Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the process of optimising a website to rank in AI search results. GEO includes optimising content to gain features in AI Overviews, the current AI-generated feature on Google Search, and getting your business referenced and recommended in AI-generated chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google Gemini.

This guide will break down the jargon surrounding GEO, explain where it came from, and what you need to do to rank effectively in AI-driven search. We’ll cover practical steps you can take to optimise your website and search strategy to ensure maximum visibility even when users bypass traditional search engines.

What Is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?

Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, is a technique to optimise website content so it’s referenced and prioritised by AI-driven search engines. Unlike traditional SEO, which focuses on ranking in search engines, GEO helps generative models understand and highlight your content when crafting their outputs.

AI is generating answers, articles, visuals, and more. Generative models don’t rank content in a list like current Google search results; instead, they generate a rich response by incorporating multiple sources. If you want your website to be among the top sources AI presents, GEO is where to invest your marketing budget.

GEO focuses on increasing visibility within these generative responses instead of aiming for a higher rank on a search results page. It prioritises factors like succinctness, relevance, factual accuracy and authority to rank and reference products, services and businesses.

The Origins of the Term ‘Generative Engine Optimisation’

The term “Generative Engine Optimization” (or “optimisation” if you’re on the British side of the pond) evolved naturally from SEO. With the rise of tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, the need for a new type of optimisation emerged. GEO takes the basics of SEO and adapts them to the requirements of AI-driven search.

The term “Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)” was first used in an academic paper published on arXiv and has started to be used among marketers, content creators, and AI enthusiasts to describe this new style of SEO. It’s a bit jargony, in our opinion, and is not to be confused with “geo” as in “geographical” locations, but it gets the job done.

How Generative Engines Work

Generative models use vast datasets to create responses to user prompts. They don’t rank content in the traditional sense but prioritise the most relevant, credible, and fluent data.

For example, if I ask ChatGPT for a recommendation on the best coffee makers, it will prioritise content that includes direct product comparisons:

Instead of using keyword density or backlinks, generative models focus on contextual relevance, user intent and the ability to fulfil the user’s query. The way AI evaluates content is different from traditional search engines like Google. It’s all about usefulness and context.

If I give ChatGPT more information about how I like to brew and drink coffee, it uses this context to provide more tailored recommendations:

More detail is needed in website content now to maximise the likelihood of these generative models understanding the specificities, nuances and relevance of your product or service to different types of users.

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GEO vs SEO: Similarities and Differences

SEO, AI Overviews (previously SGE) and GEO are the three organic search terms that we are hearing a lot about, but they serve different purposes and use different strategies.

• SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): SEO is the traditional approach to ensuring your content ranks well on search engines like Google. The goal is to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs) when users search for related topics.
• AI Overviews: AI Overviews are the AI-driven summaries directly at the top of search results (previously called SGE or Search Generative Experience). It provides users with quick overviews of information sourced from various web pages.
• GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation): GEO takes optimisation further into the AI realm, focusing on referencing content within generative models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. GEO is not just about search rankings; it’s about becoming a part of the AI’s knowledge base so your content is favoured during answer generation.

How Is GEO Similar to SEO?

• Visibility Goals: Both GEO and SEO aim to increase the visibility of your content, whether it’s in traditional search engines or AI-generated responses.
• Content Quality: High-quality, authoritative content is crucial for both GEO and SEO. Search engines and generative models favour content that is reliable, informative and well-structured.
• Keyword Strategy: Just like in SEO, GEO involves identifying relevant keywords and phrases to make content easily discoverable by search engines or AI models.
• Technical Optimisation: Both GEO and SEO benefit from a technically optimised website, including proper use of schema markup, metadata and fast page loading times.
• Importance of Backlinks: Backlinks remain important for establishing authority and credibility in both GEO and SEO.

How Is GEO Different from SEO?

• Target Audience: SEO focuses on improving content visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs), whereas GEO aims to have content referenced in AI-generated responses, such as by ChatGPT, Google Gemini and other generative engines.
• Content Presentation: SEO focuses on ranking on search pages where users choose which link to click. GEO aims to have your content directly included in an AI-generated answer, eliminating the need for users to click through multiple links.
• Authority Signals: While SEO relies heavily on keywords, backlinks, and on-page signals, GEO also depends on brand mentions and having information available in trusted aggregators or directories that AI models may prioritise.
• User Intent Handling: SEO focuses on optimising for a wide range of search intents, from informational to transactional. GEO, on the other hand, focuses on optimising for AI-generated answers, which tend to be more informational and less about driving direct traffic.

“SEO and GEO share a lot of similarities and they pretty much both use all the same building blocks but they put them together in a slightly different way, improving one almost always improves the other as well. You do need to start with a solid foundation of SEO though. SEO is about getting your website found by people, and bots. If the AI bots can’t find and, accurately, index your website, then they can’t evaluate it properly to use in its answers, and that’s where the SEO comes in.”

Andrew Tuxford
Head of SEO

Comparing SEO, AI Overviews and GEO

Let’s get some more details on SEO, AI Overviews and GEO. Here’s how they stack up:

TL:DR:

• SEO is about ranking well on Google and other search engines.
• AI Overviews (previously known as SGE) is about being visible in AI-driven search result summaries.
• GEO is about being recommended by AI tools and generative engines that provide answers or generate content directly. This includes AI chatbots and covers AI Overviews.
• To succeed, you need a mix of all three. You need traditional SEO to build a strong foundation, AI Overview tactics to gain top placement on certain Google searches, and GEO techniques to rank highly within AI-generated outputs.

How to Rank in Generative Engine Optimisation

Want your business recommended more often in generative AI models? We’ve spent a whole lot of time hypothesising, testing and experimenting across industries to understand how to optimise for generative engines. Here are the current theories of how to make it happen:

1. Optimise for Web Search: Many AI tools perform a web search in the background to generate their responses. GEO is built on traditional SEO (yep, spoiler: SEO isn’t dead yet). This means you need to rank in traditional search results to be then picked up by generative models. Essentially, you need to rank well in the old SEO game to be able to play the new GEO game.

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2. Optimise for AI Overviews: Google’s AI Overviews summarise content from web searches to deliver users an answer more quickly. These answers dominate the top of the search results page, though the latest figures show that 7% of searches feature AI Overviews. You want your business to be featured in relevant searches where an AI Overview is present. Read our detailed guide here on how to optimise content for AI Overviews

3. Optimise Your Prompts: Be clear and direct in your content. Craft prompts into your content that make it easy for AI to understand what you’re aiming for. Different types of prompts work well:

• Question-Based Prompts: Asking questions like “What is the best strategy for X?” tends to get specific, in-depth answers.
• Instruction-Based Prompts: Content explaining “How to do X step by step” is highly valuable for AI-generated summaries.

4. Use Relevant Keywords: Forget keyword stuffing (hopefully, you forgot this in 2011). Instead, naturally include relevant terms that help AI see the value and purpose of your content. Use latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords* to improve content accuracy and help the model form associations.

* What’s an example of LSI keywords? If you’re a personal injury law firm, your primary keyword may be “Personal Injury Lawyer”. Some LSI keywords would be: “Accident Attorney,” “Legal representation for injury,” “Car accident claim lawyer”, “Compensation lawyer for injury” and “Slip and fall lawsuit.”

5. Get Mentioned Across the Web: The more your business or content is mentioned online, the more likely it is that generative models will pick it up.

• Brand Mentions: Digital PR and Content Marketing are key here. Getting brand mentions on other websites ensures AI (these LLMs) has plenty of data about your business during its training phase.
• Recommendations from Influencers: Consider setting up affiliate schemes or having influencers test your product/service and share their thoughts on their websites and/or social media.
• Reviews: It’s not just brand mentions that matter, but reviews, too. Getting first-hand customer reviews on your website and third-party platforms like Google Reviews, Trustpilot, Feefo, Reviews.io and other feeds AI answers. You want both quality and quantity here. If reviews are specific, even better.

6. Show Authority and Authenticity: AI values well-sourced, factually correct content. Back up your information with reputable sources to establish authority and ensure it’s written (or at least reviewed) by an authority on the topic. Essentially, follow the principles of E-E-A-T. If the information you are communicating is based on data you have created yourself, provide the data itself (not just the conclusions from it) in the content. This way the AI can read the data directly and combine it with other datasets it knows, extending your GEO reach.

7. Make Short, Helpful Videos: People want answers, not jargon. Quick, informative videos and shorts addressing popular questions like “How do I apply for a mortgage?” can improve the quality of your content (embed them in your blogs) and also have the potential to rank on SERPs and video platforms in their own right.

Best Practices for Implementing GEO

It’s not just what you do but how you do it. Increasingly, we’re seeing GEO prioritising content that follows these best practices:

• • Good Quality: Nobody wants to read crap content. Be detailed, factual and cover topics comprehensively. Include statistics and data points to reinforce credibility. Write a good author bio and include it in the blog post.
  • Consistent Brand Voice: A consistent brand voice helps AI recognise your authority and credibility. We’ve found the best way to do this when generating content through AI tools or to even out tone consistency is to feed it a full Brand Accelerator report that includes tone of voice, copy examples and customer personas.
  • Simplifies Complex Concepts: Make your content easy to understand. Generative models value fluency and readability, so aim to simplify complex topics while keeping key information intact.
  • Skimmable Content: Make your content easy to skim by using headers, bullet points, and visuals. Generative models prefer skimmable content that can be easily summarised.

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Integrating GEO with SEO

GEO and SEO work hand-in-hand to increase your content’s visibility across both traditional search engines and AI models. By combining these strategies, you ensure your content ranks well in search engines and is referenced by AI models.

Strategies for Effectively Combining GEO and SEO

To get the best of both worlds, we recommend combining GEO and SEO. Here are the strategies we recommend to effectively integrate GEO and SEO into your marketing strategy:

• Optimise for Both Web Search and AI Context: Focus on ranking well in traditional search engines while ensuring your content is detailed enough for AI models to understand its value and relevance.
• Content for Humans and AI Readability: Create well-structured content that is easy to skim by using clear headings, bullet points and concise paragraphs. This helps with traditional SEO while making your content easier for generative models to summarise and reference.
• Backlinks and Brand Mentions: Go bigger and broader with Digital PR, focusing both on building backlinks and gaining brand mentions across many different websites.
• Monitor Visibility in Both Channels: Track your visibility in and traffic from both traditional SERPs and AI-generated responses.

Does Implementing GEO Actually Work?

Research on the effectiveness of implementing GEO is limited, as it is still a new and emerging field. From our experience at Thinkplus, we’ve found that it is effective. We’ve been pioneers in this new type of optimisation, helping clients rank in AI Overviews and teaching other agencies to do the same.

Through using the GEO techniques we discussed above, our Ninja team has secured a whole heap of AI Overview spots for clients across industries. Here’s one example of an AI Overview we’ve secured (and held) for a client in the cleaning sector. This page is consistently the number 1 traffic driver to this client’s website, overtaking the homepage by a lot.

However, we also know that these AI search features and AI chatbots are evolving, and fluctuations happen. Just as with getting the top of Google’s search results, securing AI Overviews or ChatGPT mentions doesn’t mean you’ll maintain them. What marketers can and should do is experiment: figure out how to get them and try different ways to maintain those positions.

We’re not the only ones seeing this. A recent research paper set the SEO world ablaze with its data, finding that implementing GEO techniques can increase visibility in GE responses by up to 40%. The table below from the same paper shows the percentage increases in visibility after making changes to website copy. Greens are new additions, and reds are deletions. Take this relative improvement data with a grain of salt as improvement measures are limited.

Table from GEO: Generative Engine Optimization by Aggarwal et al.

How Can You Measure Results from GEO?

Tracking AI Overviews

SEMrush’s Position Tracking tool tracks AI Overview features for keywords tracked for your campaign. Within the Position Tracking tool, navigate to SERP Features and this will display keywords from your campaign that triggered an AI Overview and whether your website was highlighted.

Tracking Visibility

The primary measure currently being used to track generative engine results is overall visibility. This includes general online visibility metrics like backlinks and brand mentions. You can check your backlink profile using SEMrush’s Backlink Analytics tool. These measures are based on the assumption that the more you’re talked about online, the more likely it is that generative models will include your brand in their responses.

AI Sentiment Analysis

HubSpot has introduced an AI Search Grader tool that measures brand presence by analysing results from GPT-4o. This tool provides a helpful overview of brand sentiment and share of voice.

In practice, the tool runs a series of queries based on the business information you provide, meaning its analysis is limited to the terms you input. However, it can be used repeatedly to evaluate different products or services, giving a more comprehensive insight over time.

Measuring Traffic Referral

The most useful current measure of GEO results are traffic, sessions and conversions on your website that have come through generative engines. At Thinkplus, we set up custom reports using your GA4 data to show GEO results. These reports include AI platform traffic over time, AI platform sessions, AI platform conversions, top GEO landing pages and AI platform traffic and conversion splits.

Tracking Mention Frequency

There is no clear way to track mentions and recommendation frequency within AI chatbots. Currently, the only other way to measure mentions is through manual searches on AI engines. This process is time-consuming and — with the rapid evolution of AI search tools — the gathered data can quickly become outdated.

Challenges of GEO

GEO has its own challenges. One major issue is AI’s inherent bias — generative engines are only as good as the datasets they’re trained on. Bias in those datasets can affect which content is generated. So, content should draw on a diverse range of reputable sources and include information representing different perspectives to mitigate bias.

There are also ethical concerns around misinformation and over-optimisation and ensuring factual accuracy in your content is key to avoiding these pitfalls.

AI is evolving rapidly, and staying up-to-date on algorithm changes and new capabilities is crucial to keeping your content visible. Additionally, the winner-takes-all nature of generative models means that only a handful of top responses get the bulk of visibility, making it essential to ensure your content is as authoritative and high-quality as possible.

That’s where Thinkplus comes in: we’re pioneers of AI search, having led the way in uncovering ranking factors for and getting our clients featured in AI Overviews and on AI chatbots. We keep on top of all the AI search updates so you can focus on other important stuff in your business. Get your free website and marketing review and find out how we can do the same for you.

“Traffic from these generative engines is increasing rapidly, so although they are very new and currently small fry against traditional search, smart marketers are putting in the groundwork now to build visibility in anticipation of the continued consumer shift towards AI.”

Tim Cameron-Kitchen
Founder

The Future of Generative Engine Optimisation

While only a fraction of searches are carried out on AI chatbots and Google still has the vast majority of search market share, some marketers are viewing this moment as a land grab. Integrating GEO into your marketing strategy now puts you ahead of competitors. Many have not yet understood the shift that’s happening.

We Ninjas don’t have a crystal ball here. Still, it’s not absurd to think that generated AI answers could become the primary method for content discovery, especially with its integration into search engines and virtual assistants. If you’re serious about dominating your marketplace, then GEO should be in your game plan.

Move beyond SEO as we know it and get to grips with GEO techniques to future-proof your business

Get GEO insights from our Ninjas by requesting a free website and marketing review. Contact us directly to discuss our Generative Engine Optimisation services.

Listen to Our Podcast on GEO

Join Charlie, Tim and Jess for our podcast on GEO and the future of search. They talk about the rise of GEO and why it matters to marketers.

Written by Charlie Marchant and first published on 15th October 2024. Updated 4th November 2024. Expert review by Andy Tuxford on 11th November 2024.

Charlie Marchant is the CEO of Thinkplus. With over a decade of experience in organic search and content creation, Charlie has driven the growth of the agency’s Content Marketing, Digital PR and Branding services. She is co-author of the book The Ultimate Guide To Content Marketing & Digital PR.

Andy Tuxford is the Head of SEO at Thinkplus. Andy has over 8 years of direct SEO experience and over 20 years in various marketing and management roles. He has driven significant organic growth for businesses of all sizes, from local plumbers to multi-national eCommerce websites. He has played a leading role in AI search experimentation and rankings at Thinkplus.

The post Generative Engine Optimisation: How to Gain Visibility in New AI Search appeared first on Thinkplus.

Winning the Business Game with a Ninja Touch!

Welcome to the B2B marketing dojo: the place to become a Ninja in B2B marketing strategies.

We’re here to prepare you for the year 2024 and beyond, where high-performance B2B digital marketing strategies will be vital to winning you more clients.

From mega-effective tips and tricks to real-life examples of business-to-business success stories, you can rest assured that we’ll have you dancing circles around your competitors in no time.

So buckle up and prepare for a wild (but entirely safe) ride in the B2B marketing world!

Content Marketing Is Mandatory

Content is an essential B2B digital marketing tool for businesses of all sizes.

From blogging to creating social media posts and videos, it’s all about creating high-quality, relevant content that draws in the target audience and builds strong relationships with them.

B2B marketers know that high-quality, valuable content can help bring in leads and drive profitable customer actions. By creating captivating content, B2B companies can showcase themselves as industry leaders and remain top-of-mind for key players in their field.

There’s no denying that content marketing takes a lot of work, but the end result is worth it! Here’s why.

• Attracting the right crowd: By creating targeted content that addresses your audience’s specific needs and pain points, you’ll draw in the folks who are most likely to benefit from your products or services.
• Showcasing expertise: High-quality content allows you to demonstrate your knowledge and position your brand as a thought leader in your industry. That’s instant credibility, folks!
• Building trust: Consistently delivering valuable content helps you establish trust and loyalty with your audience. When they see that you’re invested in their success, they’ll be more likely to choose your brand over the competition.
• Driving conversions: Content marketing is fantastic for nurturing leads and guiding potential customers through the buyer’s journey. By providing helpful, informative content at each stage, you’ll increase your chances of turning prospects into paying customers.
• Long-term gains: Unlike paid ads that vanish once the campaign ends, content marketing keeps working its magic long after you hit “publish.” It’s the gift that keeps on giving, with lasting SEO benefits and the potential for evergreen content that remains relevant over time.

Unlocking the Power of a Content Marketing Strategy

Now that you understand the value and importance of content for your B2B marketing let’s dive into what a content marketing strategy is and explore some examples that can fuel your success.

A content marketing strategy is simply a comprehensive plan outlining how your business will create, distribute, and promote content to attract, engage, and retain your target audience.

It focuses on consistently delivering valuable, relevant, and engaging information to drive measurable results, such as increased brand awareness, lead generation, and customer loyalty. A well-crafted content marketing strategy is the cornerstone of an effective B2B marketing campaign.

Here are some examples of different content marketing strategies to inspire your own:

• Thought Leadership: Position your brand as an industry expert by creating insightful, authoritative content that addresses current trends, challenges, and innovations. Share your expertise through blog posts, whitepapers, webinars, or podcasts to build trust and credibility with your audience.
  • Example: A cybersecurity company produces a series of in-depth articles and webinars discussing the latest threats and best practices in the industry.
• Case Studies & Success Stories: Showcase your product or service’s effectiveness by highlighting real-world examples of how your solutions have helped clients overcome challenges and achieve success. These stories provide social proof and also demonstrate the tangible benefits of working with your company.
  • Example: A marketing automation software provider publishes case studies detailing how their platform has helped clients streamline their marketing efforts and boost lead generation.
• Educational Content: Provide valuable, informative content that addresses your audience’s pain points, answers their questions, and helps them make informed decisions. This type of content positions your brand as a helpful resource and encourages potential clients to engage with your company further.
  • Example: A B2B SaaS company offers free eBooks, webinars, and blog posts covering topics such as software implementation, best practices, and industry trends.
• Interactive Content: Engage your audience with interactive content that encourages participation and fosters a deeper connection with your brand. Quizzes, polls, surveys, and interactive infographics are excellent tools for capturing attention and gathering insights about your audience.
  • Example: A B2B financial services company creates an interactive calculator that helps businesses estimate their potential cost savings by using its services.

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One of the most important things to remember about an effective content marketing strategy is the value of repurposing a single piece of content into multiple formats. For example, you can write a blog post and then leverage it to create a podcast, video, webinar, social media posts, and more.

This means you can reach a wider audience and maximise the value of your content while providing your audience with diverse ways to engage with your brand.

Remember, a well-crafted content marketing strategy is an essential component of your B2B marketing success.

