Tag Archives: content marketing

Marketing , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Reputation Management Begins With Credibility

by

Information moves faster and its reach is more widespread than at any time in history. Audiences—your clients, competitors, business colleagues and community in which you operate—participate in the 24/7 news cycle and expect transparency in real time. The lightning-fast movement will also include stories that involve your brand. Whether those stories posted by your organization and its supporters and are intended to build and celebrate your brand, or are negative and, for some unfortunate reason meant to undermine the perception and value of your brand, it is imperative that business owners and leaders take a proactive stance and manage information related to your entity as well as potential audience reactions to that information.

Staying out in front of the buzz about your business that’s pinging through the echoverse is essential, primarily because the potential for the appearance of unflattering information, that may or may not be true, is possible. The last thing you want is for a public relations crisis to land in your lap and create a five-alarm fire that forces you into a reactive rescue mission that can only leave you in a position of weakness, no matter how quickly and expertly you quash it. You will no doubt agree that having the luxury of shaping your brand stories and eliminating the need to control a crisis is the best defense? You may already have guessed that creating and presenting relevant and timely information is how the war can be won.

Online search and social listening

The potential for attacks on a business entity is worrisome and the aggression can be persistent. Arguably, the expansion of Artificial Intelligence powered automation has intensified the ability for bad actors to launch dirty tricks campaigns: some may originate from a particularly vicious competitor, or an unknown hacker may enjoy bringing trouble to the life of another human being. The first pillar of reputation management is maintaining consistent awareness. Business owners and leaders who fail to regularly monitor what is being said about their entity and note the prevailing tone of opinions expressed could be doing their brand reputation a disservice. Monitoring the prevailing sentiment is ideally an ongoing practice that informs you of what your customers and other stakeholders say about your brand. About every three months, it will be useful to search your name and the company name, plus your city, in engines such as Bing, Google and Yahoo and read what the AI summary or other search mechanisms reveal about you and your brand.

Quick response to customer complaints found on social media platforms must express empathy and offer a practical solution; apologize and offer your side of the story and make amends when possible. If a customer offers criticism (that might be constructive, BTW), address the matter. Disparaging rumors directed at your business must be met with a polite but firm, discreetly phrased but truthful, clarification. If you see that your business has been reviewed in an excessively negative and/or inaccurate way, contact the reviewing site and request that the offending post be removed.

Brands are also turning to social media user comments for market and consumer info when trends and other marketplace developments evolve too quickly for traditional research methods to keep up. Social listening tools like Talkwalker use AI to pull specific brand insights from the vast quantities of data available on social media platforms, in real time. Social listening, another manifestation of that practice, tracks online comments made about your brand, industry and competitors across social media platforms. From an analysis of those comments, a the big picture will emerge of the unfiltered perceptions that your customers, prospects and others have about your brand. Social listening can also capture developing trends that are bubbling up and indicate where opportunities (or risks) that impact your entity are hiding. In short, social listening data can assist all facets of your brand.

Informative and timely content

The second component of your reputation management strategy is investing in your strengths before an emergency develops. Build genuine, search-visible assets steadily, so that when a difficult moment arrives, your reputation has the depth to absorb it. A company that has consistently shown who it is can take a hit that would flatten a competitor with nothing in reserve. That reserve is built in the quiet quarters before a crisis, not during one.

By positioning yourself as a go-to source of useful insights and info, you’ll win audience trust—and that is vital. The quality and timeliness of the information you deliver, whether by text, video, or audio, will enhance your value. Distributing your thought leader content on social media platforms favored by your target audience maximize distribution and help you build a following. You’ll benefit from increased name recognition, eventually acquire trust and influence and, ultimately, you’ll create for yourself a solid brand reputation. Linking your blog and/or newsletter to one or more social media platforms when you publish is a great way to share your compelling content with a wide audience (readers will find my weekly blog at LinkedIn activity/posts.)

Because you cannot manage what you are not watching, those who pay attention to narratives that appear in the digital space or print, whether friendly or unfriendly, are getting reputation management right. A concern caught early on is a conversation; that same concern, if ignored and allowed to fester, is a headline. An effective business leader’s goal is not to respond well to incidents, but to anticipate that, unfortunately, occasional headwinds are inevitable. Building up credibility, which could be expressed as thought leader expertise, client, nurturing colleague or peer relationships and being responsive to any concerns, or participation in community organizations and/or events are the invisible yet powerful and sustainable pillars of reputation management

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: Vlada Karpovich

Marketing , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Audit: Is Your Marketing Content Doing the Job?

by

Relevant, actionable even, marketing content is the engine that pushes a business entity forward. Marketing (and its tactical sibling, sales) is enshrined as one of the three pillars of a business, along with operations and finance. A range of marketing content can be developed and employed to carry out strategies and tactics that promote the company’s business solutions—its products and/or services—by addressing the pain points, goals and challenges that prospective customers who make purchases on behalf of their organization must resolve.

That content is used to advance defining story narratives that communicate how your company’s products or services produce returns on investment for customers—commonly, financial gain, operational efficiencies, risk management, or achieving a mission-critical goal. B2B marketing content is meant to create conditions that persuade prospects to green-light the sale:

  • Expand the customer list by introducing the business entity and its solutions to prospects who have a problem to solve or goal to reach
  • Generate viable sales leads
  • Establish trust in the perception of the solutions that the business provides
  • Promote the company’s visibility and credibility
  • Distinguish the business from competitors
  • Enhance the brand reputation
  • Position the company to survive and thrive by growing sales revenue and profit

We approach 2027 with the knowledge that for Freelance business owners, implementing a powerful marketing content strategy that is carried out by credible, useful content that is timely and able to address the needs of prospects at every stage of the buyer’s journey has never been more important. Now that B2B decision-makers have made it known that 67% prefer to self-direct their buyer’s journey and only contacting the vendor until they approach the comparative evaluation of solutions that have made it to the short list. Because it is often not possible to add your input to the buyer’s journey until a decision is about to be made, it is imperative that your marketing content is persuasive enough to carry your solution through the vetting obstacle course with a good chance to emerge as the winner.

Adjust to the B2B buying reality

The sales cycles in B2B has become long and perilous, and prospects are known to be demanding. The communication formats you have in place, e.g. presentations, links to webinars or podcasts and case studies, too, exist to show prospects why your solution makes sense. During the buyer’s journey, marketing content must satisfy the priorities of influential stakeholders, gatekeepers and, finally, the decision-making committee. Before any campaign launches, your organizations needs alignment in three areas:

1. Content availability: right time, right place

Ask yourself—when you’re looking for something, whether it’s your keys or some useful information, you need whatever it is to be there when you need it, in a place where you can find it. This basic fact of human nature unfortunately prevents lots of informative marketing content from being noticed and receiving serious consideration by the parties for whom it is intended. So much useful marketing content is created and subsequently clicked out of existence, unable to fulfill its purpose, because the recipient decided it wasn’t worth the time and energy to deal with it when it landed in the inbox. Unfortunate timing condemns good content to suffer the delete button. In other words, good content does not automatically become visible content. Prospects tend to rank what they read:

  • What looks relevant
  • What looks important
  • What looks familiar
  • What can be ignored

Another scenario that drains the power of content is putting a story that could be effective in front of the prospect at the wrong time. Keep in mind that your job is to nurture the buyer’s journey and organically move it forward, toward a successful conclusion—the sale. You cannot force the process. It is imperative to have at the ready informative and persuasive marketing content that informs each stage of the buyer’s journey—awareness, research, decision and post-sale. If you only produce early awareness stage, “top-of-funnel” content, it’s likely you’ll get window shopper prospects who never convert. If you only produce “bottom-of-funnel” content that’s intended to encourage prospects who are evaluating short list candidates so they can finalize the sale, it’s likely you’ll get many prospects to take the journey in the first place. Oh, and your content must not only address each stage of the buyer’s journey, but also stand out and capture attention. B2B buyers keep a trigger finger on the delete button and they’re ready to click.

