The Complete Manual of B2B Marketing for 2023

The Ultimate Guide to B2B Marketing in 2023 gives you an excellent overview of the latest trends in B2B marketing. It includes account-based marketing, social media, augmented reality, and loyalty loop marketing.

Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing (ABM) has become more prominent in the marketing world. ABM can be defined as a strategic approach for identifying and engaging targeted accounts and retaining and expanding relationships with them. It also increases sales opportunities and generates better ROI. Depending on the objectives of the company, ABM may take various forms.

Account-based marketing is different from other types of B2B marketing. The main goal is to identify and engage highly-targeted high-value accounts. This allows the company to increase loyalty among its customer base. Investing in these relationships results in long-term customer relationships, which is crucial for business growth.

ABM is typically used in conjunction with other marketing techniques. Some examples include social media and ad campaigns. For example, LinkedIn is a great way to target specific companies. Using InMail and Sponsored Updates to communicate with targeted contacts is an excellent way to stay in these prospects' minds.

Marketing and sales teams can also collaborate on account-based campaigns. Association management offers numerous services, including leadership, membership, event planning, marketing, communication, and financial management. An Association Management company can ensure the campaign is optimized for success.

Augmented Reality

Augmented reality in B2B marketing is gaining momentum and has the potential to be a game changer for your business. Adding digital content to your customer's experience will improve engagement, shorten the sales cycle, and increase conversions. Whether you're a manufacturer, retailer, or service provider, you can use augmented reality to enhance your product or service offering.

With augmented reality, your customers can try out a new product, view a demo, or learn more about a particular product. This immersive experience will encourage decision-making and make it easier for them to select the right products for their needs.

Augmented reality for B2B marketing will also reduce the risk of human error. You can use an AR system to allow your customers to interact with a bank teller or insurance agent. You can even equip your employees with smart glasses that can scan and sort inventory, increase the accuracy of your inventory, and streamline workflows.

Loyalty Loop Marketing

You should consider loyalty loop marketing when looking for the ultimate customer experience. This loop involves using psychology to deliver a memorable experience.

It works by taking the most critical step in the customer's journey and making it easy for them to take the next step. Creating a simple but effective process will allow your customers to move from consideration to evaluation to buying with you.

The loop also works by recognizing that people will need to reevaluate your brand's value. They will return to you for more if you give them the correct value.

Using the loyalty loop to its full advantage can increase your sales. In today's competitive retail environment, this is an essential tactic.

The loyalty loop is a great way to increase the return on your investment. Loyalty loop marketing includes providing incentives, purchase rewards, and learning experiences.

There are many ways to achieve this. One of the most effective is by leveraging social media. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter offer powerful tools for engaging customers and collecting valuable information.

Social Media

A social media marketing strategy is a must for B2B sales. It helps build relationships, conduct research, and generate leads. However, it can be unclear because there are several platforms and campaigns to choose from.

To develop a successful social media marketing plan, you need to understand the benefits of each platform. To determine which is right for your business, start by identifying your audience's habits and the best tools to use. Then, create a comprehensive strategy that aligns with your business goals.

In addition to using social media to generate leads, you can also build a community of brand advocates. This includes employees. Employees can help establish your brand as a trusted industry expert by sharing company info and recommendations.

Employee advocacy is one of the best prongs of a social media strategy for B2B sales. People trust their employees' recommendations. Plus, the content that employees share has a higher CTR.

Social media is a powerful tool for B2B sales, but it takes an expert to make it work. That's why hiring someone who knows how to manage a social media account is essential.

Benefits of Sales and Marketing Alignment

For all B2B company sales and marketing, alignment is essential in selling complicated products to various committees that make decisions over a long time. Account-based initiatives may be in danger of being flat unless professionals align sales and marketing.

Many companies without sales and marketing professionals may experience negative outcomes. If you fail to align sales and marketing, it may result in lost opportunities, customer frustration, and duplicate effort. Established companies like Maxlend loans can help you collaborate and align with professionals in sales and marketing and help you achieve better results.

Here are some of the benefits of sales and marketing alignment:

Understand Your Customers Better

Sales and marketing can be stimulating by nurturing, closing, and attracting deals. All these must be on one page about the customers they want to reach. When different teams work together, it becomes much easier to make accurate buyer profiles.