By understanding your audience, providing value through various content formats, and consistently delivering high-quality content, you can achieve your marketing goals and differentiate your brand from the competition. Let’s take a look at what that looks like in practice with a real-world example of an organisation that excels at content marketing — HubSpot.

Content Marketing Example

HubSpot is a shining star in the content galaxy. Their tantalising mix of blog posts and whitepapers has clients buzzing around like bees on a honey mission.

HubSpot’s blog is a treasure trove of fun, easy-to-digest nuggets on inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. They dish out useful tips and tricks that businesses of all sizes can’t resist. Their posts are well-researched, engaging, and so practical you’ll want to high-five the screen!

And let’s not forget those scrumptious whitepapers, research reports, and eBooks. HubSpot serves up deep dives into hot topics, with a side of case studies, data, and action-packed strategies.

It’s like an all-you-can-learn buffet for hungry business Ninjas!

By dishing out irresistible content in all shapes and sizes, HubSpot has become the life of the inbound marketing party. Grab a plate, join the fun, and watch your business groove to the rhythm of success!

In a nutshell, content is a powerhouse B2B marketing tool as it helps attract the right audience, showcase your expertise, build trust, drive conversions, and offer long-term gains.

By creating top-notch content that resonates with your target audience and addresses their needs, you’ll position your brand as a go-to source of valuable information – and that, my friends, is a recipe for B2B marketing success!

Lesson learned: Give ’em valuable content in multiple formats, and they’ll give you their business. Consistently offer quality, and you’ll become an industry leader.

Social Media, Supercharged

Get your digital mingle on! Social media is where connections and conversations happen, so jump in and make a splash.

B2B marketers looking to maximise their digital presence should consider a social media marketing strategy. Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are invaluable for building relationships with your target audience and boosting visibility.

B2B companies can use this powerful combination of content sharing, community interaction, and real-time engagement to craft effective B2B marketing strategies that deliver an unbeatable competitive advantage.

With its highly targeted approach, social media marketing is the ideal way to show off your brand’s value while increasing your chances of success in the B2B digital marketing space.

But why is social media marketing such a game-changer for B2B brands? Let’s break it down:

• Targeted outreach: Social media platforms offer advanced targeting options that allow you to reach the exact audience you’re after. Zero in on industry professionals, job titles, and even specific companies to ensure your message hits home.
• Two-way communication: Social media enables real-time interaction with your audience, fostering genuine relationships and allowing you to gather invaluable feedback directly from your target market.
• Expanding your reach: Social media platforms have massive user bases, so there’s ample opportunity to connect with new audiences, influencers, and potential partners in your industry.
• Boosting brand awareness: Maintaining a consistent presence on social media will increase your brand’s visibility and recognition, making it easier for potential customers to find and engage with your business.
• Establishing thought leadership: Share valuable content, join industry discussions, and showcase your expertise on social media to position your brand as a thought leader and go-to resource in your field.
• Driving website traffic: Sharing content, promoting events, and offering exclusive deals on social media can help drive traffic to your website, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates.

Mastering Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

A well-crafted social media marketing strategy enables you to reach a massive audience and engage with them meaningfully. Here are some tips for developing a successful social media marketing strategy:

• Define your goals: Start by defining your social media marketing goals. Do you want to increase brand awareness, generate leads, drive traffic to your website, or boost sales? Clearly defining your goals will help you create a targeted strategy that aligns with your business objectives.
• Know your audience: Identify your target audience and tailor your content to their preferences. Understand their demographics, interests, and pain points to create content that resonates with them.
• Choose the right platforms: Determine which social media platforms your audience frequents and focus on creating content for those channels. Each platform has a unique audience and user behaviour, so choosing the right platforms that align with your goals and audience is essential.
• Create engaging content: Develop high-quality content (yep, it always comes back down to the content you create) that encourages your audience to interact with your brand. Mix up your content formats and use various media, such as images, videos, infographics, and live streaming, to keep your audience engaged.
• Optimise for engagement: Use tactics like hashtags, polls, and questions to boost engagement and encourage conversation. Respond to comments and messages promptly to foster a sense of community and build brand loyalty.
• Measure your results: Use social media analytics tools to track your performance, identify areas for improvement, and adjust your strategy accordingly. Keep an eye on metrics like engagement, reach, conversions, and ROI to measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts.

One simple but highly effective strategy is repurposing your existing content specifically for social media. Highlight key points from your blogs, infographics, and webinars in attention-grabbing social media posts to maximise your reach and engage a wider audience.

With these tips and the power of social media on your side, you can create a dynamic, results-driven social media marketing strategy that elevates your brand.

Looking for inspiration? Stay tuned as we take a closer look at Salesforce, a brand that’s mastered the art of social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing Example

Hold onto your hats, folks, because we’re about to unveil a B2B social media wizard: Salesforce! This trailblazer has turned social media into a customer connection wonderland.

Salesforce sprinkles magic on its LinkedIn page, turning it into a bustling engagement hub. With a mix of informative posts, quirky visuals, and industry insights, they’ve got B2B professionals hooked like kids in a candy store.

But wait, there’s more! Salesforce’s Twitter game is on fire, too. They serve up bite-sized tips, news, and shout-outs that make their audience feel part of an exclusive club. And with their lively conversations and timely responses, they’ve built a tight-knit community that keeps coming back for more.

So, what’s the secret behind Salesforce’s social media success? It’s simple: be authentic, be approachable, and never stop dazzling your audience. Follow in Salesforce’s footsteps, and watch your B2B social media strategy soar to new heights!

By embracing social media as part of your B2B digital marketing strategy, you’ll tap into a world of opportunities to connect with and impress potential customers, partners, and industry influencers alike. Now go forth and conquer the social media realm!

Your mission is to be the life of the social media party, and clients will come flocking.

Lesson learned: Approachability and authenticity win hearts.

Personalisation Power!

Know your audience and speak their language. Personalisation is the key to winning hearts and minds, so take the time to understand what makes your clients tick.

So, what’s personalisation all about? Simple! It’s the art of making your customers feel special and unique. Because, let’s be honest, who doesn’t like feeling like a VIP?

B2B marketing strategies have come a long way in the past few years, and personalisation helps B2B marketers keep up with the fast-paced and ever-evolving digital world by tailoring their campaigns to meet each customer’s preferences, interests, and needs.

By utilising B2B digital marketing strategies such as creating segmented customer journeys, collecting customer data from various channels, and leveraging AI technologies, B2B marketers can bring their brand closer to their customers than ever before.

This results in meaningful relationships that result in more leads and loyal partners eager to do business with them.

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Personalisation: The Key to Unlocking Your Marketing Success

Personalisation has become a buzzword in the marketing world, and for good reason. By tailoring your marketing messages and experiences to individual customers, you can increase engagement, loyalty, and sales. Here are some tips for personalising your marketing strategies:

• Leverage data: Collect data on your customers’ preferences, behaviour, and purchase history to create personalised messages and experiences. Use tools like customer relationship management (CRM) software, web analytics, and social media listening to gather valuable insights about your audience.
• Segment your audience: Divide your audience into groups based on shared characteristics, such as age, location, interests, or behaviour. This allows you to create targeted messages and experiences that resonate with each group.
• Personalise your content: Create content that speaks directly to your audience’s interests, needs, and pain points. Use their names, provide personalised recommendations, and tailor your messaging based on their previous interactions with your brand.
• Automate your campaigns: Use marketing automation tools to deliver personalised messages at scale. This can include triggered emails, personalised offers, or targeted ads based on customer behaviour.
• Offer personalised experiences: Personalise the customer experience by providing tailored product recommendations, custom landing pages, or personalised offers. This can help build brand loyalty and increase customer retention.

Incorporating these personalisation strategies into your marketing campaigns can create a more engaging, relevant, and memorable experience for your customers. Remember, personalisation is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It requires careful analysis of your audience and an ongoing effort to create tailored experiences that resonate with them.

Looking for inspiration? Check out how one of the world’s most recognisable brands used personalisation to drive their marketing success.

Personalisation Example

You’ve probably seen those Coca-Cola bottles with names printed on them, right? Well, that’s personalisation in action! By putting a name on a bottle for their legendary Share a Coke campaign, Coca-Cola transformed a simple beverage into a meaningful, shareable experience.

Suddenly, customers weren’t just buying a Coke; they were sharing a moment with friends, family, and even total strangers.

Source

You might be thinking, “That’s cool, but how do I add that personal touch to my B2B digital marketing strategy?” No worries, we’ve got you covered! Here are a few fab ideas to get you started:

• Name-dropping never felt so good: Be like Coca-Cola and personalise your products or services with your customers’ company names. It can be as simple as adding their name to your email subject lines or incorporating their logo into your presentations.
• Be the (data) detective: Use analytics to uncover your customers’ preferences, pain points, and interests. Then, create targeted marketing campaigns that address their unique needs.
• Personalised content is king: Create tailored content that speaks to your customers’ specific industries or roles. Think case studies, whitepapers, or webinars that address their pain points and showcase your expertise.
• Become a social (media) butterfly: Engage with your customers on social media by responding to their comments, sharing their posts, and celebrating their achievements. Show them you’re not just a faceless corporation but a real human who cares.

So, there you have it! B2B marketing strategies in 2024 will become increasingly reliant on personalisation to meet and exceed the expectations of clients. Taking the time to understand and cater to specific customer needs will be one of the best B2B digital marketing strategies out there.

By truly getting to know your clients, you’re giving them a customised experience that puts their satisfaction first and helps you build trust — a surefire way to win hearts and minds! Don’t hesitate — start personalising today, and watch the sparks fly in 2024.

Lesson learned: Customisation fosters connection.

Video Verve

A picture’s worth a thousand words, but a video? Priceless!

It’s no secret that people love watching videos, whether it’s cute cats, epic fails, or mouthwatering recipes. But here’s the kicker. Video marketing is a game-changer for businesses, and here’s why.

First off, video marketing is like a superpower for grabbing attention. For B2B marketing strategies, videos are the bomb. Not only do they have that special sauce that captures and holds folks’ attention in a world oversaturated with content, but videos can also powerfully express messages with visuals and audio working together like PB&J.

And, backed by your overall B2B digital marketing strategy, you can leverage video to make the kind of impact that just isn’t possible any other way. Whether you’re looking for recognition or ROI, including video as part of your B2B marketing strategy is a surefire way to get noticed in an ever-competitive market.

But wait, there’s more! Videos are crazily shareable. When your audience digs your content, they’ll want to spread the love, and before you know it, your brand’s reach has gone through the roof. It’s like a giant game of telephone, but way more effective and less garbled.

And let’s not forget the human touch. Videos give your brand a personality and help you connect with your audience on a deeper level. You know that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you see your favourite brand’s latest vid? That’s the power of video marketing, baby!

So, to put it simply, video marketing is the ultimate tool for capturing attention, boosting engagement, and creating genuine connections with your audience. If you’re not already riding the video marketing wave, it’s high time you hopped on that board and started making marketing magic!

Unleashing the Power of Video Marketing Strategies

Video has become an increasingly popular and effective way to engage with your B2B audience and drive results. By incorporating video into your marketing strategy, you can improve brand awareness, generate leads, and increase conversions. Here are some tips for creating a successful video marketing strategy, and you’ll notice that some of these tips are going to be working across whichever B2B marketing strategy you embrace.

• Define your goals: Like every marketing strategy, always start by defining your video marketing goals. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, drive sales, or educate your audience? Defining your goals will help you create targeted videos that resonate with your audience.
• Know your audience: To create effective videos that engage your audience, it’s crucial to understand their preferences and pain points. Develop audience personas and use surveys or social listening tools to gather insights into their needs and interests. This data allows you to tailor your videos to meet the specific needs of your audience, resulting in more impactful and engaging content.
• Choose the right format: There are many different types of video formats, including explainer videos, product demos, testimonials, and live streaming. Choose the format that aligns with your goals and audience preferences.
• Create compelling content: Develop high-quality, engaging video content that captivates your audience and delivers your message effectively. Use storytelling techniques, humour, and emotion to make your videos memorable and shareable.
• Optimise for distribution: You can optimise your videos for distribution by creating attention-grabbing titles, descriptions, and tags. Share your videos on social media platforms, email campaigns, and your website to increase visibility and engagement.
• Track your performance: Use video analytics tools to track your performance and identify areas for improvement. Monitor metrics such as views, engagement, and conversions to measure the effectiveness of your video marketing efforts.

By following these tips and leveraging the power of video, you can create a compelling video marketing strategy that engages your audience and drives results. Next up, let’s take a closer look at a company that’s using video to fuel its marketing success in a unique way.

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Video Marketing Example

Patagonia might not be a B2B firm, but its savvy marketing squad have flipped the script for video marketing. They’re all about that long-form video content, with many of their online vids clocking in between 10 and 20 minutes.

Whoa, right?

It just shows that so-called “video best practices” don’t always cut it if they’re not right for your brand. Usually, we’d suggest clients keep their videos under two minutes since that’s what seems to work for most people. But Patagonia knows its audience inside out, and they’ve taken a different path. A path that’s paying off!

The video length is just one way Patagonia stands out from the crowd, but there’s more. A lot of their videos don’t even focus on products. Instead, they dive deep into crucial environmental and conservation topics that are super important to their audience.

These videos feel less like your typical marketing spiel and more like documentaries with a purpose. You probably noticed that vibe in the video above.

Heck, they even have a whole section on their website called “Films,” with the tagline, “We are a collective of storytellers who make films on behalf of our home planet.”

Not exactly your everyday video marketing approach, but hey, it’s working wonders for Patagonia!

So remember, sometimes it’s all about knowing when to break the mould and go beyond standard marketing tactics — especially if your customer research tells you your audience wants something different.

The secret to video impact is visual storytelling that tugs at the heartstrings. Give ’em the feels, and they’re all yours.

Lesson learned: Emotions drive engagement.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Awesomeness

Zoom in on the big fish with a laser-focused ABM strategy. Identify high-value accounts and tailor your approach to their unique needs. ABM is like a secret weapon for B2B marketers, and we’re gonna spill the beans on why it’s so cool.

Picture this. Instead of just hoping to snag some good leads, B2B organisations can use ABM to strategically target specific high-value accounts, allowing their marketing and sales teams to work together more effectively like a superhero team.

It’s an important part of any B2B digital marketing strategy and requires specialised expertise to craft effective campaigns that cut through the noise. Gathering data on prospects and customers can put your team in a better position to develop creative strategies that will get results and help reel in those dream clients.

But why is ABM so amazing?

First off, ABM is all about personalisation. When you’re focusing on a select group of accounts, you can tailor your message to fit their unique needs like a glove. And let’s be real, who doesn’t love feeling like they’re the centre of the universe?

But there’s more! With ABM, your marketing and sales teams are BFFs, working together in perfect harmony. This means they share info, align their goals, and collaborate like nobody’s business.

The result? A streamlined process that’s more efficient than a well-oiled machine.

And, of course, we can’t forget about the ROI. ABM is like a laser-guided missile for targeting high-value accounts, so you’re not wasting resources on low-priority leads. More bang for your buck? Yes, please!

Crafting a Winning Account-Based Marketing Strategy

You can improve lead quality, increase conversion rates, and drive revenue growth by aligning your sales and marketing efforts around specific target accounts. Here are some tips for creating a successful account-based marketing strategy:

• Identify your target accounts: Don’t just scream into the void. Start by identifying the high-value accounts that align with your business goals. Use criteria such as company size, industry, or revenue to create a list of target accounts.
• Develop account personas: Develop personas for each target account that represent their unique characteristics, challenges, and pain points. This helps create tailored messaging and content that resonates with each account.
• Create targeted content: There’s that content again. Develop content that speaks directly to the needs and interests of your target accounts. Use personalisation and customisation to create messaging that is specific to each account.
• Align sales and marketing: Work closely with your sales team to align your marketing efforts with their sales goals. Develop account-based marketing campaigns that support their sales efforts and work to engage and nurture target accounts.
• Track and measure results: Use data and analytics to track your account-based marketing efforts and measure their effectiveness. Monitor metrics such as engagement rates, conversion rates, and revenue growth to identify areas for improvement.

By following these tips and leveraging the power of account-based marketing, you can create a targeted and effective B2B marketing strategy that drives results. Now let’s take a look at one of the best ABM examples of recent years from a firm that’s nailed its account-based marketing strategy.

ABM Example

When GumGum, a company specialising in computer vision, set its sights on winning over T-Mobile’s business, the CMO went full Sherlock Holmes, investigating the buying committee from the top down.

It turns out, T-Mobile’s CEO, John Legere, is a huge Batman fan. So, GumGum cooked up a genius plan that put Legere smack dab in the middle of their story. They crafted a comic book (T-Man and Gums) featuring their very own team of writers, illustrators, and other creative gurus. After shipping 100 copies to T-Mobile and its agencies, guess what?

They nabbed the account!

Source

Now, this example might be on the extravagant side, so you could save mega-campaigns like this for your VIP accounts. But don’t worry; you can still make a splash with your personal touch.

Start by digging up as much info as possible on your target account contacts. Then, send out customised direct mail campaigns with goodies that’ll make ’em feel special (like merch from their favourite flick or a bag of their go-to coffee beans) to get the conversation rolling.

As for when to use this approach, it’s perfect for kickstarting a relationship with a brand-new account (like GumGum did) or reaching out to fresh buying committees within an existing account. In short, it’s all about making that first impression count!

To sum it up, account-based marketing is your secret resource for scoring those coveted clients with personalised campaigns, teamwork that would make Captain Planet proud, and an ROI that’ll have you dancing all the way to the bank.

So, if you’re a B2B marketer looking for the next big thing, ABM is your ticket to success!

Your task is to concentrate firepower, maximise ROI, and celebrate those sweet victories.

Lesson learned: Prioritise quality over quantity.

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SEO Smarts

The digital spotlight awaits! Get your content in front of the right eyes by optimising it for search engines.

Alrighty, let’s chat about the awesomeness of SEO for B2B marketing and why it’s a total game-changer.

First things first, SEO is like the secret weapon that makes your B2B digital marketing strategy hit its target. It helps your brand rise to the top of search results, so potential clients can find you in a snap.

And let’s be real. Being the first name that pops up when someone’s looking for a solution is like winning the B2B marketing lottery!

Now, for those hot tips to make your B2B SEO strategy shine:

• Know your audience: Before you can dazzle them with your content, you’ve gotta know who you’re talking to. Identify your target audience and learn their pain points so you can create content that truly resonates.
• Do your keyword research: Uncover the magic words your audience is using to find solutions. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner or Semrush to dig up your industry’s most relevant and high-traffic keywords.
• Craft killer content: Once you’ve got your keywords, it’s time to create content that’s engaging, informative, and valuable. This will help you rank higher in search results and keep visitors coming back for more.
• Optimise your website: Ensure that your website is well-structured, user-friendly, and mobile-responsive. Use relevant keywords in your meta tags, headings, and content to help search engines understand the context of your pages.
• Create high-quality content: Develop high-quality, informative content that speaks directly to your audience’s needs and interests. Use a variety of content formats, such as blogs, whitepapers, infographics, and videos, to increase engagement and improve search rankings.
• Leverage link building: Build high-quality backlinks from reputable websites in your industry. Use tactics such as guest blogging, broken link building, and social media to attract links and improve your website’s authority.
• Monitor your performance: Use analytics tools to track your website’s performance and identify areas for improvement. Monitor metrics such as traffic, rankings, and conversions to measure the effectiveness of your SEO marketing efforts.

One effective SEO marketing strategy to consider is local SEO, which involves optimising your website and content for local search queries. This can include creating local landing pages, optimising your Google My Business profile, and building local backlinks to improve your visibility in local search results.

And it’s not difficult to find B2B brands excelling at SEO marketing. It’s one of the main B2B battlegrounds, and competition can be fierce.

So are you ready to be blown away by a B2B brand that’s crushing it with its SEO game? Hold onto your hats, folks — this one’s gonna be wild.

SEO Marketing Example

Fasten your seatbelts marketers. We’re about to take a thrilling ride into the high-octane world of SEO (alright, calm down).

Our travel companion for this trip? None other than MasterClass.com, a business that’s revving the engine of SEO like no other.