2. Audience attention

You already know to define your audience and confirm factors that incent them to seek out your type of service or product and what they want to achieve when your solution is implemented. Once you’ve confirmed your prospect’s agenda for doing business with you (or one of your competitors, but we don’t want that to happen!), you must ensure that your marketing content makes viewers stop, read and look. B2B marketing is no longer about competing against other businesses anymore—it’s competing against multiple distractions, sensory overload, fatigue, or doing nothing at all. When a prospect eyeballs your content, here’s the time frame you’re up against:

  • 3 seconds to grab their attention.
  • 30 seconds for a glance.
  • 3 minutes for a full read

Eye-catching

An arresting visual, an unexpected revelation, humor, or emotional honesty are among the hooks you might use to bring audience attention that causes them to engage with your content and read on. Providing a contrarian or surprising fact or statistic that challenges a common belief can likewise be compelling.

Call-to-action

A call-to-action asks the reader to do something — learn, win, sign up, give feedback, for example. Many emails that drop into the average inbox lack an interesting, appealing subject line. It’s so easy for the eye to slide over much that is sent. Devise an amusing, novel, or practical call-to-action that will both grab attention and either inspire or dare your intended reader to read on.

Emotional relevance

You will be mistaken if you think that the decision-makers for your sale are ruled by the logic of facts, figures and potential outcomes. most decisions are emotional first and rationalized second. Humans naturally pay more attention to things connected to:

  • Identity
  • Safety
  • Status
  • Belonging
  • Aspiration
  • Fear
  • Pleasure

Humans remember what we feel and this is why emotionally relevant marketing consistently tends to outperform purely informational marketing. Facts matter but feelings determine whether those facts are noticed.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: © Liquoricelegs

Marketing , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Bring Visibility to the Value You Deliver

by

Is the value of your B2B products and/or services fully recognized and acknowledged by your customers and prospects? You may assume that if sales get within striking distance of your annual revenue target, the answer is yes—yes, prospects trust that your solutions will resolve their pain point or achieve an important goal. It’s great when customers understand their need for what you sell and they’re willing to pay to use it. However, there may be a hidden negative action that has the potential to undermine your sales. Yes, you have a roster of paying customers, but some may have a casual attitude toward your offering. These customers fail to fully appreciate the significance of the outcomes derived from using your service or product. The failure to grasp the good stuff your service or product brings to the table is called a value gap; although customers improve the position of their company in one way or another when they use your offering, they don’t exactly count their blessings for being able to do so. Those customers do not objectively measure, document, or communicate to their company leaders and stakeholders the user case that explains why doing business with you is good business.

You might suspect a value gap if it appears the enthusiasm customers once expressed for the results produced when using your service or product diminish and leave your solution to fade like a wallflower, instead of sparkling like the belle of the ball. Maybe social media engagement is drifting downward and few customers are singing your praises and making referrals?

The existence of a value gap typically weakens future sales (including repeat business), shrinks the number of customer Word-of-Mouth referrals you receive and some customers may even find it acceptable to bargain down the selling price for your solution. Meaning, a value gap kills growth opportunities and you’ve got to reverse it. Doug May, founder and managing partner of Value Sherpas, a go-to-market advisory firm, and Wendy Wise, founder and CEO of Profitwise, which provides pricing and go-to-market services, are co-authors of Bridging the Value Gap (2015) and they can show you how to climb out of the quicksand.

Based on their experience, May and Wise recommend that companies make demonstrating customer value foundational in all relevant customer touchpoints across the organization to successfully when looking to overturn the value gap. Business owners and leaders should research, evaluate, confirm and integrate value that matters into customer-facing business operations to receive the greatest reward from interactions that are visible, and therefore memorable, to customers. In this way, the business owner will have the best opportunities to create competitive advantages that are unique to your organization. 

Your job is to discover what motivates prospects and customers to seek out products or services in your category, and then determine what customers and prospects value most highly about the solution they intend to purchase. Finally, you must decide how your company can consistently deliver highly impactful value and simultaneously enable customers and prospects to see and appreciate that value. The authors define the process as a sequence—research and understand, verify, operationalize and scale.

May and Wise point out that addressing the value gap is most efficiently managed when you align the benefits and outcomes associated with your solutions with quickly recognizable, easy to explain and highly valued business outcomes such as increased annual revenue, cost reduction and risk management. You do this by clearly identifying how customers capture value when they implement your solutions.

In your marketing messages and sales pitch, articulate and reinforce those defining, problem-solving, goal achieving outcomes to ensure that recognition of the value you bring to customers is the foundation of the sales journey. In all aspects of your sales and marketing functions, emphasize and explain the value that a customer will receive when s/he buys from your company, from implementation, to outcomes, to pricing and after-sale customer service. Organizations that make customer value not only visible, but also measurable, will make the value memorable and therefore better positioned to sustain growth and strengthen the competitive advantage.

Research, verify and understand

You can begin building a customer-value focus almost anywhere in the organization. Be advised, however, that this work cannot be done with surveys, or casual conversations that focus on “What do you value about doing business with us?” To understand the wins, losses, pain points and the use case, it will be necessary to identify a subset of customers who represent these varied contexts—and conduct deep, one-on-one conversations to understand how your solution affects their costs, revenues and risks and how it aligns with their strategic priorities. Document the most common benefits and begin to build a model to enable sales.

Operationalize it—starting with sales

 According to the authors, sales is the place to begin, because the impact is fastest and most visible (pricing is a close second). Apply the customer-value approach directly to live, in-progress sales opportunities. Embed value that is recognizable, measurable and coveted by the prospect into the sales process itself. Value messages must be woven into sales presentations and sales content. Develop business-case models—a good case study could work—that will allow the sales team or specialist to measure the customer’s current challenge or pain point and project the future value your solution can deliver—grounded in real customer data and benchmarks. One step is essential: the customer champion must be involved in building the business case that will ultimately land with senior leadership. Without that co-creation, the case will lack the internal credibility it needs.

Cascade the perception of value throughout the organization

Once the foundational models are in place, extend the customer-value mindset beyond sales to achieve a holistic approach—embedded across customer success, product, pricing and the C-suite—needed to drive higher margins and a sustainable competitive advantage.

  • Marketing: Ensure that messaging conveys customer impact for primary use cases and that demand generation focuses on outcomes, not just product capabilities.
  • Post-sale: Guide a meaningful portion of your customers to deepen their use of the capabilities and products you offer that are most differentiated—and that they are aware and can articulate the business value they are capturing.
  • Service/Product: Eventually embed customer business value thinking into product planning, using it to drive innovation priorities and feature sequencing.
  • Pricing: Evaluate your pricing against your use cases and the business value they deliver. Ensure that you are incentivizing the right customer behaviors such as adoption and retention of adjacent products while capturing appropriate revenue.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: EgolenaHK/Bigstock.com

Marketing , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

How To Encourage B2B Referrals

by

When it comes to influencing B2B buying decisions, few marketing resources are as powerful as a referral made by a customer who had a good experience working with your organization and is happy to recommend those in his/her business network to investigate your brand if there is need of a service or product that matches yours. Customer endorsements, also known as Word-of-Mouth referrals, are a crucial ingredient of an effective customer acquisition strategy. It’s been documented that Word-of-Mouth referrals positively affect 20% to 50% of purchasing decisions and 84% of B2B buying decision-makers report that their buyer’s journey typically begins with a referral. Foundational to Word-of-Mouth referrals are good customer experiences and good relationships.

