The post Heinz Took Its Logo Off Its Own Ads. Customers Recognized It Anyway. first appeared on Agency List.
]]>In January 2025, Heinz UK ran an out-of-home campaign with one rule: no logo. The keystone-shaped Heinz mark, the brand’s name in red, all gone. In its place, full-bleed photography of the food Heinz ketchup gets eaten with, plus a single sentence in the brand’s house font.
“It Has to Be Chips.”
“It Has to Be Toast.”
“It Has to Be Fries.”
That’s it. No bottle, no logo, no callout. The campaign rolled across London, Manchester, Edinburgh, and the Tube. AgencyList.org Member Wieden+Kennedy London made it. Pre-testing showed over 70% of consumers still identified Heinz as the advertiser without ever seeing the brand on the page. The work made D&AD’s 2025 shortlist.
This campaign would have killed almost any other brand. Pulling your logo off a paid OOH placement is the kind of stunt your CFO will ask why they paid for. The reason it worked is that Heinz had decades of equity to draw on, and a brand team that knew exactly how much of that equity was sitting in places other than the logo.
Heinz ketchup is one of the most-recognized FMCG products in the world. Color (red), bottle silhouette, label proportions, the way the word “Heinz” sits in the keystone, even the specific shade of off-cream on the cap. Most of those signals don’t need the logo to do their job. Once you see the bottle’s shape, you don’t need to read the word. Once you see the keystone, you don’t need to confirm the brand name.
W+K London’s bet was that the brand had earned the right to disappear from its own communication and still be present.
The mechanic is so simple it’s hard not to underestimate it. Photograph the food. Caption it with the cliché phrase about the food. Put it on a billboard. Don’t tell anyone whose campaign it is.
The genius is what the team did NOT include. There’s no bottle in frame. No red. No keystone. No “Heinz” in the headline. The only signature is the typeface, which most people who don’t work in advertising can’t pick out by name but absolutely recognize when they see it.
What this lets the campaign do is two things at once. It tells consumers, “you already know us, we don’t need to introduce ourselves.” And it tells competitors, “our brand is so deeply linked to your product category that we can claim it without naming ourselves.” Try running this same campaign for a private-label store-brand ketchup. The Heinz association would still show up. That’s the actual flex.
The first risk was confusion. A non-trivial chunk of consumers were going to walk past these placements and not get it. Heinz’s brand team had to be willing to leave money on the table from the people who couldn’t connect the dots, in exchange for the deeper engagement of those who could. Brand-tracking research has a name for this. Most marketing teams are afraid of it.
The second risk was the trade press finding the wrong angle. “Heinz forgets to put logo on ad” is a real headline that real journalists could have written. The work needed enough of a story behind it that coverage would frame it as deliberate art, not procurement error. W+K London ran the case-study angle hard out of the gate. By the time mainstream press picked up the campaign, the framing was already locked in.
The third risk was the test results. If pre-testing had come back at 30% recognition instead of 70%, this campaign dies in the deck stage. Heinz had to fund a research process willing to kill the work, and a creative team willing to let the data govern the launch.
The 70% recognition figure is the headline number. It’s the kind of stat that lives in case-study slides for years because it does so much work in one sentence. But the under-reported result is the trade-press lift. Within two weeks of launch, the campaign was covered by The Drum, Campaign UK, LBBOnline, and Adweek. Most OOH never gets that kind of write-up. The story was the trick, and the trick was the story.
D&AD 2025 shortlisted the work. Cannes Lions 2025 recognition is still in flight as of this writing. The Effie 2025 jury has the data they’d need to short-list it. None of that pays for the bottle on a kitchen table, but all of it is the kind of earned credit that brand teams trade for budget the next year.
Audit how much of your brand lives outside your logo. Most brands have more equity in adjacent signals (color, shape, type, cadence, voice) than they realize. Strip the logo from a comp and ask the room to identify it. If they can, you have more room to play than you think.
Use pre-testing to license the bigger swing. “Pre-tested at 70% recognition” is what made this campaign viable. The number didn’t generate the idea. The idea generated the test. But the test is what got the idea past the gates.
Replace your category cliché with your category’s reality. “It Has to Be Heinz” is what marketers say. “It Has to Be Chips” is what customers say. The campaign earned its footprint by speaking the customer’s sentence, not the brand’s.
Make the constraint legible. A campaign you have to explain is a campaign that didn’t work. The whole strength of this one is that anyone in the UK reads “It Has to Be Chips” and finishes the sentence. The constraint and the punchline are the same thing.
Got a campaign you want us to break down next? Send it over.
The post Heinz Took Its Logo Off Its Own Ads. Customers Recognized It Anyway. first appeared on Agency List.
]]>The post Is a Social Influencer Right for you? first appeared on Agency List.
