Category: Featured

By Mike McDermott | Categories Blog | Featured | October 11, 2018

Targeted marketing can be a powerful tool, gaining new clients and keeping your current ones intrigued. We’ve all heard the age-old advice that says, “If they’ve bought from you before, they’re likely to buy from you again,” so you should keep your current and past clients at the top of your mailing list and keep them interested in your products and services. 

As useful and accurate as that advice may be, it’s only the beginning of your email marketing campaigns. You must acknowledge the possibility that your current and past clients may not continue to purchase from you. Grow your business and prepare for the future by continuously searching for new prospects, gaining new leads, and building up your clientele. One of the best methods of identifying new leads is to enter account-based marketing (ABM) lists. 

What is ABM and Why Should You Use It? 

Rather than marketing to the masses and treating each customer the same, account-based marketing strategically targets clients based on their individual needs. It personalizes marketing messages and techniques to each customer or customer segment to gain more interest and higher ROI. By targeting your efforts to specific accounts, you also have the advantage of choosing the customers that you really want to sell to, meaning that you’re likely to spend more time and effort personalizing your sales techniques for each of these companies. 

Highly-targeted marketing tasks that are required to build an ABM framework include more than sending emails and calling potential clients. It involves an investment of time to take a hard look at your organization and evaluate what your goals are and who you want to purchase from you. It means updating your website to ensure that your message is clear and relevant to those companies that you want to sell to and creating ads that are targeted and specific to the goals of your clients rather than generically applicable to a thousand different companies. It means personalizing marketing emails so they’re specific and relevant to your targeted clients. 

Three Steps to Build an ABM List That Works 

Once you’ve evaluated your organization and have a thorough understanding of who you want to purchase from you, it’s time to begin building your account-based marketing lists. These are lists of companies and clients (accounts) that you are specifically targeting. 

Step 1 

Begin by identifying ten prospects that you would truly love to work with. These should be companies that you honestly believe will benefit from your products or services -that you know you can do an amazing job for. Targeting companies this way helps ensure that you’re working with valuable clients and that you’ll maximize your time and efforts to win them over and keep them interested. 

So, how do you go about finding clients you want to target? You need to develop a strong strategy and analyze each prospect. Search within all the resources at your disposal and analyze the potential client as much as you can. Search social media and LinkedIn, run a competitor analysis, take a look at their core values and compare them to yours. Spend some time to really analyze and get to know them. 

Step 2 

Find the contact information for each prospect that you’ve identified. Check listings, make phone calls, and review their website. Identify the names of key players within the organization and find their phone numbers or emails and their areas of expertise. Research these people and familiarize yourself with them. When you finally begin to make contact, you should know who you’re addressing and what you can say to initiate a response. 

Step 3 

Send highly targeted messages to the prospects from your new account-based marketing list. Think about why you chose these companies. Why did you want to work with them? Who are they? What are their goals and obstacles and exactly what can you do to address their specific needs? Use this information to your advantage by editing your message so it’s applicable to the person who will be reading it. 

Think about the kind of contact that you’ll be making. If you’re sending emails, ensure that you have the right strategy in place to create effective business emails. Spend some time getting the wording right, keeping in mind that they’re busy people without much time to read through their emails. If you are making phone calls, remember to listen, decode their tone of voice, and be ready to edit your message if the situation calls for it.

We are expert strategists with the skills and abilities to perform in-depth industry and competitive analyses, assist in the creation and promotion of brand identity and inbound marketing and marketing automation services. The Bash Foo content marketing team constructs campaigns, develops content, and hosts and design high-quality websites. Our professionals are more than equipped to assist with your ABM implementation, from updating your website to helping you build your ABM list and create a strategy that will benefit both you and your new prospects. Contact us today to find out how we can help you succeed.

Sources:

Smart Insights: How to build an account-based marketing (ABM) target list

American Marketing Association: Ditch the Traditional Funnel: ABM Proves Marketing ROI

American Marketing Association: Best vs. Next Practices: Account-Based Marketing

By Mike McDermott | Categories Blog | Featured | October 1, 2018

If you don’t know what a long-tail keyword is or if they’ve never been a high priority, you may want to consider this fact: long-tail keywords make up about 70 percent of searches online.

However, before you try to implement them into your marketing strategy, it’s helpful to have a precise understanding of what they are, when to target them, and how to target them.

The Definition of a Long-Tail Keyword

A long-tail keyword is a long keyword phrase that is more descriptive and specific than other keywords. It is usually at least three words long (and often times longer than three words — sometimes even full-length sentences).

Example: 1952 gibson les paul guitar

If you look for this keyword in Google’s Keyword Planner, you’ll see this long-tail keyword has a low search volume but also low competition.

By their very nature — because they are detailed search phrases written by individuals looking for something specific — they are used to reach niche audiences who have a clear, specific goal in mind with their search effort.