The term Word-of-Mouth marketing refers to an informal sharing of opinions, experiences and recommendations about a brand, product, or service between colleagues and friends. Whenever people speak about a business, they are participating in Word-of-Mouth marketing. Long before social media marketing existed, business owners and sales professionals relied on the trusted opinions of business colleagues and other reliable sources to guide their purchasing decisions. Word-of-Mouth endorsements continue to be sought after and trusted, even as business (and personal) communication has gone beyond telephone or face2face conversations to encompass digital formats, including social media, online review sites, webinars and podcasts and/or online professional communities.

There are few marketing strategies that are as potent or as cost-effective as endorsements made by satisfied customers and the power of Word-of-Mouth referrals is supported by metrics. According to data published by ThinkImpact, a platform that provides business and career related information, 78% of B2B referrals create viable customer leads for the business and 63% of B2B revenue comes from existing clients and referrals combined.

Credible, verifiable and sharable

In the increasingly complex B2B marketing landscape, Word-of-Mouth referrals are considered credible and verifiable business intelligence. In spite of, or maybe even because of, the dominance of professionally produced marketing materials and campaigns, prospective buyers are acquiring a growing respect for boots-on-the-ground, real world user experiences—and that evolving perspective has caused some to look skeptically at corporate-concocted marketing messages.

In stark contrast, Word-of-Mouth referrals are seen as unquestionably real and born of bona fide knowledge and/or experience and they have the power to significantly amplify your brand reputation and annual revenue. The problem is they are an unpredictable gift. Waiting for personal endorsements made by satisfied customers to materialize leaves too much to chance in a hyper-competitive marketplace. It should come as no surprise that a Freelancer must take charge and devise a strategy that will keep positive Word-of-Mouth opinions circulating through your networks.

The key driver of B2B Word-of-Mouth customer referrals is trust that is the outcome of consistently providing an excellent customer experience, encouraging customer engagement and inspiring brand loyalty that advances into advocacy and culminates in Word-of-Mouth referrals. Encouraging customer feedback through various channels and touchpoints, such as surveys, polls and calls-to-action that invite customers to produce a testimonial that describes an example of customer service or customer experience that they found especially meaningful—can put your customers on the pathway to making Word-of-Mouth referrals on your behalf.

You will find it useful to expand your Word-of-Mouth referral network to include professional colleagues. Cultivating a reputation as a thought leader by developing relevant educational marketing content, combined with taking an active role in local business associations, can become a launching pad for establishing thought leader credibility. Devise a strategy that thoughtfully showcases your subject expertise and capabilities as it subtly promotes your unique value effectively and generates a positive buzz that results in Word-of-Mouth referrals. See below to find possibilities to expand your visibility to customers and colleagues who can become your brand cheerleaders and reward you with Word-of-Mouth referrals.

  • Social media and online review sites and communities.  Social networks are ubiquitous and enable participants to make many business and social connections. Invite your happy customers to share their enthusiasm for your product or service by posting user generated content that explains how your product or service made their life easier, enabled the company to achieve an important goal and what factors motivated them to choose your company instead of a competitor.
  • Case studies. Particularly if your service or product resolved a particularly vexing pain point for a customer, invite him/her to tell the story in a written or video format case study. A good case study allows prospects who are making final selections to envision the problem-solving capacity of your product or service and demonstrate thought leadership.
  • Webinars and podcasts. Laying the Groundwork for Word-of-Mouth Success for your webinar or podcast appearance by developing content that listeners will consider to be valuable. Address and offer effective solutions to problems that your listeners are likely to encounter—identify themes that your audience already has problems with and is searching for better ways to solve them. If you are the program host, your speakers should be someone who has proven credentials in developing valuable content. Finally, like an email subject line, create a catchy title for your webinar or podcast, it’s important to both communicate the benefit while creating curiosity.
  • Speaking engagements. Getting involved with local business associations such as the chamber of commerce, is a great resource to help you build your way to thought leader status and receiving Word-of-Mouth endorsements. If you haven’t done so already, get to know the leadership and membership by volunteering to manage programs. Volunteering to introduce a featured speaker or moderating a panel are pathways to an invitation to present a workshop that you’ve developed. An incubator for testing the reaction to a topic you’ve developed, or to polish your public speaking ability, is to explore speaking opportunities at your local library (where you may find a less demanding audience).

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: © Deposit Photos

Business Strategy , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Spice It Up In September and Beyond

by

Happy August! I hope you are enjoying summer, whether the season is a busy or slow one for your business entity. If taking a vacation is on your wish list, I hope that it has, or will, achieve its purpose, and allow you to see new sights or return to familiar places, have fun, recharge your energy, and lower your stress level. I also hope that you’re finding time to read at least one business book that’s helping you to sharpen your business acumen.

September and the fourth quarter will soon arrive and now is the time to consider how you can successfully position your organization to achieve a strong year-end finish. Selling a product or service is usually a challenge, especially for Freelance professionals and small business owners. B2B marketplaces are nearly always crowded, typically consisting of a handful of market leaders that are trailed by a passel of “me, too” offerings. Unless your company has a sizeable marketing budget, it can be a struggle to build and sustain marketing or branding campaigns that will heighten the perception of your value and make your product or service appear more appealing to prospects. In short, today you can begin thinking about how to identify for your business a new competitive advantage.

The time is now to assess potential strategies that can position your entity to generate higher sales revenue in the coming months and it’s entirely possible that your preferred strategy can be carried out at a comparatively modest expense. Listed below are strategy possibilities that are accessible to Freelancers and SMB owners. Keep in mind that your promotional messaging must address urgent buyer pain points. You must do more than merely being clever as a way to get attention. The purpose of whatever new strategy you implement now is to leverage the competitive advantages you plan to highlight will result in customer roster that has a higher value, increased sales revenue and an enhanced customer lifetime value.

Read on and consider what you might have the means to do to fulfill the important goal of optimizing your brand visibility and image and maximizing sales revenue and profit as we look forward to the waning days of 2026.

I. Dare to be different

How can you clearly communicate to current and potential customers that your product or service will effectively address worrisome pain points and solve problems, enable them to achieve mission-critical goals without expressing those very important strengths in boring and predictable text? Useful information should not be ignored but…brands that are competing for the same target customer group can all sound alike. Target eyeballs cannot help but glaze over. The curse of commodification can creep in as prospects wade through sound-alike sales funnels that echo chamber repeat the same sales pitch. Isn’t it time for you to dare to be different and take a brave step forward?

Caution must be exercised and controversy is to be avoided for sure. You cannot afford to turn off the potential or current customers. But by choosing the right product attribute to showcase and then creating a cheeky tagline—or short video, or catchy image—that cleverly and succinctly describes your lead attribute, you can steal the thunder of competitors and propel your brand to the head of the class. If the Boston Red Sox can win 15 games in a row during July and escape an early death that had fans and sports announcers talking about “next year” sometime around Memorial Day, you can claim the spotlight for your brand and leap to the front of the pack. The suggestions below can stir up your creativity. Just do it.