]]>It depends. One thing is for sure, the media landscape has transformed over the past decade and end consumers are seeking new ways to find trustworthy information. New platforms to connect with potential customers are launching almost daily, and consumers of all demographics are engaged with social media and content on a daily (or hourly) basis. How do you stand out in a world overloaded with digital content? And furthermore, how do you stand out to those customers who will benefit from and possibly even fall in love with your brand? Up against these new challenges, a social media influencer could be just the right opportunity. In order to be done well, and reap the many benefits of a social influencer, it’s imperative to have a solid brand mission & messaging before engaging. This will help to ensure you remain core to your brand when embarking on this new medium. The filters to determine the right approach are not much different than what you’d use for any other other marketing or advertising executions. Considering a social influencer is ultimately creating a partnership between two “brands”.
Start with these filters:
Trust | Can you form an honest and open dialogue to build from?
Authenticity | Is this opportunity true to your core brand mission? Do you have shared values with your potential social influencer?
Partnership | Can you form a mutually beneficial partnership to add value to both brands?
Engagement | Does this create a unique way to connect with new customers?
Not only is partnering with an influencer more and more popular, but it’s becoming expected, especially by our younger generations – Millennials and Gen Z specifically. They actually want to know who endorses your brand, and the genuine perspective as to why they are endorsing it. This is becoming a standard part of the research process before any purchase, and can be an impactful tool. With the evolved media landscape, anyone with a passion, skill or craft can create, share and build their brand on social media. Through this seemingly organic & authentic brand growth, these personalities are now followed by masses, seen as creative, self-starters and influential leaders in setting trends, ideas and lifestyles. So much so, that larger brands are tapping into these networks to showcase their humble, more connectable side via social influencers. Amazon has an entire branch called “Amazon Live” where fitness, fashion, culinary and lifestyle personalities of all sorts are featured on this new platform. Amazon is tapping into the ~500K followers of fitness phenom @melissawoodhealth to boost their current 11K followers. Even if 1% of her followers became engaged with @amazonlive, that would almost double their current followership.
Another example, @cupofjo – Lifestyle, parenting, design and relationship blogger has 200K+ followers and is featured in our NYC Social Influencer category; shares her favorite products, experiences, stories, and engages with her audience in a way that encourages they to share their experiences on her platform. This type of personality has curated a unique audience based around shared ideals, choices and life experiences. If your brand fits within her domain, and you cultivate a partnership that shares your brand message & adds value to her brand, what a perfect harmony for her followers, and your potential new suitors. It’s a win (value add) for everyone and that’s your brand’s ultimate goal when partnering with a social influencer.
Chicago Influencers – Los Angeles Influencers – San Francisco Influencers
Millennials and Gen Z are more inclined to listen to a trusted source, a real person, over a brand. They feel more connected to and invested in someone they follow on social media over a brand whose relationship historically talked “to” them vs. “with” them. The “trick” again is to remain honest and true to your brand and create an authentic partnership. They can see through a B- effort and will simply continue scrolling. So, you can’t get away with just hiring someone to push out content for you, like the early days of social media when awareness was the primary goal. Now to be successful and sustainable, influencer’s need to be approached as valued partnerships, selected in a strategic, calculated and purposeful way. The goal should be authentic engagement for both sides.
That’s where the authenticity comes in, full circle. So, you can’t get around good old fashioned brand building; creating your brand story, mission, messaging and identifying strategies that align with your brand. Do the work upfront, ask the right questions, and see where that takes you. Approach some influencers you think are relevant to your audience base, and see what they have to say. You just might learn something. Remember, they have direct access to your audience and if they engage on a regular basis, this is a landmine of insights for your brand.
Happy networking!
Sib Santos is an independent marketer with an emphasis in brand strategy, client management and creating experiences. From large brands like Nike, Google, Apple and Mattel to startups and local shops, Sib’s focus on client management, project management & empowering team building have been keys to success and growth. Sib’s work and life mantra is “courage over comfort.”
The post Is a Social Influencer Right for you? first appeared on Agency List.
]]>The post Actionable SaaS Sales Strategies first appeared on Agency List.
]]>When choosing the appropriate SaaS sales strategy to meet your growth goals, it is best to go evergreen with tested and scalable approach leveraged by high-growth SaaS platforms.
Look at what SaaS unicorns like Slack and doom are doing to get an idea of what’s working well. Picking something that will work longterm will help you in the future, but also refine you lead generation and customer acquisition in the present.
This article is all about that, and we will give you actionable SaaS strategies list you can use to boost your online presence and improve sales. Three SaaS growth hacking topics listed below will work in 2020 and beyond, but will also improve your SaaS marketshare over time.
Strategy #1: Re-think SaaS Pricing Model
Most business owners first look at competitors when deciding about the price of their app. While there’s nothing exactly wrong with that, you should factor in more things when determining what your price is going to be.
Yes, lower prices will increase the chances of successful sales, but they will also lower your margins. You will have to sell more units or subscription in order to make it work.