The Benefits

• You will encounter less competition with long-tail keywords.
• Their specific nature brings in traffic that’s more qualified. This means higher conversion rates.
• It’s easier to rise in rankings for search engines because of the highly specific nature of the keyword and fewer competitors. And just because they are so specific with less competition doesn’t mean they’re not popular within a niche; which means you can still get solid, consistent traffic and conversions.

When to Target a Long-Tail Keyword

The following tips will give you a sense of when to target this kind of keyword:

• When you have a small budget: If you don’t have a big budget (or a budget at all), you can use a long-tail keyword strategy to get quicker, more effective organic results that won’t cost you a penny. On the other hand, if you do have a budget, long-tail keywords tends to be less expensive with their cost per click for paid advertisements, so they will save you money even in paid campaigns.
• When you’re struggling in search engine rankings: If you set up your SEO title and description (your metadata) properly, visitors looking for long-tail keywords will see your result and know right away if your content is relevant. This means you’ll be getting traffic that stays on your page and reads the content instead of immediately clicking back to the search engine results. Search engines notice when visitors stay longer and will reward you with better search rankings. Because long-tail keywords are so specific and relevant to a searcher’s goal, they tend to boost your rankings because you’re getting better quality traffic.
• When you have specialized knowledge of a product or issue: According to Google Data in recent years, the usage of first-person words such as “I,” “my,” and “me” have increased more than 60 percent. Search engine users are making their searches more personalized and treating search engines like personal advisers similar to how users search for answers to specific questions on Quora. If your business has expert knowledge about specific problems related to the product or service you offer, it’s time to target long-tail keywords that are asking detailed, expert answers to problems.

How to Find and Target Long-Tail Keywords

The following tips will give you a sense of how to target this kind of keyword:

• Use the ‘Searches Related To’ Function: When you enter a keyword search (try to use a phrase with a couple or more words) and scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will see the phrase “Searches Related To” when using Google. These other “related to” searches often bring long-tail keywords to your attention that people are searching for but aren’t finding much content. They are usually low competition keywords that need more quality results (which you can happily provide by targeting the keyword).

Note: Other engines such as DuckDuckGo.com have a similar function. When you search on Duck Duck Go, scroll down until the results end. Where it says “no more results, try…” you will see other related searches. Bing is almost identical to Google’s approach. After you enter a search and scroll to bottom you will see “Related searches for…”.

• Take Advantage of Autocomplete Functions in Search Engines: Google made this feature popular, but now every major search engine has it. Say, for example, you type in the basic keyword “gibson guitars,” the search engine will automatically display a drop-down menu with a list of other keywords (many of them long-tail keywords) that use the basic keyword you just entered. These are long-tail keywords that are already getting traffic, and it’s a great way to discover new long-tail keywords.
• Use Google Keyword Planner: Keyword Planner is a fantastic tool for finding long-tail keywords and figuring out which ones are low competition. After you set up an account, go to the Tools section called “find new keywords.” Enter a basic keyword relevant to your desired topic or product, then look for long-tailed keywords in the results that are generated. You can also filter the results to show all of the low competition keywords at top.
• Target the Long-Tail Keywords: Make a list of good long-tail keywords with low competition and launch a campaign targeting all of them at once through a variety of methods: blogs, paid ads, video and social media content, or landing pages built and optimized for each long-tail keyword.

A Search For Hidden Gems

Finding and using long-tail keywords is similar to searching for and mining hidden gems. It can take some work and time, but when you find a good one it’s worth the trouble and wait.

If you’re looking for a partner in your search for hidden gems, Bash Foo knows how to take Search Engine Optimization and keyword targeting to the next level for businesses. Contact us for more helpful tips on long-tail keywords and keyword planning.

By Mike McDermott | Categories Blog | Featured | September 27, 2018

Tipp City, OH, September 26^th, 2018 – Bash Foo becomes the first Ohio digital marketing agency to join the Brewers Association as an allied trade/supplier.  The Brewers Association is the national association representing the interests of craft brewers and whose purpose is to promote and protect small and independent American brewers, their craft beers and the community of brewing enthusiasts as well as partnering with companies to provide essential resources and services to craft breweries.

“With the number of craft breweries in Ohio, I was very surprised to find that Bash Foo was the first digital marketing agency in Ohio to join the Brewers Association,” said Mike McDermott, President of Bash Foo.  “I feel that this is the perfect opportunity to engage with our current brewery clients, while also deepening our understanding of the craft beer industry. We have plans to share marketing best practices with members of the Brewers Association and further expand our relationship within the craft beer industry.”

Thanks to the Brewers Association, we know that Ohio ranks at #5 in craft beer production with 1,355,279 barrels of craft beer produced in 2017 out of 255 craft breweries. That’s nearly 5 gallons of beer for every of-age (21+) adult in the state.

“I feel that today’s craft beer consumer is looking for more education about what they are drinking, how it was brewed, and the story that each brewery has to tell,” said McDermott, “our job is to help these small craft brewers tell their story in a way that resonates with these consumers.”

About the Brewers Association

The Brewers Association (BA) is the not-for-profit trade association dedicated to small and independent American brewers, their beers and the community of brewing enthusiasts. The BA represents 4,800-plus U.S. breweries. The BA’s independent craft brewer seal is a widely adopted symbol that differentiates beers by small and independent craft brewers.

