Customer Development For Content

Let’s talk about relevance, and why this is important. In our opinion, the most important thing about Content Marketing is relevance.

Here’s the thing: most of the content out there is not relevant, and in order to get traction with your content, you have to make sure that you create relevant content.

This means that your content ideas have to resonate with your audience.

We’ve heard it all before: it’s not quantity, it’s quality. But actually, it’s not just quality, it’s relevance too. It doesn’t matter if a particular thing is good; what is important is that the content you create matters to the audience that you are trying to reach.

So, how do we actually do this?

This is what most of us do when we want to create content marketing ideas:

We get into a room with a whiteboard, because it just has to have a whiteboard, we come up with a bunch of ideas, and then we sit back and look at them, thinking that we have some really cool ideas.

Don’t get me wrong, there is value in doing that, but these will not be your most relevant content ideas. You’ll need to dig deeper. So how do you do that?

This is where the angle of customer development for content comes in.

We do a lot of customer development for products, but we don’t do it for content. Which doesn’t make any sense, because we should really be trying to understand what these people want to learn about and what they want to talk about.

How do we know what type of content is relevant for the people we are targeting?

There are three things to delve into when carrying out research on customer development for content.

People



Tools



Data

Let’s talk about it one by one.

Researching Your Audience (People) For Customer Development For Content

There are really four broad categories that you need to focus on when researching people in order to make your content more relevant.

If you are into the B2B space, you’ll most probably have a business development team, a customer service team, and a product team.

These are the internal teams that you have to talk with. These people are constantly having conversations with customers, so they could give you some really great ideas.

Customers



Prospects



Followers/Fans

Obviously, you will need to talk with your customers, prospects, and followers or fans to really understand what they want to learn.

Let’s go even deeper: how can we go beyond that?

So, it really comes down to the type of content you are going to be creating for these people.

By now, we all understand that we have top of the funnel content (TOFU), middle of the funnel content (MOFU) and bottom of the funnel content (BOFU).

Here’s a framework that I use for content research. It is developed by UberFlip:

Here are some great questions you can use for the audience survey questions:

Questions for followers, fans, and customers:

Questions to internal teams:

It is very important to carry out these surveys, as before you write even a single word, you need to make sure what content resonates the most with your audience.

Tools To Use For Content Marketing

The next very important aspect of content marketing is to dig into what kinds of tools to use for creating more relevant content.

The next aspect for helping you to create relevant content involves digging into the tools available.

These tools are:

Some of my favourite tools are industry reports. Reports give you a great insight into what’s happening across your industry’s landscape.

I’ve already quoted a couple of them from the Content Marketing Institute’s annual industry report. These are good things to keep an eye on, especially if they are related to your audience in your customer segments.

I also use Business Insider Intelligence a lot to keep myself up-to-date with what is going on in my industry.

The next tools I like to use are BuzzSumo.com and Answerthepublic.com.

BuzzSumo is probably one of my favourites.

With BuzzSumo, you can really understand what resonates with people based on their shares.

Answerthepublic.com is similar in the sense that you can actually get insights into what people are searching for on Google. Whilst BuzzSumo gives you data in terms of shares and engagement, Answerthepublic.com gives you great information about what people are actually searching for.

Here’s a tutorial I made on how to use BuzzSumo and Answerthepublic.com, and how to use them effectively for content marketing:

— Video Coming Soon —

How To Use Data For Content Marketing

Determining relevance by digging into your own data is so incredibly important.

Now, there are really just three things that I want you to keep in mind here so that you can understand what works:

This comes down to what your goals are.

Here’s what I mean by talking about engagement metrics versus growth metrics: A lot of marketers focus too much on their “engagement metrics” and not enough on their “growth metrics”.

Source: Uberflip.com

This doesn’t mean than there is no time and place for engagement metrics. They are still important, but you really need to step back and think about what the goal of your content marketing is.

Is the aim of my content marketing to create lead generation (focusing on growth metrics) or to create brand awareness (focusing on engagement metrics)? Make sure you distinguish between the two.

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

Here are a few things you need to be careful with when doing email outreaching.

Send Your Emails To The Right Person

Make sure that you are sending your emails to the right people. This is where good customer segmentation will be very important, so that you can achieve a higher conversion rate.

Interact With Your Recipients Before

Interact with your recipients before you send them emails. This can be at a conference/meetup, through a LinkedIn connection, via a Facebook group, or on a forum.

Email Templates Should Not Sound Like Templates

Use templates that don’t sound like templates. This is very important because you want to sound natural. You want to be original.

There is nothing wrong with using templates, but make sure that you craft them using your own style of voice.

Craft Brief Emails

People are busy, and so are you.

So your emails should be nice and brief and sound very natural.

Have only one message in your emails and make it very easy for your recipients to be able to answer you.

Don’t Lie In Your Emails, Be Honest

Always, always be honest with your recipients. Don’t make big promises that you won’t be able to keep later on. Don’t lie just because you want them to contact you. Be genuine and people will appreciate you much more.

Don’t Forget About A Call To Action

Make sure that you have one call to action in your email, and that it is very clear what your call to action is.

Check Your Grammatical Mistakes And Proofread

When we have spelling mistakes in our emails, it makes us look lazy and as if we’re not serious about what we’re doing. So make sure you proofread all of your emails before sending them out.

Don’t Include Attachments In Your Emails

Don’t include attachments. This is a huge mistake that many people do and all email providers will start to flag you up as a spammer.

