Monthly Archives: June 2022

Customers today expect more than value for money from their purchases. They want brands to align with their worldviews and address their unique needs. If you want to capture the attention of your audience and turn them into a faithful following, you need to invest in brand marketing. Here are several benefits that brand marketing can bring.

Brand recognition brings sales

With so many products and services flooding the marketing, consumers are spoiled for choice. If you have a similar offering to another brand in the market, brand recognition is the main driving factor for your customer to pick your brand over another. A consumer survey shows that 71 percent of consumers thought it was important to recognize a brand before buying. Therefore, if you want to get ahead, you need to get your brand within the sights of your target audience. Brand marketing can help you to do that.

Brand values build loyalty

Brands that are in tune with the lifestyles and values of their target audiences are more likely to foster long-term loyalty and trust. On top of that, honesty and authenticity are becoming increasingly important to the cynical modern audience of millennials and Gen Zers. According to one study, 87 percent of Americans indicated that they would buy from a business that advocated for an issue that they cared about. Meanwhile, 76 percent said that they would boycott a brand that went against their beliefs. So, if your brand stands for something, you should make it known.

Brand communication aids engagement

Brand communication is how your brand speaks with your audience. If you pay little attention to brand marketing, you may find that your company varies in tone across different platforms. For instance, your social media posts may be friendly but your emails impersonal. Not having a consistent brand communication strategy can affect your customer relationships. A prospect who is attracted by an advertisement may lose interest when talking to a customer service agent. To ensure effective engagement, you must have clear brand communication guidelines.

Brand image builds on itself

If you maintain consistent brand marketing, you will start to develop a strong positive brand image. Brand image is how consumers perceive your brand and expect your brand to perform. For instance, if your brand is often marketed as being honest and reliable, these qualities will become synonymous with your brand. Over time, consumers will automatically associate your brand with being honest and reliable without needing your suggestion. As you enhance your marketing, you can reiterate positive qualities and reinforce your brand image.

Here is how to market your brand

Companies of any size—even solo entrepreneurs—can benefit from brand marketing. With numerous robust brand marketing tools available, you can undertake brand marketing on your own. After all, nobody understands your brand as well as you, its founder. These guidelines can help you to get started on brand marketing.

1. Understand your brand purpose

Think about the people are trying to help and the problems that your products or services hope to solve. This is the purpose of your brand. Now that you have your target audience, you should think about how you want to address them, how your brand should make them feel, and how you can persuade them to trust you. If you are struggling with these questions, look at your competitors and evaluate what they have done.

2. Define Your Audience

Knowing your audience is crucial to successful brand marketing. Research your current audience and develop a picture of your ideal customer to guide your marketing strategy. The data that you should consider includes age, marital status, education background, income level, online shopping behavior, values, and more. Once you understand your ideal customer’s persona, you can adjust your brand tone and strategy to reach and engage them.

3. Write Your Story

Your brand story can help you to connect with customers and give them a reason to believe in your value promise. A good brand story does not have to be dramatic, but it does have to be authentic. Think about how your company came to be and the challenges that you faced and overcame. What has your brand learned and how does this help your customers? Let your story be the foundation for your brand’s mission, values, and vision.

4. Create Brand Guidelines

When you have formulated your brand identity, you should create a comprehensive guide on how to apply it across all media platforms. Brand guidelines can help your employees and any agencies that you engage understand the type of tone, voice, visual style, and content to use with your brand. This will ensure that your message will always be delivered consistently and effectively.

Brand marketing is a powerful technique that turns your brand into an asset in itself. As you build up your brand, you will benefit from widespread recognition, deeper loyalty, and stronger engagement. Consistency is the key to successful brand marketing. Take the time to define your brand and ensure that all your marketing efforts contribute to boosting your brand image.

With so much focus on social media and influencers, many B2B businesses feel that digital marketing is reserved for B2C companies. That is untrue. Many B2B businesses that have invested in digital marketing have seen significant growth and expansion. The article will tell you more about how digital marketing can benefit your B2B business.