The decision may involve various stakeholders at different points. It is essential to know when and who to engage in creating a story thread with many stakeholders from the start to the end, allowing a simple handoff between sales and marketing. It is also important that the sales and marketing understand what may influence the buyers at different stages.

When you understand the customer, you enhance the possession of the client's experience with your partner. Prospects don't like the influence of siloed organizations, which is seen through confusing and fragmented engagement.

More Customer Feedback

Both sales and marketing collect applicable knowledge about potential clients while they observe them and interact with them in the process of buying. Shared customer knowledge and feedback helps to create a way for better conversions and big win rates.

Both teams can position to engage and identify the most promising clients. This only happens when two teams share insights about the customer preference, pain, interests, and even behaviors. When the customer feedback has more details, it increases the sales team's accuracy, and much less time is spent on which one should be the priority.

Business Leaders Offer Better Support

When a company's team shows total commitment from sales and marketing to coordinating their efforts, the executive group becomes motivated to help ensure the sales and marketing alignment are completed successfully. Such support can be extended to various places, such as communication concerning the benefits of collaboration and the commitment of resources to maintain it, including initiatives to simplify department silos, like integrating all important tools and adjusting compensation plans to reward and reflect the combined efforts accurately.

Better Engagement Between Marketing and Sales

If sales and marketing work separately, every team does its activities without being attentive to what the other team is doing. Such separation may result in unclear experiences for possible clients and redundant efforts. It can also make it very difficult to identify where the leads drop in the client's journey.

 Nonetheless, when two teams cooperate and interact more often, they may join their forces to increase the effectiveness of their efforts. Collaborating like an oiled machine can help sales and marketing launch a campaign to maximize the impact, engage more prospects, and handle lead fluids in attractive ways for all the potential clients. Sales and marketing alignment can respond faster when there is a change in marketing dynamics because of the collaboration between two teams.

Other benefits of sales and marketing alignment include:

• Getting a better map of the client's journey

• Having an effective strategy

• Better execution of customer feedback

Make sure your company hires sales and marketing alignment professionals who will help to effectively increase your results by collaborating, reducing risks, and taking your relationship to another level.

Effective Marketing The Old School Way

The rise of digital marketing platforms and social media influencers have helped the direct mail industry to find inventive ways to market products. If you didn't know what direct mail was before reading this then keep on reading because this article will not only shed light on this ingenious marketing strategy but will also highlight some key advantages to direct mailing as an industry alternative for brand exposure.

By now you probably get the gist of what direct mailing is about but to put it in simpler terms, this is a type of marketing that involves brands sending their promotional items to a person's home or work address without their knowledge. The main objective behind this strategic approach is to drive online sales of that brand or business. Nowadays, brands target influential people through this age-old marketing technique. 

Now that you are familiar with the concept, it is important to understand what the advantages are for brands when they opt to use direct mail as their marketing strategy. 

• It Commands  Attention

This is the oldest and most effective way for a brand to be noticed by a prospective client. It provides an intimate relationship with a client because it shows them that you have been attentive to their needs and wants. 

•  Personalized 

Everyone wants something different from the next person. Each delivery is customized.

•  You Get What You See

It is a tangible delivery service and as a client, it's easy to find out if you will like your promotional gift or not as soon as you open the door to sign for your delivery. 

Direct mail is popular for its efficiency and cost-effectiveness. You can receive your direct mail from anywhere in the country and there are many services providers that you can find for instance, if you search for direct mail services in Atlanta you will have a selection of more than twenty businesses that offer the marketing option to brands. So, it doesn't matter where you are you always have the option to do marketing the age-old way. 

How White Label Link Building Can Be the Boost Your Marketing Agency Needs

It’s important that you carefully consider the services that you offer as a marketing agency. Every agency has a menu of services that they excel in – search engine optimization, digital advertising, content creation – the list goes on and on. By offering white label link building, it can boost your agency to new heights while also giving you a competitive edge in today’s marketplace.

Attract New Clients

Businesses of all shapes and sizes need help with their marketing strategies. You may already be helping clients with digital advertising campaigns. You know how to get them the traffic they need through paid campaigns.

