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Why Your Customer Acquisition Strategy Should Be Content-Driven

magnet showing acquiring customers with content

Customer acquisition is the lifeblood of any business. It’s the driving force behind marketing strategy and overall business growth.

It’s also extremely competitive and more expensive than ever — customer acquisition cost (CAC) has increased more than 60% in just the past six years. Sounds daunting, right?

It’s definitely a challenge in today’s oversaturated digital marketplace, where every company(?) has websites, blogs, paid ads, social media, and more. But those same digital channels offer a huge opportunity to attract new customers acquisition with content — and not just any content.

We’re talking high-quality, user-focused, SEO optimized, unique, innovative content that grabs attention and converts web visitors into paying customers.

The thing is, pretty much every company knows that digital content is important. But far fewer of them are staying laser-focused on creating quality content that actually performs rather than the crap most companies spit out.

We are proving every single day with our own clients that getting smart about content helps you acquire more customers more quickly, more affordably, and faster than your competition.

Ready to learn how to do it? Let’s get started.

Quick Takeaways:

  • Great content drives customer acquisition by building brand trust, an important motivator of purchase decisions.
  • You can optimize your content strategy for customer acquisition by creating content for every stage of the buyer journey.
  • Brands can capitalize on existing content by continually optimizing their best performing posts and webpages.
  • Gated content like high-value lead magnets drives acquisition by capturing contact information.
  • Social proof is another important creator of brand trust and assures customers your brand will deliver on its promises.

The Connection Between Customer Acquisition and Content

Like savvy companies leveraging digital opportunities to find and convert customers, consumers are smart when it comes to choosing brands and making purchases. Traditional marketing tactics of the past — catchy taglines, salesy language and the like — are not enough anymore to capture their interest.

This dilemma? It’s why content has become so important to customer acquisition.

Consumers are not just looking for the brand with the best marketing slogan of the moment — they’re looking for brands they can trust. Research has found that 81% of consumers cite brand trust as an important factor in their buying decisions. They rated it above any other company factor or attribute outside of direct product quality and value.

The research proves that being a helpful provider of thought leadership content will win you new customers.

Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Trust in 2020 | Edelman

Image Source: Edeleman

To boot, the same study found that 76% of consumers pay attention to ads from brands they trust, versus only 48% for brands they don’t trust.

Where do consumers go to establish the trust they value so highly? Your content. By creating and publishing consistent, high-quality content, you establish credibility and brand authority, build your brand’s personality, and provide value for consumers that tells them your brand can deliver what they need.

Why Content is the Key to Customer Acquisition

Content vs Ads

Most people think marketing is just ads. It’s the annoying stuff that interrupts the content you are trying to consume. Watching the superbowl? Nope, we’re gonna serve up 3 ads first. Reading an article of Forbes? Nope we’re gonna pop-up an ad for something you are not interested in. Ads don’t work. And everyone knows it. But that’s what most people think marketing is.

We use the term “content marketing” to refer to the kind of content that actually helps people. It’s what marketing is supposed to be. And marketing’s main goal is to acquire new customers.

Content marketing works because it is written by people for people. It works because it is intended to help you get educated, to share experience, to drive you forward. Content marketing works better at acquiring new customers because it’s goal is to help, not sell.

Content for Search, Email and Social

Want to rank for search engines? Don’t try using ChatGPT for that! In order to rank for search engines, you simply need to answer the search intent of the keywords and questions your buyers are asking.

When you create content that ranks, it also works well in email and social media. You see, search still matters! Alot.

How to Shop for Video Games from the USA to Worldwide | Ship7.com |

Content ROI

Ok, now we’re really getting into it. I said the main reason to use content marketing for customer acquisition is because it works. There is the famous marketing stat that content marketing leads cost 62% less than traditional marketing. And that’s because content marketing is better at attracting and converting new customers for less money.

At SAP, our content marketing platform delivered $7 in revenue for every dollar we spent. That’s a 7X ROI. Guess what the ROI was of the rest of marketing? Around 1x. In other words, marketing barely paid for itself. (In fairness, we influenced hundred of millions of dollars of pipeline that didn’t get “credited” to marketing)

Content + Paid

There’s a lot of talk about AI taking over content marketing. And while we’ve proven that nonsense wrong, it is true that it’s getting harder, not easier, to acquire new customers through organic means. One way to supplement organic content acquisition is through paid.

