Why Fintech Businesses Need a Digital Marketing Strategy

Fintech is booming as the financial services industry continues to go through a period of huge change. And as fintech grows, so does the demand for fintech marketing. But what does digital marketing look like for fintech and how does it differ from traditional marketing methods in financial services?

Recent years have seen customer expectations altered in almost every sector with digital services becoming the norm. This development has created fantastic opportunities for finance companies but has also led to a situation in which competition is arguably at its fiercest ever. Digital marketing provides an opportunity to stand out in a crowded market.

What is changing in fintech marketing?

Marketing financial services has always been blighted by one major factor – financial products are both complex and mundane. Consumers have typically chosen financial products on the basis of trust – and they always will do. But before you can develop trust, you need to get your target consumers’ attention.

The old ways no longer work if you want to generate interest, build a brand and attract loyal customers. We live in an age of instant gratification where pretty much anything and everything you want is available quickly, smoothly and at the touch of a button or tap of a screen. Fintech marketing companies must tap into this opportunity, building trust and getting noticed in the digital spaces their audience occupies.

New ways of reaching customers are offered by:

• AI
• Machine learning
• Computer vision
• Chatbots
• Social media

And who knows what the next advancements in digital marketing will turn out to be?

But not everything about the future of fintech marketing is entirely new. There was a time when the ability to withdraw money from a cashpoint was seen as progress simply because people no longer needed to visit their branch. Then online payments replaced the need to write and post a cheque. In 2022, consumers want all the latest conveniences offered by digital banking – but there is also a curiosity about many aspects of the fintech industry. 

Cryptocurrency and challenger banks are flying high. But not without an element of scepticism. But as fintech success stories continue to circulate, there is an air of anticipation among consumers. They want to learn more, to find out for themselves if it really is as simple, accessible and profitable as they have heard. What they want is information. Fintech companies have millions of people out there who want to hear what they have to say. A captive audience who just want to know that the companies that are intriguing them and piquing their interest are credible and trustworthy.

You might say that the financial services sector has gone full circle and that relationship banking is once again in demand. But this is not the type of relationship banking that sees consumers wanting to visit a branch and speak to a stuffy man in a bowler hat. This is a digital relationship. One in which consumers demand access to the reliable information about the products they want at the time and in the place that is most convenient to them. That place is online. And that’s why every fintech company needs a digital marketing strategy.

Creating an effective fintech digital marketing strategy

A good fintech digital marketing strategy will put you in front of your target audience, clearly define what differentiates you from the competition and show what you stand for. Modern consumers want to know a brands’ values and to understand the personality behind the persona. Modern marketing is about aligning your brand with your target audience and demonstrating that you ‘get’ them.

First and foremost, your digital marketing strategy has to be launched in the right places to speak to your intended audience. Traditional TV and radio advertisements that try to appeal to a mass audience are a dying breed. The digital transformation has presented marketers with an opportunity for highly targeted advertising that appears in users’ news feeds whenever they go online or puts compelling emails in their inbox that will tempt them in. 

So, let’s take a look at how to create a killer digital marketing strategy for your fintech business:

Go mobile

Mobile devices are now the most popular way for people to go online. That means your digital marketing must be mobile friendly. And mobile-friendly means quick and easy to use. Remember, getting noticed is just the tip of the iceberg. Once you have a users’ attention, user experience and the customer journey are vital if you want to turn that interested browser into a paying customer.

The principles of digital marketing don’t change. This is a technical process of making sure your brand and products are accessible. But a word of warning – currently 52% of online searching is done using mobiles. This figure is set to rise as time goes on, but compromising the quality of your desktop browsing to focus solely on mobile devices could alienate you from almost half of internet users. It may be that your main target is Gen Z and millennials, in which case mobile-first might be your best bet. But don’t fall into the trap of going mobile-only.