Carry Out A Recipient Email Address Verification

Verify that your email list is clean and in working order.

Email bounces can affect your delivery rate and spam rate. Make sure that all of your recipient email addresses are working. Use Kickbox.io to do it for you, or do it manually by using Rapportive or FullContact.

Follow Up Your Emails

It takes up to about five follow-up emails to close a sale, yet many salespeople don’t follow up their emails. In fact, 70% of salespeople give up after not getting a reply from their first email. (Source Yesware.com)

Check out these cool follow-up emails.

Don’t Buy Any Kinds Of Email Lists

As I mentioned before, initial interactions with your recipients are very important for achieving high conversion rates. Buying email lists is a waste of time and money.

Email Open Rate Enemies

The funny thing is that most of these mistakes are right under your nose. And they are things that you think you are doing a good job of, but actually you might be making a terrible mess of it.

So, let’s quickly get into what those things are.

Enemy #1 – Too Many Images

Yes, images.

A lot of people think that we need to include images in our emails because we think that they are engaging or that they show what our product is.

Because at the end of the day, if you have an ecommerce business, how are you meant to show your product if you can’t use images?

Solutions

A single image – if you really need to include more images, have a maximum of 2.



Image ALT text – it helps the mail server to understand what that image is about.



Reduce the size of the image.

Enemy #2 – Email Size

We sometimes include so much information in our emails that the email server clips the email.

This happens when you see this:

Now, the dangers of messages being clipped happen in two ways.

The primary danger of your message being clipped is that it is clipping off part of your content and often (because of the way we design our emails), it is clipping off your call to action.

The second has to do with the open tracking itself. Oftentimes, your open tracking pixel will be at the bottom of your email in the footer, so you won’t be collecting accurate data, and you might be getting really low open rates because your messages are really long.

Solutions:

Just use text – email was meant for sending text, so don’t make it messy with a bunch of images.



Click-through for longer content – keep it simple and motivate people to click through to a longer version of your email (e.g. have a blog post summary in your email, and a long post on your blog).



CTA near the top – make sure you add the call to action at the beginning of the email too, not only at the end.

Enemy #3 – Unverified Sender Identity

This is the easiest one to defeat. Anybody can do it.

You don’t need to be a copywriter or a marketer.

If you expand the email you’re sending and you have something similar to what’s shown below, you will most likely be sent to the spam folder.

Why?

As you can see below, the mailing list is some weird number. This is because the email provider they use lets them send out emails without verifying the sender.

Here is an example of a verified sender:

See the difference?

It is telling us what domain is sending out the email. Much clearer, right?

Solutions:

Check your domain key status: http://ift.tt/1qoAt4l





And your sender score at: http://ift.tt/10GLh1C

If you need to get a DKIM Key, don’t worry, just google DKIM Key + {your email marketing provider} and you will get one.

Make sure that you do this ASAP before you start sending out any emails via an email marketing tool (e.g. MailChimp, GetResponse, HubSpot, FreshMail, or SALESmanago).

Enemy #4 – Bad Subject Lines

Ohhh, this is a big one.

Bad subject lines just scream out for attention off the spam filters. It is very easy to spot them.

Here are a few bad subject lines:

“Your June Hot Pick”

“Something new on the horizon”

“Verify your subscription! Don’t miss out on the latest…”

“Recap”

There’s nothing offensive or wrong, they just don’t say anything. They don’t peak your curiosity.

Some tricks include making your emails look like a reply or a forward by using “re:” or “fwd:”, or you could use some of these keywords: “you”, “new”, and “now”.

Here is a great blog post from HubSpot about 23 subject lines that work.

Enemy #5 – Stinky Content

The next enemy for your email marketing is just plain bad content. The number one predictor of your future open rates is your current content.

So if you have really bad content that doesn’t say anything, that is full of images, and that basically doesn’t give anything back to people for the time that they have invested in opening your email, then they will have very little reason to continue opening your emails in the future.

You can always trick people into opening your emails with good subject lines, but if you consistently give them non-relevant content, your open rates will go down drastically.

The key to sending good content is to know your audience and to segment them so that you are sending quality and relevant emails to the right people. Don’t forget that.

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Here is a great resource by HubSpot on the art of sending sales email.

Enemy #6 – Your Ice-cold List

The biggest enemy of all is your ice-cold list. It is a dormant list.

If you have an open rate under 20%, a delivery rate under 99%, and an unsubscribe rate of more than 3%, then you have dormant subscribers.

Dormant = deep sleep

There is a general statistic that 60% of subscribers around the world are dormant. 60%!

You need to wake them up, guys!

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Backburner = automated loop; it’s when you send them some sort of newsletter that doesn’t require segmentation or customisation.

Obviously, this is just a simple email marketing activation formula, we go into much more detail about segmentation later on. There’s more about this in Chapter 6 where we talk about marketing automation for your online business.

Activation merely unlocks further activation. This means that our work is not yet done through activation alone.

Let’s say you activate someone to click on your landing page. Now, here is someone who not only opened your page, but also clicked on it, so they must be interested. If you want them to be even more interested, you have to have the next level of ASK, to show that you want them after they have clicked on your landing page.

Maybe you want them to buy something, so you need to create further activations. So, this is the next step in terms of activation.

Now, maybe they’ve bought something but you want them to buy something else; so now you need to create another form of activation with just this goal in mind.

Maybe they’ll become repeat buyers, and now you want them to refer you. This is another potential activation.