The folks at MasterClass.com have done something truly smart. They’ve tuned into the radio frequency of their audience’s curiosity and identified hundreds upon hundreds of questions that people are asking about a whole galaxy of topics.

The work doesn’t end there. They’ve spun an absolute web of knowledge, crafting over 1,300 articles that tackle those questions head-on. In doing so, they’ve built an intricate matrix of information, effectively turning their site into a question-answering powerhouse.

The result of this clever manoeuvre? They’ve hoisted their SEO flag on thousands of keyword territories. It’s like they’ve built an SEO lighthouse that beams brightly whenever someone’s searching for answers online. More often than not, you’ll find MasterClass.com on the shore of your search results, welcoming you into a haven of knowledge.

Want to be an SEO guru just like MasterClass.com? Don’t just answer the expected questions about your product or service. Dig deeper. Unearth those not-so-obvious enquiries, the kind that show real curiosity. Then, craft detailed, SEO-friendly articles that serve up answers on a silver platter.

By doing this, your business won’t just be a flicker in the vast SEO universe but a dazzling star that attracts attention from all corners. So, strap on your SEO jetpack and prepare for an exhilarating journey to the SEO stratosphere, just like the experts at MasterClass.com.

Lesson learned: Visibility equals opportunity.

Find out a bit more about how MasterClass.com uses SEO to generate such whopping traffic volumes in our more in-depth discussion of what masterclass.com is doing to excel in optimising for search engines.

Webinar Wisdom

Teach, impress, repeat! Hosting webinars allows you to demonstrate your expertise and connect with potential clients on a personal level.

Webinar marketing is all about creating live or on-demand online events to educate, engage, and connect with your audience on a more personal level. It’s a powerful B2B marketing strategy that makes it easy to host educational and engaging online events with your target audience — whether live or on-demand.

You can use webinars to give your audience an inside look at what your brand has to offer, present your products and services in a new light, or even host real-time Q&A sessions as if they were a virtual masterclass!

There’s no better way to make real connections with your customers than by bringing them together in an interactive space like this.

So, why is webinar marketing a must-have in the B2B world? Here’s the inside scoop:

• Hyper-targeted content: Webinars let you create content tailored to specific segments of your audience, addressing their unique pain points and interests. This level of personalisation makes your message more impactful and relevant.
• Global reach: With webinars, you can connect with your audience from anywhere worldwide, breaking down geographical barriers and expanding your brand’s reach.
• Time-sensitive topics: Webinars are perfect for discussing current trends, new developments, or industry updates, ensuring your content is timely and relevant to your audience’s needs.
• Measurable results: Webinar platforms often provide detailed analytics and reporting, allowing you to measure engagement, track leads, and optimise your marketing efforts.

Maximising Your Marketing Impact with Webinar Marketing

You can establish your brand as a thought leader and attract high-quality leads by providing valuable information and insights. Here are some tips for creating a successful webinar marketing strategy:

• Choose a relevant topic: Select a topic that aligns with your business goals and addresses a specific pain point or challenge your audience faces. Use surveys, social listening, and industry research to identify topics that resonate with your audience.
• Develop compelling content: Create engaging and informative content that provides value to your audience. Use a mix of formats such as presentations, interviews, and case studies to keep your audience engaged.
• Promote your webinar: Promote your webinar through multiple channels, such as email marketing, social media, and paid advertising to maximise your reach. Use a mix of pre-recorded and live webinars to cater to different audiences.
• Encourage engagement: Encourage audience engagement during the webinar through interactive features such as polls, Q&A sessions, and live chats. This helps create a more personalised experience and can increase the likelihood of conversion.
• Follow up with leads: Follow up with leads after the webinar to continue the conversation and nurture the relationship. Use email marketing, personalised landing pages, and targeted content to keep the conversation going and convert leads into customers.

By following these tips and leveraging the power of webinars, you can create a dynamic and effective marketing strategy that engages your audience and drives results. So who’s doing webinar marketing well?

Webinar Marketing Example

Now, let’s take a close look at Gartner’s winning approach to webinar marketing:

• Wide-ranging topics: Gartner covers a diverse array of subjects, catering to the interests of professionals across various industries.,This ensures they consistently provide valuable content to a broad audience.
• High-calibre speakers: By inviting top industry analysts and experts to present, Gartner ensures their webinars are packed with authoritative insights and credible advice.
• Practical takeaways: Gartner’s webinars go beyond theory, offering actionable, data-driven strategies that attendees can implement in their own businesses for tangible results.
• Regular cadence: Gartner maintains a consistent webinar schedule, keeping their audience engaged and fostering a sense of anticipation for future events.
• Promotion and follow-up: Gartner effectively promotes their webinars through multiple channels, such as email marketing and social media, and follows up with attendees post-event to reinforce key takeaways and maintain engagement.

Webinar marketing is a powerful strategy for B2B brands looking to deliver targeted, relevant content, expand their global reach, address time-sensitive topics, and measure the success of their marketing efforts.

Gartner’s approach to webinars exemplifies how to create a winning combination of diverse topics, expert speakers, actionable advice, and consistent scheduling, all while effectively promoting and following up with their audience.

By implementing these best practices, your brand can also reap the rewards of a successful webinar marketing strategy.

Your game plan should be to offer irresistible value and nurture those leads like a true B2B sensei.

Lesson learned: Education builds trust.

Influencer Ingenuity

Two heads are better than one, especially if one’s a top industry expert! Influencer marketing is all about partnering with influential folks in your industry – the movers and shakers, if you will – to create authentic content and promote your brand. These influencers have a strong following, oodles of credibility, and the power to sway opinions.

But why is influencer marketing a big deal for B2B brands? Let’s break it down:

• Authenticity: By collaborating with influencers who genuinely use and love your products, you create content that resonates with your audience and builds trust.
• Expanded reach: Influencers help you tap into new audiences and amplify your brand message.
• Expertise: When you partner with industry experts, you boost your brand’s credibility and authority.
• Relationship building: Working with influencers can lead to long-term partnerships and a network of advocates for your brand.

Influencer Marketing Example

Now, let’s talk about Adobe’s approach to influencer marketing:

• Star-studded partnerships: Adobe’s B2B digital marketing strategy strikes a chord by partnering with typically untapped creative professionals — leading designers, photographers, and other creative professionals who are already fans of their products.By leveraging star-studded endorsements from these industry leaders, Adobe can gain awareness and recognition in the B2B market, helping them stay on top with one of the best B2B marketing strategies around. Their team-ups have been strategic and well-timed, providing benefits to both sides while driving innovation and creating an explosive atmosphere of collaboration within the B2B digital marketing space.
• Creative content: Influencers have the power to captivate audiences through creative content, and B2B marketers are using this to their advantage. With Adobe’s tools, they can craft stunning visuals and share their creative process in real-life scenarios that show off the product’s capabilities. This B2B digital marketing strategy is an engaging way to reach new audiences and establish brand loyalty. From memes to videos, influencer B2B marketing strategies help businesses bring their content to life and connect with people on a deeper level.
• Word of mouth: Word-of-mouth endorsements from influencers are a powerful tool for B2B marketers, allowing them to bring positive experiences and successes using Adobe products to the attention of their target audience. Influencers can showcase products in entertaining and relatable ways while inspiring their followers, bringing true social proof to campaigns. B2B digital marketing strategies focused on influencer outreach can generate huge gains in brand exposure, trust and loyalty with minimal effort due to the already-established connection between the influencer and the target market. Ultimately, B2B marketers must capitalise on this growing opportunity to ensure success within an ever-changing digital landscape.

The secret to influencer marketing success? It’s all about finding the perfect fit:

• Size vs relevance: When it comes to influencers, audience size matters less than audience relevance. Sure, a large following can help with reach, but it’s crucial to find influencers who have genuine credibility and expertise in your industry.
• Quality over quantity: Focus on partnering with a handful of key influencers who truly resonate with your target audience rather than chasing big numbers.

Influencer marketing can be a powerhouse tool for B2B brands looking to create authentic, engaging content and expand their reach. Adobe’s approach demonstrates the power of partnering with influencers who genuinely love their products and can showcase their capabilities in real-world settings.

By finding the right influencers and focusing on relevance over sheer numbers, you, too, can hit the influencer marketing jackpot!

Lesson learned: Leverage others’ influence to expand your reach.

Lead the Way in 2024

So there you have it — the best B2B marketing strategies to keep you ahead of the pack in 2024. These tactics are your golden tickets to winning the business game, from video marketing and SEO to account-based marketing, webinars, and influencer collaborations

Remember, the secret to success lies in understanding your audience, staying true to your brand, and never being afraid to think outside the box. After all, fortune favours the bold!

As you embark on your B2B marketing journey, consider these winning strategies and take inspiration from the trailblazing brands we’ve discussed. Embrace innovation, be adaptable, and don’t forget to have a little fun along the way!

Because when it comes to B2B marketing, the only limit is your imagination.

Here’s to a smashing 2024 – may your marketing efforts be fruitful, your leads be plenty, and your business will thrive like never before!

If you want some help with your content strategy, we have a team of digital marketing specialists at Thinkplus. Learn more about our digital marketing services here.

What to Read Next

• Looking to rev up your marketing strategy and skyrocket your brand’s reach? Read our Ultimate Guide to Connecting with Influential Bloggers in Your Niche and unlocking your full potential!
• Eager to boost your website’s visibility and attract more visitors without spending a dime? Discover How to Increase Organic Traffic for Your Website in Ten Steps and transform your online presence today!
• Struggling to find the perfect social platform to grow your brand and engage your audience? Learn How to Choose the Social Network That Works for Your Business and make the most of your online presence!
• Unsure about allocating funds for your marketing strategies in the coming year? Dive into How to Plan Your Marketing Budget for 2023 and master the art of strategic budgeting to elevate your brand’s success!

Ready to ignite your online presence and outshine the competition? Request your FREE website and marketing review from Thinkplus, your trusted digital marketing ally, and prepare to be amazed by your brand’s potential to grow!

The post The Best B2B Marketing Strategies in 2024 appeared first on Thinkplus.

An effective content marketing strategy, done in the right way, can help you attract quality potential clients.

You need to know who you want to reach with your content, the type of searches they’re making just before they become leads, and the searches they make at the start of their journey.

Some people may go from cold leads to making an enquiry through one piece of content, whereas others will need a few more touch points before they take that leap.

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This blog will help you determine the different types of content you need for each stage to help people become leads quickly.

How Can Content Marketing Get You More Legal Leads?

There are several key reasons that content marketing is so helpful for getting more leads.

• It builds credibility and trust. By consistently providing free, valuable legal information and education, you position yourself as an authority and helpful resource for potential clients. This makes them more likely to contact you when they need legal services.
• It improves visibility and discovery. Quality content, optimised for SEO and promoted across channels, helps your law firm be found more easily online. This introduces your expertise to people searching for legal help.
• It nurtures prospects. People consume a lot of information before contacting a lawyer. Content keeps you top of mind while allowing you to nurture leads until they are ready to become clients. This could take minutes, days or weeks. It all depends on the client.
• It converts visitors into leads. Calls-to-action within content invite visitors to sign up for email newsletters, download guides, request consultations, etc. This gives you their contact info to continue nurturing.
• It qualifies leads. Your content showcases your knowledge and specialities. Prospects that resonate with your content and brand are more likely to be a good fit as clients.
• It builds relationships and loyalty. By educating and advising, you provide value to prospects even before they hire you. This makes for satisfied, lifelong clients.

Content marketing isn’t just something your law firm should do to rank at the top of Google. It’s a great tool for moving potential clients down the sales funnel and should be a key part of any law firm’s marketing strategy.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy for Your Law Firm

You know how important content marketing is. But we can hear you already:

“Where do I start with my content marketing?”

Don’t worry, we’ve got you.

This section covers building a content marketing strategy for your law firm from the ground up, starting with goals.

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Goals

Content marketing has many goals. It could be to become a thought leader, increase your ranking on Google, improve your social media presence or get featured in more publications.

The main goal we’ll focus on in this guide is getting more leads for your law firm.

That doesn’t mean that the other goals won’t be included here, though. Becoming a thought leader can get you more leads. Getting to the top of Google will definitely get you more legal leads.

This content will be written to get more leads and clients as the main focus.

A popular goal-setting method is using SMART goals. It helps you set sensible goals which will help you make real progress with your content marketing. This speedy video explains exactly what SMART goals are.

Once you’ve set your goals, you must identify the best channels to achieve them.

Types of Content Marketing

Content marketing refers to lots of different types of marketing. It includes;

• Blogs
• Social Media
• Video Content
• Podcasts
• Guest Posting
• Webinars
• Downloadable Guides
• and more.

When earning more legal leads using content marketing, you need to think about these different platforms.

Some are better for raising awareness of your firm or building a relationship with your potential clients.

Others are best for lead generation.

Blogs, video content, podcasts, webinars and downloadable guides are some of the best platforms for generating more legal leads.

• Blogs meet your audience when they’re searching for things that make them ideal clients.
• Videos and podcasts are great for educating your audience in a more personal way than blogs. They can answer the same questions as your blogs but in a different format.
• Guest posts help you connect with your audience on another website. If you specialise in helping small businesses with legal problems, you may want to write a guest post for a publication aimed at small business owners.
• Webinars allow your ideal clients to interact with you in real-time and ask questions about common problems they have.
• Downloadable guides are a great way to educate your audience and reassure them while also getting them to sign up for your mailing list, helping you move them towards converting in a more personal way.

Multi-channel Marketing

Multi-channel marketing is using multiple channels or platforms to distribute marketing content and reach customers.

This is in contrast to single-channel marketing, where a business focuses on only one platform.

For content marketing, a multi-channel approach typically involves creating content like articles, videos, podcasts, etc. and distributing them across several online channels.

A multi-channel content approach aims to distribute content across the channels where your target audience is most active.

This increases the chances of them engaging with the content across multiple touch points, which can build awareness, trust and loyalty.

The key is to create omnichannel experiences so the journey is seamless between channels.

The mistake most businesses make is trying to make brand-new content for every platform and channel.

You should create one big piece of content that you can then use on other platforms.

This is called omnichannel marketing.

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Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing refers to providing customers with a seamless and consistent experience across all channels and touchpoints.

The goal is to create a unified brand experience instead of fragmented, isolated interactions on different unrelated platforms.

• Creating content tailored for specific channels. Content is customised for each channel’s unique formats and consumption habits like social media, website, mobile, etc.
• Consistent messaging across channels. While content may differ, the broader messaging and branding align across channels.
• Cohesive user experience. The transition between channels is smooth through user-friendly journeys and integrated platforms.
• Centralised data and insights. Data and analytics are integrated across channels to provide a complete view of the customer. This allows for personalised experiences.
• Ongoing optimisation. Content and experiences are continuously improved based on cross-channel data and testing.

For example, you could create a big guide to a specific type of legal issue, then cut that guide down into different blogs, and then use those blogs as scripts for YouTube and podcast content.

Then, you can cut that YouTube content down into short-form videos and social media posts.

If it’s only relevant to one part of your audience, you can target them through email segmentation.

This is much easier than creating something bespoke for every platform, meaning everything you produce will be of higher quality.

The goal of an omnichannel approach is to put the customer at the heart of the experience and meet them wherever they are.

This provides a more relevant and engaging brand experience across touch points.

How to Create Content for Your Strategy

Now you know the channels you want to use and understand that the best strategies involve connecting content across different channels and platforms.

Next, you need to actually create this content.

No matter the type of content, there are some fundamentals you should follow and some elements you need to have in place.

Starting with the topic of your content.

Topics

Your content topics should match up with any keyword research you’ve done.

If you’re new to keyword research, you can learn more in our keyword research guide or our law firm marketing playbook.

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We see many law firms fall into the trap of posting firm news or news about the legal industry on their blog. This can be informative to some, but more so to others in the legal space than potential clients.

So, the topics for your blogs need to have your ideal clients in mind.

You can find these topics through speaking to existing clients or reflecting on common questions clients ask you. Especially the questions they have before they become a client.

By answering these questions in blogs, you can shorten the client’s journey and get them the help they need faster.

Reader Intent

Once you have your topics, you need to identify the reader’s intent before writing.

Their intent could be to hire a lawyer as soon as possible, or their intent could be to find the answer to a question they have.

The second person looking for answers could turn into someone who realises they need to hire a lawyer as soon as possible, but they’re unsure to start with.

Understanding this intent will help you create the best content and convert more leads.

• For example, someone searching “lawyer near me” is likely looking to hire a lawyer and will be best served by a service page.
• Someone searching “How are assets divided during a divorce?” will likely want a short guide explaining this to them in simple, understandable terms, with a CTA directing them towards speaking to a lawyer.
• Someone searching for “Do I need a lawyer when renting a property?” may not need a lawyer right now, but their question can be answered with a short blog, with a CTA directing them to download a guide to handling any disputes with their landlord if anything goes wrong with their rental agreement in the future.

All these searches show different intent and will need different types of content.

Another way you can check reader intent is through competitor research. By searching your term on Google and reviewing the content in the top 10 results, you can get an idea of the search intent.

What kind of content are your competitors using for the search term? It’s likely you’ll want to replicate that in your own content marketing strategy.

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Credibility

Credibility is one way you can stand out from other law firms, especially regarding blog content.

It also gives potential clients more reason to trust and hire you.

People want to know their information is coming from a credible source, especially when it comes to legal matters.

If a lawyer from your firm writes your content, you should add a writer’s credit and a bio next to the article.

Another way you can prove the credibility of your content, even if a lawyer does not write it, is by adding a line at the top of the content, letting readers know a lawyer has checked it before being published.

Niche Terms

Niche search terms should always be included in your law firm’s content marketing strategy.

These are search terms that SEO tools tell you have a volume of 0, but you know that your clients are searching for them.

For example, the term “falsifying log books” has a low search volume according to SEO tools, but we knew that our client would be able to get high-value traffic for this term.

Because of this, we had the opportunity to get them the featured snippet for this term, landing them at the top of the search results and putting them right in front of this high-value traffic.

The Best CTAs to Convert Potential Clients

Another essential element of law firm content marketing is the calls to action (CTAs) you use.

After all, your content is here to get you more clients and help people. CTAs help guide the reader to the next step.

CTAs should also keep in mind their readers’ intent.

• If you write a blog about an update to the human rights bill but include a CTA to speak to a lawyer, your reader is unlikely to click that button. They’re just here to learn about this new bill.
• But, if you invite them to join a mailing list to keep them updated on legal changes in the public sector, they’ll be more likely to convert. That way, you connect with them even if they don’t need legal services right now.
• If someone searched for “how to start the debt recovery process” and landed on your blog, they’re more likely to want to speak to a legal professional, so a CTA offering a free consultation would be a good fit here.

Make sure each blog has the best CTA by considering the next step the reader will want to take and what they’re ready for.

So, how do you create a good CTA?

• Be clear and concise. The CTA should communicate what action you want the user to take in a simple, straightforward way. For example, “Sign up today” or “Download now.”
• Make it prominent. The CTA should stand out on the page through size, colour, placement, etc., so it catches the user’s eye.
• Personalise when possible. Using “you” or “your” makes it feel more like you’re speaking directly to the reader.
• A/B test different CTAs. Try different phrases, designs, colours, etc. and use analytics to see which CTAs have the most conversions.
• Make sure it stands out. Use contrasting colours from the rest of the page so the CTA pops. Using the same general colour scheme but darker/lighter versions also works well.
• Reduce friction. Don’t make users click through multiple pages to convert. Have the CTA link directly to the desired action.

Keep in mind that not everyone is ready to “Speak to a Lawyer”. A better CTA for some people may be “Get a Free Consultation” or “Learn If You Have a Case”.

The below CTA from Lawhive is a great example.

1. It tells you what will happen — you’ll find a solicitor in five minutes, and when you press the pink button, you’ll get legal help.
2. It makes it clear that the help is fast, convenient, and affordable, and all their solicitors are licenced.
3. They reassure you that this will be an online process and you won’t need to visit a solicitor in person.
4. There are suggestions below the search bar in case you’re not sure what to type.

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If this CTA still doesn’t convince the user, there are multiple things to reassure them on the page.

