Tech Channel Marketers Need Strategy & Agility to Succeed - Most Lack Both
Unlock the Power of Strategic and Agile Marketing for Tech Channel Success
Tech channel marketers can achieve success by mastering strategy, agility, and aligning marketing activities with organizational goals. A clear understanding of the difference between strategy and tactics is essential, as it enables businesses to create marketing plans that deliver both short-term wins and long-term growth. Embracing agility allows companies to rapidly adapt to market changes and capitalize on emerging opportunities.
Operating in today’s fast-paced and ever-changing technology landscape, tech channel marketing directors face the daunting challenge of staying ahead of the curve while delivering impactful results.
Amidst this whirlwind of innovation and competition, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the constant push to keep up. However, success in this high-stakes environment hinges on two crucial elements: a well-defined strategy and the agility to adapt. Unfortunately, many businesses struggle to strike this delicate balance, often focusing on short-term gains at the expense of long-term growth.
In this blog, we’ll explore the importance of strategic thinking and agility in tech channel marketing and how mastering these key components can lead to enduring success.
You Must Understand the Difference Between Strategy and a Tactic
To thrive in the competitive tech channel landscape, marketing directors must have a firm grasp of the distinction between strategy and tactics. Understanding this difference is vital for creating marketing plans that not only deliver short-term wins but also pave the way for long-term success. Here’s a closer look at what sets these two concepts apart:
Strategy
This overarching plan outlines how you’ll achieve your marketing objectives. It represents your long-term vision and serves as the foundation of your marketing efforts. Think of strategy as looking down the road, keeping your eyes on the horizon to anticipate future challenges and opportunities.
Tech channel marketing directors must strike a balance between strategic thinking and tactical execution. By keeping an eye on the road ahead, they can better navigate the complex and ever-evolving tech landscape, ultimately achieving enduring success.
Tactics
These are the individual actions and tools used to execute your strategy. Tactics are short-term, focused efforts that help you progress toward your strategic goals. In our analogy, tactics represent staring at your feet, ensuring you take the right steps as you move along the path.
To emphasize the importance of balancing strategy and tactics, consider these key points:
- Vision and direction: A clear strategy provides your team with a sense of direction and a roadmap to success, while tactics ensure you make the right moves at each step of the journey.
- Adaptability and resilience: A well-defined strategy enables you to adapt to market changes and maintain a competitive edge, while tactical agility lets you seize emerging opportunities and address challenges as they arise.
- Long-term success: Focusing on both strategy and tactics is crucial for driving sustainable growth. A strong strategy ensures your marketing efforts align with your organization’s objectives, while effective tactics help you make steady progress toward your goals.
The Benefits of Marketing Agility
In the rapidly evolving IT and tech industry, marketing agility offers numerous benefits that enable businesses to stay ahead of the curve and weather challenges. By embracing strategic thinking and agile practices, tech channel companies can adapt to changes and capitalize on emerging opportunities. Some of the key advantages of marketing agility include:
- Rapid response to market shifts: Agile businesses can pivot quickly and adjust their marketing strategies to accommodate market changes, ensuring they remain competitive and relevant.
- Improved collaboration: Agile organizations foster a culture of cross-functional collaboration, enabling teams to work together seamlessly and deliver superior results.
- Enhanced customer experience: By adopting an agile marketing approach, tech channel businesses can better understand and anticipate customer needs, tailoring their offerings to deliver greater value.
A prime example of the power of agility can be seen in how businesses responded to the pandemic. As organizations worldwide scrambled to adapt to remote work, forward-looking companies rapidly changed their outward (and inward) marketing strategies, and deployed collaboration tools such as WebEx Teams and Video, Zoom, and RingCentral Meetings to keep teams connected. This swift response allowed them to maintain marketplace awareness and trust, and amplify productivity and progress even in the face of unprecedented challenges. In contrast, businesses that lacked agility found themselves struggling to adapt and, as a result, faltered.
Tech channel businesses must prioritize agility in their strategic marketing planning to circumvent obstacles and seize opportunities. This enables you to shape your future and achieve real traction in the highly competitive IT sector.
How To Align Your Marketing Activities with Your Organizational Goals
To achieve lasting success in the tech channel, it’s crucial to align marketing activities with organizational goals. Building on the importance of strategic thinking and agility, here’s a step-by-step guide to ensure your marketing efforts are closely aligned with your business objectives:
- Set clear, measurable goals: Begin by defining specific, attainable, and quantifiable goals for both your marketing activities and overall organizational objectives. This clarity will ensure everyone is aligned and focused on the same targets.
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- Examples: Increase market share by 15 percent within 12 months, generate 500 new leads per quarter, or improve customer retention rate by 10 percent.
- Develop a comprehensive marketing strategy: Craft a well-rounded strategy that takes into account industry trends, competitor analysis, and your target audience’s needs. This strategy should outline the overall approach to achieving your marketing goals.
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- Considerations: Content marketing, social media, SEO, email marketing, and paid advertising.
- Create an actionable tactical plan: Outline the specific actions, tools, and channels that will be used to execute your marketing strategy. This plan should include clear timelines, responsibilities, and performance indicators.
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- Break it down: Content calendar, social media posting schedule, email campaign timelines, and advertising budgets.
- Foster cross-departmental collaboration: Encourage collaboration between your marketing team and other departments to ensure that marketing activities are aligned with and support broader organizational initiatives.
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- Collaboration tips: Regular meetings, shared goals, and open communication channels.
- Monitor and adjust: Regularly track the performance of your marketing activities against your organizational goals, making adjustments to tactics and strategy as needed to optimize results.
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- Key metrics: Conversion rates, ROI, customer acquisition cost, and customer lifetime value.
Tech channel businesses can effectively align their marketing activities with their organizational goals, ensuring that every effort contributes to the company’s overall success. This positions you to thrive in the dynamic and competitive IT landscape.
Charting a Path to Tech Channel Marketing Excellence
As we’ve explored throughout this blog, the keys to success for tech channel marketing directors lie in mastering the delicate balance between strategy and tactics, embracing agility, and aligning marketing activities with organizational goals.
By focusing on the road ahead and adapting to change, businesses can navigate the complex and ever-evolving tech landscape, ultimately achieving enduring success. It’s time to rise above the competition and harness the power of strategic and agile marketing to unlock your company’s full potential in the dynamic world of technology.
It’s time to elevate the tech channel’s marketing standards. Schedule a call and let us guide you on the path to success.
Tech Channel Marketers and Sales Teams Have Trust Issues
How Collaboration and Transparency Between Sales and Marketing Teams Can Supercharge Revenue Growth and Long-Term Success
Trust issues between tech channel marketers and sales teams can lead to a lack of shared understanding, missed opportunities, and decreased revenue growth. By improving communication, setting clear goals and objectives, implementing lead scoring and nurturing, and ensuring clean and up-to-date data, sales and marketing teams can generate high-quality leads and close more deals, driving revenue growth and long-term success for the company.
Imagine a bustling tech company where the marketing and sales teams work like two ships passing in the night. Marketing generates leads, but sales has no idea how they became qualified. Sales reps chase leads blindly while marketers pat themselves on the back for hitting their MQL targets. Meanwhile, the company’s bottom line takes a hit and tensions rise between the two teams.
In the tech industry, this scenario plays out far too often. Channel marketers and sales teams work in silos, causing trust issues between the two factions. Unfortunately, the lack of shared trust doesn’t just make for awkward Zoom conversations—it can negatively impact the business’ bottom line.
There’s a better way.
In this blog, we’ll explore the importance of a strong inter-departmental connection, examine how marketing and sales teams can work together, and provide practical solutions to overcome the trust problem.
Why Is Shared Trust Between Sales and Marketing Departments So Important?
Shared trust between marketing and sales is the foundation of a successful tech company. When both teams work together, they can generate high-quality leads, drive revenue growth, and achieve long-term success. Here are just a handful of wins that await organizations with harmony between sales and marketing:
- Efficient lead generation: Marketing teams need to understand the needs and preferences of the target audience to generate leads effectively. When sales reps trust marketing, they’re more likely to follow up on leads and convert them into customers.
- Improved sales productivity: Sales reps can spend more time selling when they have access to qualified leads from marketing. They can focus on building relationships with customers and closing deals instead of wasting time on unqualified leads.
- Increased revenue: When marketing and sales work together, they can create effective campaigns that target the right audience, generate leads, and convert them into customers. This results in increased revenue for the company.
- Long-term success: When marketing and sales teams trust each other, they’re more likely to work towards the company’s long-term goals. They can collaborate on strategies to drive growth and revenue and ultimately achieve long-term success.
Shared trust between marketing and sales teams is crucial for the success of any tech company. Without it, both teams may struggle to achieve their objectives, putting the company’s growth and revenue at risk.
How Do Marketing and Sales Work Together?
Marketing and sales teams must collaborate to create an effective lead generation strategy.
Marketing teams have a deep understanding of how to generate leads and create brand awareness. On the other hand, sales teams have boots on the ground, so they know the ins and outs of the company’s ideal customer profile, their needs, and the buying process. Together, they make an unstoppable team that can create campaigns that target the right audience, generate high-quality leads, and convert them into loyal customers.
