What You Need to Know About Marketing Automation for 2016

When you look at the cold hard facts, marketing automation is the new normal for the B2B marketing landscape in 2016. Simply thinking about putting a plan into motion is no longer enough—action steps for automating your marketing outreach also need to be well underway.

Dun & Bradstreet’s 2015 State of Marketing Data report found that “only 5% of B2B marketers say they’re not interested in using marketing automation. That means 95% of survey respondents think it’s a good idea for their business.”
This clearly points to the fact that B2B organizations are already creating and/or carrying out an automated marketing strategy.
If you’re not currently examining data and combining it with tech tools to drive marketing efforts in a timely way, your leads and customers are ripe, low-hanging fruit prime for the picking…by the competition.

Marketing automation is the best way to ensure you are building strong relationships with customers and new clients and enhancing trust in your brand (with more targeted, frequent marketing touchpoints) while also keeping pace with competitor tactics.
Given the lengthy duration of the B2B buyer’s journey, you also need a marketing strategy to create long-term, consistent customer contact that speaks to your target market in a way they can relate to.
Here are three ways to maximize the power of marketing automation in 2016 to keep the sales pipeline filled and flowing.

Clearly Define Your Objectives

Collecting data just for the heck of it is useless. It’s essential to build a marketing strategy that reveals useful insights about buyer behavior from the start. These key metrics act as a window into the true revenue-drivers along the buyer’s journey.
For maximum punch, track how marketing efforts and social media outreach specifically do the following things:

• Increase lead generation
• Improve lead nurturing
• Increase sales revenue

First, Get Focused. Then Refine, Refine, Refine

You don’t need more data. Instead, you need to refine and clarify the data you already have and use it to reach your marketing objectives.

Two-thirds of companies that use marketing automation believe it’s critically important to their business, yet 75% haven’t maximized its benefits

Dun & Bradstreet’s recent Marketing Automation Strategy Survey shows that, as of 2015, “two-thirds of companies that use marketing automation believe it’s critically important to their business, and yet almost 75% think they still haven’t maximized its benefits.”
In order to refine with precision, be sure to create consistent check-in points to monitor performance daily, weekly, monthly, etc. Make sure everyone on the team has access to the same data in a centralized location.
Next, make tweaks to marketing messaging or channels as needed. A bit of the work is trial and error at first, so get proficient on certain marketing and social media platforms and tactics before expanding your efforts.

Track Conversions from Lead to Customer to Measure Marketing Automation Performance

DemandGen’s 2015 Benchmark Study states that “74% of B2B marketers surveyed consider ‘lead quality over lead quantity’ as a prime focus.”

74% of B2B marketers surveyed consider lead quality over quantity as a prime focus

With so many eyes on the same objective in the B2B market, it’s essential for organizations to discover what content, delivery style, and timing impacts a customer’s decision to buy.
Getting clear on which content within the marketing automation process converts also serves as a powerful benchmark, helping marketing teams flow with changing customer behaviors while keeping skin in the game long-term.
The most important step for any B2B organization in 2016 is to get serious about marketing automation and the potential it has to turn leads into customers by leveraging the right data sets for success.
When push comes to shove (or if you have no idea where to start with a marketing automation content strategy), remember that outsourcing is always an option!

http://www.business2community.com/marketing-automation/what-you-need-to-know-about-marketing-automation-for-2016-01382797#EJzq6b6zQg4626eM.97

 

 

Marketing Strategy to Improve Social Media Presence

Social media is becoming an important part of online marketing as it enables you to promote your brand and connect with the audience but you should keep in mind the following points while promoting your brand over social media.

1. Social media is a medium for people to connect with each other. It is not designed to directly promote your products or services. That's why you should use such platform wisely in order to make strong brand reputation online.

2. Focus on posting useful information that provides value to the customer. Try to engage customers in reading content and also communicate with your followers.

Here are some tips that help to improve social media presence -

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram are the most common social media channels today. These sites provide a network where everyone can actively participate. Business are also using it commercially to spread their business online.

Determine Objectives and Goals

Determine your goals and objectives for growing your business presence on social media. It will help you to make the strategy accordingly before you start posting. Make sure about the platform you are using is going in an efficient way to spread your business online.

Understand Their Needs

Find out the things that your audience is looking for. Understand what topics they want to read about. After knowing their requirements and needs provide them useful things they want to see.

Add Social Profile links on Your Website

People who visit your website also check the social profile of a specific company or business to find out what quality of services/ products they offering to the end users and it affects the website ranking also. Nowadays, people check the company reviews at different websites prior to seek the services. This way by linking your profile links on the website will help the visitors to like or follow the verified page of your company and it makes the site more trustworthy.

Try to Engage With Every One

Whenever someone comment, favorite or retweet on your pages try thanks them in a usual manner. Reply to those users who post something on the page and let the audience know that you are reading.