What about organic traffic, though? May clients want to focus on the best possible content along with backlinking strategies. It can ensure they get the traffic simply by maintaining their online presence.

When you can offer more services and help people achieve their goals in different ways, you can attract new and different clients. If you’ve been looking to diversify for a while, the simplest solution may be to look at white label link building. It can enhance your portfolio and ensure that you can continue to be the go-to marketing agency for all of your existing clients while attracting new clients at the same time.

Offer More Services

Today’s business owners are savvier than ever before. They’re reading magazines and blogs to tell them what they need to do in order to get more traffic. They know about things like search engine optimization and website conversion rates. When you know that business owners know about marketing, you have to be ready to field their questions.

Do you offer search engine optimization? What’s the average ROI? How do you handle link building? How long will it take to see results?

If you don’t have the answers to their questions, they’ll bring their business to an agency that does have them. It’s not just about knowing the answers, though. It’s also about offering diverse services that will help them grow and get higher levels of traffic needed to achieve all of their goals.

The services you offer don’t have to be provided by you. It’s important to search for third parties that offer the services behind the scenes. With such things as white label link building, you can offer the service and take the credit while a third party does all of the work. It’s a chance to add to your menu of services easily.

Reduce the Hours You Work

It’s not uncommon for marketers to put in a significant number of hours. Especially if you’re just starting out, you’ll work your fingers to the bone in order to prove that you can help your clients. You know that you can only be successful if your clients see some kind of success.

Even with marketing automation software, you may be working countless hours each and every day. You may be writing the content, researching the keywords, and doing everything on the back end.

What if you could get some help? It can be difficult to hire new employees to your agency because there are not only hourly rates to worry about but also employee benefits. It can be expensive – especially if you don’t start growing your client base quickly enough.

Help doesn’t have to come from the hired staff. It can come from third parties that offer white label services. You simply have to decide on the areas you want the help in – such as link building. It can reduce the hours you spend working for your clients – and that can give you more time to pursue new clients.

Increase Your Revenue

With new services comes more revenue. When you take advantage of a white label link building service, you have the ability to set your own prices for the service. The third-party sets their fees – and you can mark them up as you see fit.

As you continue to offer new services and create various marketing packages for your clients, it allows you to boost your revenue. You can decide how many clients you want to take on – and when you’re not doing all of the work thanks to what the third parties are offering, you may find that you can take on more clients than you ever thought possible.

Marketing Tips For Professional Services

Professional services firms such as law firms, accounting companies, or human resource agencies often have a reputation for not being very forward-thinking when it comes to marketing and more specifically digital marketing. In the distant past, professional services did most of their business on the back of referrals or face to face meetings. 

The world has moved on and professional service companies are embracing more sophisticated marketing tactics for finding their target audiences. Focus On Your Client, Not Yourself.

In professional services, it’s very easy to focus on your experience, accreditations, and credentials. Sell the benefits of your services, not just the features. Prospective clients want to know what you can do for them, it’s that simple.

While it’s important that you do have these, you need to focus on solving your client’s problems. A law firm or financial advisor prospecting for clients needs to identify and solve a problem for their clients. Every key message needs to be client-centric. 

Creating a buyer persona is a great way to get into the mindset of your potential clients. 

Don’t Forget Your Website Design and Messaging

A well designed, optimized website is so much more than an online brochure that you should just build and forget about. Your website should be working hard for you and work to drive customers to convert to qualified leads. 

Your website should be updated regularly with blogs, video content, case studies, and news stories.  Embed a way of capturing leads with calls to action and data capture forms. 

SEO should also be a big part of your online presence. This is done by researching your market and doing keyword research, optimizing your new and existing content to rank for specific keywords and keyword phrases.

A good SEO company will not only help you improve your site but should also be aiming to boost you ahead of your competitors. 

Find Your Target Market and Engage with Them

Many professional services companies try to be all things to all people and don’t target a particular niche.  This can make it difficult to effectively appeal to anyone. By targeting correctly, you’ll be able to identify and network within the right markets and gain a foothold through referrals and reputation. 

