Marketing Blog

It is getting down to the nitty-gritty now. Whether you are going to Modex or another big industry show, this is the time that you start to get nervous? I spend a fair time getting nervous before big trade shows too. So many logistics to think about, but what always cures anxiousness for me is action.

What actions can we do a few days before a show to make sure that we get the best ROI? You know, so you can look like the superstar you are.

Share the Plan: Make sure that everyone knows the plan. I mean everyone. The logistics coordinator, the leader of the show booth, everyone who will work in the booth, the CEO, everyone. Make sure all of your people have the message and the talking points down. Make sure everyone has a copy of the trade show planning documents, everyone knows how and where they get their trade show outfit. Everything.

Ensure that everyone knows the rules of the booth and the schedule. If you haven’t planned an all-hands meeting on the show floor, plan it now.

Plan for the unplanned: Something always goes wrong with trade shows. Always. No matter all the assurances, something will break. So how do you plan for that? Well, you don’t, but make sure that you have options for everything.

Electronics: Make sure have duplicates of all the cords you need. HDMI cords, power cords, a universal remote, whatever.

Tools: Make sure if you have all of the tools that you need to assemble. Good to go? Now check again.

Restaurants: Even if you are not planning for dinners after the show, do some research on some places to dine. Pick some venues that will work for different audiences. An intimate dinner for a few CFO’s is different from a low-key bar to take the members of your industry press.

Schedule: People get pulled away. Sales, engineering, R&D, even marketing. Things come up. Have backups on your schedule if at all possible to fill any holes.

Contacts: Make sure that you have the contact numbers of all the people that are working the booth. That includes cell numbers, emails, Facebook contact, anything you can get. Trade shows get hectic so make sure you can get in touch with everyone on the team.

Oh and not just the people who are working your booth, but also the contact information for your trade show house (if you have one).

Back up: Make sure that you have someone at HQ that you can radio for help. Whether it is that a salesperson forgot their cards, or you need more brochures, whatever. However, keep in mind that they can’t do everything.

A colleague relayed this story, let’s call him Scott. He received a frantic call the day of a trade show from the on-site trade show lead, let’s call him Bill.

Scott is in North Carolina; the trade show is three states over.

Scott: “Hello,?”

Bill: “Hey glad I got a hold of you. I am on this show floor, and it opens in 10 minutes!”

Scott: “OK…”

Bill: “The backing fell and I need a screwdriver!”

Scott: “OK….?”

Bill: “I need a SCREWDRIVER!”

Scott:, “OK, look down the aisle to the left. Is there anyone there?”

Bill: “What, yeah, all of the other exhibitors are there.”

Scott: “Ask if one of them has a screwdriver. I am 300 miles away.”

My point is HQ can’t solve everything. Take a second and think of how to solve a problem before immediately making a call. It will take 30 seconds and might save you from looking insane.

Capitalize: Make sure that you have a plan in place on what to do with your leads. Also, all of the collateral that you will send to people that visit your booth needs to be handy.

Ensure that you have emails prepared to send to people that visit your booth and that you have a person that knows to send them.

Photography and Video: Remember to take all the pictures you can of your booth, your people, everything. You can’t recreate it. Capitalize on it when you have the chance.

Want more advice about trade shows? Download our free guide to trade shows here.

As a marketer, I dig inbound marketing. And when I speak to salespeople whose marketing teams use inbound marketing, they really, really, really like inbound marketing.

Why would sales care about what marketing strategy you use? They care because the inbound marketing strategy works and it gives your sales team precisely what they want.  Just a hint: they don’t really want leads. (Stick with me here).

When you use inbound marketing, your sales teams can spend more time closing sales and less time in business development and qualifying.

Get Leads that Are Ready: If you have ever been in sales, you know the excitement of getting a hot lead. You also know the disappointment of realizing that it wasn’t a “real” lead but just someone who was kicking tires.

Like we said, salespeople don’t want leads. They want sales. And leads are only the first step to getting a sale. The second step is an opportunity. We define opportunities as leads that have a budget and a need that your solution can solve.

