy-to-navigate website to mean that your services or goods are equally impressive. Today, users expect to navigate a website as easily on a mobile device as they would on a computer, leading to the phrase ‘mobile-first development’. It means that websites should be responsive so that users get a seamless experience across any internet-enabled device.

If your existing website wasn’t designed with mobile users in mind (and you don’t have an SSL assigned to the site), you are probably hurting your digital marketing strategy. You might have great content, but it isn’t converting because users do not enjoy being on your website. Once you sort that out, ensure that the website loads fast, and users can easily navigate it. This means that your call-to-action buttons as well as navigation links are easy to find.

Poor Search Engine Optimization

SEO refers to adjusting your content, website, and other channels so that your audience can find your brand more easily in a general web search. The primary part of SEO is ensuring that pages on your website are well linked to enable search engines to crawl and index your content. Further, when developing content, you should have your target audience in mind. Keyword research is necessary so that you find out which types of information or questions your audience is asking. Your content ought to be geared towards answering these questions.

A good organic content strategy, born from proper keyword research, can lead to a steady stream of customers who see your company as an authority in a specific field. In addition, high-quality content lives a long time, and you might only need to refresh it every few years. SEO also applies to content you provide via other platforms, including YouTube and LinkedIn. Proper titling, descriptions, and inclusion of links to your other platforms are just as important as the actual content.

Too Many Strategies at Once

There is nothing wrong with having multiple objectives and strategies. However, if you do not have sufficient resources to pursue them all, you risk spreading yourself too thin. For instance, a small company with a marketing team of two people probably can't pursue a multi-pronged strategy that includes content production, social media posts, and paid advertising. The chances are that one strategy will not be pursued effectively, leading to a waste of resources. It’s better to focus resources in areas of strength and then spread organically.

One way to combat this problem might be to outsource some marketing service to a consultant/agency. This way, you have a set monthly budget with clear deliverables. You can run this consistently for a pre-determined period and examine whether you achieved the intended results.

Ignoring social media

Social media is an important space today, whether you’re selling directly to end-users or to other businesses. As highlighted, your brand does not need to be visible on every platform, but it should instead go where the majority of your target audience is. Developing a brand presence on social media creates awareness for new customers but also improves affinity to the brand for existing customers.

It is essential that you have consistency and professionalism in your messaging, are posting on a regular basis, are engaging with customers, and are including your employees so they understand your strategy. It is equally important to produce quality visual content because this reflects positively on the brand. It also protects the brand from legal or reputational damage from plagiarizing the content of other creators.

Having a social media strategy is also important because customers will undoubtedly give some negative feedback or criticism on your products. The social media team should know how to respond to such feedback so that the brand doesn’t appear aloof or insensitive.

Not Nurturing Leads

Failure to understand the customer buying journey is a major reason for ineffectiveness in digital marketing. A lot of communication is aimed at increasing awareness of a brand’s existence to specific people. However, you need to invest more thought in how to use the goodwill the brand has to secure a final purchase. Brands need to recognize leads and keep in touch with them until the point of conversion (and even after if appropriate).

One common way of doing this is by collecting emails and remarketing to these people. The company can send customers educational materials about the product or service they asked about. Another way to cultivate leads is through blogs that go deeper into explaining how the company’s products solve real customer problems. Other strategies of lead nurturing include sending samples to customers or inviting leads to try out a free trial of a subscription service. All these must be decided at the onset of the marketing campaign.

Avoiding Mistakes

Understanding the ins and outs of digital marketing can be a difficult task even for experienced marketing teams. As new communication channels emerge and audience demographics change, marketing teams must adjust. Drastic changes are rarely necessary, especially when current marketing channels and strategies are delivering a good ROI. However, exploring the opportunities that lie in new channels is always important.

If your brand wants to craft and implement a robust digital marketing channel, you can reach out to the Gray Matter Marketing team. We offer customized marketing, branding, and event services. We help clients define how they want their brand to be perceived, then craft an effective strategy to achieve it. Reach out to us for our first conversation about your brand.

Tips For Developing Your 2023 Marketing Budget

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 12:30:00 GMT

As we start to wind down 2022, companies are preparing their 2023 marketing budgets. By looking at surveys from different industries, we see multiple approaches to the budgeting process. One approach is the bottom-up method where the planned activities for the year determine how much the marketing department requests as part of the company’s annual budget. The second approach is top-down, where the marketing budget is determined as a percentage of the target revenue. Other companies use a hybrid of these.

A more simplistic method is to use the previous year’s budget and adjust for inflation and expected additional costs. However, many industry experts think that using the top-down approach is the best way because it is forward-thinking and considers marketing to be an important driver of revenue.

According to Gartner, marketing spends, as a percentage of revenue targets, fell to 6.4% in 2021 following the pandemic. This shows that there was a pull-back from spending by companies whose revenues were affected in 2020. However, in 2022, the allocation seems to have increased so that marketing budgets were at 9.5% of revenue targets for the surveyed companies.

Economic Realities and Today’s Business Context

Heading into 2023, companies are faced with a different kind of reality. There are growing fears of a global recession and inflation is at an all-time high in countries once considered to be strong and stable economies. In the UK, for instance, the pound fell to a 40-year low against the dollar in September. This makes imports more expensive and real inflation is thought to be in double figures for the first time in decades.

According to several probability models, there is a 100% chance of a global recession in the next year. Companies might face a situation where employees demand higher compensation to cushion themselves against inflation. This might force companies to cut down margins on their goods and services to protect their markets and marketing budgets typically take the biggest hit (which can be a huge mistake).

Spending by Channels

Customer journeys are changing and it’s no longer viable to limit marketing communication to just a couple of channels. Currently, online channels are gobbling up 56% of marketing spend and this figure is only set to grow.

Currently, social advertising is taking up 10% of companies’ marketing budgets , a sign that new media has wrestled the power away from traditional media. Search advertising remains strong at 9.8%, despite being around longer than social advertising. These two together with digital display and video advertising seem to the most preferred paid channels for marketing campaigns.

The unpaid channels include funding search engine optimization (SEO) efforts through the creation of content and website conversions. Email marketing is still taking up 7.8% of marketing spend while messaging and organic influencing are 7.8% of marketing spend each.

Increased Ambiguity

The abundance of marketing channels might cause a company to spread its resources too thin thus compromising effectiveness. To combat this challenge, companies may prefer to work with external marketing experts to design a focused marketing strategy supported by a sound budget.

Marketing experts will be more adept at scenario planning and adjusting the budget as markets change. These experts also understand nuances such as demographic changes and how they affect spending. In many cases, this might require conducting research or relying on studies published by reliable sources. When selling in multiple markets, marketing experts help fine-tune the message to suit local audiences.

Whether you’re an in-house marketing team or are working with an external consultant, you should look at implementing best practices as you prepare your 2023 marketing budget.

Align Marketing with Company Goals

It’s imprudent to prepare a marketing budget without a strategic plan in place. The former should support the latter and marketing budgets ought to have a theme. For instance, if the company feels that it has been losing customers because of poor experiences, the marketing budget should include campaigns that show how you’re making improvements, such as onboarding, customer care, and feedback collection, improving the UI on its app or website, etc.

Drawing a clear connection between planned marketing activities and revenue will be key. If you can conduct research to find out the most accurate way to segment customers, this might lead to the discovery of gaps for which the company may need to develop new products. The marketing function can be influential in developing an agenda in all the other functional departments by unlocking insights into the customers’ needs.

Pay Attention to What is Working

Marketing can quickly drain a company’s resources if there isn’t a plan and there’s a careless and experimental approach to how dollars are spent. Companies should gather objective data on the output of each channel currently being used.

At least 60% of the marketing budget should go towards the best performing channels. Another 20% should go to emerging and promising channels with an intent to grow this spending if they result in success. Only 10% of a company’s spend should go to experimental channels no matter how popular they appear to be. This approach explains why offline channels still get 44% of all marketing spend today. It means that objective data shows they are still an effective way to connect to certain consumer segments.

Study Your Industry Keenly

Your marketing budget must be alive to the key trends in your industry. If you are the market leader, there may be a threat of new entrants in the market. In those circumstances, you need to figure out ways to assert your competitive advantage, through pricing, more efficient distribution and delivery times, or a brand awareness campaign. If you are the new entrant in the market, the goal might be to carve out a niche by identifying an underserved market and using marketing to make your audiences take notice.

Be Aware of Trends

As highlighted, 20% of your spend should go to channels that show potential for not only boosting revenue but also helping position the company strategically in the market. Creating content, both video and audio, can help achieve your positioning goals. Brands are using content to grow engagement with their target customers and spark dialog. For instance, investment companies producing educative content are driving conversations to help audiences think more critically about planning for their futures.

Podcasts have become a way for people to make informed decisions on serious matters, such as where to go for college, holiday destinations, or a choice of an event planner. It's important for a brand to study how emerging channels are influencing customers' journeys and decide whether they too should invest in them instead of just following what everyone is else is doing.

Don’t Forget Your Internal Audience

As you develop your overall marketing budget, be sure to include dollars to support the growth and operations of your marketing team. Marketing technology, training sessions, team building events, and certifications will help ensure you are keeping up with the latest trends and are prepared to quickly pivot if markets and/or audiences change.

In might also be a good idea to poll the sales department to determine if anything has been forgotten, such as launch parties, sales kits, etc., which will be important when educating the sales forces on new marketing and branding initiatives, campaigns, and messages. In-person sales is still important, especially as Covid restrictions have passed.

Return-on-Investment

To get the most out of your marketing budget, leadership needs to adopt the mindset that marketing is indeed an investment. This means availing sustained support for the marketing efforts so that sudden budget cuts do not undermine efforts. For instance, a brand awareness campaign might need to go on for more than one financial year. To quantify the return-on-investment, companies should invest in data analytics to get objective measures of the impact of marketing efforts.

All this points to the fact that marketing is a major operation that requires surgical precision from the setting of objectives, budget projections, scrutiny, approval, implementation, evaluation, and finally adjustments.

If your company is seeking a marketing partner to help craft and implement a marketing strategy and budget, reach out to the Gray Matter Marketing team. We are a full-service strategic company, handling marketing, branding, and events for our clients. We can help maximize the impact of your marketing budget through the development of a customized plan suited for your specific industry audience.

Don’t Use Social Media? The 8 Reasons Why Your Company Needs It.

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 16:47:58 GMT

It’s estimated that more than 40% of the world’s population uses at least one form of social media. That’s 3.5 billion people. This number will only continue to grow, and business owners understand the impact that social media can have on their revenue. Businesses run campaigns on social media for reasons such as new customer acquisition and brand awareness. However, to truly understand the power of social media, a deeper dive is necessary.

Today, brands can be omnipresent on all social media platforms to complement in-person meetings, conference attendance, etc. They can also direct their message to specific groups thus reducing overall spend while increasing the return-on-investment per marketing dollar.

Brands do not need to spend millions of dollars to be as recognizable as Coca-Cola. In fact, the best and most common examples of successful social media marketing are small business owners who’ve built communities that form the core of their customers. There are also cases of social media posts going viral, leading to a big break for small businesses. While not every campaign will go viral for your business, there are several reasons to start using social media for your business today.

1. Build Credibility

In today’s environment, people research brands or specific products before making their first purchase. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a hotel they intend to book or an investment account they want to open with a bank—people want to hear the experiences and opinions of other people who have interacted previously with the brand.

A social media presence can be important so that prospective customers can see your interactions with customers and success stories. Having active social media handles also gives prospective customers the assurance that they can always request support through these channels should they run into issues while using your products. Quick responses on social media tend to be taken as a reflection of your customer service quality.

2. Grow Your Audience

Producing social media content is one of the most popular ways to grow your following (both existing and prospective customers) online. The content, however, needs to be engaging, meaningful, and deliberate and should be part of a well-thought-out content strategy that is geared towards attracting a certain audience.

A following is important because these people are drawn to your brand and represent low-hanging fruit in terms of conversion into customers or ambassadors for your brand. An audience also makes it easy to introduce new products to the market. From your audience, you can draw samples to test new pricing, new packaging, blends, colors, and so on. However, to quickly grow and maintain an audience that engages with your business, you need to be consistent with content production.

3. Generate Brand Awareness

Increasing your audience online helps to make your brand more recognizable. People who already easily identify your products in physical and online stores will also identify your other campaign assets such as billboards, brochures, and posters. Familiarity matters in purchase decisions. Brand awareness is one step on the purchase decision journey and it’s on your marketing team to take new audiences from the awareness stage to the purchase stage as quickly as possible.

4. Track Social Listening

With billions of people online every day, there is a chance that your customers are talking about your brand. It’s important to be aware of such conversations and if possible, share useful information when called upon. Social media listening involves tracking mentions of your brand, and other keywords in online conversations. Social media listening tools also provide the ability to tell the general sentiment about your brand.

Such insight is important because it can inform decisions that can save your business from loss of clients. For instance, social media mentions about poor customer service can lead to retraining sessions. Complaints about the complexity of an app can lead to the redesign of the app’s user interface. Social media engagements with customers are an opportunity for the business to come out as authentic or “human” by accepting feedback and criticism and making noticeable changes.

5. Measure Marketing Efforts

All major social media platforms provide an analytics section that can help you assess the impact of your marketing efforts. You can look at organic metrics such as the number of followers gained. You can use listening tools to look at mentions of your brand name to assess whether you’re creating a buzz through your campaigns.

For organic marketing, social media companies sometimes provide an estimation of earned media value (EMV) to determine how much you would have spent to attain the reach you’ve received organically. With paid marketing on social media, you’ll always be able to see the number of impressions or reach of individual posts. They also monitor the click-through rate when your campaign is meant to redirect people to an external website.

6. Drive Though Leadership

Social media is not just a place to promote a brand’s products. Too many outright sales posts will fatigue your audience and they might lose affinity for your brand. A more organic strategy keeps them engaged. Thought leadership posts are opinion pieces created by people within your business where they share expertise on different issues. Social media is a great place to determine questions that the audience has, as well as concerns, challenges, or things you may be unaware of. Opinion pieces might address these questions and issues as well as emerging issues in an industry, market, or even a country.

Sharing opinion pieces consistently places a brand or the specific writer as a provable expert in a field. In the B2B business space, this can lead to new speaking opportunities as well as new business leads. It’s a great way for the company to stay top-of-mind in the decision-making circles in an industry.

7. Increase User-Generated Content

Producing regular, engaging social media content can be difficult for a brand. For instance, creating one or two marketing posts a week is considered as enough most times. However, conversations by your followers are a great way to get recognition from new audiences. User-generated content also includes replies to your posts, shares, and retweets. In fact, user-generated content is a far more effective marketing tool because it is ‌unbiased, whether positive or negative. Therefore, by being on social media, you create a spark for user-generated content that helps to scale the magnitude of your marketing efforts.

8. Personalize Interactions

One major difference between social media and other paid media is the fact that audiences can now share their feedback after seeing a post. This is very important for users today because it makes the brand accessible to them. More importantly though, it’s a chance for the business to personalize interaction with users. For instance, when a user asks a question, the brand can personalize answers. Personalized interactions present opportunities to create new leads for the business. For instance, based on a user’s location, prospective leads can receive invites to a company’s offices or follow-up calls to ensure their issue was solved or questions were answered.

Other Benefits of Having a Social Media Presence

When we hear the term social media, our minds will immediately think of the largest platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. However, there are opportunities to tap into other non-mainstream channels that help you focus on a particular audience. For instance, LinkedIn presents an opportunity for companies to share what life is like working at their company. This can be especially beneficial in attracting new talent. LinkedIn is also quite popular for sharing thought leadership articles on industry and HR matters.

Best Practices When Creating Social Media Strategy

Several things will help your business get the most out of social media activities. Having clear objectives is crucial so be sure to set key performance indicators to help you along the way. List down your objectives and rank them according to priority so that you allocate your resources appropriately.

Another important best practice is to be clear about who your audience is. What kind of language do they use? Your social media copy is important in ensuring you engage your audience properly. Also, make sure you develop your company’s brand voice and stay consistent with your value proposition and messaging. Without a specific voice, your messaging will be all over the place and not effective in building an audience.

Be sure to engage your employees when developing your social media presence and campaign. They can help expand the reach of your posts to their followers as well and can provide feedback on your content as they are talking to customers all the time.

Working with Experts

If your business wants to use social media effectively, working with an experienced marketing consultancy is the right place to begin. At Gray Matter Marketing , we work with clients to develop and implement an online brand strategy that’s fitted to suit their objectives. Whether you want to grow an audience or develop more affinity for your brand, we will craft a strategy for you. Reach out to us today for a consultation session .

Does Your Web Content Lead to Conversions? Six Ways to Identify Areas of Improvement

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 13:00:07 GMT

According to research by Ahrefs , more than 90% of all website content drives little to no traffic from search engines. This is quite a stark statistic given the time and money organizations put into creating and publishing content.

Some blog posts perform better than others and you can repurpose them because people are clearly interested in the topic. However, it should worry you when a big portion of your content receives no visits or drives little conversion.

There could be many reasons why web content may not deliver conversions as expected. The content’s quality may not be good enough. For instance, for highly sophisticated products, potential customers may need to understand how the product works or will solve their need. The web content should perform the role of informing and convincing potential clients. If the content is not good enough, conversions will be low.

Other potential reasons for poor performing content could be the UI/UX design of your website. Visitors should have an easy time interacting with web content no matter the device they are using. Third, poor on-page and off-page content optimization could hurt the website conversion rate. All these possible reasons mean that you need ways to continually improve the performance of the content.

What are the right questions to ask regarding your web content performance?

1. Questioning Your Goals

A major reason why some web content fails to make an impact is because the writer did not understand the purpose. Web content must always be developed with a clear goal in mind. Some content is meant to simply create awareness about a product or help educate the audience on how a product works. Naturally, the latter type of content will be more detailed. Its audience is further down the sales funnel and closer to making a purchase decision. The content should therefore have an appropriate call-to-action (CTA) to nudge the audience to make an inquiry.

When attempting to find areas of improvement, it’s important to consider why readers of your current web content may not be responding to a CTA. Have you made it easy to do so? For instance, if the CTA is to create an account and sign up for something, how fast is that process. A one-click signup process is far much more effective than a multi-step one.

You should also question whether your audience is suffering from banner blindness . This is a phenomenon where website visitors subconsciously ignore information that looks like an ad. Therefore, if all your CTAs are big buttons and banners, users might ignore them, which hurts your conversion rates. To get around this, you can switch some of the banner CTAs for anchor-text keywords. These are keywords you naturally use in the content you post. In fact, you can run an A/B test on both scenarios to determine whether indeed the audience ignores banners.

2. How Consistent Are You?

Next, you need to assess whether you have done enough to earn the audience’s trust. A higher trust index makes conversions easier. First-time visitors to your website may be unwilling to give up private information. The best way to earn trust on the web is to deliver high-quality content consistently. While setting goals, it’s important to have this in mind.

Do you have a calendar for your web content? A content calendar holds you accountable for how often you put out information. It also requires prior thinking about the type, topic, and length of content you want to put out.

3. Working with Professional Editors

Another way to identify areas of improvement is to work with a professional editor. People within your organization may have great content ideas, but they may not have the ability to write it in a way that’s attractive and effective enough for the audience. It’s ok to get some help—collaborate with a ghost writer to flesh out outlines into full-length posts. The other option would be to work with an editor to help achieve the right tone through the choice of words and writing style.

The other advantage of engaging an editing service is to help remove any errors in your web content that you may have missed juggling content writing with operational duties. There is always the temptation to hit the publish button immediately after you finish writing. However, it’s safer to let an editor review it. Minor errors on your website reflect badly on your brand. People will think that the carelessness in editing translates into the quality of goods and services the brand sells.

4. Checking for Outdated Content

Part of the reason web content may not be doing well is that it is outdated. Search engines try to give users the latest and most recent information based on their searches. Therefore, a post titled ‘The Best Budget Phones in 2018’ probably isn't as relevant as it was four years ago. It’s important to go through your web content every so often to review such content and update it for the current season. You should not just change titles, but you must be diligent enough to carry out proper research so that the content is indeed useful in today’s content. Updating past content takes a much shorter time than researching for a new post from scratch.

5. Are You Using Enough Visual Tools?

Another way to find areas to improve your content is to find opportunities to use more visual tools. These include images, charts, graphs, tables, and videos. Block content can be hard to read, especially when the content is 1,000+ words long. People have become accustomed to easy-to-snack content on social media and therefore you should emulate the same on your website.

You can use visual tools within a post or use them to repurpose a well-performing piece of content. For instance, a blog post can be summarized using an infographic and shared on social media with a link back to your website. You could do a two-minute video summarizing a blog post and use it to drive traffic to your posts. More visual tools on your content will increase engagement of your posts and ultimately improve conversion.

6. Are you Leveraging Customers to Build Trust?

Word-of-mouth referrals from existing customers will build trust with potential clients more quickly than any form of publicity campaign. As such, it may be useful to question how well you are leveraging the trust that current customers have in your product to win more customers. Some companies do this by including quotes from satisfied customers in the web content posted on the company’s website. But it may be more effective to find ways to get existing customers to share that content with their networks. This is why some content may have CTAs such as ‘share’ to maximize reach.

Excellent Web Content Is King

High-quality content is a gift that will keep on giving. It will build your brand as an authority in the sphere within which you publish. It can also win new leads and open opportunities such as speaking or writing engagements. A company that suffers from a high number of non-performing posts should look to find out the underlying reason.

With more than one million blog posts being published on the web every day, only the highest quality content will have a net positive return on the time invested. If your organization needs help in crafting a web content strategy, reach out to Gray Matter Marketing . We can help craft and implement a winning web content strategy.

Marketing Beyond the Brochure: 8 Marketing Strategies for Better Engagement

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 10 Aug 2022 12:30:00 GMT

Long gone are the days when buying ads and sending out brochures and direct mail was considered just about enough for marketing departments. Brands today are actively seeking opportunities to increase their level of engagement with customers. They are designing new, innovative touchpoints to build loyalty and collect valuable information.

Customer engagement provides an opportunity to guide potential customers through the sales funnel. It accelerates the purchase process and increases the conversion rate for the business. In turn, the business gets to improve its return-on-the-marketing budget. A well-thought-out customer engagement strategy boosts the experience of the brand for existing customers and increases their loyalty to the brand.

If your company wants to grow its engagement with customers, here’s several strategies:

1. Mapping Your Customers’ Journey

It’s important to understand how your customers think when buying your products. Begin by identifying all the touchpoints between your brand and customers. How do they notice your brand? Are you doing enough to amplify the brand?

Second, establish where they get more information about the brand. Have you put out enough content on your website, social media, print, and brochures? Could you create experiences where they can interact with your product teams to ask questions? Do you respond to queries on email and social media?

The third stage in the sales funnel is consideration. At this point, you need to ask whether you are helping customers along the decision-making journey. Is your website user friendly? Can customers book a demo? Is your pricing strategy correct?

After customers have made the purchase, you need to interact with them to find out their experience, keep them as customers, and determine how to grow their lifetime value.

2. Create a Loyalty Program

Loyalty programs serve several purposes for a brand. First, they are a great way to ensure repeat business and boost customers’ loyalty. When you reward customers with loyalty points, discounts, and gifts, they will speak about your brand and refer more people to it. It’s a way to create user-generated content that’s often persuasive and effective in driving behavior of prospective customers.

3. Artificial Intelligence Chatbots

Chatbots are a way to keep engaging with customers even after office hours. Through artificial intelligence, it’s possible to monitor user activity on an app or website and pre-empt questions they may have or a chokepoint in their experience. For instance, through the chatbot, you could ask customers whether they have found what they were looking for or suggest they check out particular products. Chatbots are also great to respond to frequently asked questions. They eliminate the need for people to interact with human support, where they would normally be required to wait on call lines or for email responses.

4. Turning Customer Interactions into Conversations

Whenever a customer contacts your organization with a query, they can be raising a new issue or a recurring issue. Your support team needs a 360-view of issues, concerns, and comments that a customer is facing so they don’t feel like they are talking to different personalities. It’s a better experience for customers when they feel that the representative, they are talking to is already aware of their past issues.

Your company can implement this by turning interactions with customers into conversation threads. This way, it’s possible to retrace past interactions with customers. If there is a recurring issue, perhaps a different approach should resolve it once and for all.

You should also ask customers to participate in a survey after interactions with support team members. The company then records feedback on whether a particular customer was served well.

5. Personalizing Customer Experiences

There are numerous ways the business can personalize offers and messages they are sending or showing customers. For instance, when sending emails through an email-marketing tool, companies should include the first name of the recipient in the salutation. This makes customers feel that the company knows them. They will be more receptive to the message. The company should also set up messages to customers on special days such as the customer’s birthdays.

As a company builds up the profile of a customer, based on activity, they should use this knowledge to personalize product suggestions. Recommendation systems have gone a long way in helping businesses massively improve the way customers experience a brand.

6. Get Maximum Value Out of Analytics

Your business must get the most from the data it gathers in customer engagement. Data from customer satisfaction surveys will give insights on what the company should improve. Such information is used to improve training for customer representatives so they can serve customers better. Analytics should also be used to provide insights on how users are interacting with your website. For instance, if a certain product page is getting the most attention, perhaps the product needs to be featured more prominently on the home page. If a certain page is resulting in the most queries on the chatbots, it may require an adjustment of the content to address those queries.

7. Use Competitions

The use of competitions on social media platforms are great for creating short-term excitement and engagement for the brand. The brand should be careful not to use this as the sole-way to engage with customers. However, they are great when creating awareness about a new product or when the company wants to gain more traction and followers. Competitions can amplify a brand as people share an opportunity to win with their friends.