Use Linked In To Network With Potential Customers

LinkedIn has transformed from a place to look for jobs, to a fully-fledged networking and sales platform for business professionals. LinkedIn’s premium tools allow you to target and network with your ideal customers. Sharing articles and content is a great way to attract people to your website.

It is also a good place in which to build your employer brand to attract potential future employees. 

Speak At Trade Events and Conferences

You may already attend trade shows in order to market to new potential clients. It can be a great way to get new business. Take your involvement a step further and get involved in presenting at these events. As an expert speaker, you automatically have a level of credibility with the attendees. Through your presentation, you will be able to encourage future contact through sign-ups of connecting on social networks. 

Conclusion

Embracing up to date marketing techniques can give your company an advantage in the marketplace. Don’t just look to your competitors, sometimes the best inspiration can come from another industry entirely. 

What Are Inbound Marketing Systems? And How Can It Help?

Inbound marketing is two-way communication between you and your users, whether that’s other colleagues or your customers. You can release information and your users find you, through search, social media, or referrals. It’s quick and easy access and can be hugely beneficial to your business, especially if you are an SME.

To put it into simpler terms, it’s a type of marketing that engages with an audience. This is done through creative and informative content through organic means, such as search engines and sharing links with friends. This may be on any type of social media or if we text a link to a friend. Another example may be a blog post that talks in detail about a specific product that can reach someone more so because of its intimate content and will reach more people than a specific banner ad tagged onto a page somewhere.  

Businesses can utilize this by creating the right content that will benefit their company. You can then look to create and then distribute relevant and valuable content that the customers want, whereas outbound marketing would include a more traditional approach. This may include direct mail, cold calling, radio ads, television ads, trade shows, and telemarketing. Both have benefits but it depends on your message, your target audience, your goals, and your budget.

Not every company can afford a lavish television advert that can cost hundreds of thousands. It’s time to find the best inbound marketing services. They will help you grow organically and give your business the boost that it needs in order for it to grow and develop. You don’t need to be a marketing genius but here are some further areas that will assist you in understanding what inbound marketing is and how it is used: 

• Topical blogs.

• Social media campaigns (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest)

• Ebooks.

• Search Engine Optimized (SEO) website text.

• Viral videos.

• Web-based seminars and Trade Shows.  

It is very digital-focused which is great because everyone is digital now. It is such a huge part of our lives and everyone can consume things digitally so easily now, and it is only going to grow. So using these areas will be vital for business growth. SEO is huge because it looks at growing your popularity on Google and allowing more people to see you before they see others which helps you beat the competition but this takes time and most often professional help to get this up and running to such an extent.

Looking at your options for inbound marketing is going to be a very practical thing to do because communication is always key. Looking at blogs and social media campaigns could really put you on a path to bigger and better things because it is so consumer-focused and you can get out the information that you need in a simple way which is effective also. It’s time to take your business to the next step with some high-quality inbound marketing and start to see it thrive today! 

Tips for Marketing to Millennials

Depending on your intended audience and product, you may want to target millennial customers. Do you find yourself baffled by where to start reaching out to younger consumers? Learn the finer points of the marketing art so you don't waste time, and so you improve your chances of experiencing favorable results. 

Make Your Content Social 

Millennials embrace new technology that allows them to connect with other people. From a marketing standpoint, that means you want to make your content quick and easy to share on multiple social media platforms. Not only is this how you appeal to younger consumers, but it's also a great way to let your target consumers handle marketing and advertising for you. This helps you save money and time. 

Concentrate on Word of Mouth 

While true of consumers of all ages, millennials are especially apt to let people know just how much they enjoy (or dislike) a specific product. To make it easier for millennials to sing praises of your product or service, offer a free trial. Such offers make it easy for shoppers to give your brand a try, as there's one less hurdle for them to clear. Marketing professionals like Eyal Gutentag would surely recommend that you encourage those who take you up on your trial offer to share their thoughts with their friends and family if they enjoyed your service or product. 

Offer Rapid Responses 

The world has never been so connected, and communication has never been so instantaneous. From a business standpoint, that means your shoppers and potential customers want a quick answer to their inquiries, especially younger consumers. Set up your customer service so that shoppers always receive a quick and thorough response to their question, no matter if it's early in the morning or late at night. Take too long to respond and you may send a potential long-time customer into the arms of your competitors. 

