If you don’t have the time to read this article now, you can download the PDF version of Marketing Trends 2024 for free by clicking below. Otherwise, just keep reading.

For the past three years running, brands have been living on borrowed goodwill. They have been happily jumping onto every bandwagon without thinking more deeply than showcasing their innovative thinking. 

Consumers don’t want just innovation. Consumers want action. Consumers want the brands they follow to speak up for them. Consumers – especially the younger generation, the ones that have yet to settle their loyalties with one brand – know that their purchasing power has a way of changing the status quo, and aren’t afraid to wield it. 

In 2024, businesses are practically the only trusted institution remaining. Governments, NGOs, and media entities are all lagging behind. Their ability to influence their audiences, their equity, and the power of their voice is all eroding underneath the faster-paced, louder business presence. 

But this doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way. 

And marketing in 2024 will mean very little unless this is understood very clearly by the brands doing the marketing. 

This is not a year where you can please both sides. This is a year where brands have to make a decision on which consumers they want to speak to – and to consistently speak to them thereafter. 

And they can do that by speaking where consumers will hear them. 

A snapshot of 2023: 

Marketing grows more complicated every year that passes. 

There’s new technology to use. There are new audiences to speak to. There are new voices added to an already crowded fray.  Every campaign has to be better than the ones of the year before. Every campaign has to cut through the noise of what’s happening outside the little slices of the world that brands live in. 

And 2023 had a lot of noise. The world is in crisis, and has been for a while – wars, recessions, climate crisis, growing dissatisfaction, protests on protests. 2024 will not see things get better immediately (and could possibly see things getting worse) – but as we said in our Consumer Macro Trends blog, there is light at the end of the tunnel for marketers. 

Brands just need to put in a little more work to make sure they’re on the right side of the conversation. 

Marketing trends in 2024: innovation, escalation, personalisation

Barriers between consumers are shrinking – and something that happens halfway around the world will be heard everywhere in a matter of seconds. 

But it isn’t just for bad news. Brands that do good – or at least their best to do good – will find that their accolades are shouted about in markets that they might not have previously considered – and the old method of communicating with their consumers based on their basic demographics is proving itself to be lacking when it comes to this generation of consumers. 

In 2024, brands aren’t speaking to audiences that are bound by causes, by opinions, by the way that they see things in the world, by the technology that they use, by a deep and understated need to find themselves in marketing. 

It means better conversations, deeper analysis of those audiences, and best of all, the room to let creativity go wild. 

It means innovation, escalation, and personalisation.

Trend 1: Innovation 

• Short-form video has the highest ROI of all marketing ventures. 
• 79% of consumers want to use AR before buying a product. 
• 65% of all internet traffic is conducted via mobile 

We live in an age of unmatched connection. Everything, from customer service to entertainment, is available immediately and in its full scope. 

Consumers no longer like to wait. As new technology is dreamed of, finding consumers who are willing to wait for your brand to keep up with current events is harder and harder – so, as they say, if you can’t beat them, join them. 

But it’s not just a case of having a website. 

There are technologies available today that make your brand experience an experience. Whether it’s using AR to showcase your products in real time, or hopping onto the latest social media trend in video, you can’t avoid beating technology, so you might as well join it. 

In 2023, the metaverse was all the rage. This isn’t the case in 2024, but we’re seeing fringe technologies like AR and VR command attention.

It isn’t really about the tech. 

For consumers, it’s about the brand; it’s about knowing what product or service they’re buying is actually what they want. Globally, the real value of wages is down. Globally, there is a sense of being out of control, and being unable to fix the big, glaring issues that affect most of society. Something that takes them out of that state of thinking – even if it’s only a little thing – will make waves. 

Case study 

Hand in hand with ten leading ASD associations and over 100 patients, Samsung released a free app called ‘Unfear’ that pairs with their Galaxy earbuds to help people with auditory sensitivities live their lives freely. The app, which is AI-enabled, blocks distressing noises and plays sounds to cover the noises that distress that user in particular – and suppresses what it can’t block. 