8. Visual Engagement Tools

Your business may consider video-engagement tools, such as co-browsing technology, that improve the quality of interaction with its customers. In this example, the customer support representative can follow visually, but securely, the browsing activities of a customer. The representative can help customers who are stuck on filling out forms or finding a product on a website.

Another tool to improve customer engagement is video chat between customers and the support team. Video chat makes the interaction more personable compared to text-based interactions.

Ways to Measure Customer Engagement

Once your business implements strategies to improve customer engagement, it should assess the success of such endeavors. The metrics applied to measure success should be relevant to the strategies deployed earlier.

Here are a few of the metrics.

Average Order Value

This is a measure of the average amount that customers spend when they make a purchase. Ideally, boosting engagement with existing customers should prompt them to spend more. If your business is running a subscription model, engagement should drive customers to upgrade their packages. If you are running an online store, you should attempt to make customers put more items in their carts. Normally, returning customers spend more than first-time customers. Engagement should focus on making clients return more frequently.

Social Media Metrics

Social media platforms provide dashboards where you can see how customers are interacting with your brands. Likes, retweets, shares, and comments are indicators of how well your content was received. On YouTube, average watch times can reveal whether a video resonated with the target audience. A combination of data from the various platforms you use will reveal what type of content you need to focus more on.

Open Rates for Newsletters and Emails

Your organization should use email marketing tools that can provide reports on how well email campaigns perform. Email marketing success metrics include open rates for emails sent and click-through rates for call-to-action button links included in such emails. Your organization can use A/B testing methods to try different subject lines and copy for your campaigns.

Purchase Frequency and Repeat Purchase Rates

Your organization should also look at how many times customers come back for more purchases in a particular period. Has the purchase frequency changed with the customer engagement efforts? You can measure the proportion of purchases that represent returning customers. A low repeat rate means the churn rate is too high. The aim should be to grow the proportion of repeat customers.

Customer Engagement Strategy Consultancy

Indeed, customer engagement is crucial in attempts to grow brand loyalty, sales revenue, and customer satisfaction. Achieving high customer engagement; however, requires a strategy that’s implemented methodically. Personalizing offerings to customers and loyalty programs will help improve the lifetime value of a customer. Competitions on social media can help create short-term hype around a product or an offer. Last, every strategy requires a method of assessing its success objectively.

If your organization is seeking to implement a strategy to enhance the customer engagement on its various communication channels, Gray Matter Marketing can help draft and implement such a strategy.

The Ultimate Guide to Incorporating Multimedia Marketing into Your Strategy

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 13:15:01 GMT

Videos can be a crucial part of your marketing strategies. In a fast-paced world where people are easily distracted, videos can present a way to capture people’s attention, condense information, and drive business in a short period of time. Including multimedia into your marketing strategy can grow your brand awareness, increase traffic to your channels, and drive sales.

If you’ve never used video marketing before, you might not know where to start. First, you should identify the various types of multimedia you can make. Your goals will then influence your choice.

Types of Multimedia

Commercials : One of the most common types of videos that businesses can make are commercials, which can be shared on paid platforms such as YouTube. They are short and have a clear call-to-action. They drive sales or create awareness. If you intend on creating commercials, the most important part of the process is developing the right copy or script that is aligned with your messaging and value proposition. In addition, you need to decide if you’ll use real employees, actors, or animated characters for your commercials.
Explainer Videos : Explainer videos tell the audience how your product solves their problems. While they are longer than commercials, explainer videos are typically less than three minutes to ensure you don’t lose the audience’s interest by getting too technical. The most important question is how the product helps the customers.
Demo Videos : Demo videos differ slightly from explainers because demos focus on how to use a product. You’ll typically make demo videos if you make technical products such as software, electrical appliances, or handy tools.
Testimonial Videos : These are videos featuring past customers vouching for the company’s product. They drive trust in a brand. They need to be real, short, and relatable.
Interviews with Industry Leaders : In some industries, making video content that features industry leaders discussing topical issues will capture the attention of their audiences. For instance, the financial services sector is undergoing major changes with the emergence of cryptocurrencies. People want to know what banking leaders think about regulations, future viability, etc.
Event Videos : If your company holds events such as conferences and roundtables, it’s a great opportunity to develop video content around that. You can create videos showing behind-the-scenes happenings, brief interviews with attendees, and sound bites from speeches.

Planning Your Video Marketing Strategy

You need to be clear on your reasons for creating videos. If the goal is simply to drive short-term sales, then commercials may be the most obvious answer. However, if the goal is to generate and nurture new leads, you may decide on a more nuanced approach. Videos can take the shape of live persons, animated characters, or tools running, or a combination of several things.

The Budget

Multimedia can get costly, especially if you are going to create content internally. If you are planning to put out high-quality videos or animations, you’ll need to invest in one or more professional cameras, lighting, microphones, software, and editing equipment. Alternatively, you may engage a professional videographer or animator to develop and/or handle the post-production work for you.

For most small business owners, though, it’s possible to shoot and edit a good-enough demo, explainer, and other short videos on a high-end smartphone.

The Video Production Process

Preproduction Work

No one wakes up and makes a great video out of the blue. At least not consistently. A successful video marketing strategy results from tens of hours of pre-production work. It starts with creative brainstorming sessions. If you have a marketing team, this may be easier because of an abundance of ideas. If you decide to do things such as interviews, educational videos, and explainers, you need to do it consistently. You need a content calendar you must abide by.

For each video idea, you need a proper storyboard that details the characters in the video, what the dialogue will be, the background music to use, and graphics. While it is not possible to script interviews word-for-word, you should know how long you want the final edit of the video to be and a general message. However, a written script is necessary for explainers or how-to videos to ensure there are no errors or omissions.

If you are hiring talent for your videos, the booking and scheduling needs to be done in advance. This will ensure there are no cost-overruns resulting from poor preparation.

Production Work

The production stage is the actual shooting of your video. As pointed out, you can purchase gear, hire videography services, or develop using your phone. Proper lighting and sound will set the correct mood for your videos, especially when you want the audience to connect with a story. If you’re not using a professional studio, be aware of your background – clean up clutter behind the speaker so the audience is only focused on what is being said. If you’re using props or showing a tool demo, have everything on hand so you have a smooth transition.

Don’t be afraid to have several “dress rehearsals” before the official shoot but you may want to capture those on video as well.

Post-production Work

The post-production work involves editing your videos and adding graphics. Hiring a professional ensures proper white balance, clarity, and color correction for your videos. Great editing is a key factor in determining how well people interact with your videos. Higher production quality is visually appealing. Having multiple angles on a video, including b-rolls, is always better than one static shot.

Video Distribution

Once your video is ready, decide where to share it and have it hosted. YouTube is the world’s largest video platform. In fact, YouTube is a search engine of sorts, where people go looking for information. Creating your own YouTube channel presents the chance to create a following of people interested in your content.

If you want a platform to host videos and embed them on other platforms, Vimeo is also a great option. Although it does not have as many users as YouTube, it offers cleaner dashboard and strong analytics.

Share on Social Platforms & Website

Social media platforms are a great avenue to share short videos or snippets of longer videos. As such, social media ties rather well with your overall video marketing strategy.

Twitter is a great platform for teasing content that’s hosted elsewhere. You can create short videos to highlight the main points of a blog post, talking points from an event, or a summary of a longer video. Twitter gives you the option of pinning such a teaser at the top of your profile to reach more people who visit your profile.

Facebook and LinkedIn are better for long-format videos and live streaming. These outlets favor videos that are uploaded on the platform as opposed to links to other platforms. Take this into consideration.

And of course, be sure to upload video content to your website where appropriate.

Analyzing Impact

It’s important to have a goal or two for each video you create and put out. This will help you analyze its success. Setting too many goals for a video will either make it too long or too shallow. A more focused approach is better for impact. Analytics tools are therefore important in determining the success of a video objectively.

For instance, for awareness, impressions are a great indicator of how far your video reached. However, if you were looking to boost sales, views and impressions alone are not enough. You’d need to find ways to measure leads received because of a video.

Engagement tracking is another important metric for your videos. If there is a link you wanted people to click, measure what percentage of unique viewers clicked on it. The watch time per viewer is another indicator of how well your videos are doing.

SEO and Timing

As you continue working on your video marketing strategy, study your target audience to see what days of the week they are most engaged on the various platforms you share content. Timing matters a lot in the success of a video. People get interested in a video that gets a lot of attention in the first few hours it’s uploaded. Sharing a video at 9 a.m., for instance, is almost always better than at 2 a.m. on a weekday when the audience is asleep.

You should also take time to create attention grabbing titles for your videos. Use hashtags that will help your audiences find videos easily. This may take time to test and learn the correct titles, meta descriptions, and tags.

Succeeding in Multimedia Marketing

Successfully incorporating multimedia into your overall marketing strategy is no mean feat. It requires significant resource investment as well as a commitment to consistency. It may take several months to realize the results. However, eventually your work will start to snowball.

If your business wants to develop a video marketing strategy and integrate it with its overall marketing strategy, contract Gray Matter Marketing . We can help craft a custom strategy for the highest ROI.

Website Building 101 for Your Business

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 04 May 2022 13:00:06 GMT

Website Building 101 for Your Business

A website is a great way to establish an online presence for your business, host your portfolio, and drive awareness and revenue growth. But building and launching a website for a small business often sounds like a complicated affair.

With the proper guidance, launching your business website doesn’t have to be as complicated as it may seem. In fact, you can go through the entire process in a few hours as long as you understand the importance of every step.

Assess Your Needs

Before beginning the website building process, it’s important to analyze what functions you need the website to perform.

For instance, a dentist’s office may want to provide a list of services they perform and their locations, while giving clients the ability to book a consultation. An architect may want a gallery to showcase their work. A freelance writer wants a blog to share some of their creative work. A person dealing with e-commerce, whose customers need to create a profile, browse goods, send messages, and transact online, will need a website that has a robust backend.

Decide on a Domain Name

One of the first things you need to do before building a website is to purchase a domain name. This is what people will type into the address bar of their browsers to connect to your website. The internet is a network of computers. Each computer has its own unique IP address. Without domain names, you would have to memorize the IP address of every website’s host computer. Domain names are easier to remember than IP addresses because they often bear some resemblance to the brand, business, or person that owns the website.

You should pick a domain name that is easy to remember, correlates to your business, and is unique. Each domain name has an extension—.com, .net, .us, etc. Most businesses use .com extensions because they are the easiest to remember. There are domain names that are preserved for certain institutions, e.g., .gov for governments, .edu for academic institutions, and .org for nonprofits.

To ensure your name is available, conduct a Domain Name Search . If your site name isn’t available, you can purchase the name, or you may need to get creative when finding an alternative. You can purchase your domain from the same company that you’re using for hosting, but you don’t have to.

Find a Hosting Solution

A web hosting service provides the computer where your website ‘lives’. If you hosted the website on your own computer, chances are that there will be times when it will be offline and developing a server can be cost-intensive. A hosting solution provider ensures the website is always live and provides enough bandwidth (computing power and storage) to handle incoming traffic and all the files that will be uploaded to the website.

Be sure to pick a reliable, high-speed provider who can offer technical support if needed. You will traditionally pay a fixed annual fee to host your site. The fee will vary depending on the space needed, the functionality, and if you’d prefer cloud vs shared hosting.

Purchase an SSL Certification

It’s advisable to purchase an SSL certificate for your website. A Secure Socker Layer (SSL) is a digital certificate that ensures there is an encrypted link between your web host and the web browsers visiting the website. It keeps your clients' and web visitors' information secure and private. Web hosting providers oftentimes include an SSL certificate as part of the hosting package or require you to pay for it separately.

Choose a Website Building Platform

A website building platform allows you to create a website without any coding language. There are a number of platforms that make website building an intuitive process, with a variety of templates that you can easily customize using drag-and-drop tools.

There are a multitude of companies who provide website building capabilities—Duda, WordPress, Square, Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, Gator, to name a few. Depending on what you need, there are tons of templates and widgets on the market to help you achieve the look you want.

Some website builders are free, while others charge to use their website building tools, but they bundle it together with a hosting service.

Plugins/Content Management Software

Plugins are software that you can add to your website to increase functionality. For instance, if you are running a Wordpress.org website, you can add a forms plugin to help you collect contact information from your visitors. You can also incorporate content management software tools, which allow you to update & publish content, index pages, change themes, and further connect your potential buyers to the sales teams.

Common Plugins

Security: protect your website from potential malicious hackers. These plugins can also detect and block visitors from posting spam content on your forms or blog comments sections.
Ecommerce: enable your website to handle sales transactions and display items correctly. Your website needs integration with online payments processors, which can be achieved by adding APIs to your website.
SEO: optimize your content for search engines. Search engine optimization refers to the process of making your content rank favorably on search engine results pages, so that your target audience finds you more easily. It affects the traffic to your website and, therefore, proper SEO is important for revenue.
Performance Optimization: helps your website load faster. They do this through caching and database optimization, thus giving your website visitors a great experience. In fact, website load time is a determinant of how your website ranks on search engines.
Backup: assists with website backup. If your website crashes, the plugins will help you restore your content. Backups are important during major upgrades in case you need to restore the previous version of your website.

Create Engaging Content

Once you have completed the above steps, you can start adding pages and content to your website. Your platform should have tools to help create, edit, and delete pages. You will need to learn a few basics about Search Engine Optimization, including internal linking so that the content on your website is effective enough in bringing traffic.

Unless you just want a static website, you will be adding content regularly to your website. You might even decide to have a blog section or regular content posting.

For more information on how to craft a marketing strategy for your business or if you need help developing content and a website that brings you business, reach out to Gray Matter Marketing.

How Can Thought Leadership Impact Your Brand?

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 11:30:03 GMT

Holding a Thought Leadership role—conveying ideas that places a person or a brand as an authority in a particular area—can be a content marketing tool that provides genuine value to readers without sounding self-promotional.

Thought leadership content can offer a new way of thinking about a subject, offer a solution to existing challenges, or answer questions that customers have about a general topic. When done consistently and in an objective manner (don’t mention your company or product names), the materials can directly impact a company’s bottom line, especially in fields where customers are keen to work with business leaders who are experts in their field.

Businesses in the B2B space should consider including thought leadership content in their overall marketing strategy. It can take the form of blog posts, white papers, research publications, podcasts, or webinars. Publishing content does not need to be too expensive and will have more longevity compared to most forms of paid marketing. As such, there is a real return on the time investment.

To understand the ROI, let’s consider how thought leadership can impact the bottom line:

Increasing Visibility

When you publish content, it can increase your brand visibility even when the content isn’t promotional. If the content offers real value to the audience, they will be curious to find out what the business does, increasing the chances of getting new leads. The content can be produced in different formats and shared across multiple channels.

It’s hard to predict the impact of great content but key decision makers in companies read up on their industries and they are naturally drawn to work with people with expertise and keen insights. It can get business leaders speaking engagements and even the opportunity to sit on boards of other companies. All this increases brand visibility. In fact, sometimes businesses have been invited to submit bids to projects due to publishing thought leadership content.

Earning Trust

Publishing well-researched content consistently helps build a business’s credibility in the eyes of potential customers. When a leader explores and writes about recent developments in a field, it shows they are genuinely committed and well-informed about the trends, challenges, and solutions around them. Part of thought leadership content answers questions customers may have in a non-advertising fashion. By doing so, thought leadership content can influence behavior and earn trust that translates into revenue.

Thought leadership content is also a great way to continue interacting with existing customers. It’s a chance for business leaders to explain to customers how the company intends to keep up with industry challenges and developments and to serve customers better.

Shortening the Sales Cycles

Businesses can shorten the time it takes to close a sale by preempting and addressing customer pain points. If a new customer challenge has recently come up, a business can place itself strategically by addressing how to handle such concerns. By demonstrating expertise and sympathy for customers’ pain, the business will have an easier time convincing customers that their products will solve their problem.

For instance, when in search of a software development partner, it will take a much shorter time to decide to work with a vendor who has a demonstrable list of published case studies about projects (with similar challenges to yours) they have undertaken in the past.

Complementing Other Content Forms

Thought leadership content should be one of several content types a company is sharing on its channels. Most companies have social media pages where they post highlights and respond to queries and comments from customers. They may also share posts regarding their corporate social responsibility work. There will obviously be promotional content. Thought leadership content adds to that variety and, in fact, can make people follow the brand.

Charging a Premium for Expertise

When a business publishes high-quality content for long enough, they can then use that to grow revenue by charging a premium. This is normally the case in industries such as executive coaching and marketing. Businesses are able to charge higher fees than competitors because they have a record of delivering high quality.

A business that wants to attract better paying clients can do this over time by positioning themselves as a genuine authority in their field. They can publish on platforms such as LinkedIn, which might later be syndicated by big publications. Over time, they will use their experience and exposure to earn premium retainer fees from clients.

What are the Foundational Elements of a Thought Leadership Strategy?

How does an organization get started with thought leadership content?

Understanding the Audience

Thought leadership must be guided by a deep understanding of the audience, which informs the unique point of view from which to develop the content.

The business must know the preferences, attitudes, and behaviors of their target audience. You must consider the places where the audience access content and the kind of searches they make. It’s also important to consider the format in which they want to consume information. For instance, some people enjoy delving into detailed white papers and research publications, while others prefer the findings broken down into a blog post they can read during a morning commute.

You should also consider the other content your audience is already consuming in your area of expertise. Here, you can either offer something of better quality or a unique perspective in order to stand out. If your audience is open minded, you can choose controversial topics and provide an opposing viewpoint.

Picking Your Channels

You should pick the channels where your target audiences search for information. However, you shouldn’t have too many channels and you're unable to effectively engage audiences. Being able to respond to comments, questions, and content suggestions is key to community building. A sense of community makes the audience become ambassadors of your content.

Staying the Course

It’s not realistic to expect to see the fruits of a thought leadership strategy within weeks. It takes months of posting regular content to be known as an authority in a field. Your performance metrics, therefore, should take this into consideration. If, after a few months, you still do not get any traction, you can begin to question the strategy.

Using Social Media for Visibility

Don't shy away from sharing your content repeatedly on multiple channels. Social media can be powerful for sharing video content, so organizations should repurpose written content into video format through livestream or recorded events. Live streams get more interaction and impact.

If your organization or executive leaders are thinking about venturing into thought leadership content as a marketing tool, they should follow through with it. With proper execution, it is a powerful tool to build credibility and B2B leads. The first step should be to figure out the audience’s pain points and preferred content format and then pick channels and produce content consistently. With time, you will get traction and notice the impact on your revenue.

Reach out to Gray Matter Marketing for assistance in developing the right content strategy to market your business.

Bridging The Gap Between Sales and Marketing

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 13:00:03 GMT

Building Effective Content That Gets Used

We recently completed a survey on LinkedIn to find out how often salespeople are using materials created by the marketing department. Interestingly, 25% of respondents said they don’t use (or weren’t aware of) any materials generated by the marketing team. 28% said they use materials 10 or less times each month. And only 22% said they use marketing department materials daily.

Marketing departments spend a lot of time and money developing materials to promote the company and individual products. But if the sales teams aren’t finding the materials effective or don’t know they exist, how can they engage customers better and shorten sales cycles?

Major Sources of Conflict

The disconnect between sales and marketing teams isn’t uncommon. The marketing team might blame the sales team for poor execution while the sales team might blame the marketing team for developing the wrong strategy. Such misunderstandings hurt performance. The sales team needs to see a link between marketing content and revenue in the same manner they see their efforts linked to revenue.

According to a Harvard Business Review article , the split between marketing and sales departments is much more likely to happen in bigger organizations. In smaller organizations, the marketing department is often an offshoot of the sales department and most of their tasks include helping the sales team’s core functions.

As the organization grows, the marketing department becomes more distinct, focusing on longer term goals and more corporate and internal projects. Marketing managers become brand managers, with more influence. At some point, they begin competing for budgetary allocations with other departments, including sales. This is therefore a common point of departure between sales and marketing teams.

The sales team feels they might be able to do more with a bigger budgetary allocation and without the input of the marketing team. To overcome this, each must understand the importance of the other.

The Importance of Marketing Content

Marketing content plays a critical role in the journey that customers take down the sales funnel. At the top of the funnel, content put out through websites and social media creates awareness about the brand's existence. It can create leads from interested customers, which need to be nurtured using more detailed information. This is where case studies, testimonials, and white papers can convince interested customers that a certain product will resolve their problem. Providing succinct information is critical for shortening sales cycles and closing deals.

According to a past study conducted by SiriusDecisions , 60 to 70% of content generated by B2B marketing departments goes unused. Given the amount that companies invest in marketing departments, having such a volume of unused content represents wastage. To turn this around, the sales team needs to be involved before the content gets produced. This will help them take ownership once it is ready. And marketing teams should ask customers and the sales team what is needed before putting too much effort into creating content not used.

Here are a few things to note.

Understanding the customer’s journey

The marketing department needs to know the objections that buyers have to a product. These are the challenges or questions that salespeople get asked when meeting customers. Marketing content should make it easier for salespeople to respond to these questions. If a certain process is too complex or detailed for customers to fully understand, perhaps an infographic might make it easier for salespeople to break it down. A blog post might help explain the benefits of a new product or the value propositions that come with a change in pricing structure.

Customers have different personas, each with a unique process. There should be material tailored for each of them. A common mistake that marketing content makers commit is focusing too much on product features. The focus should be on how the product solves problems. Buyer-centric information has more impact on sales compared to just listing features.

Removing communication barriers

It’s important for the leadership within any organization to be deliberate about the need for collaboration between the sales and marketing teams. Regular meetings are important to discuss the impact of marketing content on building customer awareness and helping close deals. How helpful is it? The leadership should encourage the sales team to give feedback on the content. It’s really a cultural thing, whereby feedback should not be taken to mean that the marketing team isn’t doing well. Instead, it must be seen as genuine collaboration to reach a common goal.

The marketing team should share analytics data to explain how content published on various channels is affecting the behavior of customers. For instance, a blog post may be driving more traffic to a certain product’s page. This demonstrates the value of content to the sales team.

Another suggestion would be to rotate influential people within the two departments. When leaders spend time in both the sales and marketing departments, they are likely to form much more balanced opinions. It would be wise to appoint permanent liaisons between the two departments who could invite members of the other department to come in and listen on and participate in important projects and meetings.

Making content accessible and using the right metrics

When salespeople are out in the field, they should be able to easily access and share content they feel will help achieve their objectives. They should be able to pull content straight from their CRM tool or internal servers. Organizing content using categories would make it easy to retrieve content when needed. When properly done, a salesperson can take a customer through the sales journey, sharing relevant information until the sale is closed.

Marketing content should align with the metrics the company has developed to measure the performance of salespeople. The content should make it easier to hit this metric.

Valuing analytics

A blind approach to content creation can waste resources and too much content will go unused. Marketing teams should have a way to gauge how different pieces of content are being used by the sales team.

Ask the sales team to report on how many times potential customers are interacting with different pieces of content. For example, how many calls are coming in or what types of questions are they receiving after sharing different pieces of content? Tracking these metrics reveal the best performing materials, which can then be repurposed. The not-so-well performing pieces can be reworked to better resonate with the target audience.

It's an Ongoing Struggle to Get it Right

The role of the marketing department differs depending on the industry. Some industries have short sales cycles while others have longer ones that need a lot of product education to engage and entice customers. In some cases, the sales team can easily see the impact of marketing content on user enthusiasm. However, when this is not the case, the company’s leadership has a role to bring out congruence in the goals of the two departments.

Allowing people to work across the two departments is crucial in removing narrow views within the company. Encouraging meetings between the two departments allows for feedback to flow so that neither department feels far removed from the other. The sales department must take part in content development by bringing to fore the main questions they face in the field. The marketing department needs to respond by generating easy-to-share customer-centric information.

In the end, getting the sales department to use content produced by the marketing team is a cultural issue. If the organization succeeds in building a collaborative culture, it will see a positive return.

If your organization needs help developing usable marketing content, Gray Matter Marketing can help discuss and develop something that resonates with the sales team. We will help identify your customers’ pain points and generate relevant content to address them. Reach out to us for a consultative call .

Six Benefits of Working with a Marketing Agency Partner

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 13:30:03 GMT

Business owners are busy. In between maintaining day-to-day operations and building a long-term strategy and increasing revenues, it can be hard to manage marketing efforts as well, especially when you have a small (or no) marketing team.

Marketing today’s brands can require a significant budget to gain visibility and market share. Understanding your audience, picking the right channels, and executing your message accurately can be quite tasking when handling other elements of your business. Enlisting the services of a marketing consultant or agency can help maximize your return-on-marketing investment while increasing the awareness of your brand.

There are dozens of reasons to hire an outside marketing partner, but here’s seven quick ones.

1. Best Talent for Your Project

Working with a marketing consultant or agency means that the best talent will work on your brand’s marketing strategy and can be tailored to meet your project and budget requirements. Depending on what you task them to handle, agencies can offer strategists, graphic and web designers, copywriters, and access to influencers. Your business doesn’t need to worry about sourcing and hiring these marketing experts.

An agency can appoint a lead to bring the whole project together, and to communicate with your company. This approach helps decrease costs and increase overall efficiency and marketing effectiveness since your Company doesn’t have to assemble and manage an entire internal marketing team.

2. Being in Touch with Trends

When new marketing channels emerge or existing ones change, your marketing agency can advise if they’ll be a valuable communication and marketing tool. They will also advise on channels that are still working despite a lack of hype around them. For instance, email marketing is still a powerful tool for highly personalized campaigns.

The institutional knowledge in a marketing agency cannot be ignored. There are people who’ve been in the marketing industry for years and have a pulse on trends. Their insights during interactions are hard to quantify but can be extremely useful.

Check out the 2022 Trends post we recently posted if you’d like to learn more.