Know Their Values 

When you want to either market to or manage millennial's, you've got to appeal to their values. That means learning which causes millennials care most about and see how your company can support those causes. This could mean supporting a charity, a specific organization, or just doing what you can to support your local community. Even if you aren't targeting younger consumers, supporting charities is good for your company's public profile. 

Remain Transparent 

Millennials shop with a fair degree of skepticism, and who can blame them? No consumer wants to feel taken advantage of or become a victim. That means you need to operate with complete transparency about how you do business, what ingredients or components you use in your product or service, and how you use customer information. Remember, it's easy for modern shoppers to do a bit of research on their own to see whether companies are as reputable and honest as they claim to be. Make it easy for younger consumers to understand where you're coming from. 

Once you gain the attention of Millennial shoppers, take steps to keep it. Once you have their loyalty, it could be easier than you think to keep them coming back to your company again and again.

Innovative Ways To Get Your Business Noticed

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With so much competition in every industry, getting your business noticed may seem like an impossible task. Gaining enough attention to influence potential customers can appear to be a very expensive and time-consuming task, that often fails or proves unfruitful for many different reasons.

However, fortunately, this does not have to be the case, as there are several projects which you can complete in order to gain sufficient awareness for your brand to succeed. It needn’t be a strenuous or stress-inducing venture, and you may see real results in just a few weeks. So, if you want to know more about how you can get your business noticed, then read on to uncover some of the most innovative ways to improve your reach and increase your customer base today.

Take Advantage Of Social Media

Failing to take advantage of social media and its marketing opportunities can cause you to fall behind many of your competitors, as it’s a key feature to succeed in today's modern world. Using social media platforms is especially effective if your target market is centered on young adults, as they average more than two hours using these applications daily. There are many different organizations online, which you can join and create a page or profile, and you can immediately begin reaching out to potential customers in several ways.

You can gain almost instant feedback from each of your posts or campaigns, as there are often options for users to ‘like’ the content and even leave a comment, in which they can express their thoughts and opinions. Advertising on social media sites is guaranteed to help you reach a much wider audience, and you can really benefit from taking the opportunity to develop your brand reputation online. 

The Wonders Of Event Sponsorship

An innovative way to get your business noticed is by sponsoring different events, such as sports games and concerts. There are several different opportunities to advertise your brand at such places, starting with the most obvious features such as crowd barriers that can showcase your logo and brand name, or getting a special shout out for providing some funding for the event. These are fun ways of reaching more potential customers, and once you invest in quality products, such as those from Eventdisplay, they can last a lifetime and be used over and over again. Get searching to identify some possible events in your local area that you might be able to sponsor, or even start planning your own event to get maximum coverage throughout. 

Take Your Brand To The Streets 

Word of mouth is as effective as ever, so it may be an idea to head out onto the streets to advertise your business in a much more hands-on and personal way. Get together a team of people with impeccable social skills, and ensure that they truly understand the ethos behind your business.

Managing to get a passerby to stop and chat is difficult, so you’ll need to ensure you do some digging to find the best employees for the job so that it is actually worthwhile. Getting the chance to speak with potential customers face-to-face can open up the opportunity to say everything that you cannot squeeze into an advert. This is a particularly good option for those of you whose commerce is done exclusively online, as your quality of customer service will not really exist as such, and this is a great chance for you to put a friendly face to your brand. 

Follow A Trend 

A new and creative option that could potentially open your business up to a much wider market is to get involved with a popular trend or craze. Individuals can earn short-term fame from creating videos or doing challenges that are the focus of that specific week, and you as a business have much more scope to put more effort in and gain an eye-catching result.

If your business has social media pages, ensure that you have a strong presence and post regularly, so that you can begin to round up followers that can spread your next move across the site. Then, whenever a new trend takes over, get involved and make your business become a part of it in a hilarious or inspiring way - post the outcome on your page and spread this through specialized insight tools so that you can appear in the feeds of interested users.

It only takes one funny video to break the internet and become a massive hit nowadays, and the attention that something such as this will get your business is absolutely huge. Of course, it is a risk, as you may put in the effort time and time again without yielding any noticeable results, but the more you attempt to understand the process, the better your chances of success will be. 

