How to write a value proposition: a guide for Microsoft Partners
For B2B technology companies, standing out from the crowd can be tricky. In an industry where every business is a “trusted partner”, where every team is overflowing with “seasoned professionals”, and positively dripping in “specialist expertise” – what can you say to differentiate your business? That’s the challenge of B2B technology marketing.
To communicate your value consistently in your marketing, you need a value proposition. Knowing how to write a value proposition for b2b business is critical: it details what you can offer customers that other businesses in your space can’t. Every business understands the value they offer customers, but potential customers often won’t take time to find out. The real challenge is being able to express your value proposition in a way that engages your audience.
What is a value proposition?
Simply put, a value proposition is a description of the value you deliver to customers – how you understand it and how it should be communicated. It isn’t a slogan, a positioning statement or a list of product features. It’s a comprehensive document that clearly defines how you help customers and what they can expect from investing in you, your product or your services.
Our approach at Fifty Five and Five
Fifty Five and Five is a full service digital marketing agency. We help technology companies grow their business, drive brand awareness and achieve their marketing goals. The importance of value propositions to our work cannot be understated – it forms the crux of everything we do and ensures our efforts are perfectly aligned with our clients’ ambitions.
Sometimes creating a value proposition is the primary reason we are brought on board by a customer. Other times it just forms the beginning of a long-term relationship and marketing strategy. Either way, we treat it with a great deal of respect – as getting it right will make all the difference for the work we do.
Our approach is unique and puts great emphasis on the initial planning and strategy stages. Albert Einstein was asked: “If you have one hour to solve a problem, how would you spend that hour?” He replied, “I would spend fifty five minutes defining the problem, and then I would need just five minutes to solve it.” What a guy!
We put the fifty five first in everything we do. We think, we plan, we strategise. We do our research and use data to complement our creativity. The fifty five is not about an amount of time, it’s about quality of thought. With the fifty five in place, the five, the execution, is set up to succeed. This is especially important when creating value propositions.
How to write a value proposition for b2b businesses
We’ve taken inspiration from the classic Five Ws and the H, and created our own set of questions that’ll help you home in on your target audience. Answering them will build the foundations of your value proposition.
1. Who?
Who is your audience?
Who are the people your product or service is trying to help? What is their industry and their business?
What are their problems?
What issues do they have, both generally and in relation to their industry? For example:
- Do they experience problems with current technology set up?
2. What?
What do you do?
Try to condense your company blurb into one or two sentences. Only include the essentials.
What is your unique selling point?
What does your company do differently to others? It might be your technology, service, people, practice, cost… find your niche and explore it.
What value do you bring to the customer?
This obviously refers to your offering, but it’s also about the customer experience you provide. How are you exceeding the normal expectations of customers?
What are you running your business for?
You need to know the ultimate goal of your company. For instance, at Fifty Five and Five our goal is to help technology companies realise their ambitions.
3. How?
How can you solve the customer’s problems?
Solve the customer problems that you identified in question one. Again, this isn’t necessarily just about your product. It’s about the value you can provide another business. For example:
- Minimise the cost and risk implications of a cloud migration.
- Take a cybersecurity assessment to gain control over your company data and minimise the threat of cyberattacks.
- Offer a friendly and professional service from start to finish.
4. Why?
Why should the customer choose you?
Show (don’t tell) the customer why they should choose you over your competition. Make sure to avoid product features – focus on the real-life benefits they can expect. Do you:
- Make users’ day-to-day tasks easier, helping them relieve stress?
- Improve employee productivity with collaboration tools?
- Provide customers considerable return on investment?
- Offer constant support and advice throughout the customer journey?
What is your product differentiation?
What does your software or service offer that others don’t? Does it have more processing power or a user-friendly interface?
Now put it all in a box
Literally. We’ve created a handy template for you to jot down your answers.
There are better ways of presenting value propositions. The final document should be dressed up a little and ideally presented in line with your branding. We use PowerPoint presentations to present value propositions for our clients. But for now… it’s important to get stuff neatly tied up on paper so that it is more palatable.
| Who? | |
|---|---|
| Who is your audience? | |
| What are their problems? | |
| What? | |
| What do you do? | |
| What is your unique selling point? | |
| What value do you bring to the customer? | |
| What are you running your business for? | |
| How? | |
| How can you solve the customer’s problems? | |
| Why? | |
| Why should the customer choose you? | |
| What is your product differentiation? | |
Involve the whole organization
Value propositions can benefit from being tackled collaboratively – an interdepartmental workshop is a great way to brainstorm and identify what sets your company apart.
Your value proposition should not be a manifestation of the c-suite’s collective will. You should not eschew the viewpoints from employees who are much closer to your customers, products and services than the proverbial “suits” in the boardroom.
Of course, you don’t need the contribution of every single employee – that would be madness. But encouraging representatives from every department can be hugely beneficial. Working with account management, sales, customer success, IT and other areas of your business gives you the insights you need to do this.
Creating your value proposition
Now you know how to write a value proposition, or at least how we do it. And you have a template to guide you. You can also look at our case studies to see how we have worked with organizations to deliver a wide range of marketing projects including value proposition work. However, as mentioned above, all of our work begins with value propositions to some extent. Without a good value proposition, marketing efforts can only ever go so far. That’s why creating a value proposition for B2B business is so important.
Fifty Five and Five can help you find the best way to communicate your value proposition to current and future customers. For more information about the importance of value propositions, get in touch with us today.
How to overcome the 4 hurdles to great content marketing
Building a brand, gaining an audience and generating leads is important for organisations of all sizes. Content marketing is a valuable tool to help you achieve these outcomes. But to really stand out, your content needs to have something special about it. It all starts with overcoming the four hurdles to content marketing greatness.
1. Build your brand
All good marketing begins with a story. What’s yours?
B2B marketers often make the mistake of thinking their marketing material should be dry and functional rather than emotive and story-driven. The argument goes that B2B buyers are driven by cool, logic-based decision making, rather than the airy-fairy emotional whims of consumers. Apart from being just a little patronising to B2C customers, this also misses a fundamental point: people are people, whether they’re wearing their business hats or they’re shopping for budget holidays.