Use Hashtags to Spread Information

You can use hashtags to improve the visibility of a particular topic. Your page's post may get noticed by more people but don't insert unrelated hashtags.

Building a strong social network will help you to increase leads towards your business.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Marketing-Strategy-to-Improve-Social-Media-Presence&id=9209300

5 Tips For Using LinkedIn To Drive Traffic and Boost Sales

As you may be aware, LinkedIn can be very effective for people selling to other businesses (B2B) - for many such businesses, it's a key source of traffic and leads.

In fact, it can be a more logical place to concentrate your marketing efforts than Facebook. Facebook users are often less interested in business or sales talk, and traffic can be harder to convert.

In contrast, LinkedIn is mainly used by business professionals as part of their working life. It's also rapidly growing, with numbers approaching 400 million.

But how should you use it for marketing? Here are 5 ways to start using LinkedIn as a key part of your overall marketing strategy, and help drive traffic and sales:

1 - Optimize your profile

Spend time on your profile and consider the image you're presenting through it. Also, consider who you want to attract.

This will help build your LinkedIn network, building your own authority and credibility, and can lead to new partnerships, business opportunities, and direct traffic.

LinkedIn can be traditionally thought of as a recruitment tool, and a lot of people craft their profiles in line with this--even when they're a business owner and/or they're not actually looking for a job.

If instead you're on LinkedIn with the primary purpose of finding new leads for your business, craft your profile accordingly.

In what way can you "sell" yourself?

A sales message talks about the benefits, rather than just the hard cold facts of what something does.

Do the same for yourself--what's the benefit for the other person in connecting with you? How would they benefit from the association?

2 - Get involved with LinkedIn Groups.

Search for LinkedIn Groups related to your niche or industry, and join them. Get involved by creating appropriate and useful content and participating in discussions. Work toward establishing some deeper relationships with others in the group.

Once you get your feet wet, you could also try setting up a group of your own and encourage people in your niche to join. Groups will be most effective for you where you aim to 'give' value as much as possible rather than 'take.

Avoid making blatant sales pitches in the groups. Instead think about how you can attract leads to you by simply contributing and helping others. You'll get much better results this way.

3 - Post content on Pulse.

Yes, just like I'm doing here.

This article is actually based on an original blog post, albeit with some adaptations and updates, so you don't have to create content from scratch each time. You can just rewrite other content you already have, and adapt it as necessary for the Pulse environment.

How does this help you?

Here are just some of the benefits:

-- You attract people on LinkedIn who may not have come across you before - those who wish to read more of your content in future can start following you and be notified whenever you publish something new.

-- When someone does follow you (or Like your post), an update is posted for their connections to see, potentially attracting more Follows and Likes.

-- You can link to your site from within the post and help drive traffic from highly targeted prospects. For example, include a call to action towards the end of the article, such as offering some kind of lead magnet in return for their email address. Or include an inline link or two within the main body of the article.

-- Your followers (which includes your connections) are notified each time you publish. This helps keep you and your business front of mind and build your relationship with them. As they read more of your content, you build your trust and credibility levels with them.

-- You can use the link to your content on Pulse for updates to your other social profiles. This increases your communications with your audience and the number of 'touches' they get from you, as well as helps to grow your social channels and level of influence in general. It also builds your engagement metrics on Pulse, which can lead to higher visibility of your content and therefore the ability to be in front of more potential prospects.

Worth doing? You bet.

4 - Update your followers.

Just as on other social networks, you can can share updates with your LinkedIn followers, whether via your personal profile or on your LinkedIn company page.

Share news about your business, useful tips, or content you've created that might be useful to your social community.

And of course interact and engage with content from your connections. This helps further build and solidify those relationships, attracts new leads and connections, and keeps you and your business front of mind.

Where appropriate and where it genuinely adds value, offer links through to content on your own site.

5 - Focus on building your network.

Your network of connections on LinkedIn doesn't just have to be restricted to people you know well or who you've met in person. Expand and build your network by doing the following:

Via 'Connections > Add Connections' on the LinkedIn menu, invite people you already know via email. If you have an email list for your business, try opening a new email account on say Yahoo! Mail, importing your list of email addresses (up to 5000), and then connecting that mail account with LinkedIn to invite thousands at a time. (Yes, there is a facility to upload a CSV file directly into LinkedIn... however, it invariably doesn't work, hence this work around with a clean email account).

LinkedIn will suggest people you may already know - go through the list on a regular basis and connect with people you recognize, with whom you have connections in common, or who may have an interest in your content and in what you do.

As you get new prospects into your business, invite them to connect through LinkedIn within the first few days, while their connection with your business is still fresh in their minds.

You'll also get invitations to connect from others, which you can simply accept as appropriate.

Have you learned something new about the opportunities that LinkedIn offers to build your online visibility? Pick at least a couple of the above tips to get started with right away.

http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Steve_Shaw/4373 Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9204653