Marketing Archives - Page 3 of 5

New Year, New Marketing Strategy

Posted on 10 January 202310 January 2023 by Hannah Sanders

The New Year. A time for resolutions, diets, gym memberships and planning what you want to achieve / see / do in the year ahead. For many UK businesses, it’s the start of Q4 – the final quarter of the financial year. Q4 is a deciding quarter – if you’re ahead, you need to keep momentum and stay head. If you’re behind, then this is your last chance to catch up and finish the financial year well.

From a marketing perspective, there will be two trains of thought coming into the New Year. What tactics need optimising, tweaking or revisiting this year to work harder. And it’s time to start strategising your next 12 month marketing plan for the next financial year.

For us, our marketing plan is so closely linked to our sales objectives that it makes sense to conduct the planning concurrently with the finalisation of our financial budgets. This also gives us roughly a 3 month window to analyse the data from the previous year’s activities, spend time meeting with key stakeholders to understand their focus for the year and come up with lots of new, exciting ideas to bring to the plan.

Your marketing plan should outline 3 key things: your goals, your budget and your tactics.

Start by understanding your goals. What do you want to achieve in the next year? For example, do you want to grow your business – and if so by how much? Are you looking to reach a new audience or a higher proportion of your current audience? Do you need to drive more traffic to your website or convert more of the existing traffic on your website?

Once you know your goals, you can start to put together your budget. How much are you willing to spend on marketing? This will help you determine what tactics you can afford to use.

And then crucially, you’ll need to choose your tactics. Your tactics will be dictated by several elements including your budget, your target market, and your goals. For example, if you’re looking for quick conversions for top of funnel leads, with clear cost per lead associated, you’re unlikely to tactically deploy a long-term for this goal. However, if one of your goals is to eventually be able to generate leads without spending money, consider implementing an SEO strategy in conjunction with your current tactics to quickly convert leads – so you are aligning to both goals.

The important thing? Step outside the everyday – dive into the data but don’t forget to get creative. And there are plenty of agencies, like us, here to help if you need it!

Opinion piece by Verity Studley-Wootton – Head of Marketing Services at Air Marketing

Refreshing Your SEO as Part of Your Website Overhaul – What You Need to Know

Posted on 22 November 20223 July 2023 by Hannah Sanders

You’re planning on refreshing your company website. You’re already aware of the benefits it’ll bring your business and how it can boost your online conversions; however, if you’re going to put all that effort into updating your website, you want to make sure it is being delivered to your target audience. That’s why an SEO refresh an essential part of this process, allowing you to establish a strong presence online.

A website refresh should address various things such as overall user experience; lack of content; design features; and so on. To achieve the best results, there are some things you need to know about SEO first.

Why is an SEO website refresh important?

There are a whole host of reasons why updating your SEO during a website refresh should be a priority, but here are the three most important reasons:

To drive organic search content to your site – to put it simply, what is the point in developing a new site if nobody is going to see it? A lot of valuable time, energy and budget can go into a website build; the last thing you want is for your audience not to be viewing it. Ensuring your SEO is implemented correctly across your new site will help you rank for those relevant keywords that your audience is searching for.
To attract the right audience to your site – if your keywords are outdated or irrelevant, you could be attracting the wrong audience to your website. This can decrease engagement time and boost bounce rates, that can damage your search engine ranking.
To make your website work harder – your website is your online shop window. Making sure your site is working hard to rank in a multitude of SERP features will increase your visibility across search engines.

What should you consider when updating your SEO?

Updated keywords – A natural part of your website refresh will include updating and adding to your existing content; when doing this, think about the key search terms users may use when looking for your services and/or products. Ensure these keywords are implemented on relevant pages to help boost your SEO ranking.
Meta data – As you’re reviewing the keywords selected for each page, make sure you review the page’s meta data. Your keyword should feature in the title and meta description. This will allow search engines to identify the key topic and rank you for relevant search terms.
Broken links – Make sure you’ve identified all broken links and fixed or replaced them. Throughout this process it’s also worth checking whether any old backlinks can be updated to direct viewers to new, relevant content.
Lack of content – You need to include plenty of content on your site that’s relevant and valuable. Try to include at least 300 words on each page and make sure that you’re covering the right topics.
Bounce rate – You can measure your bounce rate by using Google Analytics. This will allow you to understand how long your visitors are staying on your site and how many are leaving without going any further.

