What does the new norm look like for your business?
The pandemic and other global crises took a toll on businesses and left many holding on to shreds just to stay afloat.
Two years down the line, we have shaken off the dust, straightened up, and are ready to navigate the new norm.
For us, the new norm is an opportunity to solidify existing relationships and forge new ones.
It’s an opportunity to review plans and come up with creative digital marketing strategies to attract customers and push up the numbers.
Luckily, the digital marketing space is highly dynamic, with fresh trends coming up every so often and changing how digital marketers communicate value.
If you’re looking for creative strategies to help you stay relevant, deliver value, and outperform your competitors, here are some techniques worth considering:
Use Intent Data
B2B intent data is information that reveals a web user’s likelihood of taking certain actions.
It allows you to identify the topics or web pages they are interested in and if they are actively considering your offerings.
The data allows you to map out the user’s challenges, topic searches, and buying motives.
You can then create and send timely and highly relevant messages that may help sway the prospect to make a purchase.
Where can you find this data?
As we browse the web, we leave digital footprints that tell a lot about our interests, challenges, and desire to purchase a product/service.
Using internal analytics and data from third-party intent data platforms, businesses can build behavioral patterns that lead to purchases.
They can then focus their energy on B2B buyers who are more likely to buy.
Examples of third-party intent data platforms include Leadfeeder, 6sense ABM/ABX platform, ZoomInfo, Priority Engine, Lead Forensics, TrustRadius, and Bombora.
Benefits of using intent data include:
- Delivering precise and tailored messaging.
- Improving accuracy in ad campaigns.
- Adapting content to suit buyer interests, pain points, and goals, leading to better ranking in search results and a higher likelihood of engagement.
- Improving lead qualification which promotes cooperation between your sales and marketing teams.
Voice search
From Google search to Siri, Alex, and Cortana, people around the globe are using spoken queries to research products or services.
According to a study by PwC, 65 percent of consumers in the 25-49 age bracket use voice-enabled devices on a daily basis.
By today’s standards, these are the rising stars in businesses and play major roles in decision-making.
As a business, it’s in your best interest to optimize for voice searches to attract leads to your site and generate sales.
How do you do it?
- Incorporate conversational keywords in your content. People using voice searches may not start their search by saying “Best … for….” which is what we do for text queries. But they may start by saying, “How do I …”, “Where can I…” “What is ….”
- Create FAQ pages. Look up relevant and common questions related to your products/services and answer them concisely. It will help capture search traffic.
- While many people use Google for voice searches, there are other search engines on the market including Cortana, Siri, and Alexa. Optimize voice search for those voice assistants as well.
- Check the mobile friendliness and loading speed on your site. Search engines are all about delivering quality to their users. If your page doesn’t follow its criteria for usefulness, your ranking may drop.
Cold Calling
You’re probably wondering how cold calling can be a creative strategy when most people dread using it.
You’re probably right, but therein lies your answer.
Since most sales teams would rather not engage in cold calling, it’s a less competitive space that you can take advantage of. Done right, cold calling can maximize awareness, build relationships, and grow revenues.
Here are tips from saleshive.com to help you along:
- Do your homework. Know your prospect’s industry, the challenges they face, their demographics, and how you can help solve these problems.
- Come up with a calling guide that incorporates the opening line, a summary of what you want to say, and a close. You want to grab your prospect’s attention, keep them engaged throughout the conversation and ask for your goal.
- What if the prospect raises an objection? They most likely will. Sit with your team to brainstorm possible objections and creative ways to counter them.
- Get your mind and body ready for cold calling. Minimize distractions, focus your thoughts on the calls, sit up straight and smile.
- Have a dialogue with your prospect. Aim to learn rather than sell. Listen carefully to what the prospect says so you can know what offering will best suit their needs.
Use Visual Content
People tend to remember pictures more than text, so why not explore and include visual content in your communications?
It’s not just memorable, visual content gets higher engagement over plain text and can be done in different formats to suit different audiences.
Moreover, you can repurpose articles into visual content and renew interest among audiences.
What visual content can you create to drive interest and conversions?
- Charts and graphs are ideal for data-oriented audiences. You can use them to explain theories or how certain conditions came to be.
- Hand-drawn illustrations. Doodles help content stand out, so add them to blog post headers or in the copy.
- Infographics are well suited for highlighting specific aspects of your industry or for telling a story using a complication of statistics.
- Interactive infographics allow audiences to alter data to produce the information they are interested in.
- Handwritten notes may help “stop the scroll” and grab a reader’s attention. Write quotes or statistics on post-it notes, pieces of paper, or napkins, take photos and add the images to your content.
Create Podcasts
At least 55 percent of America’s population have listened to a podcast. You have an effective platform to be heard.
Podcasts increase brand awareness and allow you to address pain points or talk about the solutions you provide.
Here’s how you can maximize your B2B podcasting strategy:
- Have a clear purpose. Why do you want to start a podcast? Who will it serve, and why should people listen to it? Identify topics that your audience can relate to.
- Keep the podcast short, ideally between 20 and 40 minutes long. Most people listen to podcasts while doing other things (like exercising) so you want to maximize that time.
- Choose a format. Will you go with a monologue, dialogue, panel-based conversation, an interview, or branded content?
- Consider hosting industry leaders to provide multi-dimensional perspectives that enable listeners to make informed decisions.
- Focus on producing quality audio. Listeners are put off by background noise and speech glitches.
- Identify distribution channels that maximize reach. Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts are excellent platforms, and so is social media.
