Marketing Archives - Page 2 of 53 - Creative Agency Secrets

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How to Create Brand Name Ideas

21 October, 2022/0 Comments/in Branding /by Rebecca Caroe

Coming up with brand name ideas is no easy task. However, companies like NAMIFY are making it easy for businesses of all sizes to create unique, memorable brand names that will help them stand out from the competition. There are a few things to remember when brainstorming brand name ideas. Below are some things to consider when creating your brand name and why this process is important.

Does My Company Need a Brand?

All companies need a brand, which is a name, term, design, symbol, or other feature that distinguishes an organization or product from its rivals in the eyes of the customer.

Take the time to research your industry and target market. This research will better understand what your customers are looking for and how you can reach them. You must know the competition and what sets your company apart to create a strong brand.

It’s also important to clearly understand your company’s values and mission. Your brand should reflect these values and be appealing to your target market. Remember that your brand will be customers’ first impression of your company. Studies show that it takes a mere seven seconds to make a first impression, so first impressions matter to consumers.

Creating a Memorable Brand Name

Brand recognition is the ability of consumers to identify a particular brand. The best brand names are easy to remember and can be easily associated with the company or product. To create a memorable brand name, it’s essential to keep it short, simple, and easy to pronounce.

The better your brand recognition, the more likely customers are to purchase from you. To help you create memorable brand names, use a service like NAMIFY to create bold, easy-to-remember names that can help you stand out from the competition.

Ideas To Create a Brand Name

There are several ways to come up with brand name ideas. The best way is to use a tool like NAMIFY, which can help you create unique, memorable names for your business or product. Another way to generate brand name ideas is to brainstorm with a group. Group brainstorming sessions can help you generate various ideas and get feedback on the names you come up with.

When creating a brand name for your new business, it’s essential to consider the industry or niche you will be operating in. This will ensure that the name aligns with your business and helps establish your brand identity. For example, if you are starting a jewelry business, consider incorporating the word jewelry into your brand name, as it will make it easier to establish your brand identity, including your niche in your site’s domain name, and take advantage of related keywords.

You can also use a thesaurus to find synonyms for words related to your industry. Using a thesaurus can help you create brand names that are unique and descriptive. Finally, you can look at other companies in your industry to see what they’ve named their products or services. While you don’t want to copy them, this can give you some inspiration for your own brand name.

Ways to Test Your Brand Name

Once you’ve come up with a few brand name ideas, testing them out is important, as it can help you see how your target market will receive the names.

One way to test your brand name is to conduct a focus group, which is where you gather a group of people in your target market and ask them their thoughts on the names you’ve come up with. This can give you some valuable feedback on which name is the most memorable and appealing.

Another way to test your brand name is to do a Google search, which will show you how many other companies are using the same or similar names. Choosing a unique name that will help you stand out from the competition is important.

Why Is Creating a Brand Name Important?

Creating a strong brand is important for any company, large or small. The more successful your company becomes, the more your brand name will matter. A brand can help you attract new customers, build customer loyalty, and differentiate yourself from the competition.

Further resources on naming brands

local swing, swing in a tree, pavement swing seat,

Benefits of meetups for B2B marketers

21 October, 2022/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

A neighbourhood swing. With the message “sit on the deck”.

A place to meet informally

For a business, would it be good to have a place where people could come and drop by to have a chat?

Customer insight is notoriously hard to get. It’s easy to get from your passionate customers. It’s easy to get from your haters, but it’s the ones in between this ‘Marmite’ brigade who are more challenging.

If prospects just dropped by for a chat, would you get a sense of what their priorities are? Where your products fit in (or don’t)?

#b2bmarketing can do this using a forum, a group chat or a regular meetup group.

What would happen if you did not set an agenda? If attendees talked about their priorities instead of yours?

I am hosting a B2B Marketing Roundtable on 26th October at 2pm. Join us?