About Bash Foo

Using digital marketing, Bash Foo builds the online reputations of small business in affordable and inspiring ways. Our teams support your business objectives with creative web design, search engine optimization (SEO), and marketing automation services. Want to provide better marketing for your brewery or brewpub? Visit Bash Foo at https://bashfoo.com

By Mike McDermott | Categories Blog | Featured | September 13, 2018

You put a lot of effort into your business’s WordPress site. You’ve made sure the theme is perfect, written up some great content, and tested and retested your links. But what if there was one major task you were overlooking, one that could make the difference between great search engine results and being banished to the third page? It’s something called the .htaccess file, and if this little configuration tool hasn’t grabbed your attention lately, read on.

What is the .htaccess file?

This file is a distributed server configuration file and acts as a set of rules for your website and all of the pages and posts it contains. What does htaccess stand for? It stands for hypertext access and it can be found by accessing your apache web server site’s files via an ftp server and find the .htaccess file in the root folder of WordPress. On rare occasions, you’ll need apache web server software access to make changes to this file.

Why should you create a new .htaccess file for your WordPress site?

The reason the hidden .htaccess file is important in WordPress is something called permalinks. It is the way your pages are named on the world wide web. Think of the .htaccess file as a search engines road map of your site. You wouldn’t want to send Google or Bing down a wrong turn, would you? Some other important reasons for a strong .htaccess file include:

1. The .htaccess file routes your URLs, or your website’s pages.
2. If posts and pages aren’t named correctly, they will not be indexed correctly by search engines.
3. Some WordPress plugins can alter the .htaccess file without your knowledge.
4. You may not want all your pages to be indexed by Google. Examples of this include custom templates, author tags, tag pages, archives, or old pages.

Manually set your permalinks.

WordPress makes it easy to set permalinks to display the way you want them to without having to alter your .htaccess file’s code. It is one of the first things you should do when setting up your website. First, log in to your site’s dashboard. Navigate to “Settings”, and choose “Permalinks”. From here, you can choose how your permalinks will display. The choices are:

• Plain, which displays your URL like this: https://www.webpage.com/?p=123
• Day and Name, which displays: https://www.webpage.com/2018/08/11/name-of-post/
• Month and Name, which displays: https://www.webpage.com/2018/08/name-of-post/
• Numeric: https://www.webpage.com/archives/123
• Post Name: https://www.webpage.com/name-of-post/
• You can also choose to create a custom structure.

Backup your .htaccess file.

If you’re ready to jump into editing your .htaccess file, always make sure there is a backup of your old .htaccess file. Do this before any alterations of any kind are made. A few very simple ways to backup your file is to download it onto your computers hard drive, or rename the original file by right clicking on it and naming it .htaccess.bk.

After your file is backed up, make a copy of the file. You can then make any changes you like to the copy.

How to access your .htaccess file in WordPress using Control Panel.

Log in to your WordPress control panel and navigate to the file management section. Click “File Manager”. Select “show hidden files” and select the public_html root. Find the .htaccess file and right click on it. Select “edit”. You can also edit the file using an ftp client or by downloading a WordPress plugin made specifically for that purpose. Several popular SEO plugins have a way to edit the .htaccess file in their features section.

What are some popular changes to make in the WordPress .htaccess file?

Here are a few tips and things you can do to optimize your .htaccess:

• Redirect URLs. If the URL has been altered, it’s important to include a 301 redirect. You can use 301 redirects to direct a page, post, or the whole website.
• Block include-only files. This function allows you to block pages that have no purpose.
• Hide directories. A simple piece of WordPress code can block access to main directories and all its sub-directories.
• Ban IP addresses. There is an option to block questionable IP addresses, and you can turn it on with a bit of code added to the .htaccess file.
• Limit image hot-linking. Altering your .htaccess can ensure that no one can hotlink images on your site except you.
• Fix duplicate content. Duplicate content hiding on your site can negatively effect your search engine rankings.

It’s easy to make these changes and others to improve the performance of your web site and optimize your .htaccess file for the best search engine results possible. For instructions on the code required, contact us.

If all this sounds a bit complicated, don’t worry. Our professionals have been helping businesses large and small get the most out of their web sites for years. To get help crafting the perfect .htaccess file for your business, just get in touch. We can make sure everything about your company’s website is optimized for the best search engine results possible. For more great SEO tips, check here.

By Mike McDermott | Categories Blog | Featured | August 24, 2018

The art of effective and satisfactory marketing has changed a lot in the past few decades; most notably from a primarily ‘outbound’ set of tactics to the new and much softer inbound method. Inbound marketing is all about creating a place potential customers will wind up and inviting them to join your services. Ideally, the inbound marketing has done its job when people visit your website, see your call to action on blogs and videos, and at least consider hiring your service if and when they decide they need something. However, this does nothing for your sales metrics and makes minimal use of the potential connections created by inbound marketing. That’s where the email list comes in.