I’m not talking about banner ads that have 99 problems and a click ain’t one. I’m talking about paid content marketing. We take our best client content and promote around the web. Then we re-target those readers with later stage offers.

Our CPC is 90% less than industry average and our click through rate is 20x higher. Paid content marketing works for customer acquisition as well!

How to Ace Customer Acquisition with Content

Align your Content with the Buyer Journey

You might hear that any traffic is good traffic when it comes to website visitors. To some extent that can be true, especially when your company is new and your main goal is increasing awareness. But when it comes to powering customer acquisition with content, you need to get intentional.

That means matching your content up with your buyer’s journey.

As your buyer moves through the sales funnel, the content that best matches the intent of their visit to your website will change. Someone doing their first Google search on a product or service they need is likely looking for more information about the problem they’re experiencing, meaning content like your top-of-the-funnel blog posts would be really relevant.

Someone later in the stages of the buying process might be looking for confirmation that your brand is indeed the one to choose, and that person might be better convinced by a whitepaper or in-depth case study.

Here’s a great visual to help you think more about the kinds of content that belong in each stage:

buyer's journey graphic showing progression through the awareness stage, consideration stage and decision stage

Image Source: Hubspot

When you’re thinking about aligning your content with the buyer journey, you always want to think of two things:

  • Giving potential buyers the information they need at their current stage
  • Including a Call To Action (CTA) or other motivator to pull them into the next stage of the buyer journey

Get Serious About Your Blog

Your blog is the foundation of your content marketing strategy. It’s great to know that you need a blog, and by now most companies do. But it’s not enough to just publish content — even if it’s fairly relevant to your industry — and hope it will perform.

Your blog content must be consistent and customer-focused. Always be extremely intentional with your blog content. Use categories to organize your content in ways that align with your content goals with customer search intent and your buyer journey.

You can start with SEO keyword research and a current content audit, then build from there. For more on the process, check out our guide to choosing blog categories and content themes.

You can set up your blog for success by combining your content optimization tactics with close attention to backend technical details that help your blog perform, including blog visibility on your home page and main navigation, using article page templates, configuring URLs and more.

(Or maybe you need a weekly blog service from us?)  😜

Optimize your Best Performing Content

Optimizing your best content is the low-hanging fruit strategy of enhancing your customer acquisition with content. You’ve already done all the work, and your work is already paying off — the content is performing well and driving traffic to your website.

Now it’s time to take it a step further so it converts that traffic into leads and sales.

Here’s how you can find and optimize your best content:

  • Visit tools like Ahrefs or Semrush and search for your domain.
  • Click on “organic keywords” to access a list of keywords you rank for and their corresponding URLs

Once you can see which content is ranking high, do a deeper dive using other tools on these platforms or by doing your own research. Be sure they’re as optimized as possible. Mainly, be sure they rank for the right keywords and have tactics in place to capture visitor information (like gated content, CTAs, subscription forms, and more).

One of our favorite tricks is to find articles that used to perform well and update them. This post was originally published in 2018 but we updated it with the latest stats, links and information. Here are some tips to updating your old posts.

Digital Customer Acquisition Strategy: 2023 Guide

Leverage High-Value Gated Content

Gated content, also known as lead magnets, capture visitor information by offering them something extremely high-value in return. Gated content comes in many forms, but it always offers something different and more valuable than what your visitors can access in your free content.

So, for example, if your blog covers why content audits are important, your gated content could be a complete PDF guide to performing a content audit.

Some of the most commonly used (and effective) types of gated content include ebooks, whitepapers, checklists, templates, and how-to videos.

Create Videos

Video is currently the most in-demand type of content by online users across the board, and brands are responding accordingly (86% of companies currently use video as part of their marketing strategy). Cisco predicts that video will account for 82% of all online traffic by next year.

The good news? You don’t need to have expensive video production equipment to produce great videos that can drive customer acquisition.

Companies (and most people around the world) are using smartphones to record and share high-quality video content.  Simply creating social media stories is an effective way to make your brand visible to customers. As you get better at video (or can afford more resources), you can expand your strategy.

Other exciting video marketing trends you can try include vlogging, live online events, webinars, and user-generated content (sharing video of customers interacting with your product/brand).