The most important thing to remember is that OPEN RATES are a form of VANITY. For us, what is most important is achieving conversions.

You’ll learn more in the next chapter about how to create RELEVANT content for your audience that converts and how to convert these prospects into paying customers.

Keep on reading to learn more.

Conclusions

First of all, make sure that you have a goal and that you know who you are targeting. In Chapter 2, we talked about buyer personas and how to carry out research into your market and your buyer persona.



Tailor your LinkedIn Profile as it if it were your sales page. Be very brief and make sure that you get a lot of testimonials from your clients and partners onto your LinkedIn Profile.



Start prospecting on LinkedIn using tools such as LeadFuze and Klenty, build a list, and segment it. Make sure that you add them to your LinkedIn connections or that you start following them on Twitter or other social networks.



Do your outreaching via Mailshake and implement all the best practices for sending out cold emails.



Make sure you go through the enemies of email open rates each time you write an email.

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

When I was 18, I read Bill Gallagher’s book, Guerrilla Selling, and was fascinated by the strategies of cold calling and techniques for getting a meeting.

To be honest, all of that doesn’t work anymore – this is 2017, not 1992. Cold calling and just popping in to a corporate office is annoying and slow.

We run our businesses online, so we need to embrace online social networks. Business owners are much more flexible working with someone over the Internet, and this opens a new way of doing marketing and sales.

In this chapter, we will be exploring LinkedIn as the main source of prospecting and reaching out to our potential clients.

In the previous chapter, we researched our market and buyer persona, so we now have a clear picture of who our buyer persona is and who we need to target.

Our next chapter will be all about the content we create for your buyer persona, what you should reach out with, and what that value is that you bring to them.

Before we get there, let’s discover how to use LinkedIn for prospecting and outreaching to them via email or IM.

Define The Goals Of Your Prospecting Efforts

Before starting the whole process, ask yourself:

What do you want your prospective client to do after they receive your email?

Do you want to meet with them in person?

Are you offering a free consultation or a free demo?

Do you want to invite them to a webinar? Or do you want to drive them to the latest blog post or guide that you wrote?

Ask yourself: What value do you bring with the email that you want to send out?

And only after you have all the answers can you start your outreaching.

Tailor Your LinkedIn Profile To Your Buyer Persona

Firstly, prepare your LinkedIn profile and use it like a landing page, as this is what all prospective clients are going to see before replying to your messages.

Make the headline talk to your audience and point out who you want to help, what you can help them with, and how you can do it.

You need to tell your audience how you will be able to help them.

See my example below:

Here is another great LinkedIn headline, which answers all 3 of these questions. The person provides tech services, for the SMB market, by being a virtual CIO. All of the most important questions that any potential client might have are answered in just one headline.

Virtual CIO: Providing expert technology services (Information Security, IT Operations, IT Strategy) for the SMB market

TIP Think of your LinkedIn headline as if it were your landing page headline. This means that you need to put in a lot of copywriting effort and constantly polish it up. Test it and see if you get more profile views.

Next is your summary, which is where you want to tell your audience more about your USPs.

My last point would be to make sure that you get a few testimonials onto your profile from co-workers, partners, and clients.

If you want to read more about how to create a more appealing LinkedIn profile, read this INC article full of awesome insights.

LinkedIn Prospecting Hack Using LeadFuze and Klenty

Your LinkedIn profile is updated and you know who you want to target, so it’s now time to start prospecting.

Jump into the video below to see how I do it using LinkedIn prospecting tools likes LeadFuze and Klenty (but there are more tools out there).

— Video coming soon —

LinkedIn Prospecting With LeadFuze

Head over to LeadFuze.com and sign yourself up for a trial account. This tool has been created for 3 purposes: prospecting via LinkedIn, finding emails, and outreach automation.

Awesome TIP: I recommend using F6S.com’s deal for LeadFuze, where you’ll get 500 + 4,000 verified emails with this awesome offer if you pay for at least 1 month. That’s 4,500 verified emails for $250. And you can now use LeadFuze to automate your outreaching. That should be more than enough to boost your prospecting and find new clients.

Now, if you don’t want to pay that money again for the second month, this is how you can leverage LeadFuze (you can do this even after the trial period, there’s no need to even pay for the first month).

I use LeadFuze to perform Boolean searches to find prospective clients fast on LinkedIn.

On LeadFuze, click on “find leads”



and start filtering your prospects. As soon as you click on “search for leads”, you’ll get a Google Boolean search.

You can select the role, industry, and location, and you can also exclude particular keywords.

The results you’ll receive will only be LinkedIn profiles.

See the functionality I use below.

As soon as you click on “search for leads”, you’ll get a Boolean search like this:

(“Marketing Manager” OR “Director of Marketing” OR “CMO” OR “Chief Marketing Officer” OR “Vice President of Marketing” OR “VP of Marketing” OR “VP Marketing”) (“Business Supplies and Equipment” OR “Building Materials” OR “Banking” OR “Biotechnology”) -intern, -assistant site:de.linkedin.com/in/ OR site:de.linkedin.com/pub/ -site: http://ift.tt/2rFGMTG -site:ca.linkedin.com

I have the role, the industry, any keywords to exclude, and the websites to search on.

Great, now you can start adding people to your list of connections. Just make sure that you customise the connection invitation and that you select “friend” when it asks you how you know that contact.

You can do the same by using LinkedIn’s Advanced Search, however, I just find that method longer when I am searching for specific positions in specific countries.