Creating Leads with an Email List

What is the difference between someone who reads your blog and a ‘lead’ in classic marketing terms? The lead is someone who could reasonably be assumed to be interested in your products. They’re (hopefully!) amenable to being sold an item or a service. They are who sales agents focus on and it is through them that marketers measure their success. The best way to count your leads is by collecting contact information and email addresses from online visitors who have admitted genuine interest in your industry, products, or services. Once you have the addresses, you can use email/mobile marketing to keep tabs, offer deals, and work on conversions.

The key, of course, is to actually get people to sign up for your mailing list. While there are many ways to semi-trick email addresses from your visitors, the best and most effective tactic is to actually offer them something of value in return for joining your email list. If played correctly, your growing number of leads and sales team can both get what they want from the deal.

1) Interesting Mailing-List Content

When people give you their email address, they know sales are going to send them junk mail; that they will get company updates, seasonal offers, and other things that are generally regarded as junk mail or spam. So why would leads share their email address with you? Because you have something valuable to offer. The most important thing to remember is to not wear down your leads with ‘spam’. Instead, custom tailor every message to be interesting; have some entertainment or educational value for your official leads and mailing list readers.

Tell industry stories, give useful maintenance tips, or even detail DIY projects that your readers can safely try at home. If you’re a more technically or financially oriented company, give lifestyle, savings, or best practices advice that can be used by your email list readers to improve their lives. These tactics make the emails you send individually valuable and therefore well worth joining the mailing list.

2) Personalized Discount Opportunities

The vast majority of discounts, coupons, and special offers sent to people on business mailing lists are ignored and relegated directly to spam folders without ever being looked at or noticed. Let’s face it: if your plan is to entice subscribers with seasonal sales, very few are going to sign up. Personalized deals, on the other hand, are an entirely different matter.

Most of the time the frustration with coupons is that they’re for things we don’t want or need. But with the power of modern data analysis and AI assistance, your marketing team can examine the buying habits of members on your email list and choose exactly the right discounts to offer them to tempt interest and close a sale. You can drastically increase the popularity, appeal, and success of discount-earning mailing list. You can even quickly customize the service for new customers by asking them to take a quick quiz.

3) Customizable Website Accounts

One pattern that is undeniable online is that there is a big difference between how eagerly a customer shares their email ‘just because’ or to join a email list, and how quickly it’s entered to make an account. If you really want to turn your visitors into long-term customers, make creating accounts quick, easy, and simple. You don’t even need to have a service they can manage online, simply a way for clients to log in, personalize their profiles, and create a continuous customer service record under their own names and contact information.

Once you have a visitor converted into a ‘member’, whether for personalized deals, great email content, or for the member shipping discount, they have absolutely become a ‘lead’ even before the first item is bought and they convert to a full-blown customer.

4) Helpful Downloadable Packets

Finally, let’s talk about downloadable content. A lot of people use the opportunity to download ebooks and information packets as their temptation for leads leaving an email address or joining the mailing list. Unfortunately, companies with little creativity or information to offer have soured a lot of the consumers to this idea as the ebook you sign up for turns out to be a half-page infographic that could have been thrown together in half an hour.

This isn’t to say that downloadable content is out; you just have to make sure it’s valuable and be willing to give first-time subscribers a sneak-peek to prove you’ve got the goods. Remember that it’s not worth downloading if it’s less than 2–3 pages and the content had better be good. You also don’t want to start sending ‘spammy‘ emails after enticing visitors with useful information so your best bet is to create an in-depth series of downloadable content ranging from in-depth industry stories to best practices to scientific studies depending on the interest and technical level of your audience.

Building an email list of leads and keeping them happy is a lot more difficult than it sounds. It’s certainly more complex than it used to be. With the switch from outbound to inbound marketing, leads need to be coaxed and entertained just like your public audience and you can’t assume they’ll stay ‘caught’ just because you have an email address. For more lead gathering tips and tricks, contact us today!

By Mike McDermott | Categories Blog | Featured | August 10, 2018

SEO is the lifeblood of digital marketing; it goes so far beyond simple inbound tactics that it’s hard to express. SEO should be woven into every word and drop of content on your website or posted under your brand name. Even content hosted on third-party websites needs to be optimized. Search engine page ranking is one of the major points of digital marketing success because it is the gateway to drawing in more leads and conveniently providing exactly the content, products, and services they need when they need them. This is the key to leads, conversions, and brand recognition. It is also constantly changing; thus, you need to keep your SEO fresh.

SEO is not a static set of techniques or a few simple keywords you can stuff into your content to “make it work”, it is a living algorithm that runs on organic human activity. The searches people type, the results they choose, and the decisions they make from that point are as much a part of SEO as what the search engines themselves decide matters for SEO. Likewise, the abuses of the system, the keyword stuffing and link buying that cause bans and changes to the algorithm are also a part of the online business ecosystem we all share. So how do you keep your SEO fresh??

