Email Marketing doesn’t get its fair share of publicity. How could it? With PPC, SEO, Videos, and all of the other forms of digital marketing, Email Marketing is considered a thing of the past. B2B email marketing is still a viable marketing platform. In fact, it boasts a higher ROI than any other form of marketing with a 38% return. 

Email marketing is one of the best ways to connect to an already captive audience, yet is one of the most forgotten, and ignored marketing channels. If email marketing is implemented, it’s usually done poorly with random and sporadic blasts that have no rhyme or reason. 

Here are some best practices for B2B email blasts:

1. Set Goals- If you don’t know where you’re going you’ll never get there.
2. Be personable in your emails. People buy from people- not companies.
3. Give more than you ask- Educate people on your products, services and methods.
4. Be analytical- Deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right people using data and data analysis
5. Make subtle nudges- Using “Call To Actions” (CTA’s) could turn a lead into a prospective customer.

Are you already using email marketing as part of your marketing strategy? The average open rate for all emails sent is 21% How are your results compared to your industry’s average? 

Source: https://mailchimp.com/resources/email-marketing-benchmarks/

Email Marketing is just one avenue to a solid Marketing Plan. Comprehensive marketing plans and campaigns include print media, radio and TV advertising, as well as, other digital marketing channels. Remember, you want to be seen and heard everywhere your customer is. Market saturation helps build brand awareness, which helps make it easier for customers to trust you, and do business with you!

If you’re having trouble implementing a solid email campaign strategy that delivers leads and drives sales? Send us a message and see how we can help you!

The post The Best Kept Secret- Email Marketing appeared first on Starn Marketing Group.

At the beginning of 2019, the average amount of time people spend online every day was 6 hours and 42 minutes which amounts to over 27% of every year. That time spent constantly connected to the internet is shaping how people are making decisions: 81% of B2B purchase cycles begin with a web search and 35% of product searches start on Google. For a company to meet their customers where they’re at, they have to have an online presence, and utilizing digital marketing can help them ensure their company’s content is getting in front of the right people. Digital Marketing allows business to be more targeted, more contextualized, and more personalized with our messaging when we’re using digital marketing compared to traditional forms of marketing.

The term “digital marketing” is used so ubiquitously that it’s almost become meaningless, nothing more than a synonym of marketing. But there is a difference between “digital marketing” and “marketing” even though the two have become so entwined.

Digital marketing is any form of communication aiming to persuade people to purchase a product or service that occurs through some form of digital device. But, that definition still begs the question “what kind of devices are considered digital? The telegraph? Radio? Television? I would argue that none of those are channels for digital marketing — though they can be used for traditional marketing. Instead, we classify marketing efforts as “digital marketing” when they occur through an internet-connected device. By our definition, standard TV commercials are not digital marketing, but YouTube ads are because audience targeting and segmentation are a key differentiator between traditional and digital marketing. With a commercial on TV, a billboard and a radio broadcast, you can only target and segment down to location. With internet devices, you can get down to behavior and way more granular pieces of information than just where they might live.

A lot of our customers are Machine Shops, manufacturers and other similar job shops. Often we see them buy new equipment, whether it be new digital measuring instruments, new material prep equipment or new mills and lathes. However, their marketing strategy is stuck in 2000 with mailers, flyers and line cards. There might be a time and place to use your old bridgeport mill, but you wouldn’t prioritize it over your new 5 axis, would you? Same with digital marketing, and traditional marketing. Line cards, and flyers are absolutely needed for trade shows and customer visits. But not using digital marketing is like not using your new 5-axis mill. 

The Benefits of Digital Marketing are abundant. Here are a few reasons why you need to implement a digital marketing strategy in your business.

• The best place to hide a body is on the 2nd page of google. Most clicks on google occur on the first page.
• You can easily set a budget and control your costs.
• You can measure the success of your campaigns with powerful analytics.
• You can target your campaigns to specific locations and demographics.
• Digital marketing pairs well with traditional marketing- allowing you to thoroughly saturate your target audience. If you remember from our last lesson- this will help build brand awareness.

Here are some considerations for you this week:

Is digital marketing part of your business strategy? Why or why not?
Today’s marketing platforms are evolving at an unprecedented rate, are You?

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Brand awareness is how familiar your target audience is with your brand and how well they recognize it. Establishing brand awareness is valuable when marketing and promoting your company, products, and services. If your target audience doesn’t know or trust your brand, how will you ever increase your customer base and sales?

Building a well known company through branding is not easy, but is a crucial part of any business strategy. Here are 3 easy steps on how you do it.

The post Marketing 101- Branding, Brand Awareness & Recognition appeared first on Starn Marketing Group.