What process should you follow for an SEO refresh?

Step 1: Find out what’s currently working (and what’s not)

The first thing you need to do is find out what’s currently working on your website and what’s not. This will allow you to identify the areas that need to be improved and make changes accordingly. The easiest way to do this is by using tools such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics and SEMrush.

Google Search Console – This is a free tool that allows you to monitor your site’s performance. It will let you know if there are any issues with your site. This will also help you identify any broken links or pages that need updating.

Google Analytics – This will give you a better understanding of where your traffic is coming from and what section of your website is performing best.

SEMrush – This tool will allow you to understand how your current websites SEO is performing. There is a free version of the tool that allows you check which keywords you are currently ranking for, which pages these keywords currently rank for, whether you are experiencing any SEO cannibalisation and much more.

Step 2: Determine your SEO strategy moving forward

After you’ve found out what’s currently working, you need to start determining your strategy moving forward. Here are some things you should keep in mind:

Who is your target audience? Knowing your target audience and how they like to search will help you in defining relevant keywords.
What design features can you use to help boost your SEO? H tags are a great place to start when making sure you’re giving search engines every chance to rank your content. Including relevant keywords in H1, H2 and H3 tags shows search engines this is a key topic within your page. Looking at whether you can include question-based subheadings will increase your chances of ranking in ‘People Also Asked’.
How can SEO inform your content plan? Content such as blogs, press releases, landing pages etc, can offer a multitude of opportunities for SEO. If you’re trying to target keywords that are highly specific, but they don’t work for any of your key pages, a landing page or blog post can be a great option. Within landing pages and blog posts you can also create great backlink opportunities. Securing high quality backlinks from external sources is the holy grail when it comes to SEO – producing high quality press releases can help secure these.
How can your images help boost SEO? Ensuring your file name contains relevant keywords will help search engines understand what’s in the image. When people search, they often look at image-based results; if your file name includes the correct keywords you will start to rank here. Image alt tag should be used to describe what is in the image for accessibility benefits. However, the alt tag is also used by search engines to find relevant visual content; including your keywords here is a must.

Step 3: Implement your SEO strategy

Now you’ve determined your strategy, it’s time to carry out the relevant updates.

Implement your SEO strategy – For every page on your website, you need to make sure your SEO strategy has been implemented. Are all your headings and subheading tagged correctly? Do all your images have relevant files names and alt tags? Are all your meta descriptions up to date? Are you linking to key content within your blog posts? Do your backlinks have descriptive text?
Create new content – You don’t have to completely re-write your entire website, but you should make sure the content on each page is updated based on your selected keywords.
Create new landing pages – If you’re targeting multiple audiences or trying to rank for highly specific keywords, it may be worth developing landing pages. These can also be linked to in blog posts and across your website.

Step 4: Review the impact and continue to develop

Finally, it’s time to review the impact of the changes you have made. Utilising the same tools as before; Google Search Console, Google Analytics and SEMrush, you can review how the changes you’ve made have affected your SEO rankings. When carrying out a full SEO overhaul and refresh, it can take time to implement all the necessary changes so it’s a good idea to monitor your site throughout the process. It can also take a while for SEO to have an impact. Monitor how your site performs over the coming months and make changes to your ongoing strategy.

Your website should never be ‘finished’, just as things constantly change within your business, so should your website. This means that SEO will need to be updated regularly.

Opinion piece by Becca Duckering – Digital Marketing Manager at Air Marketing

Outbound or Inbound Marketing – Which Is Best For Lead Generation?

Posted on 12 September 20227 July 2023 by Hannah Sanders

When you’re looking to sell your product or service, is it best to write a blog or pick up the phone?

You can split all marketing channels into two separate camps – inbound and outbound marketing.

Outbound marketing is anything you can use to broadcast a sales message to prospects, including direct mail, media ads, out-of-home (OOH) advertising and, of course, telemarketing.

A newer concept enabled by the rise of the internet, inbound marketing refers to marketing that appeals to people who are looking for an answer to a question they have. Blogs, videos, podcasts, and social media are all good examples of inbound marketing.

Need an easy way to remember the difference? Outbound marketing is about ‘pushing’ a message to customers, while inbound marketing is about ‘pulling’ them in.

When you run a sales and marketing department with a limited budget, you might wonder which method is best for bringing in the leads. Many digital marketing agencies out there sing the praises of inbound marketing, which begs the question… what about outbound?