B2B Marketing education ideas

11 October, 2022/0 Comments/in B2B, Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

I’ve got a red book – and it’s where I write notes from any educational things I do. It’s fascinating – the current book starts with “Trusted Content Creation” by Brian Clark and the most recent entry is about YouTube Video production by Evan Carmichael.

The thing I like best about it is not the factual notes, it’s the ideas they spawn. I like to draw a light bulb in the margin next to these…. they are scattered around and it delights me that I can innovate in the B2B Marketing I do for clients just by going and listening to experts.

What’s the latest thing you studied? And where do you record your notes / ideas?

#continuingeducation #b2bmarketing

Link Outreach Services Purposes and Advantages

29 September, 2022/0 Comments/in SEO /by Rebecca Caroe

SEO link building is an investment that can pay off big time in the long run. It’s cost-effective, repeatable, and personalized. But it can also be tedious if you don’t know where to start. Link outreach services can help you build the right link profiles for your business.

Link Outreach Services are a great way to get quality links for your website. However, they are time-consuming and expensive. Luckily, several companies out there will do the outreach for you. Keep reading for tips and strategies to help you make the most of your outreach efforts.

Link building is a Strategy to Get Links from Other Quality Websites

Link building is gaining links to your website from other websites. It is important for search engine optimization. Google measures backlinks as one of the most important factors in ranking a page. For example, a page that ranks on the first page of Google has an average of 3.8 times more backlinks than a page that ranks at the bottom.

The process of link building involves acquiring hyperlinks from quality websites. Links signal to Google that a website is an authoritative source and has high-quality content. While Google’s algorithms are complex, backlinks are still important in its search rankings. This is because sites with more links earn better rankings.

It’s a Time-Intensive Part of SEO

Link outreach is a key part of SEO strategy. It involves building relationships with websites and blogs to generate links. Link building is not about building a big list of contacts. Instead, the key is to target prospects that offer value in return for a link. This can be a product or service or even your personality.

Link outreach requires creativity and imagination. Standing out from the crowd in an online environment full of competitors is important. You may even want to consider unconventional methods to achieve your goals.

SEO Link Building is a Long-Term Investment

Link building is a crucial element of SEO and is an effective way to raise your domain authority. A higher domain authority means higher rankings, which in turn means more traffic. Not only that, but effective link building can also generate traffic through other channels, such as referral traffic. If you create strong links with high-quality publishers, you can expect to receive separate referral traffic on top of the traffic that you receive from search engines.

Link building can also help your business achieve its goals by promoting brand awareness. You can begin by building links with niche sources and build your way up to high-authority sites, such as Forbes or the Huffington Post. The goal is to create a consistent flow of referral traffic to your website, increasing the likelihood of conversions. This means more direct revenue for you.

It’s Cost-Effective

Link outreach services are a great way to generate links for your website. They work by exposing your website to more audiences and increasing your relevance. They also can generate more traffic and potential revenue for your website. As a result, you will be able to reach a larger audience and receive more links to your site in a shorter amount of time.

You can find several link outreach services that are cost-effective and easy to use. It offers four packages that you can choose from. The Standard package provides keyword alerts for one keyword, the Advanced package provides three keyword alerts, and the Premium package provides unlimited keyword alerts and support.

It’s Personal

Link outreach services can be a powerful tool to boost your website’s visibility. This process involves building relationships with various sources and creating engaging content. This strategy takes time, but it is very effective for gaining links. In addition to outreach, it can also be useful to your digital PR campaign.

Link-building outreach is all about quality rather than quantity. Targeting prospects that provide real value to your company is essential. Your outreach should explain exactly what you can offer them in return for a link.

It’s Repeatable

Link outreach services can help you improve your content’s visibility on the web and generate backlinks. Backlinks improve the visibility of your content on search engines. They are also helpful for promoting your site to the press. However, link building requires organization. A simple spreadsheet can help beginners and intermediate link builders, but this method becomes cumbersome when you have several campaigns to manage. Link outreach services can help you avoid this issue and increase the efficiency of your outreach efforts.

