How A Successful Marketing Strategy Can Accelerate Buying Decisions For Technology Consumers

In the race to market and sell the latest technologies, Predictable Marketing has established that it’s not how much you say, but how effectively you can target key customers with relevant and clear messaging that will generate genuine leads and close a deal.

When purchasing technology, outside of renewing a service or subscription, customers are selecting something they hope will ultimately change an aspect of their personal or working life for the better. It therefore makes sense that your customers will seek to inform themselves before buying. This creates an opportunity for tech companies, to help their customers in their research by providing relevant, helpful content.

Many companies over-create content, to cover as many bases as possible. This approach however leaves sales teams and customers confused or the content too focused on the products, solutions or services and not providing the answers the customer is seeking. It is essential to create a content plan that takes the customer through the journey of awareness, research, building trust and making a buying decision.

Start by creating a profile of your existing customers and those you wish to target, diving into their needs for your product, level of understanding and what implication purchasing from you might bring. At Predictable Marketing, we encourage our customers to actually print out pictures of their target personas and define their personalities. From here they can then create content with these customers in mind. Review your content from this customers perspective and approve the content only if you feel it would add value to this prospect.

Establishing A Need

The first step is to create a creating a profile of potential or existing customers based on what they might be looking to achieve. The first question to explore is why people should implement a new technology? There are many reasons potential customers are looking at new technology; they might believe it will make their workflow easier, save them money, improve customer experience, meet compliance objective, grow their business without increasing costs or beating competition.

An example of this can be seen in the number of companies that are investing in automated processes to save their workforce time which can be better spend within the business. Knowing your customer’s needs and expectations can then help you select what aspects of your technology you want to highlight first to drive interest.  Your marketing at this stage should resonate with the needs of your customer or their business, showing them how your software offers a solution to the problem they have highlighted. You can get this message across most effectively with infographics or a short demonstrational video.

Further Research

Once the need for change has been highlighted, potential customers will now research the options available to them. A marketing team must focus on which unique selling points are going to appeal to which customer profile and what platform to use to reach them. If a customer can’t find this key information it will trigger a knock-on delay in a purchase or result in them looking to another supplier.

This is where a marketing team needs to have materials ready that will best help consumers understand your product. Through the use of informative content like whitepapers, datasheets and demos customers can get a real feeling for your product and what it brings to the market.  After researching and accepting the need for change, your customer is now ready to practically think about how the change will be executed. At this point, when the customer is thinking about how they can implement a new technology, your marketing can move to its next stage, starting to talk about the pricing options and levels of support available.

Making a Decision 

Now that you have a very engaged lead you can work to bring the sale over the line. Customers will make the final decision based on the credibility and trust you have built up with them, and that you have built up with previous customers. This is where you produce materials that demonstrate previous success stories, these can include testimonials, business case studies.

Interactive demonstrations of your product, such as in webinars and workshops, are also good to give customers a hands-on experience of your software and answer any remaining questions. Many times, your customer will now be working to convince their bosses or stakeholders to invest within your software. It is therefore important that you make yourself easy to contact to field any questions they might come back to you with or to provide support to build a business care for other stakeholders in the company. Marketing can help by creating easy to use contact forms and chat functions on your website and through emailing and engaging regularly with a client.

Start Now

Once you have planned your customer’s journey and created content for each stage it’s time to sit down and relax…..not!  This is where the optimisation process begins. Marketers should continuously monitor feedback in terms of engagement rates and responses to calls to actions and make changes based on the data collected throughout the customer journey. For example, if you can see most visitors drop off at your landing page it’s time to make some changes to it!

Your new campaigns and content must focus on; presenting and addressing the need customer have expressed an interest in. The language of your campaign is also key to selling your technology, too technical and you will confuse buyers but too simple and you will undersell yourself and your product.

Once you have a content piece that connects with customers and you are getting the responses you want, consider scaling assets.  This involves creating similar pieces of content with differing variations for social channels or addressing different audience personas. This ability to have similar materials within a campaign is essential to marketing each unique selling point effectively across multiple channels.

Armed with a new sales strategy, back up with a solid marketing campaign, you can now enact your plans and target new customers, achieving greater results. Remember however to update plans, rework content and not be afraid to delete elements as your technology and its customers evolve. This process of re-focusing your marketing and sales plans will be time-consuming initial but it will soon pay dividends as you develop a deeper understanding of your customer’s behaviours.

