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How Content Leads a Rebranding Effort

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A robust content marketing strategy typically comes after a brand has established its identity. That identity is the rudder that steers the brand in everything it says and does.

However, sometimes an established brand needs an image refresh or rebrand. With all the digital tools available today, content can help lead that change.  

UK branding firm Fabrik explains the difference between a refresh and rebrand this way: “While a brand refresh is like giving your company a fresh lick of paint, a new look, and a fancy new logo, ‘rebranding’ is all about tearing down everything you’ve built, and starting again from scratch.”

We would add that these changes are not aesthetic only — they also speak to the focus of your content.

Marketing agency Rattleback offers questions to ask when considering whether you need a refresh or a comprehensive rebrand. You might consider a refresh or rebrand if:

  • Your brand identity has changed. Perhaps you have new service offerings and new business objectives, or you’ve outgrown an outdated positioning and need to remain relevant.
  • Your audience is evolving. Perhaps you are targeting a new audience, or your existing audience has changed.
  • External factors have impacted your brand or business. Perhaps you had a PR crisis, or technology has created new competition.

No matter why or how your brand changes, make sure you don’t alienate loyal customers by changing so much that you become unrecognizable. Lindsay Kolowich at Hubspot has a great post about developing an identity and translating it into marketing. “A brand is one of the most valuable assets of a business, and it needs to be carefully crafted to ensure it properly and authentically represents the business,” she says.

Fresh brand identities also call for new campaigns. With these examples, we want to demonstrate the benefits of leading with your content strategy.

Personalize Complex Industries

Content is the No. 1 way to assert your brand’s relevance to any audience. The following companies demonstrate how content can personalize even the most complex industries.

Example: General Electric

Electricity, lighting, energy and transportation are not the easiest industries to relate to, but the 125-year-old engineering company is challenging that. By focusing on the power of science, technology and innovation, General Electric has set the standard for content marketing.

“We’re a company that does things that are complex and difficult, so finding ways to describe them in a way that’s simple and engaging is quite important,” says CMO Linda Boff.

One memorable way GE did that was through the Owen campaign. Owen was a fictitious industrial internet developer hired at GE. As the content showed the new college grad trying to explain his job to friends and family, the campaign was able to humanize the industry.

GE recruitment increased by 800 percent the following year.

The company leverages its unique content on nearly every channel possible. That includes Facebook Live coverage of drones visiting GE factories, a content hub that explores topics like ending power outages, and even science-fiction comic books.  

Takeaway: Good content can make seemingly complicated topics relevant and interesting to just about anyone.

Example: Hewlett-Packard

Technology writer Liz Alton notes that B2B companies in industries like IT have to establish authority and take on big issues. However, it’s also important to remember that IT teams are made up of real people.

With their digital publication Tektonika, Hewlett-Packard demonstrates that you can be human even when talking about serious, technical topics. Just look at how they describe Tektonika: “Whether you’re looking for a fresh take on the hottest tech or searching for ways to lock down your IT environment from hackers, Tektonika is sure to provide a sharp perspective — with a smirk.”

Tektonika covers serious topics like security breaches while being appropriately playful, with headlines like “Business solutions + data backup = RIP Google Drive desktop.”

Takeaway: It is possible to be entertaining and human when talking about technical topics.  

audience

Reach New Audiences

Content is also a great way to reach specific audiences and people who might not know (or care about) your brand otherwise.

Example: Urban Outfitters

While London Fashion Week is usually exclusive to high-fashion brands, retailer Urban Outfitters decided to take part in the conversation using content. They collaborated with Centrefold, a limited-edition magazine that showcases well-known and emerging artists in the fashion and design industries.

Urban Outfitters commissioned a special issue of the magazine to celebrate Fashion Week and showcase the brand’s support of art and fashion. The brand’s Multimedia Creative Director Nabil Aliffi told Dscoop.com: “This creative concept, eye-opening content and outstanding digital print capabilities enabled Urban Outfitters to leave a mark and express its promise of youth and beauty.”

Takeaway: This demonstrates how a brand can connect with a new, relevant audience using one piece of content.

Example: Telekom

German mobile phone company Telekom (which does business in the US under the brand T-Mobile) has been creating quality content for years. The company’s digital magazine Electronic Beats explores the world’s electronic music scene and is a respected brand in its own right. Its digital presence has expanded to include a podcast series, social media channels and ElectronicBeats.TV.  

The Content Marketing Association makes an important point in its review of Electronic Beats: The brand only promotes Telekom subtly, by using the logo and colors in the design. “Given that Electronic Beats has been around for so long…it is clearly working for the telecoms brand in engaging a young, tech savvy, music-loving audience.”

Takeaway: Telekom exemplifies how cool content can impact an audience that likely would not think about the company otherwise.

Join Competitors on the Map

Content has the power to pull your brand out of a downturn — or even put you on the map for the first time.

Example: LEGO

It would be remiss not to mention the LEGO movies. While LEGO is one of the top toy companies in the world today, Jonathan Ringen reminds us that the company was near bankruptcy just a few years ago.

With the 2014 release of The LEGO Movie, the company surged past Mattel to become the world’s biggest toy manufacturer. Combined with The LEGO Batman Movie, the films have made nearly $800 million in the box office alone. The movies have not only put the company back on top — with more on the way, the LEGO franchise is just getting started.

The Mission writes a detailed assessment of why The LEGO Movie’s content did so well. The movie understands LEGO stakeholders and other brands’ successes, is open-ended and leverages a timeless narrative without preaching to viewers.

Takeaway: While creating full-length films for the big screen is a pretty lofty task, LEGO has proved that the sky’s the limit when it comes to branded content.

Example: Iceland

Iceland has not always been the tourism destination it is today. That changed seven years ago when the country’s tourism sites launched an integrated campaign, which included some very thoughtful content marketing.

The “Inspired by Iceland” video series really put Iceland on many travelers’ maps. That series features more than 100 videos of dignitaries explaining why Iceland inspires them. They showcase the country’s beautiful scenery and unique culture, and explain exactly how to navigate barriers to visiting.

They also include clear invitations to explore the country guided by Icelanders.

The content was fun and even humorous, but most importantly it showed viewers exactly why they should visit Iceland — and how to do so. More than 2.2 million visitors passed through Iceland in 2017 as a result. That’s more than four times the number of visitors who passed through in 2010.

Takeaway: Skyword sums up why the Iceland campaign was so successful. “It wasn’t enough to simply suggest that Iceland was unique, adventurous and interesting — but rather, it was by suggesting that visitors themselves could become a bit more unique, adventurous and interesting that Iceland was able to successfully bring in a huge wave of tourism.”

landscape

Respond to an Evolving Landscape

Changing a logo or using new colors will not make industry issues disappear. However, content can play an important role in guiding your company through them.

Example: Coca-Cola

In late 2012, the Coca-Cola Company replaced its corporate website with Coca-Cola Journey, a digital magazine with original and curated content. This came as global health concerns around topics like obesity and sugar were beginning to impact consumers’ perception of the company.

The new site offered feel-good stories and branded content, but it also addressed issues head-on in areas like health and the environment.

By doubling down on content, Coca-Cola reaped several additional benefits. For example, around the same time Journey launched, the company set a moonshot goal to grow its social channels by 50 percent per year. They did much better than that, though: Coca-Cola’s social channels grew by 100 percent every year for three subsequent years.

Ashley Brown was the director of digital communications and social media when the platform launched. “I realized moonshot goals matter, because — as the saying goes — even if you miss, you land among the stars.”

Takeaway: Content platforms are key to communicate your company’s point of view during difficult times.

Example: McDonald’s

Around the same time, health concerns were also impacting McDonald’s. In response, the team in Canada decided to address myths and misconceptions surrounding the company’s food. “Our food. Your questions” began with a YouTube video and dedicated website where consumers could submit questions about topics such as ingredient quality and sourcing.

The company answered thousands of them.

The transparency campaign spread beyond Canada to Australia and eventually the US, and is still online today. At one point, McDonald’s even created digital content by sending mythbuster Grant Imahara to visit suppliers and restaurants around the country. The campaign was covered by reporters like Maureen Morrison at Ad Age, and many praised it for redefining transparency.

Takeaway: With new options and calorie counts on menus, McDonald’s has started responding to health concerns in the United States and abroad. Content cannot replace core changes like these, but it can demonstrate that your company is serious about an issue.

Always Gather Data and Feedback

We will leave you with two important principles to remember when refreshing your image or rebranding:

  1. Check your audience data. With the amount of information available today, there is no reason to make strategy changes without first consulting data. Doug Randall, the founder of narrative analytics agency Protagonist, emphasizes this point by showing how data could help Harley-Davidson with a brand refresh.
  2. Whatever you plan to do, test it first. No one wants to end up like Airbnb when they launched a new logo that closely imitated another brand and was compared to human body parts. If you missed it a few years ago, brand marketer Dave Vinjamuri recaps that debacle and what to do if something similar happens to you.

Images by: Rosie Kerr, Bobby Stevenson, Madhu Shesharam

How Mature SaaS Companies Can Take Their Content Marketing to the Next Level

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The internet is saturated with content about creating content. After all, that’s what content marketers do for a living.  

We have seen plenty of guides for software-as-a-service startups that want to attract users with smart content. However, there is less information for established SaaS companies that have a content foundation and want to take it to the next level.

This guide is for mature SaaS companies that want to speak to their core users, build awareness among potential users and speak to topics outside their primary offering. It’s designed so SaaS marketers can envision how next-level content can support their growth goals.