 Trend 2: Escalation – deeper communication fostered

• 40% of marketers see controversy as inevitable. 
• The increase of over 2.3 million US citizens as cross-border buyers precipitates greater cross-border and no-border purchases in 2024. 
• 76% of consumers are using social media as a search engine. 

If you’re marketing in 2024, you’re marketing to the entire world – both the good and the bad. 

Brands have been slowly, inexorably going global since the creation of the internet, but it was after COVID-19 that globalisation really peaked. On the one hand, it’s an excellent opportunity to court the kind of audience that might be difficult to find locally; on the other, it means that your conversations are subject to a lot more scrutiny than they might have been initially. 

Coupled with an audience that has become increasingly stratified and a worldwide obsession with black-and-white thinking, brands have to dig deeper to make the kind of conversational connections that they used to – and that’s not taking into account the moments when those conversations go wrong. 

This isn’t bad for brand. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. Consumers like this care deeply about a company – so deeply that they see brands as extensions of themselves, extensions of how they think about the world, extensions that they can proudly champion. 

While it means that brands need to be more careful about what they say, and craft their narrative to fall on the side of the conversation they want to be on, audiences today are smart and dedicated to the companies that they want to see thrive. For brands, it’s an easy win, and a hard road to get there. 

This doesn’t mean that brands will always be in the right. Controversy is part of the brand experience for 2024, and no amount of hedging your bets is going to help you avoid that.

If you find a position you’re willing to stand by, stand by it. If you find an argument you want to make, make it. If you think that an issue has no place for you to communicate in, stay quiet, and communicate about an issue you can talk about. 

Brands cannot afford to stay silent.  

What does this mean for you and your business?

You have to pick a side, and you have to talk. Controversy is unavoidable – that isn’t a bad thing. There will always be an audience that will see the side of things that you see, so if you’re happy to continue to communicate with that audience, then do so. If you’re not, you need to communicate with the audience that you are happy to talk to. 

Staying silent, pleasing both sides, and simply walking back any controversial statement has diminishing returns. It’s time for your brand personality to take the centre  

Case study 

Ahead of the release of Scream VI, QYOU created a series of interactive content campaigns that played out across social media in order to draw the interest of both new and existing fans of the franchise. They employed over 16 creators in four different campaigns that culminated in 17.5M views, 1.9M engagement, and an overall click-thru rate nearly 3x the platform’s benchmark. 

Trend 3: Personalisation – the individual, not the audience

• 56% of consumers state they will become repeat buyers after a highly personalised experience. 
• 92% of businesses will be investing in AI to create better personalised experiences.
• 62% of consumers will move away from a brand if it does not provide personalised recommendations.

The amount of data brands have at their disposal is staggering – so it isn’t surprising that consumers expect more from their experiences with brands than what they currently get. Add in the lingering effects of the post-pandemic chaos, and the fact that there is simply too much choice for consumers to make, and you have a perfect storm of consumers that both expect a personalised experience from brands, while maintaining a modicum of privacy and rigidly aware of the minor factors that can make or break a successful brand interaction. 

Think of cookies. 

Cookies offer that very personalisation by knowing you: knowing what you browse, knowing what you buy, knowing where you go when you want to read something or spend some time on the internet. However, as a result of the changing legal requirements around consumer data privacy – pushed into law by the same consumers who thrive on personalised shopping approaches – third party cookies are on their way out. 

Consumers have an overabundance of choice available to them, and there are few brands who will be able to withstand an audience deciding to switch. As consumers more heavily consider brands as an extension of their own selves, they expect to see a reflection of what they find interesting in the brand selection process to start with, and for brands to know them as well as all that collected data suggests. 

Case study 

Dove teamed up with Open Source Afro Hair Library and Edelman to launch the ‘Code My Crown’ campaign, a free to use guide that teaches young gamers and developers how to code natural and protective hairstyles in video games. The guide follows on from Dove’s previous efforts to end race-based hair discrimination in workplaces and schools and champion a real change in the world for the individual. 

What does this mean for you and your business?