Gamification

Gamification is the process of taking gameplay principles and applying them to non-gameplay apps and sites. In marketing, gamification often takes the shape of:

• Contests
• Prizes and awards
• Reward points for certain actions such as purchases or referrals
• Online quizzes and puzzles that turn the mundane into something engaging that gets people motivated to act

This is a popular tactic in the run-up to a new product launch as it generates interest and encourages people to share content and compete with friends or other users.

Affiliate and influencer marketing

Third party validation is a traditional principle of marketing. But these days, you don’t need to hire a celebrity – at least not an expensive A-lister. There are plenty of influencers with huge followings who charge huge sums of money to feature products and services in their content. However, conversion rates are low.

On the other hand, there are micro-influencers (those with 100 – 500,000 followers) and bloggers who will promote your product for a far lower fee and with much better conversion rates. 

Ok, we all know that influencers and affiliates are being paid to promote your product, but it’s in their interests to give their audience what it wants. An influencer or blogger who promotes things that don’t interest their audience will see numbers (and subsequently income) dwindle. So, find someone with a following that matches your target market and you have a foot in the digital door before you even get started.

Community marketing

The digital world is all about belonging. Offer your target market what they want, give them places to connect with your brand and each other, and you begin to develop loyal customers. 

Some fintech customers have encouraged members of their community to help develop or name new products. Others offer live Q&A sessions and invite members to ask questions. In addition to getting people involved and making them feel part of a movement, this also helps show the personality behind the brand and build credibility in your niche.

If you choose to go down the community marketing route, you are positioning your business as a brand that values engagement. And that means making sure you are consistent across all platforms. You’ll need to be active on social media and be sure to engage with and respond to your community. Sometimes that might mean asking questions or creating polls, at other times you will need to produce shareable content, and there will also be times when it’s as simple as answering queries or liking posts from your followers to show them you are interested in their opinions.

Content marketing

Quality is key here. If you write something, make it valuable. Pre-empt the questions your audience will ask and write blogs that give them the answers. Optimise your content for Google and follow all SEO techniques. Remember, SEO is an ongoing task so make sure you have plans in place to keep on top of it yourself or to hire a digital marketing agency to manage it for you.

Think about all the types of content available to you and what your target audience engages with. Videos are popular with users and are a great way to hold someone’s attention. But you need to grab them from the start. A video has approximately 3 seconds to hook someone in before they decide to scroll on. This is no time for lengthy introductions. Get to the point, grab the attention, then fill in the rest.

All content marketing must be customer-focused. Keep in mind that your customer (no matter how loyal they are) does not care about your product or service. They care about what it can do for them. Focus your digital marketing on the features and benefits of what you do and show people how it solves a problem or issue for them. This is marketing – you’re selling a lifestyle not a product.

Conclusion

The key to digital marketing for fintech is to define your target market and choose a cross-channel approach that engages your entire audience with a consistent message but in a way that is uniquely designed to speak to each segment. 

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to digital marketing. But don’t look at that fact as an obstacle. See it as an opportunity. Tailor your content to each section of your market, hone your digital strategy for maximum exposure and expect to see conversion rates rise.

At Fascinatid, we support fintech companies build their brand and create a digital presence that speaks directly to their audienceFor more details and to discuss how we can help you stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace, get in touch today.

Content Production in B2B Marketing

The need for content marketing of companies that make B2B (Business to business) marketing and offer their products and services to other companies is increasing day by day. These companies have a much different target audience than B2C (Business to customer) companies that market to the end user. Therefore, B2B and B2C content marketing strategies have to be different. So, how to create a content strategy in B2B marketing?

Content marketing allows you to communicate effectively with your target audience. We see that blog posts, e-books, case studies, podcasts and videos are preferred in B2B content marketing. With the shared content, it is aimed to strengthen brand awareness, increasing the site traffic as well as potential customers and ultimately sales.

Content is a secret weapon that B2B marketer uses to interact with the industry, generate leads and gain customers. With this effective weapon, you can not only make your customers’ work easier, but also grow your business.

Why Does B2B Need Content Marketing?