How is a modern marketing team supposed to maintain the SEO quality of their entire website and online presence when the rules, trends, and best practices are constantly changing? It’s not easy, but we’re here to help with 10 ways to keep your SEO fresh and up to date.

1) Keep Up with Algorithm Changes

First and foremost, know what the current algorithms want. Search engines, primarily Google but others included, are constantly updating what causes a website to gain the highest page ranking. Sometimes these changes are in response to consumer trends. Usually they’re corrections of abusive ‘best practices’ which have developed to exploit some loophole allowed by the previous configuration. Arrange to get updates when the algorithm changes and prepare a strategy to accommodate those changes.

2) Make an Update Plan for the Entire Sitemap

The next step is to have a complete sitemap of your website plus an additional map of all the social media and third-party locations where your brand presence is maintained. Every single page on which your brand hosts or posts content is part of your SEO suite and will need to be updated when the rules change or when your brand enacts a new strategy. There’s no bigger rookie mistake than getting penalized for a legacy SEO tactic that has since been banned

3) Correct Old Examples of Keyword Stuffing

SEO takes a while to get the hang of and almost all SEO learning curves start with keyword stuffing. Unintentional stuffing is a simple matter of clumsiness, of not being used to working keywords organically into your content. But keeping your SEO fresh is all about constantly updating your content to the best tactics you know today. The first use of your update map should be to check all older content and smooth out clumsy examples of keyword stuffing into better organic phrases and uses.

4) Write New Content Organically

Once you get the hang of writing content organically, never go back to the keyword stuffing style. Rather than simply finding places where your target keywords can “fit” into the content you were already going to write, challenge yourself to write organic content that accommodates the keywords instead. Keywords are lead magnets for a reason; your target audience wants to read about content that revolves around them. By writing organically, you will find yourself producing more content that your audience really wants to read.

5) Integrate Multi-Media Into Your Pages

SEO now relates to a lot more than just the text on your pages. It also reads the dynamic design of your pages and multiple forms of media have become increasingly popular. Integrating podcast audio content and social video content is a great way to revitalize the material you already have. Consider ways to make videos and audio content for what you have already written.

6) Calculate For New Keywords Monthly

Another thing that many businesses and organizations forget about SEO is that your target keywords can and will change. While some things like your location and product names will remain consistent, the trends and current interests of your target audience are not in stasis. People change, society changes, the seasons change, and the keywords you should be targeting will morph with these changes. Keep track and do regular keyword research if you really want to keep your SEO fresh.

7) SEO for the Seasons

One of the keyword changes that occur on a predictable cycle are the seasons. Every season comes with new interests and concerns for your target audience. The temperature and weather, home maintenance and holidays, work and vacations happen in cycles and your content should cater to the issues that are at the top of your audience’s minds.

8) Re-Write Popular Older Content to Keep Your SEO Fresh

When content you write or record is popular and gets a lot of traffic, you know you’ve hit a chord with your target audience but old SEO rewards new content over old content with the assumption that old content is outdated. If you have content that has done very well in the past, don’t be shy about re-writing it in a new fresh way with the current SEO best practices in mind. This will bring back the draw of your original content and boost today’s SEO value.

9) Bring Activity to the Website

Many businesses keep the majority of their audience engagement and activity on social media and this has some value, but it doesn’t actually help your web pages appear at the top of search results. Use social media and other semi-outbound tactics to draw activity to your website and build your website content in a way that promotes interactivity. Bring more browsing, page changing, reading, and discussions to your website and you will gain SEO ‘points’ for activity and web page popularity.

10) Get Relevant with Current Trends

Finally, don’t underestimate the power of trends. There are two ways to follow trends with content and social media activity; only some brands get the technique right. Rather than ignoring the trend or jumping on the bandwagon with the same ‘me too’ responses of the overall internet community, add your own twist. If you’re a dentist, write content about the dental impact of the latest fad diet. If you’re a home decorator, write about how to decorate with the latest sustainability trends. Turn the trends to your own industry, give them a new perspective, and you will get all the benefit of both the hot keywords and generate interest in the relevant expertise you have to offer.

For more great inbound marketing tips, tricks, and trends — or if you’d like us to help keep your SEO fresh — contact us today!

By Mike McDermott | Categories Blog | Featured | July 23, 2018

Imagine a sales process that integrates so elegantly with the marketing department that every week your team has a strong and reliable flow of qualified leads to work through.

Ok, now step off that cloud number 9 and start getting real with yourself. That has never happened for you and your organization, so why even pursue the thought?

Sales enablement by the marketing team can certainly happen. But, we recommend checking in with the C-class leadership of your organization to make sure they are on board. The first thing on order by your Marketing team will be properly funded campaigns.

What we commonly hear:

Thing is, that budget may not even be large enough to capture views in a single metro area like Chicago, IL let alone the entire country.

To capture the eyes and more importantly the hearts of hundreds of millions of Americans, your brand will definitely need more than a cool grand to get started. That is why it is critical to get with the business owner and/or company executives to make sure that the sales goals in their head match up with the marketing efforts your team will be expending.

