3 Keys to a Modern Marketing Strategy That Drives Revenue

The business world today is more competitive than ever. Some of the most significant changes have taken root in the power dynamic between the customer and the company.

Back in the day, the company held all the power, and the salesperson controlled information and the process. They doled out information, manipulated the prospect and did everything they could to convince someone to buy something.

But as competition, technology and the internet became commonplace, the script completely changed.

Today, customers have the final say, and your marketing strategy must stand out.

To lean into this new dynamic instead of fighting against it, you’ll need a marketing and sales strategy that puts your prospects at the center and provides educational content to help them move their buyer journey forward. The better you are at this important pivot, the faster your company will grow.

To deliver on this, you have to focus on three key areas:

1. Personalizing content
2. Gathering customer feedback
3. Using automation to your advantage

1. Personalize Content So That It’s Tailored to Your Personas

Today, personalized content in sales and marketing are table stakes. Gone are the days of a one-size-fits-all approach to promoting your products and services.

If you’re still saying the same thing to everyone, your approach is way outdated.

When you create personalized content, you’re tailoring it to the specific needs and interests of your prospects and buyers.

This adds a few big advantages for your business:

• When people see that you’ve taken the time to understand them, they’ll trust you more
• Customized content is more persuasive because it specifically appeals to the people you’re targeting
• Personalized content helps increase retention by making customers feel valued and understood

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best ways to get personalized content in front of your audience. By adding relevant keywords to your content and using credible backlinks on your site, you can boost traffic via organic search queries.

Getting ranked on Google is tricky. One of the best ways to improve your rankings is to provide links that people find, click on and then stay on. This signals to Google that the content the search engine served up met their needs. This encourages Google to serve up that link more frequently.

Personalized content is going to get people who find your site via Google to click more, stay longer and consume more pages. This all helps you rank higher for important keywords, keyword phrases and questions.

Another important marketing technique is email marketing. Today, email is undergoing massive changes, and the challenges associated with delivering your email to your intended audience have never been harder.

Apple iPhone tools, regulations and privacy practices are making it harder and harder to use email effectively.

However, email marketing remains one of the easiest and least expensive ways to get your story out.

Email marketing is also a wonderful opportunity to leverage the power of personalized content. Using landing pages and calls-to-action (CTA), build a segmented list of leads to nurture. Once you have this list organized into buyer persona groups, send emails tailored to the needs of each individual group. The smaller the groups, the higher the open and click-through rate (CTR).

Segmented email campaigns show a 50% higher click-through rate than untargeted campaigns.

In addition, using personalization in email marketing has shown to improve open rates by 82%, CTR by 75% and customer satisfaction by 58%.

Why not realize those improvements in your own email marketing campaigns?

2. Listen to What Your Customers Have to Say

Building strong relationships with prospects is a primary focus of modern marketing.

Communication is the foundation of all relationships, and listening is half of the communication process. Listening to what your customers are saying is important for a couple of reasons:

• By being available and attentive to customer feedback, you can better pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses
• When customers feel heard, they feel appreciated, and they’re more likely to do business with you

Want to gather customer feedback? Periodically send surveys or contact them to get their thoughts. You can even use incentives such as gift cards, discounts or free swag to increase survey participation.

Social media listening is another effective way to see how your customers feel. Review your tagged posts, comments and mentions on social media to see what people have to say.

By combining social media listening and survey data, you’ll gain a much clearer picture of whether customers are having a great experience with your business.

3. Get With Automation or Get Left Behind

Automation is revolutionizing business, especially with recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). Marketing is no different, and if you’re not integrating automation into your marketing strategy, you’ll be playing catch-up.

Chatbots are becoming common on companies’ websites for good reason – they help your customers navigate your site, find answers to frequently asked questions and proactively solve problems.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a must-have for most businesses. CRM’s primary function is to store contact information, but it’s much more than just phone numbers and emails. It keeps track of all customer data points, such as their industry, demographics, job title and stage in the buyer’s journey. This information is invaluable in helping to nurture leads, personalize content and reduce friction between marketing and sales teams.

HubSpot, the company that coined the term “inbound marketing,” is now at the center of marketing AI with its alpha release of ChatSpot. It can help generate blog ideas, write emails, create CTAs and more. To learn more about ChatSpot, check out our recent blog post on it.

Automation is an opportunity for your business to get ahead. Begin using this technology now – or risk getting left behind by your competitors.