So sales doesn’t really want leads, they want sales that come from opportunities and those start with qualified leads. Good news, inbound marketing gets you qualified leads or MQL’s (marketing qualified leads). How does that happen? Let’s look at content marketing.

Marketing Qualified Leads:  One of the tactics of inbound marketing is content marketing. With content marketing, you create a variety of pieces that educate potential customers and illustrate benefits of your solutions. Each piece you design may appeal to a different buyer persona and have various benefits to possible buyers of your solutions.

This means that not only does sales get an MQL, but they also find out the interest points of potential buyers. Did they read an infographic about your solution vs. others in the market? Did they download a case study about what you were able to do to solve a particular problem for a customer?

That is gold to your sales force.

In addition, the content that you create appeals to people in different parts of their journey. Some content will appeal to a person who knows they have a problem and is looking for a way to solve it. Some of your content further down the funnel will appeal to someone who is ready to make a decision.

In essence, when you hand over a marketing qualified lead you not only give sales an MQL but you can also tell them what this buyer may be most interested in, and also where the prospect might be on their journey. 

Inbound is a Sales Enablement Tool: The compelling part of inbound is that with the help of the internet your customers are going about 60% of the way down the funnel before they even talk to a salesperson. Inbound helps fill in the gaps.

Let’s take the scenario where you give a lead to sales, but the prospect doesn’t buy. That’s not ideal, but it is OK. Traditionally we just cast off the lead and go somewhere else. But now you can put the prospect in a specific funnel that appeals to their demographic and buyer cycle. When you publish information that might appeal to them they automatically get that information.

So if they heat up again, marketing knows. And with more advanced inbound marketing automation your salespeople can know as well.

If you want to learn more about inbound marketing, you can download an intro here. Or you can request a demo, and we can show you something that is tailored just for you.

I recently started looking at home automation, and I got into it quickly. Bear in mind; this is years after Alec Baldwin began shilling for Amazon Echo. I never really saw the need for home automation, until I saw the need for it.

I have to admit I went a bit crazy on the subject, I am glad we have Prime for all the shipping!

That is how a lot of companies see inbound marketing. You keep hearing it is valuable but nothing has grabbed you about it, or you don’t have buy-in from the boss, or you have other projects that get in the way. Whatever. It has remained a “hmmm that would be nice.”

Here is why you should pull the trigger:

1. Your competition is probably using inbound:

Even if you aren’t using inbound marketing at least some of your competitors are. Why does that matter? Well, for a couple of reasons.

Inbound marketing uses content marketing as one of its key tactics, and most of that content is evergreen. That means that once you create it, it keeps plugging along being a conduit of leads for your competition. If you aren’t creating content of your own within an inbound marketing strategy every day, you are getting further and further behind.

Inbound marketing helps position you, pardon me, them, as a thought leader. In combination with the content marketing, inbound marketing leverages social media to push ideas out to the world at large positioning them as a company with ideas.

2. Your sales staff makes more money when they are selling.

Your sales staff is probably great, but how much greater could they be if they could focus more on sales. When I say sales, I mean actual sales. Not finding leads, or even dare I say…..cold calling.

Inbound marketing gives you a way to get leads. However, instead of just throwing everything over the fence to sales immediately marketing can develop those leads until they are qualified and ready to hand over to the sales team. That way sales isn’t just thrown a lead but a real opportunity. And your salespeople are making more money for the company when they are selling, right?

Inbound marketing can help sales stay on top of opportunities that didn’t pan out the first time. You can add them to a distinct funnel and when marketing creates a piece of content that might appeal to them they automatically get it. Your company and (sales team) are thought leaders when that person is ready to move forward again.

3. Your marketing team can prove ROI and pursue strategies that make money.

Even if you only have a marketing team of one, inbound can help your marketing efforts.

For one It can give you real ROI. Inbound marketing is one of the best strategies to get a real return on investment. Marketing teams can struggle to show KPI’s that move the needle but inbound gives you analytics that prove value.

With the use of automation, you get more time to work on campaigns instead of remembering to send out that email to those leads that downloaded your great new piece of content. You can market smarter, not harder.