Here are some ways that marketing and sales teams can work together effectively:
- Regular communication: Marketing and sales teams should have regular meetings to discuss the progress of lead generation campaigns, any issues, and feedback. This allows both teams to adjust and optimize the strategy continuously.
- Clear goals and objectives: Both teams should have clear goals and objectives that align with the company’s long-term goals. This ensures that everyone is working towards the same vision.
- Lead scoring: Lead scoring is a collaborative effort between marketing and sales. Sales teams need to provide feedback to marketing on the quality of leads generated, which helps marketers adjust and optimize the strategy accordingly.
- Collaboration on content creation: Sales reps know what type of content resonates with their customers, so they should collaborate with marketing teams to create content that meets their customers’ needs.
When marketing and sales teams work together effectively, they create a powerful force that drives revenue growth and long-term success. By leveraging each other’s strengths, they can create effective campaigns that generate leads, convert them into customers, and drive the company’s growth.
The Channel Marketing Problem: Trust Issues and Transparency Between Marketing and Sales
The lack of transparency in the lead generation process is one of the most significant trust issues between marketing and sales teams. The disconnect between the two can lead to missed opportunities, wasted time, and decreased revenue growth. Sales reps often have no view into marketing, leaving them in the dark about how prospects become qualified leads, and marketing teams may have a short-sided mindset of reaching their MQL targets, leading to unqualified leads being passed on to sales.
Here are some of the ways that this channel marketing problem affects the company:
- Wasted time and missed opportunities: When sales reps receive unqualified leads from marketing, they waste time chasing leads that will never convert. This takes away from the time they could spend closing deals with high-quality leads.
- Lack of trust between teams: When sales reps don’t understand how prospects become qualified leads, they lose trust in marketing. This can lead to tension between the teams, which ultimately affects the company’s growth.
- Decreased revenue growth: When sales reps waste time chasing unqualified leads, the company’s revenue growth slows down. This can lead to missed opportunities and decreased revenue growth, which can have long-term effects on the company’s success.
To overcome this channel marketing problem, marketing and sales teams must work together to increase transparency in the lead generation process. Here are some practical solutions:
- Clear communication and collaboration: Marketing and sales teams should collaborate on lead generation campaigns, and there should be open communication about the types of leads that are being generated.
- Quality over quantity: Rather than just reaching their MQL targets, marketers should focus on generating high-quality leads that are more likely to convert.
- Lead scoring and nurturing: Marketing teams should focus on lead scoring and nurturing, ensuring that only qualified leads are passed on to sales reps.
- Consistent feedback: Sales reps should provide consistent feedback to marketing on the quality of leads generated, which can help to optimize the lead generation process.
By increasing transparency and working together, marketing and sales teams can overcome the channel marketing problem and drive the company’s growth and success.
Understanding Lead Scoring and the Customer Journey To Optimize Sales Efforts
In today’s tech industry, the customer journey extends far beyond clicking a link or completing a form. Customers are more educated than ever, conducting extensive online research before making a purchase decision. That’s why it’s crucial for sales reps to understand the customer journey and implement lead scoring strategies to optimize their efforts.
Lead scoring is a process of ranking leads based on their level of engagement with the company, the fit of their needs with the company’s products or services, and their likelihood to make a purchase. By implementing lead scoring, sales reps can focus their efforts on leads that are more likely to convert and avoid wasting time chasing cold leads. Here are some lead scoring strategies to optimize sales efforts:
- Identify the ideal customer profile: Sales reps should work with marketing teams to identify the ideal customer profile based on demographics, needs, and pain points. This helps to focus their efforts on leads that fit the company’s target audience.
- Prioritize warm leads: Warm leads are more likely to convert, and sales reps should prioritize them over cold leads. Lead scoring can help identify which leads are warmer than others, allowing sales reps to focus on those with the highest potential.
- Understand the customer’s interests:It’s essential to understand whether a lead is interested in the company or the industry. This can help sales reps tailor their approach and messaging to the lead’s needs, increasing the chances of conversion.
- Educate the customer: The increasingly educated buying public demands more information about products and services before making a purchase decision. Sales reps should be prepared to educate leads on the company’s products or services, industry trends, and how the company can solve their needs.
By implementing lead scoring strategies and understanding the customer journey, sales reps can optimize their efforts, focus on the right leads, and increase the chances of conversion. It’s essential to work closely with marketing teams to ensure that lead scoring is accurate and effective, leading to long-term success for the company.
It’s a Sales Problem
The inability of sales teams to close qualified leads on a regular basis is a persistent problem that can be directly attributed to the lack of access to critical data. Without the necessary information, sales reps struggle to properly understand customer needs and preferences, resulting in lost opportunities and missed revenue.
Providing sales teams with easy access to relevant data allows them to make informed decisions, effectively engage with customers, and close more deals. In today’s competitive market, access to data is essential for sales teams to succeed and thrive.
Qualified Leads Aren't Being Closed Regularly
Sales teams constantly strive to close qualified leads, but this is no easy feat. Sales reps face numerous challenges that prevent them from achieving this goal. A lack of information or ineffective communication can stand in the way of success.
But fear not, there are solutions to help sales teams overcome these challenges and close more deals. Here are a few specific obstacles that sales reps encounter, along with some solutions to help overcome them:
Lack of information: Without the necessary information about a lead’s preferences, needs, and buying behavior, it can be difficult to close a deal. This challenge can be overcome by using customer relationship management (CRM) software that consolidates data from multiple sources to provide a comprehensive view of the lead.
Failure to follow up: Sometimes sales reps don’t follow up with leads as consistently as they should. This problem can be addressed through the use of automated follow-up systems, which send reminders and personalized messages to leads, making it more likely that they will convert.
Ineffective communication: Sales reps need to be able to communicate effectively with leads to understand their needs and explain the value of their product or service. One way to solve this challenge is by providing sales reps with sales training that focuses on effective communication techniques.
Sales Doesn't Have Easily Accessible Data to Close Deals
To close deals successfully, sales reps need the ability to access and analyze data. Unfortunately, sales teams often encounter a range of challenges that prevent them from obtaining and using data effectively. Here are some specific obstacles they face, along with potential solutions:
Data fragmentation: Data can be scattered across different platforms, making it difficult to access and analyze. To overcome this challenge, sales reps can use data integration tools that centralize all relevant data in one place.
Limited data availability: Sales teams may have limited access to data due to privacy or legal restrictions. To work around this challenge, sales reps can utilize data enrichment services to supplement existing data with additional information from reputable sources.
Inadequate data analysis: Sales teams may struggle to analyze data effectively, resulting in missed opportunities. One way to solve this problem is by providing sales reps with data analysis training that teaches them how to interpret and apply data to their sales efforts.
How To Repair the Broken Trust Between Marketing and Sales
For tech channel marketers and sales teams, building trust is particularly crucial due to the complex nature of their industry. Misaligned teams can cause significant losses in revenue—but with the right strategies, trust can be built and maintained.
Tech channel marketers and sales teams can begin by gaining a deep understanding of the sales cycle and the target persona. This involves knowing the customer’s needs, preferences, and pain points. By working together to develop content and campaigns that support the sales cycle, marketing can help sales teams close more deals.
To further promote collaboration, marketing should ensure that the leads passed on to sales are qualified and interested in the product or service. Automation tools can be used to streamline the process and reduce workload. Additionally, ensuring that data is clean and up-to-date is critical for building trust between the teams.
With these strategies, tech channel marketers and sales teams can repair the broken trust between them and achieve greater success.
Understand the Sales Cycle
To build trust between marketing and sales, it’s crucial to understand the sales cycle. This includes understanding the steps involved in the process, the challenges faced by sales reps, and the goals of the team. By gaining this understanding, marketing can create content and campaigns that support the sales cycle, leading to a more productive collaboration.
Know Your Persona
Marketing and sales need to be on the same page when it comes to understanding the target persona. This includes knowing their needs, preferences, and pain points. By understanding the persona, marketing can create content that resonates with the audience, and sales can tailor their approach to better engage with them.
Understand Where the Lead Is in the Marketing Funnel
Understanding where the lead is in the marketing funnel is essential for sales to close deals effectively. By knowing the stage of the buying journey, sales reps can tailor their approach to meet the lead’s needs and expectations. Marketing can support this effort by providing content that is relevant to each stage of the funnel.
Minimize Wasted Time for Sales
Wasted time is a major source of frustration for sales reps. To mitigate this issue, marketing can work to create a streamlined process for delivering leads to sales. This includes ensuring that leads are qualified and have expressed interest in the product or service.
Increase Efficiency with Automation
Automation can help to reduce the workload for both marketing and sales teams. By automating certain tasks, such as lead scoring and lead nurturing, the teams can focus on more high-value activities that drive revenue.
Ensure Data Is Clean and Up-to-Date
Data accuracy is critical for building trust between marketing and sales. By ensuring that data is clean and up-to-date, both teams can rely on the information to make informed decisions. Marketing can support this effort by regularly cleaning and updating the data in their systems.