More ways to look at your stuff

After your leadership team buys in (literally) to the marketing campaign, understand where their near-term work will be. Spoiler alert! It won’t be where you may want it to be. The marketing team will begin by widening the sales funnel. Put simply, adding MORE ways for people to look at your stuff.

Creation of email campaigns, landing pages, sales pages, social media sites, backlinking strategies, product recommendation pages/sites, etc. All these methods are part of the madness of marketing your product/service more effectively.

Tighten up your stuff

Then the marketing team will work to tighten up your stuff. As more people look at and consider it, the marketing team will observe product objections, sales page abandonment, unsubscribes, and other forms of “thanks but no thanks”.

Consider a new logo. If that’s not in the cards, try re-branding with new colors and a catchy byline. Marketing your old product in new ways means getting creative and pulling on the heart-strings of the consumer. Is a charity interest involved? Do you “give back”? Are you “eco-aware”? This is a no-stone-unturned type of exploration that while it may be confusing at first, really can deliver the clicks and calls the sales team is looking for.

Softball before hardball

The sales funnel is a funny thing. The sales pitch that really works at the bottom of the funnel is highly unsatisfactory at the top of the funnel. Bottom of funnel prospects are already informed about your product, have probably shopped around with pricing, and find your brand interesting and worthy of continued engagement.

Making assumptions that someone that just stumbled on your website (top of the funnel) already fully buys into your quality control, competitive pricing, and elite customer service experience is true folly. “Buy now!” and “Call now!” buttons are entirely ignored by these prospects. They need more information, competitive analysis, comparative analysis, talk of discounts/freebies, case studies and maybe even video walkthroughs before they fall lower into your funnel. All rolled up. They need the dreaded “Time to Consider”.

Handling “Time to Consider”

95% of all sales professionals HATE the idea of time to consider. Similarly, 100% of your leadership hates it too. The thing is… if you ask a seasoned sales professional what one of the most important weapons in their arsenal is, and they will tell you it’s the “Time to Consider”.

Handing over the reins (virtually) to your prospect to do their own inspection and qualification of you the product/service provider is key. It’s why we don’t like heavy-handed car salesmen. We like to do our own research on the product. Compare providers. Review options. Allowing your prospect enough length in their chain to do all of that, while still retaining dominance over them is what makes great salesmen sticky.

Digital product/service dominance

So, why are we seeing more sales online and fewer sales from brick and mortar retailers? It’s stickiness.

When effectively executed, a digital marketing campaign will first drop a cookie on each prospect’s electronic device. This cookie will serve to inform them of the prospects actions or lack of actions with their brand (and other creepy privacy related things).

The online retailer will deliver carefully authored emails to their inbox, querying them about their interest, delivering valuable information or discounts.

Their sales team will observe the activity each hour/day of these leads to see if any of them “bubble up” to become something worthy of a phone call.

When a prospect walks out of the retail store, you better darn well have had them sign up for a “buyer rewards program”, or something to get them to stick to you. If not, when they tell you “I’ll be back later today/tomorrow to buy this” what they really mean is “I am definitely going out to my car to buy this online using my mobile phone”. All to receive better pricing, sometimes better service, zero lines to stand in, and better availability of sizes/colors/formats.

Bringing it all around

OK, so this article started talking about sales enablement. Then I began to riff on what your marketing team must do to become an “enabler” instead of just a department that does some “not-sure-if-it-will-work” stuff.

So, as a member of the sales team, how can you have confidence that any or all this enablement stuff will work? Well, you should ask. Frequently. And emphatically. Because it matters to you (your paycheck) and the company that you work for.

• Metrics. Using digital metrics, you can observe the sales funnel, and if it is indeed widening. You can also observe to see if there are more leads going in this month than last month. More leads in the top = more leads at the bottom.
• Communications. One part of inbound marketing and marketing automation is that it creates communication triggers that are observable and quantifiable. Are the discussions you are having this month with leads MORE and BETTER than last month?
• Receive triggers. One of the most annoying parts of marketing is having a sales team that doesn’t proactively respond to triggers. You may be the sales executive that only wants to follow up on those purple unicorn prospects. The ones that stand up, yell, shoot off fireworks, and show up at your office with several duffle bags of cash. Problem is… there are so few purple unicorns out there.

If you truly want to understand your customer, and you feel like this is an important part of your job you’ll be shagging every lead that is set to trigger for you.

A high performing and effective salesperson will provide FEEDBACK to the marketing folks on what is working and what is not working, and in doing so you’ll become an effective sounding board for the prospects, making sure the next one that comes down the funnel with interest is less confused, more excited, and more willing to buy.

By Mike McDermott | Categories Blog | Featured | July 12, 2018

Marketing today in many ways has gotten a lot more complicated than marketing ten years ago. Before the inbound craze, B2C companies had billboards and television commercials. B2B companies handled almost everything behind the scenes with business connections and networking. Inbound marketing has opened up a whole new world of opportunities to B2B providers like manufacturing companies. It has also added a new layer of complexity to how marketing decisions are made. Here are some helpful tips about manufacturer inbound marketing.

