3TecSolutions | B2B Lead | Marketing Automation | Outbound Campaigns https://3tecsolutions.com Defining Success Together Wed, 02 Sep 2020 10:31:20 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.7.6 https://3tecsolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/cropped-site-icon-32x32.png 3TecSolutions | B2B Lead | Marketing Automation | Outbound Campaigns https://3tecsolutions.com 32 32 Lead Generation Software https://3tecsolutions.com/lead-generation-software/ https://3tecsolutions.com/lead-generation-software/#respond Wed, 02 Sep 2020 03:10:02 +0000 https://3tecsolutions.com/?p=2066 More leads, no extra effort

Sounds too good to be true right? We get it, you’ve been burned before. All those “One tip to increase leads 5000%” blogs that led you nowhere. Generating leads is difficult.

So we’ll tell you real quick how Leadfeeder works.

  • Install the Leadfeeder Tracker script on your site
  • We identify companies that have visited your website
  • We enrich this with an employee contact database
  • You send qualified leads directly to your CRM and email

How does this help you? Well, you get to identify companies and decision-makers that are already engaging with your content and campaigns.

That’s right, they’re looking at you right now. They know who you are and they’re interested in what you sell. No extra budget or effort needed to acquire new traffic, launch more ad campaigns, or test landing page forms. Just supercharge what you’re already doing.

Get more leads from your current website traffic. Seriously, go get ‘em you rockstar.

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HubSpot vs Salesforce: Choosing the Right CRM https://3tecsolutions.com/hubspot-vs-salesforce-choosing-the-right-crm/ https://3tecsolutions.com/hubspot-vs-salesforce-choosing-the-right-crm/#respond Wed, 02 Sep 2020 02:55:19 +0000 https://3tecsolutions.com/?p=2061 Customers are the core of your business. In order to operate a successful company, you need a reliable CRM that fits both your business’s needs and your clients’ needs.

Customer Relationship Management helps identify and close leads while simultaneously maintaining and assisting your existing customers. CRM technologies lead to better business strategies and a higher level of functionality in terms of sales, marketing, customer service and more.

HubSpot vs Salesforce

We understand the importance of choosing the right CRM for your business. Although it’s clear that integrating CRM software into a business plan is necessary for most growing companies, finding the right CRM is not as easy.

It’s important to choose a CRM based on your business’s needs rather than solely on big names and ratings. This includes evaluating inbound vs outbound sales and tools that can help your business best accomplish its goals.

So if you’re conflicted, don’t worry. In this post, we’re examining HubSpot vs Salesforce and bring you one step closer to selecting the CRM that’s right for your business.

What Is HubSpot?

HubSpot was founded on the idea of inbound marketing. Its technologies feature sales, marketing and service systems, all of which are tied together through its CRM software. The foundation of HubSpot revolves around being helpful, human, and holistic, and its tools are designed to make each step of your journey personal and simple.

Within HubSpot, users have access to a variety of features. Its main software includes a marketing hub, sales hub and service hub, and the benefits of each of these can be integrated through the HubSpot Growth Stack.

HubSpot’s CRM is at the core of it’s software, allowing you to operate all of these technologies together in a way that is easy and efficient.

HubSpot CRM

HubSpot CRM organizes and tracks your leads and customers. One of the major advantages that separates Hubspot’s CRM from other companies is it’s price – it’s free. For no cost, you have up to 1,000,000 contacts in addition to users and storage.

Although HubSpot also offers premium features, their free software is a great option for businesses that are just getting started and may have a tighter budget. To learn more about its pros (and cons), check out our complete HubSpot CRM Review.

HubSpot Interface

HubSpot’s interface is clean and simple, which makes it easy to find and access whatever it is you’re looking for. The CRM dashboard displays your entire sales funnel and is updated by the minute, giving you a real time look into your progress.

Its interface allows you to sort and filter your deals according to your preference. With easy access to deals both won and lost, contracts in any state and upcoming appointments, you’re able to easily see your company’s current performance in comparison to your overall goals.

Moreover, every interaction that you have with a lead or customer is stored in one easily accessible place in the form of a timeline so that you can quickly sort through emails, calls, notes, and meetings.

HubSpot Sales Software

When your business is ready, take HubSpot CRM to the next level by syncing it with the HubSpot sales software. This integration lets you and your team fully personalize your approach towards sales, leading to better, long-term customer relationships.

Many of the HubSpot CRM features involve automation so that salespeople can focus on selling rather than inputting data. This saves salespeople time and gives them the opportunity to close more deals (and see increased profits as a result.)

HubSpot software saves customer interactions and logs sales activity automatically for various platforms. When used with the sales hub, HubSpot will sync with Gmail or Outook and track calls, emails and meetings.

HubSpot Sales Hub Features

In terms of email marketing, you can schedule personalized sequences so that you reach leads at the right time. HubSpot’s tracking features and real-time notifications give you insights into which emails are successful based on their open and click rate. Once these emails are identified, quickly turn them into templates for future use.

While using the CRM, you also can place calls efficiently and simplify meeting scheduling. Call with just a click directly from HubSpot and opt to record a call based on the information discussed. After the call is over, HubSpot will automatically log it to the corresponding contact.

If you need to schedule a meeting, leads and customers will be able to see your availability through a shareable link with your calendar. Each of these features makes the sales process easier and more efficient for everyone involved.

HubSpot’s Additional Features

HubSpot’s tools, especially when combined, take your business to the next level. In addition to its CRM and sales software, HubSpot also offers marketing and service technologies that will fully integrate its software into your business strategy.

Its marketing hub offers a variety of services including lead generation, marketing automation and analytics. In terms of service, HubSpot creates a direct connection to your customers through various features including tickets, customer feedback and a knowledge base.

HubSpot Marketing Software

HubSpot’s marketing software is an all-in-one technology built to bring customers directly to your business. The marketing hub is designed to help you attract more visitors, convert leads, close deals and delight customers.

Attract more visitors by creating a responsive web page filled with the content that consumers crave. The content strategy tool will find key information so that you can post about topics that your customers are already searching for.

HubSpot then takes this to the next level through blog post blueprint and SEO, allowing you to reach and hold onto the right people. Once on your website, visitors are much more likely to convert as a result of HubSpot’s landing pages, call-to-actions and lead management software.

After a lead subscribes to your email list, deliver personal follow up through marketing automation, CRM and salesforce sync. With all of these features in addition to social media monitoring, your current customers will turn into your biggest advocates.

HubSpot CMS

HubSpot’s content management system integrates all of your marketing tools into one powerful, accessible and personalized website. With this technology, you can create and track emails, pages and blog posts in one place.

It automatically optimizes your content for any platform so that it is safe, secure and fast. From there, you’re able to see who is visiting your page and where they’re accessing it from through the content management system’s smart content insights.

This creates a more personalized experience for every potential customer. Through a combination of marketing automation, lead management, analytics and SEO, you will be able to streamline your content in a way that appeals to the people you want to reach.

HubSpot Service Hub

Once you’ve converted leads into customers, the HubSpot sales software helps you to manage and attend to your existing clients in order to better grow your business.

The informed customer has high expectations. Therefore, your business needs to continue delivering value to them long after you’ve closed the deal.

Answer your customers immediately with live chat features. If their problem is more complicated, assign a ticket to one of your team members. Either way, HubSpot automatically logs this information in their customer profile as a result of the integrated CRM software.

You can also increase your efficiency by adding chatbots, a help desk and a relevant FAQ page, while still remaining personally involved. HubSpot also wants customers to be able to help themselves.

FAQ pages based on questions that clients have actually asked, in addition to the HubSpot Academy and HubSpot Community, will help your customers to grow with your business.

Once you’ve made these improvements, use HubSpot’s feedback tools to see the overall impacts of implementing this layer of customer service.

What Is Salesforce?

Salesforce identifies itself as the world’s #1 CRM platform. Salesforce CRM was the first of its kind and changed the way that businesses operate. Like other CRM softwares, Salesforce was built to take your business to the next level.

It strives to make advantaged technologies more accessible to everyone, creating better opportunities for growing companies. Salesforce was founded on the characteristics of trust, customer success, innovation and equality.

From a software perspective, Salesforce operates on cloud-based applications for sales, service, marketing and more. Similar to HubSpot, its all-in-one CRM platform is designed to log, manage and analyze customer activity simply.

Salesforce Features

Salesforce’s three most comparable features to HubSpot are its sales hub, marketing hub and service hub. These cloud-based softwares aim to personalize the customer experience by taking advantage of the best developments and technological advancements such as automation and artificial intelligence. Salesforce embraces change and uses technology to transform businesses.

Salesforce Sales Performance Management

Salesforce’s sales strategy involves closing more deals, obtaining leads, accelerating productivity and making insightful decisions. To accomplish this, it includes services for contact, opportunity and lead management.

The contact feature gives you all of the information you need about a customer in addition to insights from various social media outlets. Salesforce takes a similar approach to opportunity management by providing a complete view of products, competition and quotes.

In terms of leads, Salesforce CRM improves conversion rates and increases revenue as a result. Its sales software combined with its sales data and forecasting lets you to track your leads throughout every step of the process, allowing you to make insightful, informed decisions.

With this sales software, you’re able to make better decisions about clients using the 360 degree view of the customer. This technology tailors any sales process to your preference, making it easier and more accessible and personalized for both representative and partners.

Salesforce Technology

Salesforce also takes advantage of frequent advances and innovation by offering the latest technology including automation and artificial intelligence.

“Salesforce Einstein” integrates AI directly into your sales process, giving you insights into top leads and potential next steps. Salesforce CPQ takes automating to the next level by computerizing your configure, price and quote process.

All of these features fit a flexible, moving schedule as a result of their AppExchange applications, sync and share files and visual workflow approvals. Whether you’re in the office on your laptop or on the go with your phone, you still have the opportunity to make a sale.

Additionally, all of the Salesforce software is protected and up to date with the standards and requirements of highly regulated industries. Each of these features unite to create a more consistent process by connecting every element of the buyer’s journey and making your business more efficient.

Salesforce Customer Service and Support Software

The service cloud was designed to increase customer satisfaction and build lasting relationships through personalized, intelligent support. This software lets you to communicate with customers through whichever platform they prefer, whether that’s via phone, text or chat.