Link outreach services can help you attract your target audience with crowd marketing, which involves contacting bloggers and site owners to leave a review about your product or service. Commenting on blogs and websites improves your brand’s image and attracts new clients. In addition, this method is affordable and safe. The goal of outreach is to gain backlinks and establish an agreement with the blogger or site owner.

It’s Automated

The outreach process is one of the most effective ways to build links and generate referral traffic. Automation can automate up to 90% of the process, allowing for better productivity and more time for other tasks. Outreach software automates finding and checking websites for link opportunities, sending messages to website owners, and more. To begin using outreach software, you must activate a license and set up the program.

Link-building outreach is typically done manually at the beginning stages, but as the pipeline grows and the amount of content increases, the process becomes more complicated. Automating the process can help you save time and effort by eliminating the guesswork. In addition, it can help you get a better quality of link traffic.

Scams and marketing spam

27 September, 2022/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

A collection of spammy adverts I’ve been served in the past few days.

I’m feeling a collective sigh of resignation about these.

So much waste, so many poor decisions, bad marketing and yet the $$$ spent and earned is high enough to continue to make it worthwhile scamming, spamming and misleading.

Is there a lesson to be learned?

What do you do?

spam advert

LI Search filter, B2B marketing, LinkedIn Marketing,

Build your B2B audience on LinkedIn

14 September, 2022/0 Comments/in B2B, Case Studies, Content Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

Here’s a case study with a difference – it’s repeatable, copy-able and also very do-able. By you.

You’re a B2B organisation and seeking an audience for your products and services. I’m assuming you are interested in content marketing as one part of your marketing strategy – you wouldn’t be reading this article if you weren’t. And if you discovered it through online search, you’ll realise the power of search engine optimisation for B2B marketing.

Either way, welcome. Let’s get started.

Find your B2B audience

I helped several clients build an opted-in email marketing audience of thousands using LinkedIn as the start point. After building an audience and communicating (two-way) with them many became paying clients.

So what’s the step by step process to getting this going?

Define your ideal customer persona
Find individuals within LinkedIn who meet the criteria
Test your messaging by manually connecting with them
Refine messaging (if needed)
Find LinkedIn Groups who serve this audience
Join the group(s)
Once in the group, you can direct message any member of the group without being a connection (you don’t have to pay LI for in-mail).
Start your prospect acquisition campaign methodology using the messaging from 2 – 4 above.
Migrate your audience off LI to a platform you control as soon as possible.

How did this work?

For my first client we built an audience of >800 contacts, assembled an amazing ‘voice of customer’ research database and were able to validate the brand’s go to market strategy as well as identify a core group of global influencers to work with.

For my second client, we tested a range of groups, refined the audience selection criteria and worked on two core messaging texts. The voice of customer research delivered key phrases which copywriters incorporated into campaigns. During this we discovered a missing block of content currently unfulfilled by any other brand – BONZA – a key positioning decision which led to creating in-person and virtual community building on Meetup which hadn’t been in the original plan.

The third used Sales Navigator – LinkedIn’s paid sales tool – to deepen the research phase into a much more targeted set of prospect accounts. This enabled us not to use the Groups tactic described above, and to change the focus of the first filter. This worked because the brand was mature and had a very tight minimum viable audience already defined.

Messaging is key

When you’re ready to work on these tactics, understand that finding the audience is really the easy part. Getting your message noticed, replied to and acted upon is where the ‘magic’ happens.

Having a skilled B2B copywriter on your team is essential – invite me for a scoping discussion here.

We’re done – how to clean your list

25 August, 2022/0 Comments/in Email /by Rebecca Caroe

I just got fed up. Sick and tired of paying money to a mailing list software company when I’m not utilising their services to the best.