Content marketing has a significant rate of adoption in the B2B marketplace and has the potential to deliver significant business results. One of the critical conditions for staying competitive in the current business environment is content marketing. Content and content marketing approaches are the basic elements that support trust and loyalty in the relationship between consumers and brands. One of the subsets of a company’s marketing strategy must be content marketing. To optimize the effectiveness of content marketing, your mission, vision, values, business strategy and marketing strategy should be in harmony.

How Should a B2B Content Strategy Be?

Content strategy in B2B marketing aims to strengthen the interest of targeted companies in the brand. With the correct methods, both sales increase and the potential customer base expands. In particular, information technology companies will have a communication model that reaches the end-user, even indirectly, thanks to the brand communication they will establish with other companies. All these studies will make the products and services understandable and show that the brand is competent in its field.

In the months following the publication of the content to be produced in accordance with the determined marketing strategy, it will be seen that the organic traffic to the site increases. Simultaneous sharing of content on social networks will increase the power of the interaction. It is possible to see the change in the rankings in search engines by sticking to the content marketing strategy and following the current trends in search engines and applying them to the content. B2B companies that attach importance to content marketing receive much more recycling than others.

The points to be considered when creating a content strategy in B2B marketing are as follows:

• Set goals

• Create a target company profile

• Audit content to spot differences

• Evaluate content ideas

• Research keywords and search terms

• Use topic clusters in the content strategy

• Use other content discussion methods that you can apply

• Choose the right types of content

Presentation of Content in B2B Companies

Most of the B2B companies use paid content distribution channels with their own website and LinkedIn account. In other words, companies that cannot benefit from free channels such as social media posts, blog posts or case studies should support their strategy with paid channels such as Google Adwords. As is known, most of these types of advertisements actually take place on social media networks. On the other hand, companies that prefer to use digital marketing ads have formed the majority. B2B marketing efforts gain speed thanks to both content and ads. Thus, the obstacles to branding, which is the biggest goal, are removed.

In B2B marketing, the content should be created with a wide range of sources and should be absolutely original. Because search engines do not bring non-original pages to the fore by excluding them from search. This situation concerns not only search engines but also customers. When customers see similar sentences and images on other sites, they turn to the most striking and original when they decide to purchase a product or service.

In addition to these, regularly producing informative, original and targeted content with keywords increases the traffic coming through search engines. Search engines, which check whether the website is useful or not, also increase the ranking of the site. This also contributes to increased visibility.

It is known that the most preferred content on the Internet is video content. B2B companies can gain the trust of their target audience by making both video content and live broadcasts. On the other hand, visual, graphic, picture and GIF works are also met with great interest by the target audience.

Content Strategy Recommendations

While trying to reach potential customers, B2B content marketing can be done on a wide scale, from blog content to social media posts, from e-mails to e-books, to both convey offers and turn them into sales. The following strategies can be used to stay ahead of the competitors.

1. Turn Content Into Engaging Stories

The way to look more professional is not to use abundant concepts that are unknown to everyone in the industry. For this reason, it is necessary to keep the contents simple and understandable. It is effective to stay away from concepts and words that will confuse potential customers and make their message difficult to understand, and simplifying the expression is effective. Of course, all this does not mean simplifying or banish the language used in the content. When doing B2B marketing, storytelling the contents takes you one step further. Because people connect with stories, get excited, emotional and learn. If the different problems of the target audience are correctly identified, creating niche content for them will increase the conversion rate. Thus, you can go beyond brands and products with a single content, and you can achieve great momentum and power in transformation.

2. Use All Aspects of the Content

In order to make a successful B2B marketing, it is necessary to diversify the contents. It shouldn’t just be content with blogging; It is necessary to use many communication and interaction methods such as online events, infographic,s and video content to communicate with the target audience. Since the sharing and interaction rates of especially infographic visual content will be high, you can answer the questions and problems of the target audience in this way and tell your story with infographics.