  • Use humor to reframe the perception of your offering and your entity and escape the constraints of commodification
  • Align with a cause, such as climate change or animal rights (but avoid getting preach-y)  
  • Choose a unique visual branding style. Think 1950s retro, or find inspiration in the work of well-known artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Peter Max, or Yayoi Kusama.

II. B2B influencer marketing

Another strategy that has the potential to help you separate your entity from the congested marketplace is to align with a B2B Influencer. While originally a strategy used by your B2C counterparts, competition for billable hours in the B2B sector has stimulated the acceptance of influencer marketing by those in the B2B sector, including Freelancers.

B2B influencer marketing is not a means to showcase your services or products—that’s a B2C strategy. Freelancers and SMB owners work with B2B influencer marketing specialists to increase the stature of their brand and use that professional capital to build credibility that facilitates trust and relationship-building with potential customers who, if all goes according to plan, will become paying customers. The goal of B2B influencer marketing strategies is to align your organization with recognized and respected industry thought leaders—the influencers— whose industry knowledge, reputation and loyal followers can be leveraged in your target market sectors.

The most effective B2B influencers are well-known and respected experts and regarded as thought leaders in their field. B2B influencers aren’t celebrities, but they are trusted members of influential online communities. They are also respected speakers who are regularly on podiums at industry conferences and other business events. The knowledge and experience they’ve acquired gives the influencers great authority and credibility that’s enabled them to build a sizeable, loyal and often activist following.

Based on that authority and credibility, the best B2B influencers are able to build trust and enthusiasm for brands within their community of followers. They are also known to make endorsements that can stimulate purchases made by decision-makers within the community. A brand endorsement can result in a significant number of positive reviews posted on social media platforms that are capable of creating a word-of-mouth campaign that can spread to the general public and stimulate still more purchases of your brand’s services or products.

The influencer phenomenon is a growing trend in B2B marketing. Apparently fueled by the entry of Millennial and Generation Z into stakeholder and decision-making positions, prospective buyers are increasingly more trusting of the recommendations of independent thought leaders, that is, influencers, than in the marketing content you provide. Millennials and Gen-Z are comfortable with influencers and that preference is starting to impact purchasing.

  • Increase brand awareness. By aligning with a B2B influencer with a large following in your target market, your brand will have access to a new audience of highly-engaged prospects.
  • Enhance credibility. B2B decision-makers increasingly trust industry thought leaders, sometimes more than marketing content. This trend is becoming more common as Millennial and Gen Z buyers move into stakeholder and decision-maker positions that impact purchases. Millennial and Gen-Z stakeholders and decision committee members are comfortable with influencers
  • Increase leadgen and sales. Selecting an influencer who is closely aligned with your brand values can help you reach specific groups of prospects who are highly likely to become your customers.

III. Get strategic about social media

You may not have the bandwidth to undertake a major overhaul of your presence on social media platforms, but if you take just three steps, your social media ROI will become more significant for your business.

  •  Define prospects: Successful B2B social media speaks to specific customer personae and post content that addresses their specific pain points and how your service or product will solve the problem or help achieve the goals. Enhance your leadgen and site engagement by posting content that helps decision-makers for your service or product. Make your marketing content speak to their pain points, goals
  • Meaningful messages: Create content that speaks to the value that prospective customers are looking for. Clarify your understanding of why prospects feel they need your product or service? How does your offering make their life easier?
  • .Create a content calendar. This will solve two problems for you: 1.) If there are specific times of the year that you want to post, you’ll remember to do so; and 2.) You will post consistently and give your audience fresh content that drives engagement.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: Stock AI image

Sales , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Don’t Close the Sale, Educate the Client

by

What does it take for you to bring in sales that convert prospects into clients? Perhaps you are a silver-tongued charmer who is capable of successfully “closing” a sale with almost any prospect? Or is the usual outcome of your sales process sort of hit or miss—not a disaster, but no one would wonder if you have a license to print money?

As you’ve done when unraveling other business obstacles, dissecting and analyzing how you sell, meaning that you’ll study the usual trajectory prospects follow when they include your service or product in their buyer journey—from the initial demonstration of the prospect’s interest to the outcome, when the prospect either becomes a client, or moves on to your competitor. Whatever you learn will indicate which of your intentions are not landing and may also direct you to the remedy. Begin with a review of sales basics.

  • Have you identified your ideal client and how to access them?
  • Do you know the usual pain points or goals that motivate prospects to consider your company?
  • Have you priced your offering appropriately?
  • How clear and convincing are you when articulating your unique sales proposition?
  • What’s your sales success rate when you must respond to an objection?
  • Are you able to detect buying signs that tell you when it’s time to ask for the sale (which could mean the prospect must contact the decision team and recommend a yes vote)?

If your analysis reveals that either your USP is vague and falls short of articulating the strengths of your offering, and maybe even leaves you vulnerable to objections that signal questions about its performance, you have a messaging problem. Attempting to defuse objections is not the cure for prospect hesitation; and bringing in a sale is no longer about dropping magic words that you hope will result in converting the prospect into your client. Enabling B2B sales in the post-pandemic ecosystem often requires that you educate prospects by presenting content marketing info that addresses their priorities and concerns and will, brick by brick, demonstrate that your solution is effective and reliable.

You must keep in mind, though, that the B2B sales process has become opaque; prospects developed an appetite for no-contact buying during the pandemic and the habit has become entrenched. Research from Gartner found that B2B buyers prefer a buyer journey that requires little to no contact with sales reps or other vendors (e.g., Freelancers); findings showed that 75% of buyers prefer to have little interaction with sellers. For that reason, B2B buying journeys and decisions are increasingly made without Freelancers or sales reps. If prospects must make contact to explore a question or two when evaluating from whom they might purchase, they hold tight to the self-serve, Do It Yourself mode. “I can handle this,” they say and you have little to no opportunity to influence, or even interact, with your prospect.

If interaction with the Freelancer or sales rep is unavoidable, a short list of “finalist” vendor candidates is typically contacted to schedule a product demonstration or learn the details of implementing and obtaining the service. But by the time you or any other vendor learns that a possible sale is in progress, the sale is already in BOFU, bottom of the sales funnel; too much has transpired to allow you to exert some control and influence over the sale. Any “sale closing spiel” is circumvented as you realize that you’ve stumbled into a decision that’s well underway—-without you. But Gartner research also revealed an upside, if you choose to see it that way—DIY online purchases are far more likely to result in buyer’s remorse.

Closing versus education 

Of course! Unless the prospect is re-ordering a service or product with which there’s been direct experience, it is unwise for prospects to assume they can successfully navigate the ins and outs of the purchase without guidance. They don’t know what they don’t know.

You designed your marketing/sales funnel to facilitate the initial stages of a buyer journey that’s conducted online and in DIY independent mode. Prospects whose level of interest brings them to MOFU and its gated content should feel comfortable to make email contact to identify themselves and request the info they’d like to view. The plan was for the Freelancer to thank the prospect for his/her interest, send the gated content and begin to discreetly monitor and guide the sales process. In so doing, Freelancers could also save any wayward prospects from themselves by being available to answer questions and make recommendations that encourage a successful experience with the product or service.