Demonstrate Social Proof

Social media alone isn’t enough to acquire new customers. But it can support your content marketing customer acquisition.

Do you look for reviews and testimonials when you’re buying a product or choosing a brand? So does everyone else! Research shows that 88% of consumers trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations, and buyers often read dozens of reviews before making a purchase.

You can power your customer acquisition potential by highlighting social proof throughout your content. Some of the best ways to do this are:

  • Including reviews and testimonials throughout your website
  • Publishing case studies that demonstrate your success with other customers
  • Sharing user-generated content (like online reviews and product photos or videos)

Social proof assures your potential customer that you’ll deliver on your promises. It is often the deciding factor for a customer considering making a purchase. Integrating social proof content into your customer acquisition strategy makes it more likely to convert leads and drive sales.

Grow Your Business with Customer Acquisition Content

If you’re ready to publish content that is always optimized to drive results, Marketing Insider Group has solutions. Our writers can deliver ready-to-publish content every single week for a year (or more!) and our Content Builder Service includes a customized strategy to help you deliver it.

Schedule a quick consultation to get started today!

The post Why Your Customer Acquisition Strategy Should Be Content-Driven appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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Why Brick-and-Mortar Marketing Needs Modern Automation to See Successful Results

The past few years have been very good for the e-commerce industry, and really any business that earns significant revenue from online sales.

The COVID pandemic sent established brick-and-mortars rushing to accelerate their digital transformation plans and sell more online. They plowed eye-watering sums into digital marketing channels despite often shaky evidence for digital ads’ effectiveness and, more recently, a broader decline in ad spending.

Some benefited greatly from this shift, but many spent the second half of 2022 wondering whether they’d made the right call. As normalcy returned and consumers sought out in-person experiences once more, brick-and-mortar retail’s prospects brightened.

We’ll never truly go back to a pre-pandemic landscape, in marketing or sales or any other domain. But brick-and-mortar retailers can look to what their digital counterparts did right and apply those lessons in the real world. This brings us to the increasingly critical importance of marketing automation to brick-and-mortar retailers’ success.

Why Modern Automation Is Essential to Brick-and-Mortar Marketing

Digital marketing opened up strategies for automation by leveraging technologies to streamline and optimize various marketing processes, from lead generation to customer engagement. While brick-and-mortar brands have embraced digital marketing trends, the same can’t be said for automating trade marketing operations. To be able to compete and survive alongside direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands, brick-and-mortar brands must adopt automation, here are some reasons why:

1. Good Data Is Difficult to Come By in the Real World

Measuring marketing performance is easy in the digital realm, where most every impression and click is trackable and attributable. In the real world, marketing performance is much more difficult to quantify. Even knowing what to measure, performance-wise, is a challenge.

This is the top trade marketing pain point identified by Brand Regulator, a trade marketing automation (TMA) software solution for brick-and-mortar brands. While it’s true that sales-based metrics can hint at what’s working and what’s not on the physical collateral front, insufficient market and consumer data can make more precise comparisons difficult.

Brand Regulator also notes that larger brands in particular may suffer from ineffective marketing automation, resulting in a lack of coordination between regional directors, HQ-based planners, and retail locations. The end result is often an incomplete or outdated representation of in-market activations, making effective campaign analysis and scalability near impossible. Collecting up-to-date data and generating accurate reports in trade marketing relies completely on the use of automation.

2. Standard CRMs and ERPs Aren’t Up to the Job

Brick-and-mortar retailers often see CRMs and ERPs as low-cost, out-of-the-box alternatives to specialized tools designed for in-person marketing automation. But these solutions — such as Salesforce and alternatives like HubSpot and ActiveCampaign — have limitations. This isn’t because they’re not good products but because they’re designed for one type of digital marketing or another rather than retail trade marketing.

What invariably ends up happening when brick-and-mortars try to use standard CRMs and ERPs for trade marketing automation is a daunting, time-consuming customization process that often does only some of what its stakeholders envisioned.