While B2B marketing, online training content, workshops and seminars are also an effective way to create a bond of trust with the target audience and activate them. Various activities, including experts on a niche topic in the industry, strengthen your position in the industry. Such online content that benefits viewers and is easily accessible to them will also strengthen brand awareness, as they will be eagerly welcomed.

3. Use Content Customization

If you want B2B marketing to be efficient, you should also use content personalization. Because you cannot evaluate the entire target audience in the same category. For this reason, you should identify different dynamics and personalize the customer experience with the help of content. The basic rule to know about this is that even if it is a single product, everyone’s motivation to buy that product is not the same.

You can reach different groups thanks to well-made, analyzed and carefully created content customization. If the content is about potential problems of the target audience, people really tend to share and consume it. If you want to increase conversion rates while doing B2B marketing, separate titles such as age, gender, geographic location, sector, title and department are also important for analyzing the audience and creating completely special content for them. You can choose social media posts accordingly, especially LinkedIn posts based on your connections.

4. Consider the Data

Data determines the steps to be taken. You should regularly examine the target audience’s behavioral patterns, conversion rates, causes and consequences, and the parameters that provide transformation, and process the data to make it meaningful. The results obtained should be the determining factor while setting the next step. You can make the content strategy much more meaningful according to the data results and analysis.

Benefits of Content Marketing

1. Creates New Business Opportunities

According to research, companies that produce blog posts generate nearly twice as many potential customers than non-bloggers. The effect of good content marketing is enormous. You can ensure that your potential customers get information about your company, your services and the value you can provide to them with the contents describing your products and services that you will broadcast on your digital channels.

2. Brings New Customers

You can get new customers with blog posts. Whether your content is a survey that a potential customer has noticed on Google, or a promotional file they download from your site. Content marketing plays an important role in the B2B purchasing lifecycle.

3. Improves Search Engine Ranking and Discovery

Search engines work more effectively on new, relevant and indexed content. Blog posts you publish on your website improve your search engine ranking and contribute positively to your likelihood of being in searches. A blog on your website will result in 434% more indexed pages and 97% more indexed links. By increasing your indexed pages and links, you can make your site more reputable before search engines.

4. Increases site traffic

According to Hubspot, if you have 51-100 pages on your website (consider each blog post as a unique page), you can generate 48% more traffic than under 50 pages. More traffic growth means more potential customers.

5. Thought Leadership Develops a Culture

Engaging your organization in regularly creating new content will develop a research culture and thought leadership. Content marketing can help keep your team updated on changes and trends. This information can be helpful in your new business and product development efforts. It’s not just the marketing team’s job to produce materials that will be used in your content marketing efforts. You can get help from customer representatives, experts and even your customers while creating content.

6. Saving Time

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 70% of B2B marketers see time constraints as the most significant obstacle to content creation. In fact, content marketing will save your marketing and sales teams time in the long run. How often does a potential customer ask for a conference call, product demonstration, or more information? You can reduce the time you spend for sales and marketing activities by creating promotional videos for your products and services. With some upfront investment, creating quality content can save you valuable time in the future.

7. Increases Customer Retention

Since the content to be produced for your existing customers will be personalized, segmented and relevant, you can increase your customer retention rate in the long term by keeping them updated with great content.

8. Content Marketing Builds Community

Every time you share content on social media channels, you provide a new center of attraction for the community you address. Thanks to social media channels, it opens the way for your followers to interact with each other as well as interact with your customers, and the quality of the content, the number of followers, and the level of interest act as a spiral that increases interaction.

9. Big Data Opens the Door to Customer Insight

Potential customers express their intentions by downloading a case study document, visiting the website or registering on the webinar. This behavioral footprint deserves to go after it. One of the secret weapons used in content creation is to reach customer insight by processing the data in question.

The content you publish can serve purposes such as creating brand awareness, educating the audience, and building trust.

A Recommendation: Create content that understands what’s unique in your company, knows how to rise from the mediocre, and surprises your audience with articles, research, video or podcast recordings.