LinkedIn Prospecting With Klenty

Here is what you can do with Klenty’s free account. You can get hundreds of LinkedIn prospects in no time and even export them into an Excel file for free.

Later on, I’ll show you how you can find anyone’s email address.

First of all, install Klenty’s Chrome Extension and start an Advanced Search in LinkedIn.

On the results page, select the locations (cities) you want to target and click on the “prospect all” button.

You’ll import the whole list into Klenty, and then within Klenty, you’ll be able to export it into an Excel file and start finding people’s email addresses so that you can prepare for outreaching.

If you choose to pay for Klenty, you won’t need to export or use any other email outreaching tool, as you can do everything with this tool or connect it with other CRM software.

Make a list of your prospects, segment them based on your customer avatars, and then start your outreaching.

Find Anyone’s Email Address For Free

If you are using any LinkedIn prospecting tools, you’ll easily be able to find your prospects’ email addresses.

To do this, I am using a few free tools. When I have many emails to find though, I outsource it.

Use LeadFuze or Klenty to save time when doing your email prospecting as they have built-in email finders. With the LeadFuze offer available from F6S.com, you’ll get 4,500 verified listed emails for $250.

If you can’t afford LeadFuze or Klenty, here is how to do it manually.

Create an account on Hunter.io, and you’ll get 150 email requests for free (which is not bad).

Now, it is very easy to use it.

Add the free Chrome Extension, go onto any website, and click on the small email hunter logo on your Chrome tab

Here’s how:

You can use the same process on any LinkedIn Profile and you’ll get a confidence score too.

Similar to Email Hunter, you have FindAnyEmail and ContactOut.

Now, just test an email address with Rapportive or FullContact. Install one of the two Chrome Extensions, and go onto Gmail and compose an email. If you’re using Rapportive, on the left, you’ll see all of the social profiles of the recipient if they use the email address you found on a social network.

Personally, I like to use Full Contact. I can just enter the email address and get all of the details about the contact.

I can now connect with my prospective clients on LinkedIn and any other social networking platform, which is a very important step before sending out any emails. You’ll see why in the email outreaching section.

I would recommend outsourcing this task if you have a lot of emails that you need to prospect.

You can use Fiverr or Mechanical Turk for this kind of work.

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

To do this, we’ll use Adbeat (expensive), WhatRunsWhere (expensive), SEMRush, and AdEspresso.

Disclaimer: some of these tools are enterprise-level pieces of software with costs starting from $200 a month.

See the video below for these advanced techniques.

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Get More Insights Into Your Audience’s Voice And How To Create Your Copy

This part is neglected most of the time by many business owners, as it is considered too fluffy.

We want to know what voice is used by our audience, what they are asking online, and what reviews they have written about your competitors or market.

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I use 3 main sources for this:

Business review sites to see what voice is being used by my audience.



Amazon Books in my niche, where I look at book reviews and tables of content to see what questions are being answered in these books.



Reddit or Quora to see what my customers’ FAQs are.

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I want to find out the following:

Research Your Audience’s Business Needs On Niche Review Sites

The first step I take is to research websites that review similar products or services to mine, or have the same audience that I target.

For example, I implement Marketing Automation for Small Businesses, therefore, I would like to know the kinds of feedback provided by different marketing automation software users.

For SaaS, I use:

I would look into marketing automation software companies that have a lot of reviews on these platforms and copy the reviews.

On Capterra, they focus a lot on Pros and Cons, so I usually start with this one.

Try to avoid comments like “I love the team at HubSpot”; focus on comments that talk about benefits and case studies.

Things like:

When supplying an automated campaign workflow for a client, they had difficulties getting to grips with the old workflow, as it was complex to look at and figure out how to use. Now it looks much cleaner, intuitive, and easy to use, so I can’t wait to show the client! [Source: Capterra]

Works well with social for posting and listening. The blog performance is good too. [Source: G2 Crowd]

It was good when we were a company with less than 25 employees, but as soon as you want to scale, HubSpot cannot handle it. [Source: G2 Crowd]

This last review (which would need to be validated by more reviews) helps me understand that if I were to target HubSpot users, my focus would be SMBs and I would need to concentrate on building my persona based on this.

These comments can help me to write better content, and write my answers to all sorts of objections like these ones.

We carry out comprehensive research into the reviews written about our copywriters or anyone else in the team writing copy, so that we understand clients’ objections, their voice, concerns, and satisfaction with using the product/service.

To visually see the bigger picture in terms of the words most used in reviews, I create a tag cloud using tagul.com.

I made a tag cloud using HubSpot reviews. You’ll get something like this.

Of course, the more reviews you add, the more accurate your tag cloud will be.

Research Niche Books, Quora, And Reddit To Build Better Content

I use this strategy to create better landing page content, blog posts, and online ads.

For this strategy, I research books on Amazon and Blinkist.

Check out the video below to learn how I do it.

Search for books using services/products as search strings.









Look inside one of the books.



Check its table of content and its foreword, and then look for patterns in how chapter titles are constructed.



Determine the book’s main ideas and jot them down in your Evernote for future inspiration.



Check a few of the book’s reviews, as these can often also be a very good source of inspiration for finding answers to potential questions.

Note down any chapter titles and book reviews you like, as these will come in handy later on when you’ll be looking for ideas for creating your content.

I also use Blinkist in much the same way as I use Amazon.

The Blinkist team writes summaries about the most important points covered in mainstream books. I love Blinkist as you can also listen to these books, they have a very easy to understand structure, and the site helps me to understand the main messages that authors want to convey.