So instead of berating myself for spending $$ which I didn’t need to – I finally took action.

Assess lists first

My account included four mailing lists – all set up for different audiences and different marketing communication tasks.

The mistake I’d made was not keeping these aligned with my business goals. When I ran an education-led B2B marketing agency, we used these lists to share articles, to fill seats at webinars and events and to sell our downloadable products.

Times change and that’s not the business I am in now.

Review what’s needed second

Today my business work is based on three things – being a consultant B2B marketer, business investing, and growing my Faster Masters Rowing sport education service.

My question to myself was “Which of these mailing lists serves my three purposes?”. And the answer was clear – only one of the lists. The remaining list sends the RSS feed of my blog out to subscribers whenever there’s a new article published.

Check the finances third

I reviewed my subscription to the software house – they have the option to switch to buying credits rather than pay an all-you-can-use monthly tier fee. By checking the frequency of my RSS publication I was quickly able to see that this was more cost effective.

I altered the account status and purchased 10,000 email credits.

Align the lists fourth

Then I checked the lists – three had hardly been used since 2019 – hasn’t the world changed a lot since then? And so I downloaded all the subscribers, unsubs and cleaned contacts and saved them in my drive. Always good to have a back up of the back up eh?

Then returning to the mailing software, I checked all the users except one on each list and moved them to archive. I can retrieve them later if I need. But all three mailing lists now have a single subscriber.

I did this because the software house has switched its plans around and in the past you could have unlimited lists – now the lower tiers only allow one or two. And I don’t want to lose the benefit of multiple lists. I can always rename them if they get revived in future.

How to tell your audience you are unsubscribing them

Here’s the text of what I wrote.

If you received it, what did you think?

Subject line for list housekeeping message

Subject: We’re done – thank you. I’m housekeeping my list and your email is being removed

HOUSEKEEPING

Hello [FNAME]

Times change – you will remember I told you my work focus altered.

I’m working as a freelance B2B marketer, I’m an investor, and my Faster Masters Rowing education business is growing. This has meant that I write my blog less frequently.

It’s clear you are busy or your focus has also changed.

My blog is emailed to you when I write a new article. I checked the newsletter open rates and you haven’t found time to read for a long while.

I’ve taken the decision to remove you from my mailing list. If you want to re-subscribe just head over to the Newsletter web page and sign up. Read past issues to remind you why you signed up.

Thanks for sticking with me – I value the time we spent together.

Best wishes for the future

Rebecca

B2B Marketing for Beginners

18 August, 2022/0 Comments/in B2B, Marketing /by Sudip Mutt

Marketing is a challenging field. When designing their marketing plan, marketers must balance the need for creativity, financial constraints, and channel selections.

Your audience, however, will ultimately determine how successful your marketing will be. Your promos and adverts will probably go unnoticed if you are not correctly targeting your buyer persona. If you’re not marketing at all, why bother?

But the distinction between target audiences for corporations and consumers varies the greatest. While some businesses cater to single customers, others do so for businesses and groups.

Compared to marketing to individual customers, marketing to businesses is significantly different. B2B marketing, a whole distinct approach to marketing, was created for this reason.

B2B Marketing: What Is It?

Business-to-business marketing, or B2B marketing, is exactly what it sounds like. It involves promoting your good or service to another company. However, it’s crucial to remember that even if you are providing a good or service to other companies, you are dealing with a person who runs that company. Therefore, it is appropriate to think of B2B marketing as focusing on the people who make decisions about purchases for their company.

Steps to B2B Marketing

Marketing is audience-dependent. Even though B2B and B2C marketing are different, there are differences among B2B marketing materials.

This section will discuss numerous B2B marketing techniques you may use to target a particular business audience. Make sure you comprehend the B2B buyer’s journey before we continue. Keep in mind how each phase may influence your marketing tactics and how you put them into practice.

You should follow a few stages while developing your B2B marketing strategies before moving on to implementation.