If you would like to talk more about how an effective marketing strategy could help accelerate your customer’s buying decision, please get in touch.

Email Marketing – How to best use it for B2B Marketing

No matter what business you are trying to promote having a clear objective and knowing your target audience is critical. An objective could be lead generation, increasing brand awareness, launching a new product or service or nurturing existing customers.

Email marketing is a versatile marketing strategy that can help achieve both the above objectives. Brand Research 2019 shows that email marketing is at the least, 40% more effective in lead generation than social media*.

Email still emerges as the quickest and most cost-effective way of communication, especially for B2B marketing. If your customers are in the B2B technology space, they probably spend more time on email then they do on social media or blogs. This attention might be moving towards social but most social sites are blocked by firewalls in offices. Hence, email is still the preferred channel for outreach campaigns.

B2B Email Marketing –Is your email compelling enough?

All of us receive promotional emails in our inbox. Some are annoying, some interesting and some compelling, relevant and leave an impact. How can you write a compelling b2b marketing email that leaves an impact? The answer is simple but often ignored.

To create an impactful email, consider the objective and target audience.

First thing to consider is the copy. Is your message resonating with your target audience? The only B2B marketing email I remember opening recently said “Are you continuously managing a list of tasks and never getting to the end of it? Here’s an excel template that helps you priortise your tasks for the day and get more done.” The email hit my pain-point and I reacted immediately by downloading the template.

If it’s a lead generation email, how do you want your target audience to react or engage? Think about a call to action that encourages them to react the way you want them to. Again, thinking about the above example – the call to action in the email was simple, but very visible as a button and the form wasn’t very difficult to fill. The template that I downloaded was actually quite handy and I still use it to date.

The importance of email marketing for B2B

• Not all promotional emails end up unopened, transferred to trash folder or spam. If you have a strongly analyzed target audience, there is high chance your mail will be opened, CTAs addressed and even forwarded to people of “social cluster”, thereby, creating a strong network of prospects.

• The return on investment through email marketing is higher than that earned through conventional marketing strategies.

Email Marketing Strategies to Implement

Marketing through email is effective as nearly 87% business professionals depend on mails for business related communications and hence the B2B mails have 47% higher CTR (Click Through Rate) than that of B2C mails. So, to implement the email campaigning successfully, here are a few tips to remember –

• Determine The Clients And Their Requirements

Unlike in B2C marketing where clients are prone to be whimsical and indulge in choosing products or services often irrationally, in B2B marketing, the transaction is between business leading clients who are clear about their requirements and choose rationally. The customer base should consist of companies or bodies utilizing your service or product to create their products, companies using products for secondary tasks or office automation, government bodies or educational institutions whose requirement matches your business and of course the reselling companies or individuals like wholesalers and brokers.

• Email Header Should Be Catchy And Sensible

Email marketing effectiveness lies significantly on how you present your products and services through the mail and that is where the requirement of a catchy header or banner comes. Marketing is all about catching attention among hundreds of other promotional emails and for that your header should properly address what the client needs but in a catchy and compact way because none likes a cluttered header. You can also place your company logo here to be easily recognizable from the rest.

• Content Should State Value for the Client

Firstly, the email subject should be easily understandable so that the recipient is urged to open the email and it is marked as ‘important’ rather than spam. However, do not depict the whole thought on the subject line; leave something for the client’s imagination! You can even add a media file with the mail to brew more curiosity and do not forget to put an emoji so that it stands out among other mails.

Once the title and subject is decided, a perfectly written content should be there for the client. Relevance with your company, unique inputs and often tricks and tips, question-answer should be included so that not only the new customers get intrigued but also the existing customers never lose interest. Unique, high-quality and compact content stating all the necessary details (often with heading, sub-heading, bullets etc) in comprehensible language always perform better.

• Authentication Of Domain Is Important

Your email marketing would fail if your domain is not authenticated as in most such cases, the mails go straight to spam folder. If your mail is authenticated, the opening rates will increase along with the click rate. You should also select the best ESP or Email Service Provider for delivery service of the mail.