Also, not al leads are created equal. Having your sales and marketing team align on the differences between MQL vs QSL Not only that, but lower prices also attract a specific kind of customers—bargain hunters. They are willing to take risks trying the low-cost option, which means they have more time. Because they have a lot of time, they are more likely to contact your support even when that’s not necessary, creating more work for your developers.
It’s probably a much better option to sell premium products. Raise your prices, but also offer more. By creating a premium environment, you will attract a different kind of customers—those who are willing to pay extra to get the peace of mind. That will reduce the pressure on your team when it comes to support requests, and they will be able to focus on making the app better.
If you are reluctant to raise all of the prices, you should at least re-balance them. Think about your average selling price, and make sure it puts you in the “green” zone—profits. Tweak your packages so that they fit your goals, at least when taken on average.
Strategy #2: Simplify User Experience
Your SaaS platform and sales ready website should have all the options, but you need to make sure you only put the most essential ones in front of users. Take an honest look at your SaaS marketing plan to make sure your sales and marketing efforts align and seek to specific pain points of your ideal buyer profiles. This ensures This should be the case particularly when browsing pricing options, signing up for the service, and purchasing the product.
When displaying your SaaS pricing packages, only show the most important characteristics and differences, and put everything else under “show more.” Customers that like reading technical details will be able to find them. But let’s face it, most people are only interested in knowing the most essential features.
The same should go for your SaaS signup process. There’s no need to ask for all of the information up front, especially for trial and free versions. Email, name, username, and password should be enough. If the customer decides to purchase the premium version later, you will ask for more info.
And when they download and install the app, make the onboarding process as streamlined as possible. All the popups and tutorials should focus on the most basic things, explaining how to use the app in the simplest way possible. You can introduce the advanced features later, but let people get used to the interface and design.
Most people buy apps for one or two specific purposes they want. Power users that use everything are rare, and they will find what they need even if it’s not in plain sight. But, there are not too many tech-geeks out there, so never try to overwhelm ordinary users with too much information all at once.
Strategy #3: Prioritize Support
While it is true that you should focus on making your app as perfect as possible, there will always be a need for support. And because customer support is one of those rare occasions where your customers have contact directly with your team, and not only the software itself, you need to be extra careful and make sure you are giving them the best service possible.
First, give them more options to contact you. Some people prefer the chat, others like email or phone, or ticket systems. You should give them all of that. Also, try to have someone available 24/7. But, if that’s impossible, make sure you address the issues in 24 hours, or at least let them know that you are working on the solution.
You should also create a knowledge base on your site, but do it right. Offer step by step guides that will explain how to solve the most common problems customers face. Create tutorial videos that will explain the program features, and also give suggestions on how to use it.
You should also make a FAQ section. Add new questions whenever you notice customers asking the same thing multiple times.
Lastly, be active on social media, forums, Reddit, and Quora. While nobody expects you to answer questions 24/7, doing it from time to time will significantly influence your reputation. People will see that you are willing to help and that you are there for them, and not only another greedy business owner.
Conclusion
While it may seem like customer support, simplifying the app and rethinking prices are not that important for sales (especially the first two). They will influence how well your SaaS performs in a great way.
Remember, you exist to keep customers happy, which determines how fast you can minimize customer churn needed to scale your monthly recurring revenue. There are not many things that influence the opinion your customers have about your company more than they level of support your SaaS platform offers to customers. Fail to address their issues appropriately, and your SaaS company will start noticing more and more bad reviews all over the web, which will cripple your sales.
As for the simplifying the experience—your SaaS customers will never feel overwhelmed and will enjoy using your site and app. That will make them more likely to continue using it for a long time, which will mean more subscriptions and more money in your pocket every month. Speaking with SaaS marketing agencies will your lead generation, customer acquisition and client engagement efforts are leveraging the appropriate strategy to ensure your SaaS platform meets and exceeds your growth goals.
Objectively set back and analyze everything your sales and marketing teams are currently doing to ensure you can implement course corrections as needed to ensure your SaaS team is creating and scaling predictable and repeatable streams of new leads, customers and revenue. Good luck!
The post Actionable SaaS Sales Strategies first appeared on Agency List.
]]>The post Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your SaaS Conversion Funnel in 2020 first appeared on Agency List.
]]>Unfortunately, sometimes after these funnels are created, not enough effort is spent in their review, analysis, experimentation, and modification. When sales begin to trail off, marketers are often inspired to review the funnel and look for problems. However, in this dynamic online business environment, the optimization of the funnel must be a constant process of review and perfection.
Even the slightest improvement of SaaS conversion rates in any stage of the funnel can have a significant impact on the bottom line. On the other hand, one minor problem in the funnel could leave significant numbers of sales on the table or witness customers wander out the back door to other services. By implementing agile, yet data-driven SaaS marketing strategies at each stage of the funnel, we can be sure to get the most out of the entire funnel. This will also help craft the narrative of your SaaS content marketing strategy.