3. Objective Insights from a Third-Party

Having the perspective of an outside party, with regards to your messaging or marketing strategy, can be important to counter bias from your internal teams. Internal business leaders may be too invested in a certain strategy because it was their brainchild even when evidence suggests it’s not working. A marketing agency’s decision-making will be based primarily on the evidence not on feelings.

A consultant or agency can bring a new viewpoint without the baggage, negative experiences, company politics, etc. that many internal organizations may struggle with as they develop marketing campaigns. And many agencies can offer a wide pool of knowledge and experience that further adds to the quality of decision-making.

4. Justifying the Marketing Budget

Many companies can find it hard to justify funding marketing efforts without tangible results. An agency can help craft a long-term strategy that is broken down into stages and tactical plans. As the company hits each of the short-term milestones, the Company is more likely to provide additional funds to achieve the rest.

Decision-makers want to see a clear focus on results and a determination to achieve them. With the help of a marketing agency, the long-term target remains clear despite any challenges or distractions that may occur along the way. As I’ve mentioned in the past, there are some key metrics that can be useful when justifying marketing dollars.

5. Keeps You Accountable

A marketing agency partner helps your company stay on course and follow through with your short- and long-term strategies. The agency should keep pitching new ideas, ensuring consistent customer engagement that follows your overall message and brand. This should work both ways. Your company wants to get the most out of their marketing investment and will check on the agreed deliverables from the agency, so everyone feels like you have a stake in the success of the campaign.

6. Helps You Focus on What You are Good at

A good business leader knows and focuses on their strengths. Leaders bring in expertise to help to complement the leaders’ strengths. Hiring a market agency is no different. The agency helps develop and execute marketing campaigns while the leader can work on other internal operations matters. Delegating marketing work to an agency improves overall company productivity because campaigns can be developed and launched quickly without any obstacles that may arise with juggling multiple internal projects.

Brand building can take years. It’s useful to work with a marketing agency partner who helps maintain effective and consistent communication with your target market. They help craft and cultivate a voice for your brand. It’s a journey for both the client and the team from the agency.

Tips on Building a Great Partnership with an Agency

Working with an agency helps your brand stand out because of you’ve developed and executed a great marketing plan. Professionally built websites, well produced ads, and well-thought out copy all help portray your brand in a positive light. It reflects well on the products you want to sell to target customers.

Working with an agency can improve the return-on-investment of your budget. However, you need to follow some best practices when seeking to work with an agency.

1) Clear Definition of Roles: When working with an agency, it’s critical to clearly establish the roles that both parties will be expected to play. This includes establishing clear communication lines and methods to resolve problems in case they occur. If the agency has a team working on your company’s project, it should be clear what specific tasks the people will carry out.

2) Non-Disclosures: When working with an agency, either party will become privy to the working methods of the other. This might include sensitive information such as campaigns that haven't been launched or strategies for coming years. There should be a clear stipulation of what each party is responsible for in terms of disclosures and non-disclosures. For instance, if the agency is handling a direct competitor’s project, it should be disclosed, including how to avoid a conflict of interest.

3) The Importance of a Good Fit: A long-term agency partnership is dependent on the cultural fit between the two parties. The working methods of both parties must align to avoid too much back and forth or disagreements on how to execute the plan. A great agency is focused on serving clients to their satisfaction. If you get any sense that this is not the case, your company should not hesitate to exit the relationship. However, there might be cultural differences between the two organizations which are to be expected. They shouldn’t, however, get in the way of the work to be done.

Gray Matter Marketing is an all-round marketing and events company. If you are seeking a marketing agency partner, we can help you create and execute a plan. We assist clients in branding and identity; graphics and web design; social media management; public relations; and launches. Reach out to us for a free consultation today.

Ten Marketing Metrics That Can Help Determine if Your Marketing is Working

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 13:00:10 GMT

Many companies are spending a portion of their revenue on marketing. However, this spend does not always guarantee profits or improved brand awareness. There is so much noise in markets today that marketing campaigns need to be highly targeted so that they reach the target customer on time. To ensure that you understand how well your marketing strategy is working, you’ll need to track multiple metrics. These metrics are particularly crucial if you are using a mix of organic and paid digital marketing channels.

1. Customer Acquisition Cost

This is the average amount of money a business spends to get one new customer. For instance, if the marketing expenses for the year were $100,000 and the business acquired 10,000 new customers, then the customer acquisition cost for the year was $10. These costs are a subjective metric depending on the industry. In real estate, a customer acquisition cost of $1,000 may be justifiable because the customer ends up purchasing property worth 100x more. However, if you are selling an online course that costs $10, a customer acquisition cost of $5 would not make sense.

This metric is important for potential investors in a business. It shows the potential of a business to grow through aggressive marketing campaigns. Still, it’s important to keep context in mind because sometimes you may not see immediate customer uptick.

For instance, the business may try to change consumer behavior initially and then benefit from the shift down the line. Alcoholic beverage companies experience this in emerging markets where they slowly create a culture of premium spirits consumption for the middle class. Such a campaign to change customer behavior takes several years before a mature market emerges.

2. Qualified Leads

Qualified leads refer to people who fit the business’s customer profile who are likely to be interested in your product/service and could potentially be converted into buyers. Businesses attempt to maximize the number of qualified leads because it directly impacts the overall return-on-marketing spend.

To grow the number of qualified leads, businesses should tailor their marketing campaigns for that group of clients. Once you have the qualified leads, you must further personalize engagement with them through email marketing campaigns, phone-calls, and, if possible, face-to-face meetings. Face-to-face meetings are useful in industries such as real-estate where a high cost of acquisition is justifiable.

3. Return-on-Investment (ROI)

The ROI can be calculated in several ways. First, you can calculate the aggregate for all marketing campaigns. You can also look at the return for each campaign on its own. By calculating the incremental revenue brought by a new marketing channel, then you can decide whether it was worth the investment.

This approach is important for a couple of reasons. First, it helps decide whether a certain marketing strategy or deliverables needs to be revised or not. A marketing strategy whose ROI is steadily increasing needs to be allowed enough time to reach its potential. The second reason is that it helps the decision-making team not to become too invested in a particular strategy with no justification.

4. Customer Lifetime Value

The customer lifetime value refers to the amount of revenue a business gets from one customer if the customer remains in business with the business. The easiest way to understand this would be to consider a client who opens their first bank account at 18. This might be a normal checking account to help them manage their expenses through college. However, over the next few decades, the bank has the opportunity to sell multiple products to the customer until they retire. Businesses attempt to grow the lifetime value of a customer by studying their needs and customizing products to suit those needs.

If the customer lifetime value is low, your business might need to work and build loyalty. This explains why numerous companies have rewards systems. It entices the customers to stay locked on one service.

5. Brand Awareness

Your brand should also monitor metrics that reveal how far your marketing message reaches. While awareness is not directly related to revenue, it’s often the first step in the sales funnel. You might consider conducting (or paying a third-party) a Net Promoter Score survey to determine how your brand is doing and how it’s stacking up compared to your competition.

Brand mentions monitoring tools provide a platform from where you can track in real-time whenever your brand is mentioned. In fact, you can respond directly from these platforms. One such platform is Mention.

Google Console, on the other hand, allows you to see searches for which your brand is ranking. This can help you improve your ranking by optimizing your content for popular keywords in your niche. If you are not ranking for important keywords in your niche, your organic content strategy might require adjusting. Search console is an indicator of how well your search engine optimization efforts are doing.

6. Website Traffic

This is the total number of visitors your website is getting in a particular period. Most companies monitor this monthly. Website traffic is best analyzed by comparing different periods. If your marketing budget is growing, then website traffic should also be expected to grow. If you have introduced an organic content strategy, this should be reflected in the volume of traffic you are getting.

7. Conversion Rate

Your website’s conversion rate is the proportion of people who end up buying or signing up after visiting. It’s closely related to the bounce rate because a high bounce rate means few people are staying long enough to check out your products.

If you are getting the correctly targeted traffic on your website, then the conversion rate can be improved in several ways. First, the landing page can be tweaked. The color can be switched or the call to action can be changed. Second, freebies can entice people to sign up or try a product. We see this often with trial periods for streaming or SaaS products.

8. Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is great because it lowers your average customer acquisition cost. It’s traffic that you do not pay for directly. It’s a result of the content on your website and social media channels and your overall brand recognizability.

An increase of organic traffic is a sign that your brand’s authority in your niche is growing. Customers who navigate directly to your website on their browsers already know and trust your products. Organic traffic, however, takes a longer time to generate and build. You will need consistency in putting out valuable content to the audience.

9. Time-On-Site

The time spent by visitors on your website is an indication of their level of interest in your offering. If you have multiple product pages and customers spend significantly more time on one of them, it’s perhaps a clue that it’s the most popular. You could do more to make more sales from it. However, it could also be an indication that other products perhaps need more visibility through marketing.

Time-on-site could also be taken as an indication of the quality of web copy on your website. It could also point to the quality of user experience. Sophisticated tracking tools can also give a detailed view of customer behavior while on the site. Are customers taking too long to find information? If so, the site might need an improvement to boost navigation.

10. Bounce Rate

Bounce rates refer to the proportion of visitors who land on the homepage and then leave the website immediately. Bounce rate is an indication of visitors who weren’t interested or didn’t think they could find what they were looking for.

A high bounce rate could mean that your homepage needs a re-design. It could also show that your traffic generation strategy is not attracting the right target audience.

Website Tacking Tools

Tools such as Google Analytics should help break down the sources of your web traffic, which is important for your decision making. Your web traffic source could be one of the following.

· Direct: These are people who enter your URL directly on the browsers.

· Referral: These are people who click on a link from another site and land on your website. It’s usually websites that have external links to your content.

· Organic Search: This is where people are trying to find some information using search engines. They end up clicking-through to your website.

· Social Traffic: This is traffic coming from social platforms where your business has handles such as Twitter and Facebook.

Deciding on Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Attempting to track all these KPIs might be a little bit too much, especially with a small marketing team. The KPIs to track should be a factor of your main marketing channels. If your website is the main source of revenue, you’ll need to track metrics such as conversion rates, bounce rate, and organic search rankings. If a significant portion of your marketing budget goes to paid ads, you’ll have to monitor the average cost of acquisition.

Finally, no marketing strategy remains stagnant forever. You’ll have to spend time reviewing your KPIs, introducing new ideas, and monitoring their success. It’s a continuous journey of trying to find the optimal marketing mix. If your company needs help developing or implementing a marketing strategy, contact Gray Matter Marketing . We’ll help you build the correct strategy together with a mix of metrics to analyze the success.

Nine Marketing Trends to Watch For in 2022

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 12:45:02 GMT

As the world continues to recover and adapt after the last two years of disruption, we expect major economies to grow at a faster rate. Companies will be more optimistic in their marketing spend, which is great news.

If there is anything that the last two years have revealed is that an online presence for businesses today is crucial for survival. Websites and social media accounts are no longer trendy accessories, but essential channels of communication. Virtual events are now commonplace. Once companies have identified their customers, understand their needs, and have crafted a focused communication strategy and story, they need an online marketing path to get their message out. There also needs to be a method to quantify the ROI on the digital presence investment.

Based on developments in 2021, we’ve identified nine trends in the marketing space that are likely to dominate 2022.

1. Thought Leadership

For the part, people around the world are exposed to thousands of ads and brand messages every day. Both personally and professionally, I put up my defenses when I’m searching for a product to help me solve a problem but instead am bombarded with hard-selling tactics. Even worse, when they try to pressure me to make an immediate purchase despite not delivering on the why.

As you develop your content marketing strategy, consider replacing some of your “buy-me-now” or “let me tell you what you need” messaging with materials that help a buyer truly understand a general topic or challenge and build your credibility. You don’t even have to put your company or product name on these pieces – they found them on your channel or website or received them from a salesperson. If they find enough valuable educational content (new trends, a common problem explained in a simpler way, research that compares solutions, etc.) produced by an expert or even the whole company, they will start to see you as an expert within your business or industry field.

2. Video Marketing

We will see more businesses embrace video marketing as part of their online content marketing strategies. Videos will likely be short, playing to the narrative that the audience’s concentration spans are shorter . More of these videos will be shared on social media and featured on websites. But before everyone runs out and creates a video in your office, backyard, stationery vehicle, or shop, develop a plan. Make sure your video is personable, honest, unique, and valuable to your end user. Maybe pose a survey question and have the video provide the results of that survey.

You can always welcome customer videos to tout your brand as well. User-generated content has become more prominent in marketing circles. According to the State of UGC 2021 Report , 93% of marketers say consumers trust content created by customers over messages created by brands. It’s not a surprise that brands are running campaigns and challenges to encourage user-generated content. This trend will continue over the next few years so finds ways to get your customers to sing your praises.

3. Enhanced User Experiences

We’ve been talking about augmented and virtual reality for years but if social distancing has taught us anything, these technologies will become even more important. For the sci-fi geek in me, yea!!!

Augmented reality layers things in the real-world. IKEA is perhaps the most widely known brand that has successfully implemented AR technology. Customers can virtually place furniture in their spaces and see how they would look. This has a positive effect on sales because it makes the consideration process more exciting.

With virtual reality, a person puts on VR glasses and is immersed in a virtual world where they can interact with objects. Brands can build out their own immersive experiences or worlds where clients can view or sample products remotely. This will change how consumers interact with brands and more money will move from traditional advertising and flow towards building out VR. As VR devices become more common and affordable in the next decade, we will see greater use of virtual reality to drive purchase decisions.

4. Influencer Marketing

As pointed out earlier, video popularity has led brands to reorganize their marketing budgets. Part of the reorganization has been to involve influencers to popularize brands. The influencer industry is currently valued at $15 Billion and is snowballing. Social media companies are, in fact, paying creators to make high-quality and original content that will help keep users in their ecosystem. The battle is for people’s attention, which has a direct impact on revenue.

For companies without a huge budget, look for more creative ways to engage with influencers and get on their radars. First of all, understand who is influencing your industry or space and determine if they’re the right fit for your company. Follow them on social media; regularly comment on their feeds; reach out and have coffee if that’s doable; or send promo items or ideas for videos, posts, and podcasts.

5. Voice Search

According to Google , 27% of global internet users are using voice search on their mobile devices. 25% of American homes owned a smart speaker in 2018. Brands need to optimize their content for voice searches, which are currently in long form. As more people use voice searches to find quick answers, businesses need to create content to answer these questions.

Companies also need to think of the most likely questions that customers may be asking. There are several tools available to aggregate information about relevant searches in each industry. It removes the guesswork from content creation. The marketing team should work with their sales teams for this. Have them jot down frequently asked questions or send you customer texts and emails, so you understand the lingo and language.

6. Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing refers to engagement with customers through real-time communication channels. These include live chat, voice assistants, and chatbots. In 2022, it is expected that brands will invest more in technology that supports conversational marketing.

There are multiple advantages of using conversational marketing including:

Providing a more personalized experience
Gaining more information as your buyers are shopping (this can help develop more targeted messaging and content on your website)
Converting more leads
Shortening the sales cycle by addressing questions and concerns
Providing an opportunity to recognize a need and address it quickly
Growing your sales pipeline

7. Live Streaming

There is something about live streams that make their watch time 250% higher than other forms of video content. They are engaging and people feel a connection to the speaker. Brands have a chance to authentically show themselves to their audiences. The challenge is being able to curate events that will appeal to audiences and achieve the objectives for which they are created.

Normally, the most engaging events are livestreams of product launches. These are great for products that consumers are excited about and are always looking forward to the next iteration. However, other brands have successfully held Q&A events where customers can ask questions to figureheads of an organization, which is obviously different from asking a sales representative. When executives of a company avail themselves of such events, the company appears transparent and progressive.

8. Hybrid Events

Over the last two years, many companies and global organizations have held their events virtually. People appreciated the beauty of attending work-related and entertainment events from home (in their pjs if they wanted). For some people, there might be a reluctance to go back to physical gatherings. On the other hand, there is a big urge to go back to physical events because it represents a reawakening or victory over the pandemic. And people like engaging with other people face-to-face.

The challenge for marketers is to cater to both sides through hybrid events. There is a new value opportunity that has emerged in providing live events coverage. Significant investment will be necessary to provide an immersive experience for online attendees. If an event has several sessions going on simultaneously on different stages, people want to be able to choose which one to tune into. They’ll also need proper two-way communication so they can chime in on discussions.

9. Don’t Forget Your Sales Teams

This one may be controversial. For a number of years, the majority of the trends that I’ve seen have been 100% focused on digital marketing, completely forgetting that humans need other humans to help them understand and engage with your brand. Just remember, just one bad experience can wipe out years of positive vibes of following you on LinkedIn.

Take the time at the beginning of the year to engage the sales force and ensure that they understand your digital marketing plan and have the right tools to reinforce the messaging that you’re putting out. Get regular feedback on how customers are reacting to what we’re saying and ask, “who do you know who might sing our praises”. If you never ask, you’ll never get it.

Readying your Brand for 2022

Indeed, the marketing industry is shifting fast but in very interesting ways. There has never been a more exciting team to be on. The space has been democratized and smaller brands with limited budgets have the chance to compete with brands that have millions of dollars to spend.

If your company needs help in developing a comprehensive marketing plan and deliverables for 2022, Gray Matter Marketing can help you plan and implement one. We will help you get a worthwhile return on your marketing investment.

Does Your Marketing Tell Your Brand Story? Eight Reasons It Should.

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 29 Dec 2021 13:30:02 GMT

Traditional marketing and advertising are not dead. I believe they’ll be around for a long time, but brand storytelling is becoming more important to build your reputation and grow sales revenue.

Manufacturers, small businesses, sports brands, non-profits, etc.—nearly all types of organizations have a story to tell that’s relatable to their customers, fans, and audiences. In an era where humans are more interconnected by technology, it’s crucial to engage your customers and let them be your brand influencers and ambassadors.

Here’s eight compelling reasons your marketing efforts should involve telling your brand story.

1. We use stories to think, process, and store information

Humans identify with stories better than with cold facts. We love narratives. Stories have been used to pass down traditions, laws, languages, and civilizations. People identify with the characters in a story and empathize with their struggles, growth, and resolutions. Therefore, when a brand tells its story, it becomes more relatable to their customers or audience. People want to see where the story goes next. They see themselves as being part of something big.

If the brand can tell a story of how it’s trying to make people’s lives better or solve their challenges, people will feel that their relationship with the brand is not just transactional. For instance, a money remittance service such as Western Union tells a story of its journey in connecting people with their loved ones who are thousands of miles away. The brand portrays itself as a bridge.

2. Stories stand up to scrutiny, authenticity, and transparency

By sharing a true story, the brand appears more transparent and authentic to the audience. By sharing stories of wins and losses, the story mirrors what normal people go through in their own journeys.

In addition, when someone searches for a brand online, they are likely to land on the company’s website, which lists products and services. However, if the person searching can find stories of people interacting with the brand, that is likely to give them more confidence in working with them.

3. Stories can be compelling and engaging

Through stories, brands can create excitement among its customers and align themselves with things that people genuinely care about. Stories of change and impact are very compelling. When storytelling is done correctly and consistently, positive emotions can be evoked by showing the brand in a new light, which can help maintain customer loyalty.

4. Provides context: how your brand fits into society

By telling your story consistently over time, your brand identity is created. One video may not do much. But a combination of videos, photographs, blog posts, social media posts, and media appearances come together to create an identity. Each new piece plugs into the bigger picture.

Context is important, especially on social media, where people share memes, jokes, and banter. By creating a persona, the brand can engage its audience at deeper and subliminal levels. Without a consistent persona, it’s hard to create an affinity on such channels.

5. Keeping the brand on track

Storytelling allows a company to share its values. As highlighted, stories have been used to pass down values in human history. Such things as courage, resilience, and honesty are held in high regard. Storytelling instructs future generations to uphold the things that the founders of a company felt were important. The future of the brand, therefore, should reflect those values.

For instance, if your brand is about your people and focus on your customers, share stories about dealings with customers, how you were able to overcome a bad interaction, or how your employees work together to achieve success.

6. It’s a non-intrusive form of marketing

People have an urge to avoid advertisements. It’s the reason ad-blockers exist for browsers and apps. These ads must be played or shown regularly to the target audience for them to be impactful. In contrast, people willingly read, watch, and share stories about a brand. It does not feel invasive, and there’s a chance that a brand story goes viral.

Instead of having ads around the year, brands can use stories to stay top of mind and visible to customers. For instance, big brands have budgets that stretch out the entire year and in multiple spaces. They can be involved in helping entrepreneurs in one season and sportsmen the next. They remain active and relevant throughout the year without being seen as too intrusive

7. By telling your own story, you control the narrative

It’s important for a brand to have its own narrative. A brand’s story will be told as long as it is in existence. However, taking the initiative to tell your own story means that the brand can get their messaging out on their terms. In case there are misconceptions about the brand’s origins, ownership, and mission, brand storytelling can clear these up.

When unfortunate incidents or mistakes happen, the brand should be quick to own up. A culture of transparency will protect the brand from distortion that arises from silence and passiveness.

8. It’s inexpensive

Telling a brand story is less expensive than paying for prime-time commercials. A single piece of content can be produced in many formats—a blog post, a podcast, social media post, or YouTube video. In fact, stories can be retold many times without losing authenticity.

A business can vastly reduce its cost of converting new customers and retaining existing ones through storytelling. By sharing what it intends to fulfill in the future, a business can keep customers excited about what the future holds.

Developing Your Brand Story

Telling a compelling brand story requires a great deal of introspection. A company needs to take time to figure themselves out and identify the messages that will last the test of time. These are the values that will keep them on track and create a lasting image in the eyes of customers. It goes beyond the logo and tagline. A great way to start is to identify the problems the business intends to solve through its products and the impact it will make.

In storytelling, a brand must be transparent. For this to work, there must be sincere congruence between day-to-day operations and the values that the brand says it upholds. For instance, a brand that’s all about uplifting people must treat its employees well. A brand that cares about the environment must be producing and selling sustainably.

As I’ve mentioned in past blogs, identifying the audience, together with their fears, motivations, needs, wants, and aspirations, is vital. It’s normal for a brand to communicate to several demographic groups. However, the message to each group must be packaged differently from the rest.

In storytelling, there is the temptation to spread yourself wide and focus on many areas. However, storytelling should be used to build authority in one or a few areas that your audience cares most about. For instance, a bank that is selling a mortgage product may focus on young professionals. It can decide to tell the story of how it helps such people build their future. The story is narrow, easy to understand, and compelling to the audience.

Examples of Great Brand Stories

Numerous brands are doing incredibly well with storytelling today. Google is one of them. Compared to many Fortune 500 companies, Google is relatively young but has become one of the most valuable and relevant brands in the world today. Their ads rarely have a call to action, and they have minimal branding. However, they feature people using Google’s products to solve problems. One great story was a video showing a young person’s search activity. They used Google to find a school abroad, find their way around in a foreign country, and settle comfortably there. Such stories are heart-warming and endear the brand to people.

A smaller but fast-growing luxury jewelry, shoes, and handbags brand, Dannijo, uses storytelling powerfully. Their Instagram page features videos of the two female founders in their day-to-day lives. It makes the brand easy to identify with despite selling high-end fashion items. The founders also do short videos with guests discussing different topics that are not directly related to the brand. They are conversations that their target audiences would have with their close friends. Sharing such content endears the brand to the people, more. Finally, their website’s About page shares the company’s efforts towards creating sustainable economic opportunities for women in developing areas.

Airbnb has also sharpened their image and won trust amongst customers. Staying at a stranger’s house can seem like an uncomfortable suggestion. However, by sharing stories of hosts on their website and YouTube channel, Airbnb has convinced people that hosts are normal and lovely people. Their campaign ‘ Belong Anywhere ’ has been quite successful. In fact, the community of hosts and customers have managed to raise millions of dollars for refugees in the spirit of kindness and acceptance of everyone.

Branding and Developing an Identity with Gray Matter Marketing

It’s clear that brand storytelling is a great way to build affinity for the brand amongst target customers. People often do not purchase a product, but rather the feeling they get after using or experiencing a product. This connection is paramount for brand sustainability. Storytelling makes the brand authentic and lets customers become influencers.

Stories are how people pass values down through generations. It’s how language and facts are remembered. This is not about to stop. Brands should step up and tell their story. Own their narrative lest it be told by someone else. Storytelling is limitless. Stories can be shared in any format. In the long run, everything comes together like a puzzle. The brand will have built an identity that can help it withstand crisis and competition.

If your company requires assistance in developing a brand narrative, get in touch with Gray Matter Marketing . We offer a wide range of marketing consulting services, including branding and identity. We will help you develop and execute a brand storytelling strategy to help endear your brand to its target demographic.

Small & Mighty

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 13:00:05 GMT

Eight Ways Small Marketing Teams Can Deliver Big Results

The size of a marketing team can vary depending on the organization, their viewpoint of the value of marketing, and the available marketing resources. When resources are strained, small marketing teams must come up with strategies to make a big splash with whatever they have.

There are definitely some key advantages that smaller teams have over bigger, sometimes bloated ones. First, it’s easier to organize small teams and have individual members take responsibility for their work. In a small agency, for instance, junior team members might find themselves taking charge of entire campaigns. They are able to learn and contribute more to the overall strategy and concept versus only working on one element and not seeing the big picture.

Collaboration also happens more easily in smaller organizations. The communication lines are more open. The relationships between colleagues can be much tighter since strained resources make collaboration a greater necessity. As a result, a lot of learning takes place in small teams. Smaller teams also tend to be less bogged down by bureaucracy, leading to faster execution of plans and swift decision-making in times of crisis.

With these advantages in mind, here’s eight ways that small marketing teams can get a higher return on invested efforts.

