A webinar is an excellent content medium to generate leads to or nurture those already in your sales funnel.
Maybe you’ve taken a webinar to enhance your professional skills. Did you know that webinars can be beneficial not only to the students, but also to the business providing them?
In content marketing, we consider a webinar content that your target audience will find valuable. You can leverage this value to move them through the buyer’s journey — whether it’s becoming a lead by providing their contact information in exchange for attendance, or by using the webinar strategically in the lead-nurturing process.
[bctt tweet=”“Webinars are ideal when you’re selling knowledge. The product allows someone to continue learning in a medium that’s similar to the webinar itself.” Amy Porterfield” username=”Fronetics”]
Porterfield suggests that live online workshops and pre-recorded courses sell well in a webinar, whereas physical products are less effectively sold in this format. “So before you choose a webinar to sell your product or service, think about how the thing you’re selling is or isn’t like a webinar experience.”
How is a webinar different from my other content?
What separates your free content (like blogs, social media, podcasts, etc.) from paid content like a webinar?
Porterfield emphasizes that, while free content explains the “What” of your products and services, “your paid content explains the How.” She suggests that a successful webinar will “paint a picture using images and really powerful words and stories.”
Your attendees should leave the webinar feeling that they’ve learned something valuable, and that they are ready to take the next step — which should be considering your product or services. “When you begin selling in your webinar, focus on how your paid program, online product, consulting, or coaching helps attendees achieve the opportunity, transformation, or result you’ve just explained,” says Porterfield.
She also suggests bringing your target audience’s obstacles to the forefront of the conversation. “Clearly articulating the obstacles lets your audience understand them on your terms and creates a well-defined pathway for your product or service to help them overcome the obstacles. Essentially, you want to provide enough information so that your product is the next logical step.”
Focus on what you do best — and save time and money — by parceling off these 6 marketing tasks to outsource.
If you’re anything like me, you’re busy — not-enough-hours-in-the-day busy. We find that supply chain and logistics marketers are some of the most overworked professionals in the industry. One person (or a very small team) is often responsible for all marketing and sales efforts for an organization. So I want to let you in on a little secret: Outsourcing is your solution to being too busy.
[bctt tweet=”Outsourcing marketing tasks allows you to focus on insourcing your core competencies.” username=”Fronetics”]
Outsourcing marketing tasks allows you to focus on insourcing your core competencies. In other words, you can start focusing on what you do best and delegate specified tasks to external experts.
The content marketing landscape is constantly changing. There are more and more marketing tasks to cover: social media, videos, blogs, emails, etc. How can you truly focus your attention on any one area when you have so many balls in the air?
Don’t work harder. Work smarter.
Outsourcing marketing gives you the opportunity to remove some of the time-consuming and laborious tasks from your desk, so you can get back to the core of your marketing efforts.
That doesn’t mean you have to outsource all your marketing tasks, or even half of them. Choosing several areas beyond your staff’s expertise, or tasks that are particularly tedious, can help you improve your marketing efforts and take stress off an overworked internal team.
Here are six areas you should consider outsourcing.
Video: 6 marketing tasks to outsource
Final thoughts
Finding the right partner is key when you choose to outsource marketing tasks. You have to trust the people to whom you are delegating tasks, so that you know the work is getting done the way you want while you focus your attention on other tasks.
The right partner will work with you to develop a strategy that closely aligns with your business goals. Your partner can even execute the strategy for you and provide regular updates on how it’s working. This kind of results-driven approach will ensure you’re stretching your marketing dollars to the fullest extent and getting the kind of results that will grow your bottom line.
If you’re looking to grow brand awareness fast, here are 8 tricks to boost your efforts.
Have you ever noticed how some brands seem to have crept into popularity overnight? You’ve never heard of them, and then, all of sudden, they’re everywhere.
Their brand awareness has sky rocketed, and they’re achieving every company’s ultimate goal: Customers know about them. So what’s their secret?
Here at Fronetics, we don’t believe they have a secret. We believe that they took advantage of content marketing and its many benefits — growing brand awareness included. They were able to scale their growth in a short amount of time, a true success story for the digital era. Companies like Uber and Yelp have used these tips to implement small changes that yielded large results.
Remember, in order to grow brand awareness, you need to be proactive. It’s time to steer away from some of the traditional marketing methods, which don’t take into account how modern B2B buyers research vendors. Start putting your content marketing strategy to the test.
[bctt tweet=”To grow brand awareness fast, it’s time to steer away from some of the traditional marketing methods, which don’t take into account how modern B2B buyers research vendors. ” username=”Fronetics”]
If you’re looking to increase your brand awareness fast, there’s no better place to start than with content marketing. Check out these 8 tips for using content marketing to grow your brand awareness fast.
Use these three steps to calculate content marketing ROI to show the value of your investment.
As supply chain and logistics businesses are finally recognizing the merits of content marketing, many are looking into it. But it doesn’t take much research to realize what an enormous investment it is. And how difficult it can be to calculate content marketing ROI.