The connect CRM feature gives you a detailed overview of everything you need to know about a customer so that you can speak directly to their needs. Salesforce’s various AI tools and automated features ensure that technicians have exactly what they need to solve complex customer problems.

The service cloud matches customers with agents who are the most qualified in that specific problem area. CTI integrations instantly log information about customer calls while automating repetitive tasks relating to customer problems to save you time.

Clients also have the opportunity to answer their own questions through an easily accessible knowledge portal. This self service features allows you to easily build your brand through customization of your community branch.

To create a more streamlined experience for your clients, directly connect the self service portal with the Salesforce platform. All of these systems were built with the purpose of creating a more personalized and efficient way of doing business.

Salesforce Marketing Software

Salesforce’s unified marketing cloud creates customer engagement through every step of their experience. This marketing platform offers various studios including email, data, advertising, mobile and interaction studios.

The advertising studio uses CRM data to attract customers through advertisements while the mobile, social and interactive studios manage customer experiences by reaching them on various platforms at the right time.

The Salesforce data studio and data management platform capture information and use that to power your marketing campaigns. The marketing software also integrates marketing and sales for B2B marketing automation.

The Journey Builder is a feature specifically designed to increase personalization. The system connects various customer interactions across different platforms in one place.

The Journey Builder listens for customer cues, connects their overall experience, adapts to different customers and discovers distributed marketing. The system notifies you when customers take key actions, personalizing their experience and adjusting based on the way they change.

Journey mapping lays out specific consumer paths for reference so that you can deliver customers with the relevant information they need. The system also involves various departments, giving consumers a more well-rounded experience and you a way to connect with customers on a deeper level.

Salesforce’s Additional Features

One of the main differences between HubSpot and Salesforce is the number of additional features and platforms that Salesforce offers. In addition to sales, marketing and service clouds, Salesforce also created commerce, communities, collaboration, industries, integration and platform clouds.

Each of these comes with their own additional features and benefits. Similar to its sales, marketing and service systems, these platforms are cloud based and meant to further elevate your business with the all-in-one approach.

The industries feature includes financial, health care, government and philanthropic services, while the platform feature helps develop and integrate various applications. From commerce to collaboration, these services take your company to the next level.

Consider Your Budget & Overall Business Value

One of the major factors involved in choosing the right CRM is ultimately the price. You need to find a CRM that helps you reach your goals, but to achieve that you have to work with a company that fits your budget.

HubSpot offers free CRM features which can be great for smaller businesses but should also be seen as a short term solution rather than a long term plan. In order to take advantage of all that HubSpot has to offer, you eventually have to invest in its software.

HubSpot CRM and Salesforce are similarly billed monthly, but Salesforce charges an additional fee for each user login. Each company offers additional add-ons that can be purchased at a fee.

HubSpot and Salesforce both offer free trials if you want to experience some of their features first hand. It’s important to understand all of these costs and how they will change based on your business’ size and needs.

To obtain a more in depth understanding of pricing and receive a personalized quote, visit each of their websites or talk to one of their representatives.

Understanding all of these technical factors is key to choosing the right CRM for you business. However, you also need to consider your own career objectives throughout this process. What are the core values of your business and which company most similarly aligns with them? Which company is going to help you achieve your specific goals?

Conclusion

When analyzing HubSpot vs Salesforce, they ultimately take very similar approaches when it comes to CRM software. They both aim to personalize the consumer experience by adding constant and consistent value through an all-in-one, seamless platform.

HubSpot takes a more simplified and clean approach while Salesforce seems to cover every potential need your business may have. HubSpot and Salesforce both understand the necessity of personal client connection and provide you with the software you need to accomplish your customer-centric goals.

Ultimately, choosing a CRM will depend on your business’ size, budget, and overall preferences. In this CRM showdown, research is a key element of this process and will ensure that you understand the pros and cons of each company.

When comparing HubSpot vs Salesforce, the right option will increase your business’s growth by providing you with a better understanding of your customers and the tools you need to succeed.

If you have any additional questions or concerns about CRMs, contact us through the form below. Our sales enablement experts will be happy to speak with you.

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5 Steps For A Successful Inbound Marketing Strategy https://3tecsolutions.com/5-steps-for-a-successful-inbound-marketing-strategy/ https://3tecsolutions.com/5-steps-for-a-successful-inbound-marketing-strategy/#respond Wed, 02 Sep 2020 02:47:24 +0000 https://3tecsolutions.com/?p=2055 It’s 2020. Every marketer wants to have the best, most highly-optimized inbound marketing strategy. However, this isn’t the case for every eCommerce brand.

We’re sharing 5 tactics to help ignite your site’s performance and improve your strategy.

Inbound Marketing Strategy Tips

Implement these 5 steps to ensure a successful inbound marketing strategy:

  • Have a plan
  • Have patience
  • Continuously test
  • Use a support tool
  • Pay attention to detail

Have A Plan

Planning is the most important step in any inbound marketing campaign. First, set a clear goal on what you’d like to accomplish with your campaign.

Are you trying to promote a certain product? Do you want to bring in more email subscribers? Whatever it may be, you must have a solid plan before trying to reach that goal.

When creating HubSpot workflows, it’s very important that you plan your emails, lists and goals ahead of time. Position your workflow so the user converts on whatever it is you are marketing to them. Well-thought-out emails and workflows can make or break your inbound marketing campaign efforts.

Have Patience

One of the biggest issues we run into as marketers is the willingness to be patient. It’s important to remember that marketing isn’t a magic trick. We can’t just snap our fingers, configure some links and rank at the top of the search engine results pages.

Although we wish it was that easy, patience paired with well-written, optimized content will take your brand in the right direction and help you build and grow your online store.

We recommend having a strong content marketing strategy in place. When creating your strategy, be sure to factor in these SEO insights and tips to improve your organic search rankings and optimize your store for success.

Continuously Test

If you’re not testing your strategies, there’s a chance you’re missing out on valuable revenue. A/B testing is something that all marketers should be practicing and implementing.

A/B testing is a great way to determine which marketing strategies produce higher results and which parts may need improvement. As marketers, we need to keep up with new industry changes and test these developments to constantly improve opportunities for clients.

At Groove, we like to A/B test as much as possible. Whether it is click-through rates or open rates, there is always something that can be A/B tested.

Use A Support Tool

In order to run a successful inbound marketing campaign, you must have the right support in place. In addition to great teammates and co-workers, support tools and CRM systems (like HubSpot) are a good place to start.

For example, one of our favorite HubSpot features is their support team. They’re readily available to not only answer any questions we may have, but they’ll also walk us through what we’re working on and provide solutions. 

Pay Attention To Detail

Just like everything else in life, the details are crucial. While working on those HubSpot workflows, be sure to pay attention to the details.

Not selecting the correct starting smart list, goal list or if/then branch will cause your whole workflow to either not work or track the wrong information.

Keep your content marketing very detail-oriented. Your writing must have a purpose and be well thought-out if you want it to rank highly drive traffic to your site.

Conclusion

We hope you find this blog helpful and begin to follow these 5 steps to ensure a successful inbound marketing strategy.

Interested in learning about how our team can help to improve your inbound marketing efforts? Contact us through the form below, and our team will be in touch.

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Getting Started With A Social Media Branding Strategy https://3tecsolutions.com/getting-started-with-a-social-media-branding-strategy/ https://3tecsolutions.com/getting-started-with-a-social-media-branding-strategy/#respond Wed, 02 Sep 2020 02:42:11 +0000 https://3tecsolutions.com/?p=2051 Optimizing your social media branding strategy is critical if you’re trying to increase interaction and engagement among your audience. You could have tens of thousands of fans on your Facebook page, for example, but you’re probably not seeing an increase in ROI if no one is interacting with your posts.

The ultimate goal of any social media community is to increase consumer trust among your brand. We’re sharing valuable insights to help your brand create an engaging and memorable social media experience.

Social Media Branding

If your current social media branding strategy isn’t driving results, follow these tips to increase engagement, customer satisfaction and ROI:

  1. Discover your brand’s purpose
  2. Decide on a voice, tone and point of view
  3. Humanize your content
  4. Use automation, but not for everything
  5. Use analytic tools to measure activity

Discover Your Brand’s Purpose

One of the most essential steps to take before planning your social media branding strategy is to identify your brand’s purpose. If you don’t know where to start, begin by looking at your company’s mission statement.

Consider your brand’s vision, and think about how you want your audience to view your brand. This will help to provide you an understanding of how your brand should portray itself on social media. With each piece of content you share, keep in mind your business objectives.

Decide On A Voice, Tone & Point Of View

After discovering your brand’s purpose, it’s time to find your brand’s voice, tone and point of view. Consumers are swarmed with hundreds of social media advertisements each day, and we recognize that it can be difficult to stand out from the competition.

Acknowledging your audience and making them feel like part of a community shows that your brand is genuine and helps to gain consumer trust. And that trust may turn into customer loyalty.

Remember how we said to keep in mind your business objectives with each post? With each piece of content you share, consider how it relates back to your goals. If you think your content could be communicated in a more effective way, try changing your voice, tone or point of view – just make it sound like a human wrote it.

Humanize Your Content

Ah! You’ve stumbled upon a brand that looks interesting on social media. Their photos capture your attention, so you look more into the company. The moment you notice the content sounds like it was written by a robot, you immediately lose trust in the brand.

As consumers, we’ve all been there at one point or another. Instill trust among consumers by humanizing your content. Content that sounds like it was written by a human – better yet, someone that consumers can relate to – will pave the way for more engagement.

Use Automation, But Not For Everything

We know, we just emphasized the importance of humanizing your content – but that doesn’t mean you can’t use automation! We encourage using automation to schedule and post content.

However, when it comes to social media comments with questions or concerns from customers, do not automate your replies. Instead, take the time to reply uniquely to each individual’s question. Not only does this make customers feel recognized, it also shows your brand cares.

Here at Groove, we like to use Bulk.ly and Buffer to schedule and send out social media posts automatically. No matter the software you use, don’t forget to optimize the content for each individual post so that your audience can relate and engage with your brand.