Key Takeaway
There are far too many examples of siloed thinking in the tech industry, where opportunities are missed and revenue is left on the table. At 4B Marketing, we understand the challenges that tech companies face when it comes to channel marketing. We have lived in this world for more than 20 years, and we know firsthand the importance of building trust between marketing and sales departments.
Our team of experts is dedicated to helping organizations bridge the gap and foster collaboration to drive revenue growth. By leveraging our experience and expertise, we can help tech channel marketers and sales teams work together seamlessly to generate qualified leads and close more deals.
Don’t let mistrust stand in the way of your tech company’s success. Contact us to learn how we can help you build a more productive and profitable collaboration between marketing and sales.
Channel Partner Marketing Strategy: A Primer for Tech Execs
Are you a tech channel partner? Learn how to develop a successful marketing plan with our practical tips and best practices.
By identifying a target audience, pinpointing a UVP, creating engaging content and messaging, and tracking performance, tech channel partners can optimize their marketing efforts for maximum impact.
Strategic marketing offers a powerful approach for technology companies seeking to expand their market share and accelerate growth. With the appropriate resources and help, your IT company can rise above the competition with a genuinely differentiated message and strategy.
In this blog, we’ll explore the critical components of an effective channel partner marketing strategy and discuss how to align your approach with your overall business goals and objectives.
Let’s dive in and discover how your company can leverage marketing to drive success in today’s competitive technology landscape.
Understanding Channel Partner Marketing Strategy
Unlike traditional marketing approaches that focus on reaching customers directly, channel partner marketing leverages the marketing resources of partners to reach target customers.
This approach solves the problem of limited resources and enables technology companies to collaborate with partners like you and use your established relationships with customers. By working together, you can expand your and the OEM’s reach and drive sales more effectively.
Here’s a look at some of the benefits of channel partner relationships and strategies:
- Access to new markets: Channel partners such as resellers, distributors, and VARs open doors to new markets and customers OEMs might have struggled to reach on their own. This can help businesses expand their reach and drive growth.
- Leveraging partner expertise: Channel partners often have deep knowledge of their local markets and customers. Technology companies use this to develop more effective marketing campaigns.
- Increased brand awareness: Channel partner marketing can help increase brand awareness and build credibility for OEM’s. Creating joint marketing campaigns and other marketing materials helps businesses increase visibility and reach more potential customers.
- Accelerated sales cycles: Channel partners can help to accelerate sales cycles by providing OEM’s with access to established customer relationships and buying processes. This can shorten the sales cycle and reduce the time to revenue.
- Reduced marketing costs: Channel partner marketing can be a cost-effective way for technology companies to reach new customers and build brand awareness. When businesses share the costs of marketing activities, it decreases the overall cost of customer acquisition for both the partner and the OEM.
Key Components of an Effective Channel Partner Marketing Strategy
Creating an effective marketing strategy is critical for tech partners seeking to expand their reach and drive growth. But what are the key components of a successful strategy?
In this section, we’ll explore the essential elements of a marketing strategy, from identifying your target audience and unique value proposition to creating engaging content and tracking performance.
By understanding these key components, you can create a comprehensive strategy that delivers results for your IT business. Let’s discover what it takes to build an effective IT channel partner marketing strategy.
Identify Your Target Audience and Buyer Personas
To create a successful marketing strategy, it’s important to know your target audience and buyer personas. Knowing the demographics, behavior patterns, and preferences of your target customers helps you create more effective marketing campaigns.
Know Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
Your UVP sets you apart from your competitors. Identifying your unique strengths and value proposition goes a long way in crafting a compelling message that resonates with your target audience.
Create Engaging Content and Messaging
Engaging content and messaging are essential to a successful marketing strategy. When you implement content that aligns with your UVP and addresses the pain points of your target customers, you’ll have a better chance of increasing engagement and building trust.
Performance Tracking and Reporting
To ensure that your marketing strategy is working, you need to track and measure its performance. By analyzing metrics such as lead generation, customer acquisition, and sales conversion rates, you can optimize your campaigns and make data-driven decisions.
Optimize and Repeat
The final key component of an effective marketing strategy is to optimize and repeat your campaigns. You must continually refine your approach and build on your successes, as it helps you achieve growth for your business
How to Implement a Marketing Strategy
Implementing a successful marketing strategy requires a comprehensive plan that aligns with your overall business goals. Here are some key steps and best practices to consider:
Use Multiple Marketing Channels
Reaching your target audience and generating leads requires a variety of marketing channels and tactics. This can include events, webinars, newsletters, email marketing, social media, and sponsored ads/content.
Events and webinars provide an opportunity to engage with potential customers and share your knowledge and expertise.
Newsletters and email marketing are effective at building relationships with your customers and keeping them informed about your products and services.
White papers, case studies, and thought leadership interviews/content are powerful tools for educating and influencing potential customers.
Sponsored ads/content can help to increase brand awareness and generate leads by targeting specific audiences.
Track and Measure Performance
The success of your marketing strategy depends on how far you’re willing to go in tracking and measuring performance. This isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it situation.
You must regularly analyze metrics such as lead generation, customer acquisition, and sales conversion rates, and use marketing automation and ROI tracking and reporting tools. Making data-driven decisions and optimizing your campaigns based on performance maximizes your return on investment and achieves better results.
Implementing a successful marketing strategy requires a combination of strategic planning, effective communication, and data-driven decision-making. Following these best practices powers a comprehensive and effective marketing plan that drives success for your business.
How to Ensure Your Marketing Strategy Aligns with Your Overall Business Goals and Objectives
You must have a solid marketing strategy in place to reach your target audience and grow your business. However, to reap the full benefits of marketing, your strategies must align with your overall business goals and objectives. In this section, we’ll show you some practical tips and best practices for developing a successful marketing plan.
- Define your business goals and objectives: Your marketing program should support your company’s overall objectives, whether that’s increasing revenue, expanding market share, or launching new products and services.
- Develop a marketing strategy: This strategy should deeply consider your goals and objectives, the marketing activities you will engage in, and the resources you will need to execute your plan.
- Develop marketing assets: This includes marketing materials, blog posts, social media, and campaigns. Your marketing materials should be customized to your customer’s needs and be easily accessible to them.
- Leverage marketing automation: These tools can streamline marketing, help you track ROI, automate lead generation, and simplify pipeline management.
- Leverage channel incentives: Channel incentives like marketing development funds (MDF) are available to most partners to help them pay for marketing campaigns and initiatives.
- Invest in training and certification: Ensure that you are equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to effectively market your products and services.
Boost Your Marketing ROI with 4B Marketing
Ready to drastically improve your outcomes with strategic marketing? We’re here to help.
Our team has extensive experience in developing and implementing successful marketing strategies for tech channel partners like you. Here’s how we can help:
- Develop a customized marketing strategy that aligns with your business goals and objectives.
- Create marketing assets and campaigns that resonate with your target audience and support your marketing activities.
- Offer sales enablement and other resources to help you succeed.
- Leverage marketing automation and other tools to streamline your marketing program and track ROI.
Contact us now to schedule a consultation and discover how 4B Marketing can help you achieve your channel partner marketing goals.
The Reasons Even Top IT Companies Struggle to Market Themselves
Digital marketing is crucial for IT companies to hit their B2B goals.
But marketing requires many skills that don't come naturally to info tech teams.
Digital marketing enables IT companies to connect with potential customers via the internet and other forms of digital communication. Also known as online marketing, digital marketing utilizes blog content, email, social media, web-based advertising, and website copy, as well as text and multimedia messages.
Table of Contents
- Why Marketing is Important for Tech Companies
- What is Digital Marketing?
- What Happens when IT Designs Websites
- Why Only One Marketing Channel Can Hurt You
- Focus on Marketing Strategy, Not Just Marketing Tactics
- Why Brand Management is Important for Tech
- The Consumer Decision-Making Process for Technology
- The Long Sales Cycle for Technology
- When Marketing is Not Aligned with Business Goals
Modern-day marketing is all around us. Every day, we jump into our social media world of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, sharing blogs dutifully written by experts in various fields while “selling” ourselves and our lifestyles with pictures, posts, and reels. No wonder everyone thinks marketing is easy.
But does having access to marketing tools mean you know how to use them? If you hand over your car keys to an emu, would you trust it to drive on a cross-country road trip safely? Probably not. So maybe you shouldn’t let a team of engineers start a TikTok account in the hopes of finding your target audience.
The ubiquity of marketing tools makes everyone believe they know how to run a marketing campaign. From the CEO and the CMO to the accounts payable department supervisor and their spouse and children—everyone thinks they know exactly what the company needs to do to sell a product or service.
The reality is that marketing is about so much more than posting a photo at the right time or jumping on a viral TikTok dance. Marketing is actually a data-driven effort built on strategic messaging and a solid, targeted content strategy. And just as engineers should be handed the reins of tech design, professional digital marketers should be relied upon to pilot all-encompassing marketing campaigns.
Why Marketing is Important for Tech Companies
Taking a 30,000-foot view of marketing, the goal is to inform and engage with your target audience so that they conclude your product or service is the best solution for the problem they’re trying to solve.