Producing regular content is beneficial for information technology companies engaged in B2B marketing to increase their visibility in the digital world. Thanks to the contents and the service, you can ensure that the customers who are satisfied with your company give positive comments about your brand and introduce it to its environment.

If You’re Not Using Case Studies for B2B Marketing, It Might Be Time You Started

According to research, 73% of business to business marketers are now investing their efforts in creating case studies. There are lots of effective B2B marketing strategies but the great benefit of case studies is that you are able to tell a story about your company and how you solved a problem for a client or customer.

By reading your story, the potential new customer can get a better idea of what your company can do for theirs. You can’t convey this in-depth amount of information using channels like social media, unless you put it into a video, so case studies are the best option to provide all of that extra detail that will persuade a business that they need your services.

The power of case studies will vary depending on the industry that you are working in but regardless of which industry that happens to be, a customer lead will be looking for a service that you provide because they have a problem that needs solving or a need that they have. This is why case studies tend to be structured in a way that describes: The Problem; The Solution: The Results.

Writing about the problem

As an example, their problem could be that the company is spending too much time dealing with email enquiries. A software development company could solve their problem by creating a chatbot for the company’s website that answers some of the more common questions that they receive all of the time. So, instead of receiving 50 emails per day, the emails were reduced by 40 of those emails being answered automatically by the chatbot instead.

The case study would be able to talk through the problem in terms of how many hours per week were being spent on answering these emails, even including the impact such as taking on extra staff, or stopping employees from being able to concentrate on other tasks that will generate leads.

Outlining the solution and results

The case study then outlines the exact way that the problem was resolved and finishes with the results, which should be metric, wherever possible. For example, reduced 10 hours of work per week, or saved £xxx in salary per annum for staff to deal with the enquiries. In this section you want to be trying to show why your company is the best one for the job, rather than one of your competitors. Numbers and facts really do help to add more weight to your story.

How long should a case study be?

The length of a case study is usually around the 750 to 1000 word mark, you need to get enough detail in, without boring the reader with too much detail! Providing a story about your business helps you to build credibility and give a better understanding of what services your company provides. The other factor that makes case studies so good for B2B marketing is that stories are more memorable than just a page of text about a company.

If you haven’t already considered adding case studies to your marketing strategy, it could be the missing part of the jigsaw to help you to convert more leads.

B2B SaaS and IT Customer Interviews: Make Your Customer Your Superstar

When it comes down to it, your customers are just like everybody else you know. They love making remarkable things, and they enjoy success. They also enjoy talking about their success and about the great results that come about as a result of their decisions.  And those likes apply to them just as much when they are an employee, owner or entrepreneur in the world of  B2B technology, as they do during their personal life.

Having a signature on the things that helped their business achieve significant results such as reductions in cost, improved productivity or increased sales makes people happy. It’s like the joy of Christmas morning all over again. If you’re a B2B technology solution provider, you can take some of the credit too. You helped them along the way. Your products and your solutions empowered your customer to get there.

The question is, do you keep this success to yourselves or do you share it with the world?

Put Your Customer Under the Spotlight

Relationships make the world of business turn. And good relationships help you succeed – there’s no doubt about that.

Once you build a rapport with a customer, that relationship elevates your connection with them.

• It’s no longer just about products
• It’s about people you know and trust
• It’s about furthering those relationships
• It’s about strengthening those relationships

If you have a client who is happy working with you, congratulations! You’re doing something right. You’ve qualified for the Champions League! You might be the coach, trainer or key player. Regardless of your role, what matters is you are an important part of the team and the success it has achieved.

So celebrate! It’s time to toast your success. It’s time to celebrate with you. It’s time for your client to tell the world about your role in their achievement.

Have you ever thought of asking a satisfied client to talk about how your product or service helped them? Often, they’re only too pleased to be placed under the spotlight – after all, it’s more good exposure for them.

When a client is satisfied with the outcome of what you provided them with, you can be sure they will talk about it. They’ll talk about it with their bosses, their friends, and their family. People congratulate them and tell them what a great job they did. So, why not put your customer under the spotlight and let them talk to other prospective clients? Make them a hero. A hero who bought your product, implemented your solution, used your service and achieved great results.