Question-and-answer sites are excellent for getting traffic, as well as for researching your audience. Carry out some preliminary research on Quora and Reddit and check if people are looking for the answers to questions you might want to cover.

Note down any FAQs.

Check the answers some companies have provided; many of them will have pitched their product and service. This can serve as inspiration for your own copy and for understanding the voice of your audience.

Conclusions

Always carry out comprehensive research on your audience and competition and have multiple sources of information.

Start with Alexa and SimilarWeb to understand their traffic statistics and sources, and use SpyFu and SEMRush to look into the keywords that help your competition to get organic and paid traffic.

Facebook Audience Insights, Twitter Audience Insights, and Google Analytics will help you to understand the demographics of your audience. You’ll be able to see a lot of valuable data and build your buyer persona based on this.

Carry out in-depth analyses on their content marketing using tools like BuzzSumo and Ahrefs.

To find out more about the voice of your audience so that you can build better content, use book reviews and summaries, research their writing style, as well as using Q&A sites and specific sites that review similar products or services to yours (i.e. G2 Crowd and Capterra for SaaS businesses).

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

Before we get started, open Notepad or Evernote (my preferred note app). Here is a template I made in Evernote that you could use to organise the data that you gather.

Traffic Statistics And Traffic Source Data Of Your Competitors

Head to Follow.net and create a free account. You don’t need a paid account for now.

Follow.net is an excellent free research tool that gathers data from many different sources from the Internet and presents it at a glance.

In our example we will be doing research on Hubspot.com.

After you have created a free account, type your competitors’ domains into the URL search bar and make notes in your chosen Notepad on the monthly traffic sections.

Follow.net will gather data from SimilarWeb and Quantcast regarding traffic statistics, but be aware that all of these are just rough estimates and different tools might show different data.

You’ll also get their last 3 months’ traffic sources.

If you want to know more about each source, head over to Similarweb.com and enter the domain to find out, for example, in Social, which social network brings them the most traffic, or which links bring the majority of their traffic to the site.

If you have a premium account with SimilarWeb, you can go into even more detail and check the last month only, and go over all the links that bring traffic to your competition.

This is a very valuable insight, as you could go out and build a relationship with the same site to drive targeted traffic to your website.

At MAN Digital, we do such in-depth analyses using SimilarWeb Pro, so just ping us here if you want me to do a free competitor analysis using SimilarWeb Pro.

One very interesting thing we can see with SimilarWeb Pro is its traffic channel analysis.

In HubSpot’s example, we can see that Hubspot.com had 4.47% of its traffic coming from emails in March 2016, and starting in April, they tripled this number up to 13% by July 2016. This is a huge change when you have 15M visitors a month.

We’ve just discovered an interesting insight about HubSpot traffic generation: they started to focus more on email marketing in April 2016.

I can actually vouch for this as I subscribe to their newsletters, and I started to get more content marketing emails from them. Emails like these:

If HubSpot is one of your competitors (which I would not like to have), hop over to their site and subscribe to all their newsletters to see what email marketing campaigns they use.

Demographics And Geography Insights

Now that we know about their traffic, let’s get more data on their demographics. I just love this tool from Amazon. In my view, it is the best research tool out there, just because Amazon has some data that nobody has at the moment (OK, except for maybe Google).

Just get a free trial on Alexa.com, gather the data, and cancel the subscription before they charge your card; 14 days is more than enough time to gather initial data.

In Alexa, I like to take the global rank of the website just to keep track of who is the best ranked by Alexa among my competitors.

Then we’ve got the geography and demographics, which is my favourite feature of Alexa.

Here is how it would look:

The most important pieces of data for me are Gender, Age, Browsing Location, and Education. I usually make a screenshot of this data and put it in the Evernote along with the other data I have collected.

I also carry out more research on their demographics in Facebook Audience Insights. Just to double check the demographics.

Here is how I do it:

Go to Facebook Audience Insights, select the country you want to analyse, enter your competitor into the interest section (step 2) in the picture below, and select the demographics.

A very interesting section in Audience Insights is the Lifestyle one, which is only available for the US market though. It is a household-level consumer segmentation and visualisation suite by Acxiom. The life stage clustering system is called PersonicX.

Find out more here, where you’ll find a very detailed report about what each cluster means.

Besides this, you have information about their relationship status and education.

Why do I insist on this?

If you understand the cluster you will understand the customer avatar much better, so you will be able to customise content more easily and create better products and services for your potential clients.

Next, go to the “Page Likes” tab, where you will be able to see what other pages this audience likes. This information will help you to gain an even more in-depth understanding of the audience, as well as helping you to create an audience to target on Facebook Ads later on.

OPTIONAL

Great, now if you’re active on Twitter, you’ll be able to get some nice data about your followers and learn more about your audience.

Go to Twitter Analytics and choose Audiences. Here you’ll be able to see a very brief overview of your audience.

I am interested in gender, age, interests, buying behaviour, occupation, and devices used.

In my case, my Twitter audience is 71% male, and 42% are aged between 25 and 34.

If we take a look at occupation, the majority of my followers are technical professionals.

Obviously, they are interested in technology, tech news, and entrepreneurship.

In conclusion, my followers are predominantly male, between 25 and 34 years of age, and are technical professionals. Now, if I am comparing this with HubSpot’s data from Alexa and Facebook Insights, it is very similar.

Now you might say, OK but these people don’t visit my site. Let’s check that on Google Analytics.