Whether inspired by flatlining sales, or just a desire to get the most possible from the conversion funnel, marketers need to know where to start. You can’t begin tinkering with the process until you understand how the process is working. Fortunately, a SaaS conversion funnel provides plenty of data to analyze in determining where the funnel is working well and where it is struggling.
Begin by analyzing the data for each stage of the funnel and look for patterns. How are your numbers for acquiring traffic? How about initial conversions such as joining a mailing list or downloading a free trial? What do the numbers look like for customers completing the next critical steps towards a purchase? Then, how do sales numbers look in comparison to each previous stage of the funnel? Finally, how long are customers sticking with you? What does that look like in contrast to the rates found across the funnel? For each and all of these, what trends do you see over time?
This is the point where we can see what is working in our SaaS conversion funnel and where there may be potential for optimization. For instance, if you are seeing excellent conversion rates for a free trial but low initial traffic to your website, it may make a significant impact to the overall funnel to focus on the acquisition stage and look for ways to increase inbound traffic. If you are seeing an excellent rate of free trial downloads but an anemic number of conversions to paying customers, it may be time to review how you are engaging these leads or consider if these conversions are genuinely well-qualified leads.
Once you have found the area with the highest potential for improvement, it is time to start digging in and finding ways to optimize. Let’s look at some common optimizations in each stage of the funnel.
If you are not seeing a robust rate of traffic to your website, it will be felt throughout your funnel. It is difficult to name the “right” amount of traffic. Different SaaS sectors have very different levels of demand. If you serve a very small, niche market, your inbound traffic will be lower than a SaaS site with a more general audience. However, the goal is always the same, start with more qualified inbound traffic, and the rest of the funnel will benefit.
So, how do you get more traffic? In the current world of inbound marketing, you need to offer an answer or solution to someone’s question or problem. This is just the reality of the modern world of marketing. People don’t want to be marketed to. When they are in need, they will go look. So, if you are not experiencing the inbound traffic you would expect, likely either you aren’t offering an answer or solution people are looking for, or you aren’t structuring your content in a way people can find it.
Chances are, business are not out looking for your solution in particular. If they are looking at you and your competitors, it is because their company role has specific pain points they want to alleviate. By partnering with SaaS Marketing agencies who specialize specifically in scaling SaaS platforms like yours, you will be able to looks at your SaaS growth objectives from a 10,000 foot view to refine your SaaS marketing strategy and SaaS content strategy to deeper identify your buyer personas and then layer sales-ready content across each stage of their buyers journey. That is why it is essential to understand what your potential customers are looking alleviate. This allows your content marketing to speak to these particular pain points as you nurture them from free trials into paying customers.
Even if the acquisition stage of your SaaS conversion funnel is working flawlessly and people are finding, visiting, and exploring your website, it won’t matter if you are not seeing engagement. Where precisely the engagement phase begins, and the acquisition stage ends, depends on your overall SaaS marketing strategy. However, this is where there is often great room for optimizing your SaaS conversion rates.
There are many places where qualified leads can get stuck in this stage. Site visitors failing to sign up on an email list, limited downloads of a free trial, or free-trial users not thoroughly evaluating the product, are just a few. While it is normal for the total numbers to decline at each stage of the funnel if you feel that the drop-off rate is higher than it should be. There are a couple of questions you can ask:
1. Do you have the right leads? If your website traffic is not engaging with your offerings at a deep enough level, it may be time to consider if you are driving the right traffic. Maybe your content or offers are drawing people who are actually looking for something else.
2. Does your call to action offer enough value? To create engagement, you need to provide something more valuable than what you are asking your potential customer to give up. Is your free trial attractive enough for people to give up private information? If people are not taking you up on your offers, maybe they are not tempting enough.
SaaS marketing strategies are different in that businesses aren’t looking for one-time purchases, or even return customers, but an ongoing relationship with customers who continue to use and pay for the product. It’s great to acquire these customers, but that means nothing if your SaaS platform cannot keep customers happy enough to keep paying your SaaS platform every month. As a result, a company’s “churn rate” is a closely watched measure of success for all SaaS companies.
The measurement of the lifetime of a customer relationship may be one of the most important metrics when it comes to overall customer value. When the number of customers failing to renew or outright canceling their subscriptions to a SaaS value offering is too high, none of your efforts in the rest of the funnel will matter.
Unfortunately, this may be the segment that is the most difficult to fix when it is broken. However, sometimes, there are great opportunities to optimize this phase with some minor adjustments that will have huge payoffs as customers stick around longer.
A ruthless review of customer service support, client feedback, and competitive offerings may yield some possible areas of improvement. Given all the work that goes into attracting, engaging, and converting these customers, the investment in improvements will be worth it.
The post Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your SaaS Conversion Funnel in 2020 first appeared on Agency List.
]]>The post Content Marketing VS Inbound Marketing first appeared on Agency List.
]]>Two terms that are commonly used interchangeably are content marketing and inbound marketing. While there is a close relationship and overlap between these two concepts, they are not merely two expressions of the same thing. Understanding the difference can help us do a better job in both areas and support our teams to focus on the right metrics and output.