3. Trade Marketing Campaigns Have Many Moving Parts

Trade marketing campaigns are much more complicated than PPC or affiliate-based or even social media marketing efforts. Brick-and-mortar marketers have to consider:

  • The various iterations of physical collateral involved (often a dozen or more pieces per campaign)
  • Keeping this collateral’s physical footprint straight (more on that below)
  • Designing and approving new collateral (a multistep process that many marketing departments struggle to manage in-house)
  • Managing orders for new or replacement collateral
  • Orchestrating fulfillment for collateral orders, from printing to shipping to installation
  • Managing trade marketing budgets within the context of a broader marketing strategy (another multistep process that can overwhelm in-house planners without adequate resources or expertise)

Given these and other demands on your marketing department (and others), sensible marketing automation isn’t just “nice to have.” It’s practically essential for success. Automating high-volume, repetitive functions frees up your core team to focus on more creative or complex functions and decisions that demand more brainpower.

4. Physical Marketing Collateral Has a Complicated and Constantly Changing Footprint

Managing all of the above is extremely difficult without scalable marketing processes and robust automation wherever possible. Throw in the fact that your physical marketing footprint is constantly changing and it’s all but impossible to keep straight using only spreadsheets, shared folders, and ad hoc communication.

For example, one of the biggest pain points for large-scale trade marketers is basic quality control, including:

  • making sure the right fixtures show up in the right retail locations
  • ensuring they weren’t damaged in transit or installation
  • overseeing that they’re properly installed per brand guidelines and the marketing team’s instructions

All this requires a huge volume of detailed, dated photos. Simply switching from a “text HQ after install” system to an “upload to a shared folder accessible to install teams, marketing, and location management” system can save dozens of person-hours per month while dramatically reducing error rates and measurably improving performance tracking.

Brick-and-Mortar Marketing Shouldn’t Be So Hard

It may seem like history now, but in 2020, intelligent marketing experts were talking about the end of the retail shopping experience. But we see now, there was really never an end in sight to speak of. Sure, eCommerce received a boost during the pandemic, but we’re now living through a reversion to the mean. 2023 is shaping up to be brick-and-mortar’s comeback year.

Yet we can’t pretend as if nothing has changed. The pandemic did drive home the importance of a multichannel sales strategy and did demonstrate the benefits of digital marketing automation at unprecedented scale. Brick-and-mortar retailers — including those skeptical of marketing automation software and practices — should apply these lessons to physical trade marketing as well.

Marketing automation is no small investment. But for brick-and-mortar sellers who thrive on loyal and engaging customer relationships that are still best cultivated in person, it’s worth every dollar.

The post Why Brick-and-Mortar Marketing Needs Modern Automation to See Successful Results appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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10 Digital Marketing Tips From Top Brands

10 colored pencil tips to represent digital marketing tips

There is no doubt that digital marketing is crucial when it comes to the success of any business no matter what industry you are in. So what are the best digital marketing tips and tricks that we can apply from bigger (better funded) brands?

The pandemic has pushed many businesses to see the value in digital marketing to attract new customers. According to eMarketer, digital marketing takes up 54% of marketing budgets and has grown by 36% since 2020!

Why? Because digital marketing is rthe best way to reach new customers. And the best part, is that digital insights allow us to directly see what customers want. With the increase in digital marketing data, tools, analytics and digital marketing software, it is far easier to see actual online customer behavior… and cater to it! Digital marketing has enabled businesses to gain treasured insights into customers’ minds.

When implemented in the right way, digital marketing will enable your business to target and reach its customers, qualify new ones, increase sales, and experience lasting growth.

These digital marketing approaches will make your business visible to your existing customers online and connect you with new ones. Let’s dive in to understand the 10 best digital marketing tricks you can use today to grow your business.

What is Digital Marketing Today?

Digital marketing is the use of the internet, social media platforms, websites, emails and all our electronic devices to get your business found by new customers.

Digital marketing is trending upwards as more people use the internet and social platforms to get work done and play.

google search volume trend for digital marketing keyword
Source: Google Trends for “Digital Marketing” from 2004 to present

It today’s digital world, marketing is about connecting with your prospective customers in the right place and at the right time, earning their trust, educating them on the latest trends and then positioning your business as a solution to their needs.

Digital marketing strategy encompasses a range of marketing activities such as content marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization, mobile marketing and more.

