by Fronetics | Aug 31, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy
Targeted content can help convince high-level decision-makers and executives to accept your sales meeting request.
There are many benefits to content marketing, but did you know it can help you land that next impossible-to-get sales meeting?
According to expert marketer Stu Heinecke’s new book, How to Get a Meeting with Anyone, top sales professionals use personalized content to target high-level relationships in what he calls “a shadow practice,” which has been extremely effective at reaching critical, hard-to-reach contacts.
In these campaigns, content is targeted to make the connection with the right people — without any obvious pursuit — and secure those hard-to-get meetings. This can be a game-changer for your business.
Heinecke’s book pools the advice of the top 100 sales thought leaders in the world. He recently shared some of his findings with Harvard Business Review.
Here are some key takeaways:
- You can use content marketing to combine marketing and selling, employing specific campaigns to connect with high-level decision-makers and specific C-level executives. Finding a few dozen of the correct high-level relationships can quickly elevate the scale of your business.
- When approaching connections derived from content, Heinecke found that response rates averaged from 60% to 80%, with some campaigns actually hitting 100%.
- The greatest success is associated with content that delivers something of value. Share the personality of your brand, but offer no sales pitch. “Your first mission is simply to create a connection, to establish yourself as someone they’ll want to listen to,” Heinecke states.
- You should offer something more, to be delivered at the meeting. The point is to continue to add value to the relationship. For example, offer to bring relevant research, a white paper, or a free audit of the executive’s business to the first meeting.
- Once face to face, continue to engage in conversation that provides insight to what the contact’s business challenges are. Refrain from a sales pitch, but share examples of other companies with similar challenges, which have benefited from your specific product or solution. Tell a story — similar to what your content marketing does.
Content can help you make important connections — just ask NoWait
The same HBR article also shares the story of the founders of NoWait, a mobile application which allows diners to put their name on the waitlist of a restaurant from a remote location.
With a minuscule budget, the NoWait founders used targeted content as the basis for their entire launch strategy. They sent personalized videos on iPads in custom packaging to the CEOs of the 30 top restaurant chains. Their highly targeted approach allowed the company to focus on the exact people who could do them the most good — the decision-makers of the biggest brands in the industry. The app is already used by more than half of their targeted companies.
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by Fronetics | Aug 29, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Manufacturing & Distribution, Marketing, Strategy, Supply Chain, Warehousing & Materials Handling
Fronetics designed a content marketing strategy that helped the logistics software company realize increases in new business and sales revenue.
Your company is doing pretty well. You have a nice website and a social media account or two. And you’ve experienced year-over-year growth. Why would you do anything differently?
Just ask TotalTrax, a provider of real-time vehicle, driver, and inventory tracking technologies for manufacturing and warehouse operations. Despite a decade of positive growth, the company realized there were many untapped opportunities for new business. So the TotalTrax team hired Fronetics Strategic Advisors to create and implement a new, data-driven marketing strategy that could increase web traffic, lead generation, and brand awareness.
After a comprehensive audit of TotalTrax’s digital assets, Fronetics was able to recommend a course of action and implement a multi-channel content marketing program. The program included such steps as:
- Creating a blog and posting regular targeted content
- Consistently posting on TotalTrax’s social media accounts
- Implementing paid search, email marketing, and other strategies
After just 24 months, TotalTrax realized significant gains in web traffic, lead generation and nurturing, and — most importantly — new business and sales revenue.
To learn more about how content marketing helped TotalTrax grow business, download our case study below.
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by Fronetics | Aug 23, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy, Supply Chain
TotalTrax leverages content marketing to increase web traffic, generate high-quality leads, and, ultimately, grow business.
TotalTrax, Inc., is a provider of real-time vehicle, driver, and inventory tracking technologies for manufacturing and warehouse operations. Despite a decade of positive growth, the company knew it was missing opportunities for new business because of its lack of a clear digital strategy.
That’s why TotalTrax hired Fronetics Strategic Advisors. The firm created and implemented a multi-channel content marketing program designed to increase the company’s digital footprint and accelerate growth.