• Deter From Addressing To CXO

Your promotional emails are not always approved by the CXO’s or busy personnel. Besides, in case of wholesalers, entrepreneurs and small businesses who control have their hands in all business processes, larger businesses have dedicated people responsible for dealing with sales enquiries. Write your email with your recipient in mind, imagine them and their work life as vividly as you can. This will help you create a message that is relevant.

• Concentrate On Cross-Selling

In case you offer more than two types of services, you can segment the mail list according to requirement and interest level. While generally you send product related mails to respective segments, in cross selling strategy, you need to send one different product related mail to the segments so that they are aware of all your products and services. This also works great in case you are advertising special promotions because the more people learn about promotional offers, more they consider availing those offers.

Apart from the above tips, timing is of essence! Especially if you are giving a deadline of any offer or inviting for an event, time yours emails to give your prospects enough time to respond.

At Predictable Marketing, we can help incorporate the perfect email marketing strategy in your overall lead generation plan or as a standalone campaign. We can help design email campaign sequences to achieve your objective whether that’s brand awareness, new lead generation, reselling, up-selling or simply nurturing existing customers. Get in touch to design your email marketing campaign today. We also offer a free review of existing email marketing campaigns. Contact us to book a date for the review.

Partnering Sales & Marketing To Avoid Being A Sales Dinosaur

As our behaviour as buyers has evolved over the years, your sale’s team also need to invite change, embrace digital or face going extinct.

Looking beyond the business world and into our personal lives, if we face a problem, we don’t want to bombarded with cold calls, emails or messages. We like to research the solution ourselves. By using search engines, we can find peoples and companies who exhibit credibility within their field and instil a trust that they can solve our problem. The same process is put into place when looking for a solution in business.

Working within marketing we are often asked why on the 50 leads we have generated there is such a low conversion rate by the sales team. Instead of creating a divide between sales and marketing the two should align to bridge the gap and work together to generate revenue.

What areas can both departments improve on to align?

Only Pass The Gold Dust

Sales is often a busy department and will often abandon avenues they feel are not fruitful. For example, if you pass on 50 leads and calling the first 10 provides unsuccessful, they will lose interest in the other 40. As a marketing department, you however recognise the strength of those remaining leads. By only passing on the stronger leads you guarantee a stronger conversion.

Never Forgetting Your Online Reputation.

Many sales reps will forget that everyone exists online, and everything stays online. Their actions when trying to push for a sale can lead to negative feedback on the various platforms on which your businesses exist online. For as many leads you can generate through digital marketing, how many of these will be put off when they Google your company and see one-star reviews?

Embrace A Change in Approach.

Inbound marketing requires a different sales approach. The attitude of needing to pick up the phone to cold call is now considered pre-historic. After a calculated and well thought out marketing strategy, customers are put off straight away with an unscheduled and unwelcome call. An alternative approach would be to send them a follow-up email thanking them for their download with follow up links and contacts for more information.

Creating a Mixed Buyer Persona

Both sales and marketing have a very different understanding of their businesses. Although marketing understands the industry as a whole and who should be targeted, a sales team will know exactly who’s buying your services and what’s motivating them to invest. The insights of both departments should be aligned when creating your ideal buyer personas. A consistent understanding of your potential customers will mean both departments are targeting and connecting with the right people.

Collaborate on Content.

It’s important to recognise the expertise a sales team has of your customer. They can predict what content they are likely to engage with and what resources they might need to follow up and close a deal with the customer. By working together both departments can streamline the sales process, using the time creating and engaging with content more efficiently. Having that feedback from sales could increase the effectiveness of inbound marketing.

KPIs That Support Each Other

The Key Performance Indicators of both your sales and marketing need not exist in separate sectors. Companies that are embracing the change to a new approach are finding they have a higher chance of increasing their return of investment but focusing on the performance of both sectors. For example, instead of focusing on the number of sales, focus on the customer experience of purchasing.

Delivering on Quality not Quantity of Communications

It’s an extremely outdated approach to send a constant stream of emails or phone calls to a potential customer. As we said earlier, no one likes to be cold-called but everyone hates to be cold-called constantly! Instead of constantly following up with potential leads, sales teams should be relying on marketing to generate new demand and leads whilst keeping those not yet committed to buying engaged.