In fact, Gartner research indicates that those with sales responsibility should provide marketing content that captures the attention of prospects because the info communicates the value of your service or product and facilitates the decision process. The content must be relevant and aligned with the pain point that the prospect must resolve or goal that must be attained. That’s how a well-designed sales/marketing funnel should work.

More than ever, high-pressure sale “closing” tactics are not what typical B2B clients respond to today. The best way to bring in a sale in the current zeitgeist is to present a rational, evidence-backed case that reveals how and why your solution will effectively and efficiently resolve the prospect’s pain point or facilitate achievement of the goal. Rather than dwelling on product or service features and benefits, a strategy that was a given in 20th century selling, the best recipe now for Freelancers to obtain a degree of influence over the sale is to guide the prospect through a discovery process.

  • Diagnose the pain point and discover its origin
  • Document current, or previous, solutions that disappointed
  • Describe what doing business will look like when your solution resolves the pain point or enables the goal to be realized
  • Determine which solution appears to be most capable of producing the prospect’s desired results and outcomes

When a prospect contacts you for information about your solution, and you learn that a serious buyer journey that involves one of your solutions is in progress, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by stepping up and seizing what may be your only opportunity to signal that you understand prospect needs and discuss and send “how-to” content and performance data, which can include one or more of the resources listed below. Your thought leader credibility will yet again prove its usefulness when it supports the value-affirming sales interactions that are most effective with prospects now and are the best option to move the sale forward. Helping prospective buyers feel confident and in control of the purchase decision (e.g., by providing a choice of tailored recommendations based on their input and criteria) builds trust that can enhance the perception of your solution and give you the sale.

  • Case studies and success stories
  • Webinars and podcasts where you are a speaker
  • Blogs, e-books or other articles that you contribute to or author

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: Image: © Prague Daily March 2, 2025 The weekly market in Prague’s Lesser Town.

Marketing , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

To Court Your Competitors’ Customers

by

Motivating prospective customers to do business with you is the leading function of independent Freelance professionals and business owners. You may not look at it this way, but recognize that your pool of potential customers also includes those who are currently doing business with one of your competitors. Think about it—how many B2B customers are buying within your category of services or products for the first time? Unless your solution is new to the market and not available from others, your customers have been someone else’s customers and every once in a while some of them might decide to look around to see what’s new or a better fit for their needs.

While it’s true that getting your unique selling proposition in front of prospective customers is essential to converting them into paying customers, there are messaging refinements you can make to strengthen your appeal to prospects who are currently active in a competitor’s camp. Some in that cohort might be dissatisfied with the experience they’ve had when using a certain service or product, or maybe the vendor relationship was underwhelming. Others might simply feel a little restless and inclined to look around and find out who else is out there (you!). Here are tactics that will be useful for your outreach to competitors’ customers.

Analyze the competitive landscape

You need to learn who your competitors’ customers are from a demographic standpoint and obtain insight into what motivated them to choose a competitor. Among the information you’ll appreciate understanding are factors that cause competitors’ customers to become one-off users and factors that lead them to become loyal customers—what are the triggers for each cohort? Study the websites and social media platforms of your primary competitors as a way to learn what might matters to competitors’ customers.

Conducting a competitor analysis will help you understand the Unique Sales Proposition (USP) and perceived advantages of products and services offered by your rivals and get a handle on what it could mean to their customers. What persuades their prospects to choose those offerings instead of yours’ and what can you do to make your offerings more appealing to them? How and where your competitors market their services or products, their pricing strategy, payment options, market visibility and brand popularity are certain to be integral to attracting and keeping those customers. By analyzing the strengths and potential weaknesses of competitors and comparing them to the strengths and weaknesses of your organization, you may be able to identify gaps in the market and find ways to promote what it is that rivals’ customers might be persuaded to perceive as a better on your side of the fence.

Identify gaps in the market

Does your competitive analysis reveal incompletely addressed customer needs or preferences? Those factors might crack open a window that lets you pull in a few of your rivals’ customers. Incisive competitive research may lead you to discover that a cohort of competitors’ customers would appreciate a more comprehensive customer service package—maybe after-sale training, for example? Or perhaps, in this era of rising prices, a couple of payment options that you’ve never bothered to promote, could turn the tide in your favor and carry in a few of your competitors’ customers.

Because you will not be able to research the pain points and priorities of your competitors’ customers because it’s almost certain that you cannot access their contact info. Unless someone visits your social media or website and chooses to reveal an email address—you cannot send a survey and hope for a response. So, you’ll have to get creative to learn about the unaddressed needs of your competitors’ customers.

Visit your competitors’ social media accounts and do some social listening by checking out comment sections. There you may learn of pain points or perceived inconveniences that you can address in your marketing messages. You will also be wise to read industry articles and visit the social media platforms of those organizations to read market research published by major market research firms that report on your industry sector.

Get visible

Today’s buyer journey is not like it was even a year or two ago; prospects may not contact vendors until they are well into the buyer journey. Prospects now explore potential vendors for the solutions they need and on their own compare offerings, get an idea of costs and only then will they reach out to two or three candidates to get details and create a shortlist.

Your strategy is to be proactive. Find out where competitors’ customers discover new products or services—do they watch product or service reviews on YouTube? Do they follow industry experts or influencers on Instagram or TikTok? Customers trust brands that meet them where they already are and provide value before the sale even happens. Once you’ve learned who their guiding stars are, establish a presence for your entity in those spaces.

You want to get into organic search results with helpful content that answers questions that are important to prospects and that can include getting out in front of hesitation by addressing common objections. Showcase the outcomes your service or products can produce and how to achieve them. Blog posts, short videos, webinars, or educational product Q & A guides may be effective. The more consistently you show up with the right message, the more likely you will be able to win over your competitor’s customers—as well as finding a few new customers for yourself.

Promote your USPs

Once you understand what differentiates your brand from its competitors, as well as the evolving shopping habits of your target market, you can begin to promote the desirable and unique qualities that make your brand stand out. These might include your prices, delivery time, product availability, convenience, quality, or customer service.

These traits, which are part of the USP, should be consistently promoted across your entire business, including your website, marketing and PR, packaging and customer experience from buyer journey to post-sale. By upholding these values throughout your organization’s customer experience, you can ensure that potential buyers will know why they should switch to your brand.

Nurture brand loyalty

Acquiring new customers is much more expensive than retaining an existing one, as research has shown. Once a customer has made his/her first purchase, it’s essential to encourage repeat visits if you want to see a strong return on your investment. Building these connections will instill consumer trust and brand loyalty, ensuring that you’ve won a customer for life.

Email marketing is a time-tested way to nurture customer loyalty and it is easy to personalize—a feeling that customers value. Brand loyalty starts with how you onboard people. When you acquire a new customer, put yourself in that individual’s seat and envision a customer journey that will resonate. For example, customer’s are inclined to appreciate a discount code but in the immediate aftermath of post-sale, they’ll likely appreciate more a welcome from you that explains who you are, what the customer can expect regarding the initial stages of working together, a request to meet and discuss the product or service purchased, invoicing and payment options. In other words, you can show your value by providing relevant information that also teaches them why they should open your emails. Set the tone early, and they’ll stay engaged longer and that is one of the pathways to loyalty.

Final thoughts

Customers leave brands—your competitors or you—that stop serving their needs. They leave because someone else made it easier to understand, easier to trust, or easier to buy. That can be you.