In B2B marketing, business buyers are catered to specifically, with the goal of improving lead quality, sales acceptance of leads, and conversion rates.
For the information technology industry, the need for a superlative B2B marketing strategy is as crucial as ever. Global IT spending is projected to total $4.5 trillion in 2022, an increase of 5.1 percent from 2021, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. This massive dollar amount reveals that while competition is at an all-time high, so is market opportunity.
There’s a good chance that if you get in front of your target audience at the right time, with the right message, you will succeed. But how?
What is Digital Marketing?
First, it’s vital to understand what digital marketing is. Some might think that marketing simply equals advertising—web ads, social media ads, print ads, radio, and TV spots—but that’s not quite what we’re talking about. Paid advertising is just one channel for increasing reach or amplifying elements of a more extensive marketing campaign or strategy.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, is all about marketing efforts that flourish on the internet.
An end-to-end digital marketing strategy leverages digital channels such as social media, search engines, web pages, email, text, multimedia messages, and other collateral to connect organizations with current and prospective customers.
For business growth and brand awareness, digital marketing is one of the most effective tools you have at your disposal. The purest way to get your story out there, digital marketing connects you with customers where they spend the majority of their time: on the internet.
So, while digital marketing is about the message, it’s also about how it is presented and the different channels used to spread that message.
What Happens when IT Designs Websites
Nobody knows more about information technology than those who work within the industry—and no one knows your business better than you and your team.
But while you should leverage in-house expertise, it can often take the form of a raw and unfiltered knowledge drop. Which, unfortunately, could turn out to be a detriment to your success.
Like many other industries, IT is loaded with jargon and technical speak that doesn’t exactly constitute a universal language. It’s true: The companies that require IT assistance do not necessarily speak that same technical language. This leads to marketing messages being lost in translation and potential customers going elsewhere for technical assistance.
When an IT company writes and designs its own website, there’s always a danger that the end product will rely too heavily on that in-house expertise without any of the digital marketing finesse. One common feature of this kind of “expertise-heavy” site can be referred to as “tech messaging.”
Tech Messaging
The minute you start sounding like you’re merely trying to sell a batch of products and services, there’s a good chance you’ll steer some customers away from your company.
A winning digital marketing strategy begins with identifying your customer’s problems, explaining why they are worth solving, then relating how you can go about solving these problems. This approach leads to engagement from your target audience, extending the conversation and growing your business.
Conversely, bad content marketing will try to pitch products and services without mentioning problem-solving or anything else that might make a prospective customer’s life easier. This prevents any engagement—if customers wanted to read a sales pitch, they would subscribe to a product catalog.
Why Only One Marketing Channel Can Hurt You
There’s a reason why people still say, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” That old idiom crams a lot of wisdom into only a few words, especially regarding a digital marketing approach for IT companies.
The IT landscape is crowded, and, as mentioned earlier, companies are willing to spend a lot of money on information technology. Fierce competition only increases the need for an agile, robust, and diversified digital marketing strategy.
A single-channel marketing strategy is tenuous at best, mainly because:
- It takes time. Different digital marketing tactics require different amounts of time to generate results. For example, without additional channels to support it, an “organic” content strategy can take anywhere from 12 – 18 months to generate ROI.
- It overlooks potential customers. What happens if your main customers don’t frequent the one marketing channel you’ve chosen? You miss out on those customers, that’s what. There are too many options for customers—if you miss your opportunity to hit them with your message, it’s over.
- It’s one and done. When you invest all of your marketing dollars in one channel, the fate of the marketing department (or team) tends to ride on the success or failure of that single initiative.
A more holistic approach to digital marketing is safer and, overall, more effective. Utilizing a marketing strategy segmented across an array of channels helps tailor your message to more customers at all stages of the “buyer’s journey.” The most common marketing channels include:
All the channels listed here are time-honored digital marketing tools leveraged by millions of companies across thousands of verticals—with IT no exception. However, these tools are just that—tools. A successful digital marketing program isn’t just about the tools you use; it’s about the strategy they support.
Focus on Marketing Strategy, Not Just Marketing Tactics
Tactics are simple tools you can learn and deploy without knowing what you’re doing.
Describing the tactics inside of the marketing toolkit doesn’t sound all that complicated—there are emails, social media posts, videos, blogs, and maybe even a cute infographic or two.
Strategic marketing constitutes a business’s overall plan to reach prospective consumers and transform them into active customers. Any solid marketing strategy will leverage your company’s value proposition, brand messaging, customer demographic data, and other elements.
Why Brand Management is Important for Tech
A successful company reaches a broad audience, converts prospects to leads without blowing the budget on advertising, grows revenue, and is scalable.
The good news is that you can achieve all of those goals through brand management—an offshoot of your greater strategic digital marketing efforts.
Brand management goes beyond your name, colors, and logo. While it includes those three crucial details, it also encompasses your customer touchpoints. Successful brand management takes great care in calibrating how your brand looks, sounds, and feels across all marketing channels, content, customer service, and communication.
There are a lot of moving parts involved in brand management, but perhaps the most essential points in the process include:
- Ensuring brand positioning and values are aligned
- Monitoring brand reputation
- Centralizing brand material
- Measuring and analyzing brand performance
For tech companies, increasing competition makes brand management imperative. In a highly competitive marketplace, IT companies with a strong brand presence and promise to deliver value have a better chance of leaving an impression.
Now, there are excellent brand management examples and some not-so-great brand management examples.
In fact, some of the biggest names in tech have fallen completely flat in the brand management department. The mere mention of some of these big tech companies—Facebook, Yelp, Amazon, for example—often elicits groans of resentment. These are some of the most profitable tech companies of all time, yet their brand management has been arguably awful.
The Consumer Decision-Making Process for Technology
Recent history saw a drastic change in the consumer decision-making process for technology. In days past, a consumer would read an ad, see a commercial, or pass a billboard. Then, the consumer would seek a quote from the company, mull over the purchase, shop around with competitors, think about it some more, then decide whether or not to fork over the cash for the product or service.
It was a long process, often with a decreasing chance of a sale with each step in the path.
In the era of digital marketing, the consumer’s decision-making process has been streamlined. Consumers can access a wealth of online information that helps them research quickly, find precisely what they need, and make a snap purchasing decision that’s greatly influenced by customer reviews.
While customers are more informed than ever, some industries like IT are still characterized by impressively long sales cycles.
The Long Sales Cycle for Technology
A 2018 Gartner survey of more than 500 corporate technology buyers demonstrated that buying teams could spend close to 17 months on average to complete a new IT purchase. According to the study, there are a few factors at play:
- Buying teams are often comprised of more than ten individuals, all bringing a complex set of priorities, ideals, and perspectives to the buying decision.
- These teams perform extensive research with partners, analysts, vendors, and external peers, leading to more diverse opinions.
- Examining cost and risk causes buyers to frequently change plans, altering the business case and requiring multiple resolutions.
- Buyers typically juggle multiple projects and are often forced to make numerous purchasing decisions simultaneously.
Making individual sales and building overall revenue are undoubtedly among your primary business goals. So the question becomes, how do you align those goals with your marketing goals of website traffic, likes, and clicks? And what happens when your business goals are not aligned with your digital marketing efforts?
When Marketing is Not Aligned with Business Goals
If the connection between marketing and business goals is severed, it will be impossible to measure the success of your digital marketing efforts. Without clear benchmarks, the chances of launching a successful marketing campaign is slim to none. Aligning the two requires elevated communication and diligent planning.
Marketing Should Build Toward Business Goals
A strong marketing campaign might not lead to immediate, measurable results. However, a sustained digital marketing effort can help build forward progress toward your ultimate business goals.
In digital marketing, there’s a constant stream of new information about strategies that work—and don’t work—with your target audience. Unfortunately, making split-second decisions based on data that hasn’t had a chance to mature can make you lose sight of your business goals.
This is why a digital marketing team must know the importance of data and how to measure Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in service of your long-term business goals.
Let us do the marketing; you take care of IT.
It’s Expensive To Rebrand, but It Costs More if You Don’t
Rebranding a business often comes with risks, but the rewards make it well worth the effort.
Businesses kickstart rebranding efforts for a number of reasons, such as a change in location, a shifting market, the need for new consumer perception, an outdated feeling to the brand, or a company merger. While rebranding adds marketing expenses, it’s often necessary to move to the next level of success with consumers.
For anyone living in the vicinity of a real pizza joint, Domino’s ranks low on the list of slices. Plenty of people have a nostalgic soft spot for the delivery chain, but that can likely be attributed to a lack of late-night pizza options and a good amount of mind-altering substances.
For all the flack it receives from pizza purists, Domino’s isn’t bad. Even without the aid of liquid courage and other recreational substances, the company’s pizza presents a solid option, especially when put up against the chain’s major competitors.
Domino’s uptick in quality can be attributed to a 2010 rebranding kicked off by CEO Patrick Doyle and his team. When Doyle took over as CEO, the company’s profits were as flimsy as its pizza crust, stock prices were stuck at $8.76 per share, and the pizza—generally considered to be some of the worst one could imagine choking down—wasn’t faring any better.