Digital Marketing includes:

  • Search Engine Marketing (often referring to as Paid Search or PPC for Pay-per-Click)
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Content Marketing
  • Audio and Video Marketing
  • Email Marketing
  • Digital Display Advertising (Banner ads)
  • Native Advertising
  • Influencer Marketing / Advocacy Marketing
  • Affiliate Marketing
  • Pay-per-Lead (PPL) sometimes referred to as Content Syndication

Need a Better Marketing Strategy? Use a Digital Strategy Template - Marketing Insider Group

Why You Need Digital Marketing Today

Digital marketing is about getting found by your target audience based on the search terms they are using, the content they are consuming on the digital channels where they spend their time.

This chart shows the dramatic decline of traditional media consumption and the amazing increase in time we are all spending on digital channels from 2011 to the present.

chart of time spent on traditional vs digital media
Source: Statista

That’s why the future of marketing is digital. Brands need digital marketing in order to achieve their marketing goals in a digital world. Those marketing goals may include awareness and reach, lead or revenue conversion, customer loyalty and retention.

Tp help you see the benefits of Digital Marketing, we’ve compiled this list of the best digital marketing tricks used by the best brands but that can be applies to any size company or budget.

10 Best Digital Marketing Tips From Top Brands

  1. Combine SEO and Content Marketing
  2. Have a Visible Presence on Relevant Social Media Platforms
  3. Optimize Your Website for Mobile-First Browsing
  4. Use the Right Digital Marketing Tools
  5. Be Awesome at Design
  6. Create and Grow an Email List
  7. Spend Wisely on Digital Advertising
  8. Visual Content
  9. Closely Watch Your Analytics
  10. Integrate Strategies and Campaigns Across Channels

1. Combine SEO and Content Marketing

SEO is certainly nothing new. For a long time, SEO was a function of keywords and coding. Then Google got smarter. Google learned that SEO is about rewarding brands with helpful content.

That’s why combining SEO (what questions do our customers ask) and Content Marketing (what answers do we provide) is one of the most effective of the marketing trends we’re going to see in the future of marketing.

Why SEO + Content venn diagram
Source: MIG Weekly Content Service Overview

Today, most of the metrics included in Google’s algorithm have to do with content (even Google admits this) and the engagement you win through the distribution of great content. Using various types of content (visual, text, video, infographics, audio, etc) does much better than using a single type of content.

More content – As more businesses embrace content marketing, competition continues to get tougher. Everything you do online is drowned in noise and information overload. In order to get ahead, every business needs to publish better and more content.

According to HubSpot data, publishing at least once a week is critical for ROI and ROI drops pretty precipitously when you publish less frequently. However, it’s not about quantity vs. quality, but an ideal mix of both.

Valuable content – Content should be entertaining, informative, and empathetic. Valuable content answers the search intent or the question asked of the search engine, but it also is structured in a way to encourages engagement such as subscriptions to your email, sharing, comments, and other actions that contribute to ROI.

Original content – Content can be audio, video or text but when you decide to use one or all of these digital content, ensure it is good and original. If you can’t create unique, compelling and good content by yourself, you can hire an expert to create content for your website and social media platforms. This is where you will need a powerful content marketing plan like never before.

Appropriate content – As you can see from this infographic from Occam’s Razor, you need to produce content that’s right for each stage in the conversion process (and your metrics need to match your goal with each piece of content).

digital analytics
Image courtesy of Occam’s Razor

Knowing where a visitor is in the conversion process isn’t always easy, but, if you’ve done a good job of coding content (applying tracking codes so you know what type of content drove them to visit your site) and use tools that let you track where visitors have been before, you can make an educated guess as to what content they need.

By delivering the right content at the right time, you’re more likely to convert visitors to buyers.

Reach is important. The more visitors you bring to your site, all things being equal, the higher your ROI. This is one of the reasons it’s important to have several social platforms and have links on your content so visitors can easily share your content. You should share your content once it’s published and here’s a schedule we recommend:

2. Have a Visible Presence on Relevant Social Media Platforms

Being seen online is the key to success for every business, especially in today’s world where almost all businesses have gone digital. It is one of the ways to stand out from the crowd.

For this reason, you need to build your online presence on social media networks of relevance. Note that there are plenty of social networks available but you need to identify where your customers spend most of their time and target them there. Pick those that are relevant to your business and prospects and build your online presence there.

wheel of digital marketing

As my daughter will tell you: share more than once on Instagram and she’ll unfollow you! In addition to sharing your own content, you should share content created by other great companies/ experts. Many experts recommend you promote or sell in no more than 20% of your content. At least 80% of your social shares should be valuable content in your industry.