Let’s look at the pros and cons of each method, and which will drive the most leads to your business.

The advantages of inbound marketing

It’s cost-effective

If you don’t have much money to spend, inbound marketing can be a cost-effective option to grab leads and push prospective customers through your sales funnel. After all, it’s a lot cheaper to create a social media post than it is to hire a billboard!

According to HubSpot, inbound leads cost 61% less than outbound leads. Not only this, but you can easily incorporate online inbound marketing into your general digital marketing strategy, increasing cost-effectiveness even more. For example, combining your blog posts into your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy to rank higher for selected words and phrases on Google and Bing.

It feels less like an advert

The point of inbound marketing is that it entertains and educates prospective customers, encouraging them to find out more about your business. Take, for example, our ON AIR: With Owen podcast series!

People are now getting savvy to marketing that feels too much like a sales pitch. We can now fast-forward through ads, block cold calls on our mobile phones and hide ads online. It’s estimated that over half of people now use ad-blocking software on their computers.

As inbound marketing draws people in, they’re more likely to stick around to see what your call-to-action is.

The advantages of outbound marketing

It’s easier to scale

With inbound marketing, you’ll eventually run out of people to promote your content to. There’s no point doubling your inbound budget when your target audience has been entirely saturated, and you’ve run out of interest.

The benefit of outbound is that you can use it to convince someone who might not have been looking to buy your product or service, meaning you can target more people.

It lets you promote yourself to the right people

Inbound marketing may bring you lots of leads, but there’s no guarantee they’re the right ones for your business. As a result, your sales and marketing team may have to spend a disproportionate amount of time qualifying and scoring these leads.

With outbound techniques like telemarketing, you can speak to potential customers directly, asking the right questions to see if they’re a good fit for your product or service. Plus, as you get an immediate response, you can see those sales rack up a lot more quickly.

Want to appeal to more customers and get more leads? Use both types of marketing

Many marketers think they have to choose between outbound and inbound marketing when promoting their business. However, the truth is that both work best when used together.

Inbound marketing is perfect for targeting people who know what they want; they just need a little nudge in your direction. For example, let’s say you sell green energy solutions for businesses. You can create a content marketing strategy that attracts people that want to know more about the different types of green energy and how your company can help.

Conversely, outbound marketing lets you promote your organisation to businesses that hadn’t considered green energy solutions before. A targeted telemarketing campaign enables you to introduce your business to potential customers, understand their pain points, and discuss how you can support them.

By using inbound and outbound marketing together, you can ensure that all parts of your sales funnel are covered, and your business gets the high-quality leads it deserves.

Need help with your inbound and outbound marketing? Team Air can help create a marketing and sales solution that covers all your requirements. Contact us today to find out more.

5 Tips to Generate High Quality B2B Leads Every Day

Posted on 16 June 20222 August 2023 by dukadmin

Discover how to generate high quality B2B leads with 5 effective strategies to help you keep your sales pipeline full of qualified prospects.

One of the top challenges businesses face is consistently generating high quality B2B leads that can then go on to be successfully converted into customers…

Whilst there are lots of lead generation tools and methods out there, naturally you’re only interested in the ones that provide qualified leads. In a classic tale of quality over quantity, there’s no use generating an extensive list of potential leads only to find very few of them are actually interested in seriously pursuing your products or services.

With this in mind, we’re sharing our 5 top tips for generating high quality B2B leads on a daily basis to help you keep your sales pipeline just as you like it – fully loaded with qualified prospects:

1. Install a Live Chat Function on Your Website

It seems as if almost every website these days has a live chat function, right? But for good reason, it’s so convenient for people who may not have time to browse your website or have a query they’d like answered as soon as possible.

It actively reduces your website’s bounce rate and delivers warm prospects straight into your inbox – from the moment they click on the chat they are ready to be nurtured by your sales team.

Implementing a live chat function from a technical point of view is easy with powerful CRMs such as HubSpot. Once your sales team are familiar with how it works, your potential customer is treated to a personalised experience where all their questions are answered, and their pain points addressed in an instant. If you don’t have live chat on your website already, we definitely recommend it!

