Whether you handle your marketing in-house or work with an agency partner, you’re probably well aware that there are many facets that go into a successful strategy. After all, today’s companies are tasked with reaching their audiences through all different channels, with all different kinds of media.
Because of this, your marketing efforts need to incorporate a whole host of services that are designed to meet your audience in all of those places. Some, like video and design, are visual endeavors meant to deliver your message in a creative way. Others, like SEO and content marketing, sound a lot like fluffy buzzwords but are actually critical to lead generation and nurturing.
Whether you’re currently using all of those tactics or not, chances are you’re at least aware of them and the value they provide. But what about the services you don’t already know about, and the opportunities you might be missing to improve your strategy?
5 Services You May Not Know You Need
These five marketing services may fly under the radar, but they’ll help you refine your strategy, add support in key areas and, most importantly, drive sales for your business.
Pay-per-click (PPC) strategy and reporting: Google Ads and other types of paid digital advertising are probably a service that you’ve at least heard of. You might even be putting money towards your own PPC campaigns, which is great! But there’s a lot of strategy that goes into successfully utilizing PPC.
It’s not about just setting an initial budget and letting your ads run. Your budget/bid strategy, target demographics and ad creative all need to be optimized based on the results you’re getting, which is why you need regular reporting and analysis of your campaigns. Without these ongoing adjustments, your campaigns will be static, and you won’t bring in as many quality leads as you could.
Sales enablement: The main purpose of marketing is to fill your funnel with quality leads. As those leads progress further down the sales funnel, though, your sales team likely becomes responsible for handling them. However, that doesn’t mean marketing won’t play a role in the sales process. Marketing is actually critical to nurturing those leads at all stages of the sales funnel.
Your sales team needs materials and messaging that will help facilitate deals with customers. To enable and educate your sales team, it’s up to marketing to keep that messaging aligned, and deliver content built for both large audiences and direct outreach on an individual level. You also need a CRM that tracks your leads, prospects and customers and all associated activities and opportunities, with insights into your lead funnel through analysis and reporting. Even better if that CRM is integrated with your marketing automation software!
Social media auditing: Social media is becoming more important as a new decade gets under way, and this is true for B2B companies as well. You might already have a LinkedIn or Facebook page, but where is your social content stemming from? Have you done an audit of your accounts to see what content performs well and what doesn’t? How about a detailed competitor analysis? Do you know what publishing cadence is best, or which times of day are most ideal to post? These services may seem minor, but they’re key to crafting a great social strategy that buoys the rest of your marketing efforts. You can even add paid social advertising to your mix to further optimize your strategy and gain additional reach through a broader audience.
Strategic content development: Your technical experts are a source of valuable knowledge about both your industry and your company’s capabilities. There is definitely room for purely technical content when engaging with your audience. However, you need to be able to convert all of that technical knowledge into top-of-funnel, awareness-level content that’s more easily digestible for a wider audience, and to all of your personas. An engineer might get what he needs from a technical paper, but that same paper might not mean much to a business executive.
If you’re working with an agency partner, you’ll want to be sure that that partner can speak your language, and turn complex technical knowledge into meaningful content that serves every stage of your sales process. Your content marketing should clearly communicate what sets your company apart, and how you help your customers solve their biggest challenges.
In-house creative strategy: You might have several different vendors that help you with your design, web development and marketing. Or you might have one marketing partner, but that partner contracts some of those services out. If you work with a full-service marketing partner, however, you’ll get the benefit of a cohesive creative strategy that’s developed top to bottom to align with your marketing and sales goals.
After all, you don’t want your creative strategy to be patched together, or take a new direction every time you have a new marketing piece to produce. You want it to drive those marketing pieces, regardless of medium, so that your company’s brand is consistent and your efforts are pulled together seamlessly.
As a full-service integrated marketing agency, All Around Creative can help provide each of these 5 services for your B2B company. Looking to partner with us? Contact us today.
Amy Schneider
Vice President, Creative Services