by Ekaterina | Apr 2, 2019 | Blog, Lead Generation, Marketing Agency, Multichannel marketing, Small Business Marketing Blog, Social Media Marketing |
What is Corporate Brand Marketing?
Unlike Personal Brand Marketing, Corporate Brand Marketing is a way to market your company and establish brand reach, recognition, and loyalty. While your company may be your baby, it is a separate entity from yourself, and has its own family, history, voice, and traditions. Your brand’s personality goes far beyond the established corporate name under which you do business, and what your brand means, and stands for, affects your customers, your industry and your employees.
Corporate Brand Marketing communicates your brand to the world via your company website, social media pages, email, telephone, video, photography, colors, copywriting, etc. All of these elements come together to create a consistent feeling and message about your business, what you offer, how you work with partners and clients, and why people should choose you over the competition.
Corporate Brand Marketing also uses social media channels to help connect with clients and deliver great brand experiences, but it takes a different approach to using those tools, and integrates them with other channels to establish your brand and reach customers:
Corporate Brand Marketing on LinkedIn:
Your business page on LinkedIn can be used for a few different things. It helps establish the HR side of your brand, connecting to employees and sharing more about your corporate and work culture to attract excellent potential new hires. It’s also a great advertising platform, especially if your business is B2B-focused, and your target markets are using these channels. You can help reach and connect to customers through posts, but if you want to extend your reach, you can also use LinkedIn’s paid advertising and job-posting options.
Corporate Brand Marketing on Facebook:
Your Business Page on Facebook is also a great place to advertise to potential clients through Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, and to share content from other platforms, like your blog, or website. You can use it to highlight current promotions, engage followers to sign up for newsletters, and much more. One of Facebook’s best features, however, is Messenger, which offers a direct chat option with clients. This means you can offer live conversation and customer support, and be available to customers on one of their most used platforms. You can also set up a chatbot in Messenger to help automate responses to specific keywords, making this communication process more seamless. It’s important to remember that your responsiveness as a brand is an important part of your brand personality, and building client trust and word-of-mouth. Facebook business pages also include options for online selling directly through Facebook. As social media platforms go, Facebook continues to be one of the most multi-featured, offering a variety of tools to support your business.
Corporate Brand Marketing on Twitter and Instagram:
Twitter and Instagram can also both be used for direct communication with clients, but they’re also great platforms to share branded content that establishes your company’s brand personality. Since Instagram does this through images, it should connect with your overall brand feel and colour scheme, and emphasize the visual aspects of your brand. In contrast, Twitter, is more about sharing ideas, and having online conversations, making it a great place to develop and share the voice of your brand personality. It’s also a visible platform for talking to clients, publicly showing how you respond to the customer.
Corporate Brand Marketing on You-Tube:
You-Tube is one of the most creative tools you can use for Corporate Brand Marketing, and often requires the most skill to get it right. You-Tube can be used for sharing your own corporate videos, or you can access You-Tube advertising options and put your ads in front of a wider audience. Corporate videos can showcase products, share corporate events, highlight company values, or demonstrate company culture to help hiring. Whatever they do, they need to do it well in order to engage your audience, so it’s worth investing, time, thought, and money in order to get the most out of branded company videos.
Email Marketing:
Setting up an ongoing e-newsletter is a great way to increase your brand reach, and connect with some of the most qualified contacts. Sending regular emails puts your brand directly in customers’ inboxes, and since customers actively sign up, you know they really want to receive it. E-mail marketing is a great tool to provide value to your customers though tips, expertise, promotions, brand stories, and more.
Blogging:
Your company blog is the place to establish the expertise of your brand, and provide added value to help your potential customers. Establishing a blog helps drive SEO to your website, but more importantly, it helps customers to move down the sales funnel, and/or become repeat customers, by providing information they need to make decisions about your brand, or to get the most out of your products or services. Creating ongoing blog content also supports all of your other social media platforms, as you can re-share this valuable information on a variety of channels. And if you have a sales team, blog content is a great resource for them to share when clients have questions.
The important thing with Corporate Brand Marketing is to create consistency throughout your social media posts, web content, visual and written messaging, and in the the way you do business. With so many online tools and platforms available, companies have a lot of power to establish the strength of their brand and reach clients. But at the same time, clients have a choice, and these very public and conversational channels allow customers to dialog with your company when they’re happy, and when they’re not. This means how you do business, how you communicate with customers, and how responsive your company is, all play important roles in your Corporate Brand Marketing, and brand image.
If you need help with your personal brand marketing or corporate brand marketing, get in touch!
by Ekaterina | Mar 15, 2019 | Blog, Lead Generation, Marketing Agency, Multichannel marketing, Small Business Marketing Blog, Social Media Marketing |
Happy Personal Brand Marketing Year!