Go onto your Google Analytics (GA), to Audience, and then Demographics > Overview.

Surprise, surprise: GA also shows similar age and gender statistics to Alexa, Facebook, and Twitter. Now our research is becoming more accurate.

Data from Google is just amazing and it can make our research so much easier. It is in Google’s interests at the end of the day, as we (marketers) will spend more on Adwords if we have more tools and targeting data.

If we look at Interests in Google Analytics (Audience > Interests > Overview), we can see that our audience’s interests are also similar to what we found using the other sources.

I could talk about Audience Insights for ages. I hope this information has helped you to understand how to gather data so that you can build your buyer persona.

If you have any other specific questions about this topic, please don’t hesitate to ask me them.

Organic and Paid Traffic Keywords Analysis

Why is this part important?

Let’s think a bit about the psychology of searching. Why do we search online?

Go to Spyfu.com; there’s no need to sign up to a premium account for now.

Enter your competitor’s domain and check both their organic and paid traffic keywords.

SpyFu is an amazing tool. They collect data, in this case for 10 years, and will estimate the monthly PPC traffic of your competitor.

OK, now, you will not be able to see all their keywords with a free account. This is when I would say that, if you’re on a tight budget, you should go over to Alexa.com and get a free 7-day trial to collect all the data about your competition.

How To Download All The Organic And Paid Keywords Of Your Competition

Go to Alexa.com/keywords (get a free 7-day trial for the advanced plan) and download both their organic and paid traffic keywords.

You will now have a full list of keywords your competition is targeting. The organic section will show you the percentage of search traffic that this website is getting monthly.

OK, now you know what keywords your competitor is targeting for paid ads and what they are building their organic traffic for, you have a very good insight into what products or services they are focusing on.

Document this data, as we will use it when we need to build content.

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

Video Marketing

We love entertainment, stories, and our mobile Internet bandwidth is getting faster, which is why video is getting more and more popular online.

Video ad spending grew +557% sequentially from Q2 2016 to Q3 2016, according to a recent report by Smaato.

This is crazy guys, +557%.

So, start making videos of your products and services before it’s too late.

Video doesn’t need to be hard, just make sure that you are using real stories, personal stories if possible, and that you are putting that little human touch into it.

Before you even touch video, make sure you have the right message to match your market.

Here are a few easy useful tips for leveraging video marketing.

Cross-device Usage

According to a study carried out by Ninthdecimal, retailers who use ad campaigns across several devices to engage with consumers experience higher rates of engagement and visits to their stores than those focusing on one device alone, such as just sticking with the traditional desktop computer, for example.

We already own multiple devices; we have iPhones, work and personal laptops, tablets, and even smart TVs. We might even have smart watches if we are geeky enough.

Luckily, we can leverage Facebook and Google’s technology to remarket to all of our audience on different devices.

TIP: “Start building remarketing campaigns on Facebook, Youtube, and Google. Be present on each of your audience’s devices and help guide the conversion.

When a cookie is placed onto your computer by an ad using SilverPush, an “audio beacon” is also emitted that can be detected by mobile devices in the vicinity that are also running SilverPush software.

They are therefore able to recognise that the same person owns these two devices. In an interview with TechCrunch, the CEO of SilverPush, Hitesh Chawla, explained that the biggest obstacle for this technology was distance.

So that they can achieve a more accurate understanding of their customers’ cross-device behaviour, marketing and tech companies are extremely keen on the idea of being able to identify and track their customers across multiple devices.

That way, they can tailor their advertising campaigns to their target audiences more effectively.

Mobile And Tablet: They Are A Must

Last year in Q4, mobile and tablet surpassed desktop Internet usage worldwide.

The percentage of ad impression is the same on mobile devices as it is on desktop.

If your website is not responsive yet, stop reading this, get yourself a web developer fast, and ask them to optimise your mobile website.

There’s no more doubt about it. You need to have a responsive website with an excellent UX.

Google is rolling out AMP and soon, if you don’t have an optimised mobile website, you will be losing a lot of Google rankings.

TIP: Assuming you have an optimised mobile website, create mobile ad campaigns for all of your advertising efforts and leverage the usage on mobile.

Awesome TIP: To get yourself up and running fast and not lose out on mobile traffic, start using Facebook Ads within Instant Articles or Facebook Canvas, available only for Mobile. It’s just amazing how beautiful it looks and how easy it is to set up. Learn more about it here.

Personalisation

Personalisation drives brand loyalty and all of us should pay close attention to what Spotify or Netflix are doing in terms of personalising the experience we have on their apps.

31% of people consider themselves to be brand loyalists, with 41% of these stating that they would be happy for retailers to use their purchase history to personalise the content that is sent to them.

But according to a study carried out by Boston Retail Partners, retailers are still not attending to these consumer preferences.

This is a huge opportunity.

TIP: Use tools like Omniconvert to survey your customers and build personalised content for them for the next time they come onto your website.

For Example:

Landingi.com created different landing pages for their clients according to who their audience is.

When they were using a simple general landing page for the whole audience group, their conversion rate was a mere 8%. But when they started to use personalised landing pages according to who was visiting them, the conversion rate skyrocketed to 31.4%.

Awesome TIP: Add your customer avatar’s influencer and if you have the name of your lead/customer, add it to the landing page and get a conversion rate of up to 57%, the same as what Landingi got when they used this strategy.