We are starting with inbound marketing because it is a broader umbrella term. The term inbound marketing is often thought of as a set of tools and tactics, but inbound marketing is actually a paradigm shift in the way markets approach potential customers. This shift in marketing methodologies has dramatically risen in the past 5-years as buying patterns have shifted and markers found they can get more by putting out content that resonates with ideal customers, which helps them obtain pertinent information throughout each stage of their buyer’s journey. Once we understand this concept, we can better understand content marketing and inbound marketing are deeply integrated when it comes to broader marketing objectives.
In the simplest of terms, inbound marketing helps to attract ideal customers and future them into happy customers. When traditional marketers start looking into the effectiveness of inbound marketing, they are seeing shift in methodologies focused on helping potential customers obtain helpful and relevant information without asking for anything in return. This not only postures the company as a thought leader to potential customers, but more importantly gives marketing and sales professionals visibility into how effective content marketing that is spread across the buyer’s journey.
The way companies buy has changed. As a result, marketers need to adapt as well in order to be effective in an age where buyers are most often over half way through their buyer’s journey before contacting sales reps. By the time the user contacts your company, they have already researched you and your competitors. This is where inbound inbound marketing really improves your overall marketing ROI, as it relies heavily on persona-driven content that speaks to the pain points of potential customers.
Let’s take SaaS Marketing for example. This deeply rooted relationship between inbound marketing and content marketing is even more prevalent with SaaS platforms. Most companies focus marketing budgets more heavily towards lead generation. These days, best practices when it comes to SaaS companies achieving high growth rates, they embrace healthy balance of content marketing resources evenly between not just lead generation, but also for client engagement. This is where the rise of niche SaaS marketing agencies has dramatically risen from being obsessed with understanding SaaS business models and what is necessary to align sales and marketing teams to scale monthly recurring revenues.
This agile balance is vital to a SaaS platform staying in business given that SaaS customer churn can erode monthly recurring revenue takes a front seat to lead generation. Which makes sense if you think about it, what is the point to spend money to acquire users if you cannot keep them happy customers. This has heightened the attention towards proactive client engagement. People no longer want to be interrupted by marketing pitches. They wish to seek out information for themselves. Inbound marketers attempt to be ready with answers when people look, build relationships with those people, and generate leads.
It may be easier to understand by looking at how it is different from outbound marketing. Outbound marketing is the methodology of going out to find people through mass emails, advertising, phone calls, and other means. Inbound marketing, however, is about helping people find you.
While inbound marketing is an umbrella term, content marketing is the more specific strategy of creating and offering valuable, relevant content that potential customers will find useful. This content can include blogs, white papers, videos, guides, apps, anything that potential customers may find helpful.
Content marketing is one facet of inbound marketing. As we will see, it is an essential aspect and one that is the heart of most inbound marketing plans. However, because inbound marketing can have other elements, content marketing and inbound marketing are not interchangeable terms.
While there are other aspects of a comprehensive inbound marketing plan, content is always central. It is virtually impossible to execute inbound marketing without a content strategy. If we want to attract people who are already searching, there must be something to draw them in. On the flip side, a content marketing strategy won’t be effective if it is not part of a greater inbound vision.
Content marketing and inbound marketing actually compliment each other, just like peanut butter and jelly. Inbound marketing focuses on getting your content in front of the right eye balls, at the right time. To that point, churning our persona-driven blog posts tailored for towards the middle or bottom of your funnel can assist in support of your lead nurturing efforts.
This is where search engine marketing strategies can pay huge dividends. Without great SEO, that content may never be found. With that said, some overzealous markets still get greedy and overoptimism and write for search engine robots instead of humans to their blog posts to reach higher rankings.
This is a huge mistake and more often than not SEO mistakes can destroy your content marketing efforts if Google penalizes your domain name. Also, content marketing will only go so far if there isn’t a strategy for nurturing potential customers into and through a sales funnel. This may include integration with CRM and a process for nurturing high-value leads into customers.
These two are always intertwined, and there is never a choice between content and inbound.
When content marketers are aligned with inbound marketing strategies, the marketing operations team can collective and effectively layer persona-driven content across each stage of the buyer’s journey. Whether you are charged with refining your content strategy, inbound marketing, or both, it is essential to keep the differences in mind. It is also crucial to understand how closely they are related. In most B2B organizations where these both fall under one department, it is important to delineate between the two to ensure you are giving the proper attention to each one. When blended into one function, there is the potential that essential components of one or the other could be neglected.
Too little focus on content, and it will be challenging to catch the interest of potential customers. Not enough effort in the general sense of inbound marketing, and your great content may never be found because it it not tailored to a specific buyer persona and associated pain points. As a result, those visitors are less likely to convert into leads or customers.