2019 is well on it’s way! Welcome to the year of opportunities! At the start of a new year, we know most small business owners are looking for ways to build customers and contacts, and planning how to grow their business in the coming year. Being a business owner myself and managing a lead generation and digital marketing agency for over 15 years, I have the privilege to provide advice to my fellow business owners and entrepreneurs on which small business marketing tactics will help you achieve the business growth you’re looking for!
What is Personal Brand Marketing?
As the name suggests, personal brand marketing is all about the person (or people) who own and run a business, and how they network and build relationships with other business owners, clients and industry leaders. Personal Brand Marketing is about building direct, peer-to-peer personal connections with other business professionals. Through these real connections, business owners can introduce their companies to other business owners, and build trust with their prospects and customers. These days, business owners can build and nurture those direct personal relationships through a variety of social media platforms, maximizing their personal accounts to build and nurture ongoing relationships, and modern “word of mouth.” Here’s how you can use some of the most common online platforms to develop your personal brand marketing:
Build your personal network of peer relationships through LinkedIn, and get in the habit of sharing expertise through this platform. LinkedIn is a great place to maintain connections that you make in person at events, or you can seek and reach out to potential contacts who may be a good fit with your business. When adding new contacts, go directly to the person’s page, and write a personal message when you connect reminding them where you met, or telling them why a connection might be valuable for you both. LinkedIn also has groups for shared business interests, and for many industry organizations, so this is really your go-to-hub for b2b connections, business advice, hiring and more. And don’t forget to add your LinkedIn address to your business card!
Facebook Networking For Business:
Personal Networking on Facebook provides a variety of different opportunities for Personal Brand Marketing. You can invite fellow business owners to become your personal friends, and then request their help growing your business page following, and do the same for them. You can also look at joining existing groups that may be relevant to your business, or creating your own groups. Group participation is especially powerful, as any group messages you post notify group members directly, whereas the reach of your Business page posts depends on your advertising and/or post boosting investments. Making use of your existing personal networks, and working to expand them is a great way to get your personal relationships helping with your business growth.
Twitter For Business:
Twitter isn’t just for big corporations and famous Hollywood stars, it’s also for you, the small business owner! We recommend creating and managing a personal Twitter account to provide your followers with the real personality and passion behind your business. This is a great place to share your ideas and expertise, and have conversations with other business owners online. Twitter is also a top platform for journalists to hang out on, so if you’re looking to get a bit of publicity, it pays to explore which journalists write about topics related to your business, start following them and build a relationship. You can do this by commenting on relevant stories they post, and showcasing your knowledge. Building the right relationships with journalists will help you be top of mind the next time they’re looking for a topic expert on an article that relates to your business.
Instagram For Business:
As one of the most high-engagement online platforms currently in use, Instagram is an excellent place to build your personal brand, and share the real you that stands behind your business. And since Instagram is image-focused, many business partners find it easier to tell their story through great photos. A picture is worth 1000 words, and it’s a lot faster to create and share! To maximize Instagram for Personal Brand Marketing, make sure to direct message your followers thanking them for liking your images, and engage with their content regularly. These are just some of the tools you can use for Personal Brand Marketing. Overall what you need to remember about Personal Brand Marketing is that it’s direct, relationship-focused, and, well, personal! As long as you let your personal business passion shine, your friends, business connections, and potential customers are sure to notice, and feel excited to do business with you!
by Ekaterina | Jul 12, 2018 | Blog, Lead Generation, Marketing Agency, Multichannel marketing, Small Business Marketing Blog, Social Media Marketing |
Pictures are worth a thousand words. Today, almost every business has an active Instagram profile, but does not know how to turn Instagram followers into leads. Here are some useful tips on how to monetize your Instagram marketing:
Understand Your Target Audience
Sometimes, unresponsive Instagram posts could be simply a result of your poor knowledge of your followers. Make sure to design and write your Instagram posts with the target audience in mind. Before scheduling your next daily post – make sure to do your research, and know who is listening.
Appreciate Your Followers by Following Back
The best way to connect to a potential client is to contact them directly. If you are looking to turn your followers into leads, it’s important to let them know are aware of their existence. Next time you receive a notification of a new follower, make sure to follow them back, or even send them a quick Thank You note and ask them to check out your business website. Perhaps, this could be your next big client!
Highlight Your Current Clients
Whether you are a service industry or manufacture products, it is important to let your audience know that your are customer-focused. Highlight and Cross-Market with your current customers and clients, especially if they are a small business just like yours. Your current clients will be happier than ever, and your potential clients will be dying to learn how to get into your next post. Make sure not to forget to @tag some usernames!