Niche Marketing

2 years back, I was working in a very niche market – the triathlon market at triathlonresearch.org. Its founder Sam was in the US army; he was a triathlon hobbyist, so he was not an expert in the field.

But because of his marketing skills, he saw an opportunity in this niche and built a digital publishing company around it. It involves helping triathlon stars like Craig Alexander (7-time Ironman Winner) or Gwen Jorgensen to build and sell their online training programmes on how to be a better triathlete.

He succeeded in this very niche market by working with the best, because the competition was very low, and because he made it his mission to understand the pain and passion of triathlete wannabes.

Sam was always eager to learn more about his niche market. He was going to all kinds of triathlon events, participating himself in training sessions and even racing.

By doing that, he was able to not only understand but also experience the pain of his market.

As he puts it in one of his blog posts:

Triathlon racing is a powerful demonstration of our humanity – our courage, our fears, our doubts, and our joy, all wrapped into one intense experience.

He knew all too well that he was able to speak their language through all the stories, ad copy, and webinars he was conducting.

Again, he was not a triathlete. He just understood the power of niche marketing and dominated that market for a while.

Images source: triathlonresearch.org

If you try to target all markets you will be in big trouble, because you’ll find yourself surrounded by a load of competition and it will be hard to showcase your unique value proposition.

A rule of thumb is to start narrow and then grow wider.

Start talking to one group of your audience and be specific about their needs and desires so that you can attend to them with your product and services.

Benefits of niche marketing:

Less competitive – a small market means less competition. Carrying out good research across a small market makes it easier to find out the strengths and weaknesses of your competition and makes your product or service better.





More affordable – you won’t be spending money on a broad target group, so you won’t waste money on advertising.





Customers are more loyal – you will be able to nurture, teach, and understand them much better.





Audience is easier to target – you know where they hang out and what their interests are, which makes it easier to target and offer them your solution.





Focused – trying to offer different services for each market can be inefficient, whereas having one nice one will help you to be much more efficient and focused on one single market.

B2B Lead Generation

This is a big one and the main topic of our guide.

We’ll touch more on this in the prospecting and outreaching section of our guide.

Nevertheless, building a list and segmenting is crucial for your business, as you want to speak with as many people as possible.

Here are some lead generation techniques for you that you might not know about:

Quora and Reddit – One of my favourites is to go out and find the questions that my audience is asking.





Guest posting – You might find this odd, but writing on blogs where your audience hangs out can bring new free leads to your business.

How you can do it?

Research the best blogs and online media sites in your niche



Pitch your content to them



Write valuable content with a CTA at the end, which links to a landing page where you offer free value



Capture the leads



Start separate email marketing campaigns for leads coming in through guest posts, as you might want to personalise the content



Our example article on lead generation for the Marketing Automation Network is here

LinkedIn profile views hack – Use this at your own risk, but this is working for me as we speak. Add an Iframe with your LinkedIn profile page into your webpage header

LinkedIn Hack

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This way, all of your webpage visitors will be considered as LinkedIn profile views.

Now you can start sending them sales follow-up emails. We’ll talk more about how and what emails you should be sending in Chapter 3.

Use Gmail Ads and target job titles as keywords. This way, if your prospective customer uses Gmail and they have the job title you are targeting in the email signature, you will be able to show ads in the promotional tab of Gmail.











Use LeadFuze to prospect on LinkedInHere is a short tutorial on how to use LeadFuze. An awesome thing is that you can get up to 4,000 leads if you are using F6S.com’s offer. Check it out here.










Export your LinkedIn contacts, upload them as a Facebook audience, and start running Facebook lead ads to your free giveaway, offer, ebook, or just invite them to your webinar (if you’re running one).

Here is a short tutorial I made on how to do it.

 

 --- Tutorial video coming soon ---

 

PRO Tip: Use UTM tags when you share links on all of these sources so that you can find out which is your best lead source.

B2B Influencer Marketing 2017 (Advanced)

In short, word of mouth is what influencer marketing is. It is used a lot in ecommerce. Below you have an interesting survey.

54% of women around the world have purchased a product or service after seeing it in an influencer’s post, according to a survey by Bloglovin.

B2B can benefit a lot from influencer marketing, here’s how.

Every week I listen to Mixergy, and a few other podcastings, and they influence my buying decisions on marketing tools and courses.

Why? Because the quality of the content is very good and I know they don’t recommend rubbish.

I understood this and built my business with the help of local influencers. I partnered with local businesses, investors, and authorities that helped me grow my business.

Here are the top 5 strategies we used and tested for B2B influencer marketing:

Attend meetups, TED talks, and conferences run by influencers and engage with them; don’t sell anything at first, just buy what they sell and be their client to begin with. Networking with influencers on a F2F basis is key, but if you are just selling and not bringing any value to the relationship, you will not succeed.



Partner with investors, and ask them if they need help in your niche in exchange for putting you in contact with other companies or investors if you do a good job.



Guest posting and review posts: I mentioned this in the lead generation section too and it is very valid here as well. Reach out to bloggers and media where your audience is hanging out and write how-tos, and about strategies and the benefits of using your niche product or service.



Sponsor review posts about your product the same way ecommerce businesses do, do pro bono services, or offer your tool as a giveaway in exchange for a review on an influencer’s blog or community.



Identify rising star bloggers (not yet influencers) and ask them to interview you and share your story. I did this here.

All these strategies are worth testing in any niche, B2B or B2C.

Just be where these influencers are online and offline, add value, don’t be salesy, and remember to buy first before you sell.

