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B2B Digital Marketing Blog

Have you thought to yourself any of these questions:

  • Why is online so complicated?
  • Where do I find the time fit in digital marketing?
  • Does digital marketing even work for the print industry?

It’s likely you have or had a similar question.

And you’re not alone!

 

The biggest problem with digital marketing today (and the digital marketing industry) is that it has created itself into being overly complex.  There are so many options, the platforms are constantly changing and to figure all of this out you have to spend a lot of time reading to stay on top of it and trying things out to see what works.

But it doesn’t have to be that way!

 

The 3 Steps to Succeeding Online for the Print Industry

To make digital marketing easy on yourself just do these 3 things.

  • Focus your effort
  • Keep it Simple
  • Commit

 

I know those sound really generic and doesn’t have the tactical application you might be expecting, BUT I am going to share with you the tactics of doing those three things here.

 

Focusing Your Effort & Keeping It Simple

These two go hand in hand as we focus to keep things simple.

Focus is most applicable to generating a return.

Like most marketers will tell you, segment and target your message!

But what most marketers want you to do is have 6 personas that have 3 different mindsets and now you have 18 customer types you have to create and message for.

FORGET THAT!!!

 

Same thing goes for the tactics of digital marketing.

There are so many things that can be done for each discipline and it’s nearly impossible to stay on top of it all if you aren’t an agency where your business is to stay on top of it.

Think about it… SEO, PPC / SEM, Social Media, Social Ads, Email & Marketing Automation, Conversions, Goals, CRO, etc.

That’s a lot.

 

But again only a fraction of what can be done is best suited for your needs, in your market for your target customers.

So that’s what you want to do.

 

Committing to the Marketing Plan

So you know the audience you’re going to focus on and the tactics suited for you.

The last step is to just DO IT!

 

This is the 2nd most common place where companies in the print industry get hung up.

They will seek some sort of perfection that doesn’t actually exist and never pull the trigger.

That’s a lot of wasted time and money to then do nothing.

 

It’s true that you’ll want to tweak things after they have run to make them work better, but if you commit and see results you’ll feel a lot better about going even harder and getting even BETTER Results.

To move ahead is most important because doing nothing will get you nowhere!

 

In conclusion our recommendation to you is…

Pick a target customer (real estate brokerages, financial advisors, marketing agencies, etc.) and create a campaign that targets them on LinkedIn sends them to a landing page created for them and gives them a PDF created just for them. This will get more sales from your target audience.

 

Optimize your title tags, meta descriptions and h1 tags to include the words people search for when looking for your services.  Add a contact / quote form to every product / service page on your site with a button for them to click to call if they prefer.

 

And ACTUALLY DO IT (the committing part).

 

Then you will get found more often by new and existing customers, generate more leads and close more business.

Guaranteed!!!

 

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    The Project Shuffle – When One Client Takes Priority Over Another

    The project shuffle – gets tedious and exhausting, doesn’t it? However, it happens more often than not when you work in the constantly changing digital marketing landscape. This is where your project management skills are put to the test. It is where you learn the quirks of the client and how to move the processes along with each task to meet the deadlines.

     

    How Do You Prioritize with Project Management?

    Determining priorities with client projects means that you have to sit down and take a look at the bigger picture. It is not the simple shuffle of tasks that will make things run smoother, its the negotiation in your mind that tells you okay this makes sense and it will not interfere with the workflow. That it will benefit the team.

    • Read the client contracts
    • Learn your client’s quirks and what they pay the most attention to.
    • Sit down with Team Members to discuss tasks at hand.

     

    Agreeing On What Needs to Be Reprioritized

    Project management with multiple clients is not just about you and the client. The bigger picture is to make sure that projects are getting done correctly and efficiently without overloading team members with tasks for that project on top of other client projects. When it comes down to making these changes, an internal meeting with all team members involved is important. Sit down, write out what is happening on a whiteboard, and reach a consensus as to what can be put on hold and pushed back. More often than not reprioritizing can be difficult if one team member is responsible for major portions of work and already has a lot on their plate. Talk with them and discuss what can be done to alleviate the stress and make it possible to reprioritize projects.

     

    Talking it out with all team members involved is more important than just deciding on your own as the Project Manager.

