Top Four Ingredients To Digital Marketing Success

Are analytics showing a spike in the number of viewers/visitors on your website? Amazing, isn’t it? But this is just the first step to a cyclic journey that never ends. After all, the marketing world runs on the systematic approach to attract, engage, convert, and retain. And while attracting them with judicious strategies is a challenging task, going further uphill from there to engage and nurture the audience is as essential as it is even more difficult.&nbsp; Why do you ask? Because your audience will take a microsecond to move to your competitor if your website is not able to engage them with the right information and services that add value to their lives.&nbsp; Did you know engagement is the driving force behind a 23% share of profit, revenues, and maintaining the relationship between business and customer? Yes, the right engagement strategy can take your business to greater heights! But before we dive into our tips that will boost your ability and empower you to engage and nurture prospects going forward, lets touch upon the basics, shall we? So, how would you define customer engagement and nurturing? Engagement and nurturing are two aspects of marketing that are responsible for forging and fostering trust and building long-term relationships with consumers.&nbsp; With the aim to enrich customers’ experience, engagement in the simplest form can be defined as the process of interacting with the customer, keeping two visions in mind- one of fulfilling customer’s needs and second, yours, of checking the list of the unique set of goals. Why is customer engagement important? The unique interaction between the customer and the brand, which lays the foundation of a relationship is important in the long run. It goes beyond just communicating and using tailored and customized processes to serve the audience and convince them to move towards the buying and retention end of the sales funnel.&nbsp; The touchpoints at which engagement goes beyond communication are marketing, shopping, and purchasing, and this is where you can make the difference. How your business and brand is perceived is what makes the targeted audience choose you over others and build loyalty.&nbsp; Price(81%), quality(80%), and convenience(55%) drive engagement while loyalty is ensured by likeability(86%) and trust (83%). It is necessary to keep the customers interested and show them how committed you are to deliver to their personalized needs and how every product and service is aligned to resolve their issue and add value to their purchasing cycle.&nbsp; Proactive and personalized communication through email, messaging helps both ways- the consumers can better understand your business. With regular communication, your business can devise strategies that hit the bull’s eye. This ensures customer loyalty.&nbsp; If put in the right manner, customer engagement strategies with defined and periodically tracked metrics can continuously grow and improve. The defined metrics will help your team, work towards dedicated factors for customer satisfaction.&nbsp; So what should you practice? Don’t overlook the impact of feedback. Not gathering and implementing feedback will become a roadblock in your business’s growth and development.&nbsp; Be clear with your message, make it readable, easy to understand, and even easier to retain. This will guarantee retention marketing is done right.&nbsp; Connect with the audience with a personal tone. Take, for instance, address customers by their first name, or go for app-style chats, which give off the personal vibes.&nbsp; What you should avoid? Businesses often lack or don’t make enough effort to establish a human connection with consumers. We understand bots have made the work efficient, but nothing can replace the human touch.&nbsp; If your business does not have a case-by-case flexible solution and system that resolves issues, then the standard one-size approach will ruin the customer experience and affect the loyalty of your customer base in the long run.&nbsp; Having covered the basics, now let us move to some effective customer engagement tips that will help you maintain and grow a loyal customer base in 2020: What are some of the customer engagement strategies that will drive your business in 2020? Let us look at them: Conduct Surveys: Surveys are an effective form of communication that will not only engage your audience but also devise and implement strategies based on these surveys to improve your business’s brand engagement and loyalty. This will help you identify what process or system is the audience most satisfied with and want changes in.&nbsp; Utilize multiple channels: Keep your brand active on every possible channel where your target audience is. This will broaden the scope of awareness amongst your followers and widen the loyalty base. But it is essential to keep in mind that you need a different strategy to engage the audience on the respective channel. What would attract the Instagram audience might not be likeable to the Twitter crowd.&nbsp; Omnichannel engagement strategies have proven effective in retaining an average of 89% of their customers, compared to 33% for companies not utilizing engagement seriously? <!