Conduct a Study of the Competitors

Conduct a competitive analysis to examine the market and discover what other companies are marketing to your target market. When examining competitors, keep an eye out for the following:

Competitor product offers
Competitor pay-per-click strategy and outcomes
Competitor marketing materials and social media presence

By understanding these factors, you can identify your competitors’ SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Establish Your Brand’s Positioning First

You must be completely aware of your brand positioning to develop a successful plan. This assertion captures the who, what, when, and how of your brand identity or how consumers see your company.

You’ll be prepared for the following phase once you create a brand positioning statement that your staff and potential customers can support.

Determine Who Your Target Market Is

Find the people truly in need of the goods or services your business offers. You may utilize that knowledge to develop customer personas and comprehend the purchasing process, which is a helpful tool for any marketing.

Research Potential Marketing Channels

Your competition study will show you the various marketing channels your rivals successfully employ and the ones they haven’t used.

You can diversify your B2B marketing portfolio and connect with the firms you need to once the earlier steps in developing your B2B marketing strategy have been finished. Investigate channels, methods, and technologies to maximize your leads and customer funnel based on your customer segmentation and competitive analyses.

Do you demo software?

11 August, 2022/0 Comments/in B2B, Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

At first glance this may seem a somewhat naïve question – why wouldn’t you want to see how software works before buying?

If you work in B2B marketing for software brands, you will know how few people actually demo software. So is offering a demo still a valid part of the marketing mix?

This article was prompted by a survey I did which asked the question illustrated below. Did you request a demo from sales. And it made me realise that I had not done that for some time.

A survey asking about demos for software

Should marketers stop doing demos?

The quick answer is… it depends.

Your customer journey determines where and how a demonstration of the functionality of the software is appropriate. And if you haven’t reviewed your customer journey recently, I recommend doing this.

Customers change – behaviours alter and marketers need to stay up to date with current trends.

What replaces a demo?

Lots of B2B Marketing collateral is designed to answer questions and showcase software features. Prospective customers may find that they get all the answers they need from your videos, or blog posts. Have you found any recent customers who bought without a demo? Go and interview them about why and how their purchase decision was made.

Listeners to the State of Demand Gen podcast will be no stranger to the concept that forcing customers into a “pipeline” whose course is determined by the brand, rather than the prospect, is a surefire killer of sales leads.

The thesis that you let the prospect push themselves along their discovery pathway at a speed that is appropriate for them, is the best way to close more business. This thesis does depend on you having a strong brand presence in the target audience’s “line of sight”. And for that to happen, your brand needs to have already been active in marketing both above-the-line and below-the-line for some time in all the channels which could be relevant to your audience.

This isn’t an impossibility to achieve within a few months but as we all know, SEO rewards incumbent brands more than newcomers and so sometimes innovative (and manual) approaches are needed to start brand building with a new audience. Contact me for a case study of brand building for a startup.

Talk to me

No, I’m not breaking the rule of letting the customer set the pace by pushing for you to get in touch with me! When you are ready you’ll reach out.

In the meantime, consider the following aspects of B2B software marketing – and if you aren’t fully confident you have got them covered, or know how to produce, manage and measure them, then maybe pick up the phone to me.

Brand positioning – who is this software for?
Why it’s different from competitors
Benefits of using the software
Type of customer who uses or needs the software
Answers to all the frequently asked questions
Examples of happy customers
A range of ways to get in touch with the company
Social media outreach to places customers hang out
Dark social ways to share information with your friends about the software
A diverse range of above the line brand building campaigns
A diverse range of below the line direct marketing campaigns
Ambassadors, influencers and happy customers who talk about using the software

And why did I find writing that list so cathartic? I’m doing a training course on B2B marketing for SMEs and this will form the core of what I’ll be teaching. Sign up for Small Business Marketing 2022 – Foundations and Best Practice if you want to join in September.