• They offer a price guarantee
• They claim to be up to 60% cheaper than high-street firms
• They offer fixed price quotes with nothing hidden
• They have fully regulated and better solicitors
• They offer fast responses.

All these things work together to put the user’s mind at ease and nudge them towards conversion.

You don’t need this much credibility on a smaller CTA within a blog, but if your CTA is the main feature of the page, like on your homepage, for example, you should add as much credibility as possible.

Below is a more simple CTA included in a blog. It doesn’t ask the user to take too many steps, and it’s clear what you’ll get from handing over your information — a free consultation.

Using AI in Your Law Firm’s Content Marketing Strategy

AI is becoming more popular with marketers as a tool to help with marketing tasks.

It’s tempting to get AI to write all your content for you, but there are some big risks here.

1. AI can hallucinate, meaning it will come up with facts and figures that don’t exist. Sometimes, it even gives them a fake source which sounds legitimate.
2. Some AI tools, like ChatGPT 3.5, are only trained up to a certain date. So if you ask it to write about new laws that were put in place after that date, it won’t be able to write about them.
3. AI-generated content often has a different tone of voice than the rest of your law firm, making it stick out and feel out of place on your website.

If you want to use AI in your law firm content marketing, then you need to use it as a brainstorming tool or an assistant rather than a tool to write the entirety of your content.

Law Firm Content Marketing (Recap)

An effective content marketing strategy can help your law firm attract more quality leads by:

• Building credibility and trust to position your firm as a helpful legal resource
• Improving visibility in search engines to get found by people seeking legal help
• Nurturing prospects through the buyer’s journey by sharing useful information
• Converting website visitors into leads through calls to action.

Don’t forget, when creating content, the main elements to focus on are:

• Picking topics that align with keyword research and address common client questions/concerns
• Understanding reader intent to provide the right information
• Establishing credibility through lawyer-written content and bios
• Incorporating niche long-tail keywords to reach highly targeted searches
• Crafting effective CTAs that move readers to the next step.

If you want to learn more about marketing your law firm, download our free guide.

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What to Read Next

• How to Earn More Legal Leads
• How to Rank Your Law Firm at the Top of Google
• What Are Lead Magnets in Marketing?

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Business-to-consumer marketing, more commonly known as B2C marketing, has been shaken up in the past year thanks to the AI boom we saw in the first half of 2023.

Because of this, you might be left wondering what marketing strategies are best for B2C businesses. In this guide, we’ll share ten ways to make your B2C marketing stand out in 2023 and beyond, including:

1. 1. Understanding your audience
   2. Repositioning your PPC campaigns
   3. Nailing your brand positioning
   4. Promoting social responsibility and good causes
   5. Making use of personalisation
   6. Using digital PR to your advantage with AI search in mind
   7. Mastering video marketing
   8. Taking your social media campaigns to the next level
   9. Incorporating influencer marketing
   10. Utilising an omnichannel marketing strategy

1. Understand Your Audience

The foundation of any B2C marketing campaign is a good understanding of your audience.

In today’s world, there’s more competition, more noise, more products…the list goes on.

Understanding your target audience is one of the best ways you can work towards standing out from the crowd.

You should think of your potential customers as more than just age, gender and location.

You need to consider what drives them, what they value and why they need your product or service.

This exercise is vital for anyone who also thinks they have a clearly defined target audience.

Reviewing this can help you find new opportunities you haven’t noticed before and help take your B2C marketing above competitors who haven’t put in this work.

How to Define Your Target Audience — Step-by-Step

Review your product or service

Start by looking at the benefits and features of your product or service and how buying from your business might appeal to potential customers. This includes ethical business practices, excellent customer service, fast shipping times, products made using a specific material or process or good product guarantees.

For example, earplug brand Loop makes the benefits of its product clear right away on its homepage — “innovative earplugs that look and feel good“.

Loop likely researched its target audience and found the common pain points — earplugs are uncomfortable and look unappealing — and realised it could highlight how Loop earplugs differ to appeal to its target customer.

Understanding what’s great about your product, service or business will help you understand who your business should target.

Conduct market research

Next, conduct market research by studying competitors and your industry. You can conduct surveys and interviews for a more hands-on approach, or you can take to social media and forums to see what your ideal customers are interested in and the comments they leave about your business or competitors.

You don’t just need to look at their comments concerning your business — pay attention to the type of things they post on their social media — this will give you a more rounded view of what your target customers are like as people, which will help you later when you create a buyer persona.

Analyse existing customers

Analysing your existing customers is one of the easiest ways to learn more about who you should be targeting. Not everyone who buys from you will be an “ideal customer”, but they will help you understand why they buy from you.

You can send out surveys to your existing customer base, look through reviews and conduct phone interviews with them.

Remember, customers need guidance through this process — if you ask them what their buying habits are, they will likely get confused.

Asking them questions like “Do you tend to buy on impulse or spend lots of time researching?” would be a better way to understand their buying habits.

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Segment your audience

Now that you’ve gathered this information, you likely have a few different customer types. Spend time sifting through all the information and segment customers into different groups.

You may find that one segment is unexpected, and it’s up to you whether you’d like to lean into this unexpected audience or change your positioning to focus more on a different segment.

For example, an earplug business could be aiming to target people who struggle to sleep but then realise that young concertgoers are making up a large part of its customer base.

It may decide to rebrand to get more concert-going customers or analyse its positioning to see why it’s attracting concertgoers over people who struggle to sleep.

You can see how choosing to target one of these two audiences would change the brand image, the way it’s presenting itself in paid advertising, the tone of its marketing campaigns, the marketing channels it’s using to promote itself…all of its digital marketing!

This is why understanding your target audience on a deeper level than age, gender and location is so important.

Create a buyer persona

Finally, you should take things a step further and design a buyer persona.

Buyer personas focus on individual consumers you’ve made up based on research — essentially, your ideal customer.

You give them a name, add a stock photo and describe their buying habits, family life, job, hobbies, values and more.

This process helps you visualise your ideal customer and will influence a lot of your marketing. When you create an ad, you’ll think, “Would this appeal to our buyer persona?”

You don’t have to do just one — if you have a couple of customer types, create more. Just don’t create so many that you lose track.

2. Reposition Your PPC Campaigns

In an AI-driven search landscape, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising will become an even more powerful tool to help businesses get the necessary visibility.

With the rise of AI search experiences, organic website traffic could drop by as much as 30-40% for some businesses. If you experience a drop in organic traffic, you’ll want to drive traffic through search PPC and non-search PPC platforms like social media or the Google Display Network.

An example of how shopping ads will look in Google’s SGE

However, you won’t be alone in this endeavour.

With the introduction of AI-generated ads, the number of businesses using PPC will increase, meaning costs will rise. Whatever quality AI can produce will become the new standard, so you must make something better.

Example of AI-generated backgrounds from Meta Ads

The quality of your ads will be crucial. Well-written and highly creative PPC ads will stand out from the crowd, as the quality of AI-generated ads can vary significantly.

Google has already provided previews of how PPC will look in the new search format, with ads appearing above AI-generated responses and sponsored shopping results within the response. Microsoft is testing ads within its Bing Chat AI, indicating an increase in PPC clicks compared to non-AI search.

Example of ads in Bing Chat

If your Google search ads are not converting as effectively in the new AI search experience, consider moving more of your ad spend to platforms where you’ve succeeded, such as a specific social media platform.

However, following best practices and leveraging AI tools available on platforms like Meta and Google, you can still get a strong start with search ads when the new generative search experience becomes the norm.

3. Nail Your Brand Positioning

Brand positioning is a crucial element that needs to be part of any B2C marketing strategy. It will help you stand out from the crowd and give potential customers reasons to buy from you.

What Is Brand Positioning?

Brand positioning is the core of your brand’s identity. It defines who you are and helps you stand out from your competition.
Let’s look at two vegan shoe brands on Instagram as an example.
Will’s Vegan Store targets wealthier customers and uses serene nature images, neutral colours and higher-priced boots.

Screenshot of Will’s Vegan Store Instagram

On the other hand, KOI Footwear appeals to a younger audience with vibrant colours, urban fashion and more affordable boots.

Screenshot of the KOI Footwear Instagram

Both brands sell vegan shoes, but their unique positioning attracts different types of customers.

To create a brand position that helps you stand out, consider your competition, where you fit in, customer needs and how you’ll put your positioning into action.

Analyse Competitor Positioning

To stand out, you first need to understand what your competitors are doing.

Look at their websites, social media presence and PPC ads. Identify their strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps they include excellent customer service as a benefit of shopping with them, but many customer complaints on social media go ignored.

Example of negative customer feedback on Facebook

This will help you improve your digital marketing, clarify your target audience and address any customer issues with your competitors.

Consider why customers might choose your competitors over you based on their positioning, but also think about why your competitors’ positioning might turn potential customers off.

Use this information to adjust your positioning. You shouldn’t copy your competitors by any means, but seeing what’s out there will help you find ways to stand out from others.

Understand Your Customers

Examine your current and ideal customers — focus on their problems, concerns, demographics and buying habits.

Use surveys, market research, social media insights, customer emails, reviews and live chat responses to gain a deep understanding of your target audience.

Pay attention to what customers do and don’t like about your brand and your competitors. This information will help you identify their pain points and tailor your brand’s positioning to address those issues.

It’s important to be authentic and highlight what sets you apart from your competitors while meeting your customers’ needs.

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Define and Implement Your Positioning

Based on your analysis of competitors and customers, it’s time to define your brand’s positioning.

Sum it up in a few words that capture your values, such as personalised service, trustworthiness or ease of purchase.

Let’s compare two life insurance brands to illustrate this point.

Dead Happy positions itself as a rebellious alternative, using catchy phrases like “make a death wish” and emphasising simplicity and affordability.

Polly life insurance positions itself as the go-to brand for mums, using emotional language and stressing affordability.

These are two brands with totally different positioning that essentially sell the same thing — life insurance.

Once you’ve defined your positioning, ensure it’s consistently reflected across your website and all your marketing efforts.

Putting Your Positioning in Action

Your brand’s positioning should be seamlessly integrated into your marketing and the entire business as a whole.

Consider the customer journey and how each aspect of your positioning connects with customers at different stages.

For example, if simplicity is part of your positioning, make information easily accessible at the beginning, provide detailed product descriptions in the middle and ensure a straightforward checkout process at the end.

Mastering brand positioning is crucial in a competitive market.

By understanding your competition, analysing customer pain points, defining your positioning and implementing it consistently, you can create a unique brand that resonates with your target audience.

Remember to be authentic and ensure your positioning aligns with the actual brand experience. Consistency across all touchpoints is essential.

4. Social Responsibility and Incorporating Ethical and Sustainable Practices into Your B2C Marketing

61% of consumers consider company ethics and values before making a purchase.

The type of things that consumers look for in ethical businesses are:

• They sell ethically sourced products
• They treat staff well
• They are transparent with customers
• They avoid false marketing claims
• They strive for constant improvement.

Ethical marketing promotes products or services produced or carried out ethically or promotes environmental or social causes as part of a broader marketing strategy.

Any causes the business promotes should be reflected in the business’s practices.

There’s no point in sharing mental health content on social media if you don’t care for employee health or sharing recycling tips if nothing is happening in the office to reduce waste.

Examples of ethical businesses include Simply Business, Candy Kittens, Betteridge & Milsom, Butternut Box and us at Thinkplus.

• Simply Business promotes mental health support for small business owners on social media.
• Candy Kittens offers discounted products through The Outlet to reduce food waste.
• B&M promotes people-first causes and collaborates with businesses that share similar values.
• Butternut Box highlights its ethical values in its marketing, including low-carbon recipes and donations to dogs in need.
• Thinkplus (that’s us!) emphasises transparency, diversity, employee benefits and community support.

You can learn more about marketing an ethical business in our guide.

5. Make Use of Personalisation

Brand personalisation is one of the most essential B2C marketing strategies you can use in 2023 and beyond.

Consumers want to feel a connection with brands, and a personalised experience can help build that connection. It also gives individual consumers a better experience by focusing on the products and services that are the most important to them.

Amazon is great at this, and so is Netflix. Both businesses suggest relevant “products” to users when they visit, based on their past searches and purchases on Amazon and watch history on Netflix.

There are a few different ways you can personalise your marketing campaigns. Here are some examples:

Tailored Recommendations and Dynamic Website Content

You can use customer data and algorithms to provide personalised product recommendations like Netflix and Amazon.

This can be based on the customer’s browsing history, previous purchases or preferences they might have set up when registering with your site or signing up for your mailing list.

Your website can also dynamically display content based on visitors’ browsing history, geographic location or past interactions. For example, a food delivery app will use the user’s location to show restaurants in their area.

Personalised Email Campaigns

You can segment your email subscriber list based on customer preferences, purchase history or demographic information.

By sending targeted emails with personalised product recommendations, exclusive offers or tailored content, you can increase open rates, click-through rates and conversions. You’ll also reduce the number of people who unsubscribe because they feel the content isn’t relevant to them.

Customised Landing Pages

You can create unique landing pages for specific customer segments or marketing campaigns.

These landing pages can be personalised to match the interests, needs or demographics of the target audience, resulting in higher engagement and conversion rates.

If you’ve looked for local services and landed on a page that says something like “Top Plumbers in Lincoln”, even though you can see it’s a national business, then you’ve experienced this type of customised landing page.

ERG Facilities has a landing page for Lincoln with a local number for potential customers to call.

This is a different number from the one on their main homepage, meaning the landing page offers a more personalised experience.

Personalised Ads

You can use customer behaviour, preferences or demographics data to deliver personalised PPC ads. These ads are more likely to convert as they’re more relevant to the person seeing them.

This is better than running the same set of ads for everyone if you have a few different customer types — the same with email.

6. A Solid Digital PR Strategy Is Key

Digital PR will be one of the top ways to compete with AI-generated search results.

It’s the ideal way to get your brand in front of prospective customers where they already spend their time, such as reading online publications, reading the news or browsing social media.

Here are some digital PR strategies that help B2C businesses thrive in this AI world.

Publishing Original Studies or Stats

Publishing stats or studies is an old-school but effective method of digital PR.

These don’t need to be brand-new studies either — you may already have customer data you can use to inform these studies as long as no identifying customer information is used.

Not only are great studies often linked to big publications, but they may also give you an advantage regarding SGE.

If someone is searching for specific data or stats in their industry, we hope the SGE will want to credit a source, even if they don’t link to you.

For example, a search for “digital marketing statistics” could return “according to Thinkplus, 55% of marketers struggle to understand why their target audience doesn’t convert”, which was pulled from our digital marketing ROI survey as part of the AI response.

The best studies share new information or creatively share existing knowledge — or even better if it’s new info shared in a cool way.

One of the best ways to do this is through infographics.

Here’s a fantastic infographic from Household Quotes about the most popular dog breeds worldwide. This infographic has a beautiful design and is cut down into smaller sections that can easily be shared if you want to share certain countries.

Image source

But how does this help a business that helps searchers find tradespeople to work on their homes?

Well, taking a closer look at the internal links, we can see readers are redirected to pages about how to make their homes pet safe, which may require a tradesperson to work on the house.

An infographic like this isn’t going to attract people at the bottom of the funnel, but it’s one of those where the business decided to cast a wide net with a study that will help get a lot of eyes on it.

This is the type of topic humans love — it’s focused on dogs — so people will want to share it on social media and show it to others.

It almost turns into word-of-mouth marketing, despite its roots being a digital campaign.

It’s likely that some of the people who see this will need a tradesperson at some point and may want to use Household Quotes to get quotes.

Or, they’re potentially choosing a new dog based on popular breeds and will move down the funnel after this infographic. They decide to get a dog → realise they need to dog-proof their home → then get a quote through Household Quotes.

Newsjacking

Newsjacking is another form of digital PR where brands jump on a trending topic to get eyes on the business by taking part in a meme or offering an expert opinion on recent news.

Let’s be real — we do it all the time on our YouTube channel with AI. But that’s because, as marketers, we can offer an expert opinion relating to AI news and communicate it in a way other marketers and business owners can understand.

Brands sometimes take part in newsjacking more casually, speaking about recent events or just sharing a couple of memes.

For example, local businesses in the USA recently spoke about how Taylor Swift concerts impact their business, with one hair salon in Houston, Drybar, describing how they saw an influx of bookings around the week of the concert. They took the time to learn different hairstyles that Taylor Swift is known for to appeal to customers.

If you realise your business is connected to an event or news story, you can reach out to publications with an expert or first-hand opinion, like this hair salon.

DryBar did miss a trick here — as far as we can see, there are no social media posts from around the time of the concert promoting that they were taking bookings for Taylor Swift styles that weekend. This would have been a quick and easy way to newsjack this story and get even more bookings for that weekend.

Coining a Term

If you created a new process in your industry or found a better way of doing an old process, which doesn’t have a name, you can use this as an opportunity to coin a term.

Create content around this term and reach out to publications whose readers could benefit from this knowledge.

Then, people will be more likely to search for “What is the X technique?” or “How to use the X technique”.

As you are the originator, your site will likely be used to corroborate the info — and put your brand at the top of SERPs.

Alongside that, if people are nice, they’ll credit you with the idea — “The X technique, coined by Y” — which is likely to be picked up by SGE and included in the generated results.

For example, Hubspot coined the phrase Surround Sound SEO.

Here is Semrush using the words “coined by Hubspot” while talking about the surround sound technique.

You’ll also get more backlinks if your term takes off. Remember that linked and unlinked mentions will fuel the knowledge graph, so even if sites aren’t linking to you, it will help your brand name appear alongside the term you’ve coined in the AI-generated search result.

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Link Insertion

Pay attention to the websites that appear the most often for searches around products like yours, and then see how you can get featured on those websites.

One of the simplest ways is to get featured in a top 10 list.

These lists will potentially become more prevalent in an AI search world, as consumers may want a more human opinion on the products they are considering.

It’s also likely that the more often other sites mention your product in a positive light, the more likely Google will choose it to feature in an AI-generated search response.

By doing this, you’re almost reversing the buyer journey by featuring on the websites that appear in the queries before the final transactional queries.

Image Source

Brand Blast

A Brand Blast refers to a digital PR campaign you plan to launch all on the same day.

It’s commonly called a “simultaneous launch” or “embargoed launch”. However, the gist is that you get everyone involved to wait to publish their content on the same day.

As a result, potential customers who read various publications related to your industry will see your story on all their most-read sites.

This will require some pre-planning on your part, as well as publishers agreeing to post about you on a particular day.

A brand blast will be most effective when you have a new product launch that gives publications a good reason to discuss it on a specific day.

But, if you have a story that’s big enough or interesting enough to share, you can often create a brand blast about it, too.

While these campaigns might not immediately help with Google’s SGE, your target audience becomes aware of your new product and brand’s existence while supplying new information to Google’s Knowledge Graph.

It then uses this for future SGE results, both informational and transactional.

Think of it this way; if there’s enough early positive press about your story, that positivity will fuel more mentions and comments that Google can pull into their answers as time goes on.

7. Master Video Marketing

Video marketing is an integral part of any solid content B2C marketing strategy.

We don’t mean big-budget productions, either.

One of the biggest entertainment YouTubers, Mr Beast, has said in interviews that although he could afford to make his videos into cinematic masterpieces, he opts for a homemade feel instead because his audience likes the more personal vibes.

The same goes for brands.

Look at Kylie Cosmetics.

Kylie Jenner’s YouTube channel is essentially the cosmetics brand’s YouTube channel. But because it feels like Kylie’s personal channel, the videos feel less like adverts.

And when she does share a professionally filmed ad on her channel, her audience feels like she’s sharing a cool achievement with them. It’s like, “Hey friends, look at this cool ad I made”.

So, how does Kylie make money from her more casual videos?

Well, this 11-minute makeup tutorial is just an ad for Kylie’s 24k Birthday Collection. But it has 12.2 million views.

It’s performed so well because the brand knows what its audience wants to see — Kylie and how they can look like her.

It just so happens they can look like her by buying her products.

If you’re selling a service, you can still create engaging video content.

One of our clients, Golf Course Lawn, shares regular videos about caring for your lawn.