Learn to Target Multiple Audiences

Perhaps you are expanding to enterprises in addition to small businesses, to customers in different roles or into a new industry. Buffer’s Guide to Marketing Personas is a great resource to create personas for this new audience.

Depending on the audience and availability of your own data, you may need additional resources to create these personas. Plenty of tools companies can help. For example, you can use SEMRush or ahrefs to analyze a competitor’s target market.

When you build content, remember that each piece should focus on only one audience. That said, Stoney deGeyter at Search Engine Journal offers examples of subtle ways you can still speak to others, such as through calls to action in microcopy. At the end of the day, though, those who are most likely to buy your product or service should always take priority.

You may find that you need more than one site to address different audience needs. For example, Hubspot has three blogs for their different personas: marketing, sales and customer success. That doesn’t mean they create three times the content; they often write similar but slightly different posts on topics that are relevant to all three audiences. Natalie Burg at Contently also has a great case study on this with her post “4 Keys to Capturing a New Audience for Your Content Marketing.”

The next step is to sketch out those various audience members’ journeys. Here are a few resources to get you started:

  • Percolate’s content marketing strategy manual is an example of how an enterprise platform created value for its key audience: content marketers.
  • Marcia Riefer Johnston, managing editor for the Content Marketing Institute, offers a useful article and template on why and how to map your audience’s journey when creating your strategy.
  • Automation makes segmented communications easier than ever. With a tool like MailChimp, you can send personalized emails based on a variety of data, such as a person’s role within a company or their response to previous communications.

interior of office with staff -- SaaS content marketing

Think Beyond the Sales Funnel

Many content marketers focus on the purchase funnel model and transactional goals like sales. LinkedIn’s Daniel Hochuli notes the problem with this model is it doesn’t account for the fact that some of our audience just wants to consume content. They aren’t interested in the product.

Hochuli offers a second model that focuses on content as a product, which might include hosting paid events and webinars, or selling ad space and paid subscriptions, for example.

Creating relevant content outside of your niche is also a great way to reach and build credibility with new audiences — and often much larger ones. This, in turn, can generate high-authority backlinks to your site and boost your search engine rankings. Marketing Land columnist Andrea Lehr calls this “tangential content” because it’s only somewhat related to your product or service rather than being more heavily branded.

For an example of what this looks like, consider HubSpot again. Their article on how to use Excel ranks No. 2 in Google’s SERPS for that keyword — only behind Microsoft — which means that piece of content reaches their primary target audience as well as countless others.

Pull Together the Tools and Data Needed to Inform your Content

Content marketers told the Content Marketing Institute that creating better and more engaging content is the biggest challenge they face. But the team at Automizy makes a great point: As a cloud-based solution, you have an advantage because you can track every step your users take. Not only can this help you target your primary audience, but it can also inform your communication to others.

In the Automizy SaaS product marketing guide, they recommend gathering data from your sales reps, customers, influencers, FAQs, Google Trends and more.

You can also look at your data to see how to improve the stories you are already telling. Have you found that video performs well? Perhaps you could document a customer’s journey, or interview someone those videos have helped.

Salesforce is a great example of SaaS content marketing done well. One of the big lessons that company has learned, according to Katie Dufficy, is that culture posts performs well, which tells her that Salesforce’s audience is interested in Salesforce as a company, not just as a vendor.

Contently’s Joe Lazauskas recommends Optimizely and Funnel Envy for gathering actionable insights from your content. These have helped Contently more than double conversions on e-book offers.

Publishing original research and content can be a great way to reach new audiences and get your content shared widely. Karola Karlson points to this post from Ahrefs as a great example of how actionable research can bring “near-magical results.”

Keyword research can also tell you a lot about what your new audience will care about.

Remember that earlier example of HubSpot’s Excel how-to guide? They created that guide after realizing how many people searched for that topic, and now they get significant traffic from it.

competition -- SaaS content marketing

SaaS Companies With Content To Admire

Cobloom’s report on the State of SaaS Content Marketing 2017 can tell you what industry leaders are doing and where they see the best results. For example, 87 percent of SaaS blogs attribute content to named authors, so there is clearly value in putting a face and a name behind your brand.

Don’t just follow other SaaS companies, either. Karlson recommends partnering with them, as well. As an example of the power of partnership, she offers an infographic and article she worked on in collaboration with Copy Hackers, Aggregate and Venngage.

Finally, Rocketship Growth has an extensive case study on how Hubspot is a best-in-class example of SaaS content marketing in general. There are countless other SaaS providers with great content marketing, including Moz, Unbounce and KissMetrics.

Getting Started With a New Content Push

Now that you have a plan of attack, you need to assess your capacity to create more content and decide who in your team will take the lead (or, you might need to hire that person).

Then, it’s a matter of understanding whether you should create this content in-house or outsource. The Content Marketing Institute found that nearly three out of every four major organizations outsource their content. If you’re among the 27 percent who keep it in house, check out six tips for running a powerhouse content team from Cognitives.

Hopefully you have read this far because your company leadership already believes in the power of content marketing. But if you need to convince them, remember this: content marketing costs 62 percent less than outbound marketing but generates more than three times as many leads, according to Demand Metric.

However, it’s not just enough to play in the space — it also pays to be the best. Research shows that content marketing leaders experience nearly eight times more site traffic than non-leaders.

Be one of those leaders.

Images by: rozum©123RF Stock Photo, stockbroker/©123RF Stock Photo, lightwise/©123RF Stock Photo

5 Examples of Mid-Funnel Content Done Right

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Mid-funnel content doesn’t get the fanfare it deserves. Maybe that’s because it’s a little harder to measure. The metrics are clear for the top-of-funnel stuff (shares, page views) and for the bottom-of-funnel content (conversions), but all of those newsletters, guides and whitepapers in the middle of your marketing funnel are equally essential.

However, just because a step is critical doesn’t mean marketers are actually doing it. Research by B2B Marketing company NetLine found that that 92 percent of content created was top-funnel, leaving only six percent for mid-funnel and two percent for bottom-funnel in the IT industry.

If you can create awesome mid-funnel content, chances are you will be heads and shoulders above your competitors. To get you and your marketing team started down the road to creating best-in-class mid-funnel content, we’ve turned our spotlight onto five companies that excel in this very discipline.

Follow their examples to learn how the best marketers turn interested followers into warm leads.

young creative business people at office – mid-funnel content

Zendesk’s Video Content

One of the clearest examples of mid-funnel content in video form is Zendesk. Their top-funnel content features funny videos about terrible customer service and explainer animations about the company, while the mid-funnel content takes a step deeper — without losing the engaging nature of the brand.

The team at Skeleton Productions, who have an excellent guide to using video across all stages of a content funnel, highlight how Zendesk uses video as mid-funnel content to speak to audiences who already recognize the brand, but want to know why it’s worth their time.

Entrepreneur Vera K. Fischer writes that customers don’t want high-level awareness messaging once they pass the top of the funnel. They’re ready for more detailed information. In the case of Zendesk, the company builds trust with its culture-centric mid-funnel content that reviews its philosophies and goals, preparing customers for the highly technical bottom funnel content that closes the deal.

mid-funnel content

Denamico’s Revamped Client Newsletter

In 2015, the marketing team at Denamico was struggling with one of its client’s newsletters. They couldn’t segment the list as they wanted, and that meant many recipients were getting redundant emails or different messages than they needed. The client’s sales funnel was thus leaking everywhere.

Denamico’s solution was to create four segments in the client’s audience with targeted content for each:

  • Top-of-funnel audiences saw a CTA for an eBook download.
  • Mid-funnel audiences saw an invite to an event, webinar or workshop.
  • Bottom-of-funnel audiences saw an invite for an in-person consultation.  
  • Existing customers saw a standard greeting with either a client appreciation message or a referral request.

Through this targeted content, newsletter open rates increased by 43 percent and CTR increased by 89 percent. Plus, with better funnel targeting, Denamico was able to see customers move past the top of the funnel — where many had leaked before — and prepare them for the middle of the funnel events or bottom funnel sales pitches.

Not every brand has to follow this exact approach, but Denamico highlights the industry move away from demographic segmentation. For example, Bobby Babak Masjedi at Connexity has nine better alternative methods of audience segmentation. Any of these could be used to help you meet your audience with a more relevant message and move qualified prospects along your funnel for more effective leads.   

Castleford Content Marketing’s Meta-Mid-Funnel Blog Post

Often, marketers create mid-funnel content without realizing it. Instead of goal-based content creation, they’re focused on filling their editorial calendars or generating sales. With that in mind, they would take a normally mid-funnel topic and try to make it a closer piece, or make it too high-level to do any good.

So recently, the agency Castleford Content Marketing, in a moment of self-awareness, set out to create mid-funnel content to demonstrate to its clients exactly what that is and why it’s important.

“This isn’t a top-of-the-funnel piece, designed to make people aware of content marketing as a whole,” they write. “This also isn’t a bottom-of-the-funnel piece, so we’re not going to include a list of testimonials from happy clients either. Instead, we’re doing exactly what good middle-of-the-funnel content should do — providing value by answering a question that’s more complex than … and illustrating how we can help.”

The body of the article does a great job of answering the 5Ws and H of mid-funnel content. The message is deeper and more involved than any other part of the sales funnel, giving readers time to really understand the message and connect with the brand.

“Content marketing talks directly to those who are already aware of your organisation,” the team at Nichemarket writes. “It convinces them that you know what you’re talking about and that your services would be a valuable investment.”

After reading Castleford’s piece, a potential customer will have a clear understanding of mid-funnel content because they’ve seen it in action, experienced how it builds trusts and can begin to envision how it meets their own audience’s needs.  
 