Use Analytic Tools To Measure Activity

Social media is one of the most prevalent channels of communication, with 97% of marketers using social media to reach their audiences. That being said, your social media branding strategy should contribute significantly to your ROI.

If you’re not seeing results, we highly recommend investing in an analytics tool to measure your activity. You’ll gain an understanding of your brand’s performance, like the content that’s performing well and the content that’s unfavorable to your ROI.

Conclusion

Customers will care about your brand if they feel your brand cares for them. Prioritizing consumers and their unique questions, remaining human, and showing authenticity while keeping your goals in mind contribute to a strong social media branding strategy.

We hope these valuable insights have inspired you to optimize your branding! By following these tips, you can expect to see an increase in engagement, customer satisfaction and ROI.

If you have additional questions or would like to learn more about how Groove can help your business create an effective social media branding strategy, contact us through the form below. Our team will be happy to help!

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How To Create A Successful eCommerce Marketing Strategy https://3tecsolutions.com/how-to-create-a-successful-ecommerce-marketing-strategy/ https://3tecsolutions.com/how-to-create-a-successful-ecommerce-marketing-strategy/#respond Wed, 02 Sep 2020 02:32:23 +0000 https://3tecsolutions.com/?p=2046 With improvements in technology, buyers are more sophisticated and have higher expectations from brands than ever before. Technology has enabled companies to have more direct interactions with customers in a scalable way – a concept that would have been virtually alien to people only a few decades ago.

The downside with this advancement, however, is that creating an eCommerce marketing strategy is becoming difficult for brands. If your business uses an outbound-only model, you’re probably facing the highest customer turnover yet.

Although losing some customers is inevitable, we’re sharing how to retain the customers that you worked so hard to win in the first place.

Creating A Successful eCommerce Marketing Strategy

When thinking of ways to impact your bottom line, consider your customers. What if each customer bought one more product each year? Or opted into a higher-level of service? What if you could double or triple your conversion rate on new customers?

All of these things happen to be some of the benefits of using the inbound marketing methodology. Read on to discover valuable insights that will help you create a successful eCommerce marketing strategy.

Clean Up Existing Data

An old database that has not been maintained well tends to have many email addresses of people who have left their companies or are no longer interested in what you have to offer. In other words, these email addresses are poor prospects for your products.

That’s why it’s important to clean the data you already have by stripping out old email addresses that haven’t opened one of your emails in over a year. Yes – your list size may shrink, but the reality is that the size of your list means nothing if it’s full of junk.

In fact, a larger list of outdated emails can actually harm your brand. You’re more likely to experience lower open and click-through rates, which results in lower future deliverability rates, spam complaints and even blacklisting.

Spend time in the beginning to ensure you’re starting with accurate data.

Use Cookies

It’s impossible to track and nurture people properly if you don’t know who they are. Get users cookied properly by using a tool like HubSpot.

Send an email to that clean list you made with the intent of getting them to click and arrive at your website. This sets the tracking cookie.

A couple options that have been successful in the past:

  • Sending an email with a discount code to receive a percentage off your next order
  • Sending an email that directs users to advanced content such as eBooks or guides

See how Michael’s includes a discount coupon in the first email they send to prospects:

Remember, the goal is to get a user to click within your email so that they’re directed to your site. This is what associates their email with their browser – and your eCommerce marketing strategy will be more optimized to that user based on that cookie.

Share Blogs & Advanced Content

Through blogging and sharing advanced content, your brand creates an avenue for customers to engage in conversation and learn more about your brand. Though it may be difficult to come up with content to share at first, be sure your blogs remain relevant to your audience and are consistent with your brand. And if you don’t have a blog just yet, follow these company blogging tips to help you get started.

Advanced content is similar to a blog but provides more in-depth information on a topic. Think of tip sheets, how-to guides and whitepapers. These piece of content show your brand’s expertise in the industry, so take advantage of them.

If you need inspiration or would like to see how advanced content differs from a blog post, browse some of our resources.

Re-Purpose Content For Different Mediums

So, you’ve spent 20+ hours writing and polishing the perfect eBook for a particular segment of your audience. Why stop there?

With all the different channels of communication out there, re-purpose your content to be sent out through different mediums (we promise this will work to your advantage!)

Take interesting screenshots or infographics from your eBook and create landing pages exclusively for them. By teasing the quality content locked within the eBook, this will help to increase the number of downloads of the eBook itself.

You can even expand on different chapters in standalone blog posts or evergreen articles (those that are always timely.) Since you’ve already spent the time and effort creating quality content, figure out how to better leverage it.

There’s nothing wrong with having similar content displayed in multiple locations on your site – as long as you address duplicate content issues for search engine indexing purposes. That high-quality piece of content should be accessible from as many relevant places on your site as possible without hurting your SEO.

Optimize Landing Pages For Conversion

Website traffic is great; however, it’s useless if your landing pages aren’t converting or you’re not capturing users’ email addresses.

Decide which content should be freely available on your landing page and which content should be gated behind a registration form. Be sure to follow landing page best practices to ensure your pages are highly-optimized.

Remember: the greater the perceived value of the content, the more information you can generally request. For example, an expert assessment request can get away with requesting more personally identifiable information than a newsletter signup. Customers don’t like to give out too much information at the beginning.

Conclusion

We hope these insights help your eCommerce marketing strategy become successful. Remember to always keep the customer’s needs in mind and share content relevant to them and your brand.

If you have any questions or concerns, would like more information, or need help creating your eCommerce marketing strategy, contact us through the form below. Our team will be in touch!

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10 Inbound Marketing Tactics To Grow Your Business https://3tecsolutions.com/10-inbound-marketing-tactics-to-grow-your-business/ https://3tecsolutions.com/10-inbound-marketing-tactics-to-grow-your-business/#respond Mon, 31 Aug 2020 18:03:37 +0000 http://wpt.3tecsolutions.com/?p=2033 Inbound Marketing is a term that was coined by HubSpot in 2006, and since then has grown in size and magnitude. Rather than being just one tool, one strategy or one single campaign, inbound marketing is a set of ongoing activities that – when implemented alongside each other – drive revenues.

10 Inbound Marketing Tactics

Implement these valuable inbound marketing tactics to increase engagement and drive revenue:

  1. Have a blog
  2. Build backlinks
  3. Create advanced content
  4. Use video content
  5. Promote content on social media
  6. Use email marketing
  7. Use marketing automation
  8. Have an SEO strategy
  9. Optimize your site for mobile
  10. Test your strategies

Have A Blog

Having a company blog helps to engage customers in a conversation. Write about content relevant to current and future customers. Although it may be hard to come up with topics to write about, make sure your blog is consistent with your brand. Follow these company blogging tips for more inspiration!

In addition to writing content that is consistent with your brand, be sure you’re consistent when publishing and sharing blog posts. Search engines reward consistency, and this is where you’ll see steady growth.

Build Backlinks

If you’re not already trying to build backlinks, then you’re probably wondering what in the world a backlink is. To put simply, a backlink is when another website has content that links directly to your website.

When it comes to driving organic traffic to your site, backlinks play an important role. Promoting your blog content to other relevant influencers in your industry helps to increase the number of people that backlink to your site. However, just because you backlink to a relevant influencer does not mean they are guaranteed to backlink to your site.

Backlinks from other credible websites build your credibility and trustworthiness – which are things that search engines consider when ranking your site among the thousands of others. If you’re looking to improve your organic rankings, check out our favorite eCommerce SEO tools for backlink information and more.

Create Advanced Content

Yes, blogging is a great inbound marketing tactic – but creating advanced content only helps to improve your eCommerce site. Advanced content includes many things, but some of the most common include:

  • eBooks
  • Resources
  • Tip Sheets
  • How-To Guides
  • Whitepapers

In contrast to blogs, advanced content discusses a topic in far much more detail. For example, if your brand wrote a blog about a certain topic, a great call-to-action to put at the bottom of the blog would be a button to view an eBook, how-to guide, etc.

Take advantage of creating advanced content. It shows your company’s expertise in the industry, encourages engagement and helps users learn more about your brand.

Use Video Content

According to Wyzowl, 80% of video marketers say video has directly helped increase sales. Excluding video from your inbound marketing strategy puts your brand at a serious disadvantage.

Not only does video content get your message across quicker, but it provides more value to the user. Sometimes, users misinterpret something through text. Video allows you to clearly share your message and appeal to emotions, which establishes and strengthens the audience’s relationship with your brand.

See how these brands use product videos to show how to use a product, compare products and promote a certain lifestyle.

Promote Content On Social Media

In today’s world, social media is one of the most effective outlets to market a brand. But – this doesn’t mean posting on social media platforms every once in a while.

Instead, it’s principal for brands to develop a well thought-out social media branding strategy. A strategic plan helps increase engagement and establish customer loyalty.

To get started, you must first understand your goals, who your audience is, and what they want to see. Then, choose the platforms that are most popular for your industry. Our favorites are Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Use Email Marketing

In addition to social media, email is a vital tool in attracting and nurturing customers. By having an optimized email marketing strategy, you’ll increase brand awareness and conversions.

Sending leads the right content at the right time in the buyer’s journey helps accelerate them through the sales funnel. By understanding the stage at which a user is in, you’ll have the opportunity to better optimize emails and send only relevant content.

And don’t forget to stay up-to-date with email trends. They’ll help you specifically tailor your messages to your audience.

Use Marketing Automation

Save time and money by automating your marketing activities. With this approach, there’s no need to perform repetitive tasks or manually create workflows. You can finally focus on growing your business.

Automating time-consuming tasks, like email marketing and social posts, is efficient for your brand and beneficial to customers. Sending personalized messages to each individual customer helps convert them into customers. The information you send is useful to the customer, customers are delighted with their purchases, and you’re making profits. Its a win-win.

Have An SEO Strategy

If your brand is having trouble ranking in organic search results, then you need to optimize your SEO strategy. By improving visibility on search engine results pages, you’ll see an increase in website traffic, brand awareness and conversion.

Optimizing your content and website structure may seem unnecessary, but search engines take these things into consideration when ranking your website. We highly recommend checking out this eCommerce SEO guide for a detailed breakdown of strategies for ranking in organic search results.