-- --> Keep Customers Updated: To keep your customer base engaged, it is essential that you keep them well informed about any new service that is being launched or if you are coming up with a new update of a product. Pre-renewal communication and offering personal discounts will keep your customer base stay loyal to your brand.&nbsp; Now that you know the what, why, and how of customer engagement, let's move on to nurturing. So, what is lead nurturing?&nbsp; While many businesses can generate leads and begin through the first step of the sales funnel, they find themselves stuck with how to convince those who visit but do not buy. This is where nurture marketing comes to rescue.&nbsp; Nurturing goes one step ahead, which taps on the consumer's experience to understand better and devise effective strategies that can build a loyal base of customers who will become advocates of your products and services while they are moving through the sales funnel.&nbsp; Why is nurturing important? This nurturing marketing through effective communication empowers your brand's standing as the authority after the consumer is done with the researching across the channels for the product that desire to invest.&nbsp; Some of the common examples that effectively used nurture marketing to convert prospects into buyers are Nike Run Club, Amazon, Helix, etc. Amazon, take, for instance, sends emails to remind you of the products you have added to cart or a wish list but didn't go through the purchase.&nbsp; While it takes time to deliver results, incorporating nurturing in your sales and marketing strategy will result in an exponential increase in return on investment.&nbsp; Effective nurture marketing increases the number of opportunities that enter the pipeline and further enhances response to the campaign.&nbsp; When incorporated right, nurture marketing plays a crucial role in improving prospect segmentation and push the conversion rate to a higher level.&nbsp; The Annuitas Group reported a 47 % increase in the purchase made by leads that were nurtured throughout the sales funnel compared to those that weren't.&nbsp; With nurtured leads, companies can shorten their sales cycle by 23% and generate 50% more sales leads at a 33% low cost per lead.&nbsp; As the marketing landscape gets competitive, research shows that compared to before, 48% of businesses now need a more comprehensive cycle for nurturing their leads before they convert. What should you practice? Make use of marketing resources to pique interest in the users and how your product/service will add to the customer's life.&nbsp; Keep track of the step where your consumer is in the buying process so that you can confidently send relevant, targeted content. Take a cue from Apple with the way in which it asks people to create free content which enhances the personalized buying process. This drills the company's name in the consumer's mind, affecting their purchase decision.&nbsp; What shouldn't you do? Don't skip the research. It is important that you know that thorough research of the prospect is important, not just in capturing them but also in building long term relationships. Don't go all sales-ey the minute you receive a lead’s contact information and overwhelmed with information about your products and service.&nbsp; Never overlook email campaigns in the lead nurturing. Take Amazon, for example, which makes use of captivating email reminders if the consumers have shown interest in certain products but didn't, but it or have abandoned their cart.&nbsp; Now that you are aware of the basics, allow us to help you with the tips to create an effective lead nurturing process that will deliver in the long term:&nbsp; Segment the audience:&nbsp; Do you know what is a good way to lose your customer? Trying to sell your product and service without keeping into consideration the stage of which the audience is, in the buying process. This is why you should first segment your audience on the basis of their buying behaviour, which can include the blogs they read, the material they downloaded, or the video they watched. The audience segmentation will lay the foundation for a strong nurturing campaign. Go Multichannel:&nbsp; Consumers now spent more than half of their time online. It only makes sense to be present to get the maximum return on investment from the nurturing campaign. Retargeting, social media monitoring, website content are just some of the ways which will help you build brand awareness and reach out to a broader spectrum of prospects. Automate email marketing:&nbsp; Invest in an automated email marketing system to boost the impact of your nurturing campaign impact. You can opt for drip-feed or event-based trigger email campaigns. When compared to standard marketing rates, automated email messages generate 70.5% of enhanced open rates and an increase in the number of clicks by 152%.&nbsp; The aim should be to make consumers feel valued, especially in this testing times of COVID, by devising strategies to approach with the products and solutions in a way that culminates into a long term relationship. The aforementioned strategies should help influence retention marketing and convince consumers to repeat the purchases.&nbsp; You can always reach out to a team of digital marketing specialist of Saffron Edge for effectively engaging and nurturing your prospects with the maximum possibility of a higher return on investment.&nbsp; ...