Vircom’s Why Spammers Spam Whitepaper

More than a decade ago, Vircom, a Montreal-based anti-spam software developer, published a whitepaper called Why Spammers Spam. Even though this mid-funnel content was geared toward a B2B audience, the whitepaper was downloaded more than 2,200 times and generated major media coverage. In fact, Vicom says it generated 21 sales worth $96,500 from the whitepaper (which cost $1,700 to create).

Gordon Graham, known as The Whitepaper Guy, covered the publication of this whitepaper and spoke to Vircom about why the company thought it was such a success. Vircom’s biggest lesson learned? Don’t make the whitepaper a hard sales pitch.

“The term ‘whitepaper’ has become synonymous with a 24-page brochure on a product,” Vircom’s market analyst says. Audiences immediately grow bored and tune out because the nitty-gritty product details are meant for the bottom of the funnel, not the middle part where people just want to learn more about your brand and services.    

The team at Nectafy explains that this is a common problem with content marketing. In their experience, too often they come across middle-of-funnel content that is either

  • too generic (i.e. it tries to speak to everyone at once),
  • too self-promotional or
  • too ambitious about showing people how to solve their pain points with the company’s offers.

Vircom’s whitepaper worked because it didn’t fall into those traps. Instead, it was genuine and well-researched, which is why it generated results.

writing -- mid-funnel content

AdEspresso’s Social Proof Ebook

In 2016, AdEspresso, published an ebook called The Ultimate Guide to Social Proof Marketing.

Then, AdEspresso’s Pawel Grabowski pulled back the curtain on how the company created and marketed that ebook. It was deceptively easy: Grabowski had written extensively on the subject of social proof earlier that year, creating at least three blog posts on various niche subjects and guides pertaining to it.

These articles alone might have been top-funnel traffic drivers or even mid-funnel explanations on their own. But he combined them all into an amended ebook to create a particularly useful resource for customers in the middle or even near the bottom of the funnel.

As a result, AdEspresso now has an in-depth guide to demonstrating social proof that speaks to the more sophisticated levels of product awareness of its mid-funnel audience. And in doing so, this positions AdEspresso as an informative and advanced social asset in any marketer’s arsenal.  

Creating Amazing Mid-Funnel Content Takes Practice

If you don’t have outstanding mid-funnel content now, you don’t need to panic, but you should take steps to improve your content strategies to generate mid-funnel assets.

“Content creation does not need to be a linear process,” inbound marketer Katie Schieder from Arc Intermedia writes at BuzzSumo. “If you already have a great bottom of the funnel piece of content, then work backwards. If you have a blog post that generates a lot of traffic but has a high bounce rate, think of ways you can expand on the topics discussed in that post.”  

Mid-funnel content is essential for brands and their sales processes. Without it, your leads will lack the information they need to buy, and your sales team will struggle to vet qualified buyers. Mid-funnel content provides information to both parties, which ultimately translates into a smoother buying process.

Images by: rawpixel/©123RF Stock Photo, wavebreakmediamicro/©123RF Stock Photo, rawpixel, janeb13

Celebrating Seattle Tech: 25 Seattle Startups to Watch

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Seattle has one of the country’s richest startup cultures. More than a few companies born in Seattle, like DocuSign and Redfin, have grown into become well-known brands.

The city is showing no signs of slowing down, either.

Check out these 25 Seattle startups that continue to do great work to improve their industries and the communities they serve.

 

Cozy

Cozy is a B2C platform that helps landlords manage their rentals digitally. The software can collect rent checks, sort through applications and use screening tools to conduct background and credit checks. Cozy is used by more than 100,000 landlords in more than 13,000 cities. As long as you have an internet connection, you can use Cozy.

 

CrowdStreet

CrowdStreet is a hub for real estate investment crowdfunding. CrowdStreet helps companies get the funding they need for real estate projects while reducing the risks to investors by spreading the burden.

Its members typically invest around $45,000 per offering, but can invest as little as $10,000. CrowdStreet currently has 92 successful current real estate investments funded with an average cost of $30 million per offering.

 

TRED

TRED is an automotive marketplace where customers can buy and sell their cars through a trusted vetting process. Sellers must complete identity checks, vehicle condition checks, vehicle history checks and other verification steps to prove that the car quality and price is appropriate, which helps buyers know they’re getting a good deal.

 

Auction Edge

While Auction Edge also works with the automotive industry, its focus is on the specialty auction community. It has more than 34,000 active dealers within its software and runs more than 100 auctions daily. This helps cars move faster and through a more secure transaction platform.

 

Doxo

Doxo is a B2C company that aggregates more than 40,000 companies to allow customers to access their bills in one place. Instead of logging into multiple interfaces to make payments and check due dates, Doxo creates a high-level overview to let customers know when bills are due.

Its encrypted system allows customers to make payments securely from the app, so they only have to go to one place to pay their bills.

ferry - Seattle Tech

 

InDemand Interpreting

As the United States becomes an increasingly diverse country, the need for multilingual medical professionals is increasing. Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to find a doctor who is fluent in the native tongue of all of his or her patients.

InDemand Interpreting solves this problem by hiring interpreters who specialize in the medical industry and connecting them through video to hospitals. This gives the doctor the right information while making the patients more comfortable.

 

Point Inside

The team at Point Inside works with massive retailers such as Target and Lowe’s Home Improvement to improve in-store app experiences. Customers can make lists before they go and look up exactly where items are in the store.

When they’re inside the store, customers can see which items are closest so they don’t have to backtrack when shopping. This makes the shopping experience easier — especially when customers are faced with endless aisles and thousands of products to choose from.

 

ExtraHop

ExtraHop is one of the top names in real-time IT analytics. Through cloud-based machine learning, its tools help IT managers and CIOs quickly understand their IT environment and how to troubleshoot any existing problems. ExtraHop currently analyzes more than 3,600 metrics over 50 protocols. Instead of waiting for reports, companies can check the status of their IT structures in real time.

 

BrandVerity

Used by marketing and legal departments alike, BrandVerity tracks the presence of online ads and branded content to ensure your company is in compliance and only showing what you want. It can identify and remove unauthorized ads from appearing on branded paid search terms, ensure ads and content meet regulatory standards, and highlight non-compliant content on the web.

 

Rival IQ

Rival IQ is an analytics tool that helps brands track their social, SEO and website performance. One of its most valuable assets is its comparison data to other industry leaders. This allows companies to track trends and understand whether they’re part of industry changes or outliers experiencing problems.

 

Placed

Placed is a marketing analytics and insights tool that helps brands understand what happens when their customers go offline. This helps digital marketers know how their customers interact with their online ads and what makes them go into the store. Placed also handles various attribution models for analysis and affiliate links.

Sign - Seattle Tech

 

Highspot

Highspot works with sales teams through the lead generation process to a completed acquisition to help them better understand their customers and what they need to move potential customers deeper into the funnel. Along with intelligent recommendations, Highspot offers content scoring and advanced analytics to let sales teams do a deep dive on their prospective clients.

 

Koru

By identifying good culture fits along with high performing employees, Koru is able to help businesses fill empty positions and streamline the interview process. Its customers report a 30–60 percent increase in high performing hires through its software, which is what happens when companies follow the Koru motto of hiring for “grit over grades.”

 

Textio

Another platform that companies can use to improve their hiring process is Textio. Textio is an augmented writing platform that makes a quantitative promise that if you use the product and get a high score, you will see 25% more candidates qualified enough to interview, 23% more women apply, and you will fill roles two weeks faster. Textio has collected over 250 million job posts and their outcomes, and the predictive engine finds the language patterns that have worked and provides guidance to improve your job post.

 

Limeade

In 2016, Limeade was named one of Washington’s Best Workplaces by the Puget Sound Business Journal. Limeade is a corporate wellness technology company that works to drive employee engagement to create happier and healthier workers. The company knows that happy employees are productive employees, and organizations thrive when management invests in wellness.

 

Shiftboard

Shiftboard was recently named the Best Employee Shift Planning Software of 2017 by PC Magazine. Shiftboard is able to scale to work with companies ranging from 25 employees to 20,000 with shift alerts, real time updates and digital schedule access. This makes management easier and reduces the number of no shows from last-minute schedule changes.

 

Panopto

Panopto is also a B2B tool to help companies streamline their internal content sharing processes, but its primary focus is on video storage and sharing. Human resource teams can store training or onboarding videos on the interface, while marketing teams can stream events and share promotional content. Some call it an internal YouTube for businesses.

 

AnswerDash

When browsing a website, 72 percent of users don’t want assisted service if they have a question, but 57 percent of users abandon the site when they can’t find an answer. AnswerDash is looking to improve customer retention by providing common answers to questions without driving customers to a FAQ page. This allows customers to get answers where they need them without the frustration of customer reps or internal search results.

fish - Seattle Tech

 

Skilljar

Skilljar also offers a customer retention tool with its training and onboarding software. The company typically works with B2B companies and other software providers that need to provide training to customers and clients on its tools. It can also help with lead generation through tutorials and digital walkthroughs.

 

MightyCall

The team at MightyCall works with entrepreneurs who use their personal devices to communicate with customers. Brands can get a branded vanity number (like 555-234-COOL), record a professional greeting for customers and prevent customers from reaching their private numbers. This creates a professional look while maintaining the work-life balance small business owners struggle to find.

 

EnergySavvy

The team at EnergySavvy works specifically to improve the online customer experience of utilities companies. It provides personalized customer insights, creates suggestions for users and works to improve customer engagement. Almost 40 utility and state programs use EnergySavvy to connect with customers digitally.

 

Sensoria

Sensoria creates smart shirts and socks to track physical performance — data that’s then sent to your smartphone. AI provides coaching and dashboard training based on metrics picked up from the apparel and fitness history. This gives athletes a personal trainer, even when working out alone.

