4 B2B Marketing trends for 2018

Marketing Automation

You should be looking to automate your everyday B2B marketing tasks to save time. Marketing automation will allow you to automate repetitive tasks; aswell as providing potential prospects with highly personalized useful content along their journey to purchase. This technology is still at its early stages but marketers are trying to exploit the opportunities of it in order to provide relevant and timely communications to prospects to nurture leads.

 

Content Marketing

Content marketing has become a popular method in nurturing and acquiring leads in the B2B industry. Businesses now need to do plenty of research on different stages of the customer lifestyle as the customer journey is becoming longer. Content marketing is highly effective as it educates customers about best practices in their industry. As a business you should set the goals you want to achieve through content marketing and measure them through KPI’s. It is important to measure factors such as traffic, brand awareness and customer engagement that you acquired through content marketing aswell as the sales that came in.

 

Content Personalization

Content personalization is a popular tactic among businesses in the B2C market but B2B businesses have been slower in adopting it. Many B2B businesses don’t adopt due to a lack of resources, technology and data. Research has found that those who have adopted it have found this tactic very effective. Automation tools like Evergage and 1:1 means personalization is becoming more affordable for small companies. It helps you provide personalized experiences based on customer demographics including company name, industry and other data.

 

Linkedln Marketing

Social media has always been a lead generation channel for B2C marketing, but more marketers now use it to educate themselves and communicate with potential prospects. Linkedln again is expected to outperform other social channels for B2B businesses. Linkedln has released a lot of different features, which has made it the most efficient and cost effective platform for reaching a B2B audience. InMail analytics helps you get more response and improve your entire teams performance. B2B marketers are making more data-driven decisions than ever before.

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5 Places to use Storytelling in your marketing

 Businesses should learn how to use storytelling to their advantage. Storytelling is a great opportunity to build trust and loyalty amongst customers. It also eliminates spamming tactics and heavy discounts.

Social Media

Social media is a very effective way to use storytelling. You can use platforms like Instagrams to post pictures of real people who use your product showcasing how it benefits their life. Posting these photos will allow people to envision themselves using your product. You can use storytelling on social media in the form of videos, images and stories.

 

Your Blog

You can use your blog to tell a story of a happy customer or it might even be how your business was founded. You could even use stories to make blogs interested and use them as a way to pull in readers.

 

About Us Section

A lot of businesses can bore people with their about us section by talking about what they do how long they have been operating and how much better they are than competition. You could use the About Us section to tell your story, and to let people know what sets you apart from everyone else. This can really engage people and leave a lasting impression.

 

Email Marketing

When you launch a product instead of just emailing people about the benefits and features, you could just email them stories. You should talk about how other people used your product or service and benefited from it. This will allow the people to see the value that your product offers and be able to relate to other people who benefited from using it.

 

Advertising

A lot of brands in their advertising will get straight to the point and mention what they do, the benefits they offer and then put out a call-to-action. Stories can make advertising a lot more powerful and can really engage the viewers.

 

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5 Ways To Keep Your Millennial Customers Satisfied

Millenials can be very hard to please at times. They expect a lot out of today’s companies and if they aren’t satisfied with the customer service they will share this on social media or with their friends. Here are 5 ways to keep your millennial customers satisfied.

 

Be Everywhere

Young customers will expect service across all channels such as Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram. If you are marketing on one channel then you need to ensure you also handle customer service on this channel. It is important to make sure you have people in place who will respond to customers on all your channels.

 

Don’t Change Channels

If you receive a complaint on one channel then you need to make sure you respond to it on that channel. If someone messages you on Instagram they don’t expect you to reply on Facebook.

 

Answer Quickly

You should aim to respond to all questions and complaints in less than an hour. To help staff deal with queries and complaints you should make sure they all the resources they need. It is important to invest in software, which will identify, categorize and reply to complaints quickly.

 

Provide Self-Service

Many millennials will be tech-savvy and less patient. This means when they are having an issue with a product they most likely will know what needs to be done. You should provide a huge amount of information online so customers are in a position to do research themselves when a problem arises.

 

Act like a Human

Customers don’t expect you to act formally on social media. If you just send out a clear copied and pasted apology text then this will frustrate customers. You should try and personalize the message as much as you can.