2. Optimise Your Outbound Calling Strategy

A lot of B2B sales happen over the phone so taking advantage of every interaction with an optimised outbound calling strategy is a must. This strategy should include:

Clearly defined goals: what are your average handle times for calls and close rates? How can you improve them?
How will you qualify the lead with each interaction in order to move them down the sales funnel?
Follow-up processes – how will you increase your company’s connection to the contact after the call has finished? What channels will you be utilising to do this? Think emails, remarketing and more!

3. Social Selling

LinkedIn is the #1 platform for B2B lead generation and offers multiple touchpoints to connect with and nurture prospects. This is where social selling comes in – as you know LinkedIn is a platform full of professionals actively sharing updates about their jobs, wins and triumphs and crucially their pain points – so be one of them! But crucially also listen to what your prospects are saying in order to create meaningful content around their hopes and challenges that resonates with them.

Social selling is all about building credibility as a thought leader and offering the solutions your audience seeks without being overtly ‘salesy’ – i.e., no hard selling of your products or messaging people out of the blue with a sales pitch.

It’s actually shortened the sales cycle for a lot of companies but be aware that this is not a short-term win solution – it’s all about building authentic professional relationships with your target audience by interacting with their content and posting your own with which they can identify.

4. Aligning Your Sales and Marketing Teams

When sales and marketing exist in separate silos, it’s a recipe for chaos and means you’re far more unlikely to reach your overall business goals. Aligning the two teams from both a company culture and for every campaign will see both team’s performances soar. Some proven ways to align your sales and marketing teams include:

Clearly defining what a sales qualified lead is and what a marketing qualified lead is
Agree when marketing hands leads over to the sales team to avoid conflicts and confusion
Use lead scoring to qualify leads first and then prioritise the best ones second
Facilitate an open culture of collaboration, sharing ideas and feedback on campaigns. Encourage everyone to offer their views and listen to one another’s respective expertise.

5. Research Your Ideal Buyer’s Industry

When it comes to lead generation, time is money. You don’t have the time to waste nurturing companies that won’t engage with you. Whilst you have already undoubtedly looked into the company, having a wider view of what’s going on in their industry can make all the difference.

Sometimes warming a lead can be as simple as striking up a conversation about a piece of news relevant to their industry. It assures the prospect that you are tuned in to the needs of their industry, boosting your company’s profile in their eyes. You can then leverage this to explain why your business’ offering is relevant to them. The best salespeople subscribe to news or social alerts within their target market’s industries for this reason.

You could also get inside their professional world by browsing LinkedIn and Twitter accounts they follow, listening to a podcast targeted at them or even browsing videos on YouTube relevant to their sector.

Utilising all of these tips will see you generating high-quality B2B leads on a daily basis in no time but if you’re looking for a B2B Marketing partner to provide tailored lead generation solutions, then simply get in touch for an informal chat to discuss your business’ needs!

To gate or not to gate? That is the question

Posted on 26 April 202214 December 2023 by dukadmin

What exactly is gated content?

Gated content is any form of content that users can only access after entering some personal details – usually including at a minimum their name and email address. The user then gains access to the content and the company, in return, gets those all-important contact details for future campaigns. So far, so straightforward. Right? Well, there’s a lot more to consider so let’s have a look at how to ace gated content.

Pros and cons of gated content

Pros

The pros are obvious – you’ll gain valuable information from individuals who are willing to provide their details. This will almost certainly be their name and email address but possibly a lot more depending on your gated content form. These individuals can then be added to your CRM system and if they are the right fit for your ideal client profile (ICP) could be added into a nurture follow-up campaign. If you read last month’s blog, The Know, Like, Trust Funnel, you know you’ve successfully moved the prospect down the funnel from the know stage to the like/trust stage. Excellent! Depending on the initial form, you may also find out useful demographic information about your potential customers such as location, age, job title etc which can then be used for segmentation.

Cons

Not everyone who lands on your gated content page will complete the form and download the content. Many will just move on. Would these individuals have gone on to become prospects/customers if the content hadn’t been gated? We’ll never know for sure. Making sure you ask for the minimum amount of information you need to nurture a lead is a good way to ensure you’re capturing the most leads possible.

Bear in mind, however that quantity of leads does not necessarily mean quality. Although you may be driving targeted direct traffic to this download, if it is on your website it’s also visible to all users so the individual may not be your ideal customer profile. This may mean that some lead details will need to be stored but flagged as not priority individuals for your marketing & sales team to contact.