 

Vicis

Americans are passionate about football, but the more we learn about the long-term effects of head trauma on athletes, the more we want changes in the game. Vicis is working to develop new football helmet technology to reduce the impact forces that can lead to concussions. This startup is a combination of medicine and engineering to protect youth athletes, college students and pros.

 

Glympse

Glympse is a B2C app that lets users share their locations with friends and set how long they can see where they are. If you’re running late or stuck in traffic, you can send others your location and they can track your progress until you arrive. Glympse was named one of TIME’s top 50 apps and the company has partnered with brands like Ford, Volvo and Verizon.

 

Peach

Founded in the Greater Seattle Area, Peach has expanded to Chicago, Boston and San Diego. It’s a food delivery service that specializes in the lunch hour by texting a daily menu to customers and taking their orders in the morning. Every day, there’s a different food option — from Southern cooking to traditional Vietnamese.

 

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4 Tips to Outsource Blogging Services for Your Content

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By 2020, the average customer will manage 85% of their transactions without human interaction. While you might have all of the answers and your team surely has years — and even decades — of sales experience, what happens when you take the human element out of your business model?

Can your website answer all of the questions you can?

Does your website or blog provide information about price comparisons and product reviews so potential leads can understand your business without picking up the phone?

If the answer is no, then you might be isolating your customers.

To answer customer demand, companies are turning to their blogs to create website content that answers customer questions and provides the information they need. In fact, 81% of companies consider blogs useful and important.

This means if you aren’t currently blogging, your competitors are. If you’re going to keep up, it’s worth investing time and energy into revamping your website content and creating blog content.

Fortunately, you don’t have to do it alone. You don’t even have to be a good writer to have an amazing blog; you just have to get creative and consider blog creation services.

 

Work With Ghost Writers that Specialize in Your Field

B2B companies that specialize in niche industries tend to have the most trepidation about contracting a blog ghostwriter. They worry about hiring someone with an English degree or alternative writing background who might not be familiar with the principles of, say, engineering or the legal boundaries of medical journalism.

However, B2B companies that use blogs generate 67% more leads than those that do not. This is because blogging lets companies break down complex subjects and address industry issues in a way that establishes their knowledge base. Think of your blog as the job interview before meeting the CEO.    

Most blogging service companies will make sure they have someone on staff who has a history of writing for your industry or a direct background in the field. This is ideal for industries and companies that tend to attract logical thinkers who are more likely to pick up a calculator than a pen. Outsourcing your content is a much better solution than asking your employees to create content for you, especially if they haven’t written more than a cover letter since they graduated college.

office

 

Your Blogging Service Can Scale Your Content Creation

Business owners never have enough time, and most employees today are exhausted and stressed. A whopping 53% of employees report feeling overworked and burned out in their current careers.

This means your team doesn’t have the time to create any blog content, much less quality articles and guides that will generate links and traffic. Even if they can handle a couple articles per month, what happens when you need to scale your production to one per week — or a few times per week?

Blogging services specialize in scaling production to the client’s needs. They keep a team of writers on staff and shuffle their workload to make sure there are enough hands on deck to handle a major project. If needed, they will hire additional hands or contract experts to create the right content for your brand. By outsourcing your work, you don’t have to worry how the blog content is made or if it will arrive on time. You just have to make sure that it meets your standards.

letters

 

Outsourced Writers Offer a Fountain of Fresh Ideas

Even if you’ve been producing amazing content for the past few years, it may be time to buy blog posts instead of relying on your team to produce them. Idea burnout is one of the most common problems with internal content creation.

It’s hard to approach a concept with fresh eyes when you think about it 40-plus hours per week. Even if your internal team is made of amazing writers, they could be running out of new angles and topics.

When you use blogging services, you’re unleashing fresh minds and new perspectives on your brand. Our own ghostwriters get excited about different things and ask different questions that you might not have thought of. The mental break of ideation alone can free up your internal minds for more important marketing problems.

Speaking of freeing minds, outsourcing your content is a great way to prepare an internal employee for a management position. By managing a new vendor through the onboarding and evaluation process, your employee is experiencing a path similar to as if they had hired an assistant or intern. Furthermore, the time your employee will save on blog creation and promotion can be spent on more managerial tasks. They can continue to learn and become better strategists now that they’re not bogged down with daily productions tasks.

 

Writing is Only Step One of Blog Management

Your blog is only as good as the links, traffic and leads it generates. While companies that regularly update their blogs receive 97% more inbound links than those that don’t, audiences won’t naturally find your blog.

New blog creators need to build their Internet presences from the ground up, and drive traffic, shares and links in the interim. If you thought writing was time-consuming, try going through the outreach and promotions process.  

Your blog syndication services team will make sure your content gets the right amount of traffic and links to your content to make the writing worth it. Furthermore, they will make sure the traffic is qualified, related to your industry or target audience, and interested in reading your work. If you’ve ever seen your Time on Site metrics plummet because of bought traffic, then you know how hard it is to find quality audiences and drive them to your blog.

Before testing a blogging services company, ask about their marketing strategies and outreach plans for your content. While some brands deliver articles and expect you to do the rest, quality content creators will approach your blog with a thorough strategy that extends three to six months down the line. They should have plans for measuring success, and checkpoints to evaluate and adjust your strategy to become more profitable to you. They should not consider their work a success until you’re succeeding in hitting your marketing goals.

Your competitors won’t know that you have ghostwriter blog posts; they’ll just know you’re creating high-quality content that continues to drive traffic and links.

Your audience won’t care where your blog content is coming from; they’ll just care that you’re answering all of their questions and concerns.

At the end of the day, you’re the only one who can see where the content comes from, and will reap the results of better traffic, more customers and happier employees.

 

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Sponsored Content 101: What You Should Know About Content as Native Advertising

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Sponsored content has become the go-to paid media tactic for many brands, and for good reason — it can be incredibly effective.

The problem, however, is sponsored content comes with a bit of a learning curve. Old as the tactic is, its execution and benefits aren’t quite as intuitive as, say, billboard advertising.

So, let’s unpack some of the more confusing and controversial aspects of sponsored content marketing, then explore how you can harness its power.

 

What Is the Difference Between Sponsored Content and Native Advertising?

Plenty of companies stumble right out of the gate with their sponsored content marketing efforts simply because they don’t have clear definitions of the strategies — and this affects their expectations of what it can do for them.

Contently Editor-in-Chief Joe Lazauskas does a great job of clearing up any confusion. He defines native advertising as “an umbrella term for ads that mirror the environment they appear in.” So, in-feed Instagram ads would be considered native advertising, for example.

Sponsored content, he writes, is one type of native advertising; it’s promotional content designed to look like editorial content on a publisher’s site. Newspapers and magazines have run sponsored content for generations under the name “advertorials.” The richness of modern media, however, creates new opportunities for sponsors.

The type of content is limited only by the platform and your imagination. You could sponsor a 500-word article on a news site, or you could sponsor a feature-length film or super-interactive piece of content to live on a major publisher’s site.

The key, regardless of format type, is that the content must look like something that would natively live on the publisher’s page. This bit of camouflage is what makes sponsored content work.

(It’s also what makes it controversial. More on that in a moment.)

Camera

 

What Can Companies Achieve By Sponsoring Content?

Because sponsored content must mimic the style, tone and quality of a publisher’s own work, it must go through several quality control filters. This cauldron of scrutiny immediately elevates sponsored content’s quality above most forms of interruptive advertising the site might feature, whether those are pop-up ads or banners.

“Most publishers who do sponsored content and exclude other native formats aren’t trying to protect advertising revenue — they’re protecting subscription revenue,” writes AdExchange Senior Editor Sarah Sluis.

“Publishers whose content is good enough to make people pay for it also have enough cachet to build out exclusive native advertising programs. They include The New York Times, The Economist and the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail.”

Subscription-based publishers owe it to their readers to ensure sponsored content is engaging, and advertisers benefit as a result. Even at publications that don’t rely on subscriptions, sponsored content must meet their audiences’ expectations of quality. This forces advertisers to tailor their messages to those audiences, which only strengthens advertisers’ branding efforts.

“The client and agency are actively interested in engaging readers with content we have but that is interesting to the readers,”Jane Grenier, executive director of client services at Quartz, tells MediaShift. “We are creating a subtle halo around the brand rather than directly lighting up brand features.”

Here are two examples of how agencies have turned that halo effect into real results:

 

GE’s Sharing Healthy Ideas

Beeby Clark+Meyler put together an interactive campaign called Sharing Healthy Ideas to reposition GE in the consumer healthcare world. The campaign created a social share bar on major news sites for any health-related pieces. When readers shared the content, the description copy would be pre-populated with GE messaging.

The campaign was a runaway success: It reached more than 5 million readers, 8 percent of whom clicked through to GE landing pages. The agency also says GE reported 200 percent-plus increases in favorability and message association metrics — exactly what you would want to measure in a brand repositioning campaign.

 

Amazon’s How to Solve a Murder

To promote the release of Season 2 of its own streaming serial drama Bosch, Amazon hired the sponsored content team at The Guardian U.S. to put together a multi-part true crime reporting series called How to Solve a Murder, which ran on the news portal’s site. The series featured little more than an Amazon logo in the corner as branding.

Rachael Post, brand content director at The Guardian, told NiemanLab’s Laura Hazard Owen the How to Solve a Murder campaign “exceeded all the metrics we’d set for it,” but declined to go into detail.