Leaving Cold Leads To Marketing

In the past sales teams have been to know to hard push a borderline deal. This is where a sale’s rep will push too hard to close a sale in which the lead is not 100% committed and will often back out. Due to the pressure placed on them to buy, they will also look for an alternative company when purchasing in the future. A lead that is not 100% committed, a cold lead, should then be nurtured by your marketing department. By building a relationship with them within a structured marketing campaign they can not only keep them engaged in your services but can convince them to purchase down the line.

To find out more about how Predictable Marketing can help you achieve a more coherent approach between sales and marketing.

B2B Lead Generation: Powerful Ways to Attract Leads

With COVID-19 still a threat, more businesses are looking for ways to reach clients online. In fact, digital sales have grown by 18% year-over-year since COVID-19 hit. Meanwhile, traffic growth has increased by 13%.

As more businesses switch to digital marketing strategies, the landscape is becoming increasingly competitive. You need a strategy that will ensure you stand out.

With an online lead generation strategy B2B, you can reach more customers, boost traffic to your website, and increase sales. Without a B2B marketing strategy, however, you could lose sales. Your competitors will attract those clients instead.

Not sure where to start? Here are the tips you need to succeed this year! With these marketing tips, you can get the competitive advantage you need.

Don’t let COVID-19 slow you down this year. Develop an effective 2021 B2B marketing strategy with these tips today!

1. UX Web Design

Before you develop a full B2B marketing strategy, review your website. Your company website is one of the most effective tools you have at your disposal. With your website, you can:

• Educate your target audience
• Generate leads
• Make online sales
• Communicate your brand
• Establish your credibility
• Share your content

Without a fast, reliable website, however, you’ll fail to accomplish anything. In fact, a slow, outdated website could scare away customers.

Almost 90% of online shoppers won’t return to a site after a bad user experience. Meanwhile, bad mobile optimisation annoys nearly 50% of customers.

In some cases, your website can make the first impression between your brand and customers. Consumers form about 75% of their judgment regarding your credibility based on your website’s appearance alone.

User experience (UX) design can help you create a sleek, easy-to-use, fast website. By improving the user experience, you can keep people on your site longer. The longer they stay, the better for your clickthrough rate and dwell time.

Improving these metrics can boost your search engine ranking. As your ranking improves, you’ll reach even more potential customers.

You can improve your website by:

• Clearing away clutter
• Using negative space
• Organising the navigation bar simply
• Ensuring your website is fast
• Using mobile-optimisation
• Improving readability

You’ll use your website as a component of your overall  increase B2B lead generation strategy. Make sure your call to actions are easy to click on. Keep your forms short and easy to use.

By adding lead generation opportunities throughout your website, you can generate leads and boost business.

2. SEO Blogging

How are you attracting people to your website? Consider working with a B2B lead generation agency that offers search engine optimisation (SEO).

SEO will help your website content rank higher on search engines. A higher ranking will position you ahead of competitors. Meanwhile, clients will see you as a credible resource in your industry.

In order to optimise your website for search engines, you’ll need to complete keyword research. Use tools like:

• SEMRush
• Ahrefs
• Google Trends
• Keyword Planner

What keywords do your clients use when looking for your business? Once you have a list of keywords, you can create content using these keywords.

Develop a content creation strategy to create SEO-optimised content for your website. These can include blogs, videos, ebooks, and more.

As you cover different topics, you’ll appear for more searches. SEO can help boost your digital presence and generate inbound leads. As people comment on your posts, engagement will rise, which can further improve your rankings.

Focus on the value you’re offering your readers. Then, offer downloadable content (eBooks, infographics, and other tools such as a savings calculator or a template for building a business case) in exchange for email sign-ups. Thought Leadership giveaways demonstrate your expertise and generate leads.

3. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing can help you connect with your customers online. It’s also an effective means of sharing your website content.

As part of your 2021 B2B marketing strategy, try dedicating more time to LinkedIn. LinkedIn can help you reach other professionals in your industry.

Social media can help you improve your digital presence. As people like and comment on your posts, you can also boost engagement. Expanding your presence and inspiring engagement can help you attract prospects and leads.

Use social media to direct people to your website. Add a strong call-to-action (CTA) to each post. Then, add links to specific landing pages to your posts.