1. Ensure all team members have essential skills

Small teams must ensure they have the right skills mix to take on the various tasks they might need to complete. Each member should offer something different to avoid too much duplication of efforts. But this is a great opportunity for your team members to “wear” many hats and learn from each other.

There should be a strategist who can articulate the long-term vision of the team and the steps to take to attain the vision. This is the person, mainly the leader, who sees the skills the team needs and either decides to bring on consultants or hire/ train internally.

Other important skills, whether contracted or permanent include:

High-quality writing, editing, and proofreading is essential so that blogs, web content, email marketing copy, social media posts, etc. have the desired impact for the team.
Designers to take care of visual communication tools once a brand has been chosen. Designers should be familiar with different tools in the market so they can always pick the right one for a specific job.

The team should always be looking to upskill its members both to keep up with trends in the industry and to offer their clients the best possible value. Training will also help the team keep hold of its most important talent by giving them a chance to grow their skills in readiness for new roles within the company and elsewhere in their future.

2. Develop standard operating procedures

Small marketing teams can benefit immensely from developing standard operating procedures for different scenarios. It standardizes and eases workflow and reduces the need for too much supervision. Unexperienced persons can also be entrusted with tasks that are relatively new to them if sufficient guidance is available through written guidelines. These guidelines might include branding elements, consistent writing methods, case history templates, etc.

3. Create a content strategy based on your customers

Having a written content strategy differentiates teams that succeed in organic content campaigns and those that fail. Without a defined strategy, the team will find itself preparing random, irregular, and unfocused content that will hardly bring any results. The small marketing team might also find itself trying to do too much; thus, spreading itself too thin.

A written strategy, that is based on your customer’s attributes, challenges, and needs, focuses on what the company can realistically achieve given its limited resources. It therefore identifies those channels that have the biggest impact and focuses on them. The strategy will identify the target audience, the objectives, the kind of content to produce, the format, and the channels to share the content. The frequency of production and the team to do the work will also be identified. This removes vagueness from the entire process. It’s probably a good idea to work with the sales department on a quarterly basis to ensure that your tactics are working or if things need to be tweaked to get better results.

4. Find the right tools and automate where possible

Small marketing teams should investigate and determine if tools that can help them manage their marketing campaigns are needed (hint, most times they are). Things like project management systems, email distribution systems, social media management platforms, and customer relationship management tools can help merge marketing efforts with data available from other business functions, such as sales. When set up correctly, these tools can add productivity in several ways.

Team members should automate menial and repetitive tasks. For instance, when customers update their contact details, a CRM can automatically pick up that information from the internet and update it on the customer profile. Notifications can also be set up so that team members are prompted to act when customers take certain actions. Some solutions offer pre-installed templates that allows marketing to quickly prepare communications to send to customers. These include posters, emails, and infographics. It can save time when the team does not have to design everything from scratch.

Finding the right solution to help the team easily collaborate on projects can be useful. Version control is also made easy—the team can save an old version of a project even as they continue working on it. They can always revert to the older one. It’s quite easy to track changes on a project and see the whole team working on it until completion. I would recommend that everyone on the team understands the value of these tools and consistently uses them or it’s just another app that no one uses.

5. Execute a social media and email marketing strategy

Developing and executing a social media and email marketing strategy is one of the most cost-effective strategies. It costs very little but allows the creation of personalized marketing messages. The marketing team should develop strategies for growing followers on their various channels while creating an email list and working with the rest of the company to supplement the list (and make changes when people move). You can reuse content for both avenues but be sure to connect with the sales teams to ensure materials is resonating with your customers.

The goal of an email marketing strategy ought to be to nurture leads depending on the client's position in the sales funnel. Emails should be based on customer behavior when interacting with the brand. For instance, depending on the services they explored on your website, you can send them a free trial offer. If a free trial expired and they did not purchase, you could prompt them with a discount. If they expressed displeasure with a service in a survey, you could start a conversation based on that. Different actions should prompt automated but targeted emails. The net result is that customers will feel that the brand is constantly in touch with them despite the limited resources.

6. Take advantage of Google Analytics

Marketing teams can make use of numerous free reports, from Google Analytics, that can provide actionable insights on how to better optimize their websites. Integrating a website with Google Analytics is an easy and straightforward process but drawing insights can be a little complicated. However, if the marketing team has the right skills, they can increase the return-on-investment in their marketing efforts.

A path report from Google Analytics reveals the path that customers take before they sign up or buy a product. This will show the pages most customers land, what they search for next, and how they finally end up being converted. This information reveals what customers are most interested in. Is it the service or product description? Is it the pricing? Is it the testimonials? The marketing team should make it easier for the important information to be found. They can also tweak the information to be clearer and more convincing to grow conversion.

Analytics can also reveal bottlenecks on the website. It’s possible to see from what page most visitors exit the website. Is it the price page, the product description or sign-up form? This should be indicative that a tweak might be required.

7. Repurpose content

A great way to maximize efforts that go into organic content creation is to repurpose past well-performing content. If a particular piece did well, it can be reproduced in another format. If it was a blog post, then it can be reproduced as a podcast or webinar. The marketing team can also summarize it in an infographic or a social media post. It can also be published on other websites as a guest post. The underlying principle is that high quality content will have an impact in different formats.

8. Optimize acquisition

It’s important that the marketing team understands the most critical source of leads. This is where a big chunk of the marketing budget ought to be directed. For B2B businesses, the most important lead source could be events where executives meet. For B2C businesses, paid digital advertising may be the most important. This understanding is crucial to avoid spreading the marketing budget too thin when there are not tangible results.

Getting The Best Out of Small Marketing Teams

Smartly run small marketing teams can generate exponential returns by focusing on the strategies highlighted above. By having the right skills mix, small teams can collaborate and deliver big projects. Automating repetitive tasks allows the team members to focus on more complex and strategic level tasks. Choosing the right tools help to easily create and run campaigns without building from scratch.

The team should also have a written organic content strategy, which will involve choosing the right channels to focus on and the best types of content to produce. A content calendar is important to hold the team accountable to itself. When done consistently, an organic content strategy can help the brand build authority in its niche, generate new leads, and maintain existing customers without paying for advertising.

If your company requires assistance in developing a strategy for a small marketing team, get in touch with Gray Matter Marketing . We are a full-service marketing company helping companies birth new marketing ideas and bring them to life using traditional and new media.

Seven Signs Your Web Content Is Hurting SEO Results

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 13:45:02 GMT

Seven Signs Your Web Content Is Hurting SEO Results (And What to Do About It)

Search engine optimization (SEO) remains an important strategy for generating website traffic and converting visits into business. People still heavily rely on search engines to find the most relevant information and solutions to their problems. It’s estimated that the top three search results garner more than 50% of traffic of all search queries on Google, proving how powerful ranking is.

However, SEO should not be viewed as a mystery that only a few people hold the keys to. Practicing Google’s best practices for content marketing can lead to a positive impact on your ranking for keywords relevant for your industry. If you are not doing it right, it can result in wasted effort and time. Here are seven signs that your web content might be hurting your SEO strategy.

1. Declining Search Traffic

If you have an organic content strategy, it’s important to steadily monitor the volume of traffic coming from search engines month to month. Use Google Analytics to get a detailed breakdown of how and where traffic is coming from. Declining month-to-month traffic may be a cause for worry because of many reasons.

One reason, Google may have penalized (manual and algorithm) your site. Penalties include:

● Plagiarizing content from other websites or having thin/shallow content

● Using black-hat SEO strategies

● Poor site speed

If you’ve been penalized, you will need to investigate your web content strategy. If you are using images that require attribution, you must ensure that it’s done accurately. In your blogs, do not regurgitate generic content from other sites. Ensure that all new content adds value to your target audience.

2. Declining Rankings for Important Keywords

If you drop in ranking for important keywords, your organic traffic will also drop automatically. This could happen because a competitor is now ranking better than you. A penalty might also be the reason. You might need to refresh your content more often. Small fluctuations are to be expected but plummeting is a cause for worry. Get a monthly report so that you can compare results more objectively.

3. Poor Behavioral Metrics

Google Analytics gives a detailed breakdown of how users interact with your website. What’s the average duration of the website? How many page views do you earn per visitor? What’s the bounce rate? A high bounce rate and short average length of sessions are a sign of a poor user experience. Your web content strategy is not doing enough to earn page views and subsequent conversions.

Google pays attention to these metrics and rewards sites that have lower bounce rates and longer sessions with better ranking.

4. Too Many Poor-Quality Backlinks

You can use backlink checking tools that are available online to see how many backlinks your website or a particular webpage on your site has. You may find you have numerous backlinks but still do not rank favorably compared to your competitors. The quality of links matters. Backlinks should not appear to come from suspicious websites that have no relation to your field. This will be perceived as a black-hat strategy by search engines and could earn your website ranking penalties.

There are numerous ways to earn quality backlinks. The best way is to invest time and energy to put out valuable content for your audience. Find the top-ranking content pieces for a given keyword. Aim to put out something better. It’s not easy, but a well-done piece has the potential to go viral.

5. No Interactions with Your Web Content

Once your content is ready, what methods do you use to promote it? Most people will share links to their blogs on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms. It’s important to monitor how your audience reacts to the content. Do they share it? Do they comment on it? On the blog page, are there any comments?

A lack of interaction could be a sign that the content is not generating interest or adding value to the audience. Content that gets shared or commented is more favorable for your overall SEO strategy. To aid this, put out content in formats proven to be easier to interact with. Consider making lists, infographics, explainers, and how-to guides.

6. Low Conversion Rates

The content on your website should achieve a particular goal. This includes convincing visitors to purchase a product or sign up for a newsletter, or any other goal. You need to find out the average conversion rate in your industry so that you can gauge how your website compares. If you are garnering significant traffic numbers with no conversions, you might need to rework your content.

Content needs to tell your audience why they need a particular product. How will it ease their need? Content needs to show you as a credible authority in your field, who also understands their pain points.

7. Over-using Keywords

Search engine optimization is not the same as over-using keywords. The keywords you are targeting must be used naturally. Attempting to over-use certain words will cause your content to be redundant. Users will not find what they are looking for. The bounce rate on your website will increase because of such content, which hurts your SEO strategy in the long run.

Avoid being too promotional, especially in content meant for audiences at the top and middle of the sales funnel. If material is educational, the content must be neutral. However, you can have a call-to-action for readers to check out your services.

How can you fix a poor web content strategy?

If you realize that your web content has a negative impact on your search engine rankings, you must act quickly to save any gains you had made before. Here is a checklist of things to watch out for.

Add variety to your content: Adding variety will help attract different segments of readers to your website. How-to guides, lists, reports, explainers, and opinion pieces are examples of blog formats you can adopt. Inside your content, add things such as images, infographics, and videos to make your content more appealing. Make your content shareable. If you have a comment section on your blog, be sure to interact with people who comment.
Find guest posting opportunities: Building backlinks is a sure way of building domain authority, which aids your search rankings. Most people: however, do not have the patience to slowly grow their domain authority through quality blog writing. They end up purchasing backlinks instead, most whose quality is low. Instead of taking this risky approach, it’s possible to find authentic opportunities to earn backlinks. You can request opportunities to contribute to other websites, which is called guest posting. There are several guides available on how best to find guest posting opportunities .
Put out quality content: The average blog post takes about four hours to write. If you want to put out a great piece, you need to spend more time than the average writer. Take time to do your research, look at what other content exists around the topic, and aim to top it. Go the extra mile to make infographics to summarize your content. If you need to pair a blog with a short explainer video, go ahead and do it.
Next, format your posts in a visually appealing manner. Edit out any errors. Find the most suitable titles. Write proper meta descriptions. Leave no detail uncovered. Remember, one quality post can earn you thousands of shares and links.

SEO and Conversion Tools

It’s important to make use of tools that give an indication of the health of your website. Are pages taking too long to load? This could be due to using images that are too big. Ensure that internal linking on your website is done properly. Watch out for any broken links, even to external sources, and fix them because they can also hurt you SEO. There are free and premium services such as Ahrefs that help you do keyword research, monitor rankings, and overall website health.

To improve your website’s conversion rate, use lead generation tools, such as OptinMonster to help convert visitors into leads and customers. You want to invite visitors to take a tour of your website, sign up for newsletters, watch product demos and so forth. These increase the chances of getting business.

Get Organized in Your Web Content Strategy

Your brand should have a clear content strategy with targets and metrics. As such, a content calendar is a must-have tool for your brand. This helps to include variety and regularize a content schedule. Brands that have content calendars can even do a series of blogs, webisodes, or podcasts on a particular topic. This keeps the audiences hooked, drives interactions, and the content spreads further than a single content piece.

If the organization needs a budget to fund the content strategy, they need to develop a rational way to gauge return-on-investment. As pointed out, content should be matched with proper lead generation tools.

Creating Winning Web Content is Not Easy but Doable

Creating quality web content is not easy. However, the impact of ranking among the top 10 results for a particular keyword can never be very powerful. Take time to research keywords to target, creating better content than competitors, and always refresh your content when it starts falling in search engine rankings. Take advantage of keyword research tools and Google Analytics to monitor month-to-month performance of your web content.

If your company needs assistance in crafting a winning web content strategy, get in touch with Gray Matter Marketing . We offer a full range of marketing consulting services aimed at helping businesses develop a blueprint for the best business growth results.

Are You Creating Marketing Content That Engages Your Audience?

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 13:45:04 GMT

Tips for Developing Marketing Content That Wows and Sells

Businesses that use content marketing as part of their overall marketing campaign should ensure the information that they publish is both relevant and engaging. Understanding your target audience and providing content based on what they want can give you a significant advantage over competition, especially when it helps endear your brand to clients.

More than two-thirds of businesses produce some form of content for marketing. However, not enough of them take time to understand what is needed. Developing an in-depth content strategy is crucial and should answer some important questions.

Who will interact with your content?
What problem is the content meant to solve?
What will make the content stand out?
In what format will you produce the content?
Where will the content be published?
How often will you publish?

Defining Content Marketing Goals

An important question that will form the foundation of your content marketing strategy is to know what you are aiming for with the content you produce. Remember the sales funnel (the journey your typical customer goes through before making a purchase)—awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, and purchase.

Producing diverse content should appeal to customers at different stages in the funnel. With each new piece of content, you should know where your target audience is in the funnel and should nudge them further down the funnel, ultimately leading to a purchase. Each content piece should have different metrics to evaluate their impact.

Specific goals might include setting up long-term lead generation. This happens when content is meant to help you rank well on search engines for certain keywords. Here, the goal is not to directly impact short-term revenue but to keep people trickling into your website in the long run.

If you are in a field that is new and thriving, such as remote work software support, the goal of content marketing would be to grow revenue immediately. Posts should inform clients of your services and convince them to turn their interest into actual purchases.

Other common content marketing goals might include:

Growing an email subscriber list
Identifying customers for retargeting with new products
Growing brand authority in a particular field
Building customer loyalty

Knowing What Content to Create

Many people will start off their content strategies with a blog for their website and social media outlets. Blog posts are published regularly to have an impact, and typically range from 1,000 to 2,000 words. However, there are other types of content that might interest your audience, and perhaps even have more impact compared to blog posts.

E-books, infographics, templates, webinars, and case studies are other types of content that could appeal to your audience. Client education is a common term, especially in agency circles. It refers to the process you take clients through until they decide to make a purchase. Some products particularly have a long sales cycle. Financial products, software, and cars are a few examples. Companies in these sectors need to create sufficient brand assets and communication material to support the entire sales cycle. If your goal is to educate your customer, be sure to provide information that your audience doesn’t already know, don’t just pitch your product or service.

The Different Learning Styles

The VARK model of learning styles was presented by researchers Fleming and Mills to explain sensory preferences. These styles are the way people prefer to interact or absorb information. VARK is an acronym for visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic.

Visual: would rather have information presented graphically or using symbols
Aural: would prefer to hear information
Read/write: would prefer worded or printed information
Kinesthetic: would prefer experiences, whether simulated or real-life situations

As a marketer, you might see why blog posts alone might not be sufficient for your content marketing strategy. You need to find creative ways to cater to people with different learning styles. However, here is some good news.

Sensory Preference vs Retention

Research has established that a person’s sensory style is not always related to their retention rate. A person might prefer to listen to information, but they might retain more of such information if they read it instead. The task for marketers should be to match information with the right learning style but also motivate those who may not particularly prefer that learning style.

A few tips when developing content:

1. Reduce the Cognitive Load of Your Content

In learning, cognitive load refers to the amount of effort required to absorb and hold information in working memory. Cognitive load might increase as the complexity of information intensifies or improve due to improper methods of teaching or presenting information. For instance, trying to introduce a new sport to people through a podcast will cause the cognitive load to be too high.

First impressions matter because they determine whether people will continue interacting with your content. After picking the right learning style for a topic you'll use to educate the audience, find a strategy that minimizes cognitive load.

Let’s say you are creating a new products page on your website. Using pictures will communicate the nature of products and spark the interest of most people. They will click on the individual products to find out more. Bulleted points would do well to highlight the salient features/benefits of the product. Embedding a YouTube explainer video on the individual product page will cater to the aural and kinesthetic learner. Finally, you could have a download link with detailed information on the specific product for the person who prefers to read the fine print.

2. Find the Shortest Path to Engagement

Picking the shortest path to engagement stems from realizing that you cannot convey all the information about a product in one instance or use one piece of content. You first need to grab their attention, then their interest, and then you’ll get a chance to close the deal. Consider the type of information your target customer consumes on a day-to-day basis. Use that information to guide your content strategy.

We see this with financial services companies that can spark interest in a product in a 30-second commercial. Clients probably won't wake up and sign up for the product immediately, but they might be interested and seek more information. The company can now share more detailed infographics and brochures with product descriptions.

3. Develop a Meaningful Call to Action

We’ve already highlighted the importance of having a clear goal for each piece of content you produce. A call-to-action should come at the end of your blog posts, podcasts, brochures, e-books, etc. Make it as convenient as possible. If you want them to navigate to a sign-up page on your site, include the link and make the sign-up process as easy as possible.

4. Use Appropriate Keywords for More Engagement

Whenever you develop a content strategy, there should be certain keywords associated with your industry, brand, product, or offer. Make sure to include them wisely across the various platforms you share content. When you do this consistently, they become ingrained in your audience’s minds. They will think of your brand whenever they come across the words, even offline. It’s a winning strategy to ensure your brand stays top of mind.

When it comes to SEO, keywords make your content easier to find through search engines. You will want to create content optimized for keywords that your target customers are looking for. This way, more traffic will flow to your website and thus more conversions.

5. Ensure Consistency Throughout Your Campaign

No matter how high the quality of your content is, it will not work unless you are consistent with it. This is the reason paid ads run constantly for weeks or months. High-quality blog posts, reports, and infographics serve as resources for your target audiences. When you put out content consistently, your audience becomes conditioned to expect it. They become more endeared to your brand because you give them value with your content. Such content will get more engagement because the audience is emotionally invested.

6. Take Time with Headlines and Intros

Whether you are publishing videos, reports, blog posts, or infographics, you need to pique the audience’s interest with a great headline, which shouldn’t give away all the information but rather draw people in to read, watch, or listen to the content till the end.

Search engines such as YouTube will suggest your content to viewers if it is doing well among viewers of a similar profile. You therefore need to think critically about the persona of your audience and the type of headline they are likely to be interested in. Popular headlines include:

Things that will make you . . .
Things you didn’t know . . .
Shocked to see . . .
Twitter reacts to . . .
See what happens next . . .

Introductions are also quite important for engagement, whether in blogs or videos. The first few seconds should hook people. A common style used in blog posts is to include an interesting statistic or ask intriguing questions in the first paragraph of a post. The same goes for videos where a snippet of the most interesting bits of the video are edited into the first few seconds to show viewers the reward that awaits them if they continue watching.

Conclusion

Producing engaging content takes a lot of thought and careful planning. Audiences will be in different stages in the sales funnel, and you will need content that caters to all of them. Marketers also need to know the kind of content that clients consume daily and use such channels to draw them in. Every marketing campaign must have an end goal and should help increase awareness, interest, or persuasion.

Again, it is important to remember that people have different learning styles although they are not mutually exclusive. Content must be presented using the most effective styles for it to effectively engage the target audience.

To help create an overall marketing campaign and marketing content strategy, contact Gray Matter Marketing for a free assessment.

Create your brand, your way. That's our speciality.

Come to us for branding and re-branding, social mapping, market identification and more. We've got what you need to make the impact you deserve.

��

Video

Nobody knows your brand better than you. We're here to put your essence into words and images that sell.

��

Nobody knows your brand better than you. We're here to put your essence into words and images that sell.

Social

��

Billboard

Nobody knows your brand better than you. We're here to put your essence into words and images that sell.

What Building Blocks Do Startups Need When Marketing Themselves?

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 12:30:02 GMT

You’ve got a great idea for a product or service. You truly believe your ware is a must-have for nearly everyone and anyone. You’ve gone through the legal hoops of setting up your business, filing paperwork, and establishing a name and tax ID number. You’re all set. Now you just need some business to come through the door. There’s one problem: not many people beyond your friends and family have heard about your company or product.

As ideas for promotions, events, collateral, etc. run through your head, it’s important to keep things simple at the beginning. Experienced marketers contend that understanding the landscape and developing messaging that includes a solid value proposition is the foundation that anchors all branding and marketing efforts.

Startups can make a crucial mistake when they fail to develop their messaging strategy before creating tactics, which can lead to inconsistent deliverables, attracting the wrong customers, and wasting valuable marketing resources.

If you’re a startup, before you publish your first social media post or ad, make sure you’ve defined who you are and have created your brand promise. Here are some tips to get you on your way.

Define Your Personality

Every startup must know why you exist. This core reason determines how you’re going to change the world, better than anyone else. You need to define your mission, core problem you intend to solve, and how you’re different from existing competitors.

For messaging, a startup must define what its story is and should highlight your key values. Determine what your personality is and what you want your customers to know. For instance, some brands are laid back while others are more relaxed and fun. Some are price driven while others are technology focused.

Once this is defined, commission the creation of a logo. It should be timeless and look good on different channels of communications including business cards, websites, etc. When I started my company, I wanted my logo to have several aspects to it that made the person looking at it find the hidden meanings. Everyone is different and this can be a subjective exercise but have fun with it and let it define who you are.

Choose the Market and Understand Your Customer

It is impossible to target everyone with a single offering. A startup must be clear on who they want to purchase their solution and what keeps their customers up at night. You need to determine the market size and understand your direct and indirect competitors. Once you have this information, you should develop a value proposition that is convincing enough to have an impact on your target market.

As a startup, you need to be clear on the metrics for success. Is it revenue, sign-ups, market share, or some other measurable? The metric must be tangible and will help you determine if the marketing strategy was successful. For instance, if the goal is sign-ups, you need to have an offer where people can try out a service for free for a short period. If the goal is market share, the marketing campaign might focus on the differences between the startup and existing competition.

An important aspect of brand definition is determining the channels of engagement with clientele. Many startups make the mistake of trying to master all social media channels because competitors are using them as well. Instead, focus on one or two channels and ensure that you have a strategy behind the frequency of posts, the timing, and the nature of messages. Visual content tends to get more attention nowadays. The target market also informs what kind of social influencers the startup might decide to work with, if any.

Build Your Brand

While the results may not be immediate, a proper and consistent brand strategy can yield results that short-term advertising cannot. First, branding improves recognition. A brand logo, its colors, fonts, tag lines, and other elements that encompass the branding and messaging process slowly become easily recognizable in the minds of people. When done correctly, these visual elements spark positive thoughts and emotions in the minds of customers, which are key in their purchasing decisions.

Consistency in brand messaging creates trust in customers. Some customers may take years to start using your products but when they eventually will start doing so in their own time. A good example would be banks. Minors may not have bank accounts but when they eventually need such services, they are likely to go for brands they started seeing years before. The same goes for such things as cars.

Startups must realize the difference between branding and advertising. While the latter is a pitch to sell a specific product, branding is more about storytelling. However, good branding makes advertising much easier because of the trust the company slowly builds with its customers. Branding also builds financial value for the company, which is crucial for startups that might want to be acquired. We have seen young companies being purchased for multiple times the value of their assets because of having a clear path regarding who they are, their core values, and their journey.

With regards to must-have deliverables for startups:

Establish a Website

While not essential at the very beginning of marketing your startup, it helps ground your marketing plan in a tangible product. It doesn’t have to be fancy or have everything on it right now. Approach your website plan in the same manner as your marketing plan. This will likely require some research:

Develop a framework for your site and determine what content you want to include
Register a domain name and determine your platform (there are free services and paid services you can design yourself, or you can partner with a web developer for an advanced customized approached)
Configure your site for search engines so people can find you

An online presence provides a physical place for people to go to learn more about your company. This will serve as an anchor for the majority of your content that you’ll include in emails, on social media, in your newsletter and more.

Send Emails

According to digitalagency.com, more than 80 percent of small businesses depend on email marketing to gain new customers. This is a relatively easy and inexpensive step and is an essential part of the foundation to attract customers for your startup that:

Reinforces brand recognition
Builds online reputation
Has a broad reach
Drives traffic to your website or online content
Leads to increased sales and revenue

Focus on: 1) your current support base; and 2) growing your email list. Start getting the word out about your company and services—with links to your website—via email to people already in your network. Ask people you trust to help you grow and share your information with their networks. Word of mouth, personal recommendations and testimonials are powerful marketing tactics to increase awareness with new customers. This not only diversifies your contacts, but by reaching out to each new person and asking for their email address, you’re also building a subscriber list.