Emotive stories can be found in even the driest of B2B technology marketing. The story lies in what technology allows real people to achieve. Just look at this example:
“Dan the HR manager used to spend two hours a day replying to emails and combing through Excel spreadsheets. Now automation takes care of that – and Dan’s much happier for it.”
It has all the important aspects of a story and is a lot more compelling than a list of features and product specifications. Storytelling sits at the root of any successful brand.
2. Generate leads
Gaining leads is the goal of any marketing campaign. Fundamentally, we all want to sell something, whether that’s an intranet, a security solution or our expertise. Your marketing strategy should prioritise getting your readers into the marketing funnel. Whether they make contact for a demonstration of your product, download another piece of content to continue their research, or are at the point of making a purchase. Luckily, if you’ve built your brand well enough, you’ll be well on your way to encouraging your users to fill in that lead generation form and take the next step in the process.
Getting the rest right is all about understanding your user journey and allowing your content to guide your readers through that. Every marketing strategy, whether paid or organic, short or long term, should make use of a marketing funnel. This means that different types of content are tailored to readers at different stages of their journey, usually as they learn more about the product you’re offering and the value it delivers. That, combined with a well-optimised website and robust SEO approach, means your readers have a clear route to conversion.
3. Measure your campaigns
It goes without saying that if you want your marketing campaign to be successful, you need to measure, observe and improve. This is as true for the marketing content you’re creating as it is for anything else in life.
The first step is to set targets, or KPIs. When embarking on an organic or paid strategy, you need to understand what success looks like. That could be “gain 20 leads”, “post a blog every week”, or “gain 20% more views on our content than last year.” There’s no right or wrong answer here, but it’s important to draw a line in the sand that you can measure against later.
Then, as your campaign progresses, you can use your KPIs as a metric of how successful your tactics are. Are you gaining a healthy number of leads, or are you still too far away from your target? What can you change in order to help you boost engagement? Then, once the campaign is over, you can review your targets, your tactics and how successful you have been. After that, simply rinse and repeat until your marketing strategy gets you the results you need.
4. Solve your resource gap
For many organisations, it’s very easy for day-to-day work to take precedence over marketing. Effective content creation requires resources and skills. All the goodwill and skills in the world won’t make quality blogs and case studies appear if your best people have too much on their plates.
There are several solutions to this problem. If you have the expertise and resources, then being firm about the time people need to create effective marketing, and not allowing that to get swept aside, can be a good way of achieving your goals. Alternatively, getting some outside help can be an effective way of ensuring your content gets written to a decent quality and published on time.
The right help from the right people
If you want to make sure quality content appears on your website or social media platforms when you need it, it’s worth considering partnering with a marketing agency that understands your industry and what can help differentiate you in a competitive marketplace.
As a full-service digital marketing agency in the world of B2B technology our job is to ensure your content can build your brand, generate leads and achieve your strategic marketing goals. If you want to find out more about how we do that, get in touch with the Fifty Five and Five team today.
How to write a winning Microsoft Partner of the Year award entry
Do you want your company to be awarded Microsoft Partner of the Year? Of course you do, what Microsoft Partner wouldn't? But how do you write an award winning entry for that sort of coveted prize? I'll keep this post short and to the point. You don't. Don't even try.
But of course you do want to win a Microsoft Partner of the Year award. You might not get to walk about Microsoft Inspire with a sash and maybe a flag, the pandemic has again seen to that for another year, but winning is an incredible achievement recognising amazing work on behalf of your clients. So what should you do to succeed? That bit is easy, pay an expert. At this point I could wax lyrical about the benefits of getting an expert in, about the craft of writing, the insight to know what to include and what not to include. But I won't.
Instead let me outline what we offer in our 'Award writing package':
- Step 1 - We'll help you select the right awards to enter
We've been writing Microsoft Partner of the Year awards for a long time now. So we'll work with you to select your best work for the most appropriate award categories. There is an art to this, and as we live and breathe Microsoft, we know what to look for.
- Step 2 - Next we will interview you and your clients
We've been interviewing clients and writing case study style material for years. So asking the right questions and seeking out the right answers is what we do. It is harder than it looks.
- Step 3 - We craft the award entry
This is when our writers craft the actual entry. It's part case study, part adhering to a wide set of rules, and part crafting a story people can buy into. It takes a bit of experience to get right.
- Step 4 - We take care of all the back and forth
Edits, client approval, tweaks. Whatever it takes, we take the pain out of the admin for you.
- Step 5 - We'll advise on what else you need
Microsoft will encourage you to upload supporting material. What should you provide? What do you have? What should you create? We can advise.
If you have the time to execute something like the above (and have the people to do it) then good luck to you. But if like most companies you are better at doing the award winning work, then writing award winning copy - why not get in touch? We have a history of writing awesome Microsoft Partner of the Year award entries, and for a very reasonable cost. Follow the call to action below or email me direct.
Content planning: the 3 crucial steps to keeping your audience coming back for more
When it comes to content planning, developing a strategy is easy…in theory. In practice, it can be tricky to create a successful plan that not only reaches the right people but keeps your readers coming back for more. That’s why we’re revealing the three crucial steps to attracting an audience and keeping them primed and interested in what you have to say.
Step 1: Know your audience
The first step to great content is understanding who you’re creating it for. It’s been said a million times before, but it’s worth saying it again:
- Research who your ideal customer is
- What is stopping them from doing a better job?
- What do you think they would change about the way they work if they could?
Asking these questions – every time you think about your audience – is absolutely crucial. Never lose sight of who they are, what they need and how you can help them.
Quick tip: combine tech and human insights
Get in touch with the person in charge of your sales strategy. Ask them to help you with their insights into who your business is talking to. You likely have an idea who your ideal audience is. Your sales team are the people on the ground talking to them day after day. Mine them for all the insights they can muster.
In combination with speaking to the humans who sell your products and services, don’t forget to lean on technology to give you a hand. Conduct keyword research to understand what your audience is searching for online. The phrases and keywords they use should help you understand exactly what they’re looking for.
Try to adopt the mindset that your audience doesn’t know who you are yet and then think of your content as the answer to their questions. You are the solution to their needs. They may just not know it yet.
Step 2: Connect with your audience
At first, your audience may be looking for the answer to a question, as mentioned above. But what keeps them coming back to you for more? It’s all down to the way you tell a story. We all love stories and are hardwired to respond to them. The key to growing a readership is to create engaging content that tells a compelling story.
