November 2018 - Creative Agency Secrets

Who starts first – marketing or sales?

15 November, 2018/0 Comments/in B2B, Marketing, Sales /by Rebecca Caroe

I wrote this email to a client today. I have been working with them to set up and activate the things which will move them towards sales. And I answer the Chicken and Egg question too…. read on

I think you have made significant progress in understanding three things which are essential to a successful new business development process.

Deep focus on the target prospect companies and how to find individuals and make contact with them

Validation that there is a flow through activities from awareness, interest, desire, action (AIDA)…. e.g.XYZ is moving down that funnel well. Also you have closed off the funnel for ABC and won’t waste time with him – he got returned to a ‘holding pattern’ in the newsletter mailing list.

Recognition that we need to get to know more new people and to find ways of becoming relevant to them – from personal chat / email to newsletter subscription to face to face meeting.

My guidance is being acted upon and you are seeing results which will bear fruit. Also it’s forcing you to challenge presumptions and to run little experiments to see what the market responds to. These both change over time and so I have learned never to guess. But you knew that, didn’t you?

New Business is a Process

Creating a set-up that delivers a stream of leads for your business is how successful sales and marketing combine in a B2B organisation. The underlying principles are the same for every firm yet the implementation and the diligent persistence of action is frequently what sets apart the successful from the rest.

Who starts first? Marketing or Sales for new business success.

Can I help you?

If you’d like an appraisal of your current situation and recommendations for improvement which you can implement yourself, get in touch.

What we will do is

Review your recent new business success (or otherwise)
Assess the process
Research the possible bottle-necks, gaps and successful elements
Guide towards an improved method

Chicken or Egg; which comes first?

So to answer the question – it depends. No, that’s not a cop-out.

Marketing comes first when the firm already has revenues and is looking to grow average size of sale, launch new products or new markets.

Sales comes first when the firm has a product and is not yet profitable enough to invest in intensive marketing or isn’t converting enquiries to revenue.

Keyword Search Simplified – 3 Ways You Can Find the Right Keywords to Siphon Traffic From

14 November, 2018/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Sudip Mutt

Whether in content marketing or a Google AdWords campaign, the role of keywords cannot be underestimated. It’s one of those things some people are quick to ignore, but which could very well spell the end for business.

To that end, you need to be working overtime to find the right keywords for your campaigns. Unfortunately, this isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Most of the top keywords are extremely competitive. On AdWords, those competitive keywords can be very expensive.

As a shrewd business person, you may want to preserve your budget by avoiding these overly costly keywords at least until you have a winning formula. On the flip side, cheap keywords rarely return a profit. That’s why other marketers ignore them in the first place. Paying for them would be akin to throwing your money down the drains.

This leaves you with only one option, to find potential keywords that haven’t become too competitive yet. The following are three ways to unearth these unknown high-performing keywords;

1. Invest in Keyword Search Tools

Keyword search tools are software programs specially designed to help marketers find the right keywords for their campaigns. You’re required to enter the parameters of your search, including your target audience, geographic location, and type of business, and then the tool looks up and returns the most relevant keywords for your business.

It doesn’t end there; some keyword search tools are now built in such a way that you can consistently monitor high performing keywords in your industry. This would allow you to keep your ads and content relevant throughout. Some of the best keyword search tools out there include; Soolve, KWFinder, and WordTracker Scout.

2. Learn From Your Competitors

There are several approaches you can use here. But one of the easiest and most effective methods is manual checking. The first step is to identify the products or services of focus. For instance, you can choose to check one of the products in their video blogs. After picking the product, go to Google and search that product or service (we recommend that you use Chrome for your search).

On the first page of results, click the first item on the list. Once you’re on the desired page, click Cmd + Alt + u to view the page source. Here you’ll find the code for that page. Now, check the whole page for non-branded keywords, focusing on titles and headlines. You’ll learn all the keywords they use to rank so well on search engines.

3. Use Google to Rig the Game

Finally, you can also use Google to find the right keywords for your digital campaign. Since you probably already know about auto-complete and related searches, we’d advise that you shift attention to three other useful sources for unique, often unknown keywords; Google product taxonomy, Google sets, and Google Trends.

Google Taxonomy is used as part of the mechanisms for Google Shopping for categorization of products. Google Sets can be found via the “Google Sets” category found in Google Spreadsheets. Lastly, Google Trends is a special website created by Google to help users learn what people are searching at different places in the world.