Make Connections

Making connections in business is always a positive thing, and is an important factor to consider when trying to get your brand noticed. Pairing up with another established company could give you the boost that you need to get out there and start reaching the wider market. If you’re in the early stages of your business, then this option will be perfect for you, as it can be very tough to get started alone, whilst having the help of a more experienced organization can help to kickstart your venture. It may seem strange to pair up with your competitors, but as the saying goes, ‘keep your friends close, and your enemies closer’!

Hopefully, these innovative marketing concepts can help you to get your business noticed, and allow you to get set in the right direction towards making a profit that you can truly be proud of.

Extra Energy To The Proceedings: Making Over Your Marketing

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When you are knee-deep in promoting your business, there comes a moment when you start to realize just how much of a massive task it is, not just for the sake of your product, but for your business as an entire entity. Marketing is one of those things that can consume any company if they don't use the right methods. And for many businesses out there, it proves to be one of the more difficult aspects to get right while also figuring out how to make a marketing strategy more innovative while improving what you've already got. How can you do this?

Tweak Your Content 

Your content is one of the crucial components, not just because it's what helps build the bridge between you and the customer, but it's also the tricks that you can implement to ensure that it catches a wider audience. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is one of those elements that, if you haven't looked at it already, you should find ways to show you are managing your SEO appropriately. Because it is such an evolving aspect of marketing, it's always worth having someone on the team dedicated to continuing going over the content and making it relevant, but also compliant with SEO so you climb up the search engine rankings. But that's not to say you should cover your content in spammy links and other aspects that debase the contact.

Learn To Automate 

Marketing isn't just about the components you have a direct hand in creating, but it’s also those that you automate. After all, you are a busy business owner and this means you've got to find the right methods to ensure the business continually operates without you having a direct hand in it. Automating emails and social media posts can be done with various tools, so you can schedule your posts ahead of time, and your content trickles out regularly, keeping everybody in your customer base in the loop, while also providing that perception that the business is operating 24/7.

Communicating With Customers Directly

We can tend to forget about the more realistic components of promotion. Regardless of how the business operates, it's important to speak to customers in a direct, human manner. While promoting your business is fantastic if you have all the online components in place, you have to find ways to continually engage the customer beyond the computer screen. It's always worth participating in something like a local community event. As well as this, think about trade shows and any event around the can show off your product in a good light. It's a very simple way to connect with a customer, while also finding ways to promote your ethics and brand in a far more substantial manner.

Marketing is widely open to interpretation. And if you feel that your business is certainly lacking in many ways, making it over and reinvigorating your promotion, but also adding a little bit of extra energy to the proceedings can help your business go further, but also make you realize where you are falling down.

It's 2019: Go Digital Or Go Home

Digital innovation is a natural growth process. You can count on the fingers of one hand the companies that have not yet embraced digital technologies in your neighborhood. However, while businesses rely on digital solutions as part of their day-to-day activities, digitalization continues to be perceived as a tool rather than a strategic goal. 

There is no denying that digital technology can not only save time and money in the long term, but it also facilitates interactions at different steps of business processes. However, failure to consider digitalization as a whole makes it difficult for companies to quantify the benefits of innovative solutions and interactive tools.

For small and medium-sized businesses, the need to digitalize processes can cast a threatening shadow over the financial growth. Indeed, enhancing your digital solutions comes at a high cost, which can be a handicap when you’re working with a limited budget. However, when digitalization becomes part of your business strategy, you can not only monitor the direct impact of your investment but also build a company that works better and harder for its customers and employees. Consequently, large-scaled digital investments are more likely to drive a rapid and significant positive ROI, as opposed to segmented and isolated digital enhancements. 

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FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS

Ultimately, today’s customers rely on the digital world to establish the first touchpoint with their trusted companies. They are not only digitally-savvy, but they are also willing to take shortcuts to get in touch with a business. With the digital universe at their fingertips, users operate cross-channels and devices in an effort to speed up their interactions. Ideally, they don’t want to waste time along the process and have no patience for companies that can’t keep up with their use of digital technology. 

Where do I click to buy? 