What is engaging content?
Really great content goes beyond answering a question or ‘providing value’. The engaging stuff connects with the people consuming it. The dynamic is similar to a joke or a piece of art. It’s surprising, it rises above the humdrum of everything else you may have read or watched on a subject, and above all it contains your unique voice. But how do you do that?
Well, first, forget the idea of ‘converting’ a reader into a lead and a lead into a customer. These things get in the way. Instead focus on connecting with what motivates your audience. This is where the art of rhetoric comes in.
When creating your content, think about the rhetorical devices that will connect with your audience:
Logos
Use facts and figures that will resonate with a certain type of audience who need to know what you’re selling will get them results.
Ethos
Develop content that shows that you are credible in your field. Awards, length of service and experience in a sector, and partnerships with other brands or vendors are all good ways of highlighting your credibility.
Pathos
Pathos is about emotional appeal. To connect with your audience on an emotional level, appeal to their beliefs. Using anecdotes, a specific tone (e.g., 'straight to the point' or 'irreverent'), along with figurative language are all good ways of doing this.
Step 3: Grow your audience
Getting your content in front of people is the task at hand. But to get them coming back for the next piece is the goal. And it’s the key to growing your audience and developing your authority in a space.
So, to recap: you need to put together your knowledge and connection with an audience into great content. That will ensure that they remember you and come back for more. By knowing what your audience wants and what it needs you can create content that is relevant to them.
Produce on a consistent basis
Looking forward to a piece of content requires knowledge and expectation of when it is going to appear. If your content is sporadic, even the most ardent members of your audience are likely to forget you. You need to schedule your work and stick to it. Creating a content calendar is a good step. Putting in place time and resources to develop ideas and create the content is crucial. And following that with a peer review will help make sure what you produce is fit for purpose.
Put your content where people will see it
There are several places your content can be seen by your audience. Your website and social media platforms like LinkedIn are the obvious two. But also creating a newsletter each week or month to send to your email marketing list is another good way of getting your work out there. Along with these, you can also publish your content on third-party sites as a guest blog or a syndication article.
Capture contact details and convert readers into subscribers
Not all your content should be kept behind gates. But long form pieces like eBooks, whitepapers or webinars can be great for capturing email addresses from interested readers. Giving people a way to put their hand up and acknowledge their interest in your content is a great step to establishing an audience base.
Amplify your brand
Once you've established a loyal following, then you can expand your content, developing longer/deeper/more niche stories. Your audience will follow you into new formats (such as podcasts). And a loyal audience will share, tell their friends, and help amplify your brand.
How to write an awesome creative brief
Don't have time to read? Listen to this blog post instead. Let us know what you think.
[player id=44745]
Over the years, we’ve responded to a fair few creative brief processes. Like all agencies, we’ve won some and lost some. But the true value of the experience comes down to what we’ve learned from the process. That’s why we’ve put together this article on the value of writing a collaborative creative brief (sometimes referred to as pitch brief, the language often depends on the project and the client).
A creative brief confession
Now we could say that winning new business is 100% down to the awesome people at Fifty Five and Five, but that wouldn’t be strictly true. Our most successful proposals have been the result of clients that have been entirely open and fully supportive of a collaborative process to get the best outcome.
Whether you’re a client looking for a new agency, or an agency wanting to improve your pitch-win ratio, this article provides advice for both sides of the fence.
We’ve boiled it down to several key aspects that make up the best type of client-agency partnerships when it comes to a creative brief:
- Research
- Transparency
- Collaboration
- Evaluation and feedback
With that in mind, let’s start exploring how to make the pitch experience a win-win for all.
Do your research
Client: Finding the right talent, chemistry and shared culture and values with an agency is no easy task. Do your research – know who you want to pitch for your business. Find the experts in your field. For example, Fifty Five and Five is a perfect fit for a B2B tech brand. A bit of time spent here will save effort later weeding our agencies that were never going to fit.
Agency: It makes no sense to say yes to every opportunity that comes your way. Inevitably, you’ll end up overstretching your teams, ignoring your existing clients and creating a culture of pitch complacency. Have a scorecard that you evaluate briefs against, and if the results show that you’re not a good fit, take a pass. This is not a sign of weakness; it’s sensible business decision-making. When you get to the creative brief, a good scorecard process will set you up for success.
Be transparent
Client: What are the motivating reasons behind bringing in an agency? What do you and your stakeholders want (vs. what you actually “need”), and how will you communicate this in the creative brief? When it comes to deliverables, think about how you want to run the process and be realistic with your timings and budget.
Agency: If you can’t deliver the scope of work within the timescales or budget, be straight with the client. They’ll appreciate your honesty and directness, even if it may not be an easy conversation. Share your reasons and discuss whether there’s an alternative solution. Don’t ignore your instincts or sacrifice learnings from past experiences just to win the business. It never ends well.
Collaboration is key to a good creative brief
Client: It’s really not worth keeping your cards close to your chest; sharing data (from campaign performance to customer insights) will help agencies shape their strategic response to your brief. It also makes a huge difference when you give them ample opportunities to ask questions.
Agency: Why not offer your client the chance to feed back on your ideas and co-create? It’s an excellent opportunity to showcase your culture, ways of working and compatibility. At Fifty Five and Five, we offer a one-hour problem-solving workshop as part of our approach to new business.
Evaluation and feedback
Client: It can be challenging to evaluate proposals if you don’t have clear criteria, especially if there’s more than one person involved in the decision-making process. Sharing how you plan to score proposals can help agencies ensure they deliver a balanced response, focusing on the same areas that matter to you. Try to include this stuff up front in your creative brief.
Agency: Like after a job interview, make sure you push for feedback – whether you win or lose. It’s essential to learn from every new business opportunity and find ways to apply those learnings in the future. It also allows you to continue a relationship with the client because you never know when there might be a second chance.
If you are looking for a new agency, and have an an awesome brief (or want someone to help you write it), get in touch with the team today.