Optimize Your Site For Mobile

According to Shopify, 82% of smartphone users seek information from their devices before making an in-store purchase. With the prevalence of online shopping, this makes sense. Shoppers want to find the best deal before making a purchase.

Brands must expect to see an increase in mobile shoppers. Catering to shoppers who use a desktop is great, but brands must also optimize their website for mobile devices.

One of the most important elements of any website optimization strategy is offering a one-page checkout. Let’s face it; there’s nothing worse than shopping on a site for a considerable amount of time and arriving at the checkout only to find that it takes longer to place your order than it did to find the items you needed. Be sure to take this into consideration when optimizing your eCommerce website for mobile devices.

Test Your Strategies

We recommend A/B testing your marketing strategies to learn what works best for your business. With advances in marketing technologies, brands can A/B test almost any asset. It’s important to note that you’ll need a large audience base for the testing to be valid.

Conclusion

We hope you find as much value as we have when implementing these 10 inbound marketing tactics. Remember that all of these tactics, when executed in tandem, will drive conversion and revenue.

If you don’t experience increased conversions in the beginning, don’t worry. Keep testing and changing significant variables one at a time to determine what strategy works best for your brand.

If you have any questions or would like additional help implementing any of these inbound marketing tactics, contact us through the form below. Our team will be happy to help you.

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Inbound Marketing for eCommerce: The Complete Guide https://3tecsolutions.com/inbound-marketing-for-ecommerce-the-complete-guide/ https://3tecsolutions.com/inbound-marketing-for-ecommerce-the-complete-guide/#respond Mon, 31 Aug 2020 17:52:30 +0000 http://wpt.3tecsolutions.com/?p=2028 Discover easy ways to ignite your site’s performance with this comprehensive guide to eCommerce inbound marketing. 

eCommerce Inbound Basics

Smith Island Cake is the official cake of Maryland (where Groove Commerce is based), and it’s a delicious, multi-layer cake, often made with chocolate ganache. Not only is this cake an amazing treat, but it’s also the perfect analogy for inbound marketing. Here’s why:

  • It’s tempting, and just seeing it often makes people want it.
  • Individually, each layer is a little boring, but when combined the sum of the parts is greater (far greater) than the whole.

Just like this cake, the output of your inbound marketing for eCommerce needs to be inviting to your customers and prospects.

More importantly, an inbound marketing for eCommerce strategy consists of a variety of smaller initiatives that on their own may not be anything remarkable, but when combined can create something powerful, moving, even transcendental (like taking a bite of Smith Island Cake). Making a cake like this takes time and effort; so too does building and executing an effective inbound marketing strategy.

And that’s where this guide comes in. You’re probably reading this because you want to learn how to boost your revenue. You may be looking across the eCommerce landscape and wonder how your brand can stand out, win more customers, optimize revenue streams, and be more competitive. Well, you’ve come to the right place. Pull up a chair, grab a piece of cake, and let’s dive in.

What Is Inbound Marketing for eCommerce?

First things first: let’s start with a definition.

“Inbound marketing is a set of marketing strategies and techniques focused on using content relevant to current and prospective buyers and pulling those customers and prospects toward a business and its products.”

The key item to note here is that inbound marketing isn’t just one tool, one tactic, or even a single campaign. It’s a set of on-going activities that, when done in tandem, create a highly scalable revenue driver.

A common question we get is, “Why do I need inbound marketing for eCommerce?” The answer to that question actually lies beyond a question of revenue, but rather focuses on relevancy. Consider these shifts in consumer behavior:

  • Shopping online is shifting to mobile, with 35% saying their smart phone is their primary online shopping tool, with revenue from mobile alone expected to top $600 million in 2018;
  • Consumers are starting to increasingly use voice-assisted purchases on devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home;
  • In fact, by 2020, experts predict more than half of all product searches will be done by voice or by image;
  • Online purchases aren’t only happening on eCommerce websites; they’re happening on Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and many other platforms;

Notice any trends? eCommerce is getting faster, more accessible, and taking place over a wider variety of platforms and devices. The bottom line for most e-tailers is that inbound marketing is the one marketing approach that empowers businesses to scale engagement with prospective, current, and past customers. Thus, our goals for inbound marketing for eCommerce typically include:

  • Increasing Visitors
  • Increasing Conversion Rate
  • Increasing Average Order Value
  • Increasing Lifetime Value

A good way to approach inbound marketing techniques is to look at them through the lens of the sales funnel.

Attract

This is the top of the marketing funnel. It’s all about generating awareness and brand recognition among key targeted audiences.

Convert

Convert can have different meanings in different industries or business categories, but here we’re using it to define gaining some sort of initial relationship with a prospective customer. That usually means capturing an email so that you can continue to market to them over time.

Close

This is the stage where the sale takes place aka SHOW ME THE MONEY.

Delight

This final stage is where a business not only fulfills an order, but exceeds a customer’s expectations. The aim here is to both strengthen customer loyalty and encourage that customer to share their experience with their friends and social networks, thereby amplifying a business’ exposure, reach, and reputation (and thus feeding back into the top-level of the sales funnel).

To reach customers at each of these stages, and to move them through the sales funnel, you’ll be developing a number of “micro-campaigns,” a series of small, on-going activities that ultimately culminate in a larger marketing effort. We’ll explore tactics you can execute at each of these funnel stages in more detail throughout the guide. But before we get to tactics, it’s essential to start with strategy.

Creating a Strategy

The distinguishing factor for success in any inbound marketing program is the degree to which a company spends time gaining insights into their customers and planning tactics around those insights. Thus, the first step in any program should be to develop an ideal buyer profile, and from that, buyer modalities, which is a more specific method for segmenting buyers.

To arrive at these crucial pieces of a marketing strategy, we like to look at Recency, Frequency, and Monetary across all buyers. That means answering:

  • How new are the buyers?
  • How often do they buy?
  • How much are they spending?

You can hone in on your ideal buyer by calculating these three data points, which sets a baseline set of metrics for you to build on. Your ideal buyer profile may also include other data such as:  

  • Gender
  • Age Group
  • Race or nationality
  • Geographical Location
  • Income
  • Education
  • Technical Ability

Buyer modalities, on the other hand, are based off of research into who the customers actually are and their intentions with the product or service you are selling. Effective modalities define individual behaviors and go beyond profile data to extrapolate intent. A few sample questions around intent include:

  • How do you use the product?
  • What do you intend to do with it?
  • What are your goals for using the product?  

The point here is that two users with identical demographics can be motivated and influenced in different ways through their interaction with your product. As a result, marketers will need to persuade them differently.

Of course, buyers aren’t some monolithic group; different people have different motivations for buying; they likely purchase different types of products in different ways, and often for different reasons. We often break buyers into four buyer types: fast buyers, slow buyers, logic-based buyers, and emotional buyers.

Within those you have competitive buyers, spontaneous buyers, methodical buyers, and humanistic buyers. Those are the four types of buyer modalities, and you want to make sure you’re catering different campaigns to each different modality. There’s no one-size fits all approach. A good strategy addresses each buyer modality through each step in the sales funnel, and plans for creating materials that speak directly to and attract each type and modality.

Which leads to the next step in building your inbound marketing strategy: Planning for implementation. That includes two distinct steps:

  1. Planning & Scheduling Content/Offers
  2. Identifying and implementing automated workflows.

Planning & scheduling is just what it sounds like: Creating a marketing calendar that outlines what supporting materials or content you’ll be producing, the channels where you’ll be releasing and promoting them, and when you’ll be doing all these activities. Remember that it’s important to address each buyer at each funnel stage.  We still see many mid-market e-Tailers who do not operate off a proper schedule. You should be able to map out 80-90% of your store’s campaigns and editorial schedule at one time.

The second part is to identify common workflows and build automations as a 12-month process. This relies on using a marketing automation software that gathers customer data—interactions, purchasing habits, etc.—and allows you to set up triggers for specific communications. This could be anything from addressing an abandoned cart to wishing a customer a happy birthday (along with giving them a special offer or other birthday treat that encourages them to shop your store). We’ll go over some opportunities to build powerful workflow automations as we explore each step in the sales funnel.

Attracting

What drives buyers to brands? Some might argue that’s it’s the value they get from that brand, but we think it has as much to do with soul or personality as it does with financial motivations (though those aren’t to be discounted, as we’ll discuss below). Your marketing efforts need to serve content that is both meaningful and relevant to your target customers, while also showcasing your brand’s soul… I liken it back to the 1980’s cult classic, North Shore, One of my favorite movies of all time.  If you want to compete against Amazon, you’re a soul, an essence, an opinion.  In the movie, Chandler tries to embody this mentality into a young Rick Kane who is redesigning the logo for his surfboard brand.

This soul has to be delivered at the right time on the right platform. As the first step in your sales funnel, the tactics used here often cast the widest net, though that doesn’t mean they’re not targeted. The goal here is to focus on bringing people to your website for the first time, no matter what their type or modality is. Typically, this includes a combination of search engine optimization (SEO), homegrown content, user-generated content, social media, and paid media. Let’s take a look at each to see how they work.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for eCommerce

Search engines and humans read the web differently. That’s why structured data was developed to help search engines understand the context of your content. Using a standardized format, structured data organizes information in a way that search engines can easily navigate using simple algorithms. As a result, search engines like Google can use structured data to display special search results including product names, bulleted lists, and customer reviews. There are several elements of a product listing or information on a page that are crucial to helping that page appear in search engine results.

Your main focus for SEO should be on using keywords properly and sufficiently. There are several areas on your page that are seen only by search engines, but remember, the rest of the content on your pages must be readable by humans as well! Sounding like a robot or excessively repeating keywords will only hurt you. Here are a few areas where you should be using highly targeted keywords to boost your SEO.

URLs

Each product you sell should have its own page, and the URL for that page must include the keyword (not necessarily the product name, though sometimes that will make sense) and should be longer than 125 characters. For example:

  • Unoptimized URL:
    /product86389j4k6
  • Optimized URL:
    /ipod-nano

Page Titles

This is the text that appears in your web browser tab. It’s read by both humans and search engines. Typically, search engines only read the first 50-60 characters, so keep it short!