Cashless payments are nothing new. The rise of ecommerce businesses encourages more and more online payments. However, brick and mortar shops still have to make cashless transactions a priority. Indeed, small boutiques, craft fairs, and even food markets struggle to move away from a cash-only policy. Card payments are an integral part of your customers’ daily lives.

Additionally, more and more customers choose to manage all their transactions through their phones, relying on mobile payments such as Apple Pay or even Paypal when shops provide the option. In a day and age where most people are more likely to carry a smartphone than a wallet, it is foolish not to adapt to your customers’ preferences. 

Don’t slow down customer service

Your customers tend to turn to social media when they want to engage in a direct conversation with a brand. From responding to your posts to asking for help with a transaction issue, social media is the new customer service platform. However, if you’re going to make the most of your presence on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, you want to figure out how to extract meaningful data to guide your online activities.

Vanity metrics, for instance, are a marketing obsession that fails to drive any valuable strategy. Indeed, you can use social media insights to identify customers’ issues and engagement. Online reactions and mentions can help you to identify problematic products or target groups, for instance, and to refocus your efforts. 

Keep the interaction intuitive

Videos are one of the most engaging media formats. But, if you are going to make the most of a vlog, you need to enhance the interactive features. Videos allow your brand to build a direct connection with the audience. Maintaining the relationship is crucial to immerse potential customers into a branded environment of your creation. Therefore, clickable links in the video and branching patterns can preserve the interaction. If at any point, a user has to leave the video to find out more about your products or your brand, the positive effect is likely to disappear. 

FOR YOUR TEAM

Your team works in a high-paced environment. It makes no doubt that the implementation of digital solutions in the workplace is designed to support the hectic challenges of a typical workday. Therefore, the digitalization process needs to maximize productivity by offering your employees a reliable and supportive network of technologies. The purpose is to allow everybody to move smoothly through their day-to-day tasks by eliminating friction, inaccuracy, and delays. 

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Free your database from slow processes

Your database is at the core of your business processes. Enabling not only rapid but constant access is a priority to manage your operations, in terms of online transaction processing, data warehousing, database workloads. However, when the development technology you rely on is over 30 years old, as it is the case for Oracle Forms, it’s time to consider replacement options.

If you are still debating how to proceed between safe Oracle Forms migration and total modernization, for instance, you might need to consider the impact on your team. Indeed, an automated migration platform could modernize your solution and integrate with most modern tech your company needs. On the other hand, moving away from forms means the costly conversion of applications and screens. 

Collaborate in real time

Your team needs to work collaboratively on a variety of projects. However, the most common collaboration tool used in companies remains the email message, which is costing valuable time to your employees. Instead, you need to consider tools that let you set deadlines, manage tasks, and maintain cross-team communication in one place. Cooperative interfaces, such as Slack or Asana, favorize a quick and smooth organization while embracing real-time comments. 

Click to invoice in real-time

Your customers want to click to pay. Similarly, your accounting team doesn’t want to waste precious time designing bills and keeping the team informed. Online invoicing is not a novelty, yet small businesses have been slow to adopt digital financial features. Ultimately, the processes of billing, managing your CRM data, following-up unpaid invoices, and checking your stocks don’t need to be separated. Keeping all financial information in one place gives back control to your team. 

The process of digitalization is wrongly criticized as a costly investment. However, for SMEs, digitalizing business operations and building actionable strategies for your team and customers can not only save you time and money in the long term but also gives you a competitive edge in a busy market. At a time when you can’t afford to miss an opportunity, digital technology can free up your teams to focus on what they do best. 

The Importance Of Visual Communication In Business

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

In today's competitive business climate, it can seem almost impossible to stand out from the crowd. But someone's got to grab the attention of those customers and get them to part with their cash, so why can't it be you and your business? It may as well be.

To cut through the clutter and get people to stand up and pay attention to you and your company, you need to be using visual communication. 

Effective visual communication is more than just a photograph with a catchy headline, a video with graphics, or an impressive convention display. Visual communications can become a powerful tool in meeting your sales and marketing objectives, whether that's communicating to customers about how your product or service works or how it may integrate with their existing business environment. A functional diagram or chart can help to depict processes and eliminate customer confusion. Visual communications examples include demonstrating products or services, illustrating product integrations, highlight features, and benefits, and explaining a buying process. 