You may need to set up a marketing complicated funnel. You may not need a sizeable marketing budget. You do need to research and learn the pain points, hot buttons, priorities and emerging next big thing—way of doing business, customer service needs, buyer journey, payment options, or whatever else. You also need to pay attention to customers and prospects consistently, to help yourself make smart improvements and prove your value where it matters most. When you do that, you don’t have to out-shout your competition. You just have to be their obvious choice.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: © Courtesy of Brimfield Antique Flea Markets. Featuring 5,000 dealers, Brimfield Antique Flea Markets is believed to be the most popular and largest such event in the U.S.

Marketing , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

How Does Influencer Marketing Work for B2B Freelancers?

by

Influencer marketing has been white hot for a minute and it’s getting even hotter. A strategy born of user generated content and nurtured by early bloggers soon produced content creators who came to be considered authorities within their niche fields of expertise, developing loyal audiences for their blog content and generating follower communities along the way. Those early pioneers earned reputations and gained recognition for product reviews that showed trustworthy insights and built credibility. The DIY grassroots aura and absence of corporate advertising gave it all the blessing of authenticity. The independent and impartial assessments provided by the bloggers encouraged engagement and audience trust. But this is America so gradually, bloggers with the biggest followings in the scene featured sponsored content on their sites (often disclosed through affiliate links) and next, collaborations with retail outlets and product brands.

The phenomenon was accelerated by the introduction of social media platforms and exploded with the arrival of visually-focused platforms. Images, and especially videos, provided an ideal environment for newly minted marketing influencers to showcase themselves and the brands they represent with exciting visual content. The visually focused platforms caused an inflection point that gave rise to influencer marketing stars who found a lot of work in the B2C sector, in particular fashion, beauty and travel. Bloggers and others who had a flair for creating appealing content plus the ability to connect with and encourage relationships with their audience began to grow significant followings and exert influence over the behavior (aspirations) of prospective and current customers.

The rise of B2B Influencers 

While originally a strategy used by your flashy B2C cousins, competition for billable hours in the B2B sector seems to have stimulated the adoption of influencer marketing in the B2B sector. However, be advised that B2B influencer marketing is not about showcasing services or products. Rather, B2B influencer marketing is about helping you build trust and connect with prospective clients who, if all falls into place, will be more inclined to become your loyal clients. The goal of B2B influencer marketing strategies is to align your organization with recognized and respected industry thought leaders—the influencers— whose industry knowledge, reputation and loyal followers can be leveraged in your target market sectors.

B2B influencers are well-known and respected experts and thought leaders in their field. They’ve acquired impressive knowledge, experience and authority that confers recognized credibility that’s enabled them to build a sizeable, loyal and often activist following. Based on that authority and credibility, effective influencers are able to build trust and enthusiasm for a brand within their community of followers by making endorsements that can stimulate purchases made by decision-makers within the community. Furthermore, a brand endorsement can also result in a significant number of positive reviews posted on social media that creates a word-of-mouth campaign that can spread to the general public and can stimulate still more purchases of the brand’s services or products.

On a national level, you might think of sales training expert Brian Tracy, marketing wizard Neil Patel, professional development guru and author Stephen Covey and leadership and personal development maven Brene Brown as powerful B2B influencers. The best influencers assist brands by providing targeted exposure, building industry credibility, facilitating strategic partnerships and product or service endorsements that, ideally, will substantively enhance brand recognition, reputation and sales. Potential B2B influencer marketing goals for your organization could include:

  • Increased credibility and trust for your brand within your target market
  • Heightened audience engagement with your marketing content
  • Enhanced perceived value of your brand
  • Increased stature and influence of your thought leadership
  • Accelerated rate and quality of leads generated and an enhanced sales conversion rate

Is influencer marketing for you?

Let’s examine how influencer marketing could be useful to B2B Freelance consultants. As usual, your first act will be to assess your client base and refresh your understanding of your target market(s). You must know whom you’d like to influence, what you’d like to achieve and why that achievement will matter. Verifying your target market will enable you to recognize which influencers, marketing tactics and channels can be expected to resonate with your clients and prospects. So that you can begin to recognize the expertise, authority, connections and social media presence your most effective influencer should have, it’s imperative that you clarify the problems and projects that clients and prospects ask you to resolve. As you go through this process, you’ll also get an idea of whether (or not) influencer marketing might be a fit for you.

Identify and investigate influencers in your industry

Take your evaluation process to the next level by investigating the types of content your clients and prospects usually engage with and the platforms that supply it. What types of content do they find relevant, whom do they follow and on which platforms can that content be found? Also, what are the most common questions they’re looking to answer and the problems they want to resolve?

Next, develop a list of influencers you’d like to contact. Your job here is to speak and get to know who you might like to work with. Does this candidate have not only the industry experience and authority that you’d like but does s/he have the connections and clout in your niche to move the needle for you? Essentially, you’ll search for influencers who can help you reach and impact your ideal audience. It’s no help if an influencer has a large community of followers but does not have a prominent presence in your industry and niche. Before you decide who you’d like to follow and follow-up with, verify precisely how your potential influencer can produce what you want, which is probably some combination of upgrading and/or increasing your leadgen, enhancing company brand, encouraging brand loyalty, upgrading and expanding the earned media you receive and, ultimately, impacting purchase decisions that increase your client roster. Keep all that in mind as you look for good potential influencers. Here are common methods you can use to find influencers you can meet and interview.

  • Social media. Many influencers have large followings on social media platforms and it makes sense to start your search there. You’ll want to choose influencers who have a strong presence on the preferred platforms of decision-makers for your service or product. Engage with the content of influencers who seem to have promise for you. You can follow those who look promising and then reach out and initiate contact. This strategy gives you direct access to potential influencers and enables you to build relationships.
    • If Facebook is your preferred platform, use their search function to find influencers. You can also check out industry specific Facebook groups or pages to find B2B potential influencers.
    • Instagram is your gateway to connecting with Millennial generation decision-makers and discovering the influencers they trust. Search the platform for producers of excellent and consistent content and then visit the site profiles of those content producers you find compelling.
    • LinkedIn is the usual suspect for all things B2B, including finding B2B influencers. You can search your industry to find influencers directly. Definitely join and investigate relevant LI groups and watch for influencers within their membership ranks.
  • Networking at industry conferences and events. Attending in-person meetings and conferences provides a unique opportunity to network with professionals and identify potential B2B influencers within your niche. The strategy is effective for discovering and getting to know B2B influencers with whom you can potentially build a mutually beneficial relationship.
    • Attend relevant conferences in your industry.
    • Actively participate in networking sessions.
    • Identify B2B professionals with significant industry influence
    • Establish connections and express interest in collaboration

  • Discover B2B influencers through industry publications, influential blogs and speaking engagements. This strategy lets you evaluate is the credibility of influencers by learning who is featured in respected industry publications, which indicates expertise, authenticity and most likely, influential relationships.
    • Regularly follow industry publications and relevant blogs, with an emphasis on organizations such as chambers of commerce or other well-respected professional societies and business associations. Identify content contributors and speakers who have the industry expertise and reputations that you seek.
    • Familiarize yourself with the content of industry experts that you find promising
    • Reach out to suggest the possibility of collaboration opportunities.

Evaluate B2B influencer industry authority and credibility;

Confirm the authority and credibility of potential B2B influencers within your industry by examining their past collaborations (if possible), content quality, consistency and presence in prestige publications. Your job is to investigate which B2B influencers’ audiences and authority align with your target market and can be useful for you. Refer to your research to develop a candidate shortlist.

