Social media is shaping our lives, and it’s influencing the way we connect, communicate & make decisions in the 21st Century. From brand reputation & credibility to product quality assessment & recommendations, customers now rely heavily on social media. According to a recent survey, over 82% of people trust social networks to guide purchasing decisions, and 80% of consumers have purchased something via an influencer recommendation.
As entrepreneurs, we are often faced with all kinds of challenges. As a result, we’re constantly multitasking, learning new skills, staying relevant in our niche and determined to build a successful, profitable Brand…. We Already Have A Lot On Our Plates! One of The Greatest Hurdles That We All Face As Business Owners Is TRAFFIC GENERATION, Not Just Any Kind Of Traffic But TARGETED TRAFFIC.
No Doubt! Traffic Is An Essential Component Of Any Successful Brand, But Most Of The Time, You Tend To Over-Complicate This Very Simple Concept. As business owners, we have tried multiple traffic channels. Invested a considerable chunk of our budget on Pay Per Click advertising, worked with numerous ads agencies & spent months perfecting our SEO Strategies. Unfortunately, it turned out that we had spent a couple of thousands on ads, and we could barely break even.
Also, our SEO results were very inconsistent due to the volatility of this industry, the rules Kept changing, and traffic was on a downward trend for us. “The simple truth is, most business owners are not paid advertisement experts/Facebook ads wizards or SEO genii, and neither are we. In addition to that, not every business has the budget to spend on ads.
In most cases, you need years of experience with thousands of dollars spent on testing different ad strategies to find a winner.” After several weeks without decent engagement on my fashion Instagram store where I sell women’s clothes. Was stuck between, influencer marketing & IG ads? But after doing my homework & found out most successful fashion stores grew their followership through influencer marketing.
Using BrandElevate, I was able to access the right influencer tools to grow my Instagram followers from 201 to 7000 in under 2 weeks. On top of that was able to sell 11 wears from my store.
Whether you like it or not, if you (or your client’s) business is online, your reputation is also. With more than 90% of consumers now looking at online reviews before they buy from a company, you have the potential to gain, or lose that 90% based on what your consumers can find or cannot find…
Anyone looking to run a successful online business in 2022 & beyond… needs to take their online reputation back into their own hands. As a business owner (in any niche) you need to create an active online standing to help boost your brand’s legitimacy and credibility.
Potential customers need “social proof” before making a purchasing decision. In fact, 88% of consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations. Showcasing this feedback can increase conversion rates by 270%.
This sales bump can happen because customers will trust online reviews as much as their friends and family. They will base their buying decisions depending on what others have said.
LocalCetric connects Google My Business (GMB), Facebook, Yelp, TrustPilot, Capterra, Amadeus and easily monitor and respond to reviews in real-time, improve local search engine rankings, track performance, enhance your reputation, and drive additional sales. See more details here..
A massive amount of branded content is being published to the web every day. Every piece makes it more difficult to capture and keep the attention of your target audience.
Joe Pulizzi, Content Marketing Institute Founder, attributes this to the increasing difficulty of “content tilt.” Tilt, according to Pulizzi, is the differentiating factor that makes your brand’s content unique. When your industry is saturated with blogs, eBooks, webinars and podcasts, “tilt” can be nearly impossible to achieve.
While well-done content marketing can create synergy within an integrated demand generation program, there’s no escaping the fact that creating quality content is time-consuming. That’s why you want to get the most mileage possible out of every piece of content you create.
7 Ways to Improve Your Content Marketing for Demand Generation
1. Focus on Problems
You’re in business because your brand has a solution to your prospect’s problems, right?
If your content isn’t hitting the mark, it may be because you’re not focused on your personas’ pains at each stage of the funnel:
Early-stage prospects are just starting the process of solving a problem
Mid-stage leads are considering their options
Late-stage opportunities are looking to overcome their concerns and get buy-in from all stakeholders
Taking a solution-oriented approach to your persona’s problems allows you to position your brand as a problem solver. You can do this in a number of ways:
Creating how-to blogs for every stage of the funnel
Infusing premium content with unique, problem-solving value.
Actively listening to your prospects, leads and customers to understand their problems.