If you are interested in inbound marketing, presumably you have tried other tactics. Maybe social media marketing or content marketing, video, storytelling, white papers, etc. The great news is that all of these fit into inbound marketing and the inbound marketing strategy helps them become more powerful.

If you want to learn more about inbound marketing get our Introduction to Inbound Marketing right here for free.

 

 

We know that reviews help your company. 

They act as social proof. If a prospect reads a positive review of your company, they are more likely to visit your site or contact you.

Reviews also help in the area of local SEO. In fact, a recent report from Moz shows that in 2017 reviews account for over 8%. So what is the best way to get reviews?

The best way is to ask for them.

Who do you ask?

Ideally, you ask people who are your clients or customers who like what you do.

The key to getting reviews is to make it as easy as you possibly can.

For instance, we made a template of how we ask for our reviews. Currently, we have a 100% response rate for this email because (well people love us) and we MAKE IT EASY.

Below is our template (feel free to steal it). The text in black is what we write in the email. The text in red are notes. Be sure to remove the red before you use this.

Hello Client,

I hope you and the family had a great Thanksgiving! (or Christmas or January or whatever)

I was wondering if I could ask you a favor? Could you take about six minutes (six minutes is pretty accurate. Also while 5 minutes can stretch to 10 minutes, six minutes by its specificity says that you mean six minutes) and give YOUR COMPANY NAME a review on Google?

It is a simple four-step process, and we walk you through all the steps below. (We even wrote a possible review below if you want to copy and paste it).

Emphasize how easy it is to do create a Google review. Even if your customers are not that technically savvy creating a Google review is fairly easy. 

Step 1: This link will take you to where you can review us. (To get this link just do a search for your company name in Google, find the write a review button and click it then copy the link)

Click Here

or drop this into your browser (add the raw link you copied). A pop-up should appear that asks if you want to review our company.

If the review popup does not pop up, you can see a button to the right of the screen that says “Write a review.” Can’t find it? Check out the screenshot attached. Attach a screenshot similar to this picture.

If your customer doesn’t use Chrome the review box might not pop-up immediately. However, you are so helpful you are going to be prepared with a screenshot of where to find the review.

Step 2: Login to Google (if you are not already) with any Gmail account. Pretty straight forward.

Step 3: Add a Review. You can then write a review or use this one that we took the liberty of creating. Go ahead if you want a create a review of your company. Concentrate on the things that your customer said about you, or the problem they wanted to solve.

Try not to go overboard though.

If there are any keywords that you want to rank for I would go ahead and put those in the review. By the way, DO NOT pressure clients to use your review. You want any good review that you can get even if it is not a perfect review.

Sample Review: We recently launched our professional services company, and 366 Marketing helped us build our branding and logo, as well as, our new website. While we are based south of Charlotte, in York SC, we need a national presence that reflects our professionalism. 366 Marketing helped us present ourselves as a cutting-edge solution to Fortune 100 companies.

Step 4: Press “Post”

That’s it.

Thanks for your time and if we can do anything to help you, please don’t hesitate to ask. Wrap it up and be thankful!

If your customers or clients don’t respond after the first email I think it is OK to send a reminder but don’t pester them, just move on and ask another client.

Would you would like more help with SEO or inbound marketing? You can contact us for a free assessment with actionable suggestions.

Perhaps you think we should have written an article about being scared of marketing ROI closer to the end of October, right? However, after listening to “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” and the reference to telling scary ghost stories I decided I could roll with this article in December.

So for our scary story, I wanted to talk about marketing ROI. ROI is frightening for a few reasons. It can be challenging to measure and can kill some favorite tactics. But the terrifying thing is that if you don’t measure it, you may be wasting time and effort. Remember that regular corporations ask, “How much does it cost”? Great companies ask, “What is the ROI”?How can we deal with ROI and not be scared of it? How do we get to the stage where measuring marketing ROI is something we look forward to, instead of dreading? That is our goal for the day.