In cases where content marketing strategy is handled by a different individual than content creators, it is vital to highlight the interdependence with critical need to align on content strategy goals. If the two are not clear about how they work together, it may be challenging to implement an effective strategy. Each team has a role to play. Those focused on content marketing strategy are tasked with creating compelling and high-converting content clearly targeted to pain points of the appropriate audience or buyer persona. That buyer personas may be clarified and developed in partnership with those dealing with the overall inbound marketing strategy.
These days inbound marketing professionals need to shift away from the traditional sales funnel tactics and focus on helping ideal customers discover your niche blog posts addressing their specific pain points and then implement a plan to nurture those visitors into leads and ultimately into paying customers.
While inbound marketing strategies and content marketing strategies may have different KPI’s, the are vital to each others success. This is where speaking with B2B marketing agencies that specialize in inbound marketing will give you a unique and candid insight and assessment into how your content marketers and inbound marketing strategists can further align to reduce lead generation costs, increase conversion rates and reduce sale cycles. An inbound marketer is nothing without effective content writers, so the complimentary nature of is what inbound marketing so effective and turning strangers into customers.
The post Content Marketing VS Inbound Marketing first appeared on Agency List.
]]>The post Top Inbound Marketing Challenges and How to Solve Them first appeared on Agency List.
]]>Targeted leads are the lifeblood of growing revenues, and it is more challenging than ever to keep that pipeline flowing and your business growing. Understanding the unique challenges faced with inbound marketing vs traditional outbound marketing is the first step in solving them. Let’s look at the top inbound marketing challenges and how to address them.
Most digital marketers don’t have the luxury of starting fresh with an overall marketing playbook built around inbound methodologies and best practices. Most are not ideally aligned with sales operations beyond the quantity of marketing qualified leads that get passed onto the sales team each month. When is comes to B2B lead generation strategies, most marketers often stay within their comfort zone, which is executing the approved marketing strategy and maximizing marketing ROI. A lot of marketers have grown frustrated that content gets created by many different stakeholders, often not in support of laser focused internal goals that do not align with pain points of agreed upon buyer personas that your sales team is focused on selling to.
An effective inbound marketing strategy needs to to be built around clear buyer personas and tuned to the various stages of the buyer journey. Once a clear inbound marketing sales funnel is developed, content can be created and optimized to reach the right potential customers at the right stage of their journey. Many of the other challenges mentioned below can be at least partially remediated by this clear strategy.
Inbound marketing can be one of the most time-intensive tools to get right. Mastering SEO, social media, and email is resource intensive, especially as you are trying to fine-tune your strategy and make the needed adjustments. Creating content that holds value for potential customers requires resources for writing, editing, and perfecting. Modern inbound marketing is about more than just churning out keyword stuffed articles. Search engines are learning to recognize genuine, original, and useful content. Consumers are also savvier than ever, and the quality of content makes a powerful impression.
The best way to address this time crunch is through a clear strategy and focus. By creating content that is designed explicitly around buyer personas and customer journeys, you will only need to curate the content that will help reach your potential customers. This not only reduces the total amount of necessary content but will likely lead to text that is easier to optimize for SEO and that will be more likely to quickly gain top SERP results.
In a world that expects instant results, inbound marketing is a long game. The most effective inbound marketing strategies need developing content, and optimizing SEO takes a long time in itself. What can be equally frustrating is the time that it takes for all of this work to begin to show ROI. You can’t force search engines to crawl faster, and domain and page authority don’t rise overnight.
Even if digital marketers understand the time it takes for inbound marketing to pay off, others in the organization may be impatient with the results. Two ways to address these concerns are to set realistic expectations upfront and invest in PPC to get things rolling. Clear KPIs can be developed demonstrating the anticipated time needed to begin to see results. That way stakeholders from your sales and marketing departments can know what to better expect and when to expect it.
Throwing money into PPC campaigns are no substitute for a good strategy and time but they can certainly be effective as a tactic to speed up the process and augment early success. With that said, be sure to always A/B test your PPC landing pages to collect data on what variants move the needle when it comes to increasing PPC conversions.
It is nearly impossible to execute an effective inbound marketing strategy without the right tools. Using the wrong software or trying to keep up with the necessary work without specialized tools will cost you time, money, and potential customers. Consider that a proper implementation will require CRM, a social media publisher, an email marketing tool, marketing automation, an analytics platform, a content management system, and website chat software to engage leads in real time.
It is not only essential to find the right tools, but it is also necessary to find tools that will work together. If your software can’t share information, you will find yourself repeating the same tasks over and over or wasting time downloading and converting data to function between platforms. Take the time to find and implement your inbound marketing tools upfront and find options that will quickly scale as the business grows.
Inbound marketing is not a skillset on its own but rather a collection of several very specialized skills. While it is essential to have someone, who understands how all of the elements of the strategy work together, it is also important to have people who are competent in each aspect. To be successful with inbound marketing, you will need an in-house inbound marketing strategist who know HubSpot and inbound methodologies like the back of their hand.
