SaaS Email Marketing Playbook for 2024

As a business owner or a company leader, you tend to spend a lot of hours dwelling on your company’s marketing tactics. You must have encountered terms like ‘Marketing intelligence’ and ‘Competitive marketing’. So, what is Marketing Intelligence, and what is Competitive Intelligence? Marketing Intelligence is the day-to-day information collected from a company’s market, this data or development metrics are then analyzed and put together to make crucial business decisions such as recognizing important market opportunities, and identifying market penetration strategies that enable the business to boost their revenue in the end. On the other hand, when we talk about competitive intelligence, we mean analyzing the data gathered by studying the company’s market competitors. How can someone map out their company’s process of competitive intelligence? Well, that question may have an elaborated answer. As we dug into several studies and saw various competitive intelligence reports, we found several parameters such as KPIs, goals, and resources, etc. We found out that different companies had a distinct process or a different mechanism behind building their competitive intelligence. The process of building Marketing intelligence emphasizes more on knowing what the rest of the market is doing. It allows you to know about the audiences you can target and tells you the current strategies of your market leaders. Nowadays parameters like CRMs, social media website analytics, audience segmentation tools, etc are helping businesses to grow at a greater pace than ever before. When we talk about investing in Marketing Intelligence, we talk about investing in enhancing your company’s marketing. If you are a business owner, marketer, or company leader, then you must go through these six steps to succeed with effective Marketing Intelligence for your company. 1. Identifying Your Competitors Benchmarking What is benchmarking? When you measure the quality of your product against the quality of those products that are produced by the current market leaders, it is called benchmarking. You need to set your standards and identify your competitors. Competitors can be both direct and indirect competitors. Identify Your Direct Competitors - Do Market Research - Analyze the market of your goods or services. See which companies are selling the same product as you. Which market competitors do you often see in the sales process? Watch out for their products and marketing strategies. Customer Feedback Is Vital - Once you build a decent customer base, make sure to take their feedback on your services and products. You can also ask them about the products they usually prefer to buy from a competitor. They may reveal some new competitors! Social Media Community Posts Or Forums - A recommendation from a friend or a family member influences our buying behavior. In today's digital world, customers take suggestions from social media websites and online forums like Reddit or Quora. You can dig into such posts because they’ll tell you more about your competitors. Identify Your Indirect Competitors Keyword Research - Perform a competitive SEO analysis to find out which brands or businesses are competing with your business in terms of content on Google. Every query on a search engine begins from a keyword. You have to be aware of the keywords that your indirect competitors are using. Analyze Google SERPs - Your indirect competitors might be choosing the same topics that might be valuable for your products or website too. Recognize those keywords that are closely related to your products and services. Analyze the SERPs to spot websites that have similar content or keywords, those websites are your indirect competitors. Paid Data - Go into Google AdWords to evaluate the keywords that are crucial for your brand. Is the competition high for those keywords? If yes, then spot the businesses that are buying ads on those keywords. These paid ads might be competing with your content. Paid data will let you know about the competitors that you weren’t aware of. 2. How To Select The Right Metrics to Measure? Choosing The Metrics to Measure Choosing the correct metrics to measure your brand and performance depends upon your business objectives and your digital marketing strategy. Your strategies must be a mix of both, brand-based marketing and performance-based marketing. But it is not possible to consider everything during the process of building marketing intelligence for your business due to limited resources, therefore, you can focus on the following metrics. Brand-Based Metrics - Demographics of your audience. The shifting behavior of your audience across the web. The intent of your audience and major trends in the category. Performance of your competitors and their tactics on social media platforms?. Performance-Based Metrics - Your competitors’ keyword rankings (non-branded). Your competitors’ website traffic and acquisition channels. Your competitors’ budget for digital advertising on all platforms. Your competitors’ strategies for email marketing, SEO, paid ads, display ads, CRO. Apart from these metrics, when it comes to building a robust digital marketing strategy, you must know the essential details about your competitors like - What is their spend on ads?, What amount of traffic are they driving to their website? What type of content do they post and what is the retention rate? etc. 3. Gather Audience And Intelligence Data Of Your Competitors Intelligence gathering is a prime segment of effective marketing intelligence. Every business or brand collects Marketing Intelligence data in its way. Even local businesses keep an eye on ads that are displayed in the newspaper, on the other hand, large companies create their pool of data by buying data through various platforms. Almost every business in the world focuses on internal data provided by platforms like Facebook Audience Insights, Social Media Analytics, Google Analytics, Excel. It is very important to recognize your competitors’ online presence. This step is a time-consuming step of the research phase. Apart from internal data, try exploring their content that is publicly available such as product pages, websites, project teams, social media content, announcements, etc. You can evaluate this data to gather helpful insights. 