Conclusions

It is very clear that video on mobile will be the biggest trend this year: Facebook Live, YouTube, and Periscope videos will grow a lot over this coming year and that’s a fact. So go and get your content ready for video.

Now, if you do this well and ensure that your content strategy involves getting across all devices at the right time, as well as choosing your niche market to work in, you’ll definitely be way ahead of your competition.

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

With that in mind, let’s dive in and see how you can prepare your business in order to master B2B Lead Generation for it in 2017.

Through the strategies you’ll learn here, the best case scenario is that you’ll become a marketer that converts your audience into paying customers.

What Industry Is This Guide For?

Our main expertise at MAN Digital is in SaaS and IT. So we have created this guide with this sector in mind. But it can also apply to any other type of online business in the B2B space.

What Is Nurturing, Lead Nurturing, And Customer Nurturing?

Before we start, I want to make sure that we are on the same page with some terminology. This is not new terminology, but we want to make sure that you have an understanding of the vocabulary we’ll be using, so that it provides more clarity for the marketing, sales, and customer service departments of your business.

Nurturing (as a marketing term) is a process of continual communication with a company’s target audience across all stages of the customer lifecycle.

Lead nurturing is therefore a process of continual communication (or interaction) with a prospect that improves a company’s chances of converting that prospect into a customer at some point in the future.

Customer nurturing (or Customer Success). This part of the process refers to the communication that happens after someone becomes a ‘Customer’, in order to move them along to the ‘Loyal Customer’ stage.

Nurturing = Lead Nurturing + Customer Nurturing

When we use or hear the term nurturing, everyone in your organisation should understand that we are talking about communication with customers and prospects across all stages of the customer lifecycle.

Source: Myk Pono on Lead Nurturing and Scoring.

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

Engagement

Define the length of sales funnel – How long do we need to nurture prospects?



More content is produced that goes into greater detail and value.



Remarketing means anyone who touches your website can be brought back in.

Sale

Your products or services are promoted in a way that leaves customers happy about how they were sold to, and willing to buy again.



Everything leading up to the sale is tracked. Nothing is left in the dark.

Our systems give you 20/20 vision into the traffic you reach.

Profit Optimization

The system is built to make optimization easy.

Squeeze every last drop from every dollar spent.

Real-Time Content Personalization

Dynamic Content = Content that changes depending on who’s looking at it and when.

e.g. auto-updating copyright notice in a website footer.

Go far deeper with self-adjusting email newsletters and web pages. Make all your content ultra-relevant to every prospect.

Future-Proof Your Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing is being eaten up by A.I… and that’s a good thing.

Machine learning enables software to plow through mountains of data, allowing marketers (like you) to take their heads out of mind-numbing spreadsheets and focus on the important questions.

Track who clicks what, when, and where.

Make content that tailors itself to different visitors.

Test different theories to find out what really makes you money.

Gather Useful Insights

Call intelligence addresses the blind spot in your marketing analytics. Use it to attribute revenue and conversions back to your marketing campaigns and get in-depth insights about your customers.

Call intelligence can capture the following data points (and more):

This kind of data is either impossible or time-consuming to track any other way. That’s why I’m so sure this is the future. When this technology becomes more affordable (just as basic call-tracking has done over the past decade), any business will be able to fill up the last gaps in their analytics and see exactly what’s making them money.

Personalize the Customer Experience

Custom Call Experiences

For example, set up distinct menu prompts for first-time callers and repeat callers. This customization can even be based on the caller’s online activity.

Leverage Conversation Analytics

Use signals from a phone call to customize a caller’s experience after the fact. For example, put them on retargeting or nurturing campaigns depending on keywords they say during the call. Or use the results of phone calls to test different sales scripts, thereby improving the experience of all callers.

Follow-Up Right

Put callers into follow-up campaigns based on call activity. Since you know their entire journey, online and offline, you’ll make sure the right message goes to the right person at the right time. No more accidently retargeting a converted customer with a discount for something they just bought!1

Act on the Data

Double Down on Successful CampaignsWith call intelligence, you don’t just know which channels bring you the most calls. You know which bring you the best leads.



Determine actual conversion pathsDo most people call straight from a well-placed search ad? Or do they decide to call only after some email nurturing? See their whole history laid out in front of you.



Tie revenue to phone callsInstead of measuring success by call volume (which can be very misleading), measure it by actual revenue and know which cogs in your machine are making the cash register ring.



Test and OptimizeThere are many things that could make your sales jump up, and with a stable tracking system, it’s fun to experiment. Review the results at the end of the week or month or quarter.

Phone number tests:

Landing page tests:

The 3 Core Benefits to Using Call Intelligence

Increase in call volume



Better lead quality



Greater marketing ROI

You don’t have to change your phone number or do anything with your phone system.

Increase in Call Volume. With insights into what’s actually driving phone calls, you’ll know how to drive more. e.g.





Better Lead Quality. Improve the entire customer journey, including their experience on the phone, so you can get more of those high-value calls.





Greater Marketing ROI. With proper analytics setup, you can improve all your channels constantly. The first step is seeing the exact ROI of every channel, laid out in front of you. The second is watching it go up.

Learn more how to do call tracking like a boss with our Ultimate Call Tracking Guide

Sources:

Think With Google, The Role of Click to Call in the Path to Purchase





Search Engine Journal, An SEO Beginner Guide: What is Call Tracking and Why Should I Care?





Less Everything, Adding A Phone Number To LessAccounting Increased Our Paid User Base