Use social media to show companies you’re active. Don’t forget to join groups that are relevant to your industry, too. Spark conversations and make connections.

You could find guest blogging opportunities as you connect with other businesses. Guest blogging can help you reach a new audience of clients.

4. Pay-Per-Click Advertising

The global digital advertising market increased from £115 billion in 2019 to £123 in 2020. In light of the COVID-19 outbreak, businesses are relying on methods like pay-per-click (PPC) to reach customers. PPC advertising allows you to create digital ads that will appear on:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Websites on Google’s network
• Google search pages

You can use PPC to direct people to your website landing pages.

Use a strong CTA to compel consumers to complete a specific action. For example, you can direct them to call you, fill out a form, or book a demo.  LinkedIn Ads is particularly helpful in B2B demand generation as it allows you to focus your marketing budget and efforts on a niche audience.

PPC advertising can become costly if you don’t know what you’re doing. Consider working with a B2B marketing London based agency to ensure you save time and money.

5. Automation

Look for B2B lead generation companies that offer automation services. Marketing automation can save you valuable time and help you generate leads.

For example, you can create an automated email marketing campaign. Automated emails sent based on triggers, such as buying signals can be very effective. Remarketing to people who have visited your website can attract them back and often lead to conversions.

Don’t forget to add a strong, eye-catching CTA button to your emails.

You can use automation to lead clients through the marketing funnel using personalised, targeted messages. Personalisation can help you connect with clients on an emotional level.

As you develop your B2B marketing strategy, make sure to keep your brand consistent. A consistent brand can boost awareness and recognition. Clients are more likely to choose a business that’s familiar.

You can use your brand across your website, email marketing, social media, and PPC ads.

Expand Your Reach: 5 B2B Lead Generation Strategies for 2021 Success

Don’t miss a chance to expand your reach and boost business this year! Instead, give these five B2B online lead generation strategies a try. With help from a B2B lead generation agency, you can get ahead of the competition in 2021 and keep your pipelines well fed.

Set yourself up for success this year with a strong 2021 B2B marketing strategy!

Need help improving your digital visibility and generating leads? Work with an experienced B2B lead generation agency London.

Contact us today to discuss your sales objectives and marketing strategies.

The market for Robotic Process Automation products in the UK

The market for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Software grew by 63.1% in 2018, Gartner reports. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is regarded as one of the fastest emerging technologies and there is a good reason why.

1. Typical ROI on RPA products is within 3-6 months. And this is only that long for large,enterprise-level projects. If RPA products are applied to a small part of the process in a business function, the return is almost instant. For example, if RPA is used for collecting invoice information from an external portal and updating it in SAP, the savings in the time taken to process an invoice are instant.
2. RPA products are less of a burden on IT staff in your business. It is a non-intrusive technology and doesn’t require you to rip-off your existing back-end systems or pay expensive development costs on top of it. RPA products work on the presentation layer and replicate what a human can do. That means IT does not need to custom code API’s to enable end–to–end automation of a process.
3. It is your virtual workforce that works 24×7, 365 days in a year. No sick holidays, no breaks. RPA products are the best choice to automate large volume, highly mature, manual and repetitive workflows.

RPA products are being used heavily to automate compliance reporting for financial processes. However, that is not the only case of RPA products being used for automation in the UK.

Some other use cases include

1. Matching of invoices
2. Gathering information to enable recruiters to find the right candidate for their job
3. Doing Competitive analysis by collecting information from different online portals
4. Conducting KYC (Know your customer) validation by connecting information from various systems

There are RPA product specialists in the UK, who have developed products/solutions/services around specific use cases whereas others operate on a broader spectrum of business problems. How to take RPA products to the market remains a challenge.

Download the guide to

Develop a successful Go-to-Marketing Strategy for RPA and AI Products.

What is the most effective Go-to-Market for RPA products?

What is the most-effective marketing channel for selling RPA products in the UK – Social, website inbound leads, events, micro-events, PR, email, telemarketing, demo events or webinars? Where do you get the best return? Most product vendors also provide support to the resellers given they have marketing and sales resources that can win new business. Talk to us at Predictable Marketing and find out how we have helped several RPA product resellers in the UK to develop and implement an inbound go-to-market strategy.