Satisfied clients are the best people to talk about your business. They have no vested interest in talking up your product or service, so when they speak, others sit up and take notice. But how do you get them to talk to people about the great product or service you provide and the results it delivered for them?

Simple. You interview them. There are many other ways to get this story out there but they can involve third parties and are often time-consuming. For an interview, all you need is an agreed time for you and one other to meet up.

Customer testimonials deserve your time

A customer testimonial says a lot. Let your client talk about your product about their challenges, the issues they face, and how you came into the picture and changed everything.

Let them draw the big picture for your audience:

• Your prospects
• Your customers
• Your competitors
• Your audience

Let them describe what you brought to their business:

• The added value
• The improved results
• The increased ROI
• The new ways of working

And any other amazing things that have happened as a result of what you did or you provided.

Ask the right questions. Remember, it’s not about you, it’s about your customer

Before the interview make sure you are fully prepared. Spend time with your interviewee. Take a look at their LinkedIn profile, see the posts they like, check out their background, their previous positions and other notable achievements. Understand all there is to know about their role and responsibilities. Make sure your questions are about them and their success not directly about your products. Remember, this is their time to shine; their moment in the spotlight.

Let them tell their story from their perspective. All you need to do is ask the right questions, probe for additional information when required and show genuine interest in their story. You can steer the conversation towards the pain points you know that your product or service addressed, but don’t explicitly ask them to say how amazing it is.

Ask questions such as:

• “What was the biggest challenge you faced?”
• “What made you choose to work with us?”
• “What was the outcome of working with us?”
• “What made you most proud of the project?”

After all, it’s their story – but you play a huge part in it.

Go with the flow of the answers. Let your customer tell their story from their perspective and try to make it more of an informal chat. Encourage them to relax and let them open up. That’s when you’ll get the real insight into how you helped them achieve success – and you might get a couple of interesting quotes to boot.

Your customer is your key to word-of-mouth marketing

When your audience read the article, you want them to say. “OK, great. So, X company did this, achieved that, got these results. This person or company has worked with them and is happy with the results. So, why don’t we give it a shot?”

You won’t get business from everybody who reads the article, but some will get in touch. Others will share the story on LinkedIn or bookmark your website for the future.

Your audience will understand what you do and how you do it. And they’ll have independent verification that you do out well. Your customer will do the talking for you which will result in:

• More engagement on social media
• More visits to your website
• Greater exposure for your company
• Word-of-mouth marketing
• Increased brand awareness
• Better quality leads and more conversions

At Fascinatid, we help B2B SaaS and IT companies discover the power of their customer’s voices. We support them to find the right questions to ask to ensure strong, positive replies. And we help to create an engaging, shareable article following customer interviews. We know the power of making your customer the superstar, and with our content marketing team specialized in creating B2B tech-specific interviews, we empower you to get qualified leads and turn them into paying customer. Get in touch with our team of experts today to find out how we can help you create new business opportunities.

4 Social Media Strategies You Need for Successful B2B Marketing

Social media is one of the most powerful ways to engage with other businesses but there are so many different strategies to choose from that sometimes it is hard knowing where to begin. Therefore, concentrating on a select number of strategies that are most effective in B2B social media marketing is better than taking the scattergun approach.

Here are four of the most effective ways to optimise your B2B social media marketing:

Share original content

If you have spent years creating marketing content then creating new content will usually come quite natural to you but for others, it can be tempting to use someone’s else’s content. The problem with this is that it will be generic content that does not relate to your business and social media users will be able to tell which content is original and which isn’t. So, spending time creating original content, or paying someone to take care of your social media for you, is going to be more effective than using someone else’s content.