Create a Blog

Now that you’re growing your email list, the next step is to create valuable click-worthy content to keep your followers coming back and engage new ones. Everyone is looking for a solution to a problem, a better way of doing things, information that makes life a little more interesting and/or easier. A simple place to begin is with a blog as part of your website. Write a piece on a regular basis that provides valuable information for which your customers don’t have dig. I’ll be talking more specifically about blog writing later this year. For now:

Outline goals you want to accomplish with your blog
Determine who you want to talk to and why (this is known as your target audience)
Define topic ideas
Create a content calendar for a consistent cadence of information
Blog away (and rework based on feedback)

Get the Word Out

Share your content on social media channels. According to statista 4.2 billion people globally are currently active on social media. This number is predicted to climb to about 3.4 billion monthly users by 2023. That’s a big pool from which to draw followers. Do your homework to determine the best platform for you and your business. Research shows Facebook is the number one social media channel, but it may not be best for your target audience. Make sure you know where your target audience resides.

You now have a following and people love your content. They can’t wait to read your next blog, attend your next event and are looking for the next big thing you’re going to create. You’ve hooked your audience on your idea and knowledge, bring home with a product or service announcement packaged with your valuable and interesting blogs.

Conclusion

As seen, before setting up a website, hiring an agency to do ads, or even the first social media post, a startup needs to be clear about its brand strategy. This strategy informs all marketing and messaging efforts. A brand strategy document helps to craft messages in the right tone and consistently so. The result is attraction of the right clientele, recognition, trust, and multiplication of the financial value of the startup. It’s a painful and arduous process but totally worth it for any startup.

If you need help developing your brand or deliverables once your brand has been defined, contact Gray Matter Marketing for help to move you to the next step in your startup journey.

https://digitalagencynetwork.com/top-6-email-marketing-strategies-for-startups/

https://www.statista.com/topics/1164/social-networks

What’s The Importance of Brand Awareness?

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 07:27:39 GMT

Are you tracking your brand awareness?

Marketers in all realms of business understand the need to invest in and protect their brand. Banks, artists, influencers, airlines, manufacturers, and any other businesses that you can imagine spend a significant portion of their marketing budget to develop and sell their brand. They know that once customers (whether consumer or B-to-B) understand/believe their story and brand promise, they are more likely to spend with them.

Brand awareness is the measurement of how memorable & recognizable your brand is to your target market. Before you can start to measure this, you should probably complete a few steps to define your persona.

Develop a detailed explanation of how you want to be perceived. Be sure to create your target buyer persona and ensure the messaging is directed to them.
Create a brand development strategy, which should align with your overall business objectives. While brand tactics such as a logo, tagline, website, etc. are important, a brand is how the customer feels about you and is only as good as the last interaction that they had with you.
The next step is to kick off and sustain the brand campaign. Try to make every experience the consumer has with you a positive one. Be sure to stay engaged and interact where possible.

Building brand awareness and that personal connection to your product/service/solution takes time. The goal is for the brand to be top-of-mind when consumers are having conversations or thinking about your sector or category of products. Let’s take a deeper look at why awareness is critical for the success of a brand.

Improved Market Share

Brand awareness can directly affect sales performance. Getting a product or service to market is not enough. Customers need to be introduced to the brand either through above-the-line marketing, below-the-line marketing, or a combination of both.

We often see influencers on Instagram and YouTube post unboxing videos of products from young companies. The goal of such videos is to create an awareness of the brand's existence so that the next time the viewer comes across it, they feel like they know and trust it. B-to-B brands also actively participate with influencers’ podcasts and industry organizations to increase general awareness and build trust.

Purchasing decisions can be complex and the marketing field is firmly aware of this fact. Before electing to try out a product or service, consumers need to develop a sense of familiarity slowly before eventually purchasing. Familiarity may be created through social media, brand mentions on radio and podcasts, traditional ads, promotions, sponsorships, case histories, and so forth. Eventually, a brand can end up becoming a part of the day-to-day life of consumers, which is often a big win for the marketing team.

Enhanced Brand Perception and Affinity

Brand awareness campaigns do not just make people familiar with your brand, they can also change how your brand is perceived. This can contribute to brand affinity, trust, and loyalty.

There are numerous case studies to show this. A country that launches a campaign to make international tourists aware of its attractions will use promotional videos to showcase itself. The campaign not only makes people aware, but it also provides the chance for the country to brand itself favorably.

Brand awareness campaigns are not solely targeted at the end customers. They should also target people whose perception can influence purchase decisions of others. Mitsubishi once launched an awareness campaign aimed at changing its image perception amongst executives and business leaders outside of Japan. At the end of the campaign, both the brand awareness and affinity had improved significantly. Part of branding is influencing what people will say in conversations when you are not there. So, make sure you’re monitoring social media and can react quickly if negative comments/press appear.

Repeat Purchases

90% of purchases happen with little thought from the customers. Our brains block out the different alternatives available because it takes effort to weigh what different competitors are offering. Brand awareness campaigns are therefore necessary to keep your existing customers loyal to your brand despite advertising efforts from competitors. If you tailor your message to a specific target audience, they will remain connected to your brand in the long run.

Building Awareness is a Long-Term Process

A couple of posts on LinkedIn and Facebook will not accomplish your brand awareness goals. Instead, a consistent and methodical approach is likely to yield the best results. I’d recommend that you develop a calendar of topics and set a regular placement schedule, so your followers, employees, and influencers know when they’ll hear from you.

Use your social platforms to tell your brand story. Telling a story instead of bombarding the audience with promotional messages is important for authenticity. Your posts should be consistent with your overall value proposition but be sure to throw in other important messaging such as financial performance, corporate governance news and developments, CSR campaigns, research and development efforts, and career opportunities, which are some of the things that audiences are genuinely interested in.

People want to interact with brands at a personal level and social media has made this possible. People can ask questions, make fun, and even give honest feedback on products if the brand creates the space.

Be sure to develop content that the audience can share on social channels. These include videos or any other form of media that is not necessarily promotional. The content should reflect what your brand is about. For instance, a hospital could make a poster about free screening services on a particular date. Such a poster is likely to be shared widely among friends and families, which increases visibility.

If your company needs help in developing, protecting, or communicating its brand image, check out Gray Matter Marketing & Communications. We are a full-service strategic partner, who help clients in marketing, branding, and events.

Marketing Retainers vs Project Arrangements – Which Way to Go

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Sun, 23 May 2021 00:26:12 GMT

Whenever your business wants to engage the services of a marketing agency or consultant, the question of fee models will always arise. Your business will need to weigh your options and budget and determine if you’ll put the agency on a retainer or engage them for just a single project.

What’s A Marketing Retainer Arrangement?

A retainer is a predetermined amount paid regularly so that the marketing agency is continually doing something for your company. Marketing agencies offer a wide range of services. Gray Matter Marketing, for instance, does brand strategy, copywriting, marketing project execution, media planning and buying, public relations, crisis communication, and much more.

A retainer agreement should specify how many hours are included every month and the general types of deliverables that the client expects the agency to complete for them. A business that requires a bundle of services can opt for a retainer arrangement because it might be more affordable in the long run.

Pros of a Marketing Retainer Arrangement

As shown, a marketing retainer arrangement is a long-term engagement. It allows sufficient time for the experts from the marketing agency to learn and understand your brand. Most of the time, goals set in an agency relationship will be broad. These include growing sales, building brand awareness, or increasing brand engagement online.

A retainer arrangement allows enough time to build a strategy and execute surgically. For instance, when engaging an agency for SEO services, they might first decide to focus on on-page optimization. Once complete, the focus can shift to link building through guest posting. Finally, this can be complemented by putting out blog content on the website and social media.

Further, retainers allow the client to tap into the wealth of talent at an agency. The agency team members might realize that your company needs a certain service that is not necessarily in the retainer agreement. They are likely to offer consultation on this service, charging nothing for it. It is difficult to quantify the value of such informal engagement with marketing talent.

When working with an agency on a retainer basis, your brand name remains top of mind and everyone understands your objectives and way of doing business. Creatives within the agency are more proactive when developing ideas and concepts throughout the month. They are likely to come up with ideas that fit your brand even without you asking and you'll see consistency in your deliverables throughout your engagement.

Retainer agreements create a bit of predictability of costs for the client company. At the beginning of each financial year or each quarter, the company already knows how much they'll pay. Some retainer arrangements include a discretionary amount given to the agency for paid campaigns. Brands benefit significantly by having these cast in stone early enough.

What’s a Project Arrangement?

Project arrangements are perfect when a client only needs one thing from an agency (this can be anything from creating one video up to launching one new technology). The arrangement involves drawing up a list of deliverables and agreeing on a fee (this can be billed hourly or for the entire project where the hours are capped). Traditionally, when the scope or deliverables change, both parties will need to approve a change order.

One good thing about projects relationships is that they have a time-constraint. Projects are usually effective when looking to get something done within a short deadline, mostly less than three to six months.

When working with a new agency, clients sometimes prefer giving them a project and using that to evaluate whether to keep them on a retainer basis. Agencies know this and will many times pay more attention to all project deliverables. Projects are also good when a client is unsure whether a certain approach is a good fit for their brand. They can use a short-term project as a test-run. If it works, they can do further iterations of the strategy.

When dealing with projects, there is always a risk that one project might not be as successful as previous ones. Even when working with one agency, the project team’s composition and availability will change with each new project. These changes put consistency at a risk. Each time you work with a new team, they will need some time to understand the brand’s voice and intended goals, which is many times added to the overall cost.

Project agreements are suitable when the client is on a limited budget. They are also good when the client has an internal marketing team and only needs to outsource a few services occasionally on an ad-hoc basis.

Optimizing Your Marketing Engagements

Whether you pick a project or a retainer arrangement with your marketing agency, it’s crucial that you understand their pricing model. A breakdown of deliverables and their costs is better than receiving a single round figure in your invoice.

In addition, you should inquire on the size of the team that will handle your deliverables and the composition. A marketing endeavor should be a collaborative effort between the client and the agency. As such, there should be an open line of communication between the account manager and a representative from the client. Lastly, even in a retainer arrangement, the client should receive regular updates on the milestones hit along the way towards attaining strategic objectives.

Successfully Developing and Navigating Your Global Marketing Strategy

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 13:43:06 GMT

Successfully Developing and Navigating Your Global Marketing Strategy

With the expansion of the internet and global travel and the ease and cost effectiveness of setting up operations, businesses are thinking more globally—from an ecommerce store that expanded internationally and grew revenues by 232% to public companies like Netflix, entering 200+ countries and generating 97 million international subscribers.[ * ][ * ]

If your business model supports international expansion—it’s time to review your marketing strategies and look beyond your immediate borders to a world with none.

Do your homework and develop an approach

Whether your company has already expanded or if it’s on the drawing board, it’s important to research the area and customers. By completing this important step, you can determine the best business approach and develop a feasible and viable marketing strategy to help ensure success.

You should probably be asking these questions, among others . . .

How do customers use/what do they think about your product?
What message, images, and channels best resonate with the audience you’re trying to capture?
How does your potential audience prefer to consume information?
Is the country open to your concept and can you keep up with demand?
Are you willing to change your brand from location to location?

Depending on the answers to these questions, you may decide to localize product messaging to connect and resonate with audiences in each country and adapt to their spending habits. Or if there isn’t a substantial departure in how people use your product from place to place, a global standardization method can be used everywhere. To explain the difference between the two strategies . . .

American technology company, Uber, whose services include package delivery, freight transportation, couriers, and ride hailing, is available in more than 60 countries and 400 cities worldwide. They expanded some services internationally before making them available in the United States. “As it moves into new markets, Uber is careful to ensure it offers solutions for all cultures. In some locations, where cash is still preferred to credit or debit card payments, it has adapted its product and marketing to suit,” according to Everything You Need To Know About Global Marketing Strategy .

IKEA is a great example of a company using the latter approach. This Swedish-based company is located all over the world, with 131 stores in 27 countries. The stripped-down, well-designed, and low-cost items and the brand is identical no matter the location. The company has ignored traditional conventions of furniture retailing (gearing products to local tastes), and instead, offers the same typically Swedish product range, according to Ikea's global strategy is a winning formula – Marketing Week .

Whichever direction you decide to take, do the research, be methodical in making your decision, and stick to that marketing and branding approach for at least the short term to determine how it is being accepted.

Communicating and engaging with internal and external customers is key

As I’ve mentioned in multiple blogs, effective communication to, and understanding of, your target audience and their specific environment and challenges is paramount. This can get tricky when you take your messaging global. For example, staying connected to sales and customer needs when you’re spread across regions can be a challenge, especially with various time zones and work weeks. As you develop your marketing plans, be cognizant of potential barriers such as language, culture, regulations, and standards (ISO certification). Solicit input and feedback; ask the question, “what works and where are opportunities from your vantage point?” Adjust marketing efforts as you have conversations with decision makers and influencers.

Be mindful of timing

Make sure you are aware of the local time for the people you’re targeting. For instance, setting a campaign launch to start Thursday morning in the US is equivalent to 5 p.m. at the beginning of the weekend in the Middle East. For internal and customer meetings, be respectful of people’s times and be aware of the work cultures in other countries—not everyone works long days and weekends.

Customizing marketing materials

Not all countries use the same paper or template size, so it’s important to check international standards for your region and project. Understanding what formatting sizes (letter, A1, A4, etc.) mean and when to use each when addressing your audience is important, whether you’re producing a brochure, postcard, flyer, information inserts, or advertisement. Even if you’re just creating electronic documents, it says a lot to create versions that will print properly in your customers’ country.

While you may not change your solution, product, or service in each location, consider changing out photos to be more culturally appropriate as you develop materials. Whether it’s landscapes or people, you need to engage with your customers in that location, not regurgitate corporate collateral and materials.

Language and culture

Understanding language barriers and requirements should be among the items you check when preparing messages for an international community. Do you have a series of standard languages into which you translate material or does your audience conduct business in a standard language? If you don’t know, discuss these needs before you go into the market.

Be aware of your word and phrase choices—they matter. Talk to people in your target audience to see how your company name, brand, and message will land and whether you need to adjust your content.

“Language is one of the most formidable barriers to effective advertising communication. The problem involves not merely the different countries or even different languages in the same country, it also involves linguistic nuances and semantics, literacy rate, prevalence of idioms and dialects, etc.,” according to Language Barriers in Global Advertising Marketing .

Social media regulations/privacy

Approaches to social media differ around the world. Channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Yammer, and others are less popular or may even be blocked in some countries. Unsolicited advertising and marketing emails in areas such as the EU or China differ from the United States. It’s important to know how privacy and social media platforms are regulated in your international arena if you plan to expand your efforts outside your country .

For more information to help you address audience needs, check out our blog Know your audience and their challenges .

Expansion matters

Global expansion provides opportunities to:

Develop new revenue outlets
Increase brand awareness
Differentiate your offerings
Help you learn about and improve your products, services, and other offerings for a new market

Once you’re ready to step onto a larger stage and need help reaching your new audience, Gray Matter Marketing can help.

Finding Opportunity in Disruption

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 14:17:31 GMT

Finding Opportunity in Disruption

Few industries, if any, have been left unscathed by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic downfalls. Declining demand, sinking profits, and business upheaval have forced many companies to halt or slow down operations.

While the outlook may be bleak right now, with every major disruption, arises real opportunity to gain a competitive advantage and better position your organization for the future. To survive—and recover more quickly—companies must rise to the challenge and seek these opportunities. Those who do could emerge better off than before this latest hiccup started, but it requires big thinking and quick action.

Don’t let valuable products go to waste

If you have a great product, game-changing process, or state-of-the-art manufacturing facility, have you considered diversifying your customer base, finding new revenue streams, or adapting for other markets or industries?

While doing so could mean making changes to your product to get a foothold in a new market quickly, you will also need to pivot your sales and marketing efforts to expand effectively. Here is our best advice for making the transition.

Figure out which markets to take on

First, you must understand your current market. If you haven’t done so already, create a detailed customer persona for each type of customer you serve. You should probably repeat this exercise every year to ensure you’re in touch with customers.

Answer questions such as:

What are the demographics of our current market?
Who is our ideal customer?
What are their biggest challenges?
What do they care about most?
What are their buying habits and interests?

Then break down how your product specifically solves those challenges. You are in business because your product has met an important need for your existing customers. So, nail down what it is that your organization does well and how that can transfer to a new industry, for example:

R&D and innovation
Manufacturing
Operations and project management
Commercializing new technology

Once you fully understand who is likely to purchase your product and why, start looking for similar markets or for customers with similar attributes in an entirely different market.

Rewrite your strategic plan

It may be time to throw out the old playbook and start over with a new plan, while making the most of what you have. The SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis is one of the top tools for helping you think about your business and chart a path forward.

While you have probably completed this exercise many times, it may be helpful to do it again to help you clearly see and prioritize what aspects of your product, operations, and marketing, and distribution models you need to change to better meet the needs of new markets.

Set realistic goals for market entry

Knowing who you are going to target and how you might adapt to market to these buyers is a huge milestone. It takes a great deal of work to get this far. That said, it’s important to rein in your expectations and set goals that you can actually hit.

The SMART acronym is one of the best ways to lay out your goals:

Specific: goals should be focused
Measurable: know what success will look like and determine how you will measure progress
Agreed upon: all stakeholders understand and are committed to achieving the goal
Realistic: they are attainable.
Time-based: assign a deadline or conclusion

As you are setting goals, start with a critical review of your resources—technology, people, time, and budget—to determine what you are capable of doing now or what you need to add, change, and upgrade to enable you to move into a new market.

Most important, goal setting can’t happen in a vacuum. We highly recommend you put your goals in front of anyone who will be expected to meet them, and ask directly “What will prevent us from doing this?” The people in the trenches, on the frontline, interacting with customers and uncovering issues all have different perspectives and will be able to pinpoint issues you can’t.

Make sure you go a step further and ask how to overcome those issues. That feedback will be vital to building a strategy that works.

Set your sights on marketing and sales

You’ve identified your new target audience and set a plan for entering the market; now it’s time to start marketing and selling. Here is a process for pivoting your messaging:

Take an honest look at your business. Review your operations, marketing materials, sales pitches, website, customer service, values, and so on. What may have worked from a branding and messaging standpoint for one industry or customer base, may not work for your new market. Be prepared to overhaul your messaging, visuals, website functionality, and more to better engage and retain the attention of a brand-new market.
Revisit your outreach strategies. Ideally, your old strategies will work on at least some level; however, don’t expect it, as it is highly possible you will need to alter how you find new customers and connect with existing ones. For example, that could mean using social media, running TV ads, or sending direct marketing pieces to get your products in front of people who have never heard of you. Just be willing to adapt and change course if your initial methods fall short of expectations.
Attend events. Trade shows, conferences, and other events relevant to the new industry provide a critical way to promote your business and reach a new audience. Right now, most events are virtual, so they’re easier to attend and they’re cheaper, so you can take the money you’d have to spend on travel and a hotel and use it to sponsor the event for even more exposure.
Build partnerships. Connect with businesses or industry associations that target the new demographic and work out a mutually beneficial arrangement, for example, a referral program, cross-promotion, or email list swap.
Conduct a PR blitz. Invest in press releases, host a webinar, offer to contribute articles to relevant blogs or publications, run an email and social media campaign, or reach out to radio spots, news stations, or podcasts for interviews. The idea is to spread the news about your new venture as quickly as possible.

If you have the right product, the right people, and the will to make it, breaking into a new market could be your best bet for keeping your business going during this short-term situation, but it could also be what’s best for your long-term success. If you would like help rebranding and marketing your product, please contact us for a free consultation.

Increase ROI and Accessibility through Technology Shifts and Trends

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 14:09:42 GMT

Increase ROI and Accessibility through Technology Shifts and Trends

In a world still significantly affected by the pandemic and lockdowns, it is increasingly important to appeal to audiences with authentic and personal messaging that creates connections and maintains relationships.

I kicked off my first blog this year by sharing several marketing trends to watch to help enhance your connection with customers in 2021 . We are constantly being reminded that complacency will not be an option moving forward, as the pace of business ebbs and flows. I’d recommend that you review your electronic marketing efforts and strengthen those practices in which you may be dabbling, drop those that may not be working, and dust-off the ones that may be sitting idle in order to drive personalization beyond what was effective pre-pandemic.

Virtual online events

Whether it’s a conference, workshop, meeting, lunch, or simple cup of coffee, there are some interpersonal nuances you can’t replicate virtually. But almost overnight, the pandemic created a need to quickly pivot and in-person gatherings were replaced by online interactions that are projected to continue throughout most of the year. Research shows virtual event budgets will increase to 36% this year from 20% in 2020. If you haven’t considered adding webinars, virtual booths in connection with virtual tradeshows, or even a virtual open house to show off your facilities, you may want to put these in the budget.

On a sidenote: I don’t normally get personal in these blogs but here goes. I’m a huge introvert and love working from home with my stretchy pants on, but I’ve really struggled without personal connection opportunities, tradeshows, and lunches. For everyone who is just as frustrated, don’t despair! This too will pass, and we’ll be meeting over coffee soon enough (ping me when you’re available). But in the meantime, embrace your inner tech side, ask your customers what they’d be interested in seeing from your company, and invite away.

Leverage customer relationship management (CRM) systems

Research shows the global CRM market is expected to grow 11% this year through mobile usage. The electronic documentation of client information, while not new, easily keeps track of business information from trends, strategies, and goals, to personal information such as children and spouse names, birthdays, and hobbies. You need to view these repositories as not just records of everything customer related, but as a renewed creative content and targeted sales enablement tool .

According to research, 59% of customers report that companies who know more about them from previous partnerships improve their experience. So use what you already have. And get creative! Afterall, you’ve carefully collected and cultivated information about your customers, perhaps gathering information that at the time didn’t seem to have a clear business use. For example, focus on strengthening customer relationships and joint improvement opportunities. Look for common themes and participate in open conversations to expand ideas. If you don’t have an official CRM system, if you’ve been lax in inputting key data into your existing system, or if you don’t know if you have the right option to grow your company, take this time to evaluate the various tools on the market, update missing information, and determine how to best utilize your CRM.

Social media campaigns

Research shows that people spend an average of nearly 2.5 hours a day on social media. From posting polls, sharing opinions/experiences, and making recommendations, to reviewing products and creating chat groups, social media use is on the rise. According to a July 2020 report , social media users increased by more than 10 percent during the past year, with nearly three billion in January of this year.

What makes you try certain things? Think about the brands you like, those you dislike, those to which you are fiercely loyal, and those that you have boycotted. Why? How did you form those opinions and followings? It likely started by hearing a friend’s experience or reading the opinion of someone else. Research shows 63% of social media users place a lot of stock in consumer ratings and 70% of consumers believe customer opinions over advertisements.

As you develop your next social media campaign, consider these quick stats ;

Brands and users exchange more than 2 billion messages monthly.
Nearly 46% of people prefer contacting a business through message chats than e-mail.
Infographics are shared and liked three times more than any other content on social media.
People spend 89% of their time on mobile media on apps, with the remaining time on websites.
E-mails with a personalized subject line are 25% more likely to be opened.

With more people online and active on social media, these are powerful platforms to reach potential customers, which can turn into long-term relationships.

For help evaluating your marketing efforts, to ensure you’re taking advantage of the latest technology trends, and developing a plan that improves your return on investment, contact us for a free consultation.

Marketing Trends to Watch to Help Enhance Your Connection With Customers in 2021

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 17:02:46 GMT

Marketing Trends to Watch to Help Enhance Your Connection With Customers in 2021

Whew! We’ve officially shut the book on 2020 and are now looking at a series of fresh pages waiting to be filled for 2021. Last year was unlike any other year that most of us have ever faced. We’d be remiss if we didn’t reflect upon and carry forward lessons learned from those challenges as we create new opportunities. Looking into our marketing crystal ball, we have an idea of how the challenges we faced will impact trends and expectations for at least 2021 and likely beyond.

Technology Shifts

While we should always practice agility and be able to pivot as industry changes occur, the pandemic and lockdowns have taught us the importance of shifting at a much faster and less-than-perfect pace than that which we normally operate at. The speed at which businesses and information were changing created an atmosphere of near constant pivoting and adjusting. Complacency and standing still was not an option and this will continue to be a trend in 2021.

Almost overnight, in-person meetings and events were replaced by online interactions. This will most likely continue in the coming year. While we’ll undoubtedly go back to some face-to-face interactions, virtual events—such as webinars, workshops and conferences—can provide a higher return-on-investment and accessibility option for the near term.

Company websites are becoming increasingly important in today’s world. If users have an unpleasant website experience, they are unlikely to revisit or recommend the site to others. In fact, research shows that 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the layout or content is not attractive to them.

To increase traffic and keep people on your site longer, be sure to provide thoughtful, pertinent and diverse content such as:

Infographics, by-the-numbers graphics, etc.
Thought leadership and informational materials (white papers, checklists, FAQ, etc.)
Multimedia (videos, animations, etc.)
Podcasts
Virtual events, webinars, and training courses
Surveys, polls, and quizzes

And be sure to update your content regularly and give people a reason to come back to your site. I’ll focus on some of these technologies in a future blog, so be sure to follow my LI page.

Enhanced Customer Experiences and Engagement

Marketing revolves around the customer lifetime value, which is made up of the total worth of a customer to a business for the duration of your relationship, as opposed to a one-off service or product offering.

Your brand, product, and people create lasting experiences and impressions—positive or negative. Businesses that actively create and manage these interactions and ensure a positive outcome tend to be more successful. If you do nothing else, remember that the customer experience is a two-way street, consisting of at least two buckets. One bucket is based on the nuts and bolts of getting business done to meet the needs, goals, objectives, operations, and budget. The other bucket is based on more touchy-feely, engaging aspects such as relationships, community, diversity, consistency, and various content and media interactions. Businesses that build relationships and stay connected to their audience will be more important to them over the long term.