To gate or not to gate? That is the question

So, this brings us on to the question of whether you should gate a particular piece of content or not. Luckily there are some ‘rules of thumb’ that you can follow when deciding whether or not to gate content. Firstly, consider the type and length of content that you’ve produced. Certain types lend themselves better to gating – longer form content such as e-books are perfect, whereas standard blogs for example should almost never be gated. Think too about the stage of the customer journey, the further down the funnel they are, the more likely it is that they will be happy to enter their personal details. Gating content early in the marketing funnel can scare away prospects so having un-gated content at this stage can improve your brand’s visibility and enhance your credibility. Make sure your gated content is relevant for prospects who are near the buying stage; this may mean the content is more in-depth or specialist.

What types of content should be gated?

If it could be considered as ‘Premium content’ then it could be gated. A perfect example would be an e-book or guide. This will be a longer length, seen by the prospect as valuable, and offer an in-depth answer to the question they want answered. E-books will also give you brand authority and build up trust with your audience. Similarly, whitepapers will help your brand become a trusted ‘industry expert’ on a topic.

Don’t just stick to the tried and tested though. You could gate templates, in-depth how-to guides, webinars, a free trial of your product, checklists, free consultations, analytical reports into your industry. Get creative to come up with something original for your particular industry.

Gated content best practises

Make sure your gated content ticks these boxes and you won’t go far wrong.

Create a strong headline to ensure that prospects don’t click away. Never over promise! It’s no good offering an in-depth guide if they download it to find out it is 2 pages long.
Make sure the title explains exactly what they are going to get. A spammy title will lead to disappointment and a lack of trust in your brand.
Ensure the content is valuable and relevant to your audience.
Decide what sort of customer information should be collected. Only ask for data that will be meaningful to you for future segmentation so you don’t deter people from completing the form.
Finally, build a strong landing page to host the offer. Make sure you create a strong headline, write compelling copy, and generate an easy to complete form.

How to use the details captured

You’ve created the gated content, it’s getting noticed, and the email addresses are piling up. What next? Make sure you segment your email lists, using any demographics you captured. Follow up campaigns can then be targeted via demographics or be based on your existing customer personas. As with any marketing strategy, measuring your success is extremely important. This data will help you understand your audience better and improve your content strategy.

What’s next

Gating content is a critical aspect of a content marketing strategy used to generate the leads that your business needs to grow. When done well, gating content can benefit both the individual and the business, and the key for successful gating is to produce high quality content for which your ideal prospect is willing to trade their personal information. How often you produce gated content and how much of your content should be gated very much depends on your industry and the size of your business but often less is more. If you’re new to gated content, we recommend that you start with quarterly downloads. Saving gated content for just a few carefully chosen and well-targeted and correctly positioned pieces will mean you’re soon capturing valuable leads that ultimately convert into happy customers.

Want some help with using gated content for your lead generation campaigns? Get in touch. Give us a call on 01392 796 702.

Gated vs non-gated content and how to use it for lead generation

Posted on 4 January 202222 August 2023 by dukadmin

What exactly is gated content?

Pros and cons of gated content

Pros

Cons

To gate or not to gate? That is the question

What types of content should be gated?

Gated content best practises

Make sure your gated content ticks these boxes and you won’t go far wrong.

Create a strong headline to ensure that prospects don’t click away. Never over promise! It’s no good offering an in-depth guide if they download it to find out it is 2 pages long.
Make sure the title explains exactly what they are going to get. A spammy title will lead to disappointment and a lack of trust in your brand.
Ensure the content is valuable and relevant to your audience.
Decide what sort of customer information should be collected. Only ask for data that will be meaningful to you for future segmentation so you don’t deter people from completing the form.
Finally, build a strong landing page to host the offer. Make sure you create a strong headline, write compelling copy, and generate an easy to complete form.

How to use the details captured

What’s next

Want some help with using gated content for your lead generation campaigns? Get in touch. Give us a call on 0345 241 3038.

Covering All Bases: How Air Marketing’s Approach Solves The Know-Like-Trust-Buy Funnel

Posted on 8 December 202120 October 2022 by Hannah Sanders

The know-like-trust-buy funnel is a fairly common term in the world of sales and marketing—but what exactly is it? And why is it so important?

Essentially, the funnel details each vital stage that a potential consumer/business goes through before purchasing a product or service from your business. Within the concept are four fundamental touch points—each of which should be treated with equal and careful consideration to achieve the end goal of a successful customer journey and sale.