Maintain consistency

It is also really important to remain consistent when you develop your social media strategy. Putting loads of content on one day and then nothing for weeks is not the best way to build up a social media following, so make sure that you schedule posts so that they are going out in consistent volumes. You don’t have to upload content each time, you can pre-set posts to go out on the dates you have scheduled them for, using a social media tool. You also need to be consistent in terms of the tone you are going to use, as your brand voice should not jump between formal and informal, for example.

Experiment with content and posting times

When you start posting content, don’t just stick with posting at a certain time, as you need to test out the time that you get more engagement. It might be that your target audience spends more time on social media at 9pm, for example, so try out some alternative days and times to see what gets the best in terms of engagement. You should also work out which type of content your followers like the most. You can try different content types like video, polls, questions etc. to again see what works the best. Content that people want to share will give you a bigger reach, so try to spend time creating high quality content that people find useful or worth sharing for another reason e.g. being humorous.

Engage in conversation

Just putting posts out there will not necessarily get people commenting and engaging with it, you have to angle your content so that it prompts people to respond. So, asking questions, running polls, responding to any comments will help to get people more engaged with your brand. Getting into a conversation will help you to build relationships with your social media followers and make your brand more memorable to them. There are plenty more great ways to engage with businesses through your social media strategy but if you can master these four as a starting point, you will be heading in the right direction.

The Power of Marketing Automation

Automation of any nature is a powerful tool but digital marketing automation software is an opportunity that businesses cannot afford to miss in today’s digitally centric world. Historically, marketing automation was a very expensive element of marketing that few companies could afford to invest in but through advanced technology solutions, it is a feasible option for every business to use.

What is marketing automation?

The most commonly used type of marketing automation is seen on email campaigns, chatbots and content creation tools. The capabilities of marketing automation are limitless, with developments being made all of the time. Automating tasks saves huge amounts of time but it can also help to deliver a more consistent experience across multiple channels.

A quick Google search for marketing automation tools will bring back more results than you could ever have the time to explore but you should spend some time finding out what solutions are most effective in your industry. From leads generated by CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, to creating more personalised communications to customers, marketing automation is one of the best strategies for getting a better return on investment.

Investing in marketing automation also leads to increased productivity, allowing a marketing team to concentrate on other tasks that need doing, or exploring new marketing opportunities whilst the time-consuming jobs are taken care of automatically. The marketing team will have time to be more creative and feel energised and empowered by having some of the more mundane, repetitive tasks taken away from them.

Chatbots

Chatbots are a type of automation tool that can take care of some of the basic questions that a potential customer want to ask before they purchase a product or hire your service. A chatbot is basically able to simulate a human conversation, based on a computer program. As AI and machine learning is becoming more sophisticated, so too is the capabilities and quality of chatbots.

So, whilst some early chatbots only served to annoy customers when they couldn’t provide the answers they needed, there has been a lot of progress since then. With chatbots able to field many of the most questions, this frees up the time it would take for an employee to have a telephone conversation or respond to an email to answer that question. If you are getting 100+ enquiries each week, that stacks up to a lot of time saved.

Email marketing

With email marketing, there are lots of time-consuming tasks that can be completed quickly and easily through automation software. For example, if someone signs up to receive a newsletter on your website, the contact will be added to your email list and when it comes to sending the newsletter out, it will go out to them. There are numerous different workflows that you can set up within email marketing automation software that will improve your email marketing strategy. If you have not yet explored the full possibilities of what marketing automation can do for your business, give us a call, so we can talk through some suitable options.

Should You Be Using Infographics for Your B2B Marketing?

When you are developing your B2B marketing strategy, there might be several strategies that you usually dismiss because you think that you don’t have the time, or the skills, or the need to successfully deliver that type of strategy. One of the strategies that people are often reluctant to try is infographics because they are worried about the design element of creating this type of content.

However, infographics are a very effective form of B2B marketing if you have the budget or the tools and creativity to get it right. High quality infographics work well because they are more engaging than most other content types, also if you manage to think of a really useful set of information to convey via an infographic, people will share it and help to grow your reach.