Content marketing can help a business elevate its brand position by producing content that demonstrates industry expertise, offers valuable information, and builds trust with their target audience. Example benefits include:
- Increased brand awareness
- Higher referral traffic
- Better lead generation and nurturing
- Improved customer loyalty and trust
- Decreased marketing cost and higher ROI
Fronetics evaluated TotalTrax’s existing digital assets. Leveraging extensive market research, the firm helped refine the company’s messaging and content distribution to better engage potential customers. Fronetics then implemented the customized content marketing strategy to help TotalTrax fully leverage its web presence to bring about new business.
The results
In a 24-month period, TotalTrax realized significant gains in web traffic, quality leads, and brand awareness. Key results included:
- 19% increase in overall web traffic
- 500% increase in traffic from social media
- 244 high-quality leads
- 30% net increase in new customers
To learn more about Fronetics’ strategy for TotalTrax, download the free case study below.
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by Fronetics | Aug 18, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy
Transactional emails offer prime real estate for driving further customer engagement or action.
Your business probably invests a lot of time and effort creating marketing emails to send to your prospects and consumers. But have you thought much about the content of your confirmation and thank you emails?
New findings from IBM Marketing Cloud’s 2016 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study suggest you should. The survey “examines messages sent by nearly 750 companies and 3,000 brands in 2015, using a wide variety of measurements to establish benchmarks on customer engagement (via multiple open, click, and device/email client metrics) and list churn (hard bounces, unsubscribes, and complaints).”
One important finding relates to how recipients engage with transactional emails, messages confirming a purchase or an action (such as signing up for a newsletter). In almost every respect, transactional emails outperform non-transactional emails. For example:
- Transactional emails generate roughly 2x the open rates of non-transactional emails.
- Transactional emails generate roughly 3x the click-through rates of non-transactional emails.
This should not be a surprise, since these emails are based directly on a person’s purchase or action. But what many companies don’t realize is that these messages represent an opportunity to drive further customer engagement or action. Adding a prominent call to action can encourage the recipient to join your email list, make an additional purchase, or otherwise move further down the purchase path.
Instead of a simple “Thanks for your purchase!” email, put a little thought into how you might keep that person interacting with your business. Here are a few ideas:
1) Ask them to review their purchases.
Include a link to the recipient’s account or orders page. This gets them back on your website, where you can add additional calls to action, advertise related products, or encourage them to join a loyalty program.
2) Offer an incentive for future purchases.
Encourage recipients to buy again soon by providing a discount code for their next transaction. This also helps build brand loyalty by showing customers you value their business and want them to come back.
3) Request they follow you on social media.
Provide links to your various social media accounts to build additional touch points with your customers and prospects. Suggest they post photos of themselves using the products they purchased, share their purchase (or link to the newsletter sign-up, etc.) with their followers, or enter your contest or giveaway happening on these platforms.
4) Show them how to use their purchase.
Link to content that can improve their experience with the product or service they just bought. Step-by-steps guides, how-to videos, images of other buyers using the product: give them valuable support to improve their user experience and to keep them engaged with your content.
5) Display similar or related products.
What else do customers buy when they make the same purchase? Do you have other products or services that go along with it? For example, someone buying a hammer might also be interested in nails, toolboxes, or screwdrivers.
6) Ask them to join your loyalty or rewards program.
This is another way to offer incentives for future purchases and exclusive access to deals while your business gains additional information about the person.
7) Request they sign up for your newsletter, join your email list, or subscribe to your blog.
Encourage them to stay in the loop by opting into your content. You’ll stay in the sights of potential buyers that aren’t ready to make a purchase, and be on their mind when the time comes to buy.
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by Fronetics | Aug 15, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
If your social media strategy doesn’t align with your business objectives and target audience, your marketing budget is probably better spent elsewhere.
Almost half of CMOs report they do not feel prepared to manage the challenges that accompany the rise of social media. Regardless marketers report that they plan to double social media spending in the next five years.
Pouring money into increasingly complex and expansive social marketing campaigns will not guarantee success, however. Instead, Keith Quesenberry, author of Social Media Strategy: Marketing and Advertising in the Consumer Revolution, suggests that marketers need to boil their social strategies down to the basics to improve results.