  • Buy <Product Name> | <Category Name> | XYZ.com

Meta Descriptions

A brief description of the content on the page. Should be no longer than 300 characters. 

  • Find discount <Product Name> and read <Product Name> reviews and other <Category/Brand Name> products at XYZ.com

Header Tags

The header for each section on a page should include the keyword for that page, but should also be tagged as a header (H1, H2, etc.). This tells search engines that the information is important to that page.

Your H1 should be the primary theme of the page, while you may want to include some modifier words in your H2’s like Buy, Best, Find or Reviews. 

Multimedia and Image Alt Text

Not only are images essential for merchandising your products, but they’re also extremely helpful in boosting SEO. Images should have “alt-tags” containing the page’s targeted keyword, and the image itself should be relevant. 

Rich Snippets

Think about these as additional information search engines used to categorize the information found on each page. You should definitely consider adding these to your templates!

  • Organization
  • Product
  • Reviews
  • Search Box
  • Social Media

Have Yotpo? Here’s how to add Yotpo Rich Snippets in BigCommerce.

Canonical Tags

These tags are a must-have for large eCommerce websites, where there is often a lot of duplicate information. Canonical tags help search engines identify which content is “original,” while ignoring duplicate content. Not using canonical tags can actually hurt your search engine listings, as Google does not like when a website uses the same content multiple times.

Content

The mantra of inbound marketing is “Content is king,” meaning the better quality your content, the more success you will have. What constitutes “high quality” content? Anything that provides value to your buyers. That could be blog posts, buyers or gift guides, case studies, videos, and more. The more creative you can be here, and the more helpful you are to your buyers, the more likely you’ll attract and convert them.

Blogging

eCommerce blogging can be a fantastic way to increase website traffic. Successful blogs share valuable information and expertise with prospective customers. That information improves trust, increases brand loyalty and leads to more purchases.

So why isn’t every business including blogging in their eCommerce marketing strategy? Writing content takes time, and as the saying goes, time is money. Unless it’s your primary responsibility, regularly writing content can be an uphill battle. Luckily, there are ways to make blogging easier and less time-consuming.

We recommend brainstorming as many ideas in advance and building those into your marketing calendar. Give yourself enough time each week or each month to draft the content, and be sure to have a clear editorial and publishing process in place, which can include gathering any relevant information or images, and uploading it to your website.

Remember to always include a clear path to purchase in your blog, using images and links directly to the relevant product pages. We built a nifty integration called BigPr.es that allows you to integrate BigCommerce and WordPress and there is another great tool for Magento called Fishpig.  Regardless of the tool you use, remember to make it easy for your customers to purchase.

Gift Buyers & Guides

This is an especially important content around major shopping holidays, mostly because the people who are doing the buying are not likely your normal buyers. You need to think about how you are going to drive people to the specific pages on your website where they’ll easily find what they’re looking for. One excellent example of this is from our client who sells millions of dollars in lacrosse equipment. The holiday season is a prime selling time, but it’s rarely the lacrosse players who are buying. It’s their parents or relatives who may not be as familiar with lacrosse as the player. Instead of organizing their gift guide around product categories, they organized it by the gift recipient, such as “For Him,” “For Her,” and “Youth.” They even included a quick link to their gift cards page.

Gift and buyers guides also make excellent blog fodder. Consider post ideas like “Stocking Stuffers,” “What to buy for your husband/wife/child,” “This year’s top products for men/women,” etc. Guides like these can have a huge impact on your organic SEO as well as providing useful, valuable and shareable content.

Ratings & Reviews

If you’ve ever googled a product, or even a restaurant, you’ve probably noticed that Google loves reviews. The search giant uses this type of information as a signal about how popular a product may be, as well as to provide a richer, more informative experience for users. Adding the ability to rate and review products directly on your site gives you a two-fold benefit:

  1. It helps your organic search engine rankings. See rich snippets above…
  2. It draws visitors to your site, allowing them to get good information about the products you’re selling, and possibly finding other products on your site.

Social Media Sharing

One great way to build your social media following is to entice your social media followers to share your content and posts. It starts with well-placed global social buttons on your site, in the footer, header, and other parts of the content on your website. Another tactic is to encourage a “friend buy,” which incentivizes customers with rewards to share your products with their friends by email and on social networks. 

Of course, every brand wants to have their social media content shared. Part of the approach is having flexible content guidelines and a creative but diligent staff to manage your social media accounts. That is, you want to give them clear direction on brand voice, but at the same time allow them to be creative with accounts. Social media is often about being present in the moment, like when Oreo shared this tweet during Super Bowl XLVII.

(Side note: This is our favorite example, since it’s from the Super Bowl where our home team won!)

Local Events/Trunk Shows

This is ideal for retailers with brick and mortar presences. Build lists for potential customers who are local to your retail locations. Use custom audiences to drive RSVPs to events and trunk shows while not burning out folks on your list who may not be in the same geographic regions.

Paid Media

Paid media is a broad category of online advertising that includes things like:

  • Search engine marketing (paid placements in search engines)
  • Display advertising (banners on websites)
  • Social media advertising (ads on Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

Search engine marketing is an excellent tool to attract buyers based on what they’re searching for, which usually signifies an intent to buy. Display and social media advertising is generally more geared towards expanding brand presence.

Lookalike Audiences

One of the really powerful Facebook features is Lookalike Audiences. This allows you to find and attract prospective customers who are similar to your existing customers. By using this feature, you can easily and quickly expand your reach to a set of highly qualified leads.

Additionally, Facebook offers a value-based Lookalike audience, which allows you to reach potential consumers who are similar to existing customers AND are considered “high value.” Of course, you have to know the lifetime value (LTV) of your customers in order to take advantage of this feature.

These capabilities help you very narrowly focus your ad spend, and can significantly improve the ROI of your Facebook campaigns. Consider offering these potential buyers a special offer or free trial to rope them in. Make sure you follow Facebook’s customer data preparation best practices in order to increase the match rate. This will help ensure you don’t pay to show ads to people who may not be interested in your product.

Converting

As we mentioned earlier, the convert phase of your sales funnel is all about capturing new email addresses so you can continue to market to them. Common activities in this stage include sending customized, targeted, and well-timed emails to different customer segments, but also creating the type of content and services that increase the value of your website, as well as the incentive to buy from it. Let’s take a closer look at a few of these key tactics.

Catalog Optimization

When you run an eCommerce site, you regularly need to analyze your product offerings and determine what’s selling, what’s not, and what can be optimized. We like to classify products into four main buckets based on their views and conversions.  

Products should be classified from low traffic to high traffic, low conversion to high conversion. First, you have your top selling products, which typically fall into 80/20 rule: high traffic, high conversion products that sell day in and day out.

Second, there are the products that need promotion. These are items that have low traffic but a high conversion rate. Are there ways to drive more traffic to those pages? It’s likely that the more traffic you drive, the more you’ll be able to increase the conversion rate of those products.

Third, there are products that have high traffic pages but a low conversion rate. This category of product usually needs extensive testing with a variety of conversion and closing tactics, because you are losing a lot of potential sales. You want to get more of these products added to the cart and into the checkout.

Finally, products that neither get traffic nor conversions should be removed from your site altogether. These products are just taking up space on your site (and possibly in your warehouse) and are dragging down the overall quality of your site. Consider removing them entirely (possibly at a loss) or at least having a fire sale. The sooner you can get them off your site, the better off you’ll likely be.

Welcome Offers

Have you ever felt annoyed by welcome pop-ups?

We often ask this question in presentations, and literally everyone in the room raises their hand. However, the proof is in the numbers, and it turns out they work extremely well! One tactic is to offer a discount on their first order in exchange for their email address. This enables you to start to gather data about them very early on in the buying process. The sooner you can capture an email address, and pair it with a cookie on their browser, the quicker you’ll be able to interact with them in a meaningful way. What we see for retailers who implement this is that their email list population looks like an exponential growth curve. 

Product Questions

Why not add a HubSpot form to your product detail page allowing visitors to ask questions about specific products while generating leads at the same time? You can create hidden fields for data like product name, SKU and url, then dynamically pass those values in using your platforms variables/tokens

Live Chat & Bots

Customer service can be a key differentiator and is an essential part of converting visitors. Many companies today offer a live chat option on their website that connects people browsing a site to a live customer service agent who can answer any questions the customer may have. To ease the burden of resources needed to staff customer service departments, many firms have turned to chatbots, automated Q&A systems that emulate human interaction using artificial intelligence. They can manage frontline customer service inquiries, and transfer a prospective customer to a live human being as needed. Oftentimes, companies require an email address to engage with a chatbot or live chat representative, giving the opportunity to not only capture that contact for future marketing purposes, but also to provide a higher level of service that earns the prospective customer’s loyalty.

Closing the Deal

Now that you’ve gotten people to your site, you’ve engaged them with your content, your products, social media, and email, it’s time to get them to pull the trigger. After all, that’s what you want in the end, right? As soon as someone becomes a customer, the nature and depth of your relationship has the potential to change. We say potential because, ideally, you’ll not only close one sale, but you’ll continue to close sales with them again and again. We’ll have more to say on that in the Delight section below, but for now, let’s explore some of the key tactics for closing sales on your website.

Site Search

Site search, the function of your website that allows visitors to search it, is one of the key tools for closing sales. Visitors who use site search are taking a pro-active step to find something specific, and their conversion rate is typically 300-500% higher than the average website visitor. Additionally, site search users typically buy more items, with an average order value 25-50 percent higher than other customers. So how do you leverage site search to boost revenues?

First, you need to track several different metrics, including what visitors search for versus what they clicked, what product combinations are viewed and purchased, which products are added to the cart, and which products are ultimately purchased. We can take all these different metrics and apply them to a website’s search results, creating a system that dynamically learns and adjusts to visitor demand over time. This will eventually return search results on your website that are smarter and more relevant to the shifting customer demand.

You can also use this data to show more relevant product recommendations and to provide more detailed information to customers, such as ratings and reviews, compare, and quick views. On sites that offer hundreds or thousands of products, being able to create filters based on unique product attributes in search results can be incredibly powerful. All the data that you have on your products—sizes, colors, different makes, models, years—can be used to create filters that make search results very usable. The more efficient it is to find products, the more likely a search will lead to a sale.