For tactical execution, you will need a copywriter, editor, graphic designer, HubSpot COS designer, HubSpot COS programmer, an SEO expert and PPC expert. Yikes! This easily could cost $20k per month to have these resources in-house. While this is common for larger companies, it is not feasible for smaller companies who are hyper focus on the ROI of their advertising and marketing. This is why now more and more companies of all sizes are choosing to leverage inbound marketing principles without all the associated expenses by partnering with HubSpot certified inbound marketing agencies who can serve as an extension pf your marketing team to help you best plan and execute effective inbound marketing campaigns.
This could be the most difficult challenge to face. Great talent is increasingly hard to find. Fortunately, we also now live in an age where it is possible to outsource areas that are difficult to fill and provide online training to close the skill gap with staff that need additional development.
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]]>The post Does Monitoring of Employees Make them more Efficient? first appeared on Agency List.
]]>it is not unusual to monitor employees especially if we talk about big companies. Also if you own a startup or a small business, you will want to keep expenses minimal in terms of time savings as well as bills for mobile and other costs that your employees can make.
You can monitor your employees in several ways, by monitoring Internet and app usage, email and its usage, phone and mobile use, computer screen recordings or perform GPS tracking by vehicle and location tracking by access badge.
Monitoring of monitoring Internet, email and app usage is quite frequent. All you need to have in a reliable administrator who will give you the access to your employee computers or set a keyword, such as Facebook or movies, which will trigger a notice on your computer to let you know that employee is doing fun stuff during working hours.
Tracking of phone use can be performed by checking the listings of phone calls, but it is a time-consuming process, so you better think about it twice, because today mobiles are much more used than traditional phones.
If you decide to do mobile tracking, you might need a phone tracker for android or iOS application to be installed on business mobiles of your employees. With a proper application you will be able to monitor their whereabouts with geolocation feature, check call logs, messages, emails and chats. You can do monitoring directly from your mobile so, you can be updated about your employees’ activities all the time.
GPS tracking by vehicle and location tracking by access badge are also a good option for employee monitoring especially if they are commercial representatives and travel a lot, or they are associates whose tasks demand a lot of getting around the company.
It is good to tell your stuff that they are being monitored, because, that will give them a bit of pressure not to do private calls, chats or jobs at work. Also, if you have performance monitoring, you will be able to connect the performance with other activities monitoring and see if there is a connection between lower efficacy and performance of workers with their other activities.
If lower performance is a result of problems at home, such an illness of a child, it is understandable, but you don’t want your employees to be less efficient because they have a coffee with a friend while visiting wholesalers and shops for commercial tasks at work.
Some people work well under pressure. The monitoring will just improve their performance, and they will be happy to know that you can see how hard workers they are. But don’t underestimate the fact that there are a lot of people that give a lower performance when monitored. So be careful when planning how to track your employees and be sure that this monitoring is within the limits of the law.
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]]>The post 7 Proven Strategies For Launching a New Business first appeared on Agency List.
]]>You’re going to strike out on your own, be your own boss, chase your own dreams (and profits.) Good for you! Now, let’s get back to reality. First off, most businesses aren’t get rich quick schemes. And even when you work for yourself, you’ll have to answer to customers, suppliers, and even your own employees.
We’re not saying this to discourage you. Far from it. Success is rarely easy but with the right effort and strategies you can succeed! That’s why we’re going to offer seven quick tips for launching a small business.
WHY are you starting a business? “To make money” isn’t good enough. You have to have something more meaningful or you’re likely to flame out. Maybe you want to offer the best cookies in town through your bakery. Or perhaps you want to build an awesome new app that will improve peoples’ lives. Figure out that “why” first.
How much money do you have in your bank account? Go and take a look. When it comes to starting a small business, you’ll probably have to put some of your own cash on the line. So make sure you understand what you can afford to spend. When you launch, it’s often best to limit yourself to risk capital, or money you can afford to lose.
Let’s say you want to open up a pizza shop. There’s just one problem, there are five pizza shops right in your area and they are all highly regarded. How you have to ask yourself, “is the market too crowded?” If so, there might not be an opportunity.
And if you do go forward, understand that you will have to be competitive. That might mean offering a better pizza, or it could mean offering a more affordable one. Ideally, you’ll offer a mix of both.
Before investing your hard earned cash, talk to some potential customers first. Continuing with our pizza shop example, you can ask people what they like and don’t like about the current shops in town. Maybe prices are high, or perhaps the pizza parlors skimp on toppings. Insights could yield competitive advantages. Also, once you’ve started your business, make sure you encourage customer reviews, those could be vital for your further success.
You need to stand out and markets can be crowded. That’s why it’s important to develop a signature product. You need something that’s unique, preferably something that no one else offers. Maybe it’s a pizza with wild toppings or chili sauce instead of pizza sauce, for example. Unique products can help you stand out even if the market is crowded.