Doyle’s rebranding of Domino’s constituted a two-pronged approach: Improve the product and embrace technology. First, Doyle himself appeared in commercials. He essentially apologized to consumers for the terrible product and promised to “work days, nights, and weekends” until the pizza improved. As for technology, Doyle recognized that Domino’s isn’t just a pizza-making business, it’s also a pizza-delivery business. With that in mind, the company drastically improved its online ordering system, complete with a state-of-the-art app.
The turnaround was immediate and remarkable. Customers embraced the boldness of the ad campaign and the new ordering technology. In 2016, less than six years after rebranding, the share price for Domino’s skyrocketed to nearly $160.
What Is a Rebrand?
The Domino’s rebrand centered around Doyle’s rallying cry that “Failure IS an option.” Essentially, Doyle and Domino’s at large took a chance and sought to transform a legacy company into a technology-enhanced, nimble, category-disrupting machine. The gamble clearly paid off.
That’s the essence of a rebrand. When a company rebrands, changes to logo, slogan, mission, vision, values, name, market, or target audience are all on the table. Rebranding builds a new brand identity and changes how the brand is perceived among customers, competitors, and collaborators. It’s all in the interest of attracting a new audience, bringing old customers back into the fold, staying relevant, standing out among competitors, and improving overall brand awareness.
When Should You Rebrand a Business?
With the ability to influence action, your brand is your company’s most valuable asset. Customers gleefully show loyalty toward one brand over another on a regular basis. Just ask people why they prefer Heinz ketchup over Hunt’s; more often than not, it’s because they grew up with Heinz.
In 2000, when the iconic American ketchup brand suddenly pivoted and released a line of absurd ketchup colors in sleek squeeze bottles, consumers were baffled. Heinz EZ Squirt featured colorful entries like “Funky Purple” and “Blastin’ Green.” While the company enjoyed an initial sales boost, the novelty wore off quickly, and the EZ Squirt brand was pulled from the shelves by 2006.
The short shelf life of Heinz’s rebrand demonstrates that there’s a wrong time for a rebrand. So, is there a right time?
If your brand no longer reflects the company’s vision, values, and mission, then it might be the right time for a rebrand.
Other reasons to rebrand include:
- Expansion into new locations: A brand refresh could be in order if you’re expanding to international markets where your current logo or messaging doesn’t translate.
- Entering into new markets: Repositioning your business to target new customers might require a rebrand, as you’ll need to connect with a new audience.
- Mergers and acquisitions: When two brands come together, it makes sense to find a fresh brand for the new entity rather than making two previous brands duke it out.
- Outgrowing your old brand: A proper rebranding injects new energy into your business, your people, and, perhaps most importantly, your customers.
- The need to overcome negative perception: The previously mentioned Domino’s rebranding illustrates this best. A strong rebrand can act as a consumer palate cleanser.
Since Heinz maintained their flagship product while they maneuvered toward the technicolor nightmare of EZ Squirt, they only partially rebranded; however, it remains a stark reminder that novelty should never be a reason to rebrand. The capital required is far too high! It would have been wiser to conduct some market research instead.
How Common Is Rebranding?
The general consensus is that even companies that are household names will go through a rebranding every 7-10 years. One incredible example of this cadence is Pepsi, which has experienced a major rebranding 11 times in its 122 year history, and that doesn’t count the company’s minor brand shifts, such as Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Zero.
Similar storylines have played out with other companies like Starbucks and Apple, two highly recognizable names that have rebranded numerous times.
How Long Does It Take To Rebrand a Company?
“Patience is a virtue.” That’s one oft-used phrase that won’t be rebranded anytime soon. According to rebranding experts, the average rebranding process takes 12 to 18 months to complete from beginning to end.
The process requires more than shifting color patterns. You need to dive into a protracted timeline, complete with upfront research, design conceptualization, brand identity design, engagement campaign implementation, trademark approval, and launch.
What Are the Risks of Rebranding?
Change can be terrifying, and with good reason! When you’ve established your brand over many successful years, the mere thought of scraping what you’ve built in favor of a new approach can be excruciating. There’s no guarantee the shift in focus will work, and if it doesn’t work, your previously loyal audience might just move on.
The Risks of Rebranding:
- It will cost money: Rebranding is an investment in your company’s future. As with any investment, you need to drop some cash in order to make it happen. Depending on the type of rebranding—brand refresh, brand reboot, brand overhaul—it could cost anywhere from $30,000 to $250,000.
- You might lose customers: Not all of our current customers will be on board with a rebranding strategy. Some might even feel insulted that a brand they’ve come to know and love has altered its appearance and/or approach. But you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. The hope is that the rebranding effort will attract new customers and a wider audience.
- It might be a tad chaotic for a while: Customers, and even team members, could express confusion or frustration as the change is taking place. Internally, you can get ahead of the chaos by constantly communicating with the team your intentions and reasoning behind the rebranding effort. On the external side of the equation, issue press releases, social media campaigns, and newsletters to keep the public aware of what’s going on.
Why Is Rebranding Not Always Successful?
It’s easy to say that the previously mentioned Heinz rebranding ultimately failed because no one wanted purple ketchup. But in truth, unsuccessful rebranding efforts meet their doom because of an array of problems.
One of the main reasons a rebranding will fail is the company in question not conducting enough market research.
Before taking the plunge with a total or even a partial rebrand, it’s a good idea to dip your toe into the market and find out what might work and what might not work for your company. One of the greatest rebranding miscalculations of all time occurred when Coca-Cola switched to New Coke in 1985. Consumers responded with swift anger, pouring New Coke down sewer drains, while one consumer even filed suit against the company. After 77 days, the previous version of Coke was brought back as “Coca-Cola Classic,” a genius rebranding and marketing spin in its own right.
A modern day approach to market research would have saved the soft drink company a lot of money. Analyze the industry, target markets, and the competition, and run focus groups or brand monitoring software to measure brand perception and the potential impact of a rebrand.
Market research provides invaluable insight into all of the factors that could potentially impact your bottom line after a rebrand.
- What tools does your target audience use to find products and services?
- Which competitor is most able to answer your target audience’s questions?
- What does your buyer see as trending in your industry?
- What influences purchases from your target audience?
- What is the overall feeling about your particular brand as it’s currently constituted?
- Is there a demand for the type of rebranding you’re targeting?
4B Marketing is a Hubspot Platinum Partner. As such we have access to a wealth of marketing research tools that can help you read your target audience.
Most Successful Company Rebrands
There are plenty of rebranding success stories to counter the corporate hiccups that were Heinz EZ Squirt and New Coke. Along with Domino’s, many different companies kicked off rebranding campaigns to rousing success. Here are a few of the most noteworthy:
LEGO
Everyone remembers playing with LEGO as children, and that was the company’s problem. In the eyes of consumers, LEGO was an outdated toy of a bygone era. At one point in 2003, the company was $800 million in debt. But then in the mid 2000s, the company rebuilt itself and diversified its products. It culminated with “The Lego Movie” in 2014 and “The Lego Batman Movie” in 2017. Thanks to its constant innovation, the LEGO brand could now be considered the “Apple of toys.”
Dunkin’
Some rebrandings just make sense. When you hear the word “Dunkin’,” sure you think donuts, but you also think coffee, sandwiches, avocado toast, and an entire lifestyle. As such, the company dropped “Donuts” from its name in 2018 and rolled out new logos, brand messaging, and ad campaigns. Now, when a consumer says “I’m going to Dunkin’,” it’s no longer a colloquial shorthand, it’s the actual company name.
Old Spice
Before rebranding as the company we know today, Old Spice truly lived up to the “old” in its moniker. Consumers viewed the company as stuck in the past, offering an odor that reminded them of their grandparents. That wasn’t what any company would want to be known for. It all changed with a rebranding effort that spun Old Spice into something sensual and alluring. Without changing its logo, Old Spice changed public perception through a clever ad campaign.
How To Rebrand a Company: 4B Marketing, Your Digital Rebranding Agency
The first step to rebranding your company is to stop and consider your options. With all the pitfalls associated with a rebrand, it’s crucial you start on the right foot. As we’ve seen in this article, rebranding is expensive and can change your audience’s perception of you, often for the worse. That’s why it’s incredibly important to talk to a trusted partner first. A skilled marketing company can help you outline your brand’s needs and collaborate with you on a plan of action.
4B Marketing will walk you through your rebranding strategy step by step, offering counsel and reasons for every decision we recommend along the way.
We specialize in:
- Developing your business reason for rebranding. Are you trying to accelerate growth? Has your brand grown stale in the eyes of consumers? Pinpointing the reason for the rebranding can help inform decisions moving forward.
- Researching your target audience. It’s hard to overstate how important solid market research is. The information you glean from market research tells you everything you need to know about why and how one rebrands. As a Hubspot Premium Partner, we have access to a wealth of research tools.
- Developing messaging around your brand strategy. The right kind of messaging conveys your brand’s mission to consumers, informing them of your intentions and the reasoning behind the rebranding effort.
- Building your brand identity. Our content creators and designers will develop the visual elements and storytelling of your brand.