With fewer face-to-face interactions, it can be difficult to create valuable experiences, so always be on the lookout for ways to interact and reward your customers for their loyalty and ask for their feedback. I’ve talked about the importance of customer engagement in several of my blogs over the past year, but all companies should be searching for ways to cast their net in a smaller area. Audience segmentation within larger target audiences will be key to developing more tailored messages, which in turn will strengthen connections. Email may become a more important marketing tool this year, as we are not yet sure when or how we will be meeting face-to-face. Newsletters, case histories, questionnaires, etc. are all potential ways to talk to your audience.

Brand Awareness

Many companies are adjusting their tone, message, and approach to marketing so as not to fall on deaf ears or get lost in the clutter of inboxes. There is also an increased awareness of the need for genuine compassion and empathy with audiences as it relates to their branding efforts to reach current and potential customers. All good content generation—whether for online or print consumption—needs to tell a story. I’d recommend that you be transparent, authentic, relatable, and consistent when telling these stories. Nothing captures an audience better than a story that speaks to emotions. But make sure it is real and pertinent to your business and your customers’ challenges, objectives, and goals.

One only need look at how companies, such as Guinness, have amended their advertising efforts during the pandemic to see how this approach works. For St. Patrick’s Day, “Guinness knew adults around the world needed a lift, so they responded with a message of resilience and assurance . By piecing together existing footage in a matter of days, Guinness shared that their own brand had endured the test of time by “sticking together,’” according to Crisis marketing: How brands are addressing the coronavirus .

If you’d like help developing and executing your 2021 marketing plan, schedule a consultation with us today .

How well do you know your audience and their challenges?

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Tue, 29 Dec 2020 12:54:52 GMT

How well do you know your audience and their challenges?

Play-Doh was never meant to be the much-beloved toy that has kept children happily busy for decades. Once the primary product of Kutol Products, it was designed as a compound to remove soot from wallpaper. But when households transitioned from heating with coal to oil, gas, and electricity, sooty build-up was no longer a problem for many homes. With demand sinking, Kutol faced a dilemma: become obsolete or reinvent the product.

The sister-in-law of one of its principals, a teacher, proposed that the once must-have cleaning compound be used for children’s play and art activities and Play-Doh was born .

Have you ever considered that maybe you’ve grown out of touch with your audience? It happens more than you think. The key to avoiding this is understanding your audience and staying engaged with their needs on a regular basis.

Knowing your customers on a deeper level

At any point in time, for each of your products or services, you should be able to answer the following questions:

Who is my target audience?
What is their demographic (e.g. age, geographical location, gender, education, socioeconomic status, etc.)?
What do they care about most when choosing a product or service (e.g. ethics, values, price, quality, etc.)?
What are their pain points or challenges?
What expectations do they have when it comes to working with an organization?
Who influences their buying decisions (e.g. family, peers, social media, influencers, experts)?
How does my solution meet their needs and expectations better than the competition?
What is their perception of my company and solution?

Why is it important to know this information? Because every piece of marketing material you create, every message you share, and every sales pitch you make should speak to that audience. It’s not enough to just have a strong concept or product. You need people to care enough about it to buy it and be happy enough with their purchase to be loyal to your brand (and maybe tell others to buy as well). If you can’t answer those questions, it’s time to sit down with your marketing, sales, customer service, and other client-facing departments to create in-depth personas for each type of customer you support.

Adapting as the market changes

With Kutol, their audience completely changed. While most organizations don’t experience that level of demographic shift, the needs, wants, and expectations of your customers and the competitive landscape will inevitably change over time. It’s critical for you to recognize when (or even before) the shift starts so that you can adapt.

To do that, you should create opportunities to communicate with customers in various channels. For example:

Conduct one-on-one interviews. After purchases, contact a random sample of customers for feedback or testimonials on the product. Find out what is and isn’t working for them. Ask how they’re using the product or service and the benefits they’re realizing as a result. Also ask them if they have or would recommend your product or service to others.
Send out surveys. For a wider audience, email a survey to solicit feedback on specific features or changes. Keep the questions short and focused so you can gather insights that you can use to inform business decisions.
Read reviews and social comments. Knowing what customers are saying about you online and on social media is vital to gaining feedback that you can use to improve your product or service, and it also empowers you to step in and manage your reputation when online comments are negative. Make sure someone in your organization is responsible for actively looking for and reporting on what is being said about your organization online.
Evaluate your competitors. If your competitors are overhauling their marketing messages or even their products or services, they may be on to something. Monitor what they’re doing, and if you see big changes, it’s likely time to talk to your own customers to see if you should be making changes too.

Acting on your findings

If you’re actively engaging with your customers, make sure that you’re tweaking your marketing messages to align with concerns and perceptions. Develop case histories that promote successes with key customers based on their feedback.

What if you find you have been targeting the wrong audience or that your audience is changing? If your intention is to stay in business, you’ll need to rebrand. Check out this article for more insight on how to do so .

And if you’d like help better understanding your audience and crafting marketing messages that resonate with them, schedule a consultation with us today .

Building Blocks to Foster Customer Loyalty

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 15:19:08 GMT

Building Blocks to Foster Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is all about engaging customers and creating repeat business, and it’s vitally important for most organizations. After all, you want what you sell to be good enough that people ultimately want to buy it again, or at the least, keep using it and recommend others do the same.

We know customer loyalty is important, but how do we go about building it? If you spend a little time searching the Internet for “how to build customer loyalty,” you will see advice like:

Build loyalty programs to reward customers for their business
Send them personalized messages and offers
Provide a great online experience
Communicate with them often through social media and content
Hold exclusive events just for them
Give them free stuff
And other similar ideas

Honestly, all these tactics are well and good, and they can definitely help keep customers happy and engaged with your brand. However, none of those things will work if you haven’t first laid a solid foundation.

So how do you achieve that? Start with these building blocks:

Have a great product or service

The key to success is to create a product or service that people both want and will pay money for. That means doing your work upfront to ensure you understand your audience and their challenges. It also means continually refining the messaging, or the product or service itself, to ensure you are reaching the right people with the right product.

Bottom line: If you don’t have a product or service that brings value to people in some way, no amount of loyalty rewards or freebies will convince them to keep investing in your brand.

Keep your promises

We cannot overstate the importance of this one. If you sell products, they must do what you say they’re going to do. If you offer a service, you should fulfill the obligations in your contract.

However, those promises don’t end with the actual thing you’re selling for money. Everything about how you do business should back up your promises. If customer service is one of your selling points, every single interaction a customer has with your business—from an initial sales call to a visit to your website—should be a good one.

That’s why it is so important for the marketing department to work across the organization to ensure everyone knows how to represent the brand and reinforce the marketing promises. (We can help with this. For more information, schedule a consultation now .)

Make sure your messaging is consistent and teams are aligned

You know the frustration you feel when a store or restaurant won’t honor your coupon? It’s a huge letdown because you’re not getting something you expect. Customers experience that same letdown when they receive mixed or contrary messaging from various sources within the organization.

A perfect example: The marketing team launches a new campaign offering something for free or a discount, but they don’t inform the sales team, who tells a customer the something isn’t free, which upsets them. Sure, they may ultimately get it sorted out, but it still sets the wrong tone for the relationship.

It is critical that sales, marketing, customer service, and other departments who work with customers collaborate and know what is going on within each other’s departments. These groups should be sharing feedback, talking about the customers’ challenges and discussing campaigns to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Be willing to adapt

This one might be the hardest for many businesses to do, but every business leader needs to understand that customers’ needs change. Their priorities shift. They get enticed away by new shiny products and too-good-to-be-true offers. Or they just want something new.

It’s important that you can change as your customers’ expectations do. Doing so requires an understanding of your customers and being aware that their needs have changed. You can’t do that if you aren’t interacting with them. Communicate with them regularly, ask for feedback, and watch your reviews and ratings and take comments on social media and other sources seriously.

Listen to their feedback, whether positive or negative, and address any issues as quickly as possible. Monitor how your competitors are responding to changing industry trends. Continuously test your assumptions about what you think your customers want. And when you are wrong about your assumptions, be willing to grow, adapt, and change. Otherwise, your customers will find businesses who better meet their needs and values.

At Gray Matter Marketing, we work to truly understand your target audience and engage them with well-executed marketing strategies. To learn more about all our marketing and branding services, contact us for a free consultation.

Is Sales Enablement at The Center of Your Marketing Plans?

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 02:39:43 GMT

Is Sales Enablement at The Center of Your Marketing Plans?

The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the good, old-fashioned sales call. Organizations that place a heavy emphasis on in-person meetings have had to adapt quickly to a whole new world. Sales teams, more than ever, are reliant on technology to connect with existing customers and prospects. Whether it’s conducting a virtual sales presentation or a meeting via video chat, we’re seeing changes that could very well become the new norm.

It is highly probable that some companies will see value in having fewer salespeople on the road, especially those organizations that stepped up their marketing this year and saw positive results. Even if everything gets back to “normal”, right now, at a time when personal connections are nearly impossible, marketers will play an even more critical role in supporting sales.

Marketing as a sales enabler

I talk a great deal about how marketing teams should play a bigger role in arming the sales force and that the development of internal and external sales enablement tools to help reinforce the brand and sell products is often overlooked. Depending on where you are in the product lifecycle, valuable tools might include clarity around the buyer and their journey, competitors and your differentiation, product messaging, and value-selling resources and content that support sales efforts to educate prospects and then convert these leads and close deals.

I recently had a conversation with one industry leader who shared some thoughts on this subject. He said, "I think marketing gets tied-up in corporate objectives, branding, core values, and illustrating organizational capabilities with limited direct involvement with sales. There are so many layers of sales that must be recognized by the marketing team for everyone to be successful.”

In other words, it’s our job as marketers to make it easy for our colleagues in sales, because when they win, we all benefit.

That may require a big mindset shift. It’s common for marketing and sales departments to see the other as a competitor. I’ve sat in countless meetings where marketing or sales professionals talked about their leads or their conversions, as if they were two different things. Some organizations even unwittingly (or even intentionally) set up commission or incentive packages to encourage that type of competition. It’s unfortunate, because success requires that the two departments be on the same page to be successful.

Content is your greatest asset

Many organizations have been forced to rethink how they engage with prospects (to be honest, this has been shifting long before COVID-19). Prospects were used to being courted by sales reps. Whether it was hunting, fishing, courtside tickets, luxury boxes, golf rounds, lunches, dinners or more, sales people have traditionally had to buy a little more time to convince a prospect to go with one product or service over another. It’s challenging right now, because building rapport and trust is more difficult over email and video chat than it is over a cup of coffee or after-dinner cocktail. And they can’t count on chance encounters at conferences, events, or even donut runs to deliver a face-to-face elevator pitch.

But that’s where marketing teams can have a profound impact. Informative content that offers real value to customers is one of the top ways to gain their trust. It allows the sales person to build credibility as an authority in your industry. Plus, when you educate customers in a meaningful way, it proves that you aren’t hiding behind some slick sales pitch; you are willing to share so much value with them because you stand by your product or service. Building their trust through honest, well-written website content, marketing copy, social media posts, and educational resources (e.g., videos, whitepapers, e-books, webinars, and blogs) offers salespeople an inroad to further discussions.

By understanding the customer and their challenges, these pieces can be customized for specific buyer personas, so sales reps have multiple tools in their kit to overcome objections. And having more in-depth internal documents such as competitor analysis, FAQs, and other critical information will ensure they have the answers to crucial prospect questions.

Marketing needs to engage with sales

One of the greatest marketing failures is to create content that the sales team doesn’t use. It’s expensive and a waste of time. So, before you invest one dime in content, you need to have open, honest conversations with your sales team. What do they need to make their jobs easier? What are prospects or customers asking for (beyond a lower price)? What resources would they use regularly? Ask them and listen to what they want and need. Then work it into your strategy.

That’s not to say you must create everything they ask for or that you don’t create other content. You should, because you have separate objectives and a limited budget. However, if you are going to create something, start with pieces that will get the most use. Additionally, make sure your sales team knows what’s available to them, ensure you are educating them on trends in the market, and explain why you are focusing on specific messaging. That way they can align with the same messaging you are incorporating into content. It’s also a good idea to launch any major campaign internally before going to market to ensure everyone is speaking from the same script.

An opportunity to revamp how sales and marketing work together

At Gray Matter Marketing, we want to make sure your sales and marketing teams are working in unison, by ensuring that the sales teams are engaged throughout the marketing process and believe in the messaging and market and customer challenges. With our marketing and sales support services, we unify the two teams to ensure everyone is on the same page to drive your message and maximize profitability. To learn more about all our marketing and branding services, visit www.graymattermktg.com .

Think You Need to Rebrand Your Business? Tips for Starting Over From Scratch.

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 14:26:47 GMT

Think You Need to Rebrand Your Business? Tips for Starting Over From Scratch.

For many organizations, rebranding is a nonstarter. After all, it takes a huge effort and budget to create a brand in the first place and even more to build it up. Some business leaders are so attached to their logo, their messaging, and their way of doing things, abandoning it just doesn’t feel like an option.

Altering anything that would reduce your brand recognition or turn off your customer base must be given serious thought. Still, while some branding can stand the test of time, often rebranding is critical to save the business. But how do you know it’s time?

Here are legitimate reasons to rebrand:

You have overhauled your business . Maybe you’ve added a range of products or are targeting new demographics. Or perhaps you have gone the other way and decided to focus exclusively on one product, industry, or customer type. Or maybe you have simply changed your culture, model, or business strategy to adapt to the times. Whatever the reason, rebranding is often necessary to attract, engage, and retain shareholders .
Negative perceptions are hindering business. Scandals, bad products or service, or other issues can drive customers away. If your brand has received a bad name for whatever reason, rebranding your company or individual product can help you confront the issue and tell the world that you are a new, better business.
You’re struggling to land new business. It could be that your branding isn’t differentiating you from your competitors anymore. Your messaging or imagery just may not be resonating with new customers. Or people may not understand what it is you do as times have changed. A rebrand can help you fine-tune your messaging so that you stand out from the crowd and connect with people.

Your brand is more than just a logo or product or tagline, it’s your promise to your customers. It tells them how your company solves their challenges better than anyone else on the market. It's important to understand that when we talk about a rebrand, we’re talking about a complete top-to-bottom evaluation of your business and an overhaul of the way people perceive your business. That’s why this is not something to take lightly.

How to rebrand your business

How do you rebrand your business? While you may incorporate bits and pieces of your old brand into your new concept, it’s best to consider it a fresh start, following a few steps:

Start with your mission, vision, and core values. What has changed? What is your new purpose? What new philosophies or values are driving the direction of your business? How are you serving customers differently? What about your business model is different? And what matters most to you now? It’s possible that those foundational elements are still at the center of how you want to run your business, but you have lost your way in reflecting them. Re-establish all these elements so you can reinforce them in your new brand.
Create audience personas. Who is your target customer? Especially if you’ve moved into a new demographic, either intentionally or not, make sure you have a clear picture of your target audiences. Detail their background, what they care about, their pain points (what keeps them up at night), expectations, and perceptions of your company, and what you need to do to connect with them, engage them, and convert them to customers.
Decide what your new identity should be. If your business has been around for a while, the look of your brand may feel outdated and it could be turning people away. Or if you have branched out into a new demographic, the tone of your brand may seem out of touch. The goal is to connect with your audience now and that could mean stepping out of your comfort zone a little.
Apply the new branding consistently across everything. You don’t want to send mixed messages with half of your old branding showing up in places and the new branding showing up in others. For example, while you may be anxious to update your website, if you send out an old direct mail piece—to use them up—and drive recipients to a new site, the change in branding could be confusing. So, if you want to use all those direct mail pieces up, do so before you debut a new website (or keep the old site up temporarily). The same goes for email campaigns, social media logos, and digital marketing pieces. Consistency is critical for people to recognize the new brand, so spend some time planning how you will prioritize updating all your assets.
Promote the rebrand. Don’t just assume people will catch on. Plan a PR blitz to promote the rebranding. Explain why you’re doing it and build some excitement for the changes. Write a press release, talk to a local newspaper or news station, spread the news across social media, and announce it in an email. Some brands even start the promotion early in the rebranding and will ask customers to vote for a favorite new logo, for example, or offer prizes for helping the company to spread the word about the new brand.
Get everyone onboard. Every stakeholder from frontline employees to the C-suite need to live and breathe the new brand—and do their part to share it with the world. Train them to understand why the rebranding is happening, the new vision for the organization, and the part they must play to build recognition and trust in the new brand.

If you are ready to rebrand, but you aren’t sure where to start, Gray Matter Marketing can help. Schedule a consultation today to learn more.

Thinking About Creating Marketing Content? Ask Yourself These Things First.

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 13:09:38 GMT

Thinking About Creating Marketing Content? Ask Yourself These Things First.

Businesses of all sizes, across all verticals, are investing a significant chunk of their budget in content marketing. In fact, the most successful B2B marketers spend 40% of their total marketing budget on content marketing, according to a survey from the Content Marketing Institute .

It’s with good reason. Content marketing delivers results because it enables you to:

Engage and retain customers. If done well, it keeps people invested. They come back again and again to hear what you have to say and offer.
Build your credibility. When you invest in content, beyond marketing emails and ads, you gain the space to share your knowledge, prove that you are an authority, and build relationships with your audience. That is the key to building their trust.
Generate leads. A download on sought-after information can enable you to capture email addresses, and a well-written blog or article can motivate people to set up a consultation or sign up for a trial.
Do well on social media. People do not want to follow an account that just shares promotions and other people’s content. They want to see original, valuable pieces. If you continuously share valuable content, they’ll keep following you, and even better, they’ll engage with the content and share it with others.
Drive traffic to your website. Search engine optimization (SEO) is mandatory if you want people to find your website, but simply optimizing your static web and landing pages isn’t enough. Consistently optimizing new blogs and other forms of content will help you rank higher in search engines.
Increase conversion. Content helps you do all the things you need to do to close a sale: bring new prospects to you, build their trust in your business, provide them with plenty of information, and offer an easy way to take the next step.

So, with all the value it brings, is it even a question? Don’t you absolutely need to start investing in a content strategy? As always, it depends.

Three key questions. . .

Most businesses think they need “content” as part of their marketing plan because that's what all the experts say, and for the most part, we recommend it to our clients. However, your content marketing strategy is only as successful as the work you put in. So, before you take that step, answer the following questions:

Can I keep up with it? Successful content marketing requires frequent, consistent, and ongoing fresh content. You can’t post three times in one week and then not again for a month. Readers need to know what to expect; they need to anticipate when your next piece of content is coming out. They are fickle and can easily forget you if you have huge gaps between your publishing dates. So, think long and hard about how much time and resources you can invest before you get started. We tell clients to start slowly and build their frequency, for example, posting a new blog bi-weekly at first, instead of weekly. After all, it’s much better to give customers more content than to take it away when you discover the frequency is too much for you.
Am I willing to hire professionals? You must . . . repeat must . . . share high-quality, well-written content. Your content must walk the line between offering real value to the reader and promoting the brand, and that takes the subtly of an exceptional writer. Consider this a warning: Poorly written content (typos, grammar issues, lack of direction, too marketing, etc.) can do 10 times more to damage your brand than no content at all. If you have a super-strong copywriter on your team, that’s wonderful. If not, set aside the budget for a copywriter with a strong reputation. The same goes for a professional web and graphic designer. The most exceptional copy in the world won’t be perceived as valuable if the packaging is unattractive. In both cases, cheap is rarely a good thing.
Am I ready to monitor, change, and adapt? Content marketing isn’t one of those set-it-and-forget-it types of activities. It requires measurement and analysis to see what is resonating and what isn’t. It requires doing more of what people want and less of what they don’t. It’s important to learn how to track and decipher the analytics so you can make decisions that move your content strategy forward. I have a client whose customers told them they liked the content, but it was too much to read in one pass, so we developed shorter infographics rather than full case histories.

If you can answer all that with a “Yes,” you’re ready to jump into the wonderful world of content marketing and all the value it brings. And if you can’t answer “Yes,” don’t worry. We’ve got you covered and are ready to help you develop and execute a winning strategy. Schedule a consultation today to learn more.

Developing a Branding Strategy as Unique as Your Business

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 13:05:12 GMT

Developing a Branding Strategy as Unique as Your Business

When you used to daydream about starting your business, you likely didn’t think “I am going to build a business exactly like everyone else’s.” Instead, you thought “This is how I am going to be better than that business.” At least that’s how it is for most entrepreneurs. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that most businesses, including mine, are launched because the owner saw or experienced a problem and thought, “I can do better.”

What I’ve found is that many business owners, who drive to be innovative and unique, often don’t carry this strategy over to branding and marketing. In other words, they create an amazing product or business model, and then either use canned tactics to market and sell it (or none at all).

One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to marketing

I’ve read several articles on how to create the “perfect” strategy to market your business. Many recommend, “Do Step 1. Then Step 2. Now Step 3,” and the advice applies to every type of business, across every industry. We have offered similar advice in past blogs, but we’ll be the first to admit that what works for one business may not work for another.

For example, we’re big advocates of social media , but social media won’t necessarily work for everyone. I’ve known business owners who stress out over the fact that they don’t have a Twitter presence, even when they aren’t even sure that their target audience is on Twitter. It’s something they’ve heard about, or they see big companies and even competitors doing, so it suddenly feels like a must-do.

Beyond shaping a message that resonates with your target audience, an effective strategy needs to take budget, resources, and manpower into account. Right now, there are businesses across the world that have accounts set up on all the platforms—and yet they haven’t posted to them or engaged with followers in weeks or even months. Those idle accounts can do more damage than no account at all.

I’ve also seen businesses pour money and resources into email marketing or social media ads and see little results, but balk at reprinting a direct mail piece that saw high conversions because of the cost to print and mail. Yes, email and social media can be cheaper, and yes, you can potentially reach more people quicker than you can with direct mail. BUT, if email and social media aren’t leading to sales, you’re wasting money that would have been better spent on what converts.

Building a strategy around your business

So, how do you create a marketing strategy that is as unique as your business?

Establish your mission and values . Everything you create should reinforce both. If you don’t have a mission, take the time to work through this exercise.
Take the time to truly understand your audience . Have you determined who your buyer (and influencers) are, do you know their pain points, and do you know how to connect with them (and how they find information)?
Define how you want your customers to perceive you. And what you must do from a sales, marketing, and customer service approach to meet their expectations.
Nail down your unique sales proposition and marketing messaging. You want to have a clear message, so everyone immediately understands why your business is better or more unique than everyone else out there. And how it’s different from everyone else.
Develop your brand promises. That is the first step to ensuring everyone across the organization is fulfilling those promises.

Gray Matter Marketing can help you develop a stronger understanding of your audience, your values, and how you serve customers, which can determine the best approach to build exposure and engagement, based on your time-frame, resources, manpower—and budget. We focus on the actions that will help your organization reach profitability faster, rather than just throwing tactics at a wall and seeing what sticks.

To learn more about our process, and maximizing your marketing dollars and efforts, schedule a consultation now .

The Importance of Leading with Your Marketing Strategy

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 15:07:18 GMT

The Importance of Leading with Your Marketing Strategy

I’ve heard people advise businesses to “Go out and pinpoint what you like about competitors’ (or even non-competitors’) branding and marketing content and duplicate their tactics as part of their marketing strategies. It’s not all bad advice. Seeing what your competitors are doing is critical to figuring out how to differentiate your brand. And looking to your favorite brands for inspiration is also a good idea. However, when it comes to flat out imitating another business, we disagree entirely.

Every business should tailor its marketing strategy and ensure that it is truly unique to their business, rather than relying on industry “best” practices or the latest marketing trends. That’s why one of our mottos here at Gray Matter Marketing is “Strategy Over Tactics.”

Instead of going off a checklist of tactics or throwing a bunch of tactics at the wall and hoping something sticks, we create a custom marketing plan based specifically on your needs, audience, resources, budget, and goals.

Maybe you’re not convinced yet. After all, if another business, specifically a competitor, has success, shouldn’t you? Unfortunately, the answer is a resounding “No,” and here’s why:

No two businesses are alike

Even if you and your competitors sell the near-exact product or service to the exact same people (which is highly unlikely), your businesses are still supremely different. Your culture and people, your relationships with the marketplace, your internal resources (i.e., budget, tech, and staff), and the assets you’ve developed will vary widely.

Before you compare yourself to everyone else and try to copy their marketing approaches, remember:

If your business is brand new, you likely don’t have the email database or social media followers of a more established business, so digital marketing may not work the way it does with your competition.
If you are a startup or small business, chances are you don’t have the budget to compete with a larger or established brand in the same capacity. You simply can’t do what they’re doing—but that’s not even the best reason to skip the imitation tactics.

How you interact with your customers may be different

Wendy’s restaurant is notorious for being savage on Twitter, particularly when it comes to dragging major competitor McDonald’s . And the slang, sarcasm, and pithiness appear to work for them. They have millions of followers and decent engagement. Still, try that approach with an older, more conservative customer base, and that tactic will backfire big time.

Gain a clear understanding of who your customers are, their expectations and challenges, and how they like to consume information. Then go where they are. For example, if they’re more likely to read blogs, write blogs, but if they are big consumers of social media, invest there. While you don’t want to rely on just one strategy (i.e., email), it’s not necessary to have a presence on every social media platform or use every channel out there.

Our best advice: Start small, ensure that you can maintain the consistency and frequency of whatever it is you do, whether that is posting to Twitter or blogging, and then grow from there. Be sure to monitor the results of anything you do. If something isn’t gaining any traction, let it go so you can focus on tasks and projects that generate results. And don’t be afraid to ask your current customers (and don’t forget your sales force) how they want to receive information and tweak your tactics and marketing dollars on this information.