At the top of the funnel, we have ‘know’—the point at which a person discovers you, or your offering for the very first time. Whatever method this may be—social media, PPC, traditional advertising, etc—any experienced salesperson will vouch that these early impressions are critical in ultimately generating revenue further down the line.

The second stage is ‘like’. However you position yourself and whatever messaging you use needs to resonate with your target market, to the point they’re willing to delve further once their attention has been caught.

Next, we have ‘trust’. We live in an era where people have learned to be more and more sceptical about who and where they’re making a purchase from. This wariness has placed an even greater importance on the trust stage of the funnel, particularly for less established and emerging brands trying to break into a sector for the first time.

This is also the point where you really need to position yourself as an expert within your field. What can you provide this person with that gives you an edge over your competitors? If you don’t have that, or you aren’t clearly communicating it, odds are they’ll find someone who is.

Once you’ve ticked all of the above boxes, your customer should be ready to ‘buy’, or at least extremely close to it. We often see companies falling into the trap of thinking once a person reaches this stage, their business is secured—but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Despite all of the hard work that has gone in prior, it only takes a split-second for a person to be turned off by a bad sales experience, which is why it’s crucial to have an expert team on-hand to get things over the line at this final stage.

Streamlining the funnel with Air Marketing and Marketing Services

Naturally, making the funnel as smooth a journey as possible for the consumer is not only going to benefit in terms of this one sale, but a pleasant and memorable buying experience is exactly what is required to build a base of loyal, repeat customers in the long-term.

To successfully achieve this, both the marketing and sales elements of the experience need to work perfectly in tandem, complimenting each other throughout each stage and designed in a way that from that very first moment, the journey is pushing towards that last hurdle of a successful sale.

One of the most common problems we see with businesses is a struggle to combine both the marketing and sales elements of the funnel. They may be able to capture the person’s attention and their story is well-received, however, when it comes to trying to convert that interest into the all-important ‘buy’ stage, things begin to unravel.

Our Marketing services team, specialise in marketing with a sales attitude—producing high-impact lead-generation campaigns and creative marketing strategies, to seamlessly and successfully deliver this entire buying process to brands.

Outsourcing all elements of the consumer journey to one supplier doesn’t just save you time and resources in terms of communication and coordination between separate parties, it ensures each touchpoint is better aligned due to it all being built and handled by a single entity.

This massively reduces the chances of mistakes or drop-offs due to misunderstandings and incoherent messaging, and allows a strategy to be altered and optimised in a far more efficient manner than if you were having to arrange with two or three different contacts.

From a sales perspective, being able to share our input immediately in the initial stages provides a massive benefit, as it allows us to truly ensure that by the time the consumer/business reaches the final part of the funnel, they’re actually ready to buy as all messaging before has been tailored specifically towards this moment.

By operating this way, we are able to constantly knowledge share from both a sales and marketing perspective, while possessing the, often vital, ability to act with agility and deliver genuine ROI for our clients.

The results

A recent campaign with one of our clients who operate within the SaaS industry saw us take this two-pronged approach with Air and Air Marketing services.

The client, who helps UK businesses apply for Series A funding and prepare for periods of growth through an expertly-led training programme, found that while their offering was indeed incredibly strong, it was difficult to market and they weren’t getting the conversions they had hoped.

In our collaborative approach, our Marketing services team crafted a full marketing strategy that combined email marketing, social media marketing and user journey consultancy. As the prospective customers shared details of becoming marketing qualified leads (MQLs), all the vital information was fed back to the Air Marketing SDR team, who were then instantly able to pursue and convert the most qualified leads.

Over a three month period, this process meant we were able to deliver all the required benchmarks that allowed our client to run their next cohort. The campaign’s results included:

40% average email open rate
+14 marketing qualified leads
58,000 reach on Twitter
300% increase in website traffic from email
20% increase in direct website traffic
95% increase in website traffic from social
5% minutes on average spent watching video content on Twitter

Want to learn more about how we work as a full-stack marketing agency to optimise the customer journey? We’d love to chat. Give us a call on 0345 241 3038 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

The 5 key marketing metrics you should be measuring

Posted on 19 October 20217 July 2023 by dukadmin

Marketing isn’t all about writing snappy subject lines, designing eye-catching graphics and crafting compelling copy. Underlying the creative, you need to have solid foundations to measure its effectiveness.