Participating on social media to answer industry questions.
Optimizing SEO for problem-oriented long-tail organic search keywords.
Creating solution-oriented lead nurturing workflows.
2. Address the Customer’s Questions
Content marketers instinctively know they should answer questions. But, answering the right questions makes all the difference.
Here are some ways you can understand what your prospects and customers really want to know:
Analyze the blogs, eBooks and content resources accessed most frequently by prospects and customers
Examine the content resources used most often by sales and customer success teams
Compile a list of questions or topics from social media interactions
Listen in on customer onboarding meetings
Pull frequent keywords or queries from your website chatbot logs
Keep a growing spreadsheet of all customer questions from before the sales process, during the sales process and after the close
3. Leverage 3rd-Party Media Sources
If you’re trying to boost the reach of your content marketing efforts – beyond what your blog, social and SEO efforts can deliver – the next logical step is 3rd-party media sources and lead generation services.
Achieving the best results with 3rd-party lead gen, in our experience, requires:
Identifying qualified media sources
Evaluating potential media partners’ audiences
Researching their account-based marketing (ABM) capabilities and targeting options.
There’s a big difference between good and bad content marketing, especially when it comes to where and how you promote your content. A bad content marketing strategy comes across as spammy and can quickly undermine your brand’s credibility. If you do content promotion well, you come across as a helpful and knowledgeable source.
What to do:
Promote your content where your personas are looking for answers
Be an active, helpful and valuable member of online communities where your personas engage
Build relationships before you link or pitch – this means having real conversations on social media post comments, and only linking to your content if it is truly helpful to audiences in the context of the original post
Don’t repeatedly post links to your own content on your personal or business social media profiles
Don’t make a habit of adding links to your content into the comment section of other blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn post – it’s transparent and annoying
Don’t feign involvement in online communities to promote your content
5. Promote Based on Funnel Stage
Content marketing is a full-funnel marketing strategy. Content drives results for brand awareness and lead generation at the top of the funnel. At the middle of the funnel, it helps nurture prospects, facilitating lead velocity, conversion rates and sales pipeline growth. At the very bottom, it supports sales enablement, resulting in more closed-won deals and revenue contribution.
You need content for every stage of the funnel. And, you need to know how to effectively distribute that content to audiences according to stage as well as all relevant stakeholders (i.e., sales and customer success teams).
Use tools to map your content to specific funnel stages and strategically promote it where it brings the most value to your prospects and customers. We’ve created several content strategy and distribution templates in the Demand Orchestration Workbook that can help.
6. Be Relevant Now
Attention moves fast. Talking about yesterday’s news gets you nowhere. In some industries, relevance is shorter-lived than in others. B2B marketers in particularly fast-moving fields, such as information security, financial technology and similar niches, need to be on top of their game.
Don’t get caught talking about issues or topics that are resolved. It won’t get attention on social media, organic search or other channels.
Creating content in the “now,” isn’t easy, and it requires a great deal of agility. But, it’s just the nature of generating demand in the digital age.
7. Use the Right Tools
Tools aren’t everything, but when you’ve got your processes and people aligned, tools can make all of the difference. Many of the tools most game-changing B2B content marketers swear by are free, easy-to-use and deliver great value.
Here are a few favorites:
Quora: Need an expert quotation fast? With 100 million users and a fast-growing segment of verified experts and celebrities, Quora is a powerful way to source personalized answers from names your audience knows.
Percent Change Calculator: Some tools only do one thing extremely well, and in the case of this percentage change calculator, that’s enough. It’s a great go-to if you need to crunch numbers quickly and accurately.
HARO: Post or respond to source requests from journalists and bloggers, including media at sources such as Reuters, Time and the Wall Street Journal or other subject matter experts.
Atlas: Atlas is akin to Google, but it’s exclusively dedicated to stats, graphs and charts, many of which are free for reuse.
Canva: Perhaps the easiest to use graphic design tool for non-designers available online.
Elevate Your Content Marketing in 2018
Content marketing isn’t simple, but it’s also not an optional component of a full-funnel B2B marketing strategy. To generate leads, nurture prospects and win deals, B2B marketers need to work smarter against increasing content competition.