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The way people search for content on the web has evolved than how they did decades ago. Today, the queries they search for on search engines usually consists of more than 4 words to get an exact answer and is based more on its context than the traditional keywords.And search engines like Google, to provide the best user experience, have also evolved to cater exactly to these long-form search queries. It’s really not about keywords anymore.Then what’s it about?It’s about topics. And Google too gives more weight to the topics you address in your blogs and web pages than the keywords you target.All of this has given to rise to the concept of ‘Pillar Pages’ and how they serve both the purposes of Google and searchers. They fulfill the purpose of searchers searching for that content as it provides all the information there is about a query on a single page. And that’s what search engines want, to fulfill the queries of their users in the most seamless way possible to deliver a good user experience. But what exactly is a ‘Pillar Page’? Pillar page is a type of long-form content that provides all the information there is about a topic broadly. And if a reader wants to consume more information about a particular sub-topic present in the pillar page, he would be redirected to a different page where all the in-depth information about that particular sub-topic will be presented to him. That part is taken care of by ‘topic clusters’. The main characteristic of a Pillar Page is that it’s closely linked to the topic clusters with the help of hyperlinks. For example - if a searcher wants to learn about ‘content marketing’, then the pillar page based on a broad topic like ‘content marketing’ would mention every major element that forms content marketing in general i.e. blogging, content outreach, influencer marketing etc. and would link each and every sub-topic with further reading materials that explains in detail each sub-topic to satisfy the searchers, creating a well-devised structure for your pillar page. How do I create a ‘Pillar Page’? Creating a Pillar Page is not hard. You just have to choose a topic broad enough so that you can write more in-depth articles about its sub-topics (topic clusters) which will link back to the pillar page to increase its overall authority.Here’s how to do it - Choose a broad topic Based on audience research, you’ll have to choose a broad enough topic which includes various keyword related sub-topics to so that you can create your topic clusters around it later. Like mentioned above, we’ll take content marketing as an example. Writing the sub-topics So, you’ve selected a broad topic for your pillar page (content marketing, in this case), the next part is filling your pillar page with keyword focused sub-topics. The sub-topics of a pillar page just briefly explain what the sub-topic is about. Your blogs or topic clusters that you’ll write later will fulfill the purpose of providing in-depth information about the chosen sub-topics.In this case, the sub-topics for the content marketing pillar page would be blogging, influencer marketing, infographics, and the likes. Writing the topic clusters Then you would write a bunch of blogs containing specific, in-depth information about the sub-topics of your pillar page and all the blogs would be interlinked to those sub-topics and the sub-topics would link to those various blogs forming your topic clusters. Say, you want to target the sub-topic ‘blogging’, to do that, you’d create blogs having in-depth information about the best blogging practices, how to find the right topics for your blogs, where to market your blogs and everything else related to blogging and all those blogs would link-back to the sub-topic creating a well-thought-out interlinking structure. Best practices of creating a ‘Pillar Page’ Now that you know what a pillar page is and how to make one, here are some things that you need to take care of to create a pillar page that would really make a difference to your overall website authority - Creating a structure Source The sole purpose of creating pillar pages is to structure all your content about a topic in a well-organized way so that users can make sense of the information easily. So, don’t forget to carefully interlink all your topic clusters to the pillar page and vise-versa. Keep it ungated Source Pillar pages are one-stop destinations for your audience to gain deep insights about a topic, don’t treat it as a lead generator and ask for email addresses to gain full access to it. You’ll be limiting its potential that way. Instead, you can simply provide a downloadable option of your pillar page along with the full content so that users can keep it handy if they wish to read it later when they have time. Provide a table of contents Source This one is important, as pillar pages usually consist of a lot of words and sub-topics, providing an option to your readers to quickly jump onto the sub-topic they are most interested in can work wonders for the user experience your pillar page provides. And when it comes to creating pillar pages, its all about providing a great user experience. Why Google absolutely loves them? Google absolutely adores pillar pages for a lot of reasons. One main reason is that they are super easy for their crawlers to make sense of and crawl because of their semantically related closely interlinked content structure. The other main reason is that pillar pages provide great user experiences to users because of their ease of navigation and closely related content which can provide all the desired relevant information to a user about a particular topic and Google cares about the user experience every webpage provides to their searchers. So, they automatically rank higher than normal pages of content found on the web. ‘Pillar Pages’ and ‘Topic clusters’ have become buzzwords for all things SEO lately and you shouldn’t wait much before jumping on the wagon. As an example, Hubspot has created a great pillar page on ‘Youtube Marketing’ which currently ranks first for the keyword on Google’s SERPs among nearly 2.5 billion results! Have a look at that pillar page and you’ll understand in an instant what we are talking about. Do let us know if you were able to find their cleverly inserted internal links that redirect readers to more relevant information about the sub-topic through their topic clusters. ...