     

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      If you talk to an agency or “expert” marketing technologist they will tell you about all the Best Practices you should be following when it comes to Marketing Automation for B2B.  And all of those “best practices” are typically highly involved, complicated, time consuming and expensive.

      But here’s the TRUTH, B2B Marketing Automation can be EASY.

       

      Why would anyone try to make it so difficult?

      There are many reasons…

      1. They believe it needs to be (… but it doesn’t)
      2. They don’t know it well enough and are quoting the “expert posts” they’ve read
      3. They aren’t that great at marketing and are a technology enthusiast (leads to overtech marketing)
      4. They have a desire to feel important and the more complicated something is the more important they think they are
      5. They want you to be “Stuck” with them, if it’s too hard for you then they feel you can’t get rid of them
      6. And the list goes on

       

      So the question for you should be… “How Can I Make B2B Marketing Automation Easy?”

      Read On.

       

      How You Can Make B2B Marketing Automation Easy

      The simplest and easiest way to get started with marketing automation as a B2B company is to use it in combination with a lead generation campaign by creating a linear, time based, drip nurture email sequence. (I explain below)

       

      Here are the 3 things you need to do

      • Choose an Automation Platform (I won’t go into these here, but pick one!) *we love HubSpot
      • Create an Ad Campaign to fill your marketing automation platform
      • Create your automation emails & logic

       

      Choose an Automation Platform

      This up to you and the choices are many.

      To be honest it doesn’t matter a ton which one you pick when you are first starting because it’s more important to just start doing it.

      You’ll be looking at price, contact tiers, capabilities and integrations that fit your business best.

       

      Again we personally love HubSpot for this (but it can get pricey quick, we get it)

       

      Create and Ad Campaign

      This is who you’ll actually use your marketing automation platform on.

      Basically decide on a target customer, create the ads, set up the campaign and ensure that the leads which come in are integrated into your automation tools database through forms.

      You can read in detail on how to set up a High ROI B2B Ad Campaign Here: https://acumenstudio.com/ad-campaigns-for-b2b-how-to-make-them-work-more-leads-and-paying-less/

       

      Create Your Automation Emails & Logic

      Lastly you’ll need to create the emails that will nurture your leads.

      We recommend starting by doing this to start.

       

      Create a 4 part email nurture series.

      1. Auto-response email to a form submission
      2. 2 days later – A follow up email asking if they received a link to the download from the form submission and / or if they have any questions
      3. 4 days later – An email giving them a little more detail on the same subject matter they originally requested and an ask to call them to learn more about them and their business need
      4. 5 days later – An email stating you don’t want to be a bother so you’d rather just jump on a call to talk give them more information on your company and what you do as well as learn about what their original interest was when downloading from the form.

       

      At this point your sales team should reach out directly a couple days after the last email went out.  What you’ll find is that you get more responses and leads are more responsive to “warm call” outreach once they have gotten all of these emails.

       

      I hope this shows you how a B2B company can implement a marketing automation tool and campaign easily without over-complicating the whole thing.

       

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        The Everchanging LinkedIn Campaign Manager

        Another day, another change to the ad creation interface. It seems like everytime it’s time to go and create a new campaign, setting up the ad has a different user experience.

        In February, LinkedIn launched the new objective-based campaign experience. Like the name, this new experience is focused on the objective of the campaign first. To put it simply, you as the marketer decide what the focus of the campaign is going to be whether it’s website visits or engagement, then the rest of the campaign creation matches that objective.

         

        While most of the format has the same options and functionality, it’s still something to get used to.

         

        What’s New in the LinkedIn Campaign Manager

        In the objective-based experience, there are a number of new items to be aware of.

        • The objective is at the top of the page and must be selected before moving forward with any other part of the campaign.
        • The audience selection and targeting criteria comes next and is broken out by language, location, audience attributes (company, demographics, education, job experience, interests), then matched audiences (website audiences and list uploads). Each of criteria has deeper criteria listed within. Like the old experience, depending on the criteria you select, other criteria won’t be available.
        • The budget, bid type and conversion tracking also must be complete before setting up the ad creative.

         

        <h2>Benefits of the New Format</h2>

        The number one benefit to this new experience is that it makes the campaign creation simpler by streamlining it to fit what the objective is. It also offers automated bidding for that objective as well.

        Even though it’s another new experience, there are definitely huge benefits to the new experience.

         

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