[bctt tweet=”A data-driven approach to calculating Content Marketing ROI lets you continually adapt to the needs of your audience, ensuring an ongoing, robust ROI.” username=”Fronetics”]
Many companies we talk to need help convincing management that it’s a worthwhile investment. To that we say, use data!
But what data should you use? How do you quantify certain benefits, like growth in brand awareness? And do you really have to keep track of all the hours you spend writing blog posts, managing social media, etc.?
Here arethree basic steps for how to calculate content marketing ROI.
3 steps to calculate content marketing ROI
1) Set up your ROI measurement.
It’s important that you measure content marketing ROI at the initiative level. This means calculating the ROI of your blog, your webinar series, your Facebook marketing, etc. individually.
After calculating the ROI of each initiative, you can aggregate that data to determine your overall content marketing ROI for your business.
2) Know as much detail as possible.
“To measure ROI, you have to know, in as much detail as possible, the R (return) and the I (investment) of your content initiative,” says Jay Baer, president of Convince & Convert. Baer walks his readers through the example of figuring out ROI for a podcast, including calculating total investment in the project (including preparation and execution), and calculating total return.
Content marketing is about creativity. By the same token, think creatively about every measurable avenue of return in each of your initiatives.
3) Calculate your ROI.
The formula for ROI is universal: return minus investment, divided by investment, expressed as a percentage.
And there’s some good news for supply chain and logistics content marketing: “Content marketing ROI calculations are indeed easier for B2B companies because they almost always have visibility at the transaction layer,” writes Baer.
Once you’ve calculated ROI for each of your major initiatives, it’s time to think strategically about optimizing your content marketing resources, in terms of allocation and timing. Having hard data helps you answer questions about which initiatives are most fruitful, what language engages your audience best, when your efforts are most likely to pay off.
Ultimately, this data-driven approach lets you continually adapt to the needs of your audience, ensuring an ongoing, robust ROI.
While automation technology can streamline many processes and functions, customer-service automation can sometimes backfire and lose you business.
We’ve talked a lot recently about implementing automation technology into your sales and marketing operations. It can be a great tool for saving time and money while increasing your communication and customization with prospects and leads.
But a recent Harvard Business Review article by Ryan W. Buell, Professor at Harvard Business School, reminds us that the benefits of automation “aren’t universally rosy,” particularly when it comes to customer service. Here’s why customer-service automation isn’t always the best answer.
Your brand is at stake
People like technology when it works. But they can be unforgiving when it doesn’t. Customer service is the part of your business that is most likely to cause lasting damage to your reputation when automation fails.
Any point of contact between your company and your customers is part of customer service. Outbound emails, chatbots, automatic order confirmations, and interactive voice response (call trees) are all part of the customer experience. If any one of them disappoints, you’ve given customers a reason to think twice before doing business with you again.
Solving problems is more important than saving time
People want technology to make life easier and ordinary tasks faster. That’s why digital boarding passes, on-demand ride services like Uber and Lyft, and electronic payment systems like Venmo are “good” technology. With simple interfaces and a specific purpose, they make it easier to accomplish something that would take longer to do without them. People perceive companies that offer these services as innovative, helpful, and even indispensable.
If, on the other hand, “an action would be seen as annoying when performed by a person, chances are it will be annoying when performed by technology,” according to Buell.
Call trees are the most egregious example of bad automation, especially when callers are forced to listen to product pitches or survey requests before they can talk to someone who can solve their problem. “The best uses of technology are likely to make customers and employees feel more, rather than less, valuable to your organization,” says Buell.
No one wants to talk to a machine
Humans are emotional and social beings. Buell suggests “an instantaneous connection to a gracious and well-informed human should be a short stroll, click, or tap away.”
Machines are information deliverers, not problem solvers. They can’t deal with ambiguity or non-conforming situations. As they get smarter and more connected, they can fool you into believing they’re thinking when, really, they’re just processing inputs and responding based on rules. That’s not the same as hearing, caring and reacting with empathy. And that’s why great customer service should always include easy access to a human being.
When electronic service isn’t responsive, it can make your customers’ problems worse, not better. Tasks that require creativity or are unique to individual circumstances don’t lend themselves to automation.
Don’t let technology take center stage
Technology should be invisible to as great an extent as possible. When servers and cashiers are slaves to tablets and POS systems, they’re not making eye contact and talking to customers. When callers are asked to repeat the same account information while navigating from one department to another, they get justifiably irritated, which puts your call center agents on the defensive before they’ve even said a word. Automated services that are difficult to use or don’t lead to the right outcomes are more annoying than satisfying.
Experts at TechTarget offer the following advice to keep service technology in the background where it belongs:
Unify management of different customer service channels whenever possible to provide consistent service.
Integrate customer data so callers don’t have to repeat the same information over and over.
Integrate business processes across departments to create logical hand-offs and a path to solving customer problems.
Make it easy to reach a human at any time!
Make sure humans test and update automated services on a regular basis.
If you’re looking at customer-service automation as a way to improve productivity, don’t make the mistake of prioritizing cost savings over customer satisfaction. Never underestimate the value of human connections for both employees and customers.