And keep in mind that social media is not the place to be pitching your products (unless you’re last name is Kardashian). Social media is for sharing and engaging. While social networks are a great way to understand what content resonates with your audience, social media is not the best digital marketing channel to demonstrate business growth.

3. Optimize Your Website for Mobile-First Browsing

Many consumers in the US and around the world only access the internet from their mobile phone. So you need a website that loads quickly, works across all types of mobile devices, and looks amazing in the process.

You also need to make sure your content is mobile friendly, and that your website and social media networks are accessible on desktops as well as mobile devices. One thing we are always looking to improve is the reader experience. We are constantly testing which fonts, colors, and font sizes, for example, are best for reading on a variety of small mobile screens. We are also always optimizing for page load times.

So, it is crucial to make your website and content accessible to users on all screen sizes. Update your website design using the latest trends and color schemes.

4. Use the Right Digital Marketing Tools

Digital marketing is an amalgamation of different strategies aimed at a plethora of channels, like SEO, PPC, social media, and so on.

In order to ensure that you have an integrated marketing mix, you need the right digital marketing tools to help you run effective campaigns. You also need to develop expertise in using them and applying the insights in the right context.

For example, you need a CMS to power the content on your website (we use WordPress just as 60% of all websites do). You also need email marketing tools to distribute your content (we use Mailchimp). You might use a social media management platform to manage the social distribution (we use Hootsuite). You should also consider lead generation, marketing automation and CRM. Many smaller companies use Hubspot for all of these functions. Larger companies often use Adobe / Marketo for these functions.

We use a landing page service called ConvertFlow for lead generation and I track leads using a sophisticated google sheet. Works fine for us! You’ll also want to use an analytics tool like Google Analytics to understand your website details. And of course there’s a whole world of Marketing Technology (MarTech) that larger companies are using.

5. Be Awesome at Design

Design underpins much of what makes digital marketing success. Whether you’re designing a website, a landing page or creating an image for your website, ad, or infographic, you need to have good design skills. Not all of us are whiz kids when it comes to design, but there are some tools to help.

Canva – is a great tool for creating social media images whether you need them for your profile or as images to include in posts. One aspect of Canva I really like is the templates that help design great looking images even if you know nothing about layout or what fonts go together. They’re constantly adding new images and tools, such as infographic templates, to help you out.

Photoshop – granted it’s expensive, but Photoshop is a great design tool.

6. Create and Grow an Email List

Email is still an effective driver of digital marketing ROI. In fact, email delivers about $36 in ROI for every dollar spent! But you gotta do it right.

Make sure your website includes an email newsletter sign up form. Deliver valuable content to your subscribers not just promotion. Tell stories. We use our email lists to mainly share our content. We also do email nurturing to our leads and convert quite a bit through this process.

The trick is to balance content, stories and calls to action. For example, our first nurture email just tells you a little something personal about me (“I have 4 kids and they ask lots of questions. Do you have any questions for me?)

But then in later emails I share some of our top stories, explain what we sell, and ask people to contact me.

7. Spend Wisely on Digital Advertising

Now listen, lots of people are spending on digital ads. Very few are able to show any ROI at all. (If you are, please let me know. I’d love to tell your story!)

Digital advertising, including PPC (pay per click) Google Ads, YouTube Ads, social media advertising on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, Snapchat, Tiktok are all things you could test in order to deliver digital marketing success.

We’ve tried it all. The one approach we have found that brings in relevant traffic, engaged visitors, and converting leads is what we call contextual content promotion. We find your target audience wherever they are on the web and we serve them an ad. But not an ad for your product. And ad for your content.

Then we gather that audience into a re-targeting pool. And we hit them with offers like e-books, webinars, free guides. This allows us to deliver CPCs that are 80% less than average and CTRs that are 4-5 times higher than average.

8. Add Visual Content To Your Digital Strategy

A picture is literally worth a thousand words, and people will share them more often than text-based content. We love infographics because they can be attractive, engaging and display lots of information. Our brains can process pictures much quicker than text. periodic table digital marketing cheat sheet

Here are some examples of the best content infographics that awesome marketers have created and used to resonate with their audience. I also created these digital marketing cheat sheets. All of these are examples of visual content in digital marketing.