The founder, Ron Henry, has created videos on tackling nearly every lawn problem and has gained over 50,000 followers.

Ron gives away lawn care secrets for free but suggests products he sells to help customers achieve the results he shows in the videos.

Because he’s sharing the results and his passion, it shows that his business is legitimate and that his products get results.

And most of his content is filmed with a handheld camera. It feels personal and doesn’t feel like a business has made it, which is one of the reasons why it’s so successful.

How to Start Video Marketing

Start by researching the type of video content that’s popular in your niche. Short-form video is a better fit for you than long-form, or vice-versa.

It’s also important to look at what’s popular outside your niche.

No one expected a language learning app to create content using current TikTok trends and internet memes. Still, Duolingo decided to take that leap and now has over six million followers on TikTok, with videos that regularly get hundreds of thousands of views.

Half the time, the videos aren’t about learning a language; they’re just silly videos that happen to include the Duolingo owl, which gets the brand in front of as many people as possible.

Video Screenshot Source

Duolingo is quite an extreme example, but it shows how you can do excellent video marketing by replicating current trends, even if others in your industry aren’t doing the same.

8. Make the Most of Social Media Marketing

Although 2023 has been a tumultuous year for social media marketing (we’re looking at you, Twitter), social media is still an essential asset in any B2C marketing campaign.

The key to great social media marketing, especially in the B2C world, is creating organic-looking content on the channels your ideal customers are spending their time.

If your demographic hangs out on TikTok, you need to create content there. If they spend a lot of time on Reddit, you need to find a way to incorporate Reddit into your marketing strategy.

Find out more about which demographics use which social media platforms.

Another way to find the best platforms is to check out competitors and see where they’re most successful. Check out the profiles of people commenting on their posts and see if they match your target customer or buyer personas.

If you have strong ethical values in your business, this may influence your choices. For example, the ice cream company Ben and Jerry’s recently stopped running paid ads on Twitter as they noticed a significant increase in hate speech on the platform.

Air travel company Ryanair noticed a gap in the market for airline content on TikTok. Many competitors weren’t using the platform, as in their eyes, the TikTok user base was too young to be able to book holidays or flights.

But Ryanair saw this as an opportunity to connect with their future customers. TikTok users would become familiar with Ryanair, and then when the time came to book their first holiday, they’d choose the low-cost airline they’d come to know and love on their favourite social media platform.

Ryanair also used TikTok to handle objections and clarify exactly what the Ryanair experience is. If you’re paying £20 for a flight, you won’t have a luxury experience. They don’t try to pretend to be something they’re not, and they even make light of it.

Video screenshot source

9. Incorporate Influencer Marketing

There have been rumours that influencer marketing is on the decline, but with Google releasing its Perspectives filter, we’re likely to see it have a resurgence at the end of 2023 and beyond.

The Perspectives filter lets you filter Google search results only to show perspectives from people around the internet. This could be short videos, long videos, Reddit threads, answers on Quora or more.

Because of this, brands will want to use online creators and influencers to appear in Google’s Perspectives.

With AI search on the horizon, businesses will likely see a drop in traffic, so influencer marketing is a great way to connect with customers outside of search.

Even without these upcoming changes, influencer marketing has been an important part of any B2C marketing strategy for the past few years.

To get started with influencer marketing, take a look at any influencers who are in your niche. You may want to work with a fitness influencer if you sell wellness products. If you sell tech products, you could work with a tech influencer.

But that doesn’t mean you’re limited to those niches. Family influencers will have an audience interested in tech, and gaming influencers might be a good fit for your wellness brand. Outside-of-the-box thinking can help you stand out.

For example, Loki the Wolfdog is an account dedicated to showing the life of some wolf dogs whose owners take them on many outdoor travel adventures. At first glance, you might think, “ok, dog influencer, I can’t work with them if I’m not a pet brand”.

But their biggest sponsor is car manufacturer Toyota.

Because of the owner’s travel lifestyle, their photos are often out in the wilderness — in deserts, forests and mountain ranges. In the background of many of these images is the rugged, off-road-ready car they use to get to these locations, and it just happens to be a Toyota.

Toyota identified that many of Loki’s followers aspire to live this lifestyle with their dogs. When the time comes, they’ll look to Toyota for a great adventure car that can handle pets and rugged terrain.

If you want to get an authentic look into the best influencers to work with and have a social media presence, look at who your followers follow. Check your follower’s accounts to see if they represent your ideal customer or buyer persona, and then see if any influencers pop up across a bunch of their accounts.

These are the people you want to be working with.

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10. Omnichannel B2C Marketing: Reaching Customers across Multiple Platforms and Touchpoints

The best marketing strategy includes multiple different channels with a combination of the strategies we included above.

This is known as an omnichannel marketing strategy. This approach uses multiple digital marketing channels and touchpoints to create a seamless and consistent customer experience across multiple platforms.

It also takes into consideration the experience customers have outside of the digital world, such as visiting a store or interacting with you at an event.

The goal of omnichannel marketing is to create a unified brand experience, no matter where customers interact with the company.

When running omnichannel campaigns, you must ensure consistent messaging across all channels so customers get the same info and experience every time they interact with your brand.

To do this well, you need to understand the customer journey and what they need at different touch points. If customers on social media are likely at the start of their journey, you want to avoid bombarding them with content about making a purchase then and there.

Business to Consumer Marketing Strategies for 2023 and Beyond

From these ten B2C marketing strategies, you should be able to find a way to boost your digital marketing and drive more traffic to your website.

Today we’ve looked at:

• Understanding your audience
• Repositioning your PPC campaigns
• Nailing your brand positioning
• Promoting social responsibility and good causes
• Making use of personalisation
• Using digital PR to your advantage with AI search in mind
• Mastering video marketing
• Taking your social media campaigns to the next level
• Incorporating influencer marketing
• Utilising an omnichannel marketing strategy

If you feel like you need to consume even more marketing info (good on you!), then here’s where you should go next:

• Learn how to create a NINJA content strategy in this guide
• Get more from Google Analytics 4 with our revenue-increasing data tips
• Add email automation to your strategy with our email automation guide.

The post The 10 Best B2C Marketing Strategies for 2024 appeared first on Thinkplus.

If you saw this headline and thought, “I’m having the same problem,” this guide is for you.

At the start of 2023, we surveyed 97 small to medium-sized businesses to find out how they’re feeling about digital marketing — what their priorities are, what’s been working for them, what hasn’t been so successful, what they think about AI marketing, shoppable video platforms and more.

But we don’t just want to share some graphs with you and be done with it. That’s not our style.

We’d rather provide actionable advice that you can do, rather than just reflect over.

If you just want the data, you can download the graphs here. Nice and square for your social media resharing pleasure. You’re welcome.

There are a few digital marketing stats that really stood out to us in 2023’s survey:

• 55% of marketers said they struggle to understand why their target audience doesn’t convert
• 72% of marketers struggle to get insights from the data they have or don’t understand the data
• 30% of marketers surveyed said they’re finding it hard to keep up with AI changes
• 77% of marketers say that SEO is the most important digital marketing channel for their business
• 70% of marketers say blogs are very important for earning search traffic
• 88% of marketers find PPC to be too expensive or ineffective
• 43% of marketers will be investing more in shoppable video platforms in 2023
• 71% of marketers aren’t cutting spending despite a looming recession

We saw a lot of trends in this year’s digital marketing ROI survey, but none stood out more than the challenges marketers face when it comes to their target customers.

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How to Find and Understand Your Target Customer

If you struggle with understanding your target customers, you’re not alone.
In fact, 55% of marketers we surveyed said their biggest marketing challenge is understanding why their target audience doesn’t convert, and 31% struggle to understand what their target audience wants.

Your audience influences every aspect of your marketing strategy — your tone of voice, your digital marketing channels, and even the colours and imagery on your website.

If you don’t have a well-defined target audience, you’re going to struggle to get an ROI from your digital marketing efforts.

If you’re unsure whether or not you’ve got a well-defined target audience, take the following things into consideration:

Are you looking at psychographics as well as demographics?

Identifying your customers’ demographics — things like their age, their gender and their geographic location is a good start, but the real gold is in the psychographics.

These are the things that make your customers tick — their hobbies, passions, beliefs — the list goes on.

Think about how you’d market a product to a female customer, aged between 25 and 35, who lives in the UK, has two children, a mortgage, goes abroad twice a year and is always keen to get the best deal.

Now think about how you’d market a product to someone with the same demographics (female, 25-35, UK) but in a different city every week, cares about the environmental impact of her purchases and has three cats.

These two people have the same demographics, but their psychographics are totally different. You wouldn’t market a product to them in the same way. You might not even sell the same product to both of them.

So if you’ve fallen into the demographics trap, take the time to define your audience further. It can seem scary to reduce the pool of people you’re marketing to, but by doing so, you can focus your efforts in the places that matter.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “Well actually, I have multiple customer types, so I don’t need to narrow things down”, make sure you’re creating different content for those audiences.

They’re likely to buy your product or service for different reasons, and they’ll have different journeys and questions on route to purchase.

If you’re getting a healthy amount of leads and sales but realise that you’ve achieved that with a basic demographics profile, you could get even more if you define your target audience further.

With something like this, it’s hard to know where to start. We always recommend that you begin by speaking to your existing customers.

Speak to existing customers

Speaking to your customers is a great place to start if you want to improve your digital marketing strategy. It helps you:

• See patterns in customer behaviour
• See patterns in demographics and psychographics
• Understand why they chose you over competitors
• Understand which of your USPs actually appealed to your audience
• What they love about your product and business
• What you could be doing better.

Speaking to customers is a window into where and how you should focus your marketing efforts.

We see this time and time again — businesses assume that their customers love a certain USP and put time and money into shouting about it, only to find out that, when speaking to customers, they were drawn to the brand by something completely different.

We worked with a custom shelving company that thought their customers liked them as they were a local business. Turns out customers didn’t really care about that aspect, but they loved that they could get custom shelves at a good price.

How to Prioritise Your Marketing Channels

Another trend in our digital marketing ROI survey is that marketers often struggle to prioritise their marketing channels.

For example, 44% of marketers plan to prioritise organic social in 2023, despite 74% claiming it has a low ROI.

Now, there are two ways of thinking here.

The first is that because these marketers have not prioritised social media marketing in the past they have not been able to get a good ROI.

Social media is just something they’ve done because they feel they should, but this is the year they will prioritise it and get an amazing return on their investment.

The second is that they aren’t getting a good ROI from social media because they aren’t using it in a way that resonates with their target customer. This could be the platforms they use or the content itself.

As a result, they’re getting a rubbish ROI, but because many people use social media, they feel like they need to have a presence there.

We saw this reflected in other data, too — 36% of marketers surveyed don’t know which traffic source earns them the most valuable leads.

There are so many marketing channels that it can be difficult to figure out which are the best for your business.

There are marketing “gurus” across the web touting the platforms they had success on as the be-all and end-all, when really it was just a good fit for their business in particular.

Other marketing “pros” tell you to put yourself across as many platforms as possible — more platforms, more eyes, more sales, right?

WRONG!

It’s far better to do high-quality marketing using the channels that your target audience are using rather than trying to master every platform.

Use what you learnt from understanding your target customers to choose your channels. You can also look at the data from your existing digital marketing efforts to see which platforms have resulted in the highest ROI.

According to our survey, 72% of marketers either struggle to get insights from the data they have or don’t understand the data. Let’s make things a little easier with a cheat sheet of the metrics you want to look at for each channel to get the data you need, and what they might mean.

Important content marketing metrics

These metrics can be found in Google Analytics 4, which you should migrate to now if you haven’t already.

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• Users — the number of unique individuals who have visited your website or app within a specific date range
• Page Views — the total number of times a page on your website or app has been viewed within a specific date range. Each time a user views a page, it counts as one page view.
  • If users or page views have dropped or plateaued, it could mean that your content is no longer ranking as high as it has previously, which could be due to more competitor content being published and ranking higher, taking your place, or changes to the Google algorithm.
  • If users or page views have increased, but conversions haven’t, it could mean that they couldn’t find what they needed to make a purchase. For example, clear information about your product or service, and shipping cost/time.
• Average Engagement Time — the average amount of time users spend on your website or app within a specific date range. Engagement time is the time a user spends actively engaging with your content, such as scrolling, clicking, or watching videos.
  • If your average engagement time has dropped or plateaued, it could be that your website is hard to navigate so users are leaving the site quickly. Or, it could be that they’re landing on a page via search, but it’s not answering their query as well as it could, so they’re heading back to search.
  • If your average engagement time has increased, but users aren’t converting, it could be that you’re providing great content but not including enough relevant CTAs.
• Conversion Rate — how many users converted on your site. What counts as a conversion depends on what you set up as conversion events in Google Analytics 4. A conversion could be a sale or a user completing a form or signing up for a mailing list.
  • If your conversion rate is down or has plateaued, review your CTAs and compare your offering against competitors. They could have a better value proposition or more enticing offers. This doesn’t mean you need to copy them, but it will help you position yourself as a more attractive option.
  • If your conversion rate is high but you’re not getting many return customers, consider ways to reconnect with them. Are you making the most of your mailing list? Could you offer a subscription with a discount as an incentive to keep them coming back?
  • If one page has a high conversion rate but another page doesn’t, compare the two and see if you can replicate the success of the high-performing page on the low-performing page.

Learn more about the most profitable metrics in Google Analytics 4.

Important email marketing metrics

These metrics are most commonly found in your email marketing platform, although you may also find conversion data in Google Analytics 4.

• Open Rate — how many people who received your email opened it.
  • If your open rate has dropped or plateaued, it could be that your subject lines and preview text aren’t enticing people enough. Subscribe to competitor emails to see the type of subject lines they use, and make sure it’s clear what your email is about and why they should read it. No more subject lines saying, “New blog live now”
• Click Through Rate — the percentage of people who opened your email and clicked a link in that email. If 100 people opened your email and 1 clicked through to your website, your CTR would be 1%.
  • If your click-through rate has dropped or plateaued, consider the CTAs you’re using and where they are placed. You don’t want to overwhelm readers with a giant “BUY NOW” button at the top of the email, but including relevant CTAs throughout the email will help increase your CTR.
• Conversion Rate — the percentage of people who open your email and then take a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or downloading an app. For example, if your email is opened by 100 people and 5 of those people convert, your conversion rate would be 5%.
  • If email readers aren’t converting once they click through to your site, consider the pages you are sending them to. Make sure they are relevant to the content of the email and not just a product page you want them to see in the hopes they’ll convert.

Important PPC metrics

You can find this data in the platform you use to run your ads. Learn more about PPC.

• Conversion Rate — the percentage of people who click on your ad and then take a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or downloading an app. For example, if your ad receives 100 clicks and 5 of those clicks result in a conversion, your conversion rate would be 5%.
  • If your conversion rate is low or has plateaued, you should review the pages your ad links to. If you promote a specific product or service but then link to your homepage, those who clicked on your ad are more likely to bounce.
• Click-Through Rate — the percentage of people who click on your ad after seeing it. It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions (the number of times your ad was shown). For example, if your ad was shown 1,000 times and received 100 clicks, your click-through rate would be 10%.
  • If your click-through rate is low or has plateaued, then you should review your ad creative and compare it against competitors. Make sure you’re grabbing the viewers’ attention and giving them a reason to click through to your site. Include USPs, high-quality images or video, and make it clear what you are offering.
• Cost Per Acquisition — the amount of money you spend to acquire a conversion. It is calculated by dividing the total cost of your PPC campaign by the number of conversions you received. For example, if you spent £100 on a PPC campaign and received 10 conversions, your cost per acquisition would be £10.
• Cost Per Click — the amount of money you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. It is determined by the competition for the keywords you are targeting and the maximum bid you set. For example, if you set a maximum bid of £1 and someone clicks on your ad, you will pay £1.
  • If your cost per acquisition or click is higher than you’d like it to be, then you should review your ad targeting to make sure you’re targeting the right audience, consider adjusting your bids and potentially review your ad creative and copy.

Important SEO metrics

These metrics can be found in Google Analytics 4, and tools such as Semrush*.

• Organic Traffic — the traffic that comes to your website from search engines, such as Google or Bing, without you having to pay for it through advertising. Organic traffic is driven by the content on your website and the keywords you have optimised for.
  • If your organic traffic has dropped or plateaued, look at your website’s content and make sure the keywords and phrases you are targeting are the best ones for your business. It could be that search trends have changed and consumers are making different searches to find what they want.
  • You should also pay attention to competitor content in search – if you search for a term and a lot of what appears is how-to guides, then you should create better how-to content than what’s already ranking.

• Keyword Rankings — how well your website ranks in search engines for specific keywords. The goal of SEO is to improve your keyword rankings for the keywords that are most relevant to your business. The higher your website ranks for a particular keyword, the more likely people will find and visit it.
• Search Visibility — the overall visibility of your website in search engines. It takes into account your keyword rankings for all the keywords you are targeting and calculates the percentage of searchers who are likely to find your website when they search for those keywords. The higher your search visibility, the more traffic you are likely to receive from search engines.
  • If you’ve seen a drop in rankings or search visibility, then you should review competitor content to see if a new style of content is taking over the search results, similar to organic traffic drops.
  • If you’ve seen an increase in rankings or search visibility, but new traffic isn’t converting, you need to review your CTAs and ensure they fit well into the content.
• Organic Conversions — the number of visitors who come to your website from search engines and then take a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or subscribing to a newsletter. Organic conversions are important because they represent the ultimate goal of your SEO efforts — to attract relevant traffic that converts into customers or leads.
• Referring Domains — the number of other websites that link to your website. Backlinks from other websites are an important ranking factor in search engine algorithms, so having a large number of high-quality backlinks can help improve your keyword rankings and search visibility.
  • Review your strategy if you don’t have as many backlinks as you’d like. Are you reaching out to the right websites to get your content featured? If you’re struggling with outreach, then you can download our tried and tested outreach templates below, or check out our link-building guide.

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Important social media metrics

These metrics are most commonly found within the social media apps themselves.

• Reach — the number of unique users who have seen your social media content. It can be measured by the number of accounts your content has reached, regardless of whether they interacted with it.
• Impressions — the total number of times your social media content has been displayed on a user’s screen. Impressions can be measured by the number of times your content has been seen, including multiple views by the same user. Essentially, impressions are the number of times your content was displayed.
  • If you’ve seen a drop or plateau in reach and impressions, review the type of content you are putting out on social media. Pay attention to current trends and see how to leverage them to promote your brand. That doesn’t have to mean jumping on every TikTok trend out there. You can also jump on design trends which have a longer lifespan.
• Engagement — the number of interactions that users have with your social media content. It can include actions such as likes, comments, shares, retweets, clicks, and direct messages.
  • If you’ve seen a drop or plateau in engagement, consider whether you’re creating engageable content. Do users have a reason to comment or share the post with their followers? The content should serve the users, not just be used to sell your products.

How to Integrate AI into Your Marketing Strategy

The impact of artificial intelligence on marketing is already the hottest topic of 2023.

Since the start of the year, AI tools have taken off, with giant leaps in technology every few weeks (and increasingly, every few days).

It can be a lot to take in, and 30% of marketers surveyed said they’re finding it hard to keep up with all the changes, and 60% have yet to use AI in their digital marketing.

The area we’re seeing AI used most is in content marketing — 33% of marketers are using AI to help write content. The team here at Thinkplus use AI tools like Surfer, Jasper and ChatGPT to help with content outlines and inspiration but not to write our content.

Another great use for AI is taking something you’ve written and getting the AI to “translate” it into a different tone of voice or for a different audience.

For example, you can ask ChatGPT to generate a paragraph explaining how Wi-Fi works:

“Wi-Fi is a technology that uses radio waves to provide wireless high–speed internet and network connections. A Wi-Fi network consists of a wireless router, which transmits the data signals, and one or more wireless devices, such as laptops, smartphones, or tablets, which receive the signals and connect to the network. When a device connects to a Wi-Fi network, it sends and receives data via radio waves in the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz frequency bands, which are unlicensed and free to use.”