Nevertheless, The Guardian was happy enough with the results that it intends to invest further resources into branded content as a way to tell “more authentic stories that come about almost in ‘natural’ ways and don’t simply consist of a media company promoting something that the brand is talking about on other channels,” Owen writes.

Dubious Owl

 

The Nature of Sponsored Content Can Invite Suspicion

Those branded stories that are designed to tell more authentic stories are a double-edged sword, however, because some audience members might feel duped to learn that a piece they enjoyed was actually sponsored by a company.

In fact, many people have trouble distinguishing editorial content from sponsored content. Ginny Marvin at Marketing Land reported on a study in which groups of people — 509 participants in total — were a piece of content: Either an article on Whole Foods that ran in Fortune; or a brand-sponsored piece that ran in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Onion, BuzzFeed or Forbes.

“In four out of the six groups shown a native advertisement, a strong majority said they thought the ad was an article,” she reported.

Controversy began to snowball:

The concern among marketers now is whether audiences will grow weary or become suspicious of sponsored content, as they’ve done with most forms of interruptive advertising.

The solution? Create content that can stand on its own merits, and be transparent about what is sponsored and what is editorial content. “We all need to do our part to ensure a great future for native advertising,” writes Danny Wong, marketer and co-founder of menswear startup Blank Label. “Otherwise native ads will become less effective than banner ads are today, and who knows what new form of advertising may swoop in after that.”

Business Section

 

How to Succeed With Sponsored Content

The primary challenges of sponsored content, then, are two-fold: How do you tell a story that gives your brand or your company that nice halo effect Grenier at Quartz mentioned, and how do you honor audience expectations by making it clear that the content is sponsored and recognizable as such?

Here are five tips:

 

Mimic the Editorial Team’s Standards, But Don’t Disguise Your Content

Step one, Annie Teh writes at Tech in Asia, is to ensure your content is relevant to the publisher’s audience, authoritative and trustworthy.

“Hiding the fact that an article is sponsored can make things worse for publishers and brands,” Teh writes. “Never underestimate your consumers and their ability to unmask promotional content in a faux-editorial. A large part of content marketing is emotional, and if your consumers realize that your brand paid money for a disguised article (and they are a very discerning bunch), they will be disappointed and betrayed. The bad vibes will rub off on your brand.”

 

Don’t Pitch

Branded content consultant Melanie Deziel says trying to shoehorn in a sales pitch into an otherwise objective piece of content — even if it’s just a sign-off at the end of the piece — reduces its credibility by 29 percent.

Instead of selling, focus on helping the reader by leveraging your company’s industry expertise. “If [a] brand produces cake mix, for example, the obvious choice for content creation is recipes, and consumers will want and need that,” Deziel says.

“But what if you went a bit deeper and thought about why someone would be making a cake in the first place? Chances are, they’re looking to create a holiday experience with a personal touch, so you might also be able to deliver DIY instructions for party decorations or a guide for what to write in greeting cards for every occasion.”

 

No, Really: Focus Everything on the Reader

Baron Manett, founder of Per Se Brand Experience, says that much of his work focuses on empathy for customers. “A lot of times we still talk about marketing challenges through the eyes of a brand in a very self-serving and selfish manner,” he tells Joe Lazauskas at Contently.

“You know what we want to do next year? We want to grow market share by 50 percent. OK, that’s what we want? What does our customer want? What does our customer care about? And how can we be relevant in their cares? I don’t think enough people are having those conversations.”

 

Tell Stories

“People spend time with a good story,” writes Doug Zanger, North America editor at large for The Drum. “On average, consumers spent almost two and a half minutes with each branded story, the same amount as editorial content, according to internal Mode Media research, and eight times more than with traditional rich media advertising.”

 

Use It to Build Deeper Relationships with Your Brand

Here is the key to getting the most brand lift from a sponsored content campaign: According to a study by IAB and Edelman Berland, sponsored content is most useful for enhancing, deepening or repositioning a brand. It falls flat, however, for generating brand awareness.

Therefore, you’ll want to get in front of audiences already familiar with what you do. The IAB / Edelman Berland study found the most receptive audiences are business and entertainment news users.

So, here’s the model for success:

  • Identify and connect with a credible site reporting on those topics.
  • Ensure your branding fits with that site.
  • Tell a story that resonates with those readers’ needs.

 

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©gpointstudio/123RF Stock Photo, Redd Angelo, Paul Morley, Olu Eletu

Don’t Always Be Closing: Why B2B Companies Need Sales Funnel Content

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One of marketing’s great insights over the last 20 years is that the act of buying something is best described as a journey.

Instead of thinking of a purchase as a single transaction, we now think about all the active research a customer performs, and all the touchpoints a company makes with that customer to inform their research.

So, how do customers educate themselves about their buying decisions? With content. Every stage of your sales funnel — or what your customers experience as a buyer’s journey — requires its own content to help customers move from need awareness all the way to purchase decision and beyond.

The problem? Synchronizing content for your sales funnel requires marketing and sales to work in lockstep, and achieving that kind of alignment takes dedicated effort across your company. As a result, many companies’ content marketing efforts fail to generate qualified leads or support sales efforts.
 
sales_funnel_content

Embed this infographic on your site:

 

4 Common Examples of Sales-Content Misalignment

Most of the mistakes we see companies make with their content marketing fall into one of four categories:

  1. The campaign’s goals are unclear.
  2. Content funnels become top-heavy.
  3. Marketers don’t invest in truly effective content.
  4. Content goes for the close too early in the buyer journey.

 

Unclear Goals

Joe Pulizzi at the Content Marketing Institute reports that just more than a quarter of B2B enterprise marketers’ organizations have clear definitions for effective content marketing programs.

“Just because we can publish, doesn’t mean we should,” he writes. “It’s clear that most enterprises around the world just started publishing in multiple channels because they can, without any clear indication of the organizational goals behind it. This is one of those times when we really need to stop and look at what we are really producing … and why.”

Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of demand generation company ANNUITAS, Inc., argues this directionless publishing does more than simply waste the time of marketing departments. Cumulatively, it creates a wall of noise that repels people.

“Before we begin the next content initiative, can we pause for a moment and do some work to collect insights on those with whom we are trying to attract?” he writes at LinkedIn. “Can we find out what matters to them, what pain points and challenges they have, who they collaborate with internally and the roles they play? Can we work to understand their content consumption preferences and patterns?

“If we do, we will reap the rewards of greater success and content marketers can start to measure real results.”

 

Top-Heavy Content Funnels

Debra Andrews at Marketri points out that inbound marketers often get too hung up on top-of-the-funnel activities because of the easy gratification that comes with, say, watching an infographic go viral. Consequently, they continue to chase these wins and lose sight of the bigger picture.

“Unfortunately, more often than not, these ‘leads’ hang out at the top or inch their way into the middle where they relax, put their feet up — and settle in,” Andrews says. “Many sales teams — even those starving for fresh leads — never get access to contacts ‘stuck’ in the funnel unless those contacts happen to call or fill out a contact form, two actions we know are not the norm.

“When leads are passed to sales, inbound marketers often believe their jobs are done. But they are leaving sales closers without the necessary support and materials to drive movement to the bottom of the funnel and on to the closing table.”

 

Failing to Invest in Great Content

Producing truly useful content takes time; there is no getting around this. But so often marketers fail to marshal the resources needed (time, money, effort, all of the above) to create this kind of content.

Case in point: eMarketer reports on a study that found while B2B marketers cite white papers and webinars as the two most effective types of content for generating leads. However, nearly 75% of B2B marketers report that they struggle to create this kind of content — and many end up cutting corners with the very content that can determine a campaign’s success.

 

Going For the Close Too Early

The counterpoint to top-heavy funnels is the executive who sees all content as an opportunity to make a sales pitch, which will land with a dull thud with buyers who are simply doing research. Content strategist Ayaz Nanji cites research from the Economist Group and peppercomm that shows the pervasiveness of this disconnect in B2B markets:

“Some 75% of executives [buyers] say their primary purpose for seeking out content is to find ideas, the survey found,” Nanji reports. “However, 93% of marketers say the intent of their content is to directly promote products/services.”

Towers - sales funnel content

 

Sales-Marketing Alignment: Building a Sturdy Foundation For Your Content Marketing Campaign

Marketing and sales activities together account for anywhere from 15% to 35% of any company’s total costs, Ben Davis at Econsultancy reports. Getting those into alignment creates efficiencies that alone justify the effort.

But there is also a solid, customer-centric argument to be made here. “The customer has never seen their own path to purchase as a funnel, nor do they want to be clunkily handed from one department to another,” he writes.

“Improving the customer path to purchase is common to every model of digital transformation, whether it be customer focused, technology focused or organisation focused. The fact that so much of the research phase for customers now occurs online means the remit of marketing draws ever closer to the moment a customer decides to buy.”

To get these two departments to fuse in your own organization, start by identifying your ideal customer, writes Bill Schick, founder of content marketing agency Mesh. Once both teams identify whom they should be speaking to, they can begin to create buyer personas.

“In developing truly adaptive buyer personas collaboratively, both groups will have stake — and buy in — with the engagement from the get go,” he says. “As sales has more meetings and learns more about how to interact and educate the customer, marketing can develop insights, educational tools, and develop marketing channels that support lead generation and customer education. This can all become a feedback loop that further elaborates on your personas, making your marketing, sales and customer insight programs more successful.”

Man on Phone - sales funnel content

 

Best Practices for Each Stage of Your Content Funnel

 

Top of the Funnel

Even in the most esoteric B2B markets, you can create short-form content and even Buzzfeed-style list posts, Steve Rayson at Buzzsumo writes. “Short form content is inherently shareable,” he says. “One opportunity may be to repurpose your longer form content, or other long form content, and produce well edited, focused, short form content with charts and images.”