There’s no point having a clever campaign that doesn’t deliver results. We focus our marketing efforts on demand generation. We apply a sales attitude to our marketing in order to generate results.

So for us, it’s imperative to gather and understand key data for our clients. Knowledge is power, and the right metrics can provide essential details to boost business and increase ROI. That data can arm us and our clients with powerful insights to inform business decisions.

We don’t use fluffy metrics. We won’t try to wow you with amazing charts that look good but are rather meaningless. We focus on information that is actionable. We realise how important it is to track and learn from the data that can enable your business to reach its goals.

The three key metrics that every business should focus on:

Leads
Opportunities
Conversions

Identifying the importance of these factors and how to generate them is fundamental for business success. But how?

Our 5 recommended key marketing metrics:

1. Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)

“A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead that the marketing team has deemed more likely to become a customer compared to others” according to HubSpot.

That qualified piece of data (the MQL) is really valuable to a business. The marketing team can determine how and where the person has engaged with the business’ content. Be it a particular webpage they’ve visited, email they’ve opened, social post they’ve shared, video they’ve watched, event they’ve attended or campaign they’ve clicked on.

The marketing team can work out which leads make the best quality prospects by interpreting their data. Say the business has specified that their ideal clients meet specific demographic criteria, or have particular problems or pain points to solve. Those factors can be identified by a lead’s interactions. That information is extremely valuable for sales teams to act upon and nurture.

2. Email marketing

Emails provide a great way to build relationships with customers and potential customers. Discovering how your customer has reacted to the email they’ve received is very telling. Did they open it, delete it, read it, click on a link within it or unsubscribe from the list? Delving deep into email analytics will help you to test and make calculated adjustments to engage your audience better.

3. Digital content

Publishing digital content is a two-way street. It’s not enough to just set it live. You need content that grabs people’s attention and prompts them to act. That action could be sharing your content to help others find it (yes please!), commenting on it, downloading it, watching it or reading it, for example.

Knowing what people have done with your content is incredibly useful. It can inform future content decisions and it can identify potential customers. It tells you the key areas in which to invest time and money for the best ROI.

4. Social interactions

As we mentioned earlier, we don’t do fluffy metrics. The number of likes and follows on your social channels are not the be all and end all. You want content that makes people stop scrolling when they see your post and engage with it.

A share from a follower is a form of endorsement. A comment means that your content motivated somebody to write something about it. Similarly, submitting a rating or review has taken up somebody’s time. That’s time that they’ve spent interacting with your brand. Knowing which social posts have garnered those reactions is powerful information.

5. Website analytics

Tracking website data with Google Analytics or other packages is imperative. We gain valuable insights from understanding who is visiting the site, where they’re coming from and what they’re looking at. For us, time spent on site is a key metric. If customers are spending time looking at a range of website content, we know that we’re providing relevant information that is valuable for the audience.

Bounce rates can highlight areas that need attention. If people are clicking away from a page without interacting with its content, changes need to be made.

The importance of measuring marketing ROI

Data takes the guesswork out of marketing. It shows you which aspects are delivering results. That information proves which areas of spend are providing good ROI.

Tracking and collating marketing metrics doesn’t have to be laborious. We’re a HubSpot Gold Partner, so we recommend using this powerful tool to monitor marketing metrics. There’s a variety of reports that can be set up easily to provide amazing insights. You can attribute leads, deals and revenue to social posts for example. You’ll get a clear view of all marketing activity in one place.

If you don’t use HubSpot, we advise tracking data in a spreadsheet, or using another great tool on the market. Monitor stats regularly to understand patterns of behaviour, set benchmarks and reflect on performance. That knowledge is extremely powerful for businesses and can make the difference between reaching your revenue goals or not

Want to know more about marketing metrics and setting-up performance tracking? We’re here to help. Call us today on 0345 241 3038.

LIVE Roundtable: Achieving Sales & Marketing Alignment

Posted on 4 October 202120 October 2022 by Helen Young

We hosted our sixth roundtable as part of our NEW annual content series, around setting up an outbound sales function. Get ideas, inspiration and advice from our panel of experts, who share and discuss their own experiences and open the floor to questions from the live audience.

We’ll be going live every month until March 2022, chatting about all topics relating to outbound sales and the stages of building a team.