Get Started Today

While not a complete list, these three sources should help you find unique, yet inexpensive keywords for your marketing campaign.

My SaaS has 7% conversion rate, how to improve?

13 November, 2018/0 Comments/in B2B, Marketing, Sales /by Rebecca Caroe

My eCommerce SaaS has a conversion rate of 7% (2 new subscribers a day). I only get 1200 page hits a month though. How can I get more traffic?

The service is called Trendosaur. It helps online retailers make money by showing them the most profitable products to sell. My subscribers love the service. I’ve been running it for just over a year. The landing page is converting really well, but now it’s time to scale up the traffic numbers. Finding it really hard to get more than 40-50 page hits a day. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I know you should not rely solely on inbound traffic. That’s a fool’s errand in today’s crowded market.

Other marketers will suggest SEO, Content Marketing, Lead Funnels, Keyword search terms, LinkedIn Content, SEM, Social adverts, remarketing. All good ideas and definitely part of the marketing mix needed – but they miss one fundamental comprehension of how modern marketing works.

Inbound and Outbound is the key strategy

When you take a product to market you need both awareness and targeted prospective buyers.

The joy of inbound is that if someone is looking, with good SEO, Keywords and Content Marketing you can appear in search results. But for B2B markets, rarely is someone looking and the search volumes are so small, so niche that these volumes won’t deliver you the customer buyers in any great size or at scale.

I recommend 2 things

Outbound Selling. Research a list of retailers who could use you and approach them direct. Direct sales is very powerful – it draws attention to you and then your content marketing / SEO will serve to bring them back to your site.
Sponsor a retailers podcast like Ecommerce Fuel with a landing page / special sign up deal.

I used both of these to grow Rowperfect.co.uk/shop such that we now have a paid Christmas promotion page based on that list which is a great case study for this method.

Case Study: Multi Language Website

12 November, 2018/0 Comments/in B2C, Marketing, Marketing ideas /by Rebecca Caroe

New challenges are what we thrive on and so the opportunity to work with a client on migrating them to a Multi Language and Multi Currency website was exciting.

Specifying the Minimum

WordPress Multi Language plugin logo

Key to getting a great outcome was the first step of the site adjustment – what was the minimum viable site which would work?

The site has three main parts – a membership area, an online shop and a blog. We decided to start with the blog and shop.

Creative Agency Secrets used our Sub-Contracted Services to find a great developer for the job. It was important that they had already used the plugin we selected – WordPress Multi Language (WPML).

The most visited pages were prioritised for translation and the migration plan included adding shop products in descending order of popularity.

Integrations with MailChimp were also planned and a range of marcoms tactics to publicise to the existing user base.

Currency choices

Stage two was to add multi-currency to the site. Since German was the language we added, it was clear the Euro currency was needed. Finding a good plugin wasn’t hard – but customising the display to suit the site made usability better.

The default install is below – the user has to notice that the flag doesn’t match their country and then click the down arrow to find alternatives. This was clumsy and not very obvious since nothing actually mentioned that this related to payment choices.

Drop down currency choice

Our improvements were made with two changes – firstly displaying the currencies side by side in a grey bar and secondly by adding a label “Change Currency”.

label to improve currency selection visibility

Change Currency label

Lastly we recommended the client pay for the fully functioned version and add many more currencies – we selected these based on the countries where website visitors come from.

Full multi currency list

Unexpected outcomes and challenges

Here’s our list of things which we found challenging and which should help you shortcut your own learning.

Back end is duplicated now in each language – but you have to select each page or post individually for translation
Creating new landing pages for each language means that the URL needs to also change, making the site structure more complex
The tags and categories can be translated, listed for the translation team to work on or left untranslated
Categories lists (created alphabetically in English) are listed differently in other languages
The media library is common to both – but labels, naming and searching is in each language
Publicity tools like OneSignal work across the whole site and were sending out updates in both languages. Customers noticed and told us they didn’t like this.
Mail Chimp allows editing of database field labels e.g. “Subscribe here” but we found that a lot more work was needed to update all the messaging with subscription confirmation emails, unsubscribe messages etc.

Overall we found that we needed to create “rules” for the teams using the site – marketing, translation, web and merchandising so that it was clear where and how we expected any product, image or article to display and be included in the taxonomy. Many of these rules could not be anticipated and so necessitated detailed checking of each others’ work to identify mis-matches.

Archive for month: November, 2018