Frictionless Checkout and Free Shipping

Having an easy to understand checkout process is as important as getting people to your website in the first place, so it’s crucial that you spend time perfecting it. The checkout has many merchandising opportunities, and free shipping is still the number one, most bulletproof promotion in eCommerce. Over and over again, we see conversion rates and average order values jump when clients turn on free shipping over a certain threshold. For example, you might offer free shipping on orders over $50, which is publicized on every product page and in the checkout process. If customers fall short of the threshold, you can include a “countdown” message during the checkout process, enticing them to spend just a little more to get the free shipping. If you can get an extra $5 or $10 out of every order for smaller, easy to ship products, you’ll grow your AOV—and your bottom line—very quickly.

Checkout Cross-Sales

Have you ever bought a new car, and you’ve got all the details worked out with the salesperson, but then you go to financing and they want to add in all kinds of options? Dealerships make millions of extra dollars by getting their customers to spend just a little more before closing the deal. The checkout process on your website can serve exactly that same function. A good example of this is the popup used by Domino’s Pizza, where the buyer is offered the opportunity to make a $1 donation to a good cause while also promoting their chocolate lava cake. Many of us might not order that dessert every time, but it’s likely enticing enough to make folks add the cake to their order at least 10-20% of the time, effectively raising their average order value.

Abandoned Carts

One of the key challenges in any ecommerce business is keeping abandoned cart rates low. That’s when a visitor places an item or items in their shopping cart, but never complete the transaction. The reasons for this can vary greatly; they may have gotten distracted by something, they may have changed their mind, they may want to simply make the purchase at a later time, or even on a competitor’s website. But whatever their motivation is, lowering your abandoned cart rate is an integral part of eCommerce success. We’ve found that setting up an abandoned cart automated workflow in HubSpot can have a dramatically positive effect on your abandoned cart rate. Essentially, you can set up a series of emails to go to anyone who has provided you with their email address but not completed a purchase. The emails can remind them of the items they put in their cart or tempt them with special offers and discounts to complete the purchase. Based on our research and testing, we’ve found a formula to capture sales from an abandoned cart email. For most products, we trigger the first email 1–2 hours after abandonment, the second email 12–24 hours after abandonment, the third email 48–72 hours after abandonment and finally one last email 3 days after the third email was sent.

Custom Audiences

If you haven’t heard of it, Facebook Custom Audiences is an advertising method that lets you reach leads and customers that you already know. Basically, you upload a list of emails into Facebook and it will deliver ads to that exact list if Facebook can identify them. Moreover, using HubSpot’s smart list tools, you can quickly and easily sync customer data to Facebook’s custom audiences, segment them based on their purchasing habits or other online behaviors, and then target ads with messaging geared specifically to each audience segment. Ads served to Custom Audiences can be major revenue drives when used properly. Here are four examples:

Abandoned Cart Recovery

Using your HubShop.ly Abandoned Cart smart list, you can target those visitors that have left items in their cart.  You will need at least 100 folks on this list to really gain traction. 

Win Back Campaigns

Create custom audiences for customers who haven’t purchased anything for 180-364 days, or for more than 365 days. Then create offers for those people and target them on Facebook. 

Welcome Series

Create a “Welcome Popup” using a HubSpot form and include an offer (we suggest a small, free gift that’s low cost to you and doesn’t eat into your margin). Create a smart list and start targeting ads on Facebook using the same offer. Set rules that once the lead makes their first purchase, they fall off the list and don’t continue to receive the offer.  

Promotion Non-Openers

Create smart lists for anyone who does not open your promotional emails. You can then easily target those non email openers with the same offers via a different channel.

Retargeting

If you’ve ever visited an eCommerce website, looked at a few items, and then navigated away only to see those same items being advertised on other websites, then you’ve experienced retargeting. In a nutshell, this is the practice of placing a cookie on a visitor’s web browser, and then purchasing display ad dynamically across other websites to entice the visitor to complete his or her purchase.

This can be highly effective in converting people who just browse your site, or even for visitors who abandon their shopping carts.

Delighting Your Customers

So you’ve now convinced website visitors to buy something from you (or hopefully several things). Congrats! Now what?

Well, if you’re a good eCommerce marketer it’s time to think about how you can delight your customer. Why? One reason is to convince that customer to continue to buy products from you in the future. Another reason is to convince that customer to tell their friends about your company, and get them to make purchases as well. Let’s look a few ways you can delight your customers, keep them happy and coming back.

Shipping & Fulfillment

Customer satisfaction starts with fulfillment. This could also include offering gift wrapping and gift messaging for when people buy something from your site for someone else. The idea here is to make your brand memorable through your packaging. Ask yourself: How can I add just a little extra love to my packaging? Make opening the box fun, maybe even surprising. We’re seeing more and more retailers add a little extra TLC to their packaging. For example, luxury watch brand Shinola puts a lot of effort into their packaging, including setting the watch for the purchaser’s time zone. The product is showcased and ready to go when it’s opened.

Post-Purchase Follow-up

You got the sale, but now it’s all about the follow-through. If post-purchase email automation isn’t a part of your inbound marketing strategy, you could be missing out on valuable revenue. Following-up with the customer by asking for a product review, sending them a notification when their items have shipped, recommendations for complementary products, or even special offers will go a long way to build loyalty and keep them coming back.

Win Back Workflows

Did you know that it’s 7x more expensive to win a new customer than it is to get an older one to make a purchase again? If someone has bought from you in the past, but they haven’t bought anything in a long time, it’s probably time to reach out to them. The goal here is to save the customer before they drop off the “cliff,” the point at which they will never be a customer again. Of course, that will change based on what you sell; some companies are happy when customers order something from them every six months, others are content when customers make a once/year purchase, and others who seek to have customers make purchases every 90 days.

The best way to manage this is to create segmented lists based on last order date, and you can start to see how your contacts flow across the timeframes. Maybe you have a 90 day list, a 180 day list, and a 365 day list. Sometimes just a nudge is all you need to win them back. Just remember that after a certain length of time, it’s probably good to scrub your email list and remove people who haven’t been active in more than two years. Continuing to email them can actually negatively impact your email deliverability rates, and it’s simply not productive to continue to try to re-engage them.

Drive Loyalty by Treating Customers like Royalty

People love to be made to feel special, to feel like they’re in a separate tier of customer. And your most valuable customers are the perfect target for this marketing. The goal here is to try to move each customer to the next level. What this means is often different for each retailer, there’s no one-size fits all approach. For example, your average order size levels might be $10 – $50, $50 – $100, and $100+. A VIP program for the top tier of customers is a great way to not only increase revenues, but to build massive brand loyalty.

Birthdays & Special Occasions

Everybody loves to get presents on their birthday (well, most people anyway). Some restaurants will give you a free dessert on your birthday. Some places will give you a free product or a special discount. Requesting this information can give you another opportunity to reach out to a customer and offer some unexpected delight.

You should conduct similar outreach for pretty much all holidays—Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc. But there are other “special occasions” you can also commemorate with an incentive to make a purchase, such as the anniversary of a customer’s first purchase.

The key here is to be fun and engaging, and the best thing about these campaigns is that you can fully automate these so that customers receive these emails whenever they reach a milestone. It’s really one of the few activities in marketing that you can set it and forget it, and it’ll continue to generate revenue.

Conclusion

Inbound marketing has become the most essential set of marketing tools to impact businesses over the past 10-20 years. Long gone are the days where you might sell directly using direct mail or TV ads (still viable tools even if you had an eCommerce website 10 years ago). That said, the tactics are constantly changing and evolving, and you need to keep up or risk losing market share. But that risk is also an opportunity, especially for mid-market e-tailers. Because the great part of inbound marketing is that it works extremely well, even if you don’t have an oversized budget that larger companies do.

You can execute plans in chunks, you can experiment without sacrificing your marketing budget, and you don’t have to worry about pulling huge media campaigns. Best of all, as we’ve discussed, you can automate so many parts of your marketing that will reduce the workload and help you shore up any revenue leaks you may be experiencing. The key to success is to put your customer first, come up with a strategy and execution plan, and then take action.

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Performance Analytics Market https://3tecsolutions.com/performance-analytics-market/ https://3tecsolutions.com/performance-analytics-market/#respond Sun, 30 Aug 2020 11:48:48 +0000 http://wpt.3tecsolutions.com/?p=2016 Performance Analytics Market by Component (Software, and Services), Application (Financial, Sales & Marketing, IT Operations, Supply Chain Performance Analytics), Vertical, Analytics Type, Deployment, Organization Size, Industry – Global Forecast to 2021

The overall performance analytics market is expected to grow from USD 0.96 billion in 2015 to USD 2.59 billion by 2021, at a CAGR of 18.7% from 2016 to 2021. Performance analytics is a set of functionalities that help the organizations to automate performance analysis of various business functions. The user can easily map the performance of their organization against a standard pre-defined set of KPIs and identify the causes for variations. The users monitor, measure, and analyze the performance of business functions such as financial operations, sales, marketing, workforce, and IT operations in real-time with easy interactive dashboards and reports. The base year considered for the study is 2015, and the forecast has been provided for the period between 2016 and 2021.

Performance Analytics Market Dynamics

Drivers

  • Need to generate insights from continually rising volume of the data
  • Rising prevalence of metrics driven business performance assessment
  • Technological advancements in computing power

Restraints

  • Lack of awareness regarding positive impacts of performance analytics
  • Concerns about positive ROI

Opportunities

  • Emergence of advanced vendor offerings
  • Increasing adoption of cloud-based performance analytics solutions

Challenges

  • Privacy and data security concerns
  • Lack of skilled analytical workforce

Need to generate insights from continually rising volume of the data would drive the performance analytics market growth

Today, the organizations across the world are flooded with structured and unstructured data with the tremendous growth in IoT and mobile devices adoption. This data describes central characteristics of an organization and is a pivotal part of business progression. To improve their market presence and build powerful product portfolio, organizations have started investing significant amount of capital on data analysis. Traditionally, the organizations were using legacy technology and operating multiple systems for data reporting. However, due to this fragmented data, the leader of the organization were forced to spend more time on reconciling and preparing data, which prevented them from identifying pain points and improving business performance. Performance analytics tools empowered the business users to create real-time business performance reporting, which helped them to make fact-based decisions.