“They must use fundamental marketing concepts and modify them for this new two-way, consumer-empowered medium of social media,” says Quesenberry in a Harvard Business Review article. He offers these four steps for developing a basic social strategy.
1) Identify your business objectives.
Any strategy your business adopts should carefully align with your goals. Are you hoping to grow brand awareness? Generate more leads? Rebrand your business? Your social strategy should serve those objectives.
2) Listen to your target audience.
Yyou should have a thorough understanding of who your target audience is and how they use social media. After all, millennials use different platforms at different times than, say, Fortune 500 CEOs. Quesenberry suggests using analytics tools within social networks and secondary research, such as the Pew Research Internet Project, Nielsen, or Edison Research, to identify larger trends in social media use.
3) Produce engaging content.
Create the kinds of content your target audience seeks, and distribute it through the platforms on which they seek it. How-to videos on YouTube? Thought leadership on LinkedIn? Optimize the material you distribute for each channel. Use the social channels that best suit your brand message, type of content, and target audience.
4) Link marketing goals to social media KPIs.
Measure key performance indicators such as social media click-throughs to purchase (if the goal is online sales), social impressions (for brand awareness), or number of campaign-specific forms completed (for lead generation).
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by Fronetics | Aug 11, 2016 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing
HubSpot and WordPress rank at the top of G2 Crowd’s list comparing platforms to create, edit, and publish digital content.
Businesses and marketers who do not have coding skills rely on web content management systems to publish their digital content. There are a number of different products available, so how do you choose which one is best for your business?
G2 Crowd is a popular business software review site that allows users to rate their experiences with different products to help others make better purchasing decisions. It has leveraged hundreds of user reviews and analyzed market-share data to create a rankings grid for web content management systems. Products with 10 or more reviews are ranked and placed into one of four categories:
- Leaders offer web content management products that are rated highly by G2 Crowd users and have substantial scale, market share, and global support and service resources.
- High Performers provide products that are highly rated by their users, but have not yet achieved the market share and scale of the vendors in the Leader category.
- Contenders have significant Market Presence and resources, but their products have received below average user Satisfaction ratings or have not yet received a sufficient number of reviews to validate their products.
- Niche products do not have the Market Presence of the Leaders. They may have been rated positively on customer Satisfaction, but have not yet received enough reviews to validate their success.
The top 10 web content management systems, with their score and category, are as follows:
1) HubSpot (89, Leader)
HubSpot is an inbound marketing software company that helps businesses transform their marketing from outbound (cold calls, email spam, trade shows, TV ads, etc) lead generation to inbound lead generation enabling them to “get found” by more potential customers in the natural course of the way they shop and learn.
2) WordPress (86, Leader)
WordPress.org is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. They like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.
3) Drupal (67, Leader)
Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications.
4) Kenitco (61, High Performer)
Delivering more out-of-the-box functionality than other systems, Kentico makes enterprise-grade, integrated marketing manageable and affordable for businesses of all sizes.
5) Joomla (59, High Performer)
Joomla is a content management system (CMS), which enables you to build websites and powerful online applications.
6) Ingeniux CMS (50, High Performer)
Ingeniux CMS is an enterprise content management platform designed to manage the persuasive web. Easy one-click editing, personalized content, software-as-a-service delivery options, and 100% ASP.NET MVC.
7) Crownpeak (48, Higher Performer)
Crownpeak is the only cloud-first Digital Experience Management (DXM) platform with native Digital Quality Management (DQM). The result is easier, faster and more cost-efficient digital experiences for Marketing and IT teams and their customers.
8) Clickability (46, High Performer)
Clickability helps businesses succeed in a dynamic and competitive environment through internet-scale solutions integrated into a global platform.
9) Evoq Content (46, High Performer)
Evoq Content is DNN’s commercially licensed Content Management System (CMS).
10) idev CMS (44, High Performer)
idev CMS is here to make your life easier. Period. Gone are the days of looking at source code and trying to figure out how to format your website content. With the idev CMS, which is at the core of nearly every Americaneagle.com-built website, your website maintenance headaches will dissolve.
To learn more about the rankings grid, methodology, and the programs, visit G2 Crowd’s website.
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