And then ask ChatGPT to rewrite this in a way a 5 year old would understand:

“Wi-Fi is like a special kind of magic that helps us use the internet without using any wires. It’s like having a superpower that lets us connect our phones, tablets, and computers to the internet without needing to plug anything in. It works by using special radio waves that travel through the air and help our devices talk to each other and share information.”

That’s a fairly extreme example, but it shows the capabilities of AI and how it can be used to take complex information and explain it in a new way.

In fact, 49% of marketers surveyed believed that there would be stricter parameters from Google when it comes to AI content. In August 2022, it seemed like Google was planning to penalise AI- generated content, but they’ve since done a u-turn (conveniently after announcing their own AI tools) and said that they will be “rewarding high-quality content, however it is produced“.

Of those using AI in their day-to-day marketing activities, 30% believe AI makes them more effective, resulting in more pieces written in a limited time, and 52% believe AI will help with time efficiency.

It’s no surprise that 23% of marketers believe that AI will replace the role or take on a large part of writing tasks — often AI written content is indistinguishable from human-written content.

The challenges lie with getting the AI to produce content in your business’ tone of voice, and risks with the AI “confidently lying” — it’s been known to include incorrect facts in content and occasionally even make up sources.

Because of this, AI still needs a lot of human intervention, but this isn’t the only place humans are needed. Unless you input a high-quality prompt, AI won’t just produce content on its own.

How to Improve Your SEO Strategy

Marketers still see SEO as one of the most important digital marketing channels. In fact, 77% of businesses say that SEO is the most important digital marketing channel to their business and 57% plan to spend most of their marketing budget on SEO in 2023.

SEO is a great investment for any business — here’s how to ensure you don’t waste your budget.

Keyword Research

Start with solid keyword research, keeping your target customer and goals in mind.

Next, decide what type of content will best fit your keywords and phrases. Shorter keywords are best for your homepage, category and product or service pages.

People searching for these simple keywords are often further down the sales funnel and are best served by clear pages that show off your USPs and make it easy for the visitor to convert.

Longer keywords and phrases, often in the form of questions, are better served by blog content. Searchers using Google to ask questions are often higher up the sales funnel, unsure if they want to make a purchase. Your content is what will help them make a decision, but only if it’s genuinely helpful.

Don’t waste your time creating content for keywords that are too competitive or that aren’t being used by your target customers.

Instead of loads of traffic and sales, you’ll get disappointment and sadness. Boo.

On-page optimisation

You don’t have to create brand-new content for every keyword — you can optimise your existing content.

• Check your meta titles and descriptions are relevant to your chosen keywords (so don’t call your homepage “home”)
• Update copy to include your target keywords and variations of them.
• Look at the search results for your target keyword and see what type of content is ranking. You might find that changing the format and making it more user friendly will make a big difference.
  • We saw the opportunity to improve a fairly well-performing blog about starting an Etsy store for a client. By updating the content format to be a step-by-step guide, adding an FAQ and expanding on the original points, we saw a near 300% traffic increase.
• This might not seem like an SEO problem, but making your website more user-friendly can have a big impact on SEO. One of the signals Google uses to rank your website is the average engagement time of your users — and if they’re not finding what they need easily on your site, they’ll be leaving faster.

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Local SEO strategies

If you’re a local business, you’ll want to use local SEO strategies in your digital marketing. Check out this video from our founder Tim all about creating a fantastic local SEO campaign.

How to Improve Blog Content to Get More Leads

In fact, 80% of businesses get no leads from their blogs, yet nearly 70% say blogs are very important for earning search traffic. Also, 42% say they’re very important for impressing customers.

It is possible to turn that traffic into leads — you just have to be smart about the content you’re creating and the CTAs you include.

First, consider who your content is for and which stage of the buyer journey those people are at. A CTA asking someone to book a consultation makes sense on a service page – these visitors are nearly ready to convert.

That same CTA wouldn’t work in a beginner’s guide blog as those visitors are likely to be at the start of their buyer’s journey.

Next, look at the content that appears in the search results for your target keyword. The content ranking highly on Google has already done something right, so this will help you see which types of content Google deems the best for searchers using these terms.

If the results are full of rich blog content that includes downloadable resources, calculators and infographics then you will want to replicate this in your own blogs.

If you’re not sold on how blog content can help your business, then consider this — 49% of marketers surveyed believe their blog enhances their brand, and 37% believe their blog helps them develop relationships with new and existing customers.

It’s too valuable to skip. If you haven’t seen much traffic coming to your blog, make sure you review the type of content you’re putting out. If you’re just sharing company “news” you’re unlikely to have much success.

How to Get More From Your PPC

A whopping 88% of marketers find PPC too expensive or ineffective — a story we hear all too often (before our PPC Ninjas get involved, of course).

Businesses know they should be running some paid ads but they don’t know where they should be running them.

This all comes down to your target audience.

Are you tired of hearing us say this yet? Sorry (we’re not really sorry — it’s crucial advice)

Where and how you run PPC ads also comes down to the stage of the sales funnel you’re targeting.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of running ads on the platforms you know rather than the ones best for your audience. Maybe you’ve made purchases in the past due to seeing Facebook ads, but the same might not be true for your audience.

For example, 45% of marketers surveyed saw great results from LinkedIn ads. They could have tried running ads on Instagram and Facebook, but they might not reach their ideal B2B audience.

The same goes for the reverse — you’d be surprised to see an eCommerce brand advertising on LinkedIn, even if their customers use the platform occasionally.

It’s also important to remember to test your PPC campaigns. If you know you’re running ads in a space your audience is spending their time, whether that’s on a social media platform or on a search engine, but aren’t getting the ROI you want, then it could be that your ad content isn’t resonating with your audience.

Take a look at the ads that your competitors are running. You can do this by typing the keyword you are targeting into search and looking at the ads that appear or by searching for your competitors in the Meta Ad Library, depending on where you are running your ads.

This will give you an idea of the type of things you should include. If competitors make their USPs loud and clear, you should do the same. If they’re putting their product front and centre, you should be too.

We’re not saying you should copy what competitors are doing — your ads should be uniquely you — but it helps to see what others are doing and take inspiration from what they are doing well.

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How to Ride the Shoppable Video Platform Wave

A recent trend we’ve seen taking off is shoppable video platforms. Actually, 43% of marketers will invest more in shoppable video platforms in 2023.

So what do we mean by a shoppable video? And which platforms are leading the way?

Shoppable video is video content that allows viewers to buy products instantly, sometimes without needing to leave the video.

It’s becoming popular with eCommerce brands as it allows them to show off their products more engagingly and connect with their target customers on the platforms they’re already using.

In fact, 53% of marketers surveyed said they expect video ads as a whole, not just shoppable ads, will be the most successful form of social media advertising for their business in 2023.

This has led to a rise in “shoppertainment” — videos which offer tutorials, product demos, live Q&As and more. Not only does this help brands make more sales as a direct result of this content, it also helps to build brand awareness and loyalty. If consumers feel like they have a genuine connection with your brand and the people behind it, they’ll be more likely to purchase.

Platforms that use shoppable videos include Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

How to Plan Your Marketing Budget in 2023

If you’re worried about cutting costs due to economic uncertainty, let us put your mind at ease — 71% of marketers aren’t cutting spending despite a looming recession.

If you’re facing budget cuts in your department, ensure you put this stat forward to your leadership team. They might think that most businesses are cutting down on marketing when in reality it’s quite the opposite.

Check out this blog about how to plan your marketing budget for 2023. It’s full of pointers to help you create the most solid budget you can.

Download all the graphs as a handy zip. file here.

What to Read Next

• Learn how to read the data in Google Analytics 4 that will help you get an ROI
• Get to grips with the basics of email automation.
• Find out how to get more organic traffic in 10 steps.

The post Why 65% Of Businesses Aren’t Getting an ROI from Digital Marketing (Here’s How to Improve Your Marketing) appeared first on Thinkplus.

So what are the secrets behind creating an effective content strategy?

Let’s dive right in and explore how you can create content that resonates with your readers.

Ready… set… content!

Know Your Audience

Your target audience is the backbone of your content strategy. Creating content that resonates with your target audience is essential for any content strategy to be successful. To craft content and advertising strategies that meet the needs of your target audience, it’s important to understand their:

• Preferences
• Interests
• Pain points.

You can use various methods such as surveys, polls, and interviews to gain this insight. These are invaluable when building an effective content creation and distribution strategy that will benefit the content and your audience.

By combining your content strategy with audience research, you can create content that genuinely connects.

You can also learn some of the basics of defining your target audience. For example, did you know you can define your target audience in 6 quick questions?

Crafting content your audience loves can be difficult, but once you understand who your audience is it becomes simple. By tailoring content to match the style and interests of your target demographic, you’re setting the foundations of an effective content strategy that will keep them engaged.

A deep understanding of your audience will inform your content strategy and help you create pieces that truly resonate. Try out some or all of the following:

• Develop audience personas based on demographics, interests, and pain points
• Use surveys or social listening to gather insights directly from your audience
• Monitor online communities, forums, and social media platforms to uncover trending topics and concerns.

Start off easy by understanding how they like their content served.

Do they prefer humour or seriousness? This simple question will mean instant insights into your tone of voice.

Remember one simple truth. Content is nothing without the right audience, so give ’em what they want.

Inspire with Your Words

Capturing your audience’s attention is a strategy all content creators should strive toward. It’s not always easy to stick the landing though!

To make sure your content stands out, you’ll want to create engaging pieces of writing with a confident, knowledgeable tone that keeps readers hooked. Make it sizzle!

As you work on your content distribution strategies, keep your sentences concise and never ramble on with long, tedious paragraphs. Often, the most impactful content comes from delivering ideas in fewer words than expected, so feel free to experiment!

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Remember, less is more!

In addition to keeping it snappy, make your content easy to scan. To break up large chunks of text, use:

• Bullet points
• Lists
• Headings
• Bold text.

This will make it easier for your readers to find the information and keep them hooked. Instead of writing a long paragraph about the benefits of a product, create a simple list:

• Saves time
• Easy to use
• Affordable.

This format is much more reader-friendly and lets your audience grasp your message quickly. So don’t ramble on, and never use five words when one will do.

Nail Your Tone of Voice

The tone of voice is essential to ensure any content strategy’s success. Having the right tone of voice will set you apart from the competition and make your brand memorable.

Depending on your target audience, industry, and company values, different voice tones may be better suited. Check out our guide to finding your tone of voice in just 15 minutes.

If you’re targeting a younger audience, using a confident but fun tone may be more effective than a strictly professional approach. For a B2B brand, taking a more serious approach may be the best option. No two brands are alike, so experimenting with the tone of voice of your content so that you can easily emphasise your unique vibe can help to attract more customers and build customer loyalty.

To find your ideal tone of voice, analyse your audience and competitors. What kind of language resonates with your target market? How do other brands in your industry communicate? Use this information to craft a tone that reflects your brand’s personality while still appealing to your audience.

For example, if you’re a Silicon Valley software company, your tone might be more informative and solution-driven while keeping a conversational and friendly vibe. On the other hand, an SME selling comics can adopt a playful, energetic, and lighthearted tone to engage with an entirely different audience.

Do Your Research

Before diving headfirst into content creation, it’s essential to lay the groundwork by conducting thorough research. A well-researched content strategy gives you a competitive edge and ensures that your content resonates with your target audience. Here are some crucial research steps to consider:

• Analyse your competitors: Understanding what your competitors are creating content about can offer valuable insights. Pay attention to their most popular topics, formats, and the engagement they receive. This will help you identify content gaps or opportunities to create unique and better content.
  • Subscribe to their newsletters or blogs
  • Follow them on social media
  • Check their content performance using tools like BuzzSumo or Ahrefs.

• Do your keyword research: Using the right tools, identify keywords and phrases your target audience is searching for. This will help you craft content that meets their needs and improves your chances of ranking higher in search results.
  • Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or Semrush (which you can try free for 30 days via thankyouninjas.com)
  • Analyse search volume, competition, and relevance
  • Create a list of primary and secondary keywords to target.

By incorporating these research steps into your content strategy, you’ll be better equipped to create high-quality, relevant, and engaging content that stands out from the competition. Remember, doing your research is essential for crafting the ultimate content strategy.

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Just Be You

Authenticity is key! In a world full of cookie-cutter content, authenticity is a breath of fresh air. Instead of relying solely on one-size-fits-all content distribution strategies, tell your followers about your experiences. By showcasing the lessons you’ve learned and successes you’ve had, you can create content that resonates with them and expresses who you are.

Plus, people love a good story!

Your content will feel natural and exciting if it captures your unique personality. Your content marketing plan should always include being adventurous. Try to find ways to let your authentic self shine through to build trust with your audience.

You’ll build a stronger connection with your audience by opening up and being yourself.

Don’t be afraid to talk openly about your successes, failures, and everything in between when creating content for your audience. Not only will you establish a trusting relationship with them by showing your human side, but you’ll also be delivering invaluable insights.

Share the highs and lows of your brand’s journey in a fun manner that energises and encourages your audience.

Adapt and Evolve

Taking content production to a new level means ensuring you have a content strategy that suits your audience and keeps you at the top of your content game. It’s all about staying ahead of the curve, finding what content topics are popular, maintaining content distribution strategies so the right people see your content, and keeping an eye out for emerging formats and platforms.

Keep your finger on the pulse of your industry to ensure your content remains relevant and valuable. Consider starting to do the following if you’re not already:

• Subscribe to industry publications and newsletters
• Follow thought leaders and influencers
• Attend industry events, conferences, or webinars.

When you can stay attuned to these changes, you stay in the know, ninja-style.

Your content will remain fresh, relevant, and engaging for every user. Investing in keeping up to date with content trends and evolving content marketing methods also ensures that you can maintain your content’s quality as you fine-tune your content strategies.

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Trying new content formats can be a great way to elevate your content strategy too. You may feel uncomfortable stepping out of your comfort zone, but don’t let it hold you back from realising better content creation and distribution strategies.

Experiment with videos, podcasts, or even interactive quizzes as different avenues to showcase your content. It’s the best way to explore the power of diversification and reinvigorate stale content strategies.

Once you’ve tested different approaches and analysed the results, you should continue to refine and improve your content strategies continuously for optimal results!

Example: If you notice that your audience is increasingly interested in sustainability, create content that addresses eco-friendly practices, products, or initiatives. By staying in tune with your audience’s evolving interests, you’ll keep them coming back for more.

Keep It Real

Nobody likes fluff or unnecessary jargon in content. Your audience craves valuable information delivered in a simple, straightforward manner. Avoid using technical terms, buzzwords, or long-winded explanations that can confuse or bore your readers. A successful content strategy should focus on providing genuine value without any unnecessary distractions.

No fluff, no bluff!

To ensure your content stays true to this principle, consider the following tips:

• Know your audience: A successful content strategy starts with understanding your target audience. Research their needs, preferences, and pain points to create content that speaks directly to them. Tailor your language and tone to their level of understanding so you avoid alienating them with technical terms or jargon.
• Stay focused: Choose one main idea per content piece and stick to it. Avoid going off on tangents or including too many subtopics that can dilute your message. This will help keep your content concise, clear, and engaging.
• Use simple language: Opt for everyday language instead of complex, industry-specific terms when possible. If you must use technical jargon, make sure to define or explain it in simple terms so your audience can follow along.
• Be concise: Eliminate unnecessary words or phrases that don’t add value to your content. Keep your sentences short and to the point, making it easier for your audience to digest and retain the information.
• Provide practical advice: Offer actionable tips and solutions your audience can implement immediately. This adds value to your content and demonstrates your expertise in the subject matter.
• Break it down: Use bullet points, numbered lists, and subheadings to organise your content and make it more scannable. This lets readers quickly locate the information they seek, improving user experience.
• Tell a story: Stories can be a powerful way to engage your audience and make complex information more relatable. Use anecdotes and real-life examples to illustrate your points and bring your content to life.
• Be transparent: Cite your sources and provide links to relevant research or data to back up your claims. This not only adds credibility to your content but also makes it more trustworthy in the eyes of your audience.

By incorporating these tips into your content strategy, you’ll create easy-to-understand, engaging, and valuable content for your audience. Cut the fluff and stay real!

Get Data-Savvy

When it comes to content, always let the numbers do the talking. Numbers might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but they can help you create a winning content strategy.

By using data to guide your content creation, you can pinpoint what works best for your audience and then refine your approach for maximum impact.

Here’s exactly how you do that.

1. Track Your Content Performance

No matter what content strategy or content distribution strategy you use, it’s essential to take a step back and evaluate your content’s performance. Tools like Google Analytics and social media analytics tools can provide invaluable data points on views, shares, likes, and comments — each one indicating the success (or lack thereof) of certain pieces of content.

This type of analysis will help you identify which content strategies are successful so that you can continue capitalising on them for even bigger wins. But remember to keep an eye on those pieces that need a little extra ninja magic for more growth!

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2. Learn from the Winners (and Losers)

Paying attention to content performance is essential in crafting a robust content strategy. Going beyond the content that receives the highest engagement and examining pieces that could have performed better can pay off dramatically.

When you take the time to analyse your content, you can better understand why some content resonates with your audience more than others. You may uncover useful insights, such as a preference for listicles or how-to guides. Developing a content distribution strategy based on these findings can help you craft content that will receive higher levels of engagement.

So start analysing the data and be consistent about it to create content strategies that will work for long-term success for your business!

3. Test, Test, Test!

Experiment with different content types, topics, powerful headlines, and formats to see what resonates best with your audience. Then, analyse the data and use it to fine-tune your content strategy. Remember, even ninjas must practise and adapt to stay ahead of the game!

Having a focused content strategy is essential to ensure your content reaches the right audience. And as content changes and evolves, so should your content strategy.

For example, if you notice that your infographics are performing well, consider creating more visual content as part of your content distribution strategy. On the other hand, if long-form content isn’t receiving as much engagement as expected, try breaking those longer pieces down into smaller chunks. Keep experimenting with different content types until you find something that resonates with your audience.

Stick to this versatile approach, and with a bit of trial and error, you’ll soon be achieving amazing content results.

By embracing your inner data ninja, you’ll be able to craft a content strategy tailored to your audience’s preferences and set you up for success. Let the numbers guide you to content greatness!

Spread the Word

Creating stellar content is just half the battle. You also need to get it in front of your audience. A well-planned content distribution strategy will ensure your carefully crafted words reach the right people at the right time. So, get ready to spread the word!

1. Choose Your Channels Wisely

Not all platforms are created equal.

Content is king — there’s no denying it. But content without a content distribution strategy? That can be pretty weak.

If you have content that you want your audience to benefit from and engage with, it’s important to understand where they are and channel your content there. It’s not wise to distribute content everywhere — focusing on the best channels for your content strategy is far better.

Doing so will save you time and resources while allowing you to reach and engage with potential customers more efficiently. Look into what platforms your audience uses, whether social media sites, email newsletters, blog posts, or podcasts. With the right content distribution strategy, these platforms can be powerful tools in your content marketing arsenal.

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2. Timing Is Everything

To get the most from your content strategy, it pays to be mindful of the timing of your content distribution. Part of this involves determining when your target audience is most active and likely to engage with your content.

With a clear content distribution strategy that considers peak times, you can maximise visibility while making sure more people engage with what you have to share. As a bonus, utilising scheduling tools is a great way to automate the process, saving time along the way!

3. Give Your Content Legs

Repurposing content is a key element of any content strategy. This approach helps keep your content top of mind and allows you to repackage content in a new and exciting way that provides more exposure for whatever you have to share.

Get creative with content formats and look for opportunities to turn blog posts into infographics or podcast episodes. Share snippets on social media to boost engagement and remind people about your content’s value. With so many ways to repurpose content, let your content shine in different forms and watch the benefits roll in!

4. Build Relationships & Collaborate

Connect with influencers, bloggers, or other brands in your niche to expand your content’s reach. Guest posts, podcast interviews, and social media shout-outs are all fantastic ways to tap into new audiences and boost your content distribution efforts.

For example, if you’ve written a blog post about the top 10 productivity hacks, consider partnering with a productivity app company. This can be a great way to widen your content strategy reach.

Whether aiming for a joint webinar or social media content, collaborating can open the door to creating content strategies that appeal to both parties’ audiences. It will help drive targeted traffic and build brand awareness, and it may also provide an invaluable learning opportunity as strategists can witness how others approach content marketing from different sides of the industry.