By adopting the right tactics, including better empathy for your personas’ problems and a commitment to relevant and timely content creation, B2B marketers can shift from simply creating great content to ensuring it’s used to its fullest potential.
The world’s first & only marketplace builder helps you scale your revenue by getting you more clients, bagging more service orders, getting more higher value projects, builds your authority as a service provider, kills the competition & helps you charge higher prices for your services.
Think about it… it’s a complete digital marketing agency setup fully done for you. Think about any high ticket service in the world, and it’s included in this big marketplace that you will get. That too completely professionally done by professional copywriters & designers. Again, you just need to add your payment method, and get started selling immediately.
Just in case you are thinking that you don’t have the skillset to offer all of these services. Truth is, you don’t have to. Because of your own professionally branded marketplace, you will be able to bag orders immediately… now go ahead & pass those orders to sellers on Fiverr/Upwork who are selling the exact service for hardly pennies. Of course, don’t tell the sellers from where you are getting the orders, just pass it on to them.
We are giving you 120+ DFY social media ads that you can start running immediately & start driving traffic to your marketplace(s). These ads have been created keeping all the niches in mind. There is no branding on these ads so either you can run them directly or you can put your branding on top of it. Totally up to you.
We have covered Facebook, Instagram & Google ads dimensions. All of them. The ads have been created by our professional designing team so you know they will be really attractive & will help you get traffic & customers from social media.You will get an effective to the point SMS funnel strategy of getting qualified leads of prospects interested in your marketplace services.
You will get the exact SMS to be sent, plus the exact funnel pointers to be used. If your outreach strategy is broken, you can never convert clients. We are sharing with you the exact outreach strategy that works. This checklist has been verified by 10 professional sales specialists, so you know it works. All that you need to do is start implementing the steps shared in the checklist & see the results coming your way.
MarketPresso comes up with an inbuilt messaging system that lets your customers message you in real time. This increases the conversions drastically because your visitors are able to discuss their requirements first before placing an order. Hence, a much higher probability of sales conversion.
Basic/Standard/Premium Variations Completely Done For You
Checkout page “upsells” completely Done For You
100% Conversions Optimised Services Description Crafted by 7-Figure Copywriters
Thumbnails + Images + Placeholders curated by the Award Winning Designers
All images + placeholders + categories + sub-categories + thumbnails + badges + checkout pages + FAQs + Recommended for you tags, etc – Everything Done For You
Your marketplace will be fully mobile friendly. We have tested this on almost every single mobile & tablet device & it has come out with flying colors in every single one of them. You will always bank in the extra mobile sales….
Petite 'n Pretty aims for its lifestyle product line to more accurately reflect the younger ... [+] getty
Young people today are thinking about their futures earlier than ever before. Gone are the days of, “I’ll figure out my major before I graduate.” Instead, these are the days of lemonade stands that turn into business plans, seed money, and a resulting entrepreneurial journey.
In many respects, branding comes early on the journey of the very young, also known as Generation Alpha. According to an N.C. State article, Generation Alpha’s habits and outlooks reflect that of their Millennial parents. “As health-conscious caretakers, Millennial parents seek out a lot of information about the products they buy and expose their kids to,” says author Heather Dretsch. Like their parents, Alpha’s appear to seek high-quality, health-conscious, sustainable products with technology, diversity, and immediacy at the forefront.
The youth of today has been marketed through social media, television, apps, games, and other media outlets. But, according to Common Sense Media, advertisers are keenly aware of the long-term effects of getting their brand in front of youth as early as possible. “Advertisers know that kids greatly influence their parents’ buying decisions, to the tune of $500 billion per year,” cites Common Sense on advertising for kids.
However, in some industries, such as beauty products, advertisers tend to position their marketing from already established models that cater to adults more than young people. As a result, mature messaging is portrayed to a younger audience attempting to develop their identity and explore their emotional space in the world.
Samantha Cutler, the founder of Petite ‘n Pretty, harnessed 17 years of experience in product development in the professional make-up industry with such brands as Smashbox, MAC Cosmetics, and others to launch an age-appropriate product line for younger girls just learning to explore their personal development and sense of self.