Following are the objectives of the report:

  • To define, describe, and forecast the performance analytics market on the basis of component, applications, analytics type, organization size, deployment models, industry verticals, and regions
  • To provide a detailed information regarding the major factors influencing the growth of the market (drivers, restraints, opportunities, and challenges)
  • To analyze subsegments with respect to individual growth trends, future prospects, and contribution to the total market
  • To analyze the opportunities in the performance analytics market for stakeholders and to provide the details of a competitive landscape for the major players
  • To forecast the revenue of market segments with respect to all the major regions, namely, North America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), Latin America, and Middle East and Africa (MEA)
  • To profile key players and comprehensively analyze their recent developments and positioning
  • To analyze competitive developments, such as acquisitions, new product launches, and research and development activities in the market

During this research study, major players operating in the performance analytics market in various regions have been identified, and their offerings, regional presence, and distribution channels have been analyzed through in-depth discussions. Top-down and bottom-up approaches have been used to determine the overall market size. Sizes of the other individual markets have been estimated using the percentage splits obtained through secondary sources such as Hoovers, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and Factiva, along with primary respondents. The entire procedure includes the study of the annual and financial reports of the top market players and extensive interviews with industry experts such as CEOs, VPs, directors, and marketing executives for key insights (both qualitative and quantitative) pertaining to the market. The figure below shows the breakdown of the primaries on the basis of the company type, designation, and region considered during the research study.

BREAKDOWN OF PRIMARY PARTICIPANTS


Note: “Others” includes sales managers, marketing managers, and product managers. Tiers of the companies have been defined based on its total revenue as of 2017; Tier 1 = >USD 100 million, Tier 2 = USD 50 million – USD 100 million, and Tier 3 Tier 3 = < USD 50 million

To know about the assumptions considered for the study, download the pdf brochure

The performance analytics ecosystem comprises vendors, such as, IBM Corporation (US), Oracle Corporation (US), SAS Institute Inc. (US), SAP SE (Germany), Siemens AG (Germany), Adaptive Insights (US), Xactly Corporation (US), Optymyze (US), ServiceNow, Inc.( US), and Callidus Software, Inc. (US). Other stakeholders of the performance analytics market include application design and software developers, system integrators, IT service providers, consulting service provider, managed service provider, market research and consulting firms, and cloud service providers.

Major Performance Analytics Market Developments

  1. In June 2016, IBM partnered with Axciom to provide powerful analytics solutions to the customers for deriving accurate insights in a short period. This would help the data scientists and marketing analysts to understand customers and predict future behaviors of the customers.
  2. In February 2016, SAP acquired Roambi to provide mobile access to analytics solutions to everyone. Roambi’s mobile-centric analytics and visualization solution allow workforce to access critical information anywhere, any time.
  3. In February 2015, SAS and ICMA have been delivering its ICMA Insights to cities, towns, and countries across U.S. to compare their performance data with other participants’ data. The solution now has been delivered to more than 100 government entities to analyze and report performance.

Target Audience:

  • Managed Services Providers
  • Consulting Services Providers
  • Cloud Services Providers
  • Internet Services Providers (ISPs)
  • Enterprises
  • End-Users

Scope of the Report
The research report categorizes the performance analytics market to forecast the revenues and analyze the trends in each of the following subsegments:

By Component

  • Software
  • Services
  • Managed services
  • Professional services
    • Support and maintenance
    • Consulting services

By Application

  • Sales and marketing performance analytics
  • Financial performance analytics
  • Supply chain performance analytics
  • IT operations performance analytics
  • Employee performance analytics
  • Others (Engineering and R&D performance analytics)

By Analytics Type

  • Predictive analytics
  • Prescriptive analytics
  • Descriptive analytics

By Deployment Model

  • On-premises
  • Cloud

By Organization Size

  • Small and Medium Size Business (SMBs)
  • Large enterprises

By Industry Vertical

  • BFSI
  • Telecommunications and IT
  • Retail and e-commerce
  • Government and defense
  • Healthcare
  • Manufacturing
  • Energy and utilities
  • Construction and engineering
  • Others (Education, research, travel and hospitality, and outsourcing services)

By Region

  • North America
  • Europe
  • Asia-Pacific (APAC)
  • Latin America
  • Middle East and Africa (MEA)

Available Customizations
With the given market data, MarketsandMarkets offers customizations as per the company’s specific needs. The following customization options are available for the report:
Product Analysis

  • Product matrix which gives a detailed comparison of product portfolio of each company

Geographic Analysis

  • Further breakdown of the North America performance analytics market
  • Further breakdown of the Europe market
  • Further breakdown of the APAC market
  • Further breakdown of the MEA market
  • Further breakdown of the Latin America performance analytics market

Company Information

  • Detailed analysis and profiling of additional market players

The overall performance analytics market is expected to grow from USD 1.10 Billion in 2016 to USD 2.59 Billion by 2021, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 18.7% from 2016 to 2021. Simple to utilize and integrated business applications of performance analytics software will propel the growth of the market. Major driver of the performance analytics market is rising prevalence of metrics-driven business performance assessment.

Performance analytics platform is a user-driven process and is a part of business intelligence architecture, mainly aimed at creating interactive reports and exploring performance-based data. Data gathered from various back-end systems and sources, are utilized for analyzing and understanding historical performance, present performance, and provide recommendation to mitigate business risk through real-time view of KPI and future indicators from the data set. Performance analytics is a management discipline process that let companies have increased focus on supporting integrated management process on the operational, financial, and strategic level, and enabling companies to closely and effectively monitor their overall performance. The rising need for data-driven decision-making and understanding past performance and future performance pattern and trends that would assist the companies to maintain the require performance level has made performance analytics as a must needed technology on both business and IT sector of the organization. Performance analytics can contribute significantly towards interpretation and sharing of insights from thorough data analytics, enabling nontechnical SMBs to perform analysis in a self-directed manner.

The performance analytics market is segmented by component, professional service, application, analytic type, organization size, deployment model, industry vertical, and region. Performance analytics software are used widely by major industry verticals such as BFSI, retail & e-commerce, telecommunications & IT, energy & utilities, government, healthcare, manufacturing, construction & engineering, and others (hospitality services, education, and travel & hospitality), for different business needs.

Globally, performance analytics software and services have gradually started to take over traditional BI tools used for assessing the overall performance of the company, which could not be utilized and accessed without any help from the technical staff. The benefits offered by performance analytics software and service to enterprises includes better preparation for change, superior business management, connected business processes, strategic competitive advantage, timely actionable information, and overall reduced operational risk.

North America is expected to hold the largest market size in the overall performance analytics market, followed by Europe, owing to the technological upgradations in these regions. The adoption rate of performance analytics platform and software is increasing in APAC and Latin America due to the increasing amount of business data across various industry verticals in these regions.

PERFORMANCE ANALYTICS MARKET, BY REGION, 2021 (USD BILLION)

Increasing demand for sales and marketing performance analytics, financial performance analytics, and IT operations performance analytics drive the market growth

Sales and marketing analytics

Performance analytics software in sales and marketing assists companies with optimized marketing spend, not in the traditional sense of applying a marketing mix model, but in delivering optimization through strategy and efficiency at the marketing process level. Additionally, sales and marketing performance analytics application also incorporates the project management process and IT management in designing and delivering tailored marketing services. This approach helps companies with the quick delivery and tailored solutions that are scalable across different regions, business segments, and functions.

Financial performance analytics

On implementing performance analytics software along with financial performance analytics application, companies would be able to bridge the gap between their financial performance and operational performance drivers. Performance analytics software here supports companies to have highly accurate cash flow analysis, real-time view of the financial situation, enhanced alignment with operations, apart from helping them identify variances with corrective actions and track the difference between actual financial performances against planned financial performance. All this linked with operations would result in enhanced overall increase in sales and profitability.

IT operations performance analytics

Performance analytics enables IT operation performance analytics assist companies in efficiently managing their huge IT layer that consists of network, server & storage, and application and identifying where the fault is and providing the immediate fix that results in delivering the high quality services and applications to its end users. Network management, network traffic analysis, network configuration management, server performance management, storage device management, application performance management and end-user experience management are some of the major capabilities of performance analytics enabled IT operation performance analytics application.

Critical questions the report answers:

  • Where will all these developments take the industry in the mid to long term?
  • What are the upcoming industry applications for clickstream analytics?

Today, organizations are commonly transforming their business either through subsidiaries or acquisitions. This is leading to expansion of operations and teams that needs high-tech technology to solve the issues regarding data management and analysis of various business functions. For instance, the expansion of operations leads to several structural changes within sales and requires effective sales planning and review system to maintain the growth. However, the fear of losing ownership to some potential sales data, hinders the adoption of such tools. Thus, the sales teams continue to rely on older software and solutions and are reluctant to adopt the new technologies. Moreover, the business users have uncertainties about positive Return on Investment (ROI) post implementation of such analytical tools. Therefore, such misconceptions have restrained the adoption of performance analytics solutions among the organizations.

The performance analytics ecosystem comprises vendors, such as, IBM Corporation (US), Oracle Corporation (US), SAS Institute Inc. (US), SAP SE (Germany), Siemens AG (Germany), Adaptive Insights (US), Xactly Corporation (US), Optymyze (US), ServiceNow, Inc.( US), and Callidus Software, Inc. (US). Other stakeholders of the performance analytics market include application design and software developers, system integrators, IT service providers, consulting service provider, managed service provider, market research and consulting firms, and cloud service providers.  

To speak to our analyst for a discussion on the above findings, click Speak to Analyst

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Inbound vs Outbound Sales: Filling Your Pipeline https://3tecsolutions.com/inbound-vs-outbound-sales-filling-your-pipeline/ https://3tecsolutions.com/inbound-vs-outbound-sales-filling-your-pipeline/#respond Sun, 30 Aug 2020 11:43:10 +0000 http://wpt.3tecsolutions.com/?p=2013 It’s time to start thinking differently about sales and marketing. Customers’ preferences are constantly changing, but many companies’ strategies are not.