Internally, teams can create visual process charting techniques, decision mapping diagrams, or organization charts that communicate responsibilities and collaboration potential for groups. Examples of internal visual communications include organization charts, new product development roadmaps, business process documentation, lead generation process, managing inbound marketing campaigns, and production workflows. While these are all important, there are more reasons you need to be visually communicating to your customers to make your business a success:

To Get Attention 

Visuals get people to stop in their tracks, and they are more likely to look at your content if there are pictures and colors rather than a load of text. People stay on the page longer when there are more photos because they want to see what photo will come next. More so, the video will grab their attention. According to a study from HubSpot, 78% of people watch online videos every week, and 55% view online videos every day, and by 2020, online videos will make up more than 80% of all consumer internet traffic. These stats are pretty impressive. And if you're not on board with video yet for your business, then now is the time you need to start. 

Video is the future, and while you might have been busy making sure you're on the first page of Google, you might have missed the fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. People use Youtube a lot for online tutorials or educational style videos as one of the biggest things that people search is "how-to," so if this is something you can capitalize on in your business, then you really should be making the most of it and getting a slice of the action.

If you add visual communication in the form of video to your website, you will increase your search rankings massively on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Having video will also make your website fifty times more likely to appear on the first page of search results.

As well as these figures, 40% of consumers have also said that seeing a video on a website increases the chance that they will purchase a product on their mobile, whereas website visitors are 64% more likely to buy after watching a video on a website. But if you can't manage videos right now, anything with a visual component will get you more clicks, and more clicks equal more revenue. 

To Make Your Business Look Good

Your visuals represent your business, so it's essential to pick visual content that conveys the brand image you want. Nearly half of consumers consider a website's design to be the top criterion for discerning the credibility of a company; people are drawn to web content that's more visually appealing because it seems like higher quality. 

It's Easier For Customers

Because we have more information to digest today than ever before, people always look for tools to help increase processing efficiency. In other words, since there is so much content vying for our attention and time, we have to find ways to digest it faster than ever before. We respond to visual content better, and it's estimated that 90% of the information that travels to the brain is visual, and we process these visuals 60,000 times faster than we process text.

You Can Share It On Social Media

Most people today like to use social media sites and with a vast audience on each platform, scrolling through and looking for engaging content, visual content is essential for your business.

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Keeping It Professional: Marketing Advice

When marketing your business, keeping it professional is a must. Here are some ideas and suggestions.

Professional invoices

With an effective invoice design, you can reaffirm your professional identity, which will help lead to more business, customer referrals, and such like. However, there is a reason why a lot of people in the US are not using professional invoice designs and this is because they do not have the money to spare on design and print companies. Such businesses usually charge huge sums of money for their services and this makes it impossible for some people to capitalize on the advantages of expert invoice design. Well, until now. All you need to do is look online and you can download templates free of charge.

Letterhead design

Letterhead design is something that most businesses will need to think about at some part. After all, it looks much more professional to have a personalized business letterhead as opposed to using a Word template or something similar. Keeping that in mind, continue reading to discover how to create the perfect letterhead for your business.

Firstly, when designing a letterhead it is advisable to keep it simple. This is not like other branding platforms where you are going to include as much information as possible about your business. Rather, a letterhead is all about creating a professional and trusted air about your business. This is why a minimalistic and simple approach is always advised. Additionally, you need to ensure that your business letterhead is an apt representation of your brand. It should include the same colors as your logo, your website, and all other elements of your corporate image, for example.

What information are you going to include on the letterhead? You will need the basics, from the address of your company to your VAT number. Don’t overload the letterhead with unnecessary content. Finally, color is something that you need to give a lot of consideration too. If you offer legal services, finance services, or something similar, you will probably want to avoid a letterhead that looks like a rainbow. Instead, you should choose professional colors that evoke confidence and are in line with your company’s brand image. 

Sign off your emails

Another area where you need to enhance professionalism when it comes to your marketing efforts is when it comes to email marketing. This is especially important if you are dealing with vital clients or potential clients. You want to give off a good impression. Email signature management software can assist with this, including consistency throughout your email marketing campaign.

Follow the three suggestions above and make your campaign much more professional when marketing your business.

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