Some other examples include Social media graphics, Videos, Webinars, even the title image of our blog posts is designed and branded in order to set us apart from just any old thing you might read on the web.

9. Closely Watch Your Analytics

Almost the other end of the spectrum from creativity is analytics, but that’s exactly the combination you need for digital marketing success. Google Analytics is perfect for understanding critical elements of your website and how visitors navigate through it. If you’re trying to learn how to gain insights from Google Analytics, you can use the Google Data Studio to give it a test drive using data from Google’s e-commerce site.

For analytics outside of Google Analytics, a number of great tools exist. You can use individual analytics from each social network (ie. Facebook, Pinterest, etc), you can bring them all to one place by using a dashboard programs, or you can pay for more powerful tools to gain more insights.

10. Integrate Strategies and Campaigns Across Channels

Integrating across these tactics can be really challenging, especially in a larger firm where different teams may manage different platforms or where different ad agencies handle different aspects of marketing, such as content marketing, paid, and social. But, integrate you must to achieve true digital marketing success.

Let’s talk about how you go about integrating across these tactics that contribute to digital marketing strategy success.

Source: On Top Visibility

Strategic planning

The first step in integration is to have a strategic plan. Don’t have one, here’s a link to creating a digital marketing plan.

Coordination comes from strategic elements such as messaging, but even elements such as mission and goals help integrate efforts by creating an umbrella under which teams create posts, infographics, and the metrics used to assess them.

Start by simply identifying your digital marketing goals, what gaps you need to fill and who can help to fill them,

Content Council

Bringing everyone together is important. Everyone should have time to share elements they’re working on and get input from the group about ways to extend a particular effort across multiple platforms and creative efforts.

The main goal is to help brainstorm ways to fill your content gaps. Once you align on your strategy, getting everyone on board can go a long way to bringing everyone together.

A Master Plan

There needs to be a point person in charge of digital marketing success and that person is key to coordinating efforts across teams. Some organizations have an approval process where the top person must approve everything before it goes live. I’m not a big fan of this approach because it can slow the process down and, unlike traditional advertising, digital media is dynamic and data-driven.

A better strategy is to use a digital master content calendar to allow everyone to post what they’re working on, the assets they plan to use, and when the creative effort will go live. But, it’s not enough to post plans. You can use your content council to review these plans and make adjustments.

For instance, reusing a graphic created by another team not only saves time and money, it creates a visual that helps consumers (customers and potential customers) associate the two efforts–and increases frequency.

Your Turn

Digital marketing is a must for your business success, and we hope our list of tricks will keep you headed in the right direction. These tricks are tried and tested and when you implement them effectively, you can get ahead of your competition.

If you want your business to succeed online in today’s digital world, then these digital marketing tricks will come in handy. What tips would you add to this list? Tell us in the comments below!

Looking to implement the best digital marketing tips for your business. We can bring more traffic and leads to your website with weekly blog articles, a full year content plan, and monthly reporting? Set up a quick call, so we can get started today.

The post 10 Digital Marketing Tips From Top Brands appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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Customer Acquisition: In-House or Outsourced?

Generating leads is an integral part of any business today. What is a business if not for customers?

“You are out of business if you don’t have a prospect!” – Zig Ziglar

61% of marketers say that a lack of resources like staff, funding and time, is their biggest obstacle when it comes to their B2B lead generation efforts.

In light of this, many businesses are looking for more ways to keep the influx of leads consistent. One method is to outsource lead generation initiatives so the in-house sales team can focus on driving prospects through the sales funnel.

But, will hiring a third-party lead generation team really improve both the quantity and quality of your leads? Or is it better to keep the lead generation activities within your organization?

In this article, we will talk about the pros and cons of both internal and external customer acquisition and how both can help your business achieve its sales and business objectives.

Key Takeaways:

  • In-house lead generation can offer more control and potential employee motivation.
  • Utilizing a legitimate lead generation company can provide your business with data-based, quality leads and give sales teams more time to focus on closing deals.
  • Asking the right questions ahead of time can make sure your team doesn’t end up tied to a bum lead generation company.

In-House Lead Generation

Advantages

Control

The biggest advantage of keeping your lead generation initiatives within the organization is that it gives you more control. Since you own the process, you can customize it in any way you want.