Digital marketing increases your visibility

Companies looking for product or service providers do not like to waste time. If your prospects are unaware of your business, it is unlikely that they will intentionally seek you out. Therefore, increasing your visibility is essential to raise brand awareness and reach your target audience. Traditionally, you would do this by sending cold emails or flyers to potential clients. However, it is much more efficient to let them come to you.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful tool that allows B2B companies to be discovered by their audience on search engines. That said, an effective SEO campaign involves more than just purchasing Google ads. B2B clients have very specific pain points and search keywords. Hence, businesses need to undertake in-depth keyword research and tailor their SEO to boost their visibility for the relevant keywords.

Digital marketing builds your reputation

Reputation is paramount for B2B sales. Unlike B2C sales, B2B sales can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars per transaction. Unless you are already well acquainted with your prospective clients, it can be tough to convince them that your company can deliver what they need. Hence, B2B companies must support their generic marketing with a persuasive combination of reputation-building content and social proof.

Content is central to digital marketing. When you create content that addresses the concerns and needs of your target audience, you establish yourself as a credible and trustworthy industry leader. Your reputation grows as your content is published on highly-regarded platforms or shared by other players in the field. Think about how a ‘featured on Forbes’ badge on your website will work wonders for your reputation.

Digital marketing shortens the sales cycle

The B2B sales cycle is notoriously time-consuming. According to CSO Insights, almost three-quarters of B2B sales to new customers take a minimum of four months to close. In fact, almost half of them end up taking at least seven months. With several people involved in the endorsing or decision-making process, B2B businesses need to customize their content and tailor their value propositions to expedite the sales cycle.

There are several ways digital marketing can help with this. First of all, keyword research ensures that your business will reach your target audience the minute they are ready to explore a purchase decision. Engaging content compels them to contact your company and reputation boosts convince them to convert. Even if you do not close the sale, digital marketing can help you to follow up automatically and continue to engage prospects with minimal effort until they move down the marketing funnel.

Digital marketing offers better ROI

Compared to traditional marketing, digital marketing offers a much higher ROI. Digital marketing works on many levels to enhance brand awareness, increase leads and conversions, shorten sales cycles, and improve sales and revenue. Content marketing typically costs 62 percent less than traditional marketing and companies can expect to earn $2 for each $1 that they spend on a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign. Furthermore, ROI can be much higher with the help of an experienced digital marketing agency.

Because digital marketing is supported by large amounts of data, you can easily measure your campaigns and eliminate any strategies that are not generating returns. There is little wastage of resources or time. Digital marketing comes with endless metrics that enable you to better understand your audience and finetune your campaigns to capture their attention. Features such as A/B testing allow you to assess and analyze the behavior of your prospects so you can develop content that converts.

It comes down to execution

It is clear that digital marketing offers concrete advantages for businesses. However, digital marketing encompasses a wide array of techniques and strategies. B2B audiences have different needs and decision-making processes than B2C audiences. For B2B companies to fully reap the benefits of digital marketing, they must hire a B2B marketing agency that knows how to tailor their campaigns to a B2B clientele.

B2B agencies have dedicated tools and experts who can research your target audience, plan your marketing strategy, execute campaigns, and measure the results. Hiring a B2B agency to take care of your marketing strategy and execution will enable you to focus on growing your business. This way, when the increased leads from your marketing campaigns start to come in, your business can respond with quality products or services.

Digital marketing is not a choice but a necessity if your B2B business wants to complete in this modern age. Digital marketing will allow you to build your reputation, expand your reach, close more deals, and scale your business. To achieve the best results, leave it to the professionals and engage a digital marketing agency that specializes in B2B marketing.

MarTech stands for marketing technology. It refers to the techniques and tools that marketers use to plan, create, deliver, automate, test, measure, and integrate digital marketing campaigns. MarTech covers a range of activities such as advertising, promotion, execution, and analysis. It curates the entire digital marketing process from brand identity to the buyer journey and client retention.