- Building your website and deploying marketing collateral. Your website must immediately match your new branding, as should all marketing material going forward.
- Maintaining consistent visibility in the marketplace. A rebranding effort that doesn’t meet your audience where they are is a wasted rebranding effort. We keep your new message moving with consistent attention and extensive marketing campaigns.
Rebranding cannot happen in a vacuum. Connect with 4B Marketing for a full examination of what you need to alter your brand.
5 Simple Steps to Prepare for Success During a Recession
As of the time that I am writing this (March 2020) unemployment is on the rise, manufacturing is slowing down and both a worldwide pandemic and environmental collapse of Biblical proportions (hyperbole?) are triggering fears throughout the financial markets. This recipe of woe has been of course sparking the notion that we are on a crash-course for a catastrophic global recession.
Naturally, the thought of an economic downturn has you fretting about the cash reserves that your company is sitting on and how it has the potential to become a squandered fortune. Your strongest competitors are undoubtedly having the same concerns. OR they could be doing what you should be doing and taking the necessary steps to weather the market dip like a champ. It’s important to remember in times of hardship or stress that change is the only constant and where you are now is not stationary. It will change and this panic is temporary.
I invite you to get off that ledge and leave the prayers for the pastors. It’s time to act fast and to start making better decisions for your company! You didn’t choose to start a business and captain your destiny only to be subject to the whims of the panicky, toilet-paper-hoarding masses, did you? I didn’t think so. Take a deep breath and let’s re-examine your fears and evaluate this opportunity. It is time to start preparing to be one of the success stories today – not by luck, but by intention.
1. Find Out Why People Have Said “YES” To What You’re Offering
Here is a great place to start preparing your company: getting good actionable feedback. You can send out a simple survey to current and past customers asking them why they chose your product or service and even if that is the only question you ask, you are bound to get some helpful input.
This feedback could enlighten you (if you weren’t aware already) of your business’s “unique value proposition.” A unique value proposition is what your business AND ONLY YOUR BUSINESS can offer to buyers. And by offer we don’t mean, “customer service,” or, “trust.” Any competitor can claim those and oftentimes they do. You need to figure out what your competitor can’t offer, and what your business can. If you can’t find a unique value proposition, find a non-unique value proposition. While not ideal, sometimes just existing and being an option is enough.
If you want to dig deeper into your customer’s motives, you can always take a look through your analytics and see which pages they are viewing the most or you can look at what pages visitors from Google are looking at most to understand what questions your site answers in internet searches. Unsure how to go about doing this? No sweat! Because we are stellar people, we would be happy to help you out with this for FREE! (Sure, we might see some opportunities to enhance your business with marketing in the process, but that is for another time.)
2. Spend While You Have the Resources!
NOW is the time, while you have the money, to make those marketing and sales decisions that you’ve been waiting to seize for a while. If your competitors are putting their dollars into reserves, it’s likely that they are pulling back on marketing or advertising to create those reserves. Good. Let them create a vacuum in the marketplace that will be replaced by your messaging. No more following in their footsteps and letting them make the mistakes that you learn from – now is when you step into the lead and put distance between you and your closest competitors.
How do you get started?
- First thing you can do is start by opening up your Google Analytics account. On the left hand menu, click on “Acquisitions”, then click “All Traffic” followed by “Source/Medium”. This page will show you the sources of your sites current traffic. Don’t have a Google Analytics account? We can assist you with that.
- You’re going to be looking for the channels that could be giving your site traffic. Some examples of these channels are: Direct (this is any traffic from a source that is unknown or with no referring website URL) Organic (this is the traffic coming in from a search engine result, or the traffic coming in because someone “Googled it”), Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Email, Affiliate links, Display, etc.
- Now that you have all this information available in Google Analytics, you can begin to think about what sources ARE bringing traffic in, and which ones ARE NOT bringing in traffic. If you aren’t running any ads, you can start by running ads through the sources that already bring you visits and see if you can expand that audience. Perhaps you’re getting a lot of traffic through Facebook? Is there more audience there to capture? Or is that audience tapped out and maybe you should be thinking about LinkedIn? It could be beneficial then to go ahead and consult an agency to help you capitalize and run some targeted ads.
If you’re serious about this and you’re ready to take this step for your business, please take us up on our free consultation because we want to help you reach your business goals.
3. Become a Necessity: Turn “Want” Into “NEED”
During the Great Depression, consumer product companies were thrust into a terrible predicament. The prosperous roaring twenties did a swift Charleston swing off the stage, and the disposable income that was once flowing so freely had dried up. This didn’t stop a company like Proctor and Gamble from realizing that people would still need soap in a time of depression. So rather than cut back on the costs of advertising, P&G doubled down, spent while they still had the resources and began to explore new marketing avenues including commercial radio broadcasts. By creating a need and successfully targeting homemakers using episodic radio serials, they were able to successfully thrive a massive economic catastrophe. This is a fantastic example of reaching beyond desire and focusing on need.
Integration is key. You need to offer help in some way, shape, or form. Let’s pretend you run a spa – convince your current and future customers to focus on self-care so they can remain together while everyone else is falling apart. Selling chocolate bars? Dive into the positive effects on the brain that are produced by eating chocolate. Selling new, expensive oven ranges? Think of how much money your customers will save by eating hot meals at home and how feeding your friends and family’s bodies translates to feeding their souls.
4. Get Aggressive With Those Messages!
The word “aggressive” can often conjure up images of people behaving negatively, inappropriately, and excessively, all while causing harm. But when it comes to your business, being aggressive doesn’t mean being a loathsome jerk, it just simply means being active, confident and willing to take risks. Being aggressive means recognizing opportunities when they arise, knowing when to grab the low-hanging fruit, and being able to focus your energies into making people aware of your product or service.
In today’s post-digital world, the playing fields have been leveled and small businesses now have the same ability as large corporations when it comes to reaching customers. You can get the message of your company out through paid ads, blog content, social media, email and remarketing all while being everywhere for your customers and future customers. In today’s digital landscape, it’s easy to create the illusion that your small business can hang with all the other big-shots, by acting like a successful business you may be able to convince the world that you’re the only game in town. If you can gain these skills, get after it. They are valuable. If you want to just rely on experts, this is what we do and we want to reiterate that, yes, our expertise is at your disposal.
5. Become the Only Option
There is a phenomenon where people, given a set of choices, will make a choice without actually choosing. This phenomenon happens to all of us whether we recognize it or not and it is referred to as the “default effect.” Your only goal as a business is to be the default choice. Rather than keeping up with the Joneses, it’s time to BE the Joneses that everyone strives to be.
In the 22 immutable laws of marketing, Ries and Trout discuss the importance of being first to mind for your customer and future customer. Let them never know your competition so that when they reach for a name, yours is closest and easiest to grab.
How do you do this? By following the steps above. Your focus (almost sole focus) should be to gather as much audience as possible so that your brand name and the market you serve are synonymous. The risk to leveraging yourself in this way cannot be understated. It is risky. It does require more of you and your business than you may be comfortable giving. But, you may also be in a unique position to break off a larger audience for yourself and if it’s uncomfortable for you, it’s definitely uncomfortable for your competitors. They are all doing the safe, protective zig. Will you seize this opportunity to do a trusting and growing zag in their absence?
There’s likely an audience out there today that needs your solution and has never heard of you or your competitor. They are just waiting to find you. Be the first to mind.
No, Advertising and Marketing Are Not the Same Things
From the outside looking in, advertising and marketing can appear to be synonymous. They both present consumers with a message in hopes of hacking the brain and burrowing deep inside, and they both share the same goal of relieving people of their hard-earned disposable income. But in truth, the very real differences between advertising and marketing should be recognized and honored. Sure, their distinctions may be smaller than the period at the end of this sentence, but knowing the difference is what separates the pros from the rubes.
Advertising is What You’re Selling:
Long before sharp-dressed, hard-drinking ad men on Madison Avenue started pitching “healthy” cigarettes, merchants in ancient Pompeii would inscribe mosaics on their amphoras in order to draw attention to their product and attract consumers. For as long as humans have been providing goods, ideas or services, there has been a need to make others aware of them through snappy presentation or promotion. This is advertising.
Now let’s put our paranoids caps on! Did you know the average American is exposed to anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements in a single day? As a matter of fact, you’re looking at a few ads right now. We’ve become pretty adept at blocking out all of the advertisements, but go ahead and disable that mental AdBlocker for one minute and look around you. Soak in all of those brand names leaping out at you from your phone or laptop, or all of the images of products splayed out on billboards and buildings. Take in all of the commercials and product placements in your magazines or during your podcast, or all of the labels in your pantry or fridge or on your desk at work. How about all of those brand logos on your clothes which essentially turns you into a walking billboard?
During the waking hours, people are inundated with an overabundance of display ads, social media ads, outdoor ads, video ads, radio and podcasts, newspapers, magazines, direct mail, email whether they recognize it or not! Unless you’re living the beatific life of a hermit in the remote mountains, you are feeling the powerful influence of advertising in your daily routine. Life is essentially one big commercial! Unfortunately, sleep is really the only refuge from the deluge of advertisements (for now.) But where do all of these ads come from?! Well, they are the outcome of a lot of hard work called marketing.