Whilst it isn’t a good idea to start using infographics for all of your marketing content, and it would be pretty difficult to put all those kinds of content into an infographic, using them sporadically, when you have the right type of information that will fit nicely into an infographic is ideal.

Where to start when creating an infographic?

The first part of the creation journey is to identify some data that can be easily presented in the form of an infographic. You don’t want to try and put too much data into the image and make it too distracting, so refine the key parts of information that you want to use. Statistical analysis that you often see content marketing companies sharing through infographics are a good example of effective ways of creating infographics e.g. 80% of all online content will be video by 2021.

Survey results are also perfect for building into an infographic e.g. 70% of consumers said they would rather buy online than buy the product in a store. So, once you have the right data to present in an infographic, you have done most of the hard work. Remember, the data has to be useful for people, don’t just create infographics for the sake of designing a pretty image.

Designing the infographic

This is the bit that can often put people off because they think they need to have advanced design skills to be able to create attractive infographics. There are two different approaches to take with this, the first one and the easiest is to hire a freelance graphic designer to do the work for you. If you just give them the data, they can usually design a quick infographic for a reasonable price that looks really professional.

The other option is to try designing it yourself, now if you a pretty decent graphic designer with the right software then you are good to go. If you have no design experience or software, don’t worry because there are free tools that you can use that will help you to create an infographic of a pretty good level of quality. Canva.com is one such free tool that provides templates and images that you can incorporate into your infographic. There are lots of premium images and features within Canva but you can still do a good job just utilizing the free features.

Once you have designed your infographic, you simply need to share it with the world, so whether that is through LinkedIn or whatever channel you want to use to share the content, you have just created and shared your infographic and should start to see engagement with it.

8 Stats That Show Why Content Marketing is the Most Important Marketing Strategy

There are many different types of marketing that have proven to be successful over recent years but what is effective one year, might die a death the next, so it is important to stay up to date with the latest trends and most effective marketing methods.

Content marketing is certainly not a new trend but changes in consumer behavior, advances in technology and updates to data privacy regulations, for example, can influence the effectiveness of a certain type of marketing.

Here are some statistics that add weight to the argument that you should be investing in content marketing over any other channels.

• Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing but generates 3x as many leads

Now that is a powerful stat and as marketers, we are constantly looking for the lowest cost method to generate the most leads. Traditional marketing methods such as direct mail, and media advertising are expensive and take a lot of time and effort to deliver compared to content marketing.

• Over 200 million people use ad blockers

Let’s face it, most people find ads annoying and it is no surprise that a huge number of people have ad blocking software to stop them from being pestered with constant ads.

• Content marketing leaders achieve 7.8x more traffic than the rest

Marketing guru Neil Patel shared his insights on how successful content marketing leaders are compared to their competitors. Developing compelling content that adds high value to the reader is priceless.

• Content drives brand recall = increased engagement

Personalized content helps to make a consumer remember a brand, engaging with the company on a deeper level. According to an IBM Digital Experience Survey, 56% of marketing professionals believe that personalized content drives higher engagement rates.

• 73% of major organizations hire a content marketing strategy manager/professional

More and more companies have now realized the value of hiring a content marketing expert, to ensure that they are prioritizing this type of marketing, as they now understand how profitable it is. This also allows the company to identify the best technology and platforms to use for the most effective types of content marketing.

• For every $1 spent, email gives back $38 in ROI

According to CampaignMonitor, for every $1 that is spent on email marketing strategy, it is able to earn $38 back in ROI. By developing personalized and targeted emails, conversion rates are much higher than other channels.

• 88% of B2B marketers use content marketing

The huge majority of B2B marketers invest in their content marketing, as a vital part of their marketing strategy. Content marketing also gives more sustainable value than other marketing options.

• Many marketers will use over 13 content marketing tactics

Using the full range of content marketing tactics generates greater results than focusing on just one or two, which is evident by so many marketers choosing to deploy varied and diverse channels. These eight statistics really underline the importance of content marketing, how effective it can be and why marketers include it as the staple of their marketing strategies.