INBOUND ACCELERATOR

From Google Assistant and Siri on the mobile phones in everyone’s pocket, to Amazon’s Alexa in several rooms of the most-connected homes, or the less-used Bixby and Microsoft Cortana platforms, voice search is rapidly growing, as Top Shelf Media outlines in the infographic below.

As you enter 2020, with a new marketing strategy and campaigns planned out and ready for creation and implementation, take time to consider these statistics.

Is your brand well aligned with your long term goals? Only 60 percent of marketers say “yes.”

Are you pumping out content without focusing on how good it is? According to 76 percent of marketers, quality trumps quantity.

Social media and video seem to be made for each other, but are you making the most of the opportunity?

A few statistics to know:

• 54 percent of consumers say they want to see more videos from brands and businesses they support.

• 72 percent of people would rather learn about a product or service through video than through text.

• Viewers are 95 percent more likely to remember a call-to-action after watching a video, compared to 10 percent when reading it in text format.

(Source)

While it is easy to see, everywhere you look, how video has become a dominant element in B2C marketing, even more conservative, information-based B2B buyers are increasingly turning to video to find information they need to make buying decisions.

So what do you need to do to reach B2B decision makers with marketing videos?

Integrated marketing and public relations rely on balancing a content triad — using earned, owned, and shared content to reach audiences and drive awareness, lead generation and sales. So how do you maximize the “earned” component to access audiences without spending money on advertising?

For B2B businesses, particularly in information-, knowledge- and technology-heavy industries, the answer is in high quality thought leadership articles placed with trusted industry media. That is the approach JONES and QPS took to gain the global CRO (contract research organization) valuable exposure without a huge investment in paid advertising.

Successful content or inbound marketing requires working from an established strategy to create comprehensive campaigns that touch on all content distribution channels to reach the most potential sales prospects and engage them in ways that generate qualified leads and closed deals.

There was a time when every conversation around search engine optimization focused on one specific topic: keywords. How to choose keywords (such as selecting keywords that have a high search rating, but are ones that allow you to be competitive). Where to place keywords in the structure of your website (also called on-page SEO). How to work keywords into your content.

Is your content marketing coming up short? Doesn’t quite have the energy and strength you’d like to see (or that you remember from a few years ago, when you were more diligent)?

While I love sharing recent successes of my clients (such as these top-notch PR and marketing efforts by QPS<> and West<>), it is also rewarding to look back and reminisce about some of my first clients, and how what I learned then is still guiding my strategies today.

Enterprise software is one industry I’ve worked in for years, and which has provided some of my most exciting moments, including helping to launch one of the first SaaS (software as a service) businesses, before the acronym became known and understood.

Some sources say that only 25 percent of new inbound marketing leads are actively looking to buy when they first enter your system; some say it is fewer than 1 in 10. That means that all your new leads really want when they first access an offer on your website is information.

And what you want is engagement and a connection, so that when they are ready to buy, you’re at the top of the list.