Taking advantage of these collaborations provides content creators with numerous advantages in reaching the desired target and engaging their followers.

With a savvy content distribution strategy, your content will reach more eyes and ears than ever. So unleash your inner content Ninja and watch your content spread like wildfire!

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Get Strategising!

Now that you’ve got your content strategy plans in mind, you can skyrocket your content creation game plan to the top. With a content distribution strategy tailored to maximise content effectiveness, you can be creative and share content in new and engaging ways.

As a content ninja, playing around with various content strategies is how you’ll discover what works best for bringing success. Fearlessly unleash those new ideas, and take the time to develop your own unique approach.

Armed with your ninja-style content strategy skills, go forth and achieve greatness in the content world.

If you want help with your content strategy, we have a team of content marketing specialists at Thinkplus. Learn more about our content marketing services here.

What to Read Next

• Take your blog to a whole new level by checking out the 22 best marketing blogs every marketer must read. Get tips and tricks from the experts.
• Getting traffic but need more sales and engagement? Read our guide, What does bounce rate mean? Google Analytics explained. Get into the nitty-gritty of what might be your most useful metric.
• Do you have a blog, but it’s not getting much action? Learn how to use a blog to improve your sales.
• Does something feel “off” about your website copy? Make sure you’re not committing these 20 sins of writing web copy.
• Don’t forget you can use the content you’ve already got. Here’s a quick and dirty guide to improving existing blog content.

Are you ready to skyrocket your online presence and leave your competitors in the dust? Get a no-cost, comprehensive website and marketing review from Thinkplus, the trailblazing digital marketing partner that will ignite your brand like never before.

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“Email marketing is dead! No one reads emails!”

Here at Thinkplus, we know that’s just not true.

On average, email has an ROI of $36 for every $1 spent, and email marketing is estimated to reach a revenue of almost $11 billion by the end of 2023.

That’s not bad, considering no one reads emails, right?

…other than the 4 billion people worldwide who use their email daily.

If you’ve not put much thought into email because of the “email is dead” myth, we want to assure you this isn’t the case.

Email marketing is a fantastic tool for any business, and email automation takes it to a whole new level. We’ve seen how well it performs with our clients:

• We used email marketing to help a fashion site generate $350,000 in sales on Black Friday, with site visitors from email converting at a huge 8.59%.
• We worked with an eCommerce brand on an email marketing campaign that generated $230,000 in revenue. The email open rate increased from 9% to 51% using segmentation, and the email click-through rate improved to 5.1%.

It’s safe to say we know a thing or two about email marketing.

We know traditional email campaigns can be time-consuming, with fewer options to target consumers based on how they interacted with your website, what they added to their cart or the forms they filled out.

Email automation takes the guesswork out of your email marketing campaigns. With automated emails, certain emails will be triggered after a user takes action on your website, such as filling out a form, signing up for your mailing list or adding products to their cart.

Today’s guide is a deep dive into the world of email automation and covers:

• What is email automation?
• Why you need email marketing
• The benefits of email automation
• The cons of email automation
• How does email automation work?
• Email automation strategy
• Examples of automated email marketing campaigns
• How to create a conversion optimised email
• Email marketing automation tools.

What Is Email Automation?

Email automation is when an email or email sequence is sent to a customer who completed an action on your website. These actions are referred to as triggers.

For example, you can use email automation to send a set of welcome emails after a customer signs up to your email list or an email to a subscriber reminding them they have items in their basket.

Email automation works for any business. The type of email may vary, but the practice is the same.

Email Automation Terminology

There’s a lot of jargon that comes with email automation. We’ve gathered some of the key terms to help you get familiar:

• Trigger – the action on a website that results in an automated email being sent to the person who completed that action.
• Segment – a section of your audience based on demographic information, purchase history or personal email preferences.
• Sequence – a set of emails sent one after the other over a set period.
• Cart Abandonment – when a visitor added items to their cart but didn’t complete checkout.
• Browse Abandonment – when a visitor browsed certain products but didn’t add to basket or convert.
• Click-through Rate – the percentage of people who opened your email and clicked a link.

Why You Need Email Marketing

Email marketing is essential if you have a product or service that you want to sell.

Why does it work so well?

It’s suitable for everyone

Email marketing suits all customers.

81% of B2B marketers report that their most used form of content marketing is email newsletters, and 64% of B2B marketers say their email marketing strategy helped them reach their business goals in 2021.

87% of B2C marketers use email automation as part of their wider email marketing strategy.

50% of consumers buy from marketing emails at least once a month, and 59% of customers said that marketing emails have influenced their purchases.

As long as you create emails your customers want to read, you’re heading in the right direction.

Tailored and personal

The information on your website is often more general. You need to cater to everyone in your target audience, so you can’t be as personal as you can in emails. Segmentation allows you to tailor your emails to audience preferences, actions they’ve taken on your website or products they’ve purchased.

By splitting your audience into segments, you can send emails at the stage of the buyer’s journey they’re currently at.

Rather than sending one email to everyone on your mailing list, you could send out:

• Loyalty discount codes to long-term customers
• Introductory information to some who indicated they are new to the product/service
• Advanced content to someone who downloaded an eBook about a complex topic.

Imagine sending the complex eBook to the person who checked the box to say their skill level is low or a basic introductory email to someone who has lots of experience with your industry. It probably wouldn’t lead to a conversion.

Immediate results

As soon as you send out an email, you can see your campaign’s results. You can see how many people are opening your email in real-time and how many clicked through to your site.

In fact, around 22% of all email campaigns are opened within the first hour of sending.

Because of this, it’s easy to test different email types and make adjustments quickly. There’s no algorithm or indexing for an email campaign, so you don’t have to wait to see results.

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High conversion rate

If you’re sending automated, tailored emails that focus on the right content to the right people at the right time, then email can bring in the highest conversion rate of any marketing channel.

We’ve worked with clients in the past to achieve a huge conversion rate of 8.59% from email marketing alone, so we know first-hand how high conversion rates are for email campaigns.

Different types of emails have different conversion rates.

According to data by the Marketing Insider Group, newsletters see a conversion rate* of around 1% – since their purpose is relationship building and cultivating your audience. Abandoned cart emails have an average conversion rate of 5%, as their purpose is conversion.

*In this study, conversion rate was defined as the percentage of people who placed an order within three days of opening or clicking on an email.

Adaptable and scalable

Email marketing works well for small and large audiences and can be adapted as your business grows.

There’s no right time to start an email marketing campaign. Don’t wait for your mailing list to hit a certain number before starting to run campaigns.

By the time you have 50,000 people on your mailing list, you will have perfected your technique by starting with the few people who signed up at the start.

It’s easy to adapt your email campaign to website and business changes. You can update part of an automated sequence to reflect changes or send out a specific email campaign focusing on a new product.

Let’s explore the benefits of automating your email marketing.

The Benefits of Email Automation

There are many benefits to automating your email marketing for your business and your customers.

Personalisation

The word “automation” can sound a bit robotic, but automated email campaigns are anything but robotic and lifeless if you do them right.

Instead of every customer receiving the same email, individual customers get a more personalised email experience. By segmenting your audience, you can send them emails relating to their interests and the sales funnel stage they’re at.

Time-saving

Automating your emails is a massive time saver. Rather than manually sending an email each time someone interacts with your site, emails are sent automatically.

You also save time chasing up potential leads. With an automated email sequence set to send if a lead hasn’t responded to you for three days, you don’t have to worry about remembering to contact them.

Improves customer retention

It’s impossible to find the time to follow up with every customer after purchase or when they abandon their cart, or even if they’ve just browsed your site.

Automating emails to customers after actions are taken on your website allows you to push them towards a conversion. Not everyone who abandons their shopping cart does so because they don’t want to purchase — people have lives and get distracted. Sending them an email about the products in their basket could be a welcome reminder for them to finish checking out.

Email automation works great for browse abandonment too. A visitor could be comparing different products on a few websites. If the next day they get an email from you reminding them about the products they looked at, it will increase their likelihood to convert.
This last push could stop them from going with a competitor’s product or simply remind them that they were considering a purchase.

Generates leads 24/7

Digital marketing works all day, every day — no need to worry about opening and closing times. Automated emails can trigger any time of day when customers are browsing your site.

If they input their email in exchange for an eBook, they don’t want to wait until the next morning when someone is in the office to receive it. With email automation, they’ll get the eBook right away, no matter the time of day, and move further down the sales funnel.

Shorter sales cycle

Email automation shortens the sales cycle by giving potential customers the information they need without waiting for it. They don’t have to hunt for more information, as you can send it straight to their inbox.

For example, if someone visits your website and signs up to your mailing list, you can send them more information that leads them back onto your website automatically over several days. You won’t have to wait for them to remember to revisit your site as you’re in their inbox reminding them.

Helps monitor campaigns

If you struggle to measure your email campaigns, you can set up triggers and measures within the automation itself, allowing you to monitor how the campaign performs from the moment it’s sent out.

For example, if an email has multiple calls to action, you can see which was the most popular. If the email flopped, you could quickly analyse why and change any similar emails scheduled to be sent out.

By using email automation, you can send different email sequences to readers who interact with your emails differently. You could send separate emails to those who went with the first call to action compared to the second.

If the first CTA leads to a full-service package, you can follow up with an email campaign that focuses on converting people who clicked but didn’t convert.

If the second CTA leads to a free webinar, you can follow up with more educational content and emails encouraging them to join the webinar if they haven’t.

Increases revenue

Building trust and sharing product and service information tailored to the email reader makes it more likely they’ll become a repeat customer or purchase a higher value order.

The Cons of Email Automation

There are many benefits to email automation that far outweigh the cons, but it’s important to consider some of the challenges that come with email automation.

Most of these cons can be avoided. It’s essential to be aware of them so you can avoid these mistakes from the start.

Not reviewing sequences

If you have a welcome sequence running for ages that converts well, you might not think to change it. That’s until someone sends you an email asking why you’re quoting data that’s three years old. Ouch.

If you have tried and tested sequences that have served you well, make sure you check in on them from time to time to ensure the information you’re sharing is up to date. It would be awkward to recommend a service that doesn’t exist or direct them to a now-defunct phone number.

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Too many campaigns

Once you see success from your automated email campaigns, it may be tempting to make a sequence for every possible trigger and every type of customer.

But imagine you’re visiting a website. You sign up to the enticing-sounding mailing list. You browse the site for a bit, then add some products to your cart.

You check your email and are greeted with:

“Welcome to the club”

“Top tips for newbies”

“Did you see anything you liked?”

“Everything you need to know as an expert”

“Don’t forget about the products in your basket”

And…unsubscribed.

Limit the number of triggers you have and set up your automations to avoid sending too many emails to the same customer. Set up time limits on some sequences, so customers aren’t being asked if they remember adding products to their basket five minutes ago.

Studies show that people usually unsubscribe from emails because they’ve been receiving too many. But how many is too many?

Test the frequency of your emails and see how subscribers respond. If your open rates plummet, you’re probably sending too many emails.

How Does Email Automation Work?

Now you understand the benefits of email automation and some of the cons, we’re ready to dive into how automated email campaigns work.

There are multiple ways you can use email automation to connect with email subscribers. These automated emails can be triggered based on a few different factors.

Behaviour-based

Behaviour-based automated emails are triggered when a visitor to your website completes a certain action. These actions could include:

• Signing up to an email list
• Adding products to their cart but not checking out
• Browsing products but not converting
• Filling out a form
• Downloading content from your website.

Preference-based

Preference-based emails are sent out based on customers’ preferences. These could be set on sign-up if you gave them multiple options, or you can gather information* about preferences from previous purchases. These preferences could include:

• Opting for a monthly newsletter rather than every week
• Only wanting to hear about certain products
• Indicating budget/team/company size.

*When gathering information about subscribers, ensure you are sticking to laws around data gathering and privacy. In the UK, we have The Data Protection Act.

Time-based

Time-based automated emails are sent out after a certain amount of time has passed. These emails are ideal for:

• Following up with leads who haven’t responded
• Reminding a customer to repurchase a product that needs to be replaced monthly
• Sending customers a discount on an anniversary (a year since first purchase, a year since they registered) or birthday.

These different triggers can be combined. Some behaviour-based emails will also need to be time-based — you don’t want to send someone a reminder about their shopping basket the moment they add items.

Email Automation Strategy

A lot of planning and setup goes into email automation, but once it’s set up, it will save you more time in the long run.

Segmentation

Automated email campaigns should always start with splitting your audience into groups called segments.

There are a few ways to segment your audience for email campaigns, depending on the information you have about them:

• Email behaviour
• Purchase behaviour
• Product/service preferences
• Demographics.

Once you’ve defined these segments, you can move on to targeting.

Targeting

From the segments, choose who you will target, what email automations they’ll receive and when they’ll receive them.

Examples of email targeting

• Who: A customer who purchased a six-month software subscription
• What and When:
  • A follow-up email after a week asking how they are getting on with the software.
  • A follow-up email after two weeks asking them to review the software.
  • A follow-up email after five months asking if they’d like to renew the software, with a discount if they sign up for a 12-month subscription.
• Who: A website visitor who signed up to an eCommerce newsletter
• What and When:
  • A welcome sequence that begins immediately after they complete the newsletter sign-up.
  • A browse abandonment email several hours after they finished browsing
  • or
  • A cart abandonment email several hours after they added items to their cart but didn’t complete checkout.

These are basic examples, and we’ll be exploring different sequences in more detail later in this guide.

Sign Up CTAs

You want to be growing your email list constantly.

Ways that you can grow your email list are:

• Strategically placed sign-up forms onsite or offsite to collect email addresses.
• Website sign-up forms offering an incentive (free content/lead magnet/discount).
• Promote your mailing list and sign-up incentive on social media.

Here’s our email sign-up box, which is used across the Thinkplus website and blogs.

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Sales Funnel

One of the powers of email automation is that it fits your sales funnel. You can send emails at strategic places in the sales funnel depending on where customers are at in their journey.

Content

Content is an important part of any email campaign. In our experience, there’s often too much focus on the design of the email and not enough focus on the content, or vice versa. Both are equally as important. Further down this guide is an entire section on how to create high-converting emails.

Design

Design is all about how your emails actually look. Use your existing branding to keep emails consistent with the rest of your marketing strategy.

You should keep your email design consistent for each campaign. Small changes and tweaks over time are fine but don’t overhaul the entire design in every email.

The level of design depends on your business and target audience. If you’re a playful brand targeting a younger audience, then including memes and bright colours could be a good fit. If you’re a hospital… not so much.

If you’re stuck for inspiration, check out the designs compiled by Really Good Emails.

Launch

Time to send your emails out. If you’re unsure which email platform to use, don’t worry. We will cover some of our favourites later in this guide.

Review

Finally, review your campaign. It’s important to review performance regularly to ensure you’re identifying any potential opportunities or issues before they’re copied into other campaigns.

Our Top Email Marketing Automation Tips

We’ve been running email campaigns for years, and over that time, we’ve developed a few best practices to help you make the most of your automated campaigns.

Sales funnel and customer journey

Start with your sales funnel and customer journey. By plotting out the steps for each of these, you’ll then be able to see where email automation can support these steps.

If you’re unsure how to optimise your sales funnel, check out our guide and learn how to create the perfect website sales funnel.

Don’t send the same message

Keep your emails fresh and interesting. Think about what you’d like to receive in your inbox.

Sign-up to competitor newsletters to see what they send out and pay attention to the marketing emails that land in your personal inbox, too.

Don’t send irrelevant emails

Segmentation and targeting are key in email marketing. Your emails should go to the right people with the right information.

Provide value with every email

Every email you send asks the receiver to give you their time to read it. It’s critical they get something of value that’s worth their time.
With these points in mind, let’s explore how you can get more conversions from your emails.

How to Create a Conversion Optimised Email

Landing Page

Send your email readers to the best page possible. If your email discusses a sale, link to the sale page rather than directing them to the homepage. Your landing page should always be relevant to your email.

For bigger campaigns, you can even create bespoke landing pages.

Subject Line

A/B test your subject lines to see what works with your audience.

Do they respond better to:

• Something straightforward?
• Something with emojis?
• Something that builds intrigue?

A/B testing your subject line will help you identify what gets your subscribers to open an email.

Eye-Catching Visuals

Decide on a design that fits your emails based on your audience. A/B test small design changes to see what your audience enjoys most, which could be your header design or the design of calls to action within the email.

Two very different emails from Ezco and the Google Store, courtesy of Really Good Emails.

Call to Action

We recommend one main call to action with some secondary CTAs further down the email.

The number of CTAs will depend on the email’s length, but, as always, don’t overdo it. If the CTAs override your email’s message, you’ve gone too far.

Your additional CTAs should focus on catching the attention of people who are not ready for the first CTA.

For example, you’ve set up an automated email to trigger when someone downloads an eBook. The main goal is to convert this person, but they might not be at the stage of the sales funnel you thought they were.

Put the main CTA in place to entice the “ready” customers towards conversion and include a secondary CTA for those who aren’t ready to convert, directing them towards content related to the eBook they downloaded.

Example of a Fitbit email, courtesy of Really Good Emails

Tailored Content & Personal Touches

Send content to your audience that is relevant to their interests. Segmentation and triggers mean you can be specific about the type of content you are sending and to whom you are sending it.

Email tools make it easy for you to address the person by name in the content and the subject line, making these emails extra personal.

Urgency and Scarcity

Urgency and scarcity may seem like bad words in the marketing world, but they’re only bad if you overuse or lie about them.

An example of including urgency and scarcity in an email is sending an automated email when someone fills in a form about a product or service, offering a one-off limited-time discount.

Frequency

Use A/B testing to identify how often to send emails to subscribers.

We recommend two to three emails per week per subscriber, but this varies between industries. Test different frequencies and monitor the results to see what works for your business and audience.

Send Day and Time

Send emails at different days and times to see what brings in the best results.

We recommend resending to non-openers later in the day to get further engagement from an email they missed in the morning.

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Open Rates

Open rates indicate email performance, but we don’t class this as the most important measurement since the IOS tracking update. We recommend focusing on click-through rate and conversions.

Deliverability

Deliverability is a key part of any email campaign. We use platforms like Litmus to test deliverability and pick up any issues.

A/B testing

It’s crucial to A/B test your emails to get the best results. We suggest only making small changes between A and B, or else you won’t know which changes work.

Only do one test at a time, changing the title or the design. Otherwise, you won’t know which change impacted reader behaviour, such as a change in click-through rate or conversion rate.

Mobile Optimisation

Check how your emails look on mobile before sending them out. Many email programs give you the option to view how your emails will look on mobile.

Think about how many scrolls it takes your reader to get to your message. That beautiful header image may look amazing on desktop, but it could take up most of the screen on mobile.

Writing Email Content

Your email content is the most important part of your email campaign. There are different elements you can use in your emails depending on the customers you are emailing.

Incentives

Incentives include downloadable content, discounts, exclusive content and more. What you offer as an incentive depends on your industry.

Always share sign-up incentives immediately after your new subscriber submits that form. Email automation is especially helpful for getting this email to the new subscriber right away. They’re here, right now, engaging with your business.

Trial incentives for other situations, too, such as anniversaries, birthdays or encouraging dormant email subscribers to purchase.

Valuable Content

All content you share by email needs to provide the reader with value, whether this is promoting products they’ve shown an interest in or sharing an interesting article relevant to them and your business.

People will only read emails that they want to read. Sending the same promotional message or rehashing your product information isn’t engaging and won’t bring good results.

Overcome Objections & Answer Questions

Think about what could be holding your reader back from making a purchase or signing up.

Use case studies, how-to guides and FAQs in your emails to overcome objections.

If you know that people new to your business have a list of questions they usually ask, create an email sequence based on those questions and send them out over a few days.

You should also cover these questions on your website, but not everyone has the time to read through your FAQs.

Examples of Automated Email Marketing Campaigns

Unsure where to get started with your first automated email campaign? We’ve shared some of our favourites to help inspire you.

eCommerce Email Automation

Automated email sequences perfect for eCommerce businesses are:

Welcome sequence

This is the sequence sent when someone signs up to your mailing list. Here you will share an incentive (if applicable) and information about your company across several spaced-out emails.