MarTech tools enable marketers to gain insight into the demographics, preferences, and behaviors of their target audience and make data-driven decisions to streamline, scale, and improve their marketing campaign outcomes. Companies often use more than one MarTech tool at a time. The term MarTech stack is used to refer to a suite of complementary tools that a company utilizes to accomplish its MarTech goals.

How Can MarTech Help Businesses?

Information Fidelity

Since MarTech tools are cloud-based, all data is instantly updated and available. Therefore, it is easy to sync information across various teams and devices. Aside from avoiding inconsistencies with data, having a centralized location for information allows companies to eliminate the redundancy of having to manually action data transfer from one team member to another.

Increased Efficiency

MarTech can allow businesses to easily integrate and manage several marketing channels through a single dashboard. This increases the efficiency and productivity of your marketing team and enables them to spend time on strategy, planning, and execution instead of dealing with scattered assets.

Better Collaboration

With MarTech tools, various departments such as sales, marketing, and customer service can better align their focus to move towards organization goals. MarTech services allow seamless transfer of information from one department to another, improving the customer experience as well.

Multichannel Insight

Internet users exhibit distinct behaviors when using different channels. MarTech can enable marketers to have a multichannel view of their target audience and their purchasing behavior. This can help marketers to determine the most effective channels to advertise on.

Personalize Campaigns

Through a deeper understanding of your prospects, you can customize and personalize your advertising campaigns to increase the likelihood of conversions. Personalization helps brands to connect and engage with potential customers, reactivate existing and past customers, and help prospects to move down the sales funnel.

Improve Quantity and Quality of Leads

MarTech can not just increase the number of leads but also improve the quality of the leads that a company receives. Through better audience targeting, marketing campaigns can generate leads that are more likely to convert and become paying customers.

Whole Customer Journey

When various departments are siloed, it can be tough to ensure consistent quality across the board. Integrating all your processes through MarTech systems allows you to have an overview of the entire customer journey from the first point of contact to the eventual sale or onboarding.

Campaign Measurement

With strong data support, companies can use MarTech tools to measure the success and ROI of their marketing campaigns. Tools such as Google Analytics provide a clear indication of the numbers of users that interacted with your advertising, the number of conversions, and where other users exited the sales funnel.

Compounding Benefits

Your company enjoys advantages with each MarTech tool that you add. While a single MarTech tool can expedite and enhance one aspect of your operations, a fine-tuned MarTech stack can bring exponential benefits across the entire sales and marketing chain, skyrocketing your growth.

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a proprietary inbound marketing and sale platform that is designed to help companies market more efficiently and effectively. HubSpot started as a CRM (customer relationship management) software and the service provider has since expanded its offerings to include five interconnected hubs for sales, service, marketing, operations, and content management. The HubSpot CRM Suite encompasses all the above service offerings in a bundle.

HubSpot is preferred by digital marketing agencies due to its broad range of tools that integrate seamlessly. Through expert use of HubSpot’s services, digital marketing agencies can help their clients to generate inbound leads, increase conversions, close deals, and improve customer satisfaction. Although HubSpot is an extremely powerful platform, it can be difficult for companies to implement or understand it. There is where HubSpot agency partners come in.

Introducing MakeWebBetter

MakeWebBetter (MWB) is a standalone eCommerce HubSpot agency that specializes in helping its clients make the most of HubSpot’s suite of services. MWB provides dedicated services and solutions to leverage the HubSpot framework and help eCommerce businesses to grow and expand. With over 15 thousand active clients, MWB is a HubSpot Certified Premier Integrations Partner and a Diamond-tier HubSpot Solutions Partner.

MWB has developed exclusive HubSpot apps that integrate HubSpot with WooCommerce, Shopify, and other major eCommerce platforms. They also have addons designed to boost sales like dynamic coupon codes and specialized HubSpot apps like WhatsApp integration. In addition, they boast an extensive range of HubSpot services that cover onboarding, consultation, website development, and custom integrations.