B2B Manufacturer Inbound Marketing

A simple example of this is how different manufacturer inbound marketing is from classic B2C inbound styles. You’re not trying to appeal to the masses and having a ‘trendy’ online presence isn’t really going to improve your reputation and industry esteem with the businesses and inventory managers who are your true clients. While the tactics like using social media and short videos may still work for you, how you use them is wildly different from how B2B eCommerce, retail, software, and entertainment brands are going to do things. You’re looking for a few dozen reliable business partnerships instead of ten thousand consumer customers. Unfortunately, this also means that the vast majority of marketing advice out there is only minimally helpful.

Instead, your goal is to impress professionals, decision-makers in the business world who choose which products will be stocked on the shelves or even where their brand’s unique products will be manufactured. To apply the tenets of inbound marketing to this task, it’s time to start thinking like a client. What do your clients think about when they’re on the lookout for a new manufacturer? What are their pain points and what would be a major selling point in their decision-making process? We’ll give you a hint, it’s not how viral your social media videos are. When your audience is made up of professionals and serious brands, your manufacturer inbound marketing material should answer questions they want to know about their manufacturing partners.

How Much Per Pallet

We know, we know. Mentioning price in your inbound marketing content is practically a promotional faux-pas. But let’s face it, this is one of the deciding factors when a business is looking for a new manufacturer. You can bet they start with a list of requirements indicating if a manufacturer is right for their business. And it starts with the words “Within Budget”.

Every business decision has a budget. If the costs related with the choice repeat monthly or quarterly, it becomes part of overhead optimization as well. Find a way to work a rough estimate of price per pallet into your blog articles. It doesn’t even have to be a promotional piece on your products. Give friendly examples of what it’s like to be a customer; write an article on how efficient manufacturing keeps costs down. That’s the kind of affordability your clients want to hear about.

How Reliable Are Your Deliveries

One of the reasons a company might be looking for a new manufacturer is because a business they had partnered with in the past could not reliably meet their needs. Your clients will be counting on you to stock their shelves or supply much-needed parts for other purposes. This means the reliability of your service matters a great deal. Manufacturers with inefficient or inaccurate ordering processes and consistently late deliveries lose good business. This gives you the opportunity to snap up companies in need of a good manufacturer; one who can provide the right goods on time every time.

To convey this, we suggest writing articles highlighting the importance and processes involved with providing a reliable manufacturing service. Authority position yourself as the expert on reliable manufacturing and you will convey that your company delivers this every time.

Topics

• how much you value reliable service,
• how to identify a reliable manufacturer,
• best practices for ordering reliable manufacturer deliveries
• methods you use to ensure highly reliable service

What Regions Do You Serve

Everyone is online these days. This isn’t just a vast generalized statement. It’s an important point to remember; particularly when talking about any kind of business requiring a physical component like delivering manufactured goods. If your manufacturer inbound marketing is well-built and successfully draws in potential clients, it’s vital that you make it clear the regions you serve and those that are too far away for you to practically work with. Nothing is more frustrating than finding a great business opportunity with a company you like – only to discover that you’re a few thousand miles too far away to take advantage of the opportunity.

For this kind of solution, be sure to use local manufacturer inbound marketing techniques that put you on the map for nearby businesses and mention your regions of service often. Write about local business concerns and opportunities in your blog. SEO your website to make it clear exactly which area and neighborhoods you can deliver to.

Can You Make Custom Products

There are three different kinds of manufacturers. Those that make one or a small collection of necessary items that are universally useful to your target audience, those that only make items for their own brand and then sell those through retailers, and those that allow their clients to customize the products produced to fit their own brands.

If you are the third type that offers product customization, you are in a unique and powerful position for those clients who need to source a manufacturer to make a product they have designed and are ready to sell. Be sure to write a few articles about what kind of customizations can be made with the items you produce. Of course, if you don’t offer custom orders, making that abundantly clear is almost equally helpful so that potential clients know exactly the kind of deal they’re deciding on.

Do You Have Special Partner Deals?

Speaking of deals, not every manufacturer offers special deals to their customers but if you happen to net the interest of a high-volume client, you have every reason to offer them a special status as a business partner. Some manufacturers quickly identify their biggest customers, sometimes known as KAs or Key Accounts, and offer them special deals and opportunities based on their high volume of purchases. For the best leads out there looking for a lot of products from you on a regular basis, advertise that you offer special bulk discounts for high-volume business partners and watch the interest and money roll in.

One of the best ways to highlight that you offer special partner deals is to get permission to use your current business partner clients as examples. Talk about how you have partnered with a few big names, given bulk discounts, and worked together to optimize the benefit they get from your services. Other companies who want this sort of treatment will be more than interested in both your inbound copy and the opportunities you have to offer.

For more great manufacturer inbound and other industry-specific marketing tips, tricks, and trends, contact us today!

By Mike McDermott | Categories Blog | Featured | June 15, 2018

When executed correctly, with engaging topics, content marketing works beautifully within the context of inbound marketing. It draws visitors to your site, encourages conversions, and ultimately grows your business.