You need to understand and communicate your differentiators

People are inundated with messages, so you want to stand out from the rest. That means showcasing how you are different, and being unique, not mimicking what someone else is doing. So, if anything, look to competitors for what to do differently or better, not for what you want to adopt.

If you have a value proposition (your promise to your customers about how you will provide them with a value differently from everyone else), you may want to revisit it once a year and determine if it’s still viable based on the competitive landscape. If you don’t have a solid pitch, I’d recommend developing one ASAP.

So, imitation is out – now what?

Build a custom strategy tailored to the specific needs of your business and your customers. If you want to develop your brand identity and build a marketing strategy that will help you reach profitability faster, we can help. Learn about our services here .

The Rise of the Fractional CMO

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 23:37:59 GMT

The Rise of the Fractional CMO

For organizations, big and small, the pandemic has critically impacted how sales teams work with existing customers and acquire new ones. However, despite tighter budgets and a widespread drop in revenues, according to “ The CMO Survey: Covid-19 and the State of Marketing ,” marketing budgets have risen to the highest percentage of firm budgets and revenues in the survey’s history, at 12.6% and 11.4%, respectively. Whether the money sticks around is the big question.

In that same survey, respondents appear to be bracing for budget reductions across all marketing spending—customer relationship management, brand building, traditional advertising, digital marketing, etc.—over the next 12 months. This isn’t surprising. Marketing budgets are often one of the first things to go, even though marketing activities are critical, especially during an economic downturn .

So, while organizations are allocating more of their overall budgets to marketing initially, perhaps to help offset grounded salespeople or low consumer confidence, it’s likely not permanent. In the months ahead, organizations may need to reimagine how they operate to meet all their objectives.

The gig economy is alive and well

It has been estimated that the percentage of U.S. workers in the gig economy will increase to 43% this year, and that was before COVID-19. We’re predicting this number will continue to increase. After all, individuals who lost their jobs are realizing the benefits of being self-employed and may never return to an office.

Plus, many companies who were against remote work will make an about-face because they a) know now that they can make it work and b) realize they can take advantage of incredible freelancer knowledge and talent—for a fraction of the cost of full-time staff.

It's safe to say that many organizations and their marketing teams will remain virtual and build leaner teams of highly skilled players that work as much and when needed, rather than keeping a full-time staff onboard.

Part-time executives are on-trend

In recent years, we’ve seen an uptick in freelance executives, those high-level folks who step in for a short time to consult, put a company on the right path, establish strategies, or develop new initiatives as a company experiences growing pains. Often referred to as "Fractional,” these highly experienced professionals are serving as Chief Executive Officers (CEO), Chief Information Officers (CIO), and even Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) for organizations that want high-level experience and expertise, but don't want to hire a full-time C-Suite employee.

What is a Fractional CMO—and should you hire one?

Many companies don’t have CMOs on the organizational chart, either because they don’t have the budget for another full-time executive, or they don’t yet see the need for one. However, CMOs bring the big-picture thinking required to develop customer acquisition, branding, sales development, and growth strategies. They have the wealth of experience, knowledge, and skills to navigate downturns, external and internal crises, product commercialization, and startups, from a marketing perspective.

If you don’t have that level of expertise because you’ve seen an exodus of veteran talent or because of budget constraints, you oftentimes have to rely on entry-level marketing staff or no team at all. Investing in a CMO, even on a part-time or short-term basis, can provide you with deep insight and expert guidance without having to dish out executive pay and benefits.

Other reasons to invest in a CMO: Consensus is difficult among upper management, sales, and marketing, or you aren’t seeing results from your current marketing efforts. A CMO can step in and help pinpoint inefficiencies or gaps, establish higher-potential strategies, and set a direction. Sometimes a CMO can help get everyone on the same page.

Help is available

At Gray Matter Marketing, our team has been supporting organizations for decades. We can serve as your CMO for as little or long as you need us cost-effectively. Here’s just some of what we can do for you:

Develop business plans and value-driven messaging
Develop and execute a brand or commercialization strategy, plan, and budget
Create content and social media strategies that resonate with your target audience
Provide a high-performing agile team of writers, graphic designers, web designers, and more
Help you stretch your budget and do more with less
Plan and execute events and product launches
Ensure brand consistency, including messaging and visuals, across all assets and marketing channels
Work with marketing and sales teams to ensure everyone is helping drive the message

Every business is different, so let’s schedule a call to discuss your unique needs and how we can help you move forward with your marketing goals and reach profitability faster. Contact us today .

https://cmosurvey.org/results/

https://fortunly.com/statistics/gig-economy-statistics/#gref

Marketing Best Practices for Small Businesses

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 26 Aug 2020 14:08:56 GMT

Marketing Best Practices for Small Businesses

Most small business owners dream big. They believe that their product, service, or location is exactly what consumers need and want, but far too many think that this is enough to succeed. I’m often taken aback by how little new businesses invest in messaging, branding, and marketing. They’re convinced that word-of-mouth or referrals will be enough to maintain a flow of paying customers. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case.

An established business may be able to get by on a stellar reputation. However, for most businesses—and especially those just starting out— building a message that resonates with your audience and getting the word out quickly, professionally, and consistently is critical to staying afloat in those early, challenging years and building long-term success. Despite this, even the savviest entrepreneurs and small business owners will push marketing to the backburner, citing budget and resource constraints. As a result, saving money often sets them back and prevents them from generating short-term revenue and long-term awareness.

So, what can small business owners do within a tight budget? It often comes down to ruthless prioritization. Here’s some advice for doing so.

Start with a website

97% of people learn more about a local company online than anywhere else and 3 0% won’t even consider your business if they can’t find you online . This applies to buyers in the consumer space as well as the business-to-business arena.

Often, it’s all about perception. A well-designed website makes you look more established and professional, so people are more likely to trust and purchase from you. However, people also want to learn more about a business before they take the next step, so they turn to websites for more details. Your website becomes the foundation on which all your marketing pieces are built, so even if you can’t do anything else on this list, allocate the funds for a website.

While you can find many DIY and other options for building low-cost websites, this is one area where we recommend you spend the time and dollars. An ugly website or one that provides a terrible user-experience is oftentimes worse than having no website at all. So, unless you are skilled in this area, prioritize hiring a professional developer and designer who can help you create a well-branded, user-friendly website. The same goes for the copy on your website. Poorly written messaging or content that doesn’t say anything meaningful doesn’t make a good first impression and could drive people away before they learn anything about your business.

Once you create the website, make sure to keep it updated with new content to keep customers coming back. We’ll talk more about that later in this blog.

Make the most of social media

Social media is free and is easy to set up and use. Chances are, many of your customers use it in some shape or form, and it informs their decisions. In fact, according to one study, 90% of people buy from brands they follow on social media . They use various platforms to see reviews, read comments and content, and learn more about your business. Commit to whatever platforms your target customers are using to connect with them, build brand advocates, share promotions, and more.

Ensure that you or someone you hire can commit time to social media on a regular basis and are actively working to build your following, so that you can share your brand with more people. Frequency and consistency are critical to keeping people engaged, as well as ensuring your social media presence is in line with what you’re posting on your website. Check out my blog (www.graymattermktg.com) with additional social media tips.

Focus on your local market first

At some point, you may intend to take your business across the country or even global. However, we recommend you focus your efforts on the local market first. It’s more cost-effective and enables you to connect with customers in-person as needed. Plus, as you build a strong local customer base, you’ll gain the confidence and finances to tackle a bigger market.

A website and social media presence are critical to reaching your local market, but you can also do the following to bring in local customers:

Form partnerships. Reach out to other businesses for cross-promotional opportunities. Offer specials or discounts to each other’s customers, co-host an event or promotion, share marketing materials for one another, or swap email lists. You might even consider establishing a referral program where you and your partners receive a commission when you refer customers to one another.
Monitor your online presence. Make sure you are seeing what people are saying about your business on social media and address negative feedback quickly. Double check your address and contact information on public sites, and reach out to your town, county, local Chamber of Commerce, or industry organizations to ensure you are listed on any pertinent websites.
Recruit brand advocates. For your grand opening, when you launch a new product, or plan an event, recruit a team of people to spread the news. They can ensure you are promoting your company with the correct messaging specific to your target audience.
Return to traditional marketing methods. Placing your business name on your car, running ads, putting up billboards and other signs, and sponsoring a little league team can still be highly effective local marketing tactics to build brand recognition. So, while these elements can be expensive, they can often give you more bang for your buck.

Offer valuable content

Content boosts your credibility and thought leadership position and builds trust in your brand. But only if it is content that people find valuable and useful. If it’s well-done, people will keep coming back for more, and they may share it with people who have never heard of you, so it’s free promotion.

So, what type of content should you create? It largely depends on your resources and what your target audience wants to see. Blogs, subscription newsletters, videos, and more in-depth marketing pieces, such as whitepapers, webinars, and e-books are all popular pieces of content. But they must be well done. If you don’t have someone on staff with professional-level writing and graphic design skills, hire someone. Otherwise you will waste time on content that ultimately leaves a bad impression on people.

Additionally, consider how much time you can commit to content generation. Blogs and newsletters require consistency and frequency, so plan to post at least once a week, or every other week at a minimum. Videos, webinars, whitepapers, e-books, and the like require less frequency, but you want to make sure you are promoting them through other channels as often as possible to maximize the ROI on them.

Consider creating a calendar with timelines and action items, and agree to guidelines and content outlines before you take on writing these types of things to avoid content creep. In addition, it’s important to stay away from sounding too marketing; people can handle some spin but if everything you create screams ‘Buy Me because I’m Better’ without valuable information, people will stop looking at your content.

Don’t turn people off with email

Email marketing can still be an effective—and cost-effective—method for marketing your business. However, remember that people are inundated with emails, so if you want your message to stand out, get read, and convert to business, you need to:

Ensure it can easily be read on a mobile device
Write a concise, direct benefit-driven headline that doesn’t exceed 50 characters, with 35 being ideal for mobile devices
Avoid the hard-sell on your initial contact and instead offer something of value (e.g., a coupon or invitation to an event, to sign up for a mailing list, or receive a free gift)
Tell recipients exactly what to do after reading your message with a clear Call to Action
Personalize the message when possible by including the recipient’s name or pointing back to a purchase he or she made, for example (if you can’t guarantee that the personalization works, don’t do it; it’s a turn-off to receive for John when your name is Ted)
Promote the content you are developing on other mediums (website, social media, etc.)

Before sending emails to people, be sure to read up on anti-spamming guidelines for the end user. Many countries have introduced legislation in this area, and you can be held personally responsible for sending unwanted information. Ensure you have an opt-out option included on every email and be respectful if someone asks you to stop.

Finally, and most importantly, make sure that everything you do, say, share, and create is consistent with your overall branding message. All content that comes from your business should sound and look like your brand and speak directly to your target audience.

I f you need help developing or executing your marketing strategy, we can help. At Gray Matter, we offer fully customized branding and marketing services to meet your specific business needs. Contact us today to learn more .

1 https://seotribunal.com/blog/stats-to-understand-seo/#local-seo-facts

2 https://www.bluecorona.com/blog/do-i-need-a-website/

3 https://www.mobilemarketer.com/news/90-of-people-buy-from-brands-they-follow-on-social-media-study-says/577342/New Paragraph

Social Media 101 for Small Businesses

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 14:49:51 GMT

Social Media 101 for Small Businesses

If you run a small business—and especially if you are operating on a lean budget—social media could be the best way for you to market your business right now. It’s a low- or no-cost way to engage with existing customers and put your brand in front of new prospects. Besides, one of the most basic rules of marketing is to go where your customers are—and increasingly, they’re on one or more social media platforms. And they’re not just there to share pictures and chitchat.

Many users turn to social media to make buying decisions. According to research from GlobalWebIndex , they’re also there to discover brands and products, conduct research and read reviews before they make a purchase.

Social media enables you to build engagement and foster connections. Every time you post content, you have an opportunity to remind existing customers why they gave you their business in the first place. Additionally, you can stay in front of customers who aren’t yet ready to invest in your products or services but could eventually.

It’s not enough to just do social media—you need to do it right

We believe that social media is still one of the best tools you can use to market your business. In fact, we often make it a priority when we develop marketing plans for clients (after developing a sound message, of course) because it is cost-effective and easy. However, it still needs to be done the right way; otherwise, it can be bad for business.

A day barely goes by where we don’t hear about some celebrity, politician, or business owner making a giant social media flub. Even if you avoid sharing something deemed offensive or inappropriate, you can waste so much time without seeing any results.

So, to help you get it right—and make the most of the time and energy you spend on social media—here are some of our best social media quick tips:

Fill in all the sections on all your profiles. The more detail you share, the more people will learn about your business. For example, on LinkedIn, add a free custom banner that is punchy and includes a descriptive tagline. Add detailed “About” copy, list industries and market segments, and include contact information. Complete the Specialties and Products section, too. There are people who will take the time to read all of this, so don’t leave it blank.
Don’t spread yourself too thin. It’s not necessary or prudent for you to be on every social media platform. Think about your target audience and the platform(s) they’re most likely to use and focus your efforts there. A quick Google search will offer you ample data on the demographics of users across the platforms. For example, Pew Research says that 79% of adults 30 to 49 use Facebook at least some.
Share content people want. People are expecting to see blatant promotions on social media. In fact, many consumers want to see promotions so they can learn more about you, the business, and your products or services. That said, it’s safe to say that people don’t want to just see promotions, so make sure you are sharing content that they will care about. Articles, videos, images, and interactive content, like polls, will keep them interested in your brand—and receptive to promotions. While you can share other people’s content, make sure you are offering plenty of original content too. That’s how you build thought leadership in your industry.
Be consistent. If you want your social media efforts to be successful, you must post consistently and frequently. Don’t post every hour the first week and then go silent for two weeks. It’s better to start slow and build up to more frequency when you have the time or resources to do so. A tool like Hootsuite , which enables you to schedule posts across all your platforms, can be a huge time saver.
Interact with followers. When they comment, respond with a note of appreciation, and answer questions. Most important: Don’t ignore negative comments—or, perhaps worse, go to war with people on social media. Doing so just makes you look bad. Instead, invite the person to call you to rectify the situation. Remember, other followers are watching you, so reply with tact and professionalism. If, after you have attempted to resolve the issue, the person continues to harass you, block him or her, and move on.
Ask for help in growing your followers. Ask employees and other stakeholders within your organization to promote your company page and encourage their network to follow it. We’ve seen clients’ followers double or even triple after we encourage employees to go out, focus on building their networks, and then ask directly for follows. Ensuring that your profile is complete and sharing valuable content will make them more likely to do so.
Create ample opportunities for people to engage with you. Include your social media buttons on every blog, newsletter, or email you share, and place buttons in your navigation bar. Additionally, add your profiles to printed marketing pieces.
Track your progress. Early on, your number of followers, engagement, and conversions will likely be low. It takes time to organically build up a list of followers that are genuinely interested in the brand. So, don’t focus specifically on the number of followers you have. Instead, focus on two important metrics: what is driving people to your website and which content garners the most interaction (i.e., share, comments, or likes)? That will help you identify which content is resonating with people, so you can share more of it or highlight it in promotional pieces.

Social media plays an important role in the marketing strategies that we develop for clients. If you want more guidance on how to develop and execute a successful social media plan that will support your business objectives, contact us today .

Improve the Bottom Line by Reducing Friction Between Your Sales and Marketing Teams

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 14:51:42 GMT

Improve the Bottom Line by Reducing Friction Between Your Sales and Marketing Teams

A colleague of mine recently shared a story that reflects a scenario I’ve encountered while working in corporate America and with clients at Gray Matter Marketing.

My colleague was supporting a new company that, for the first time, was investing in marketing. This was a company with brilliant people and a great product in an industry with outstanding growth potential. The company had been relatively successful with no marketing at all, so she was excited about how much more it could accomplish with a solid marketing strategy.

However, her excitement fizzled-out after a few conversations with various people across the organization; it didn’t take long to realize that she was facing some serious pushback, specifically from the sales team, and even from management. It turned out that the sales team saw the newly formed marketing team as competition, rather than what it was supposed to be: a resource and tool for expanding sales and increasing engagement with their customers.

The pushback came from tight-lipped salespeople who wouldn’t share their sales pitches or approaches, from an intense scrutiny over marketing copy, and from a complete lack of direction or feedback on what was and wasn’t working. Most of all, it came in the form of zero action. After several months, nothing had moved forward with the marketing and branding strategy.

While this is an extreme example, friction between the two departments is common. I’ve seen disconnected sales and marketing teams first-hand and witnessed how it can kill momentum and affect profitability. That’s why, when I work with clients, I focus on unifying the sales and marketing teams through a variety of methods .

Educate and engage both teams

Both the sales and marketing teams need to fully understand how they complement each other; they need to see the vision and goals of the organization, the target audience, and the marketing messaging you want to use to attract and engage that audience. One way to achieve this is to ask for the sales teams’ commitment to reinforcing the branding messaging and for their ideas on deliverables.

It’s ideal if all parties understand the roles each team plays, their goals, and how they operate, at least to some degree. For example, be clear about how the marketing team will support the sales team (e.g., how they’ll allocate the leads that they generate) and what the sales team will do with the resources the marketing team develops. This transparency can reduce some of the competitiveness between the two groups.

Invite members of both teams to staff meetings and solicit feedback on a regular basis. If the sales team can only manage 10 leads per week, the marketing team needs to create tactics that will help achieve that. Giving them 100 leads per week without warning them would be counterproductive and causes additional friction.

If you don’t ask, you won’t know

Salespeople are on the frontline. They hear all the objections and the praise. They know the types of challenges that their customers are facing because they’ve specifically asked about them. They also have a good idea about how to effectively speak to your target market because they’ve honed their sales pitch after successes and failures. The marketing team should use that knowledge to their advantage when developing content.

In addition to generating leads and building brand awareness, a critical role for marketing is to arm the sales force with information that they can use to educate themselves. The marketing team shouldn’t make assumptions about what the sales team needs; they should ask. And they shouldn’t be offended if the sales force doesn’t feel there’s value in a certain type of marketing material. There is no point producing something that is unlikely to be used, as the resources of doing so would simply be wasted.

But sales should be honest about deficiencies. I worked with a client that had a fantastic product and great marketing, but they weren’t seeing sales. We went back to the drawing board and developed new messaging, deliverables, and sales training to overcome customer objections (beyond the typical “make it cheaper”). After the “relaunch,” they started seeing better results. Providing customers are open to it, marketing should participate in customer sales meetings, where they can actually ask the customers how they’d like to receive information.

Break down barriers between the two teams

It surprises me how siloed the sales and marketing teams can be when they have the same objective: to make money for the company.

It’s essential to eliminate the red tape and bureaucracy that prevent these two teams from collaborating. Ways to achieve this include increasing the time they spend together; creating opportunities for them to communicate, share ideas, and brainstorm; and discussing what is and isn’t working. And then celebrating successes together.

All this helps to build trust and cooperation while ensuring that everyone is on the same page and knows how to support the overall business goals and reinforce the messaging.

Ramp-up communication before and after a campaign

When you are launching a new product or campaign or promoting an event, step-up communication even more. For many organizations, the communication process slows down or stops altogether once the launch occurs. However, it’s critical that the two teams frequently engage in discussing how things are going and pinpoint tweaks that can improve the campaign or success of a launch. You need to ensure that you keep the dialogue going.

In summary, bringing your sales and marketing teams together is key to success. However, depending on how fractured the relationship between the two is, it may be a slow and difficult process. So, if you find you are struggling to end the war between your sales and marketing teams, I’m ready to help. Contact me today .

Wishing You A Happy and Safe July 4th Celebration!

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Sat, 04 Jul 2020 03:37:16 GMT

On behalf of Gray Matter Marketing, we want to wish you and your families a happy and safe July 4th. It's been a stressful first half of the year, but we all need to stop and cherish the relationships and things around us.

Hoping the second half of 2020 is more peaceful and successful.

Beyond the Logo: Your Brand is So Much More Than Eye-Catching Design

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 23:06:08 GMT

Beyond the Logo: Your Brand is So Much More Than Eye-Catching Design

Thought-provoking trademarks and slogans, well-designed logos and websites, and sophisticated-looking marketing materials tell the world that your business is official and ready to provide services or products. These elements indicate that you are both professional and successful enough to invest in important assets. Still, your brand identity is so much more than just a snazzy logo and complementary color scheme.

David Ogilvy described a brand as “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes.” When thinking of your company, have you created a brand promise that resonates with your stakeholders? Are you reinforcing this promise at every touchpoint to help guide your customers’ (potential customers) perception? Are they emotionally connected to your brand enough to motivate them to purchase your solution and tell their friends and colleagues to do the same?

If you can’t answer yes to all of these questions, I’d recommend you implement some of the below strategies.

Develop your brand identity

The essential first step is to outline what you want your brand to be. Whether you are building a brand from scratch or relaunching your existing one, start by answering some questions:

Who is the target customer for your business, what matters most to them, and what do they expect from you?
What promises are you making to the customer, and are they easily understood?
What ultimately do you want to do for your customers that other organizations don’t (differentiators)?
What are the current perceptions of you? How do you want to be defined?
How do you want people to talk about your organization (internally and externally)?
How do you want existing customers and prospects to feel when they have experiences with your business or brand?

Answering these will help you flesh out how to present your brand to the world and form the foundation for your value proposition, messaging, operational strategies, and culture.

Live the vision

Once you have a sense of what your brand identity currently is or what it should be, it’s time to start reinforcing that vision in everything you do. If you’re not, you are just making empty promises, and when that happens, your stakeholders will create a different brand for you through social media chatter, reviews, word of mouth, etc.

Fulfilling your brand promises involves every aspect of your business, so as you strategize how to move forward with your branding or rebranding plans, keep the following in mind:

Take an honest look at your current situation . Do you have the technology, capabilities, resources, and qualified people to fulfill your promises? If not, you have two choices: shore up those areas or scale back your promises. It’s not always easy to admit that your culture, processes, or people need an overhaul, but for many organizations, it is necessary to turn things around or continue to grow. Engage various stakeholders in these discussions to ensure that you have a complete analysis before launching the brand internally and externally. Be willing to make changes, even sweeping ones.
Ensure internal audiences understand the plan . Every employee, contractor, investor, or anyone else who represents your company should know your values, mission, and messages and understand exactly what they should be doing to support the brand. If you promise, “We’ll treat you like family,” and your customer service reps are curt and impatient, you’re breaking a brand promise, and people will lose confidence in your brand. Offer plenty of ongoing training to ensure stakeholders can consistently support your branding. When onboarding new employees (no matter their title or role), ensure that they understand the messages as well.
Unify sales and marketing . In many corporate cultures, the sales and marketing teams work in silos. Or worse, they see one another as competition. As a result, there isn’t enough collaboration and cooperation. Every salesperson in your organization should view the marketing team as an asset and resource (and vice versa). Bring the groups together to discuss how well the organization is doing at fulfilling your promises. Ask them to work together to find ways you can do better. Ensure that your sales team understands how to fulfill the promises the marketing team is issuing and ensure the marketing team understands what the sales team needs to achieve their goals. And when you’re fulfilling your brand promise, celebrate successes through case histories, press releases, social media posts, etc.
Engagement is key . In today’s world of social media and online reviews, if your company isn’t engaging with customers when they have positive or negative things to say about you, your brand may be tainted. Have a plan in place for addressing criticisms and execute on this plan professionally and quickly. Just deleting negative comments won’t make the problem go away. When you receive positive reinforcement, share these both internally and externally to remind everyone who you are as an organization.
Don’t stop striving for perfection . Will you ever reach it? Probably not. However, you can continuously work to improve. Talk regularly with staff to ensure that everyone plays a role in fulfilling your mission. Survey customers for feedback on how well you are meeting their expectations. Measure and monitor performance, such as customer complaint metrics, and be quick to respond to negative trends. The most successful organizations proactively seek out potential issues and work to prevent them before they impact the bottom line. Ask for employee feedback on how the company can better live the brand and try to implement these ideas to keep everyone engaged. There’s nothing better than employee brand ambassadors who live the dream every day.

Ultimately, your logo and design choices are the icing on the cake, the visually appealing part of your brand, but not the substance.

Are you feeling stuck about where to go with your branding strategy? We can help. Contact us today so we can discuss your business goals and vision .

Choosing the Right Marketing Support

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 23:47:38 GMT

Choosing the Right Marketing Support

In a recent post , I talked about how critical it is to keep marketing to your customers/potential customers, even when it seems like you should pull back because of budget concerns or you’re going through some sort of upheaval.

I firmly believe that during times of change, distress, or disruption, it’s especially important to step back, take a look at what you’ve been doing, and ask the age-old questions “Is it working and can it be better?”

While I may be biased, I see tremendous value in having an “outsider” conduct an assessment of your marketing strategies and deliverables and, if you don’t have a plan, help create/hone your messaging and tactics. This strategy is important even if your marketing team is amazing, but especially if they want to try new ideas or correct old problems. And most definitely if you have no, or a small, marketing group.

That’s when a marketing agency or consultant can offer an unbiased, untainted perspective and evaluate your brand, plan, and collateral and determine if your marketing is helping you achieve your business goals.

But there are so many agencies and consultants. How do I choose?

This can certainly be challenging. Every marketing agency or consultant is going to sell you on their services and, because it’s what they literally do for a living, they are going to be convincing.

Choosing the right marketing option depends on your business, what expertise you need, and even the connection you feel with the person(s) with whom you’ll be working. It is a highly personal choice, but after working in the branding business for a couple of decades (on both sides of this situation), I’d recommend you consider a few things.

Does the agency/consultant offer you a personalized experience?

Some marketing companies sell a one-size-fits-all package that includes the exact same tactics—to every client. This may work for some people, but if your business is unique, your marketing strategy should be too. The marketing tactics and branding outreach that work for other organizations might not work for yours, and you shouldn’t force it.