What We Should Measure

There are ways that we can measure marketing ROI that make us look good and ways that we measure ROI that have actual results. Which ones are you using? Likes on Facebook are rarely something that gets the C-level excited. Looking for better and more accurate ways to measure marketing return on investment is essential.

Regular corporations ask, “How much does it cost”? Great companies ask, “What is the ROI”?

One of the best ROI metrics, in my opinion, are Marketing Qualified Leads or MQL’s. An MQL is a lead that is more likely to become a customer vs. your other prospects. There are a variety of demographics on the lead that you can do to determine who is more likely to become a customer. You can research your CRM or talk to sales to get their opinion. Or even better, do both.

After you determine what metrics you will use to measure your ROI then you need to set your goals. If you don’t set goals how will you know when you are hitting it out of the park?

Use Tactics that Create Better ROI

Did you know that marketing video is the number one tactic that marketers across the world use for the best ROI. What are you using to generate the best ROI?

Have you measured past campaigns and strategies to decide where you get the best ROI? Is it from content creation, video, live events or a combination of tactics?

Now start to focus on creating more of the campaigns that lead to success in the past. Instead of just doing a cookie cutter look at your tactics, see what you have learned and figure out a way that you can make them better.

Multiply Your Marketing Efforts with Tools for ROI

Use tools that help you maximize your ROI. Inbound marketing analytics and automation can help you measure your ROI and help you achieve the metrics you want. A good inbound marketing platform (we use Hubspot) can help you not only analyze your efforts but also give you plans to make it better the next time.

Inbound marketing also helps you capture and educate your leads, putting them on the road to consider your solution.

Want to learn more about Inbound marketing, get our Intro to Inbound Marketing here and see how it can help you with your Marketing ROI.

We have had success using inbound marketing for industrial companies for years. Just as a refresher inbound marketing is the process of combining smart content marketing plus software automation.

The goal of inbound marketing is a holistic, data-driven approach to marketing that attracts companies and converts them into lasting customers.

Aren’t you glad we started with the first definition?

So why does inbound marketing work for industrial companies so well?It is not because inbound marketing was necessarily built with industrial businesses in mind, but when we look for a good fit for inbound, industrial marketing checks a lot of the boxes. If we look at the customers we are trying to attract, and the way industrial sales work we can see why the inbound process works so well.

Let’s look at a few reasons why.

Sales cycle: The sales cycle for industrial marketing is at least a month and sometimes for more complex sales it can be three to six to twelve months.

Your customer must go from awareness of a problem, to consideration, to a decision. They are typically looking for information in the beginning. This need for information pairs well with the content creation side of inbound marketing. Industrial companies can work on regular content creation in a variety of mediums to help educate their customer in all stages of the decision-making process, not just consideration.

Also, the tracking of downloads of premium content (think, ebooks, white papers) that you create can also help educate customers and give your sales staff actionable leads. You know what your customers are downloading, and with the automation of inbound, you see when they visit and what pages of your site they find most interesting. This allows sales to hone in on where a prospect is in the sales cycle and how they can best present your company.

Sales amount: The sales amount from an industrial marketing customer also pairs well with the template for inbound marketing. Industrial sales above $5,000 require a certain amount of consideration from customers. I think there are very few industrial B2B sales that are less than 5k. In fact, I would wager that most are at least four to five times that amount.

With a sales amount in that range, you need to create content to differentiate yourself from your competition. You also need the automation that inbound affords so that you aren’t losing significant sales because you miss interested prospects.

In light of the sales amount, inbound fits well. You can demonstrate a high ROI with sales in 5,000+ range for industrial marketing.

Marketing Team: Industrial marketing teams are typically on the smaller side so they can benefit from inbound marketing. Whether your marketing team wants to do some or none of the program or wants to use an outside source to manage it all, inbound marketing gives a boost to your marketing efforts.

One of the best parts of inbound marketing for a smaller team is that it can allow them to focus on other parts of the marketing mix as well. The automation in inbound marketing also enables marketing to give robust reporting of metrics that matter to the executive team and sales.

Do you want to learn more about how inbound marketing can help your industrial company get more leads and convert those leads to sales? Download our Intro to Inbound Marketing.