Gaining Qualified Leads and Increasing Overall ROI

Leads. We all want them. We need them. We know how crucial generating leads is to your company’s success—and that generating qualified leads shares top spot with closing sales once you nurture them down the funnel. Your boss knows this as well. In fact, CEOs will often put costs in the rearview when generating leads in order to yield successful results. HubSpot’s recently released “State of Inbound 2015” study delves deeper into this trend.

The Direct Link between Content Marketing and Sales

Joe, Shirley, Ruth, and James are hardworking sales people. And they hit their numbers every time. But you need the numbers to increase and your company wants to shift into new markets, so you’re facing a double whammy of a transition. They all have very different personalities and approaches to work, and their own preferences for how and when they communicate to prospects and customers. You spend way too much time creating sales enablement strategies that support each of their styles of working. You need a plan that will encompass all their work habits and keep you from having to micromanage their different approaches for engaging with clients. On top of that, corporate is after you to align branding and messaging more consistently. You need a content marketing plan. 

A Content Marketing Plan Is all about Sales

You’re comfortable doing business the way you’ve been doing it for years. We get that. But there’s an inherent problem with that. Your customers and prospects aren’t; their buying habits have changed—dramatically. Technology has been driving this content marketing train for a while now, and the painful reality is that if you don’t jump onboard, your potential customers will be leaving the station without you. Stale metaphors aside, you really need to get on track with how business is being done and create a content marketing plan. Okay, bad puns behind us now, let’s get to the meat of it.

How a Content Marketing Plan Can Save the Sales & Marketing Marriage

We all feel the pressure to be as efficient at our jobs as possible. Metrics dictate our decisions, follow us around, and predict our relative success … or failure. No one feels this more profoundly than salespeople. After all, if you distill it down, our jobs depend on their success. If nothing’s being sold, nobody’s getting paid. Having said that, the sales team isn’t in it alone. Marketing is an integral arm of sales. Traditionally, they have begrudgingly co-existed in many organizations—kind of like a bad arranged marriage. Both know they have an obligation to be there, yet they’ve discovered they don’t always speak the same language. There’s a disconnect that threatens to derail the best intentions of—what should be—a fruitful union. Content marketing is proven to attract prospects, and sales should be happy to embrace this methodology, because it will deliver the kind of leads they have been demanding for a long time.

What Is Content Marketing? Oh, You’re Already Doing it—Now Plan on Making Money from it!

You know that rabbit hole you go down each time you read an article online and then click on one link, only to click on another, which has you reading an article about the pros and cons of this and that, eventually taking you to a product page? From there, you start clicking down the customer reviews—some of which may even redirect you to another product entirely? Which takes you down that rabbit hole all over again?

That zig and zag through the content marketing minefield is just how business is done these days—both for B2C and B2B endeavors, whether you realize it or not. But wait! The good news is that it’s mining gold … and it can for your industrial manufacturing business when you get on the other side of it. 

Because Your B2B Brand Strategy May Still Need Fixin’

We hear all too often the strains of, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” reasoning for not updating brand messaging or revising outdated websites. What you aren’t doing, in reality, is adhering to a consistent and congruent brand development strategy. But do you really know how many opportunities you may be missing out on by not making these changes? What is your gauge for broken? If you don’t remain relevant and contemporary, prospects may be passing you by because you look “broke” to them. Your assumptions may be shortsighted and costly. 

Have a Healthy, Heart-Hitting Company Brand

Why is Walt Disney World® magical? Why are Volvos safe? Why are Jeeps® adventurous? Each of these answers boils down to one thing: brand essence. It is the emotion your brand conveys. In other words, it is the emotional heart—some would say, soul—of your brand. So, Disney World, Volvos, and Jeeps evoke feelings of magic, safety, and adventure, respectively, among their customers. Better yet, these characteristics are associated with these companies even by people who don’t buy Jeeps, Volvos, or go to Disney. Well done.

Google’s Coming to Get You!

Mobilegeddon is upon us … and you’re still here! Congratulations! But will you be in a year? While this asteroid may have already hit, it’s possible that its after-effects will not be felt immediately. You may think that you are doing all you need to do with your B2B marketing strategies, but we want you to know—that may not be so. As we talked about in our most recent blog post, the Google mobile algorithm is already at work crawling the web in real-time, and the ranking results may take time to show tangible drops, or rises, in SEO ranking. But this does not mean you have time to spare.

The Lowdown on the Latest SEO SmackDown

Let’s put it on the table up front: small businesses are particularly vulnerable with the latest Google algorithm. Grant Marketing specializes in comprehensive B2B marketing for small to mid-size companies. The irony isn’t lost on us that all the efforts and success people and businesses have made towards strengthing local economies, while trying to become global players, may rest in the hands (aka algorithm) of one of the biggest players of them all—Google. Keep reading, though. We’re here to makes sense of it for you, and give you the tools to make the necessary adjustments to stay in Google’s global game.

As Opposed to Being Shot Down by It 

To people of a certain generation, their first introduction to “branding” had more to do with the etched insignia on the rump of a cow than the brand promise of, say, their favorite frosty beverage. Jump forward a few decades and today’s average consumer is, at least subconsciously, educated on what the brand promise is for each of the products that they depend on.