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Inbound Marketing has emerged as a new field of marketing and gained importance in recent years. As a result, this required a complete overhauling of the sales and marketing departments and making them learn how inbound marketing works and how to handle the queries that come in through this channel. This makes the two separate teams of sales and marketing get intertwined with one another. It has become important to offer these teams the right kind of support they need in order to get on the right foot. And, the best way to do so is to partner with an excellent inbound marketing agency that provides sales enablement while the in-house team learns the way inbound marketing works during the process. 5 important benefits from partnering an Inbound Marketing Agency 1. Inbound Marketing Strategy that suits your business Not being familiar with the inbound marketing and starting on your own without much knowledge about what best suits your business can be catastrophic and make customers fall out of that sales funnel which was your ultimate goal. Customers falling out of the sales funnel means that some might become critical about your company for the next time even if you target them with the right kind of strategy or re-targeting. But all these kind of repercussions can be avoided if you are up for partnering with the right Inbound Marketing agency. You will get the right advice and people to implement the suggested strategy that suits best for your industry, your unique company, your products or services and your audience. This will help your company realize ROI much better and quicker. One of the eminent players in this industry is HubSpot for US based firms. 2. Making the Sales Team Learn Even though partnering the inbound marketing agency helps in strategizing and implementing it, partnering with the agency that provides sales enablement as well can be an added advantage for your company. During the process the sales team learns how to pitch for sales while handling an Inbound query. It is pretty obvious that your sales team might resist this change and your reps might feel like they’re being replaced. An agency that provides sales enablement can make the transition smoother and get your reps on board effectively. Their coaching will include that they won’t have to chase down leads anymore or cold call anymore, that they will get highly qualified leads that are actually interested in your company’s products or services and hence will make them achieve higher lead targets. 3. Sales and Marketing Teams are better aligned with each other Implementation of Inbound Marketing will make both marketing and sales teams to work in collaboration which could be a huge change for them, but this is a good thing because to get the maximum results we need both the teams to work in collaboration. An inbound agency with sales enablement will help make sure that the alignment between these two teams is more effective. A sales coach will offer tips about how to properly communicate with the marketing team and make sure that both work together in achieving their respective goals ,i.e., lead generation and conversions. 4. It provides help with CRM An Inbound marketing agency like HubSpot provides its own sales CRM for the sales team. Similarly, if other Inbound marketing agencies also do provide their own CRM tools for your sales team, moving over to the new platform can be easy if their is a proper training given about the features of the new tool and what all it can do. If the agency is up for providing the help and support you need then it will be a smooth transition for the sales team to get used to using the new CRM. 5. New techniques for selling If your company’s sales team is used to outbound selling techniques, inbound techniques can be whole new world for them. In that case, they might use the same aggressive techniques that they used previously instead of focussing on the customer’s needs, they might not know what is social selling, they might not know what is thought leadership or they might not know what is customer-centric approach. So in this case, Inbound Marketing agency that offers sales enablement will provide an ongoing training for the sales team and let them learn about the best practices to sell in inbound marketing, so your sales people can make more sales without bugging customers too much. ...

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