But all of that can only be possible if the content you write actually resonates with your audience. In other words, you have to make sure that each piece of content you publish is both high in quality and relevant for potential customers of your business.

That goal may be relatively simple to accomplish for social media, where short snippets and visuals tend to capture your audience’s attention relatively quickly. But what about longer-form varieties, like blog posts, webinars, and e-books?

Especially if you’re looking to optimize your content marketing for conversions, these types of content need to be a crucial part of your strategy. To give them the highest possible chance of success, here are 6 strategies you can use to find engaging topics for your content marketing.

1) Listen to Your Audience

Once you master this strategy, it’s the easiest way to generate new content. If you want to maximize the relevance of your efforts, your best strategy is to simply listen to what your audience would love to write or hear about. There are a few ways you can accomplish this feat:

• Pay attention to blog and social media comments. The most vocal members of your target audience will give you their thoughts and opinions in the form of comments on both previous blog posts and social media updates. They may have follow-up questions, or simply offer a judgment on the content itself. You can then use that content for future posts, specifically mentioning your impetus for going this route in future posts.
• Talk to your sales staff. Even those who don’t share their opinion publicly are likely to do so during a sales call. Your sales staff should be aware of the comments they receive most often, which can help you address common concerns and questions in the form of a blog post or long-form content.
• Engage in social listening. We’ve written in the past about the importance of social listening, the technique of monitoring relevant conversations around your brand or industry that don’t necessarily show up in your social media mentions. Only 24% of brands engage in social listening, so this is your chance to find new and engaging topics that others haven’t necessarily written about yet.

2) Need Engaging Topics? Jack the News!

There is no better way to grab your audience’s attention than to write about a topic they’re already reading about to begin with. In every industry, a steady stream of news gets published every day that may or may not be relevant to your brand and expertise.

Instead of recycling the same news items everyone else is already writing about, find the pieces of news most relevant to you and put your own spin on it. Relate its impact back to your audience to see your relevance soar.

3) Focus on Your Core Competencies

Sometimes, the best content comes from turning inward. What is it you think you know most about? Think more specific than an entire industry, and try to get granular. For example, you’ll see this blog focusing not on marketing in general, but content and inbound marketing specifically.

If you think you’ve exhausted the possibilities of your own knowledge, turn to other members on your team. Do they have specific areas of expertise that they would just love to share? In addition to getting more content, finding someone who is passionate about a specific topic also makes it easier to come up with great content for that topic.

4) Build a Content Series

If you’re looking to really go all out, try finding engaging topics that are exhaustive enough to fill in more than one slot in your content calendar. For example, start a blog series to discuss various topics within a general theme. Moz’s Whiteboard Friday is a perfect example.

The same concept can easily be applied to any type of content. For example, a webinar series can build your thought leadership over time while maximizing your lead generation efforts. Once you know the general theme, it becomes easier to think of and build out its individual pieces of content.

5) Put a New Spin on an Old Topic

Think of this as a way of recycling an oldie but goodie. Find a piece of content that performed well for you (or a similar source) in the past, and put a new spin on it.

Don’t just write the same essence of it again; instead, use your space to provide an update on where things stand now, delve deeper into one of the points you made originally, and more.

6) Branch Out

Finally, don’t be afraid to branch out. Sometimes, your audience wants to read about more than just the industry in which you’re targeting them. Remember that they don’t come to you because they want to convert. They come because they want to consume content relevant to them.

That relevance may extend beyond your core competency. Find out about your audience’s interests, then write about them. If you can connect it back to your value proposition, great; but if you write the occasional post that doesn’t, it can actually enhance the perceived variety of your content marketing efforts.

Using these strategies, you can begin to build a content marketing framework that both draws in your audience and drives them toward conversion. But of course, finding the right topics to write about is only the first step to building a successful and sustainable content marketing strategy.

Surprise: you also have to make sure that the content itself is great, and that it fits into your overall inbound marketing strategy. If you’re worried about accomplishing that feat, contact us. We’d love to work with you to elevate your content marketing efforts by helping you create meaningful, high-value content that your audience will love to consume.

By Mike McDermott | Categories Blog | Featured | May 25, 2018

In response to the GDPR or the General Data Protection Regulation passed by 28 EU nations and going into effect today, we released the attached update to our Privacy Policy.

This new policy was created to help define how we use our visitor data, and that users of our website have the ability to block cookies on our site should they not want to have us track them.

Download and View our GDPR Privacy Policy. 

Additionally, here is a podcast we recorded regarding this landmark regulation that affects any business that actively markets its products to others.

Listen to “GDPR Podcast – a 30 minute update on the largest privacy compliance law in 20 years” on Spreaker.

Thank you!

By Mike McDermott | Categories Blog | Featured | May 21, 2018

With advances in search engine technology over the last several years, search results have become increasingly personalized. Personalized results are terrific for the user, because they are more likely to get exactly what they want. If they get what they want, they are happy and will continue to use the search engine and often the business they have discovered.