Conclusion:
There might be over 50 different methods on how to engage your Instagram followers. With over 15 years of marketing experience, we decided to share the three top methods that worked best for our business clients. Not sure where to start?
Contact us to get a head start on fine turning your marketing and turn Instagram followers into leads.
by Ekaterina | Mar 27, 2018 | Lead Generation, Marketing Agency, Multichannel marketing, Small Business Marketing Blog, Uncategorized |
What is Your Marketing Maturity Score?
I’ve been a marketing strategist and a campaign manager for over 100 B2B clients and owned a Canadian-based lead generation agency for over 13 years. Utilizing this experience, my team and I have developed a marketing maturity scoring system for our prospects and clients. This system allows us to forecast the success of each of our client’s campaigns and the return on their marketing investments.
Our marketing maturity and lead generation client scoring system is based on six primary criteria:
1. Understanding your market:
How well do you and your employees understand your market? Who are your customers? Why do they buy from you? Where are they located? What priority do your products/services take in their daily life? Who are the stakeholders? How do they make decisions? Are they end customers or resellers.. and many others.
2. Branding and messaging:
Modern marketing is 100% content driven. If you know your customers well, you can produce great offers, telemarketing scripts, websites, social media posts, white papers, etc. The history of your content creation and distribution activity is very valuable. How much do you value your content? Do you believe your customers read it and benefit from it? Do they share your content? Do they click on your Call to Action links?
3. Marketing Strategy:
Do you understand the difference between marketing strategy and individual campaigns? Do you have a long-term integrated marketing vision and lead generation strategy, or do you keep throwing money into individual marketing campaigns here and there (telemarketing, blog, a website, a brochure, etc? )
4. Measuring results:
Have you defined your lead generation activities’ Key Performance Indication criteria (KPIs)? Are you familiar with your website analytics? Do you track your SEO rankings monthly? What are your content distribution and social media results? (Clicks, shares, engagements, etc.)
5. Technology:
Are you using technology to connect your company with your prospects and customers? What is your experience with CRM, process management and communications management? What are your sales channels reporting, and do you have feedback systems?
Investing in lead generation without proper technology is like navigating savage waters in total darkness. You may survive it, but most probably, you, your investments and your assets will be badly damaged.
6. Monetization:
From our experience, the lower our customer’s marketing maturity score, the more importance they put on monetizing their short-term marketing and lead-generation campaign. Many B2B business owners still believe in a direct correlation between dollars invested in a single movement and dollars received in corresponding sales contracts. In our experience, these expectations are often primarily unrealistic.
When you know your marketing maturity criteria, try to calculate your score, giving each category a score from 1 to 5.
For example:
- How well do you understand your market? Your score: 4 Great!
- Is your company branding defined, integrated, implemented, sufficient and across multiple platforms? Your score =3? Good for you!
- Do you have a long-term marketing strategy with a calendar of events, campaigns, and activities? I hear 2? Wonderful! Great start!
- Do you use marketing technology outside your MS Office and Outlook tools? Yes? You are a rock star!
- Are you making money from your marketing campaigns and communications? Give yourself 5!
Are you laughing yet? Let’s get serious: It is rare when a small or medium-sized company can achieve a higher marketing maturity score without the help of a marketing consultant or an outside marketing agency. Business owners often confuse marketing strategies and marketing campaigns. Instead of creating long-term marketing strategies, calendars and budgets, they hire multiple providers to manage their marketing and lead generation activities (website design, SEO, social media, telemarketing, etc). These investments often bear no results because their efforts are not integrated, measured and planned. We advise hiring an integrated marketing agency rather than hiring a specialist. This will save you money and frustration for years to come.
by Ekaterina | Mar 27, 2018 | Blog, Lead Generation, Marketing Agency, Multichannel marketing, Small Business Marketing Blog, Social Media Marketing, Uncategorized |
Marketing Strategies for SAAS Companies Lead Generation
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a popular implementation of business management software and is widely used by consumers. SASS model represents lower month-to-month costs, which allow organizations to have access to powerful software without a large up-front investment. Prospect Solutions’ Vtiger CRM is a good example of SAAS.
Without ROI focused marketing and lead generation strategy this model can be an accounting nightmare for growing SaaS companies. Because of huge up-front investments, support and maintenance the early trickle of revenue can be not enough to sustain operating costs.
In order to get past first growing pains and continue to scale, SaaS companies need a healthy supply of new customers. The biggest metric for determining how healthy the supply is not monthly sales, but lead generation and sales pipeline monitoring. In fact, lead generation for software companies is the single most important facet of helping SaaS companies grow and prosper. (more…)
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