One of the first steps you should take is to register a domain name for your business. You should also begin setting up social media profiles and the like. By the way, read a bit about how often to post on social media for a successful campaign. For nearly any business, a strong online presence is vital. Even when customers are shopping locally, they often do research online first.
You want to research the different types of legal entities you can set up before you launch your business. Different entities offer different advantages. For example, LLCs separate your business from your person. This provides certain legal advantages, such as reducing liabilities.
On the other hand, a sole proprietorship is often the easiest to set up. You won’t have to deal with stocks and all the messy paperwork and obligations that often comes with setting up an LLC. No matter what, it’s important to weigh your options.
After you’re all set up, the last thing to do is execute. Yes, execution is usually the trickiest part and sometimes even good ideas and great leaders fail. Still, with the right products and strategies, you stand a great chance of succeeding!
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]]>The post Five Surprising Traits of Great Leaders first appeared on Agency List.
]]>That’s something we spend a lot of time thinking about. Truth is, no one has found the secret formula that will guarantee that you’ll be a great leader. It simply doesn’t work that way.
However, by studying already known great leaders, you may be able to identify common traits. If these traits are common, then perhaps they’re part of the reason why great leaders are so, well, great. And perhaps by adapting and emulating these traits, you can become a great leader yourself.
So, let’s take a peek at five traits that might lead to you being a better, we dare say even great, leader.
A leader is in charge. They’re the boss. They often have the final say. But you know what? Great leaders are also humble leaders, they know how to interact with people from all walks of life. A great leader will feel as comfortable and humble interacting with a janitor as they will with the board of directors.
An important quality not to overlook here is empathy. A great leader must be empathetic and able to put themselves in other’s shoes. And once there, a great leader will realize that everyone deserves respect and sympathy.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how far you rise as a leader, you should always treat others around you as equals.
The buck always stops with the leader. If a project fails, at the end of the day, the person who is in charge will shoulder the blame. After all, had said leader made different choices, say removing this employee or promoting that one, the project might have been a success.
On the other hand, when a project is a success, a wise leader will share that success. A great leader will recognize everyone that chipped in and will value contributions big and small. By sharing credit, a wise leader will create a rewarding and inclusive environment.
When a leader takes the blame, they’re showing that they are strong. On the other hand, when a leader shares credit, they demonstrate that they are generous. You should learn new skills that will make you more successful both as a person and as a leader.
Does it sometimes seem like great leaders have all the answers, that they know every solution? Guess what, they don’t. Every wise leader knows that they can’t know everything. Unexpected problems will always arise, and new challenges will always emerge. And no matter how smart they are, the great leader knows they won’t always have the answer.
Instead, great leaders learn to expect the unexpected. They develop plans to deal with these new challenges and learn to rely on experts as well.
Great leaders know that elbow grease and sweat go a long way towards success. It’s hard to achieve much without hard work.
Sure, starting in a good place makes a difference. Let’s say you have a lot of funding for your startup. This can have a big impact on your chances of success. However, without commitment and hard work, no amount of funding would ensure success.
At the same time, leaders know that they need to take some time off and relax. And they know that downtime has to be taken as seriously as work. You need to set aside time to recharge. If you don’t, you’ll burn out. That’s why great leaders “relax hard.” When they are off the clock, they are off the clock.
No person is an island. No one can accomplish everything on their own. A great leader will recognize that it takes a team to accomplish big, ambitious projects. And great leaders work hard to assemble those teams.
This includes both professional and personal teams. You need a team at work that you can rely on to see projections through to completion and success. High-level leaders will need multiple teams. And in your personal life, you should have a network of people who can support you along the way.
So put the above tips into practice and start your march towards success.
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]]>The post How to Effectively Manage a Startup Team first appeared on Agency List.
]]>but one of the biggest challenges you’ll face is managing your team. A cohesive, motivated team is worth its weight in gold and is sure to take you places. A team that isn’t united or invested in what they’re doing, on the other hand, could spell trouble for your fledgling company. In this video, Dan Martell explains the best method for doing exactly that — the highly effective “Three M” method.
Successful teams touch base with one another frequently, making meetings one of the most effective ways to keep everyone on the same page. You’ll learn about the four distinct types of meetings every startup team requires in order to be its very best: the daily stand-up, the weekly meeting, the quarterly retreat, and the yearly plan. You’ll also discover why each is important, as well as learn how to set yours up for maximum effect. Meetings are important even when you manage a virtual team because you need to make sure everyone will stay productive while working from home!
How to Effectively Manage a Startup Team
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Running a startup has everything in common with playing a game. Each team member not only needs to know the score, but also what’s expected of them as an individual in order to succeed. Learn about key performance indicators, as well as how to help team members get “unstuck” if they run into issues. The importance of delegation and verification are also discussed.
When people are given the gifts of vision and excitement, they work harder and become capable of reaching their full potential as team members. Learn why the story of your business is important, as well as discover how to tell it in such a way that each team member views it as their story too. “He with the best story wins.” It’s time to learn how to make sure that’s you!
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