The art of seduction: your brand tone of voice is your secret weapon
You have probably given a lot of thought to how your business looks. From your website to the murals on the walls in the office, when it comes to visual representation of a brand, companies put serious time and effort into their looks. But have you given much thought to how you sound? The way you express yourself as a business is made up of more than just your colour scheme. Beauty is only skin deep. Personality goes right to the bone. If you attract your audience with design, your brand tone of voice is how you seduce them. In this post, you will learn:
- It is appropriate for your specific audience
- Helps you stand out
- It’s a trust builder
- Helps you go from prospect to customer
Get your personality across
Even when you know exactly what your business’s strengths are, they won’t come through unless your brand voice is engaging. Way back when, Marketing Week reported that in the B2B sphere, emotive marketing messages works better than rational marketing messaging—and that hasn’t changed much in the intervening years. This is interesting when you might assume that B2B is all about rational decision making.
An engaging brand tone of voice is what generates emotive messaging. It’s what engages your audience. So, let’s look at how you go about making sure your organisation is expressing itself consistently and in a way that ‘fits’.
Get everyone on the same page
If you’re going to stay consistent, you need to have everyone within your business on board. From marketers to your CEO, everyone must understand your voice, or at least know that you have one. If not, it won’t come through in everything you put out there.
What to do -
Get the important people together. Host workshops where you can discuss your brand voice and get input from different areas of your business. It’s only when you start discussing ideas that you’ll find out that people can interpret ‘friendly’ as different things – and you need to iron out those creases. Highlighting what you’re trying to achieve will help everyone understand why you are doing this in the first place, and help ensure that everyone is on the same page.
Tune into your values
Your business should have brand values (if not, that’s a bigger conversation). Your values should help guide your business decisions both internally and externally, and logically it should also inform your brand voice.
What to do -
Look at your brand values and see how they translate into a personality. If transparency is one of your brand values, then your business prioritises honesty, clarity and getting right to the point. That translates to a straight-forward, honest brand voice.
If you’ve chosen integrity as a brand value, this signals that your business cares about making responsible decisions and going the extra mile to help customers. Your brand voice should be helpful and trustworthy.
This act of translation is how you create a tone of voice that’s tailored to your business, your brand and your audience.
Write brand voice guidelines and stick to them
It’s easy enough to create a brand voice document and think that because you’ve created it, you’re automatically creating marketing materials in your brand voice. Consistency really is key. When multiple people are creating different materials, it can be hard to remember how to ensure that your brand voice comes through. That’s why you need a set of simple guidelines that will make it easy.
What to do -
It doesn’t have to be complicated or long – think of it as defining a character or persona that you’ll be able to inhabit:
Our brand voice is uplifting; we always look on positive side of life. We’re friendly and warm, making sure that everyone who interacts with our business comes away feeling optimistic. To keep things simple, our brand voice uses the simplest and clearest language possible.
Your guidelines should tell this person’s story and explain their voice in a way that makes it easy for anyone to understand. Keep these guidelines up to date and revise them when your business makes any changes to the way you operate. They’ll be the thing that keeps your identity constant even as you grow and change.
Fifty Five and Five is a digital marketing agency with a lot of really talented storytellers. We’ve been creating brand voices that get results for years now – if you’re not confident that you know where to start, we’d be more than happy to give you a hand. Get in touch today.
6 digital marketing technologies to help you raise your game
Technology has permeated every aspect of our lives, from the way we communicate to the way we shop. Marketing has become an art that’s primarily digital. No matter what you’re selling, and to whom, technology can improve the quality of your marketing output and, ultimately, help you generate more leads. In this post, we’re going to examine the current state of six digital marketing technologies, and how you can use them to raise your game.
- Social media
- Paid media
- SEO
- Reporting
- Training
You already use all of these technologies, right? Well, let us blow your mind.
1. Social media
Social media can be used to build your brand identity, to reach out to your existing customers and to find new audiences. It can be used for thought leadership, to enhance your SEO rankings and as a direct channel for people to interact with your brand. Most organisations already know this, but they invest hours in social media management without having a good idea of how to get return on investment.
The key to using social media is knowing what you’re using it for. Are you looking to create brand awareness? Then that goal needs to inform the way you use social media - you need to target your audience, create relevant content and maintain a strong brand.
What tools to use and why?
If you’re looking for greater visibility over your social channels, detailed insights about what is does or doesn’t work or greater control over publishing posts through automation and scheduling, these tools can transform what’s possible with social media. If you want to produce quality posts that engage and grow your social following across multiple channels, then these tools are exactly what you need.
Hootsuite is one of the most popular tools for enhancing your social media output. It supports over 150 integrations, allowing users to update multiple networks in one step. It’s also capable of analysing over 200 metrics, so you can create a dashboard that perfectly tracks your business’s goals . It’s the perfect first tool to get started when you’re investing in your social media management.
Hootsuite’s dashboard
Sprout Social is a social media scheduling, monitoring and reporting platform that offers a customer relationship manager (CRM) feature. This enables you to create profiles of your customers, which will lead to stronger relationships. When it comes to social media followers, it’s about quality over quantity: having many followers who don’t interact with your channel is less valuable than a few followers who do.
Sprout Social’s CRM platform
Revive Old Post is an excellent tool to get maximum impact from your content. It helps you schedule new and old content that can be automatically posted in regular intervals that targets your audience. Many businesses make the mistake of never reposting their content, but it’s essential to reshare content in order to improve its performance. This tool will help you create a schedule that works for you.
Revive Old Post PRO
Loomly isn’t just a social media management tool – it’s also an idea generation platform to help you create ideas that will resonate with your audience and tie in to current trends. It suggests ideas related to your industry, any holidays or national days that are close, trending hashtags, and more. You can even integrate it with Zapier so that your content generation and publication processes are entirely streamlined.
Loomly’s post builder
Having a social media channel is an excellent way of reaching new audiences and creating a recognisable brand. These social media tools represent just a fraction of what’s available on the market to help you make the most of your content and your social channels. Brands are going to be expected to keep up with social media and be present on an increasing amount of channels as times go on – best get started sooner rather than later.
2. Paid media
Paid media is an external marketing effort that involves a paid placement. This can include PPC advertising, branded content and display ads. It’s a crucial part of any marketing strategy: by picking the right platform and targeting the right demographic, paid media can ensure your message reaches the right audience. However, to do this you need the correct tools to track your campaigns. There are also great tools to help you develop a competitive strategy.
What tools to use and why?
Using a third party platform means you can extend visibility of your advert placements and find a larger audience. Your ROI needs to be optimal, which means a lot of planning and overseeing your long term strategy. A management platform simplifies the process, allowing you to target your audience more effectively and reduce your overall spend.