Re-engagement sequence

This sequence targets inactive subscribers. These emails may include a discount or incentive, new products and useful content.

Abandoned basket

This automated email triggers when someone on your mailing list adds products to their cart but doesn’t checkout.

Browse abandonment

This automated email triggers when someone on your mailing list browses your website but doesn’t add products to cart or make a purchase.

Preference emails

Preference emails can be sent out to new or existing email subscribers to check they are receiving content relevant and interesting to them. For example, a fashion retailer may want to segment emails by gender. These emails help improve segmentation and personalise emails.

Review collection

These emails trigger when a customer receives their order. Set up a sequence that triggers if the customer didn’t respond to the first review request email — it could be that they hadn’t had the product long enough to share an opinion.

Birthday and anniversary

Send these emails on a customer’s birthday or their anniversary of joining the mailing list.
Discounts are always a huge hit but don’t be afraid to innovate. Spotify runs a yearly campaign where customers can view their listening habits over the past year.

eCommerce Automation Examples

Welcome sequence

For your welcome sequence, we suggest sending the first email immediately after the customer signs up to your mailing list, then waiting three days between sending the other emails in the sequence.

Email 1 – Incentive Email
This email confirms subscription and shares the sign-up incentive (if you have one).

Email 2 – Welcome Email
This email is where you share who you are and what you do — a company introduction.

Email 3 – Engagement Email
This email explores what you can do for the reader by using blog articles, videos and useful content to demonstrate your products’ features and benefits.

Email 4 – Engagement Email
This email answers objections. Within this email, you can use successes, your USPs and your reviews to answer any objections the user may have.

Email 5 – Conversion Email
The final email in this sequence is conversion-driven. It focuses on your products and any available discounts.

Re-engagement sequence

For your re-engagement sequence, we suggest waiting five days between emails so that you don’t overwhelm your dormant subscribers. You want to encourage them to become a customer, not turn them away with too many emails.

Email 1 – Re-engagement Email
This email focuses on sharing the discount code and new products the subscriber may not be aware of.

Email 2 – Re-engagement Email
The second email focuses on useful content, showing how you stand out against competitors and the benefits of your products.

Email 3 – Final Email
This email drives the discount end date, shares your key products and provides a simple message that focuses on the user converting.

Abandoned Cart

For abandoned cart emails, we suggest emailing around three hours after the visitor leaves the website and doesn’t return. Wait around 16 hours after this first email to send a final email explaining that their cart will expire soon. If your website’s cart expires faster than 16 hours, send the email sooner.

Email 1 – Abandoned Cart Email
This email is sent three hours after items were added to the cart, but checkout was not completed. Remind users what they added and include an expiration time for their cart.

Email 2 – Abandoned Cart Email
This email is sent three hours after the first email if the email was not opened. You can use more urgency here, for example, “Before your cart expires…” or “Your cart is about to expire”.

Lead Gen Email Automation

For lead generation, you can use similar emails as eCommerce. Automated emails that work well for lead generation are:

• • Welcome sequence
  • Re-engagement sequence
  • Preference emails
  • Review collection
  • Birthday and anniversary.

Email Marketing Automation Tools

When choosing an email platform, it’s worth setting up free trials with a few different platforms to see which one works best for you. We’ve gathered a list of some of our favourites to give you a head start.

1. MailChimp

MailChimp offers email automation alongside many other email and marketing tools. MailChimp integrates with over 300 apps and web services, including QuickBooks, Zendesk, WooCommerce, Shopify, Firebase and Magento.

2. Klaviyo

Klaviyo is an email and SMS marketing platform with advanced email segmentation. It integrates seamlessly with over 220 eCommerce tools, including Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Okendo, Recharge and Gorgias.

3. Sender

Sender is an email and text message marketing platform. Whether you want to start a newsletter or grow your existing mailing list, Sender has a tool to help you reach your goals. It has plenty of integration options, too, including Magento, WordPress, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Cloudflare and Zapier.

4. Sendinblue

Sendinblue offers email and SMS marketing tools and prides itself on helping small businesses grow. The platform offers over 150 integrations, including Zapier, Shopify, WordPress and WooCommerce.

5. Infusionsoft/Keap

Keap provides loads of marketing features, including email marketing, appointment management, invoices, quotes and more. Some businesses it loves working with are accountants, coaches, consultants, insurance brokers, non-profits and real estate. The business describes its platform as “flexible for all industries”.

Why Email Automation?

Let’s recap. Why is email automation perfect for all businesses?

• It’s adaptable and scalable
• It saves you time
• It provides your customers with a more personal experience
• It generates leads 24/7
• It helps you increase revenue.

If you want some help with your email marketing, we have a team of email marketing specialists at Thinkplus. Learn more about our email marketing services here.

What to Read Next

• Learn how to increase organic traffic to your website and boost your email sign-ups in the process.
• Ensure you’re connecting with the right audience by defining your target audience. If your target audience isn’t nailed down, your email campaigns won’t be as effective.
• Give your sales funnel a tidy-up to influence your automated email campaigns.

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So, you’ve written an awesome, insightful, SEO optimised blog post for your website. Nice one! Now, time to copy-and-paste in the same one-line call to action you used in your last post, right?

Wrong! Don’t let your hard work go to waste with an under-par CTA. It might be brief, but a blog post’s call to action is a major part of the content you create.

A staple of digital marketing, a call to action crystallises everything an online business is trying to achieve. In just a couple of short sentences, your aim with a call to action is to encourage readers to become customers.

A call to action will often be the last thing users read before making a decision on whether to invest in your business. Making the right impression here is absolutely crucial.

Ready to up your CTA game yet? Keep these seven key principles in mind when putting together your calls to action and you’ll give readers every reason to become consumers…

1. Emphasise the Value and Benefits

If you’re including a value-based incentive on your site and it’s relevant to the blog post you’ve just written, shout about it from the rooftops:

• Is your business currently offering some sweet deals that could entice readers to make a purchase?
• Is your eCommerce store offering free delivery for purchases over £50?
• Got a half-price offer on a product related to your blog post subject?
• Is there a price match guarantee in place?

Let the reader know in your CTA about strategies like these. They tend to call many of us into action!

Establishing your unique selling point (USP) in your call to action highlights an area of value that no other website can talk about. What can you provide that nobody else can? Every company has a key feature that offers unique value to customers, making it extremely useful information in a CTA. So, what’s yours?

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2. Make Your CTA Unique and Related to Your Post

Whatever you decide to say or promote in the call to action, make sure it stays relevant to the blog post the CTA will be attached to. The last thing you want is to start referencing products or other areas of your company that have zero relation to the topic. So, always write a unique call to action that works with the blog post.

Constantly using a generic CTA with the same content is not a good idea. You miss out on the chance to promote the products and info within the blog; the stuff the reader is most interested in, because that’s what they chose to read about! Identical or very similar CTAs across many different pages also creates duplicate content, which can negatively affect SEO efforts and appear lazy or unhelpful to users.

Take a look at this CTA example from a blog post about PayPal Credit by Wise:

Read on for all you need to know about using PayPal Credit, including how it works, any fees you need to know about and how to apply.

Plus, a quick look at an alternative solution for those who prefer to use a debit card for online shopping – Wise. With the Wise international debit card, you can shop in multiple currencies for less.”

Wise aren’t trying to get readers to give up on the idea of using PayPal Credit, but they are offering an alternative for people who would prefer to use a debit card. They’re also highlighting their international debit card to people who want to learn about and use PayPal Credit but are also interested in signing up for an international debit card.

3. Use Emotive Language

Much like your blog post title, there are certain words that can really grab the attention of readers. These 25 words in particular can be seriously useful, if used correctly.

Incentivise the CTA and show how transformational becoming a customer could be by using action words like “Stop”, “Start” and “Discover”. Make it feel personal to the reader by using personal pronouns like “You” and “Your”. Tap into the reader’s need to change or improve or change something by using negative words like “Sick”, “Confused” or “Worried”.

Using words like these to your advantage is key to making a CTA compelling.

The call to action in this blog post by Gymshark, for example, shows how personal pronouns can be used to make the reader feel singled out and really involved in the text.

It also includes two reasons why the reader might want to purchase the product, “Trying to up your one-rep max or finding the bar slipping out of your hands?”  This sentence is descriptive and intends for the reader to imagine themselves in that situation, either upping their one-rep max because they bought the gloves or dropping their bar because they didn’t buy the gloves.

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4. Create a Time Incentive

“Offer ends soon”

“Buy now before it’s gone”

These are often-seen examples of call to action statements that create a sense of urgency. They aim to eliminate the prospect of the web user thinking, “It’s okay, I’ll come back later”, before completely forgetting about you and heading somewhere else.

As well as the basic “Give us a call today” kind of time incentive, you can create a more powerful sense of urgency by combining this aspect with others.

How about the USP? “Limited edition product. Get it now before it’s gone”

Or what about value and benefits? “This product is half-price TODAY ONLY”

Booking.com uses a sense of urgency in their search results, including, “Only 1 room left at this price on our site”, in order to get visitors to book right away.

5. Involve the Reader and Reduce Risk

Don’t let the reader go without leaving with at least something that will keep you in their minds once they head somewhere else. If you’re working on a free newsletter, why not encourage readers to sign up to that? It keeps your name and offers in their inbox, showing them more of what you can offer.

If there’s a free trial available, make readers aware of this and how it requires no commitment or investment. Taking the risk away from potential conversions can be a major tipping point for customers. It’s why video games have free demos. It’s why Netflix and Now TV constantly promote their free trials.

Our free marketing review, for example, gets plenty of attention because of how much we’re willing to offer, in exchange for nothing more than contact details. If you offer a similarly beneficial, risk-free service, use it.

6. Stress Simplicity

So many web users will opt to not make a purchase or conversion because they feel the process is too convoluted or time-consuming. In your call to action, break down this barrier by stressing how simple it is for them to make the action we’re looking for.

Regardless of the specific action you want people to make, there’s a way to promote it in a simple way:

• Need their contact details? “Fill out this simple 30-second form”
• Want them to create an account? “Become a member today for super-quick sign-ins and purchases”

This call to action on the Huel homepage offers a solution to visitors who don’t know where to start in the form of a quiz.

The headline is “Not sure where to start?”, grabbing the attention of anyone who is confused. This is followed by, “If you’re struggling to find the right Huel for you – worry not. We’ve put together a quick quiz to get you on your way.”  This sentence tells you exactly what you’ll get if you follow this call to action – a quick quiz that will help you find the right product for you.

7. Be Short, Sweet and Concise

Avoid going overboard with your CTA in terms of length or word choice. A large chunk of text at the end of a blog post is unlikely to attract someone’s attention, whilst those who do read it may struggle to identify the main points. Use short sentences and impactful words to get across the key information quickly and effectively.

Look at these excellent CTAs for website landing pages. What do they all have in common? They’re super short and get to the point as quickly as possible. Readers are looking for solutions to their problems ASAP, so try not to waffle on!

Struggling to shorten or simplify your text? Free online tools like Grammarly and Hemingway can give you pointers on how to get your point across more succinctly.

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How to Write a High Converting Call to Action

Let’s recap the seven steps that will help you write an effective call to action.

1. Emphasise the value and benefits
2. Make your CTA unique and related to your post
3. Use emotive language
4. Create a time incentive
5. Involve the reader and reduce risk
6. Stress simplicity
7. Be short, sweet and concise

Take inspiration from websites in your niche, as well as sites you visit frequently. It can take a while to perfect your calls to action, so don’t forget to keep practicing and trying different approaches to your CTAs.

This guide was originally written by Chris Groves and updated by Jess Percival in August 2022.

The post How to Write a High Converting Call to Action appeared first on Thinkplus.

Why You Shouldn’t Believe What You Read in the News…

Newspapers and news sites have a reputation for being trustworthy sources of information, but marketers can buy a portion of that trustworthiness and use it to achieve their business goals. It’s entirely possible to get your business mentioned in practically any publication of your choosing, including prestigious names like The Guardian, The New York Times and Forbes — even without developing an interesting news story or cultivating your journalistic contacts.

Everything has its price, and a slot in a newspaper or on a website is no different. In this blog post, we will explore sponsored content, when you should consider using it and how even small businesses can use sponsored content effectively.

In this blog:

1. Why Choose Sponsored Content? (and What It Is)
2. What Does Successful Sponsored Content Look Like?
3. How Much Should You Pay for Sponsored Content?
4. Achieving an ROI through Sponsored Content

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Why Choose Sponsored Content?

Sponsored content is when you pay a publication or website to run your content. It is an example of native advertising because the content you supply is normally designed to look and feel like the content that is on that website already.

Native advertising spend in the USA alone was over $47 billion dollars in 2020, and accounted for 63% of all digital advertising.

Readers often don’t realise they are reading an ad until they are part way through the article. Sometimes they never realise that what they are reading is paid for. If your sponsored content is well written, the promotion of your product or service takes a backseat.

The supply of content on the internet is enormous right now — an estimated 5 million new blogs are uploaded to WordPress every day. The demand for online content is also enormous, but there are some natural caps and barriers in place.

People only want to spend so much of their time consuming content, and it only takes one content creator to make something that can be read by thousands if not tens of thousands of individuals. This means that there is a mismatch between supply and demand, with some websites having a larger supply of content that their current demand.

In this situation it is very difficult to persuade an editor to run your content unless you have a truly exceptional story. In this situation, it may be worth paying the publication a fee to run your content, saving you time and giving you access to a publication of your choosing.

Google, reflecting the view of the the average internet user, is wary of sponsored content. They are concerned about the prospect of companies effectively paying to rank highly for keywords (or at least, they are concerned because in the case of sponsored content, Google itself isn’t making any money).

They have said that any company or website that runs paid for content could be excluded from Google News completely, though this seems increasingly unlikely as many major news sites blatantly disregard this rule. Google also states that paid for links must be declared and given the “nofollow” tag. Yet while Google’s rules are fairly tight, their enforcement of these rules has been lax… so far. Time will tell whether they will decide to loosen the rules or enforce existing rules more harshly in the future.

Sponsored content has also generated controversy amongst readers and even government regulators who are concerned that sponsored content is misleading the public. It’s important that both publishers and marketers realise that misleading sponsored content erodes the trust between readers and publishers, and that trust is a resource that is quickly spent but very difficult to regain.

What Does Successful Sponsored Content Look Like?

Example #1: The Guardian and Visa – How mobile payments are driving a boom in startups

The Guardian commonly runs sponsored content and has been doing so for many years. As publications go, it is one of the most transparent, featuring a (reasonably) prominent “paid for by” section next to the article. They also include who the article was paid for by. The Guardian clearly distinguishes between sponsored content, supported content, and content that is brought to readers by brands.

Example #2: The Times and AlixPartners – Stay in the game: how to deal with disruption

The Times features a “Sponsored” section on some of their sub-pages, making it clear which articles are sponsored.

They also make it clear within the articles that they are sponsored, and who they are sponsored by. The “promoted content” area in the top right corner of the page includes the logo of the company sponsoring the post, and doesn’t try to hide it.

Now it’s unlikely that any small or medium-sized business owners will be on either of the above websites as sponsored content (we’re about to tackle pricing in the next section) but we can learn a couple of things from their approach.

1. Sponsored content should appear native. It’s important that the reader feels that your content is a natural part of their reading experience and doesn’t feel disjointed when they come across your message. Looking at the above examples, we can see how each brand has tailored their content format to suit the publication.
2. Yet you shouldn’t get caught deceiving readers. Each of the above four publications marked the sponsored content as such so that their readers didn’t feel cheated or lied to. This is good practice, as readers hate to be taken for fools and won’t think highly of brands that treat them as such.
3. Sponsored content does not mean substandard content (if anything the opposite should be true). In the early days of advertorials, brands didn’t pay that much attention to the quality of their sponsored content. It was enough to be in the publication, and the quality of the content was an afterthought. Now that advertorials are near-universally hated for their poor quality, they’ve realised that this was a colossal mistake. Brands do have access to some pretty cool resources, such as an advertising budget and industry insights. When they use them to create sponsored content of a high standard that perhaps even a professional journalist might have struggled with, the sponsored content will get most attention and be most effective as a marketing tool. In other words, now that you’ve paid for the soapbox you better be sure that you have something interesting to say!

How Much Should you Pay for Sponsored Content?

As of 2022, clear industry-standard pricing plans for sponsored content have yet to be developed. In fact, aside from the reach and influence of the target publication, the single thing that will most likely determine how much you pay is your ability to negotiate a good deal.

The cost varies on a few different factors – the size of the publication, the number of readers, the Moz Domain Authority of the website. It can be anywhere from £50 upwards, and every site prices themselves differently.

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Achieving an ROI through Sponsored Content

Before you hand over any of your hard-earned money to a publisher, you should negotiate to be sure that you are getting the fairest possible price and that both parties are clear on exactly what the agreement means. Make sure to cover key details such as links (nofollow or otherwise)  and visibility time. Most publications and bloggers will have either a media kit or a media package containing key metrics that will help you decide whether the investment is likely to be a good one. You can use this, alongside your own research, to determine how many readers you are likely to get, what the engagement levels might be, and then you can start to estimate roughly how many leads your content will generate. Once you have that estimate, you can start to negotiate what both parties consider to be a fair price.

To keep the price down, there are a few things that you can do:

1) Reduce the work needed to be done by the editorial team and the blogger to the absolute minimum, including doing tasks such as sourcing images and proofreading for grammar errors. The less time that the blogger or publication have invested themselves, the less they are likely to charge for the service.

2) Attempt to secure a deal on a per-lead basis. Most publications and bloggers will be reluctant to do this — they want to be paid regardless of whether or not your content is successful. But it can strongly be argued that the value of the content is directly linked to the amount of leads that it generates. The higher your lead-conversion rate, the better a deal like this could be for your business.

3) Consider asking for a discount on repeat purchases. There are diminishing returns on investment for each article in terms of strict SEO benefits, so you should be able to argue that second and third purchases be discounted.

There are also a couple of red flags to watch out for:

1) Limited visibility time. Often publications will feature sponsored content for a limited time only, to prevent their website from appearing overly spammy. Of course, in most cases you want your article to remain live indefinitely. In some exceptional cases, on some exceptionally popular websites, it may be acceptable to agree to limited visibility time. Though you’ll need to work out whether this is worthwhile on a case-by-case basis.

2) How the sponsored content will be presented. Will it be clearly marked as sponsored content, and if so, how so? It generally pays to play by Google’s rules, so sponsored content that is marked as such isn’t necessarily a bad idea. But it should still be formatted and packaged in a way that is attractive to readers.

Once you have a price agreed, determining your ROI is a simply a matter of comparing the cost of the sponsored content to the number of leads that it generated. You can use Google Analytics to see how many of your website visitors are coming through a particular link, then use your lead-conversion rate to calculate roughly how many of those visitors went on to become customers. In addition, some of your content’s readers may not have necessarily followed the link but instead came through as organic traffic later on. If there is a spike in your web traffic after your sponsored content is published, estimate what percentage of that is due to the post and add that to your ROI score for the content.

After you have compared your ROI to the amount of time and money spent on creating and securing the content, it’s time to analyse it in terms of your overall goals for your digital PR campaign. If it was a success, great! What can you do next time to make it even more successful? If it was a failure, why exactly was it a failure? If the content got less readers than a typical post on that website, perhaps you need to re-evaluate your content creation process. If you didn’t secure as many leads as you hoped you would, perhaps you should work on your website’s conversion rate before restarting your efforts at sponsored content.

Remember too that, as always, targeting the right publication for your target audience is just as important with sponsored content as it is with any other type of content marketing. If your typical customer is a 35-45 year-old Welsh woman with a love of gardening, then your sponsored content needs to be in a publication that is widely read by that demographic.

What to Read Next

• Find out where your competitors are placing sponsored content by conducting a competitor SEO analysis.
• Learn how digital PR can improve your SEO.
• Drive organic traffic to your website by getting to the top of Google.

This guide was originally written by Tim Cameron-Kitchen in 2017, and updated by Jess Percival in 2022

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