Rayson then recommends mixing in deeper long-form pieces to serve as cornerstone content that speaks to audiences that are already a little more engaged.

All you’re trying to do at this stage is to create value by being informative and helpful. Don’t apply any pressure here, even by gating the content with an opt-in form. “For top of funnel audiences at least, a data capture form WILL inhibit the success of an integrated campaign,” communications consultant Armand David says. “Data capture forms and landing pages are the mainstay of traditional field marketing; however, with 50%+ of browsing happening via a mobile, few people have time or inclination to tap in the 7–12 information fields required by a typical data capture form.”

 

Middle of the Funnel

“Mid-funnel content bridges this gap between initial intrigue and the final sale,” Contently Marketing Editor Erin Nelson says. “It is the beef of the conversion funnel that holds together its outer compadres.”

In B2B markets, she writes, this kind of content needs to nurture relationships with prospects. Examples include newsletters, ebooks, fact sheets, case studies, webinars and white papers.

B2B content strategist Jeffrey L. Cohen recently wrote about a nurture campaign he was putting together built around short, informative pieces. “These are meant to educate our readers about the ideas behind our products,” he wrote. “They are not about our products. It is the type of content that prospects might seek out in their journey, but we know about their interests, and we can feed that.

“These content pieces will not appear on our blog. They won’t be shared on our social channels. They are for this specific nurture.”

 

Bottom of the Funnel

The bottom of your content funnel will speak directly to leads who are ready to buy. This kind of content needs to be highly targeted and highly relevant, PointDrive CEO Bill Burnett writes.

“Ultimately, the buying decision hinges on one question: Which product is a better fit for the constellation of business needs buyers are dealing with? The right piece of content can help a company envision your product or service as that solution.”

Here are five examples of content you can offer to leads who have made it to the home stretch of the buyer journey:

  1. A specialized offer. “Based on the information you’ve collected from them throughout the funnel (what content they’ve seen and interacted with, their company information),” says Bizbible‘s Jordan Con, “marketers can offer compelling discounts (e.g. free month if you sign up for a demo now!) or bonus access to convince leads to enage with the sales team.”
  2. “Have a set of customer references ready to share with your prospects in case they need proof of performance,” content marketer William Johnson writes at SEMrush. “The reviews should be substantial and data-centric and must qualify the confidence test in a true measure.”
  3. Help-desk style blog posts. “One of the best ways to do this is with ‘help desk’ style articles and blog posts that deal with specific issues and answer them clearly,” Con says. “And in this case, it’s OK for your product to be the direct solution. You’re allowed to ‘sell’ a little bit more. These types of articles and blog posts are also great for SEO because they’re targeted at very specific keywords. Because they’re so specific, they have less competition and clutter and should have low bounce rates.”
  4. Evaluations and comparisons. “The comparison sheet can be of a checklist type that details out all the user level needs that can or cannot be met,” Johnson says. “A well-prepared evaluation sheet makes decision making transparent, faster and effective for the prospects. If you want to specialize in preparing product comparison chart, this article can be of good help.”
  5. A consultation. A one-on-one with a lead isn’t quite as scalable as a white paper, but it’s as targeted as you can get. “A consultation is a great way to get on the phone with a lead,” Andrea Moxham writes at SmartBug Media. “It allows your business to get to know the individual and get a clearer idea of their problems and concerns. Not only can you build a relationship with that particular lead, this knowledge will help you improve your services and better develop your products and marketing strategy.”

 

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Patrick Pilz, Benjamin Child

The Rules Have Changed: SEO Writing for Small Business Owners

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For most companies, the majority of your web traffic will probably come from search engines.

Maybe those site visitors searched the name of your company, or maybe they searched a topic related to the work you do. Either way, this demonstrates the power of search engines — and the unique opportunities they provide.

If someone is actively Googling questions or issues your company can help solve, then you have yourself a pretty well-qualified lead. Your job, then, is to employ search engine optimization tactics to make sure your website gets in front of as many of these search engine users as possible.

There’s no better way to drive qualified traffic to a website.

 

Where SEO Writing Fits In

Here’s the thing: Google, Bing, Yahoo! and any other search engine can do a fairly good job of elevating the most relevant results for a particular search term, but their algorithms aren’t perfect and need a little help.

SEO writers structure the information on your site to make sure the right signals get to the search engines’ crawlers, the little bots that creep across the web to identify and index websites. So, if you’re a dentist in Dayton, Ohio, you’ll want your practice’s website to be at the top of any results when people search for things such as “dentist dayton ohio” or “teeth whitening dayton.”

You’ll largely do this by optimizing your site for a specific set of keywords and by creating SEO-friendly content. The next three sections of this guide discuss exactly how to do this. Then, you’ll be armed with enough knowledge to know whether you have the resources to handle SEO efforts in house or whether you need to hire an SEO professional to help you out.

 

It Starts With Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of identifying the best keywords to build content around, and is the foundation of good SEO writing. It’s a tedious process that takes time, but it’s definitely worth being diligent at this stage.

You’ll almost definitely need to buy a keyword research tool, but there are a variety of options to fit everyone’s needs and budgets. No matter which tool you use, the process will be very similar. You’ll be exploring long lists of keywords and filtering for four things:

  • Relevance — Is the keyword a logical and natural fit for your business?
  • Search volume — Are people actually searching for your keywords on a monthly basis?
  • User intent — You know how some people walk into a clothing store just to browse and others walk in with the intention of buying something? Organic website visitors are the same, and the keywords they use will signal their intent.
  • Competition — Other businesses will be competing with you for the same keywords. The more competition, the harder it will be to rank in a search engine’s results page (or SERPs).

For a deeper dive into this phase, Rand Fishkin from Moz has an excellent video tutorial on conducting keyword research against this rubric:

 

Your SEO Writer Must Create Helpful, Engaging Content

In the old days, SEO writers could get away with stacking a bunch of keywords at the bottom of a web page or writing clunky pieces of content that read as if they’d been written by a robot (actually, some of those pieces were).

But the search engines caught on quickly, and today they routinely penalize websites for trying to get away with this kind of SEO black magic.

Therefore, there is only one sustainable method for doing good SEO: Publishing good stuff. In certain industries, it’s a real challenge to keep your content fresh and interesting, but remember that the people who land on your site via search have already proved they’re interested in what you have to say.

So, if your company has a line of products it sells, for instance, you can create SEO-friendly content that digs into the nuances of what those products do. If your writer is thoughtful and thorough, you’ll create an asset that delivers real value and keeps readers on your page for more than a few seconds (bonus: that’s a signal of quality search engines are looking for).

 

Slotting Keywords Into Your Content

It might make sense to build a piece of content around a single keyword, or it might be better to group a handful of keywords together for one piece. Either way, make sure to put your keywords into a checklist as you start writing; this will keep your keyword groups organized and ensure you don’t forget one.

There are two primary ways to work your keywords into your copy: Building the copy around them, or sprinkling them in after the fact. This largely depends on the keyword.

A conversational search string such as “exercises for back pain” could be a headline or subhead your can build around.

A less conversational keyword, however, might need to wait until after you’ve written your first draft. From there, you can find a place in the copy where the keyword more or less fits, then finesse the sentence to accommodate it.

 

How Many Times Should These Keywords Appear?

As many times as would be natural, and not more or less. There is no keyword density benchmark you can reliably shoot for. If the success of a piece of content hinged solely on whether “how to wire money to Kolkata” appeared three times instead of two in an article, the Internet would be a pretty dire place.

 

Making Keywords Sound Natural

Use common sense here. “Teeth Whitening Dayton” would make a terrible headline. If there is a natural way for those three words to fall in that exact order, go for it. Otherwise, no need to worry. Search engines are smart enough to deal with prepositions and punctuation.

That means you’ve got a couple of options for that “teeth whitening dayton” keyword:

  • Separate with a comma or a period. “…the city’s must trusted practice for teeth whitening. Dayton residents have come to our practice for 25 years.”
  • Separate with a preposition. “The most highly rated practice on Yelp for teeth whitening in Dayton.”

Keyboard

 

Think Strategically and Publish Regularly

Search engines work a lot like FM radio: They tend to focus on fresh, new content and greatest hits.

This has two big implications for SEO writers:

  • We have to publish regularly to keep a stream of fresh content going.
  • When a piece goes over especially well, it can all but cement its place on the first page of SERPs for specific keywords.

The best way to keep this all organized is with an editorial calendar. Sticking to a calendar ensures you will regularly produce SEO-friendly content, and can help you budget for bigger pieces of content that might require a little more work.

 

Do You Need to Hire an SEO Writer?

This is the big question for many small business owners, who already have little time to devote to new projects. SEO writing requires a commitment of your time and a willingness to learn some esoteric ideas, after all.

Hiring an SEO article writing service can relieve a bit of that pressure and let you hand over a crucial pillar of marketing that might not be one of your core competences.

If you’ve made it this far, though, you know enough of the basics to either start learning SEO skills yourself or identify good SEO writers.

If you decide to hire, keep these two things in mind:

  • SEO skills aren’t enough when scrutinizing writers. They also need to be able to think creatively, have some degree of expertise in your industry, and should also know the ins and outs of search engine marketing — because the rules are always changing.
  • Hire a handful of SEO writers for test projects, evaluate their work, and only then make commitments for future work. The test run will let you identify any deficiencies in the skills above. Maybe a candidate who initially looks good cannot think creatively, or maybe the candidate employs old school SEO tactics such as keyword stuffing. Keep an eye out for those red flags. You know enough at this point to know what to look for.