Reach out to your follow-up list gauge and request an opportunity to discuss the possibility of an influencer marketing relationship. Enhance your appeal to your intended influencer with a personalized and compelling outreach message that demonstrates your awareness of his/her industry authority, as evidenced by the quality and consistency of his/her published content, speaking engagements and /or professional awards. Express your admiration for their insights and expertise.

If your invitation to talk is accepted, during the conversation inquire about the brands and types of campaigns your would-be influencer has previously collaborated on. If the initial discussion leads to further and more specific talks, request a link to his/her portfolio to verify the success of past collaborations and get a feel for how a collaboration with you might work.

Negotiate terms and collaboration agreements

Clearly define and commit to writing in a signed contract your expectations of the influencer marketing campaigns, the roles and responsibilities of the influencer you’ll partner with and the compensation agreement (monetary amount and due dates) with your selected B2B influencer. Execute this agreement by producing a transparently communicated legal document—a contract.

Keep in mind that a contract is only as good as your ability to enforce it. Help yourself by keeping your wish list and the timeline for its achievement realistic. While discussions and negotiations with your preferred influencer in advance of finalizing the contract, do your best to confirm which items of your wish list outcomes seem possible for your organization as well as the amount of time and other resources that will likely be needed to get you there.

Monitor and measure campaign influencer performance

Monitor the performance of your B2B influencer campaign by tracking the relevant associated key metrics, such as client and prospect engagement, click-through rates and shares, follower growth and expansion, leadgen growth and expansion, brand reach and impressions and sales revenue. In sum, you’ll want to evaluate the campaign ROI outcome and understand the costs associated with your influencer marketing campaign versus the sales revenue that can be attributed to the campaign.

It’s imperative that you obtain an objective and comprehensive assessment of your influencer marketing activities. As with all of your business strategies, obtaining a big-picture performance evaluation is a must-do. Once you learn which strategies and campaigns are effective, and therefore worthy of your investments of money and time, and what failed to live up to your expectations, and might either benefit from an adjustment or maybe should be dropped will, as always, show you the path forward.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: © gstockstudio for Freepik

Marketing , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Level Up Your Thought Leader Cred

by

Being a thought leader is a vital ingredient in a Freelancer’s recipe for a B2B content marketing strategy that moves the needle. In fact, establishing yourself as a credible thought leader is foundational to building a thriving Freelance client list. Freelancers must recognize that business acumen, lived experience and data you share with content followers, some of whom are prospects and clients, is a valuable strategic asset. What you know and how you express your knowledge is the core of your Unique Selling Proposition and the engine that drives your ability to deliver solutions that produce results and convert prospects into paying clients.

Many independently employed professionals label themselves an “expert in the field and thought leader,” but few do so with a carefully considered sense of purpose that leads to an actionable outcome—like persuading a hesitant prospect to become a client. In today’s hyper-competitive marketplace that’s populated with cautious prospects who’ve lengthened B2B sales cycles and pushed your next paid invoice farther into the future, it is imperative to distinguish yourself from those whose “thought leadership” amounts to checking the box and calling it done.

Tickling a handful of marketing metrics doesn’t prove that you’re a credible thought leader, either; click bait posts and articles are only eye wash and audiences recognize it. True connaisseurs of thought leader content track business impact (vs. 63% overall) and 51% track brand authority (vs. 38% overall) to assess how audiences really feel about their content. They measure the relevance of their thought leadership with insightful metrics:

  • Audience engagement — views, downloads, shares (80%)
  • Business impact — lead generation, pipeline influence (63%)
  • Audience feedback — client/prospect feedback, sentiment analysis (40%)
  • Brand authority — speaking/media opportunities, publication citations (38%)

Furthermore, connaisseurs publish their thought leadership on marketing channels that provide an audience of B2B prospects who are serious about obtaining useful information. If you are not currently publishing on these channels, as well as getting out in front of a live audience every once in a while, add these items to your thought leadership promotional activities.

  • LinkedIn (76%)
  • Email newsletters (54%)
  • Speaking events, webinars (52%)

Those who “get” the power of thought leadership know that the information they present may be used by audience members who are either familiar with or contending with a particular challenge. The insights and info you present as a thought leader is used to support responsible decision-making, whether in the moment or in the near future. Therefore, the goal of savvy Freelancers is to produce credible, possibly innovative and reliably useful thought leadership content that followers and other readers or viewers will notice and remember. Below are thought leadership ingredients you can use to develop your recipe for success.

1. Solve a problem readers will recognize

Effective thought leadership is born of a vexing problem that is urgent—an emerging risk, a stubborn and mysterious challenge or failing, or even a misunderstood opportunity. The most perceptive and confident thought leaders will dare to step outside the usual narrative or practice and provide a perspective the audience hasn’t heard before and use it as a launchpad for potentially effective solutions. Does your thought leadership content inspire your audience make smarter, braver, decisions, or help them to avoid a potentially costly error, or problem they may not have considered?

Thought-leadership content that presents insights and information that helps decision-makers perform not as mere functionaries but as leaders who know how to keep the mission-driven goals of their organization in the forefront builds trust and separates you from competitors. To achieve that, thought-leaders must be aware of what audience members need to know now—before a competitor tells them first.

2. Present thought leadership content with an out-of-the-box idea

Defining the problem is where thought leadership starts and proposing an innovative way to perceive and address it is what gets thought leader content noticed. A true thought leader is provocative, one who reveals an “aha” moment that makes a new way of looking at things both credible and memorable. Create thought leadership content that challenges conventional wisdom or reframes a common problem in an unexpected way—and show your audience that you understand the problem and how it can be solved.

To stimulate your creative spirit, you may want to employ an Artificial Intelligence tool to rev up your brainstorming. You’ll have to experiment to find the right prompts that help you discover intriguing, but credible, possibilities for topics that answer questions for readers and reveal what they consider to be an emerging concern. AI can also help you frame your approach to the topic and provide suggestions as to which narrative threads might be included in your content. Also, use storytelling to shape your content, as it is usually the most relatable way to communicate with your audience—and they’re more likely to retain the info you deliver.

A concise overview of a case study or references to insights gleaned from user generated content that’s appeared on your company’s social media accounts are excellent sources of lived experiences that are provided by your very own followers. You can also discover topics to explore as well. Let AI help you start the brainstorming process by showing you topics that your audience are likely to find relevant and then build your case with real time source material that might reflect both your own experiences and that of your clients.

3. The best thought leadership content is in the trenches

When scouting for source material, keep in mind that residents of the C-Suite may not give you boots-on-the-ground perspectives or stories that reveal out-of-the-box perspectives or possible solutions that bring “street cred” to your thought leader content. Clients and colleagues who have a customer-facing role are better positioned to provide you with the most interesting topics, experiences and insights that bring authenticity to your narratives. You want reports from those who notice shifting customer behavior, for example, and other grass-roots experiences that bring a rawness and depth to your thought leader content and makes it relevant to a wide audience.