Marketing is What You’re Buying:
Marketing is an umbrella term that basically describes the activities and the processes of figuring out how people think and behave so that companies can successfully create and deliver catchy messages to the person, in the right place, at the right time, and for the right price. In order to accomplish this, marketing teams will dabble in some mind control and hypnotism, aka market research. By utilizing tools such as market research and the “marketing mix” (or the 4 P’s: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place) businesses are able to help identify a targeted audience and increase their chances of acquiring new customers. Advertising is just another component of the marketing process.
Good marketing is rooted in strategy and the better companies out there don’t even sell you a product; they sell you an idea or an experience like the fear of missing out. It’s the reason why we don’t question our sudden impulse to go out and try an Impossible burger from BK or why we will join the hysteria and wait in line for an incredibly scarce chicken sandwich from Popeye’s. It is the reason why we will rush to the store to pick up some Daytrip CBD-infused energy drink while wearing a Topo cross-body sling bag despite having spent decades snarking on the absurdities of fanny packs. Getting us to spend money, and to spend it on things we think we NEED but will no doubt roll our eyes at down the road is a true marketing masterstroke.
Marketing is an activity, advertising is the outcome. Marketing is the experience and advertising is the exposure. They’re not the same, but they rely on one another and you can’t possibly have a successful business without incorporating both. If this helped you, please let us know in the comments and be sure to share this post with someone who could benefit from a little enlightening.
Marketing is Actually a Subset of Digital Marketing...
…Or at least I am fairly certain it is. Look, I know what you’re thinking…in this day and age, it seems to be fashionable to make bold, outlandish statements that can be easily proven false. Attention is the new currency, and it can be a totally manipulative hack to grab your attention by simply making a BS claim just to earn a click. Well, let me assure you that my intentions in this article are just, and I ask that you give me a few minutes of your day so that I can make the case that marketing is, in FACT, a subset of digital marketing and not the reverse. Now is this a hill I want to die on? Eh, probably not, but at least hear me out.
Digital Distribution is Generally a Critical Component
Okay, let’s start with the basics. (Cue cheesy 70s public information film music) The dictionary defines marketing as, “the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.” Digital marketing is basically any form of marketing that exists online. You’re probably thinking, “well, doesn’t that make digital marketing a subset of marketing then?” You would think so. But let’s dig a little deeper and think about marketing prior to the digital age.
Ever since the first commercial aired for a watch in 1941, the ideal marketing mediums for decades had been tools like billboards, flyers, radio and television commercials, or ads in magazines and newspapers. These were some of the primary methods when I was a kid back in the totally radical 80s of the last century. Who could forget such advertising gems like Wendy’s, “Where’s the Beef?” catchphrase or Domino’s Avoid the Noid campaign? And don’t even get me started on those Motown-singing California raisins! Pure genius! But while these 80s pop culture footnotes were everywhere and being repeated at work or on the playground ad nauseam, the companies churning them out had to be relatively in the dark when it came to understanding their return on investments. Within these distribution channels, segmentation of your audience was fairly sophisticated given how basic these mediums were. Want to engage unemployed people? Run ads for your trade college during Price Is Right. Want to sell Jane Fonda aerobics videos to moms? Run your message on a commercial break for ThirtySomething. Trying to sell Dad a new home computer? Get that ad in the evening edition of the paper. That’s not even considering segmenting by geographics.
There is a massive advantage digital mediums have over traditional mediums; digital can be inbound and targeted in places where everyone is already spending a disproportionate amount of time…online. We have a working generation that grew up without newspapers and the next generation joining the workforce grew up without over-the-air or cable television. These are your audiences and their analog experience is generally secondary to their digital experience.
Let’s take a look at Facebook as an example. Facebook isn’t simply a tool used explicitly to connect old casual acquaintances and weaken democracy (heavy sigh); it’s a platform where businesses hire marketers to target and tap into prospective consumers. Go ahead, log into your Facebook account right now, take a look at the first ten things that pop up into your feed and chances are, somewhere nestled in between the memes, the misinformation and the minutiae of your elementary chum’s everyday life, you will see targeted ads that are tailored specifically for you! Based on how you react to certain posts and behave on websites that you’ve visited, Facebook is able to pinpoint your interests accurately and deliver ads that you are most likely to engage with.
Digital Marketing Is More Than Just Message Distribution
With message distribution based on the audience’s affinities and behaviors rather than being based on the broad preferences of the platform’s users, businesses are able to affordably get the maximum return on their ad spend using reporting, tracking, monitoring, and analysis. In this case, Facebook’s AI is likely doing some of the marketing for the marketer, attempting to learn from the audience who’ve seen and been active with a brand’s ad(s) to extract better results from the campaigns.
Facebook is merely a single example and if you’re a marketer you probably already know that. Thanks to our modern abilities to house, manage, and leverage the insane amounts of information about any given American and their behaviors, marketers can use these digital platforms to communicate finely-tuned, personalized messages to our audiences where and when they are most likely to act on them.
It will probably escalate, too. What if every digital billboard changed on your way home, precisely when you approached it, to remind you that it’s been a couple of weeks since your last Arby’s Beef N Cheddar? And you’re going to get that ad because the marketer already knows when, where, and how many times you need to see that messaging before you take action. That future seen in Minority Report is probably coming, or is it already here?
Now when you are propagating a message that isn’t easily measured or cannot be measured at all, is that really marketing? It kind of sounds just like advertising (and there IS a difference between marketing and advertising, but that is a subject for another time.) Just like traditional marketing, digital marketing is entirely data-driven; it’s all about measuring the research and optimization of a message. Chances are pretty likely that you’re not getting any solid marketing feedback without it being viewed as a digital measurement.
There’s a simple, sure-fire way of measuring whether or not your business’ advertising, PR and marketing programs are even effective and that measurement is basically this: are you making more money or not?
Of course, this bottom line is really only evident at the end of the journey and in order to arrive at this destination there is a long, hard road you must travel. Have you ever seen one of those “iceberg illusion” graphics that vacationing celebs love to post on their Instagram page? You know, the ones where there are two parts to the iceberg: what people see (the tip of the iceberg above the surface) and what people don’t see (the giant mass just below the surface.) Well, marketing is much like that iceberg: the small tip represents the profits, and that giant mass just below the surface represents all of the strategies that were put into it. A healthy bottom line is, of course, the raison d’être of any business, but in order to get there, you have to put in a lot of hard work, persistence, dedication and other iceberg illusion buzzwords.
If you’re sending postcards, are you making sure your site is getting visits from the zip codes you sent the postcards to? Are you tracking calls from a unique number that exists only on that postcard? Are your branded searches increasing on Google and Bing? Is your click-thru rate increasing on non-branded searches? Let’s face it, it is next to impossible to prove the value of your hard efforts when you are still in the dark ages of marketing. The emergence of digital measurement has caused archaic methods of untraceable marketing to go the way of the town crier in a tricorn hat. If you aren’t tracking at least some of these digital metrics, it’s likely you aren’t measuring the important key progress indicators, and, in fact, aren’t actually doing marketing. You’re probably doing advertising on par with sign twirling and crossing your fingers, hoping that it’s effective. Hope is a fantastic campaign slogan for effective leaders, but it is NOT a marketing plan.
Aren’t The Research Tools of Yesteryear Still Marketing?
Of course they are, but many of those libraries and focus groups and much of that front end research are experienced online. Unless, Science forbid, the world has been reduced to a post-apocalyptic society where the remnants of humanity live in a dystopian wasteland without internet and computers, marketing technology will continue to advance and evolve with great leaps and bounds. We’ve come a long way from the days of full-page ads for Burnett’s Cocoaine hair tonic in The Saturday Evening Post, or biplanes scrawling out a message in the sky to buy Lucky Strike cigarettes. Nowadays, in the post-digital revolution world where just about everything is done online, there is virtually no separation between marketing and digital marketing.
Your audience data collection, research, distribution, and measurement are probably all taking place in a digital space because they simply must. Marketing IS digital marketing.
Well, there you have it. I think I have done an adequate job making the case that marketing is a subset of digital marketing, even if it was just by stating that marketing has come out of the dark ages and into the age of enlightenment. Now I’m curious…what are your opinions on the matter? Agree? Disagree?
How to make a more effective light rail ad.
Bar Louie is a chain gastropub with several locations in my fair locale of the Denver-Metro area. In all, as best as my research could reveal, they have 133 restaurants nationwide, so it would be a fair assumption that they have this whole marketing and advertising thing pretty well locked down. By and large, I’d agree with that assessment. I’d say that they were almost perfect in a recent campaign… almost.
When I came across a light rail car with multiple ads for Bar Louie, they caught my eye. This isn’t that rare since I make it my job to assess the marketing and advertising that I’m exposed to, looking for both strengths and opportunities. To be honest, most ads don’t stick. I don’t love them or hate them – I just forget them. But Bar Louie’s ad was different. It required my attention.
Sitting in my light rail seat, the images below represent my view.
Would Bar Louie have demanded your awareness as it did mine?
Why did this Bar Louie ad stick with me?