There’s a great tool called SpyFu, which enables you to carry out PPC competitor research. Whether it’s a competitor’s estimated monthly spend, the keywords that they are targeting or how well their ads are ranking, SpyFu gives you insights to help put together a highly competitive campaign strategy .
SEMrush is a popular paid media tool that offers an extensive keyword database. It makes building ads simple -using information about the ads posted by your competitors to ensure that they have the best chance of ROI. This chance for better audience targeting means your PPC campaigns will be more likely to succeed.
SEMrush’s dashboard
Leadpages is a tool that’s suited for smaller businesses who are looking to engage with their core audience on social media channels. It acts as a funnel, sending your target audience to a specific landing page designed for them. When it comes to social media followers it’s a case of quality over quantity – if you can engage with a small selection of more interested followers, your content is more likely to see conversions. It’s integrates with with Google Ads and Facebook Ads, so you can capture leads effectively and quickly.
Leadpages’ dashboard
PPC is an investment that takes research and precision to get right. Before intelligent digital marketing tools, it was simply a case of buying ads in places you thought your audience would see them and hoping for success. But now, with the amount of research and segmentation that’s possible, your business stands a much better chance of getting seen by the right people.
3. SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is all about staying visible on search engine results pages. It feels like an arcane art sometimes because Google is forever changing its algorithms. Staying on top of these changes is hard enough but being able to adapt your SEO to these changes and stay ahead of competitors is the real challenge.
What tools to use and why?
Moz is a great bet for continued SEO success. Not only does it offer useful educational resources to keep on top of SEO best practice, but the Moz all-in-one SEO toolset provides the full range of capabilities that you need. It tracks desktop and mobile keyword ranking, allowing users to easily keep tabs on any and all active keywords. This intelligent keyword analysis is supported by other features like link building and opportunities, site audits, search visibility score and page insights.
Moz’s dashboard
DeepCrawl is a unique website crawling tool. It provides SEO auditing that shows you a deep dive of your site issues to assess your overall site health. With features like backlink tracking, device breakdowns, ad hoc keyword research and more, DeepCrawl puts you in a great position to begin improving your SEO from. It’s not a tool for keyword research or position monitoring, so it’s perfect for SEO newbies.
Deepcrawl’s dashboard
In today’s competitive online world, it’s not enough just to use SEO practices and hope you rank above competitors. You need to use the right tools to find the right online niches to occupy. Long tail keywords, in particular, have become a beacon of hope for small businesses hoping to rank on results pages. Taking SEO seriously means doing your digital research and picking the perfect keywords.
4. Email
Our email inboxes are awash with communications competing for our attention. With so much competition, you need to make sure you optimise your emails so they stand out from the crowd. Great email marketing isn’t just about open-rates but click-throughs and conversions. It’s not just about getting people to open your emails; you need to offer actual value.
What tools to use and why?
MailChimp is our tool of choice for sending out emails. MailChimp allows you to automate your email marketing with simple A/B testing, ready-to-use campaign templates and a simple email designer, so you can focus on the strategy to guarantee that your emails add value to the target audience. ‘MailChimp reports’ make it easy to track how successful your emails are at engaging with your audience, using advanced segmentation for precise targeting, distribution by time zone and comparative data reporting.
Mailchimp’s dashboard
SendinBlue is a digital marketing suite that includes an email marketing platform. It’s easy to build emails with a drag and drop editor, and it offers personalisation, data list segmentation, automation and analytics. The free version is more than enough to keep a small business going, offering unlimited contacts and up to 300 emails a day, so this is an ideal way to get started with email campaigns.
Omnisend, as the name suggests, is an email marketing tools with omni-channel capacity. Within the automation workflow, you can add additional functions like push notifications and social media messages alongside your email campaigns. This is a wider approach to email marketing, incorporating it into targeted workflows that reach your audience using multiple personalised methods. It’s ideal if your marketing resources are stretched, giving you a single tool with plenty of functionality.
Omnisend’s automation dashboard
Email marketing is one of the core tools for a marketing team for a reason; it’s excellent at nurturing leads into customers. It also offers an opportunity to create a dialogue with your audience, sending them targeted updates and offers that’ll pique your interest. It’s a more one-on-one dynamic, and that means gauging the tone and the relationship between you and your audience correctly. The name of the game here is personalisation.
5. Reporting
40% of marketers said that demonstrating the ROI of their marketing activities is one of their greatest priorities. Marketing professionals are under pressure to prove that their campaigns are creating business value. These days, marketing is very much a numbers game. You need to be able to report back to the C-Suite with hard evidence that your campaigns are working – otherwise the budget for your next social campaign will dry up.
What tools to use and why?
Most tools and platforms – from the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to the dedicated-marketing tools like Hootsuite – offer in-depth analytics. Google Data Studio collects real-time data from YouTube, Google Ads and Google Analytics to help you create dynamic, interactive dashboards. It’s also compatible with multiple third party data sources like Twitter, MailChimp and Salesforce. Google Data Studio helps users put together reports that are fully customisable, easy to filter and easy to share.
Google Data Studio’s dashboard
However, for that added bit of magic to pull everything together, Google Analytics stands head and shoulders above the rest as a tool for measuring the bigger picture – particularly by monitoring traffic arriving on your website and how site users are behaving. Google’s machine learning capabilities mean that Google Analytics can generate insights you just can’t get anywhere else.
Google Analytics dashboard
Cyfe is a popular tool for marketers because of its comprehensive reporting. It tracks just about everything within your business, from social media to analytics, and sales to KPIs. There are more than 250 metrics available to measure, and it’s easy to integrate with other services like Google and Salesforce. The dashboard is fully configurable with pre-populated widgets that can be tailored to each marketer’s need. The reporting is all-encompassing across your business, so this is a great tool for businesses without much room for new tools.
Cyfe’s dashboard
Instead of thinking of reporting as the culmination of your efforts, you need to think about it as the way that you justify future investment in your marketing efforts. After all, management want to see results and return on investment – this is the best way to show that the tactics you’re using are successful, and that you have ideas about how to improve in future. Digital reporting tools are your best friend when it comes to innovation in your marketing efforts.