4. Design A Competitive Analysis When we talk about evaluating the gathered intelligence data, we talk about breaking down the statistics or information to pull out crucial trends and important details. Once you have these chunks segregated into several other segments, it becomes easier for the whole organization to understand and interpret them. The information can be easily passed on to the whole organization. Design a competitive analysis for your business, it can be done in several ways. You can perform a benchmark analysis wherein you can gather all the information about your competitors and make a separate profile for each of them. Making such profiles are very beneficial because it allows you to see all the details of all the competitors in a single document. You can also perform ‘real-time’ analysis and track their actions. One of the most effective ways to keep track of your competitors’ actions is to set up instant alerts on their product changes, new customer feedback, etc. This will allow you to provide a day-to-day analysis to your team. 5. Communicate The Marketing Insights Throughout The Company Well, it’ll be a waste of time and effort if the gathered marketing intelligence data is not being utilized to enhance your marketing strategies. Therefore, it is necessary to pass on this vital information through some sort of platform to the whole organization. You can use dashboards provided by platforms like Google Data Studio and Tableau. The only issue with such dashboards is that they need to be updated constantly. Automatic dashboards can be costly and challenging for your team because they require integrations and APIs. A large number of companies share their marketing intel through email, some still rely on meetings, others use an internal team chat through communication tools like Slack or Campfire to deliver instant messages or updates to the team. You can also use tools provided by companies like intranet or wiki to deliver alerts to your team and store all the profiles of your competitors. Another way to deliver important updates about your competitors to your team is by choosing the old traditional method of providing slide presentations to them. Slides are simple, shareable, approachable, and can be easily accessed. You can mention your key points to your team and explain to them your objectives in a short time. 6. Convert Data Into Action And Action Into Results What is the ultimate aim of marketing intelligence? Better marketing performance and results, right? Whether you want an increase in sales, more brand visibility, a larger customer base, etc, there can be several different business goals. The most important thing is to link your marketing intelligence with your marketing strategies. Well, we still don’t have those software or tools that can magically build a link between your marketing intelligence and your marketing strategies. We can’t automate them. But there’s one thing that we all can do, it is the process of backing our strategies with our data. The sphere of marketing has evolved significantly. We can now rely on data-driven strategies. Most of the data that was collected in the past 10 years has largely affected the present state of our marketing environment. So whenever you are evaluating or developing marketing strategies, make sure that you come across both, internal as well as external data. So once you have identified your competitors, collected the data, analyzed it, and passed on the information to your organization, you need to convert your data into actions. For instance, the data gathered can be used to tweak your content marketing strategies, social media strategies, A/B tests or it can be used to develop new marketing plans. The data gathered about your competitors’ products or the pricing can be used by your product team or sales team in their sales processes respectively. The process of building marketing intelligence for your company is a very crucial step. As we have discussed earlier, marketing Intelligence is the day-to-day information collected from a company’s market.The data or metrics gathered can be very beneficial for a company. It can help a business like yours in making better business decisions. It can help your team in identifying important market opportunities and can help you to figure out market penetration strategies that can boost your company’s annual revenue. Make sure to follow these six steps to succeed with marketing intelligence in 2021. ...

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Why Online “Buzz” Influences Purchases Decisions? Online Reputation management has become essential for modern-day businesses. As much as customers care about the quality of your product and services, they equally care about your online activities, reviews, and brand presence. What is your brand posting on Instagram? What are you tweeting? Did you reply to their online queries? Actions like these matter a lot! You never know; your existing customers might be posting pictures of your product or sharing their experiences with your brand, and you simply can't afford to lose out on this engagement. As per Statista's survey of 2020, 36% of Instagram users follow brands that they use on the social media platform. Apart from Instagram, 35% of the respondents said that they follow their favorite brands on Twitter. Another study says that almost 90% of the users purchase from online brands they follow on social media networks. Hence, for the years to come, we can say that investing in online brand reputation can help businesses drive ROIs like never before! Myth: Your Online Reputation Is Not In Your Control! There exists a psychological factor behind consumer reviews, comments, or ratings. For a new customer, they act as a testimony. Hence, it is a huge misconception that online presence or reputation is something that doesn't influence purchase decisions. Here, we are talking about the control or "management" of your brand's online reputation. You can always gain a competitive edge as a brand by eliminating fake or negative reviews, establishing your presence over influential platforms, etc. If you want to garner great reviews that speak positively about your work, you must adopt a reputation management strategy. You can learn how we ran a well-structured referral and review campaign on Amazon that lifted the sales of a Coffee Brand by 230%! Check out our case study to know more. A well-designed online reputation management strategy shall portray your brand in a positive light. By investing your efforts in nurturing your online reputation, you can witness skyrocketing growth in sales. If you can maintain a positive brand reputation, you will attract potential customers by gaining their trust! For instance, we generated + 279% Organic Traffic for a doctor booking platform based out of Philadelphia via fifteen Social media campaigns which brought tons of users to their website. It helped them to boost their customer acquisition. Check out our case study to learn more. So How Can You Maintain Your Online Reputation Across Multiple Digital Platforms? You can follow these four steps for your brand’s online reputation management. These are some simple steps through which you can improve the online presence that’ll benefit you in the following ways: ORM can expand your customer base and help you maintain a consistent outreach. Online reviews can help customers to engage with your brand. When you stay in touch with your audiences, you improve internal practices. You have a better chance of boosting your customer retention. Better online reviews and presence can help you in SEO. The elements of