If I could only choose one thing that made me “lean in” to this ad, I’d have to say that it was a giant QR code. Perhaps in the same way that a cassette boombox or any other recognizable relic of the past would jump out at you for seeming so out of place in the present, devoting that much real estate to a sign of what once was practically grabbed me.
Now, when it comes to QR codes, I think Bar Louie has it right and conventional thinking has it wrong. QR codes only went out of style, in my opinion, because they were inconvenient upon release. Yes, they were meant to create convenience, but between searching for a reader app, downloading it, launching it…. I’d have rather just been given a URL to type in at that point.
But, that was also prior to Apple’s iOS 11. The age of practical convenience for QR codes had arrived. It arrived late, but it arrived. Now, all you have to do is open your phone’s camera, point it at the QR code and your phone will ask if you’d like to visit the website. It’s extremely easy. Lest you think this is only for iPhone users, Android already had that feature before iOS did with Google Suggest turned on. It really couldn’t be easier for the wide majority of smartphone users to use a QR code. Just in case you weren’t aware of how easy it is, Bar Louis conveniently added instructions to the bottom of their ad:
A QR Reader is built in to your phones camera.
If I had to choose another reason that I believe this ad worked, it’s because they leased multiple prominent placements in the light rail car. I absolutely love this. I know clients (and account managers) who would say “We only have budget for four ads? Let’s put them in four different cars.” In this scenario that Bar Louie has created, while they’re reaching fewer people, they’re immersing those fewer people in your message, rather than reaching a larger audience who will more easily ignore them.
But, what about the messaging?
I am not Bar Louie’s target market. I know it and, almost certainly, Bar Louie knows it. So, the messaging about getting paid to party rolls off of me like beads of sweat off of a sangria glass (I tried).
I’m also a small business owner surrounded by a city of small business owners, some of who own gastropubs. If I intend to be loyal, I will be loyal to my fellow business owners who rely on that loyalty to maintain and grow. So, their second message of “Loyalty Always Pays Off” is again, a miss for my lifestyle.
That’s ok because I’d assume that with 133 locations, this brand knows their audience and the prospect of being rewarded for drinking a pineapple martini with their friends after work is a strong motivator.
The messaging doesn’t attract me and it’s not supposed to, which likely means that it speaks clearly to a person who’s not me, aka, the regular Bar Louie customer.
Alright, Tyler. Where’s the missed opportunity?
I’m on a train and there are two ads, each ad has its own color and its own message.
One of these colors is more attractive to my fellow light rail passengers than the other.
One of these messages is more attractive than the other.
One of these placements is better than the other.
Bar Louie still doesn’t know what’s working best for them on this campaign.
As you can see, these QR codes are identical.
Identical QR codes mean that there’s no variation in what URL you’re going to be visiting, which means you can’t track which ad people are pointing their smartphone cameras at.
Phase one: Were I in charge of leading the strategy for this campaign, would be to create URLs with different UTM codes indicating which ad was being scanned. Is it the pink ad promising a payday? Or is it the olive-colored ad promising a reward for loyalty? With UTM codes, a review of my analytics would reveal this information.
Phase two: Once I’ve determined which ad is working best, I’d see if the locations could be swapped to determine if it’s still the messaging or color that’s prompting the scans or if it’s simply the ad placement.
If it was ad placement, I’d ask if we could remove the other ads in the non-producing placements to see if that affects the volume of scans I get on the placement that is producing scans.
If it wasn’t the placement that prompted the scan, I’d swap the messaging on the posters to determine if it was the color or the offer that prompted the scan….
The ideas of what could and should be tested continue on and on… with each test getting Bar Louie closer and closer to creating an optimal ad with optimal placement. When those optimizations are put into practice, they will find that they have more budget to reproduce these winning campaigns in city after city.
Marketing is nothing if it’s not testing and the reason we test is to make sure that we communicating as effectively as possible to our audience. If you’re not testing, you’re gambling. Sometimes you’ll win, sometimes you’ll lose, and sometimes you’ll break even. If your aim is to win, having a thoughtful marketing partner on your side can sway those odds in your favor. I can help you win and when you’re ready to see how, book some time with me.
What Does SEO Cost?
Before I answer what SEO costs, I think it’s important to talk about what the wrong price to pay for SEO is. I recently met with a small business owner who had been paying $275/month for 3 years. His site was a mess, his domain name had little to do with his brand or his services. Google has 9 pages indexed for his site. He’s not receiving monthly updates from his SEO provider and when I inquired as to what keywords he’s ranking well for, he wasn’t sure. On top of this, while the site had some minor optimizations, it left a lot to be desired from an SEO of even intermediate skills. This man had spent close to $10k on search engine optimization services and he was, apparently, getting little to nothing for it.
These bad actors ask for minimal investment and deliver next to nothing in return, or worse, they achieve quick and unbelievable results through black hat SEO tactics including low-quality link networks. While this might be initially great news, these tactics can (and likely eventually will) result in Google delisting your website, which will cost you quite a bit more money to recover from. Let’s call these people what they truly are: Spammers and scammers. They reach out to a business owner and suggest a price that undercuts the market while promising the world. What happens when the SEO service doesn’t deliver? Almost nothing. If the small business owner recognizes how little is being done on their behalf, the cost has been so minimal that it’s not worth it for that business owner to hold anyone accountable.
The true end result of hiring a cheap search engine optimization servicer is that the business owner has just lost time, budget, and faith in digital services. The only party this is good for is the cheap SEO, who has already moved on to his next mark.
SEO can be too cheap. Anyone who doesn’t have a vested interest in your success and offers you inexpensive SEO is likely not worthy of your trust or your budget.
Now that you know what you shouldn’t pay for search engine optimization services on your website, let’s get to the reason you arrived at this article in the first place:
How much does SEO cost per month?
According to a 2018 article on ahrefs.com:
- The majority of SEOs charge between $75 – $150 per hour.
- Monthly retainers will generally run you between $500 – $1,000/month in the US.
- The more experienced an SEO, the more they’ll charge.
Let’s follow up those hard numbers by answering a question a prospect recently asked me:
How does an SEO agency justify their monthly cost?
Technical Search Engine Optimization
Technical SEO is all about making sure that your site is visible, in full, to Google and Bing, communicating your site’s pages and relevance to search engines, meets Google’s Best Practice Guidelines for SEO, is visible and functional on all platforms, including (and maybe, most importantly) mobile devices. All of the work in the world won’t be worth much if Google doesn’t know it exists.
Key Query and Competitive Research
You can absolutely achieve with a rudderless SEO campaign, in the same way that a rudderless boat can hit land. It’s mostly out of your control and relies on an abundance of luck. Upfront key query research can help give some guidance around what content should be created, including what questions are being asked that you can and should answer, and where your best competitors are earning search traffic.
As your content matures, Google will start ranking it in search. Your SEO practitioner should be able to inform you for what queries your pages are actually ranking at volume and recommend some adjustments for continued upticks in search visibility. Remember that your website is a living and ever-evolving library of information. A website is always under construction.
Content
I’ve said it before – I will continue to say it: Poorly optimized content that’s great can rank all on its own, while well-optimized content that’s poor may fail to provide results.
The clients that I’ve achieved the best results with are also those clients who are continually creating new written content. This can be content that they write themselves, that they have outsourced to a copywriter or a combination of both. Your investment in SEO should partially go to creating new content and/or adding markups and refinements to new content.
Reporting and Analysis
This is really what you’re paying for – proof of change. I’m still amazed by the number of people paying for search engine optimization services that aren’t having regular check-ins with their agency. Website traffic and analytics reporting, ideally, is where the rubber meets the road and your learning how your rankings are fluctuating, discover trends in your traffic, and review what upcoming work should include to maintain or improve upon your existing rankings, and find new opportunities.
Off-page SEO
Your companies trust with your audience or relevance with search engines isn’t solely built on your website alone. There are a host of websites that can reference your content, provide categorical context for your services, and furnish customer and employee reviews of your company. All of these entities are important to the search experience and should be tended to in part or wholly by your search engine optimization agency.
This includes ensuring that all of your social media profiles include accurate and complete information, that your Google My Business and Bing Places for Business are kept up-to-date and include frequent updates, and, if included in scope, that backlinks from highly trusted sites are secured, when possible.
Another consideration to be aware of is that if your search engine optimization agency finds that you have received poor reviews which are breaking trust with potential customers, they should recommend a reputation management program meant to address negative reviews and generate reviews from happy customers.
And if everything is going right, they should come back after a while and ask for a bigger budget.
You probably don’t want to hear it, but justifying an increased budget is the mark of an SEO and/or marketing program that’s going well. Your investment should result in improved results. Your agency should want to build and continue a relationship with you. Eventually, be it a quarter or a year down the road, your SEO company should be able to show you how far your investment has taken you so far and where additional budget should allow you to go in the future.
Whether your hire 4B or not, you deserve to get the best search engine optimization for your business. For that reason, we strongly recommend that you invest the 12 minutes required to watch this video from Google on how to hire a good SEO service and avoid a bad SEO service. If you’re ready to get started improving your velocity of search traffic, get in touch.