To be blunt, many traditional sales and marketing techniques no longer work. The average person receives over 2,000 outbound marketing interruptions every day; the majority of which are either blocked or ignored.

Making the switch to inbound marketing and sales allows for qualified leads and customers to come directly to your store, instead of the other way around.

Inbound vs Outbound Sales

The buyer-seller relationship has changed throughout the past decade. Many individuals now associate traditional sales with various elements of deception that result in a general lack of trust.

eCommerce is becoming quicker and more easily accessible from various devices. As a result of this abundance of accessible online information, today’s consumers are more informed than ever before.

In this blog, we’re breaking down inbound and outbound sales so that you can find the right balance for your business.

The Outbound Sales Method

The outbound sales method, also known as traditional sales, revolves around companies finding leads and customers. Outbound techniques typically include:

  • Cold calling
  • Expensive print advertising
  • Email blasts
  • Trade shows
  • Television ads

Outbound sales can become very costly for companies and less effective as a result of technologies designed to block spam emails and recognize caller ID. Rather than adapting to these changes, many businesses continue to try these same techniques, losing both customers and money as a result.

Instead of getting overwhelmed by the ever-changing customer, we recommend adapting and using these changes to your advantage by implementing inbound sales techniques.

The Inbound Sales Method

The inbound sales method is helpful, human and holistic. Inbound marketing tactics allow you to connect with your customers and earn the attention of the empowered buyer. When used correctly, these techniques bring qualified buyers directly to your company, saving you both time and money.

The basic strategy of inbound sales focuses on improving the overall customer experience that your business provides – yes, that includes both potential and current customers.

To help you gather a greater understanding, we’re breaking down the inbound sales methodology into 4 phases:

  • The Identify Phase
  • The Connect Phase
  • The Explore Phase
  • The Advise Phase

1) The Identify Phase

The identify phase is where you’ll separate active buyers from passive buyers.

Active buyers are customers who have already begun their buyer’s journey. They’re looking for a solution to a specific problem and may immediately benefit from the product or service that you offer. From there, you can prioritize them as qualified leads and meet them wherever they are in their buyer’s journey.

Passive buyers are customers who are not currently ready to buy but may be interested in the future. Though marketers typically prioritize active buyers over passive buyers, it is possible to get passive buyers to convert – even though it may take a bit more effort. 

Social media is a great tool to use during this phase because it will allow you to gather information about a potential customer that you could not previously access.

2) The Connect Phase

After identifying the right type of buyer, you’re in the connect phase. This stage is a crucial part of the inbound sales strategy because it’s about building a relationship with a potential client.

We recommend beginning this phase with a personalized message that shows you understand the buyer’s context. By revealing your ability to listen and understand a customer’s current problem, they will begin to develop a sense of trust and sincerity among your brand.

3) The Explore Phase

Once you make a connection between your company and the buyer, you can transition into the explore phase. The objective of this step is to gain a more complete understanding of the customer’s needs through an in-depth and attentive conversation with an expert consultation.

By directly communicating and listening to the buyer, you will gain a better understanding of their overall goals and further build on the trust you created in the previous phase.

4) The Advise Phase

After you have identified your buyer and built a relationship with them based on understanding their needs, you can enter into the fourth and final stage. At this point in the inbound strategy, you have the opportunity to deliver a presentation that highlights all of the outstanding elements of your company.

However, in contrast to outbound sales, this should not be a generic sales pitch that could be given to any customer. Instead, this is a presentation that is tailored to the client. Reveal the specific ways your product or service will help them achieve their goals they discussed with you during the explore phase.

Finding the Right Balance for Your Business

Although we’re huge advocates of inbound sales and the major benefits it offers a company, we also recognize that inbound and outbound work together to create a holistic approach.

Finding the right balance between inbound and outbound techniques and the strategies that are currently working in your business’s favor is a critical component of creating a successful eCommerce marketing strategy.

If you’ve received great feedback and a high ROI on a clever television commercial, use that to your advantage by taking it to the inbound level. Taking that inbound step will really help to improve engagement and increase sales.

Don’t know how to take that next step? Add a hashtag to your advertisements to encourage viewers to connect with you on other platforms. As a result, you will be able to utilize existing campaigns while also learning to identify qualified, inbound leads.

Finding a balance between your existing strategy and the inbound methodology will allow your business to seamlessly transition towards this smarter way of selling.

Conclusion

The inbound sales strategy has created a new kind of buyer-seller relationship as one that operates on trust and thrives on communication. By identifying and connecting with active buyers and your targeted audience, you’ll save both time and money while simultaneously developing a lasting relationship.

Take advantage of the way technology has changed by implementing a successful inbound marketing strategy. They key is to create and deliver value to the consumer throughout every single step of the buyer’s journey.

And if you’re evaluating tools to help enable your sales team, we recommend exploring our blog that compares HubSpot and Salesforce.

If you have any questions about inbound vs outbound sales or if you would like to learn more about how Groove can help improve your inbound marketing strategy, contact us through the form below. Our team will be in touch!

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61 B2B Lead Generation Tactics and Strategies For 2021 https://3tecsolutions.com/61-b2b-lead-generation-tactics-and-strategies-for-2021/ https://3tecsolutions.com/61-b2b-lead-generation-tactics-and-strategies-for-2021/#respond Sun, 30 Aug 2020 11:33:51 +0000 http://wpt.3tecsolutions.com/?p=2004 B2B lead generation is easy.” 

Even sales reps teeming with elite level sarcasm wouldn’t dare to utter such a statement. 

Because if you’ve ever tried to increase B2B sales by generating more leads, you know it’s tough 💆

Like swimming without using your hands or feet—aka Navy SEAL “drown-proof” training—tough.

Like being jolted awake after a burrito and Bordeaux-wine filled night and being asked to crack the DaVinci Code, tough. 

Not only are you navigating a minefield of shrewd buyers, and battling hordes of hungry competitors, you’re also bombarded with a maelstrom of misinformation that includes: 

👉 Conflicting research about the best ways to generate leads.  

👉 Overhyped case studies that worked for XYZ corp—who with thousands of established buyers, would’ve increased sales regardless of the tactic they used.

And it doesn’t help that every expert or authority is adamant that their lead generation tactic or strategy is the “bee’s knees” way to increase B2B sales. The “ugly” truth is: 

You’ll have to tailor your approach to the DNA of your organization, industry, product/service, and buyer. 

Often, this means ignoring self-tooting horns and trialing a new way to generate leads. 

That’s why I’ve listed 61 powerful lead generation strategies and tactics B2B businesses use to increase sales. These include: 

  • Website Optimization
  • Content Marketing
  • Email Marketing
  • Paid Advertising
  • Social Media
  • And 5 essential lead generation tools to support you with all the above

But, before we dive into the “meat” of this post, let’s clarify the basics of increasing B2B sales…

First, what is B2B lead generation?

B2B lead generation is short for business-to-business lead generation. Which describes businesses that primarily sell to (*drumroll please*)…other businesses. 

This is parallel to business-to-consumer (B2C) lead generation, where products and services are sold directly to consumers.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And in a typical marketing funnel or sales process, B2B lead generation is that step.

It involves collecting a potential customer’s information—such as name, email, company name, and job title—that will be used to personalize communication and make sales.

After this information is collected, these leads are then typically nurtured via marketing automation and passed to sales once they are qualified. 

The end goal of B2B lead generation is to create a consistent pipeline of high-intent prospects that turn into customers.

Increasing B2B sales: The steps inside the lead generation process

If you’re serious about increasing B2B sales, you’ll need a strong lead generation process. This aligns marketing and sales teams and gives reps a proven framework to follow. 

We know that B2B lead generation describes the process used by sales/marketing teams to turn prospects into paying customers. But what do these steps entail? 

Step 1: Finding B2B leads 

The first step towards generating B2B leads is finding the contact information of potential buyers. 

This information is often sourced in-house, generated by a third-party “lead gen” company, or bought from a lead database (not advisable for B2B lead generation). 

Step 2: Reaching out to leads

With a list of (hopefully) high-quality leads, reps reach out to leads through cold outreach, social media, or by replying back to inquiries. 

Step 3: Qualifying & prospecting high-quality leads

While interacting with leads, reps measure how likely leads are to buy. 

They’ll do this by gauging the stage leads are at during the buying process. These stages include: 

1. Research & awareness: The customer is aware of a solution they need, or problem they face, and they begin to learn more about it. 

This is the stage where they’ll consume content like blogs, whitepapers, and case studies.

2. Consideration: The lead knows the exact service/product that is needed. He/she will now detail their specific needs before researching and “opening up” to vendors. 

3. Decision: Filtering through vendors that best suit their needs, the buyer will have multiple meetings and check-in with other decision-makers to complete a purchase. 

Depending on what stage a lead is at, reps will initiate nurturing campaigns or focus on getting the prospect to book a call or demo. 

Step 4: Closing leads

Success! After multiple meetings with different vendors, the prospect picks you and the deal is done. They’ll now be transferred to customer success for onboarding

But what’s the best way to get B2B leads? 

Most reps and marketers search for the silver bullet that’ll increase B2B leads. Unfortunately, such a thing doesn’t exist. 

Even the experts can’t agree on what the best B2B lead generation strategy, tactic or channel is… 

Hubspot created the chart below to shed light on where leads come from. At first glance, it’s what you’d expect. 


Starting from the left, you have the typical channels and strategies we’re all aware of — direct mail, trade shows, email marketing, etc,.

But to the far right, towering above all other channels, the biggest source of B2B leads is apparently “Other.”

What on earth does “other” mean? 

I mean, if the experts can’t figure it out, who else knows?  

This data might not reveal the exact source of B2B leads, but, it does show that even the industry authorities with tons of data struggle to pinpoint the best way to generate leads.  

To conclude with a powerful quote from our CRO, Jaakko, “The best way to generate more sales is to tailor your B2B strategy around your industry, product, and buyer.”

With that in mind, let’s get to the 61 ways you can generate more B2B leads and increase sales. 

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