6. Training
In a sector where change is almost always constant – SEO is a great example of this – it is essential to keep on top of the latest marketing platforms. In this respect, to succeed in marketing you need to be a life-long learner. You need to be open to change and ready to pick up new skills all the time.
What tools to use and why?
There are several tools that can help you keep up with the latest digital marketing platforms and skills. LinkedIn Learning is a great example – with a wide range of professional courses and tutorial videos. There are courses for every level from beginner to expert, and even over 16,000 entirely free courses. From the technical aspects of PPC to the writing skills you need for engaging content, there’s a course here for everything.
LinkedIn learning
Another great example is the Top 50 Microsoft Partners benchmarking tool; a tool created by our team at Fifty Five and Five. Using a wide variety of metrics, you can rank your company’s marketing efforts across its social output, website and blog. See where you rank today.
The Top 50 Microsoft Partners dashboard
Google Digital Garage also offers a ‘fundamentals of digital marketing’ course that’s extensive enough for any beginner. After all, a lot of digital marketing is about working with Google, so why not go directly to the source for more information? It’s self-directed, with 26 modules coming in at around 40 hours, so it’s a handy way to get started for free.
Keeping on top of your marketing education is essential – things are always going to change, and if you don’t keep up then you’ll get left behind. We like to think of training in marketing as a way of investing in the success of our future efforts.
Why are digital marketing technologies important?
There’s now such a wide range of applications to help B2B marketers that it can be hard to decide what your team requires. A recent BrightTALK study found that ‘lack of resources such as staff, funding and time remains the biggest obstacle to successful B2B lead generation for 61% of respondents’. With that in mind, more marketers are going to rely on digital tools to streamline their marketing efforts.
It’s easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer variety in the market, but the key is remembering what your business is trying to accomplish. Create a strategy and set goals – this will make it easier to identify features in tools that will be most beneficial to you. There are thousands of tools available, so make sure to create a list of the most beneficial services your business needs before you get started researching.
We hope this guide can point you in the right direction to find the technology that your marketing team requires.
At Fifty Five and Five, our expert marketing team use a variety of digital marketing technologies to help them deliver the best results for our clients. To find out more about our team, what we do, and the technologies we use, get in touch with us today.
How to write for email campaign success and actually get results
When it comes to email campaign success, starting from scratch can be daunting. It’s predicted that we will be sending and receiving upwards of 347 billion daily emails by 2022. With all this noise, how could your emails even be noticed – never mind opened?
But there is a way. It’s about being simple, engaging and consistent. We’re going to share some straight-forward steps you can use right now to bring your email campaigns to life and enjoy actual results—and good ones too.
Identify the goals for your email campaign
The first step in this process is identifying exactly why email should be your preferred option. The clearer your goal, the easier it will be to measure progress and results once the campaign has been executed.
For example, goals for your campaign could include persuading recipients to:
- Download an eBook
- Sign up to a webinar
- Buy a specific product or service
As well as provoking actions like these, campaign goals could also include:
- Getting recipients interested in your offerings
- Raising brand awareness for your business
- Re-engaging or nurturing current subscribers
Once your goal is established, you can get started on defining your audience.
Who’s reading these emails, anyway?
Now, before diving into copy, you must first outline exactly who your emails will be seen by. If you’ve been doing email marketing for a while, you’ll no doubt already know who your audience is. But if you’re new to the scene, you’ll probably need to make a few educated guesses so you can tailor your content effectively.
To do this, you can use Google Analytics to access data on demographics, interests, locations and so on. This will provide a snapshot of who your customers are and what they are interested in.
The trick with successful emails is to make them personal. By segmenting your audience, it’s easier to send emails that at least feel personalised.
Curate effective emails for your audience
With your purpose and audience in mind, you’re all set to begin writing. Here are a few simple pointers to keep in mind:
- Keep it short and sweet
When taking into account the sheer volume of emails sent and received every day, it’s important that your copy is engaging. Avoid waffle, keep to the subject and add value.
- Provide clear and obvious value
If you only send promotional emails, your readers will likely lose interest. Keep them interested by outlining how your business or product can benefit them. Seems too obvious but make use of bullet points and bold text so that the important parts of an email are easy to find.
- Stay relevant
When writing your emails, always keep your audience in mind. What is it that they want and need? How can you address their pain points? Rather than focus on what you’re trying to sell, you should focus on what your readers need.
- Include a clear CTA
What is the overall objective of your email? The call to action you include needs to be immediately obvious and move the recipient towards your goal. So, if you’re looking to encourage sign-ups for a free trial, your CTA might read ‘Sign up now!’
- Check, check...and check again
Once the email is written get a second or third opinion, proofread and ensure you’ve ticked off every point in this list. When sending out an email to a large mailing list, you really don’t want to make any avoidable mistakes.
Add the finishing touches
When it comes to selecting imagery for your emails, we’d recommend avoiding stock photos – or at least the most obvious and artificially-posed ones – as these can deter readers. Adding a few interesting images can boost the click-through rate but be mindful of the file size – as images that are too big can trigger spam filters, sending your email to the junk folder.
Your email campaign also provides a good opportunity to highlight your website and social media platforms. Add links where possible to drive people to your site. This shouldn’t distract from the overall objective of your email, but it certainly can’t hurt to include a few inbound links where relevant.
Create your email template
Fortunately, there are plenty of email providers (we use Mailchimp) that will allow you to set up and schedule emails with no need for coding.
A crucial consideration here is responsive design. This ensures that your email looks great on every device and will improve your click-through rate (CTR). If you’re using an automated email platform then this will be taken care of for you. If not, there are lots of tips out there for responsive design best practices!
Set up tracking devices
Before sending your emails out into the world, you’ll need to track them. This is the best way to quantify the success of your campaigns, and it can be executed with relative ease by using a tracking pixel.
The gist of it is that a tracking pixel is added right before the closing body tag of the email. Then, when this image is loaded by the reader, the image request is logged by the server. This information is then collected by your chosen analytics service and you can access statistics on click-through rates, open rates and more.
Testing! Testing! 1, 2, 3
With all of the above in place, you’re ready to test your email. This should involve sending it out to multiple email accounts (accessed from a variety of devices) so that you can ensure everything looks as you want it to. Different email providers tend to display emails differently, so you need to check that yours works across the board.