Cutler recognized that if beauty products were already being marketed to a younger age bracket, she might as well offer a healthy, age-appropriate product that educates through inspiration, empowerment, equity, and inclusion.
While working at name brands, many friends and acquaintances would ask her if she could recommend products, and she realized how many products did not align with younger kids.
“I never had an answer, the products weren’t age-appropriate. Many of the products had suggestive naming conventions, or the colors were extremely pigmented, something many parents would not feel comfortable giving their daughter or son,” says Cutler.
Product integrity is essential to Cutler, and some marketed merchandise did not represent clean beauty. In addition, some were produced overseas without proper testing that would appeal to parents wanting the safest products for their children.
As a mother herself, she knew there was a need. “I felt like there was this whitespace of opportunity in beauty, educating about beauty, and I always wanted to start a brand. But the beauty marketplace is saturated with 300 times the number of brands launching yearly than when I first started working. So I wanted to ensure there was a purpose behind what I did.”
Niche Market
Cutler concentrates mainly on the niche market from ages 7 to 12. While cutesy in nature, the company’s naming is steeped in feedback from the associations of younger kids and application principles. “I raddled off names to my three-year-old daughter and when the word ‘pretty’ came up, she instantly knew what it meant. There was a familiarity, and ‘pretty’ is a feeling that comes from within, a good feeling. Petite represents everything we produce. Everything is slightly smaller and gives a first user the best initial experience.”
At the core, Cutler is trying to bring confidence and comfort to kids by starting what she calls ‘the beauty journey’ and building within the offerings. “What I like to say is if your daughter or son is going to ride a bike for the first time, you’re not going to give them a mountain bike,” she says. “Everyone begins the journey at a different age, and we are here to support them and be their friend, knowing there are no mistakes along the way.”
Education Zoom Camps
During the pandemic, Cutler found the use of Zoom camps a tremendous educational and informative tool. “The camps were a great revenue driver for us and brand building experience. These kids were so bored and stuck at home, and ultimately it was an opportunity for us to create a fun brand-building experience with dynamic, engaging, creative activities.
Influencers
Cutler’s ability to team up with influencers such as Piper Rockelle, with almost 10 million subscribers on YouTube, is part of the process of bringing people from other worlds together. Cutler has noticed that some influencers’ numbers skyrocket after the collaborative process. “There’s a fascinating dynamic with influencers, actresses, and dancers, and we bring them together for photo shoots. As a result, different audiences come together, and everyone begins to follow and learn from one another socially.”
Competition
Many brands try to go after the younger consumer. Still, Cutler recognizes that many brands are not directly integrating them into marketing or bringing them together for learning workshops or photo opportunities. “They know there’s an audience and a consumer that sits on TikTok all day, or Instagram, but they are not necessarily hiring a 12-year-old for a photoshoot. They’re trying to get the audience to engage with their brand but not directly.” It’s a direct relationship that appears to set Cutler’s efforts apart from others.
Big Picture
With 30% to 40% growth rates last year, Petite ‘n Pretty is looking to scale at a 30% rate this upcoming year. Online sales on Amazon and others have been a success and Cutler is moving back into Ulta.com stores this coming year. The projection is to build the branding in stores in the U.S. with international efforts on the horizon.
Cutler’s approach is a more hands-on collaborative effort. An iterative educational process that learns about the younger generation while at the same time generating consumer behavior habits that are authentic to their consumer needs. Cutler recognizes that the younger generation isn’t necessarily and habitually brand loyal, but more driven by a loyalty found in authentic experiences that speaks to them and caters to the world they are forming.
Samantha Cutler found her entrepreneurial groove with her motherly instincts intact. Her thriving business illustrates the scale companies can grow if brands and proprietors maintain a sense of self along the way and educate themselves on the needs and understanding of the younger generation.
Even though cosmetics tend to be viewed as ‘outer’ oriented, Cutler is building a company of substance that stays true to the consumer base with the sensibility of market trends, sustainability, and safety.
I am an education and health care industry strategist having covered thought leadership and entrepreneurship for Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, Scholastic and Huff Post.