 

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20 Chicago Software Companies to Watch

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It’s been a big 18 months for startups and software companies in Chicago.

In 2015, local startups raised more than $1.7 billion in funding, Built In Chicago reports, and the tech industry has kept its momentum rolling through the first half of 2016.

“The city’s tech scene is breaking out as investment in local companies now routinely exceeds over a billion dollars each year, and recent billion dollar exits have come from local companies like Cars.com, Grubhub and Orbitz,” local reporter Mike Ewing wrote for Thrillist at the end of April.

Against that backdrop, here are 20 software companies in Chicago we recommend keeping an eye on for the rest of 2016 and beyond. They’re all poised to do big things.

 

4D Healthware

4D Healthware has built a platform that lets patients manage chronic conditions online. It can collect a person’s health data from more than 200 devices, deliver that data to care management teams in real time, and use AI to identify the best ways to nudge patients toward more proactive management of their own conditions.

Built in Chicago reported in February that 4D Healthware completed a seed round worth $710,000 in funding.

 

AddStructure

AddStructure offers a trio of products that are perfect for helping customers find products on major retailers’ websites more effectively. This product suite includes

  • a plugin “to automatically improve relevance for subjective, thematic, and semantic search queries” for on-site searches;
  • a landing page builder that restructures product pages to better fit customer searches;
  • and an API that turns unstructured content such as user reviews “into structured data that is readable and actionable by both machines and humans.”

The Chicago Tribune’s Ally Marotti reported in June that the AddStructure team was one of 10 startups selected for the Techstars Retail accelerator program, which is hosted in collaboration with Target.

 

Akouba

Another company participating in a tech accelerator program this year is Akouba, which creates software that makes it easier for local banks to offer small business loans. Akouba is a 2016 cohort of the VC FinTech Accelerator in Little Rock, Arkansas, where founders get a crash course in rapid growth and customer acquisition, Tech.co reports.

 

benefitexpress

Schaumburg’s benefitexpress builds software for small companies and HR departments so they can easily manage employee benefits. The Daily Herald’s Anna Marie Kukec reported in March that benefitexpress had closed a “sizable” funding round and had brought on Michael Sternklar, a veteran executive in the employee benefits space, as the company’s new CEO.

 

Bright

A member of the Techstars Chicago 2016 class, Bright has built an analytics platform for SaaS providers. “While I realize there’s no shortage of dashboards and BI tools in the market, there’s a gaping hole in visibility,” founder Jeff Judge writes on the company blog.

“SaaS and subscription-based companies need tools that will help them see how growth translates to revenue, and how that revenue translates to making decisions. We see an opportunity to help companies grow faster by giving them context, insights and recommendations.”

startup business people group working everyday job at modern office

 

Green Key Technologies

Green Key, which has built a platform that allows any financial market participants to communicate via digital voice, has already had a busy 2016. This spring alone, Green Key announced

 

HealthJoy

HealthJoy announced a $3 million funding round in March to grow its platform, which connects patients, healthcare providers and other participants in the healthcare marketplace to help consumers save money on healthcare expenses.

“This investment will allow us to continue to work hard on our healthcare decision platform and advance the development of JOY, our human supported machine intelligence, that is already helping thousands of people every day,” HealthJoy CEO Justin Holland says.

 

Hearken

Hearken is building a platform that will allow journalists and news outlets to tap directly into their readership to get real feedback on what stories readers want to see covered. It’s a novel and engaging way to tap into readers’ collective insights — but Hearken pushes back on the use of the E word in this context.

“The word ‘engagement’ to me feels like another way of saying ‘people give a shit and you can tell,'” CEO and co-founder Jennifer Brandel told TheMediaBriefing in June, a few months after the company announced it had raised $700,000 in seed funding.

 

Motion AI

In late June, VentureBeat’s John Brandon had a great column on why he’s bullish on chatbots. “The tech gets better the more we speak, and here we are using Siri and Alexa as a result,” he writes.

“Chatbots will someday be able to remind me about appointments, let me know that there’s a good deal on the pizza I always order, prompt me when there’s a new Bryson book, and even banter away about Brexit, possibly using correct British grammar.”

Enter Motion AI, which has built a platform that makes creating chatbots incredibly easy. Its service even has a free option that lets companies experiment with chatbot technology for support or concierge services.

Investors seem to be bullish on the technology, too, because the Tribune’s Amina Elahi reported last December that Motion AI had raised $700,000 to hire more engineers to build out its platform.

 

Opternative

Opternative has had a busy 2016 already because of pressure from legislators.

The company, whose app lets you conduct eye exams at home with your phone, came under scrutiny from lawmakers in Georgia, who passed House Bill 775 to restrict the ability of residents to use Opternative’s technology (or any other company’s) to perform eye exams at home and get a prescription. Other states are looking to follow suit.

But Opternative has its proponents, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the investors who put in $6 million for a Series A funding round in February. And all of this pushback from lobbyists and entrenched interests just serves to reveal the larger point: Opternative’s team has built a disruptive, awesome product.

downtown chicago, illinois usa

 

Pearachute

Pearachute has built a platform that will let parents and their children find classes around the city that matches their interests (and the family’s schedule). As Connie Loizos at TechCrunch reported in February, Pearachute has raised $1.2 million and has begun working with three dozen activity centers and 1,200 parents around Chicago for its launch.

 

Procured Health

Healthcare analytics provider Procured Health announced in June that the company had raised $10 million in a Series B round. Procured’s team says healthcare providers will waste an estimated $35 billion this year just in making poor decisions on what supplies they purchase, and getting data-driven intelligence to these providers to fix that inefficiency will be a big focus of the company’s growth.

 

Regroup Therapy

Regroup Therapy is another Chicago company working in the telehealth space. The company’s specific focus is on delivering mental health consultations remotely. “There’s just this really deep shortage of providers,” founder and CEO David Cohn told the Tribune’s Meg Graham in May, when Regroup announced it had closed a $1.8 million funding round.

“Fifty-five percent of counties (nationwide) don’t have any behavioral health providers in them. Not a social worker, not a psychiatrist, nothing. It’s a huge problem.”

 

SpringCM

SpringCM makes software that helps businesses manage contracts and other documents, and the company announced earlier this year it had raised $17.5 million from investors. The company says it expects to release six new products before the end of 2016.

 

Tend

“Most people have a general idea of how many visits their site gets every month, and some could tell me what drove traffic to their site, but almost no one could tell me exactly how well their marketing tactics did at driving customers,” Tend co-founder Ryan Evans writes on the company’s newly-launched blog.

“Having something in place to track what is working should be the foundation of any marketing effort. And, yet, so few people have this in place. Why? Well the answer is actually pretty simple: Most web analytics tools really suck.”

That’s why he and co-founder Marty Thomas built a platform that lets companies see exactly how their website visitors become customers. Tend shows who your website visitors are, where they came from, what pages they went to and if they’re paid traffic what specific ads they clicked on.

startup business people group working everyday job at modern office

 

Tock

Restaurant reservation management system Tock launched in 2015 as a platform for diners to book experiences at the world’s top destination restaurants — like Alinea, for example, which is owned by Tock co-founder Nick Kokonas.

Tock CTO Brian Fitzpatrick tells ChicagoInno that it already is being used by more than 80 restaurants around the world. All told, those restaurants’ bookings through Tock amounted to a half million diners and $30 million in restaurant revenues in the company’s first year.

 

Uptake

Industry-agnostic analytics platform Uptake is growing quickly. A little more than years ago, Uptake was a team of four. At the time of writing, it has more than 40 open positions listed on its Jobs page.

Last October, Uptake announced a $45 million round of funding, and that Ray Lane, former president of Oracle, had joined the company’s board of directors. We’re excited to see what Uptake does with all of these resources.

 

UrbanBound

Relocation management software company UrbanBound announced it had raised $8.5 million in a Series B round in April, and the company has its eyes on rapid growth.

“Now, with a team of over 40, we have a stronger understanding than ever before of where UrbanBound is headed and how it fits into the relocation industry,” UrbanBound’s Aria Solar writes on the company’s blog. “We know exactly what challenges we’re aiming to solve and the voids our software is continuing to fill.”

 

VillageMD

VillageMD‘s platform is designed to help primary care physicians grow their practices through analytics-driven decision-making, access to capital and automation of many administrative tasks.

Fortune mentioned VillageMD in March as part of a piece on Obamacare’s effects on healthcare startups, and reporter Ezekiel J. Emanuel noted the company had shown it has been able to raise primary care physicians’ salaries, which gives those physicians the freedom to move into communities where quality care had previously been harder to access.

 

We Are Mammoth

We Are Mammoth celebrated a decade in business earlier this year, and what’s notable about that milestone is how the company built slowly toward that occasion with sustainable, deliberate growth.

Over the last decade, the We Are Mammoth team has built two companies — Kin and DoneDone — and the company’s recent projects have included an app for workers’ compensation company AF Group and customer service software for HR tech company Little Bird.


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Trade Show Marketing: 17 Tips That Will Attract Prospects and Build Real Value

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Trade shows are great places to build out your network and connect with potential customers — if you come prepared with a real strategy.

Many participants and attendees don’t, however. These are the teams you see bumbling about on the last day with towering stacks of business cards, content that they’ve satisfied some vague notion of networking.

Don’t be those teams. Instead, show up at your next trade show armed with a plan to book appointments and give live demos to qualified leads.

Here are some solid tips to help you do just that.

trade show floor

 

What to Do in the Weeks Leading Up to the Trade Show

Early preparation for a trade show is key. Just glancing at the list of other companies on the plane ride in won’t cut it. You need to make a dedicated effort to connect with people well before the week of the show.