4. Thought leader content is considered useful

Good thought-leader content earns attention by delivering relevant information. That doesn’t mean checklists or how-tos—but it does mean clarity and ideas that make a subject that is complex feel as if it can be navigated and understood. When your followers and other readers finish your article and let the information you provided and hit the save and/or the forward button, that will verify your status as a thought leader. Useful content helps readers do things like:

  • See a risk they hadn’t considered
  • Argue for a decision internally
  • Convince the audience to take action
  • Shift the mental model audience members were using

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: ©nobelprize.org (L-R) Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, Simon Johnson of MIT and James Robinson of University of Chicago in Chicago, IL

Business Strategy , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Mix Master: Balance Branding, Marketing and PR

by

When operating a business, whether that means a boutique, one person Freelance entity or an enterprise company that employs thousands of workers in dozens of locations, encouraging sales of products and services is most often the purpose of information that company leaders share with the public. Sharing specific types of information about the company and its services and products with those that research indicates have significant potential to become customers plays a vital role in building and maintaining a thriving business. The ability of said company’s services and products to capture the attention and inspire the loyalty and trust of prospective customers is reflected in name recognition, feelings of credibility and loyalty among target customers and customer evangelism for the company and its services and products.

The information created to be seen by prospective customers is without question a company’s most important communication initiative and it’s known as the marketing strategy—a comprehensive road map that defines how the company will reach out and appeal to prospective customers and convince them to become paying customers. The public facing components of the marketing strategy are advertising, branding and publicity/public relations, along with campaign-specific marketing activities. Ideally, all the aspects of marketing information will function in tandem and create competitive advantages against the company’s marketplace competitors. To most efficiently and effectively implement a big-picture marketing strategy, it is advantageous to follow a certain “order of operations,” a road map that enables each component to support the others. You may be surprised to learn that the road to a high-functioning marketing campaign begins with public relations and publicity.

The goal of marketing—whether the big-picture marketing strategy that includes branding, advertising and PR/publicity, as well as the campaign-specific activities of marketing initiatives that typically include email marketing, networking, social media and content marketing—is to introduce and create an appetite for your service or product. Many marketers (and that would include me) have been tempted to begin implementation of the big-picture marketing strategy with branding. We tend to assume that presenting an identity, a brand persona, for the company and its services and products will most immediately resonate with prospective customers. We’ve been taught that prospects will more readily understand and value the service or product by getting familiar with the brand, which would make that function the first step in cultivating loyal customers who, we hope, will give good word-of-mouth by making referrals and becoming advocates.

However, in the 2020s era to begin a major marketing campaign with branding is very cart-before-the-horse. Today, PR/publicity exacts considerable influence on the perception of product or service credibility. Maybe it’s the inevitable result of Instagram and TikTok? In the here and now, start-up founders and marketers for existing businesses must acknowledge the power of PR in their arsenal of promotional communication resources. Strategic and consistent PR/publicity is now recognized as the way to encourage visibility and instill credibility that distinguishes your company and its services and products in the marketplace. Marketing, and its advertising component, will drive awareness but the PR spotlight can make your services and products seem trendy and trustworthy and create an aura that drives sales.

PR is visibility and credibility

Publicity is born of look-at-me attention and buzz. PR means press releases, blogs, podcasts, special events and influencer shout-outs that echo through the digital metaverse and put your company’s name on the lips of target customers. PR expands marketplace awareness that sparks name recognition but it is not a direct method of generating leads or driving sales. Instead, PR works in the background, cultivating and elevating your brand’s reputation.

So make yourself visible on behalf of your business; you might start by exploring how to become a podcast or webinar guest or participate in a panel as a speaker or moderator. You could also research local events that resonate with your values, and the values of your target customers, and engineer another opportunity to receive visibility as you simultaneously verify your belief in corporate social responsibility.

Incidentally, be aware that CSR is sometimes a decisive factor in B2B and B2C purchasing decisions —today’s consumers increasingly prioritize ethics. B2B services company BusinessDasher explains that 84% of customers evaluate a companies’ ethics and values when considering a purchase, and 63% say they would prefer companies with whom they do business to adopt ethical business and social practices.

As noted, promotional communications are under the marketing umbrella and there is a degree of overlap between all marketing functions, but Public Relations/publicity and marketing have their differences. PR/publicity is focused on establishing and expanding the company name and reputation of its services and products by being seen in the right places. PR can encourage positive word of mouth so that prospective customers will realize that your entity is open for business.

After you’ve developed and implemented successful PR/publicity initiatives over several months or even a year, consult your marketing data to check on metrics that indicate when it could be advantageous to launch a boots-on-the-ground marketing activities that include implementing a sales/marketing funnel, publishing a newsletter or blog, setting up email campaigns, or stepping up social media presence, all to continue and further solidify customer engagement. Step Two in your marketing strategy is about shifting gears and bringing in high-quality leads you can convert into sales.

Marketing attracts customers

Marketing refers to everything that brings information and images that represent your company and its products and services directly to potential customers, to capture attention, educate them about your services and products, inspire trust and loyalty and promote sales—it’s Step Two in your promotional campaign. Great marketing doesn’t so much sell your product or service—rather, it creates a desire for your product or service. Effective marketing generates actions that are measurable, whether that’s clicks, email sign-ups, subscribing to your blog or newsletter and eventually, sales. If publicity is about awareness, marketing is about attraction. Now is the time to leverage the visibility that was generated by PR/publicity and use it to reach out to prospects and cultivate relationships, now that you’ve achieved name recognition and familiarity that are the seeds of trust.

As you know, a key component of marketing is content marketing, which is information that educates prospects about your product or service; particularly in B2B, content marketing has become the new advertising. In fact, the Content Marketing Institute found that 80% of corporate decision-makers prefer to review information about products or services that’s presented as objective research, rather than advertisements, which are considered to be biased. One study has put the number of prospects and customers who believe advertisers have integrity at 4%.

Customer trust in traditional advertising has tanked, especially for Millenials and GenZ.  Wharton Magazine reports that 84% of Millennials not only dislike traditional ads, but also distrust them. For companies that would like to expand their market reach, these statistics send a clear signal. Investing only in advertising and marketing campaigns is unlikely to move the needle. To develop a good reputation for your brand, it’s recommended to start with PR/publicity and then move into marketing activities that include content marketing, networking, podcast or webinar appearances and publishing a blog or newsletter.

Brand is identity

The impact of brand identity is revealed in the sum total of how customers experience and perceive your business and its services and products, from product packaging to tag line, price structure to social media presence. A brand encompasses all the touch points that shape how customers feel about interacting with the brand. The interpretation of those touch points belongs only to the customer because engaging with a brand involves emotion—what people feel when they see your company name, logo, service, or product. It’s your company’s identity and reputation and it expresses and represents what it means to customers.

Your brand will be nurtured by ongoing PR/publicity, from CSR inspired events to your active involvement in professional associations or business organizations. along with content marketing activities, from case studies to email marketing. Associating your company with respected business organizations and community events can only elevate its visibility and brand reputation—characteristics known to encourage brand loyalty and sales.

Identify what motivates customers to buy

To understand the motives behind your customers’ purchases, tap into information that’s provided by the inward-facing aspect of marketing—market research. After all, the best decisions are data-driven. Yelp’s Trend Tracker can give a big boost to the ROI of your marketing activities with analytic insights that are available to you free of charge—join the mailing list and you’ll receive data that is relevant and updated monthly and enables those who pay attention to access boots-on-the-ground marketing info that can steer the effective promotion your products and services. Supported by Trend Tracker data, you’ll be positioned to detect and quickly respond to customer preferences, adjust marketing strategies and/or tactics to better align with shifting customer priorities and maybe even tweak your service or product line to reflect a significant shift in customer tastes.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: David created by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475-1564, Republic of Florence) and unveiled in 1504, the statue has been housed at Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, Italy since 1873.