Goodbye, 2015! Once the Egg Nog Fog Clears. And you think back on 2015, there were many aspects of your marketing strategy that were baby steps and learnings for many B2Bs and NPOs. What did you learn? For starters, In-Bound Marketing proved to be a big winner for B2B lead generation. Mobile Responsive Design was a must have for Nonprofits. And Social Media proved to generate a positive ROI in the right channels when aimed at the right audiences. You also learned what content stuck and shrunk your engagement. It was a year of tremendous experimentation in 2015. Now 2016 is gearing up to be the year that all the 2015 A/B testing is poised to pay off.
While you are considering your major power moves, we wanted to share a list of some top resolutions and rules to follow for any B2B or Nonprofit wanting to make 2016 "the year of lead generation" for your company or nonprofit.
1. Marketing Platform Integrations - #1 Imperative!
First and foremost, now is the time to focus marketing efforts centered around mobile devices. With more users accessing the Internet with mobile and tablet devices, it’s imperative for every B2B business seeking the attention of new and existing customers and constituents to integrate their marketing platforms, CRM, and CMS to keep up with your mobile audience's engagement in realtime. This includes synching your website, email marketing campaigns, content posts, and social media platforms into a unified platform such as HubSpot to capitalize on every opportunity when your prospect wants information and follow on the spot -- that is spot-on.
2. Show Google The Love and SEO will Follow
A web responsive makes website edits easier by editing the entire site across all devices, instead of editing a mobile site and then separately editing a desktop site version. That's so 2015. The Google-loving way to make websites more mobile and tablet friendly is by making them web responsive. This allows your B2B website to function properly whether the client is visiting on a desktop, mobile, or tablet device. As a result, your SEO will benefit and at the same time each conversion step in your automated lead maturation process will improve multiple percentage points along the way due to the ease of engaging with a mobile responsive site. These percentage points in conversion add up fast and leads will follow.
3. B2B Sector Buyer Personas
There’s no point in making new marketing resolutions without a solid understanding of your B2B customers first. By truly understanding your sector's customer's needs, you have the opportunity to reach them at the right time and channel, with the right message. We suggest refreshing your buyer personas to help you determine and develop the best types of content for reaching these customers in each B2B or NP sector based on your service offerings. Here is a great resource for developing content for each persona.
4. Catapult Lead Capture with Fresh Call-To-Actions
Conduct a content audit to find out what types of content work best for your business, whether it’s video, infographics, blog posts, email marketing, etc. Start by going back and looking at past analytics can help you determine which types of content were most engaging. You can also add new Call-To-Action modules and Lead Capture Landing Pages to your old blog posts to drive people to your new resource downloads. At the same time continue to add new content based upon the sector driven buyer personas above.
5. Reimagine Email and Social Efforts
On the same note, now is the perfect time to also clean up email marketing campaigns, including workflows and lead-nurturing e-book downloads. By making sure your email workflows are working properly, you will be able to more accurately monitor clicks and conversions, allowing you to continually improve and grow your marketing later down the road. As you grow your inbound lead capture, this will only fuel your outbound efforts (email, ad, events, etc..). As such, they must be working together in a clear and clean funnel flow. Start at the top of the funnel (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn) and make social a part of every engagement along your workflow from awareness to lead capture to sales conversion.
In Summary
2016 is the year to make every deal you close and campaign you run case study worthy in 2016. Now is to time to clean house and pull it all together. Integrate your inititives from silo specific platforms into unified systems, such as HubSpot and others. Wake up, smell the coffee, and take inventory of your goals, campaigns, and platforms. Then reap the rewards in the new year and beyond.
For the latest 2016 B2B and NPO best practices white papers and digital marketing guides visit Tapp's Resource Center.
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