This is a well-known concept that summarizes the basic principals of any marketing strategy: product, price, place, and promotion.

The idea behind the theory is that if you implement them, you will generate more sales. But sadly nothing is that easy.

The post Marketing 101- 4 P’s of Marketing appeared first on Starn Marketing Group.

The term “digital marketing” is used so ubiquitously that it’s almost become meaningless, nothing more than a synonym of marketing. But there is a difference between “digital marketing” and “marketing” even though the two have become so entwined.

Digital marketing is any form of communication aiming to persuade people to purchase a product or service that occurs through some form of digital device. But, that definition still begs the question “what kind of devices are considered digital? The telegraph? Radio? Television? At Starn Marketing, we’d argue that none of those are channels for digital marketing — though they can be used for traditional marketing. Instead, we classify marketing efforts as “digital marketing” when they occur through an internet-connected device. By our definition, standard TV commercials are not digital marketing, but YouTube ads are because audience targeting and segmentation are a key differentiator between traditional and digital marketing. With a commercial on TV, a billboard and a radio broadcast, you can only target and segment down to location. With internet devices, you can get down to behavior and way more granular pieces of information than just where they might live.

Why Digital Marketing? 

At the beginning of 2019, the average amount of time people spend online every day was 6 hours and 42 minutes which amounts to over 27% of every year. That time spent constantly connected to the internet is shaping how people are making purchase decisions: 81% of B2B purchase cycles begin with a web search and 35% of product searches start on Google. For a B2B company to meet their prospects where they are at, they have to have an online presence, and utilizing digital marketing can help them ensure their company’s content is getting in front of the right people. You can get way more targeted, way more contextualized, way more personalized with your messaging when you’re using digital marketing compared to traditional forms of marketing.

Methods Through Which Digital Marketing Occurs

Organic search

If you want your company to grow over time, you need to be findable online; you need to make your content available where people are looking for it — search engines. One of the best ways to be found online is to optimize your content for organic search. Make sure your website follows SEO best practices, produce indexable content like blogs frequently and put effort into link building. It can take time for your organic SEO efforts to take off, but once they do, you’ll continue to get value from them in the long-run.

Referrals

Referrals occur when you have other sites link to you. You can get referrals by forming affiliate marketing or co-marketing partnerships with other companies, guest posting on other websites or creating high-quality content that garners backlinks. If you think about it from the user perspective, it provides trust because you are being referenced by another company, but also Google uses [referrals] as a valuable signal that other companies trust you.

Social media

People are spending a lot of their time on social media today, and it’s a great way to stay in touch with your audience. [social media] can be another way for people to consume your content off of your website where they are already spending their time. More and more social channels are now providing a way to start conversations and for people to convert directly through social media. For B2B companies, LinkedIn is typically the primary social platform to reach your buyer personas, but Twitter, Instagram and Facebook could also be effective. Find what platforms your target audience is active on, and then create content that’ll resonate with them.

Email marketing

Email can help you keep in touch with your contacts, promote relevant offers and nurture leads through the buyer’s journey. If you were to go back 10 years, before social media, before some of these other channels were being leveraged, email was the thing. Today it’s not the top dog when it comes to channels within digital marketing, but it’s still highly important. Even though a lot of communication is moving to social media, email is still one of the primary drivers for external communication, whether that’s with clients, prospects or partners.

Paid search

Paid search has similar benefits of organic search: it helps you get found online. However, instead of providing long-term results for your company, paid search only benefits you as long as you’re actively paying for it. It can be used as a bridge before you’re able to rank for a keyword. You can use paid to supplement your SEO efforts and make sure you’re able to be found for the terms that matter to your business. Since you are paying for this traffic, you want to get the most value that you can out of it, so normally it’s best to take someone to a page where it’s easy for them to convert.

Paid social

Paid social enables you to expand the reach of your content or hone in on specific audiences. Paid social is the most targeted that you can get with digital marketing. LinkedIn and Facebook both enable you to set extremely specific parameters around who you want your ad to be shown to, and since social content doesn’t have a very long lifetime to begin with, the trade-off between short-term and long-term costs and benefits of paid and organic aren’t as comparative for social as they are for search.

The Takeaway

Digital marketing is here to stay and B2B companies need to leverage it if they want to grow. It’s one of the most powerful methods to get your message to a wide audience in a targeted, personalized way, something that wasn’t really possible before the advent of all these channels. However, for digital marketing to be used effectively, you need to understand who you’re trying to reach with your marketing communications, and then take a strategic approach to attracting them to your business and nurturing them toward closing as a customer.

The post Digital Marketing Guide appeared first on Starn Marketing Group.

. Is your company utilizing these strategies?

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