 

1. Attendees might be higher quality leads than you think.

Mike Thimmesch, director of industry relations for Skyline Exhibits, points out at Trade Show News Network that

  • More than three-quarters of trade show attendees travel at least 400 miles to attend the event, and
  • 81% of attendees have buying authority.

This means most people have spent a decent amount of time, money and energy to be standing in front of your booth, and they’re in a position to make buying decisions.

 

2. Be selective and strategic about what trade shows you attend.

Jamil Bouchareb, co-CEO of Restaurantware and CEO of Genman Corp., says to “pick your shows wisely” because there are so many that might be tangentially relevant to your business. Instead, focus on the ones that are a perfect fit.

And when you identify a perfect fit, map out your company’s specific goals for attending. “Are you focusing on attracting new clients, luring in new distributors, establishing your brand, or to gather tips on improving your marketing further?” Bouchareb writes. “Giving all you can towards one goal will help ensure you accomplish it as well as possible.”

 

3. Contact trade show organizers to get intel on attendees.

UK company We Brand It, which creates promotional products for other businesses, notes that trade show organizers usually have stats and other information on people who have attended their shows in previous years.

This data is a treasure trove of customer insights. Knowing attendee’s specific interests and business challenges will help you focus your own message and craft a better pitch.

 

4. Email your existing customers and invite them to come by your booth.

If your team is travelling to attend a trade show, this is a good opportunity to connect face-to-face with some of your customers in the area, Quality Logo Products says. That outreach will look something like this:

  • First, send out a coupon or some other promise of a freebie to customers who stop by your booth.
  • Book meetings with customers who respond so they don’t have to wait to speak with you.
  • Then, send out a wider email letting all other customers know you are participating. “Even if the vast majority doesn’t attend, they will see you as a significant player in your industry for participating,” Jana Quinn at Quality Logo Products says.

 

5. Start reaching out to other attendees via email or social media.

Organizers will provide a list of what other companies will be at your trade show, and usually who the individual attendees are, too. This, effectively, is a list of prospects. Go get in touch with them.

HackerRank‘s Poya Osgouei writes at Sales Hacker that one of his team members reached out to each attendee via Twitter, LinkedIn or email before a specific conference, and a full quarter of all attendees dropped by the HackerRank booth as a result.

 

6. Or, use snail mail to both add a personal touch and qualify recipients.

B2B marketer Ruth P. Stevens has an excellent tip for engaging with a trade show’s attendees well before the event. This is an especially useful tactic if the list the show’s organizers put together doesn’t include enough information about each person to qualify them.

Here is Stevens’ tactic:

  • Create postcards that will go out to every registered attendee. These postcards will clearly communicate the benefits of visiting your booth.
  • Speak directly to the people you would like to reach as a measure of qualification. Her example: “Attention, purchasing managers! Come find out how you can save time and money in your search for the best widgets.”
  • Send these out as first-class mail so they arrive 10 days before the show — soon enough to keep you top of mind, but not so late that people will already be en route to the event.

exhibit

 

Showtime: How to Maximize Your Time at the Event

With a plan in place and a schedule already partially booked with appointments, you’ll be primed for a successful few days at the event.

 

7. Engage with other attendees online the night before.

One more touchpoint just before the event kicks off, while you’re all on location, can be a helpful way to keep your booth on prospects’ radars. (Just remember to mention your booth number.)

Rachel Nevers at event marketing platform Splash recounts how her team made this tactic work:

“The night before the expo (when everyone was settling into their hotel rooms), we promoted a Facebook post that invited attendees to swing by our booth to watch live demos and to enter our raffle. The expo hashtag was clearly displayed, and the location of our booth was front and center. We found it to be one of the best ways to invite our existing user-base to come meet us face-to-face — AND to pique curiosity from new prospects.”

 

8. Design your marketing materials to reflect trustworthiness.

This sounds a bit abstract, but it’s important to remember that you’re competing with other companies’ booths more on trustworthiness than you are on potential or even past results. “Think about it. In any kind of business collaboration, where so many decisions have to be made, a million things can go wrong,” Tony Caccamo at Mirror Show Management says.

“Which is why you need to be dealing with people who really have your back. Without trust, the world’s most skilled vendor can never become the partner you need because you’ll always be looking over your shoulder.”

Caccamo has a handful of tips for gauging a vendor’s trustworthiness; the tips are actually intended for attendees walking around the show floor, but they’re equally useful for vendors:

  • Make sure you are transparent about your company’s process and practices.
  • Communicate your values as a company.
  • Make a point to underscore your client retention rates. “Client retention really does speak louder than words,” Caccamo writes. “It’s concrete, verifiable and super-important because no company can keep clients for long if they can’t build a trusting relationship.

 

9. Design your booth with hospitality in mind.

Caterina Lui at the PR Newswire blog has a couple of excellent posts on trade show marketing and visual strategies for trade show booths. One recurring point of emphasis is simply being hospitable.

“Event attendees have a lot of booths to visit,” she writes. “Make their lives on the show floor as easy as possible.” There are several ways you can do this, including:

  • Optimizing your booth for conversation — Make it easy for attendees to sit down and chat with you.
  • Having comfortable seats — Give someone a chance to sit down and take a break, prospect or not.
  • Having outlets and phone chargers available — This both solves a problem and invites booth visitors to linger while their devices charge.

 

10. The interaction your booth facilitates is more important than the environment it creates.

David Rich, SVP of client services at George P. Johnson Experience Marketing, writes at BizBash that while the look and feel of your booth is important, you should spend more time ensuring its design creates opportunities to begin and continue conversations. This is why you spent time in the weeks before the show understanding attendees’ needs and pain points.

“Think of yourself as a bridge builder, building a connection between organizational objectives/goals and audience needs,” he writes. “What does your audience need in the way of an experience to be motivated and enabled to act on your objectives? … Aim to give them an experience that will help them see themselves as potentially bigger heroes in their own stories — if they heed your call to action.”

 

11. Use the location of your booth as a strategic advantage.

Here is another instance where you can convey helpfulness and hospitality with your booth. “The more you know about an event, the more opportunities you’ll recognize,” Shuly Oletzky, president of Frigibar Industries, Inc., writes at The Huffington Post.

“One of the first things I do once the layout of an event is finalized is locating where my booth will be and learning about what booths will be close by, location of the bathrooms, refreshment and information stands, and how to get to exhibit and presentation locations from where my booth will be.”

“If you’re near an entrance or the end of an aisle, knowing your surroundings will come in handy when visitors ask you questions. Being a resource to help make their experience as enjoyable as possible is beneficial to your brand even if they aren’t an immediate customer.”

 

12. Invest extra money in a corner booth if you can afford it.

You can direct traffic from any spot, of course, but a corner booth naturally attracts the most traffic in the first place. Jess Ekstrom, CEO and Founder of HeadbandsOfHope.com, says these booths typically cost $200 to $500 more than other booths but see twice the amount of foot traffic.

 

13. Keep qualifying visitors and convert as much of that traffic as possible.

Remember, the whole point here is to find qualified leads, not collect a bunch of business cards. For the Dreamforce conference in 2015, SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter says his company changed up its expo strategy a little, and doing so led directly to 183 qualified leads who booked appointments.

First, Porter says each team member on site set a quota for appointments booked. “Then we interacted with people,” he writes. “We asked them qualification questions. We avoided taking their cards or scanning their badges. We helped them determine whether we could be valuable.

“And when they said ‘yes,’ we asked them to take out their phone and find a time on the calendar that would work.”

 

14. Set a target for number of product demos per hour.

Marc Goldberg, partner and founder of Marketech Inc., writes at the Skyline blog that anyone with a product to demo should shoot for at least four demos per hour, whether those are on demand or arranged in advance.

However many demos you give, Goldberg recommends giving them one-on-one so you can ask pointed questions. “The booth staffer should not do all the talking,” he says. “Probing for needs and presenting benefits to fill those needs, then demonstrating how the product can fulfill the needs will be best received by the booth visitor.”

 

15. Take some time to survey your competitors.

Finally, use any trade show you attend as a chance to gather some competitor intel. “This is a unique opportunity to personally browse case studies and business models at other exhibits,” the team at Exhibit Network in Houston says. “Take note of the new products or services other companies are offering.”

11482430 - macef trade fair, fiera di milano, milan, italy

 

What to do After the Trade Show Ends

In the days after the trade show, this is the time to follow up on leads and nurture the connections you built.

 

16. Pull together any information you’ve collected on potential partners or vendors.

With enough luck, you’ve identified a few companies that could help grow your own business.

Frequent trade show buyer Art Santos tells ASD Insider he makes sure to take notes about the companies he interacts with during a trade show, especially the ones who might make good partners or suppliers at a later time.

“When I speak with a company and think there is the potential to do some business with them, I make a note of their company name, booth number, and a brief comment about what it is I like about that company or their products on my phone,” he says.

 

17. Follow up with leads quickly so those lines don’t go slack.

Finally, it’s time to move forward any relationships you’ve created with potential customers. Robb Clawson at Dealer Marketing Magazine has a few especially useful tips to structure your follow-ups:

  • Be strategic. “Send thank you emails with a marketing brochure one to two days after the show (if not sooner) to keep your company top of mind,” he says. “Add a personal note, and schedule times to follow-up with tangible ‘asks’ one or two weeks later.”
  • Connect via social media where appropriate. Clawson recommends posting photos from the event to your social channels and sharing those with other attendees. You could also host additional photos to drive those leads back to your website.
  • Follow up on specific questions. Review the notes you took on each booth visitor, and send a message addressing the unique questions, issues or concerns they had.

 

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