You can make it as simple or as complicated as you wish. For instance, in-house teams can either cast a wider net or focus on a smaller niche as they choose.

Employee Motivation

Another potential advantage is that it builds a “hustle culture,” which enables teams to become high performers. This type of business culture generates not just leads, but also an energetic work environment which can propel your business to greater heights when managed properly.

Tread lightly here though. With the great resignation upon us, a “hustle culture” may turn toxic quickly when handled poorly, and employees are no longer taking –ish from unfair companies!

Image Source: Statista

Disadvantages

Stretching your team too thin

While sales and marketing teams work hand-in-hand, some companies only have one team for both functions. Some people think that sales teams should have the responsibility of generating their own leads from referrals. Though this depends on the sales teams’ relationships with clients, it makes more sense to delegate lead generation activities to a different team so that your sales team can focus on closing deals.

Training needed

Generating leads and closing sales are not the same. If your sales reps are the ones doing the lead generation activities, the management team should invest in training them, which could be time-consuming and tedious.

Too focused on the close

Another disadvantage of an in-house lead generation initiative is that many find it difficult to determine what a qualified lead is. Perhaps, the biggest disadvantage of an in-house customer acquisition department is that many sales professionals and teams can become so focused on closing deals that they don’t have enough time to process some of the feedback they get from potential leads.

Time consuming to start

Lastly, setting up an in-house lead generation initiative takes longer to build and stabilize, since you’re starting the system from scratch.

Outsourced Lead Generation

Advantages

Image Source: Margen.net

A dedicated team

The biggest advantage of outsourcing customer acquisition is having a dedicated team doing the tedious and time-consuming research for you. It’s like you’re adopting a team of experts! Plus, since most companies’ goals are based on client sales, you’ll know they’re working tirelessly to get you a genuine lead, not just fluff that will never close.

This group of professionals is experienced in all facets of lead generation and are already familiar with the practices needed to grow your customer base. This saves your company both time and money on in-house training.

Always based on data

Outsourced lead generation teams utilize a lead scoring system, which means that they have the data to figure out how likely each lead is to convert. This gives your in-house sales team the advantage of knowing how to approach them before they even make the first contact—enabling more accurate targeting through personalization.

Saves time for your sales team

Another great advantage is that an outsourced team will handle the preliminary communications with prospective clients. This service provides your sales team with a solid foundation before they speak to leads. While your own sales team can very well conduct the initial communications, this is something that you can outsource so your team can focus on the leads most likely to make a purchase.

This will save your sales team a lot of time. This can give the sales team an even better chance of moving prospective leads down the sales funnel and developing genuine rapport.

Library of resources

Chances are, if you’re outsourcing to a credible lead generation company, they have a vast library of contacts already at the ready. While they’ll research more and find you specific new candidates, you have the chance to see new leads fast.

Disadvantages

You don’t own them 

With all the convenience of an outsourced lead generation team, the biggest disadvantage is that, well, they aren’t yours. They’re an external team whose expertise is available to a wide range of clients. Simply put, they have other accounts to focus on, so you might not always be their top priority. But, find the right company and this obstacle shouldn’t be felt at all.

Learning curve

Depending on the size and scope of the lead generation company you chose, they may not have experts in your field. This doesn’t mean the job won’t be well done, but there might be a learning curve in the beginning.

Are You In Or Out?

While having more control is a great advantage, the outcome of outsourcing to a dedicated and experienced team may be quite beneficial. When you factor in how much time, effort and financing it takes to build an in-house team, small businesses (especially startups) without the necessary resources will find the idea of outsourcing lead generation far more attractive.

Check out this checklist from Dan Harsh of Concept Services to help understand how the two compare:

Keep in mind that even though you are hiring lead generation experts, they’re not miracle workers, and they still require time and attention from your internal teams to make the process work. But, the faster ROI can cancel out some of these disadvantages.

The most important thing is to do your research in the beginning so you don’t find yourself tied to a bum lead generation company. How do they measure success? What kind of communication will be standard? Ask the important questions upfront so you can be confident in your outsourced lead gen efforts.

The same goes for outsourcing other marketing initiatives for your business. A prime example is outsourced content marketing, growing more and more popular every year.

If you’re curious about content marketing and what it can do for your business, check out our SEO blog writing services or set up a free consultation with our team!  

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