This stage is vital as it gives you the chance to iron out any creases before your email is sent. Any issues that you spot should be addressed, and the testing process repeated.
What are you waiting for? It’s time to push the button
Sending mid-morning during a working day seems effective in terms of open rates. To find your optimal time, it’s best to trial a few different times and analyse which gets the highest engagement.
Let the data do the talking
Hopefully, you will gain lots of useful insights from the data your campaign accumulates. Understanding this data is vital to understand what works and identify areas for improvement. We suggest looking at:
- The success of your CTA – does it need tweaking next time?
- How many readers are using mobile devices? If you have lots of mobile users, you’ll want to focus on mobile-friendly design.
- Who is least engaged with your emails? You can segment these contacts out and then try to retarget them with tailored content in the future.
Pick a partner to do all the grafting for you
We hope this article has provided helpful insights to get your email campaigns off the ground and produce fantastic results. However, if you don’t have the time, resources or knowledge to achieve this by yourself, we have heaps of email marketing experience and would love to lend a helping hand.
If you’d like further help with email marketing, get in touch with a member of our team today. You can also check out our website for more information.
It’s time to reinvigorate your best lead generation strategies
What your marketing can learn from Rocky IV
(Please bear with me while I relate lead generation strategies to a boxing film from 1985...)
Remember that training scene in Rocky IV? Sylvester Stallone goes to a Russian farm in the dead of winter to get in shape for his bout with Ivan Drago. While his opponent uses state-of-the-art equipment, Rocky trains by hacking at trees with an axe, lifting logs, sawing wood, pulling sleds, crawling face first through the snow.
What’s my point? Well, who won the fight? (Spoiler alert: it was Rocky) Cutting edge technology can provide an advantage but it doesn’t replace good old-fashioned grit and determination.
Let’s move from the boxing ring to the marketing gauntlet - 61% of marketers say generating leads and site traffic is their top challenge. 85% of marketers say lead generation is their most important goal. Lead generation is hard. Almost as hard as defeating a giant Russian boxer surrounded by his comrades.
It can be tempting to look for the ‘silver bullet’ that claims to boost your leads. in reality, it’s a result of consistent marketing efforts, ongoing relationships, interactions and everything else happening in a business’s day-to-day.
Below we’re going to run through some old lead generation strategies and introduce some new ones too. But to generate those leads, just like defeating Ivan Drago, it’s going to come down to good old-fashioned hard work and staying persistent.
#1 - Microsurveys
Microsurveys are extremely short surveys, made up of a handful of questions that take a couple of minutes to complete.
This has a variety of benefits over regular surveys. The short nature naturally brings a higher participation rate and, in terms of lead gen, you can approach people at a specific point in the customer journey. Sometimes, without them even leaving the page.
Lead generation strategies in practice
Let’s say you’re an IT consultancy targeting the top end of the sales funnel. By locating and focusing on customer pain points (pre-identified through marketing personas), you could create a microsurvey on the challenges they want to solve with your services. Embed this microsurvey on a webpage with high traffic and watch the responses roll in.
A little further down the funnel, you could embed a microsurvey into the top of your email newsletter. Here, you’ve got a more engaged audience than your website and you can use that to your advantage. Adding a one or two question microsurvey in your newsletters is a great way to gather consistent, unique insights. Ask your subscribers what content they’d like to see and include it in your next newsletter!
#2 - B2B influencer and word of mouth marketing
Influencer marketing is where you encourage, persuade or pay market influencers to promote your product or services. This can encourage word of mouth marketing (even if those words are said over the internet) which can result in 500% more sales than a paid media impression.
People listen to their peers. An individual is far more relatable than a brand. A shoutout from an influencer in your sphere can provide a big recognition boost, they can also add authenticity and credibility to your business through thought leadership content.
Lead generation strategies in practice
Now, let’s say you’re an ISV. The first step is to build a pool of potential influencers. Tools like Audiense and FollowerWonk are great for this, helping you find and rank leaders in your industry or niche. Even something as simple as looking at the ‘most popular’ social accounts that follow your brand can net surprising results.
Why not combine microsurveys and influencer marketing by asking current customers who (in your field) they like to listen to, read and watch?
It’s important to remember that building relationships with influencers is a gradual process. B2B purchases usually involve multiple decision makers, giving the ultimate decision more nuance than in the B2C space. The good news is, the average B2B purchase dwarfs that in the B2C market, giving successful referrals a huge impact.
Aim to start small. Thought leadership content is a good first step and can be a gentle introduction to your product and brand. Once they’re on board, educate them on your product. Despite being experts in their field, the more they know about your product and brand, the more genuine their marketing will be.
#3 - Lead magnets
Also known as gated content, lead magnets offer a long-form resource, such as an eBook or whitepaper, in exchange for contact information. Essentially providing information for free, this can be hugely tempting for the reader.
This might be number one on the list of lead generation strategies, but one lead magnet stands tall in terms of success rate: webinars. Adobe Connect found a 51% average registration conversion on their webinars, leading to 36% live attendance and a further 55% viewing the recording post-event. This opens the door to a series of polls and further communication during the webinar as well.
Lead generation strategies in practice
Start a webinar! Or other content that involves the ‘human’ element, like podcasts or a video series. If these are live events, signing up will feel like a natural step of the process. Even if visitors are getting pre-recorded content, knowing that they’ll see or hear from a real person - not just read some text - helps usher form filling.
#4 - Never underestimate the power of a landing page
The landing page is the step between lead magnets and form filling - the dedicated space where a visitor becomes a lead.
This might seem obvious, but that’s because it’s proven to work, time and again. It’s also because we still see companies link CTAs to their homepage. A call-to-action should always drive a visitor to a place designed to convert them into a lead.
So, you know that landing pages are critical to success. How do you make sure they actually convert your visitors into leads? We’ve got a step-by-step guide that explains exactly how.
Lead generation strategies in practice
This time, you’re a marketing agency offering best practice advice and content marketing for B2B tech companies. You’ve got an avid reader approaching the end of your blog (sound familiar at all?) and there’s some relevant, in-depth content that could help them further.
Lead generation is an uphill battle, but every great training montage features a rise to the top. Rather than reaching for the next advanced piece of technology, change your mindset. Go back to basics, thinking of ways to improve and optimise what you’ve already learned. Yes, it’s hard work. But as Rocky said: “If I can change and you can change, everybody can change.”