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6 Tips To Use Chatbots for Marketing & Sales

 Chatbots are becoming more popular thanks to artificial intelligence and natural language processing. They are very useful tools to have and can help automate some of your business processes. If you are a business you should look into introducing chatbots to help with your marketing & sales.

Give the customer a personalized experience

If you can talk to someone who knows your name it makes a huge difference to the conversation. Chatbots will integrate with social media gathering data about every single person whom they interact with. Chatbots can take the conversations a step further by offering shopping advice based on that customer purchasing history.

 

Increased engagement capacity

A Chatbot can keep a customer engaged by entertaining them. It can catch your audience’s attention, then learn from the interaction and send relevant information to them regarding your products.

 

Reach a wider audience

Chatbots are predominantly found on social media messaging platforms, which means they can reach a huge audience. They can target new demographics and can be integrated across multiple messaging applications, which will make you more readily available for your customers.

 

Send relevant notifications

Chatbots are able to send personalized notifications through social media that are relevant to each user. This can be a welcomed change from receiving an email or text message.

 

Constantly remain active on Social Media

A Chatbot allows you to be available 24 hours a day seven days a week. You will save money and keep your social media presence fresh and active.

 

Move customers through the sales funnel

Chatbots are able to gather the information you need to create personalized messages that can help guide your users through their buyer’s journey. They can tailor messages to be relevant to each lead that visits your website or one of your social media pages

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4 Instagram Features you may not know about 

Many of your followers might not know about certain features of the platform. This is a great way for you to surprise and engage them. Recently Instagram have introduced new features that you may find useful in your own social media marketing.
Add UTM Links to your Instagram stories
Instagram allows businesses with 10,000 followers or more to avail of this feature. You may be sharing a blog post, running a campaign or even doing a competition; Instagram will allow you to send people directly to those pages. When you add the link to your story users will see a SEE MORE button at the bottom of the screen, they can either tap or swipe up to view the link.
Replay Live Videos in Stories
You are now able to post a live video to your Instagram story for 24 hours. Before this update live videos would disappear when the stream ended. When you repost the video the views, comments and likes from the video will show up automatically.
Enable Comment Block Filters
Abusive and offensive comments can have a very damaging effect on your brand. You can use Instagrams comment block filter to ensure negative comments are removed. You can set up a automatic or manual block filter. The automatic filter will flag and hide comments based on Instagram’s algorithms, while manual blocker requires you to enter exact keywords or phrases you want blocked.
Archive your old Posts
The image your brand is trying to portray can change overtime which means that some of your Instagram posts from a few months ago may not match up to your current brand image. The archive feature allows you to remove outdated content into a private tab without fully deleting it. If you decide you want it to appear again you can reshare it and it will appear in its chronological spot.
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Everything You Need To Know About Vero

The last few days Vero has begun to take the world by storm. It was launched in 2015 and is now benefiting greatly from the ongoing frustration with Instagram’s algorithm. A week ago it didn’t appear in the App’s store 1500 top apps, now it is ranked number one. It is so popular that their servers have been overloaded and many users can’t post or set up an account.

What is Vero

Vero was founded in 2015 and it is a social network similar to Instagram & Facebook but it ad-free and has no algorithms. It was founded by Ayman Hariri who is the son of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. On the app, you can share photos, text and URLs, aswell as sharing recommendations for TV shows, books and movies.

Vero puts a strong emphasis on its privacy policies. It says it collects minimal data such as name, number and email addresses. It doesn’t share your data with advertisers or third parties. It will distinguish connections based on their relationship to you. You can choose people as close friends, friends, acquaintances or followers. You can opt to share posts specifically with these groups.

How will it make money?

Vero will rely mainly on subscriptions for its revenue. It has decided to let the 1st million users join the app for free. It also plans to take a share of products other companies sell on the app.

Why has it become so popular?

The app is expected to go from 600,000 total downloads to now 500,000 in a day. It is hard to point out the exact reason for its success but one of the main reasons is the frustration around the Instagram algorithm. Instagram users are now promoting their Vero accounts to followers. There are currently 500,000 Instagram posts tagged as #vero.

It will be interesting to see can Vero rival Facebook/Instagram or will they just be another platform that has gone viral but is unable to stay at the top.

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