ORM include responsiveness to online reviews, reputation monitoring, search protection, constant outreach to encourage customers to share their reviews online, social media branding, damage control, and review audit. These elements are usually implemented via paid, earned, owned, and shared media channels. Let’s begin! #1 Perform Sentiment Analysis! As a business leader, you need to analyze how your customers feel about your brand. Are they happy with your services? Are they satisfied with the results? You must dig deep into the data to understand your brand’s current reputation standard. Check your social media posts, comments, mentions, take a glance at your competitor’s social handles, look at how their customers talk to them, and then define a path for yourself. You must also evaluate your online reviews on platforms like Yelp, Yahoo, and Google. There are various online tools or experts who can quantify this data into comparable metrics so that you can analyze how things are going for your brand. #2. Track Social Media Tags Mentions. Brand reputation management is a continuous process; you have to stay proactive! Once you recognize your online reputation status, you need to set up your social media channels to respond to customer queries or complaints. Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, etc., are popular platforms where brands reply to their customers. Social media channels make it very convenient for a user to ask a question or appreciate your work. Pro Tip: Ensure you respond to your customers as fast as possible! #3. Make Your Business Appear Positive. As discussed in the previous section, negative reviews can hamper your client acquisition efforts. The best way to deal with them is by resolving them and encouraging positive reviews. Of course, you can’t force your customers to post positive reviews about your brand, but you can always share testimonials of happy clients. You can highlight the kind of positive experience they had on your social media platforms. You should never hold yourself from reposting your clients’ tweets or feedback. In this way, you can leverage user-generated content that can enhance your online marketing. Apart from customer reviews or comments, you must encourage your employees to post positive sentiments about their work culture. #4 Work With Reviews, Comments, And Analytics. Your customers should feel or recognize that your brand is putting additional efforts into fixing certain shortcomings that they comment about. They should feel that they are being listened to. For instance, they might complain about the delivery process or the recent rise in the price. Listen to them and make changes accordingly. Your brand’s reputation matters! Yes! Your online brand reputation is within your control. But first, you must realize the key areas where you can improve upon. You must listen, process, and react to online conversations that are related to your brand. If you are looking for more effective ORM solutions and efficient tactics, we at Saffron Edge can help you develop a robust strategy! ...

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With the decline of traditional advertising in the modern world, TV and radio ads are being edged out by the latest trends of digital marketing. Branding used to cost a pretty penny when it was on TV and radio but today Digital marketing came out as a much affordable and practical option. In past few years, entrepreneurs, business professionals and marketing experts have put a humongous range of efforts to witness tangible changes in their conversion rates. Inbound marketing emerged as the best tool for brands to communicate their ideology, message to the customers through content marketing, Social Media and other verticals of digital marketing. A Quick Recap of digital marketing In the last year, marketers learn to elicit the desired response on their content. In one way or another, brands cracked the code of communication through emotional responses. These responses proved to be the key social drivers in marketing. Whether it’s a thought-provoking image or story, or even a noble cause to rally behind, emotional responses are often key social drivers in marketing. In the past few years, content marketers have worked a lot over the creation of a quality content for Social Media and other web platforms. They have significantly boosted the content output but could not improve the engagement and value. Rise of Influencer marketing in 2017 In the year 2017, digital experts realized the importance of branding and its valuable utility for the customers. In order to achieve the very goal, brands ought to reach out to people on a personal level. In order to serve this purpose, the marketers relied on the concept of Influencer Marketing. Since almost everyone is sharing his/her delightful moments on Social Media at present, a few users turn as an influencer through their quality content and genuine recommendations. Influencers have changed the game of branding The only marketing technique which has a potential to attract higher ROI on conversion rates is the Word-of-Mouth. People trust a brand when they notice it being used by someone rather than advertising it. This simple psychology was earlier overlooked by brands while curating their marketing campaigns. Almost every user on Social Media trusts recommendations from individuals irrespective of their acquaintance with them. It implies that modern marketers do not need to invest a huge amount of money and efforts on advertising their products. On a contrary, they need to approach these influencers to promote their brands. Million dollar tip for influencers: Be original! The one thing that both brands and influencers need to take care of is to avoid the practice of advertising their product. Influencers need to use product and services of the brand as a value in a unique way. Why are TV advertisements not able to engage users? In the modern world, people don't want to be commanded or guided about their actions. Brands used to restrict customers from watching them the stuff of their choice. This interruption could be removed by seeking some sort of investment from them. Obviously, we don't want this to happen with influence marketing. In order to maintain a genuine influencer profile, marketing experts should balance the level of branding exhibited on their social platforms. This can affect your individuality and people will stop trusting your recommendations. Wrapping it up with final remark When it comes to brand communications, you have to think out of the box. Influencer marketing has emerged out as an anchor sheet in terms of connecting customers with the brands at a more personal level. Currently, influencers are highly demanded due to their utility and brands should not miss this golden opportunity to engage with them. You can Contact us to know more about brand communications and latest digital trends in marketing. ...

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