Our team’s top tips for B2B marketing automation
It might be an unpopular opinion, but sometimes I do wish the robots would take some of my jobs. When it comes to tedious and repetitive tasks like creating targeted mailing lists, or personalising individual user journeys, actually, you know what? Take it away, robot friends.
Bill Gates is widely credited with saying that lazy people will find an easy way to do things. I think Mr. Gates has it slightly wrong here – sorry, Bill. It’s actually smart people that find an easy way to do things. That’s why we have the amazing tools that we have today – very smart people built incredibly complicated software and algorithms so that computers can automate tasks or analyse data so that we don’t have to. That’s brilliant, and I want to get in on it.
In this blog, I’m going to tell you how you can use B2B marketing automation effectively to make marketing jobs easier and our work a lot more impactful. There will also be insights from some other members of the team who use automation regularly in their work for our clients. Let’s start with that classic mainstay of digital marketing: the email.
Smart, responsive email marketing
Many businesses use email marketing to communicate with leads and existing customers. It’s one of the oldest, most established, tried and tested formats. Automated email marketing usually comes under one of the following categories:
- Event-based emails that are triggered by pre-defined events or user behaviour
- Drip-feed email content that’s scheduled to be deployed at specific times
Trigger events include when someone joins your email list, clicks a link in an email, fills out a form or visits a page on your website. When these things happen, you can pre-define an email to be sent out to them. This is a great way to follow up from previous points of contact and nudge a prospect along the path to a sale.
Drip-feed email content is a series of automated emails to subscribers sent out at pre-determined intervals, usually forming the bulk of your email campaign and taking prospects on your lead nurture journey. These emails are perfect opportunities to provide leads with content that will support your sales pitch – links to blog articles, eBooks and more.
Here at Fifty Five and Five, we often use Marketo and Mailchimp for our email marketing automation. As well as scheduling emails, today’s sophisticated B2B marketing automation tools often allow you to make use of your customer contact lists in clever ways, and they can also provide valuable data on how your email campaigns are performing.
I asked our marketing executive Maria about how she uses Mailchimp. Here’s what she said: “Mailchimp helps you to build an email campaign by sorting your audience based on some specific characteristics (such as where they're based, what they signed up to before, etc.) and it pulls them into the campaign. Then, once you launch the campaign, it sends the email to who you choose to be part of the pool and it gives you useful insights, such as open rate, drop rate, etc. that help you to shape up your campaign.”
In summary, Maria also added: “Email automation is a great help in reaching out to leads and providing them with "richer" information on your product or services. And, when it comes to managing large amounts amount of data – thousands of emails or more – these tools can save a lot of time and reduce the chances of making mistakes.”
Optimised paid media advertising
B2B marketing automation can also be highly valuable in the world of pay-per-click advertising. Running successful paid media campaigns is a skill, and it requires an awful lot of time, in the prep and planning stages, through to creative design and execution. However, once the strategy and assets are agreed, it's time to be smart in order to achieve the best results possible. That’s where automation and machine learning can help.
For example, if you're running a Google Ads campaign and not using 'Responsive Search ads', you're missing a trick. These ads use Google's algorithms to serve potential customers with the most personalised combination of copy you have provided. That means the user sees something more relevant to them, and you can benefit from better results and performance.
Bidding algorithms are also hugely helpful in the paid media world, as our Head of Client Services Aidan Danaher explains: “Almost every platform provides this functionality, along with traditional methods like manual cost per clicks, or maximum CPC. What's great about this approach is it will optimise based on the objectives you've set, improving that ever-important customer journey, and ultimately the conversions for your campaign.”
As Aidan says, functionality like Responsive Search ads and bidding algorithms are now a vital part of the paid media toolbox. Businesses today should definitely be harnessing them across their pay-per-click marketing.
Scheduling your social media campaigns
Social media marketing is another area where B2B marketing automation can offer serious benefits. Scheduling and automating your social media marketing means whoever’s managing your social media accounts doesn’t have to concern themselves with remembering to post this or that post at a particular time – which may be when they’re sitting down to eat lunch or getting settled for a night of TV.
Our writer and social media executive Megan explains the benefits: “Social media automation allows me to keep a clear view of all our upcoming content. It's important to post consistently on social channels, and the tools we use allow me to plan ahead of time – so we never miss a day or an opportunity to engage our audience!”
Fifty Five and Five marketing executive Laura also had this to say on the subject: “To ensure the success of your campaigns in social media, timing is crucial. That means finding out at what time of the day your audience is going to be most receptive to your message. But we're all human – and sometimes very busy ones – so it's easy to forget to post. That’s where social automation becomes a game changer.”
Top tips for making the most of social media automation
No more grappling with time-zones
This ability to schedule social media activity at any time of day or night is especially useful if your team want to post in different time-zones. They don’t have to be awake at 2am to post because it’s midday somewhere else in the world. With social media automation, they don’t have to be.
Keep a healthy balance
This isn’t to say that all your social posts should be automated. Social media is, by its very nature, supposed to be dynamic and personal – there’s no substitute for posting in the moment. Ad-hoc social activity capitalising on recent events, news stories and trends ensures your followers stay engaged, and don’t feel like they’re just following a bot.
Be careful with your responses
On a similar note, think carefully before using automated responses to social media interactions – this can easily come across as lazy and impersonal. We’ve all received an automated “Thanks for following!” DM and thought, “OK, great, but so what?” A good rule of thumb is to automate your campaigns and use real-time personal interaction for the rest.
Choose the right tool for the job
Hootsuite is the social media automation tool of choice for organisations all around the globe, including our own. It’s simple to set up and use, with an intuitive dashboard interface and support for all the most important social networks including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
I asked Laura about the benefits of using Hootsuite for B2B marketing automation. Here’s her reply: “From my experience with Hootsuite, I can say that it helped me a lot in previous campaigns to get the right message across to the right audience while making sure that my campaign execution was following the strategy thoroughly". She’s summed it up well.
Ready to get started with B2B marketing automation?
I hope this blog has been useful in illustrating some of the many marketing automation benefits. Automation is addictive: once you start using it, you’ll soon be finding new ways to apply it to your role and across your whole business, making life easier for everyone and achieving some pretty impressive marketing results. You’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.