Agenda

We answered questions around (but not limited to):

The need to work in partnership with one another
Creating an environment that integrates well
Processes
CRM and tech stack
Sharing well-defined objectives
Implementing a feedback loop for better alignment throughout your organisation
Evaluating the results, and adjusting your strategy to respond to your customer
Celebrating success

Host

Owen Richards – Founder & CEO at Air Marketing

Speakers

Neil Clarke – Commercial Director at Air Marketing

Gareth Mapp – Director of Sales & Marketing at Software Solved

Louis Fernandes – Vice President, Sales, EMEA at Uberall

Who is it for?

Founders, Sales Leaders, and Revenue Leaders.

The benefits of working with a HubSpot Solutions partner: getting the maximum value out of your HubSpot investment!

Posted on 24 September 20217 July 2023 by dukadmin

HubSpot is a powerful platform that delivers valuable results, but it takes expertise to get to grips with it – like anything complex and feature-rich. For organisations that want to explore their options before jumping in feet first, free HubSpot is a great way to kick things off and allows you to try out some of the platform’s features with no upfront cost. And maybe that’s more than you need right now, but if you want the full functionality and the full benefits HubSpot has to offer, you’ll need to invest in a paid subscription.

If you decide to go down the route of a paid subscription, there are many CRM options available: each with a different feature set, cost, and level of expertise required to implement them. HubSpot split this functionality into Marketing, Sales, Service, CMS and Operations.

For example, HubSpot’s Sales Hub is designed specifically for sales teams looking to drive more revenue from existing customers through lead nurturing campaigns that map out multiple stages of contact between buyer and seller. The Sales Activity Hub provides a centralised view of all sales activity across your team with detailed reports on opportunities and pipelines. The result is enhanced insight and a closer understanding of your customers.

So if I can buy directly from HubSpot, why would I work with a partner?

Money will buy all the functionality you need, but without the knowledge and experience to properly manage it, you won’t get the most out of your investment. Working with a HubSpot Solutions Partner is the best way to improve your marketing engagement and ultimately increase conversion rates. An experienced partner will create custom solutions that will help you get more leads, convert those leads into customers, and turn them into long-term clients.

All the support you need, from implementation and strategy to live campaigns

A HubSpot Solutions partner can offer you that additional level of expertise and assistance when implementing your marketing strategy. That means looking at all the teams that need access to HubSpot and rolling out onboarding and training that ensures everyone is engaged and understands the processes for getting the most out of it. They will have experience in the change management aspects of implementing a new system and can work with you however you want – whether that’s providing advice, strategic direction, or creating and delivering the strategy for you. That means you get professional assistance with content, strategy, and implementation, ensuring your team uses HubSpot successfully.

Save time and empower your sales and marketing teams!

Working directly with a HubSpot Solutions provider can also save valuable time for your in-house development teams to focus on what they do best, while bringing excitement back into work by being more creative about their approach to marketing campaigns. This is hugely empowering for teams and is the perfect starting point for marketing and sales alignment. Because HubSpot’s reports and analytics provide such a detailed and accurate picture of what works well (and what doesn’t), you can see where you need to optimise at any stage of the funnel.

Access a depth of experience and get up and running right away

A solution partner’s additional (reassuring benefit) is that they will typically have an existing customer base across multiple sectors and draw on their depth of experience in helping customers fast track getting started. Meaning you can get up and running efficiently without the need to build extensive knowledge from scratch.

In a recent episode of ON AIR: With Owen hosted by Air Marketing’s Founder & CEO, Owen Richards, we were are joined by Caleb Buscher – Senior Channel Account Manager (EMEA Region) at HubSpot, to discuss how to make the most out of HubSpot as a revenue growth business tool.

We explained how we’ve had first-hand experience of the difference HubSpot can make to a business: “We have had some truly inspiring conversations with clients who had zero experience of using a joined-up marketing automation CRM tool and now have a newfound love for HubSpot and what it can do for their business. Our work is about helping our customers energise the way they approach marketing, giving their business a single point of truth and empowering them to deliver better customer experiences that fuel loyalty and growth.”

Need some help getting started?

HubSpot is an incredibly powerful platform, but it’s not the only one out there. There are other great solutions available, and we’re happy to work with any of them and apply the same principles to deliver precisely what you need. If you want to discover how HubSpot could be a game-changer for your business, we’d be happy to guide you. Equally, if you’d like to talk about any aspect of your marketing strategy, get in touch today on 0345 241 3083.

Category: Marketing