MarTech has the potential to help SMBs and enterprises achieve unprecedented success. If you would like to leverage the strength of MarTech but are unsure of how and where to start, consult a MarTech services agency. An agency like MakeWebBetter can offer you a customized solution to help you to propel your business to new heights.

A fractional executive is a seasoned C-suite professional with at least twenty years of experience in their field of expertise. The majority of fractional executives boast an impressive career history with experience in various C-level roles across multiple industries. Some of them have since retired early or moved on to become entrepreneurs but are willing to share their expertise in a fractional working arrangement.

How Fractional Arrangements Work

Instead of hiring a senior executive full-time, a company engages a fractional executive to take on an interim role for a fraction of the time and cost. Fractional executives can take on several roles including Chief Operating Officer (COO), Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), Vice President of Sales, and Marketing Director.

Fractional working arrangements are usually flexible and dependent on the needs of both the company and the service provider. Some fractional executives work on full-time, short-term contracts while others prefer part-time, long-term engagements. There is also the option of hiring virtual fractional executives who provide their services remotely.

Often, a fractional executive will enter the company with the purpose of meeting defined goals and objectives. They will put in place strategies, plans, and processes, or develop the capacity of your employees to allow your company to scale up. Although fractional executives can be considered a transitional asset, some companies prefer to retain fractional executives long-term instead of hiring an in-house C-level executive.

Who Needs Fractional Executives?

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and startups typically do not have the financial resources to hire an in-house C-level leader. Unlike established companies that often have a team of top senior executives, most SMEs and startups only have the business owner acting as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Yet, growth and scale are essential for small companies to survive and compete.

A sign that your company may need the intervention of a fractional executive is that it is not attaining set organizational goals. Perhaps the leaders in your company do not have the knowledge or experience to create an effective growth plan or marketing strategy. Even if your company is operating fairly well, you may be missing out on opportunities for scalable growth. If you feel that your company is not achieving its full potential, you should consider engaging a fractional executive.

Benefits of Engaging Fractional Executives

More Cost-Effective

An average C-level executive can command a minimum of $250,000 a year before benefits and taxes. Many startups and SMEs simply cannot meet such a high salary expense. This creates a catch-22 situation where the company needs revenue to pay for expertise but does not have the expertise to attain this revenue. Fractional executives are much more affordable than in-house senior executives, allowing companies to access top executives. There may also be potential tax savings.

Access Expertise

With decades of experience in C-suite roles, fractional executives have a depth and breadth of experience that can benefit any business. They have practical knowledge about a vast range of industries and valuable connections that can help a company gain an edge over than competitors. Furthermore, fractional executives are invested in professional development. They constantly educate themselves about industry trends and technology, helping your company to stay at the forefront of change.

Help Where It Matters

You can hire entry-level employees for general roles such as sales and customer service, but you need someone who really understands the big picture to affect growth. A fractional executive can help you with complicated tasks such as strategic planning or operational streamlining and help your company focus on revenue expansion. Having an expert in your corner also allows you as a business leader to spend time on the core of your business instead of trying to handle everything on your own.

Get an Entire Team

C-level executives are powerful but they must be backed by a competent team to make a solid difference. Some fractional service providers now allow companies to outsource an entire team of fractional executives. For instance, your company could engage a team of fractional revenue experts to help your company scale successfully. This saves you both the time and effort involved in aligning your team and systems. Your revenue can take off much quicker and your company can be ready to scale sooner.

More Flexible

Fractional working arrangements can be negotiated to suit the demands of the company. A fractional executive could start full-time and reduce their hours as the in-house team becomes better trained and more productive. When you hire an in-house senior executive, you often have to sign a long-term employment contract. This can be a liability when the executive does not meet your expectations. Although fractional engagements also require contracts, they generally have more flexible severance terms.

The idea of hiring a top-level executive with Fortune 500 experience may seem a pipedream for many small businesses. However, this is now a possibility with fractional service providers. With a fractional executive or a fractional team of experts, your company can function better, increase revenue, and set itself up for long-term scale and success.