So, make sure the group you choose is willing to spend time upfront learning about your business goals, products, or services; audiences; and challenges. That’s the only way they will be able to develop a strategy that gets results.

Are they knowledgeable about your industry?

Is it absolutely essential that the agency/consultant has experience in your industry? Not necessarily, providing they are willing to put in the work to learn about your markets thoroughly or have contacts who can assist throughout the campaign. However, it does make the whole process much simpler and more efficient if they have upfront knowledge.

Adding an outside marketing team with a deep understanding of what you do and who you sell to can offer powerful insights that can avoid wasting time and money on tactics that don’t work. In addition, you can dramatically shrink the time it takes to get the agency up to speed and start work on your marketing strategy faster. That means you’ll see quicker results.

Does their process/plan Include an internal messaging aspect to it?

You may have great, well-thought-out customer-facing branding and marketing strategies. But if the stakeholders within your organization don’t understand the message, and just as important, don’t support it, it will be much harder to be successful.

The best agency/consultant ensures that sales, customer service, and other departments in your organization understand your strategies and know what role they play in ensuring they’re fulfilling marketing promises at every level.

This one is really important. Make sure you put in the effort to gain internal buy-in—whether it be through the development of sales kits or internal launch events or pulse checks once a campaign starts—to ensure customer engagement.

How flexible are they?

Most agencies/consultants have some tried-and-true practices or processes on which they rely. However, again, your business is unique, and the best marketing companies should customize their services to fit your budget and timeline. They’ll provide you with the right amount of expertise and manpower to develop and execute your strategy, nothing more and nothing less.

Finally, the right agency/consultant will stick with you for as long as you need support, whether that’s just to step in and help you run a single campaign or to execute a full-on product launch. Don’t be forced to pay for options you don’t want, just because that’s how the agency/consultant packages their services.

Of course, you want to look at their portfolios and evaluate their web design, print design, and copywriting shops. And you want to get a handle on how successful they’ve been, but much of that can be a result of trends and fads that come and go. The best marketing support can figure out how to match your style and voice.

I would suggest that these four factors (Personalized Experience, Industry Knowledge, Internal Messaging, and Flexibility) are non-negotiable—at least, if you want to avoid regrets later.

Are you looking for marketing support? At Gray Matter, we offer fully customized branding and marketing services to meet your specific business needs. Contact us today so we can learn more about you .

Strategic Marketing Alliance Expands Capabilities

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Thu, 28 May 2020 03:57:03 GMT

Highway 9 Consulting and Gray Matter Marketing are excited to announce a strategic alliance to offer a more comprehensive range of services and further enhance marketing results for clients. By combining the complementary strengths and offerings from both firms, this unique partnership gives clients access to additional expertise and capabilities throughout the branding, marketing, and sales enablement lifecycle.

Highway 9, Houston’s Industrial B2B HubSpot agency, helps clients use HubSpot’s marketing automation technology to acquire, cultivate and close B2B Industrial buyers. Highway 9 is led by Kevin Brady, a 30-year sales and marketing veteran with a track record of developing high-performing sales teams. Unlike traditional marketing agencies, Highway 9 has decades of specialized domain expertise in industrial technologies, helping deliver lead generation campaigns that engineers and scientists respond to.

Gray Matter Marketing combines years of branding and identity experience with a tried and tested methodology for successful launches to help customers create engaging connections that shape perceptions, transform businesses, and drive profitability. With hundreds of branding and launch campaigns under their belt, Gray Matter’s owner, Wendy Gray, and a hand-selected team of professionals tailor marketing and brand strategies to fit a client’s pace, budget, and resources to achieve optimal ROI.

“Wendy and I have worked on projects together for over five years and have developed and executed successful marketing plans at every turn. This is the right time to formalize our relationship so that we can produce more integrated and complete campaigns for our clients,” says Kevin.

“The Gray Matter Marketing team could not be more thrilled about the expanded relationship with Highway 9,” said Wendy. “By combining a proven track record of strong branding and launch strategies with enhanced marketing automation and digital lead generation, we’re providing clients with a more comprehensive offering that will help optimize their marketing spend, especially important in today’s environment.”

For more information or to schedule a free consultation, visit either company’s websites at www.hwy9sms.com or www.graymattermktg.com .

Why You Can’t Stop Marketing During a Financial Downturn or Crisis

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Thu, 28 May 2020 03:52:54 GMT

Why You Can’t Stop Marketing During a Financial Downturn or Crisis

In a crisis, whether it’s a large-scale economic turmoil or business-specific troubles, organizations are often forced to make decisions to stay relevant until better times emerge.

Over the years, I’ve seen too many organizations immediately gut their marketing budgets and curtail sales team activities to improve profit margins or increase cash flow—and it is always a huge mistake.

As a business owner myself, I fully understand the need to cut costs when profits are falling, but I cannot emphasize this enough: Parking your marketing plans or stopping marketing activities altogether will prolong your pain for a number of reasons.

You run the risk of disappearing in your customers’ minds

If clients or prospects don’t hear from you for a while, they could assume your business has gone under or can’t meet their needs anymore. They may also turn to a competitor who grabs their attention while you were missing in action.

In situations where your salespeople may be grounded for a while, your marketing efforts may be the only way to get your message out and perhaps correct things that your competitors are saying about you. Even if it’s at a slower pace, you need to keep communicating with customers so they know your company is surviving the crisis and is prepared to help them once the market improves.

You may have to start over

When it’s all said and done, you may have to relaunch your business and rebuild your brand awareness. For companies you never targeted, that might not sound like that big of a deal, but what about the ones already in the pipeline?

You may need to rebuild prospects’ and even customers’ trust if you stop communicating with them. They are going to wonder why they haven’t heard from you. They would question the stability of your organization if you had to quickly eliminate business-critical activities, like marketing, to stay afloat. It puts doubt in their minds about whether they should do business with you. It will also cost a lot more to catch up, especially if your competitors are still “out there”.

You miss opportunities to help people—and your business

Regardless of what is going on within your organization or the world in general, there are businesses or people who could benefit from your product or service. Widespread crises tend to change people’s and businesses’ buying habits, needs, and priorities in ways that you would never think of.

If you stop marketing and engaging with the market, you miss opportunities to find prospects who weren’t on your radar before the crisis, but who now need your business.

The answer: Keep marketing to maintain your relevance

You must connect with your customers on a regular basis. Social media, email marketing, and digital marketing assets, like whitepapers or blogs, for example, can be cost-effective ways to continue providing information to customers and prospects. The frequency depends on your relationship with your customers and how much content you can develop and post.

Here are a few tips to consider:

Audit your customer-facing materials. Organizations who plan marketing messages in advance or who reuse and repurpose materials will need to evaluate them carefully before sending them out again. Messaging that comes across as too marketing, canned or tone-deaf/uncompassionate during an economic downturn, crisis or pandemic should be revised.

Additionally, make sure you can still meet your pricing, shipping, discount, and other promises you’ve put on your website and in marketing collateral. If you can’t, you need to update it. That could mean eliminating or reserving for later direct mail pieces and giving your website a refresh.

Stay focused on your value proposition. In your messaging, tell clients specifically how your product or service benefits them and how you’re providing that value better than the competition. Make sure you’re following your customers and competition (either on social media or pick up the phone and ask/listen). By staying engaged with the market, you can adjust your message to be more impactful.

If a widespread crisis is impacting your audience, talk about how you can help them weather the challenges. If your business is the only one going through tough times, keep the message focused on what you can do for them that others can’t.

Revisit your branding message. A crisis is the perfect opportunity to think about how well you’re meeting your mission statement and fulfilling promises to the customer. Consider whether it is time to reinvent your brand and create a new marketing strategy that better aligns with where you are now—and where you want to be a year from now.

The good news is that crises end, and with the right attitude and strategy, businesses can navigate the challenges and survive the downturn. For some very savvy businesses, they even come out better on the other side.

If you would like to discuss your marketing challenges, we are happy to offer guidance. Contact us today.

How to Launch Virtually “Anything” Successfully

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Thu, 28 May 2020 03:50:33 GMT

You have a great solution that you think will solve your customer’s (and potential customer’s) problem(s) and you’re ready to share this new (or overhauled) company, brand, product, service, or process with the world. What next?

First, it might require retooling how you think about launches. One of the biggest misconceptions that I’ve come across as I’ve helped launch more than 300 “things” over the past 25 years—launches aren’t one-time, one-day spectacular events.

In fact, in my experience, successful launches typically take place over a 12- to 24-month period. They require a great deal of planning and investment to lay the groundwork. Once your solution is officially launched, it requires tweaking and adapting to ensure you are reaching the
right people, with the right message, at the right time.

It’s important to get the launch right because it’s more than just introducing something new to customers and prospects. It can build brand recognition, grow your customer base, help you compete more effectively. and give your sales a big boost.

So, how do you get it right? It’s so much more than trendy tactics and flashy promotions. It starts with a solid foundation.

Here’s some tips I’ve learned along the way:

Understand your audience
It’s shocking to see how many well-meaning organizations develop or revamp an amazing product or service without defining who it’s for—and without understanding if that customer will actually purchase it.

They believe so much in the idea that they’re convinced someone will want it, but they don’t think through who that customer will be. It’s a big mistake, and it’s why at Gray Matter, we spend so much time helping our clients define their target customer and understand buyer personas.

From the very beginning, you need to outline who will want whatever you are launching and why. Define the customer’s challenge or problem, and how your company, product, or service specifically solves their problem better than anyone else. Once you’ve done that, determine the best way to reach that audience. It’s not the same for everyone. For some market segments, social media is a gold mine, others, not so much. It’s important to tailor your strategy to your specific audience.

Early on, develop a thorough market and competitive analysis, perhaps as part of a business plan. But—and I cannot emphasize this enough—draft some initial messaging points and marketing promises that will speak to your target customer. Throughout the development phase
of your offering, revalidate this information with sales personnel and other stakeholders to ensure that your messaging describes how your product solves the challenges in a different (and better) way than your competitors.

This level of preparation early on can keep everyone on the same page and help ensure that when you are ready to launch, your product fulfills your marketing promises and meets the needs of customers. It’s ok if your message and campaign tactics change several times before you launch as you learn more from customers. For example, you may find that your solution offers additional benefits that you were unaware of when you first created it. Of you may learn that your solution is designed for a different audience than you first anticipated.

Work with marketing experts
Engage a marketing team early in the development process, whether you choose an existing team, build a new one, or hire a consultant. Marketing experts can bring a different perspective to the discussion. Some may have worked on other projects with the same buyers meaning some of the research has been completed.

Marketing experts can be instrumental in developing—and sticking to—a marketing plan with objectives, goals, and a budget. But they can also offer valuable insight that can be helpful such as features the audience wants or the challenges they face. They can identify issues that may make the new product, service, or idea hard to market, giving everyone time to develop counter points.

Additionally, marketing experts can secure market data, coordinate customer interviews, and perform product testing. They can uncover opportunities, such as sponsorship, advertising, public relations and more to market the launch—even up to the last minute.

Prepare to market
If you wait until after you are ready to share the product or service with the world, it will likely be too late. Make sure you have the proper channels in place to effectively market to your audience, whether that is via direct mail, email social media, or a combination of them all.

Start developing a marketing plan and deliverables a minimum of six months before you are ready to launch. Give customers a hint of what is coming and build anticipation and excitement. If you are a brand-new company or you haven’t done much marketing in the past, increase your
exposure by building your email list and social media followers. This latter part can take months, so don’t put it off until the last minute.

When you create your marketing plan, think about different ways you can reach your buyer personas—that could mean creating/updating your website, content assets (case histories, multimedia, white papers, etc.), and a publishing calendar to support the launch. Include dates to ensure everything is finished, printed, and shipped if necessary, in time for the launch.

Communicate thoroughly with internal audiences
A “wow” event and tons of advertising is awesome if you can afford it, but what’s more important is that every stakeholder in your organization is prepared to support the launch. Prior to the launch, give clear guidance to sales and other customer-facing personnel on what can be communicated externally so you’re not “leaking” too much information and losing your launch momentum or alerting your competitors to what you’re doing.

Additionally, arm your sales team with a playbook that contains information they need to overcome objectives and sell against the competition. Provide your service teams with the detail they need to support your brand promises. Include employees in other locations, even if you won’t be launching there right away to keep everyone in the loop.

Offer frequent updates and ongoing communication about developments and successes to maintain excitement over the launch.

Ensure you can handle the best-case scenario
Most people spend time planning for the worst-case scenario but neglect to think about what happens if the launch is a massive success. What if you blow past sales targets? What if you experience a spike in demand and have more leads than you can process? It’s critical that you have the infrastructure in place to handle orders, manage shipping, produce more inventory, and address customer service issues. While you want to be conservative, you need to ensure that you can keep up with supply and demand if things go well.

Spend some time thinking about the situation you will be in and the outcomes of a best-case scenario and plan accordingly.

At Gray Matter Marketing, we’ve executed more than 300 successful launches—and we’re ready to support your next launch. Contact us to schedule a consultation.

Welcome to the Gray Matter Marketing Brainwaves Blog

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Thu, 28 May 2020 03:38:07 GMT

Welcome to the Gray Matter Marketing Brainwaves Blog
Proven advice for discovering and selling your brand identity

At Gray Matter Marketing, we’re all about supporting our clients for the long haul. We partner with them to discover their brand identity, guide them in developing marketing messages and strategies that reinforce that brand, and then help them execute those strategies internally and externally, for as long as they need us.

So much of what we do is about developing the right processes and tools—within their timeline and budget—to help them reach profitability faster.

We want to share the knowledge that we’ve gained through 25+ years of supporting businesses with others. So, the idea for this blog was born. In it, we’ll share our best marketing advice, client success stories, words of wisdom from experts in the field, and much more.

So be sure to follow us on LinkedIn so you don’t miss a post.

As always, please reach out if you’d like to discuss your own branding and marketing strategy. We’re here to help. Contact us today.

Remembering Those Who Have Sacrificed

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Tue, 26 May 2020 03:59:56 GMT

To my father and every individual who has served this nation selfishly, I wish I could shake each of your hands (I know that’s taboo right now but worth it). Thank you for your service and your sacrifice ensuring I have the freedoms I do.

I’m forever thankful on this Memorial Day.

10 Tips for Developing Successful Online Events

wendy@graymattermktg.com (Wendy Gray) — Sun, 19 Jan 2020 14:51:58 GMT

Despite the disruptions brought about by COVID since March 2020, event entrepreneurs have managed to not only pivot but also thrive. Online events are now seen as normal and perhaps a more efficient way to put together events and scale attendance with fewer logistical hurdles.

Even as protocols are loosening, and we learn how to attend live events (with certain restrictions) again, there are still audiences that want to attend on-line or hybrid events. If you are planning an event (whether a small company webinar or a bigger industry conference), here are 10 tips to consider to be successful.

1. Define the Purpose of the Event

As an event planner, you need to understand the purpose and outline why you are putting together the event. Are you targeting existing customers of a brand or trying to reach new audiences? A lead-generation event will have totally different content when compared to an existing customer engagement event. Mixing the two audiences will water down your event. The purpose will also determine the format. A product launch or exhibition will require proper production and professional camera work to truly have the impact it intends. A discussion where attendees are expected to contribute needs proper chat tools and a reliable connection.

Once you have the purpose defined, develop a list of key performance indicators.

2. Narrow Down the Audience Persona

Event planners, whether of online or in-person events, should understand the audience persona since it determines everything. The type of content to be shared and speakers to be invited will depend on how savvy the audience is. An audience made up of industry experts will require experienced speakers who can break down an emerging issue or persistent problem relevant for the audience. Customers new to a product need complex concepts to be explained in a manner that they can identify with. The audience persona also determines the timing of an event because of their personal schedules. It can’t hurt to survey your potential audience members to determine if you’re heading in the right direction with regards to location, timing, and agenda.

3. Pick the Correct Event Format

Sometimes the purpose of the event might be such that several event formats seem like a good fit. For instance, a discussion on an industry problem could be either a social media livestream or a recorded webinar. It’s up to the online event planner to consider the pros and cons of each format. The planner should also use their creative license so that each event they produce has something unique about it. There is a temptation to go for what other event planners are doing but trying out new things might lead to your event having a unique selling point. You can certainly create a hybrid event that is a mix of online and in-person if that makes more sense for your audience.

4. Get the Right Speakers and Program

Giving value to your audience must always remain the primary goal for an event planner. As such, you need to take time to carefully curate speakers and develop a quality agenda for every event. There should be a good mix of knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm to bring your event to life. If you receive speaking requests from speakers, take time to check out their profile and judge whether they would be suited for the event in question. A speaking appearance at your event is seen as a stamp of approval for them. Research their work.

5. Write Good Copy for Your Event

No matter how good the event is, you need to put the word out correctly. You might enlist the services of a copywriter to help highlight your event’s selling point using the most engaging verbiage. The copy on your website, event poster, or email invitation should nudge people to sign up. This also applies when trying to find speakers for your events. The wording of your message should highlight the things the speaker considers as important—the chance to reach a new audience, share a platform with other profile speakers, and the opportunity to discuss something they are passionate about.

6. Promote Your Event

To properly sell your event, you must be aggressive but also strategic about how you do it. Initially, organizers can get events listed on platforms such as Eventbrite. If you are planning to build an event brand, a landing page is crucial to helping audiences quickly find information and share with other people. The next place to promote your event is on social media. Post about the event early enough and frequently, making sure to highlight its value points. Be sure to engage your employees and speakers (and perhaps sponsors), asking them to share details of your event with potential attendees. Have some fun with it and think outside the box.

7. Hold a Practice Run and Using Easy Tech

Event planners should never unnecessarily use complicated technology. Pick a popular platform on which to host the event if it provides all the tools and features you need. The User Interface should be easy and intuitive for your attendees to use. If one platform allows unlimited session length at no charge, there is no need to hold the event on a premium platform if the former is widely available.

A few days before the event, invite your event speakers for a practice run to break the ice and to ensure every technical aspect checks out. This will save you the hassle and embarrassment of trying to resolve technical issues during the live event. Technical problems may cause the audience to feel as if their time was wasted, especially when the result is a cancellation or postponement of the event. It hurts your brand value.

8. Collect Feedback Post-Event

Be sure to ask stakeholders to provide their thoughts on your event immediately following the event. Prepare a survey for attendees, speakers, and sponsors. Get to know what they liked, what they did not like, what you could have implemented differently, and any other thoughts they might have. Surveys to speakers and sponsors are important to continue your relationship past the event and to create opportunities to work together in the future. Feedback from sponsors is also useful when attempting to crowdsource for your next event.

9. Evaluate Your Event

A review of the event should happen after you receive feedback from stakeholders. Some things to look at include the number of attendees, the amount of engagement received, the buzz that the event generated, and business leads received. It’s also crucial to consider whether attendees stayed for the whole event or if there was a drop-off at some point. If the latter is true, carry out an analysis to find out why.

10. Repurpose Your Content

As pointed out earlier, some event organizers build an event to become a brand asset that can earn attendance revenue as well as sponsorships. One way to advance this strategy is to repurpose content from the event and use it as resource material on social media or websites. For instance, if a presenter does not mind sharing their slideshows, this can be used to build up an email list. The event planner can also summarize presentations through blog posts. Sound bites are exceptionally great for sharing on social media to show people what they missed.

Online polls for attendees can also be used to create nostalgia by getting people to vote for their favorite speakers or segments from an event, which can be used to determine content for future events.

Potential Challenges

One of the key challenges facing event planners is to replicate some of the benefits that come with in-person events, such as networking and audience participation. However, with online events, the challenge lies in finding creative ways to do so while also determining platforms with the right features. Social media live streaming allows users to send in comments and questions, but audiences are easily distracted and there tends to be huge fluctuations in the number of people attending. Some platforms allow for polls, breakout rooms, and session feedback, all to keep people engaged.

Audience technology

Another challenge in online-event planning is varying audiences’ technology. The planner should use a platform that is available on all platforms—browsers and mobile apps; iOS and Android; etc. This maximizes the total number of attendees. The event planner must also figure out the right way to monitor important live metrics about their online event. Platforms such as YouTube allow content creators to see the number of people streaming, the devices used, location of audiences, and so on.

Third-party value demonstration

When pitching online events to partners or sponsors, the event planner must be ingenious in demonstrating how the event represents value for the potential sponsor. Physical events have physical space for stands, banners, and the possibility of distributing merchandise to attendees. With online events, the event planner can bring the sponsor’s attention to the audience through mentions, giveaways, and product placements. This must be done smoothly so that the event remains as organic and valuable to the attendees.

Lack of security preparations

Online events can be easy targets for malicious attacks intending to either disrupt the event or simply grant access to non-paying audiences or competitors. Both can hurt the revenue model for the event or company brand. To prevent this, the event planner should only rely on reputable platforms that have no history of breaches. The platform should also enable the storage of event data event after it ends. If possible, the tech-vendor should have integrated a payment mechanism with the access control system to make the entire process shorter and more intuitive for attendees.

Need help with event management?

Although online events may never fully satisfactorily replace physical events, it is possible to produce them excellently and give value to attendees. Event planners must take time to define the purpose of events, curate a list of relevant speakers and performers, and promote the event to engage customers. They must pick the correct event format and host it on an appropriate platform that allows for audience engagement. If an event needs sponsors, the company should be clear about the value the event gives to the sponsors. Sponsors are willing to put money in high-value production events with a well-selected target audience. The pitch, however, must be perfect.

If your organization needs help putting together an event (either online or in person), get in touch with Gray Matter Marketing . We can help you develop a strategy that brings your ideas to life while providing maximum value to your stakeholders. Our experience spans three decades of working on engaging events of all styles and sizes.

dhtc2378f13

Why Understanding Your Unique Differentiators Is Essential When Marketing

Why Understanding Your Unique Differentiators Is Essential When Marketing

Happy Holidays

On behalf of the entire Gray Matter Marketing team,

﻿ Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Sales & Marketing Strategies Every Company Should Be Embracing in 2023

Five Ways Conversational Marketing Improves B2B Sales Conversions

Grassroots Marketing: Why Is It Still Effective?

Seven Digital Marketing Errors and How to Fix Them

Tips For Developing Your 2023 Marketing Budget

Don’t Use Social Media? The 8 Reasons Why Your Company Needs It.

Does Your Web Content Lead to Conversions? Six Ways to Identify Areas of Improvement

Marketing Beyond the Brochure: 8 Marketing Strategies for Better Engagement

The Ultimate Guide to Incorporating Multimedia Marketing into Your Strategy

Types of Multimedia

Planning Your Video Marketing Strategy

The Budget

The Video Production Process

Preproduction Work

Website Building 101 for Your Business

Website Building 101 for Your Business

How Can Thought Leadership Impact Your Brand?

Bridging The Gap Between Sales and Marketing

Building Effective Content That Gets Used

Six Benefits of Working with a Marketing Agency Partner

Ten Marketing Metrics That Can Help Determine if Your Marketing is Working

Nine Marketing Trends to Watch For in 2022

Does Your Marketing Tell Your Brand Story? Eight Reasons It Should.

Small & Mighty

Eight Ways Small Marketing Teams Can Deliver Big Results

Seven Signs Your Web Content Is Hurting SEO Results

Seven Signs Your Web Content Is Hurting SEO Results (And What to Do About It)

Are You Creating Marketing Content That Engages Your Audience?

Tips for Developing Marketing Content That Wows and Sells

Defining Content Marketing Goals

Knowing What Content to Create

The Different Learning Styles

Sensory Preference vs Retention

1. Reduce the Cognitive Load of Your Content

2. Find the Shortest Path to Engagement

3. Develop a Meaningful Call to Action

4. Use Appropriate Keywords for More Engagement

5. Ensure Consistency Throughout Your Campaign

6. Take Time with Headlines and Intros

Conclusion

Create your brand, your way. That's our speciality.

What Building Blocks Do Startups Need When Marketing Themselves?

What’s The Importance of Brand Awareness?

Marketing Retainers vs Project Arrangements – Which Way to Go

Successfully Developing and Navigating Your Global Marketing Strategy

Successfully Developing and Navigating Your Global Marketing Strategy

Finding Opportunity in Disruption

Finding Opportunity in Disruption

Increase ROI and Accessibility through Technology Shifts and Trends

Increase ROI and Accessibility through Technology Shifts and Trends

Marketing Trends to Watch to Help Enhance Your Connection With Customers in 2021

Marketing Trends to Watch to Help Enhance Your Connection With Customers in 2021

How well do you know your audience and their challenges?

How well do you know your audience and their challenges?

Building Blocks to Foster Customer Loyalty

Building Blocks to Foster Customer Loyalty

Is Sales Enablement at The Center of Your Marketing Plans?

Is Sales Enablement at The Center of Your Marketing Plans?

Think You Need to Rebrand Your Business? Tips for Starting Over From Scratch.

Think You Need to Rebrand Your Business? Tips for Starting Over From Scratch.

Thinking About Creating Marketing Content? Ask Yourself These Things First.

Thinking About Creating Marketing Content? Ask Yourself These Things First.

Developing a Branding Strategy as Unique as Your Business

Developing a Branding Strategy as Unique as Your Business

The Importance of Leading with Your Marketing Strategy

The Importance of Leading with Your Marketing Strategy

The Rise of the Fractional CMO

The Rise of the Fractional CMO

Marketing Best Practices for Small Businesses

Marketing Best Practices for Small Businesses

Social Media 101 for Small Businesses

Social Media 101 for Small Businesses

Improve the Bottom Line by Reducing Friction Between Your Sales and Marketing Teams

Improve the Bottom Line by Reducing Friction Between Your Sales and Marketing Teams

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year