You probably already have data on your consumers. Now it’s time to dig deeper into it, and find the aspects of that data that you can use to show your business knows its audience as well as they know themselves. 

This means occasionally leaning into efforts that might not result in immediate return, but can build your brand’s efforts to stand out, to speak for its consumers, and to create a real, lasting change. 

Trend 4: Fandometrics

• 83% of consumers admit that tie-ins influence purchase decisions. 
• 61% of fans enjoy seeing brands create content that relates to their fandom, provided that they make an effort to understand it. 
• 95% of 2023 content was part of a franchise. 

Fandom has come a long way from being a movement on the fringe edges of awareness; it’s now something that dictates a significant portion of the entertainment industry, and spills over into several others. Brands that partner up with fandoms tend to see a surge of interest in their products, and as 2024 rolls on, the power of the fandom is even more pronounced. 

Tie-ins, brand deals, limited edition offerings: these are all excellent ways to build a conversation with a powerful segment of modern audiences, however it comes with its own pitfalls. Fandom is particularly finicky about how brands communicate to them, and it is likely that any attempt to speak to a fandom by prioritising the brand over the fandom will not be met well. 

Figure out a happy in-between, though, and it’s an excellent way to start an organic conversation with your audience that has a lot of opportunity to keep growing. What it does mean is investing some time into understanding these audience segments – and making sure that they feel listened to.

Case study 

LEGO has recently unveiled their kid-friendly metaverse, a multiplayer crafting-based spin-off of Fortnite, one of the most popular games for the segment they are targeting with over 400 million registered users and around 80 million active players per month. This continues on from Lego’s increasing attempts to digitise their offerings, following their online loyalty program launch, Lego Insiders, this past August. 

What does this mean for you and your business?

Fandom is powerful, and fandom can make you money – but if you’re going to wade into this facet of marketing, you need to know the fandom you’re speaking with will almost certainly be split into factions, and that pleasing all of them is going to be difficult. However, this doesn’t mean you should avoid it: not at all. Study the way other brands interact with fandoms. At the end of the day, this is another conversation, another tie you can build with your consumers, another form of data that you can use – and done well, it has immense potential for lasting brand relationships. 

And in the end…

Business has come a long way since 2020. What started as an upheaval due to COVID-19 has become a completely new way of doing business – and, as a result, a new way of marketing. 

This would be the part where we say there’s no wrong way to market. 

It would be a lie. 

It has become increasingly obvious that the way marketing works has changed, and both marketers and brands have to walk a fine line. Partially due to brands’ easy access to a near never-ending audience, partially due to the fact that that same audience is tired of being marketed to, marketing is no longer as effective as it used to be, and more thought has to go into the messages being relayed to consumers. 

This means understanding those consumers, and also understanding that there is a limit to the amount of marketing messages that those consumers will absorb, much less listen to. 

But this isn’t new. This is the continuation of something that started before now, with a deepening pattern of globalisation and audiences that are inundated with a barrage of information at all times. 

It isn’t hopeless. Most brands can easily pivot into communicating in ways that matter. 

But it takes time, and it takes understanding your audience – and how it changes from one year to the next. 

If you struggle with that, and you need some extra advice, we can help you.

The post Marketing Trends 2024 appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

We’re talking about cold outreach. 

What is cold outreach?

Cold outreach is when you phone, email, or otherwise connect with potential customers without having an initial conversation. This could be reaching out to a company you want to work with or a company you know could benefit from your services. Regardless of what the initial aim is, cold outreach can be a highly effective way to source new leads for your business. 

While it could sometimes result in no responses, cold outreach can have its role while growing a small business – and it can be as effective as networking within conferences or reaching out to warm leads. 

Here’s a few ways to make cold outreach work for you and your business. 

1. Do your research first. 

It might sound like there’s not much difference between cold emailing and spam, but the truth is actually very different – provided you do your research first and you only reach out to prospects that you can actually offer something to. It might sound like a small thing, but taking time to do your research will lend your cold outreach a much-needed, and genuine, boost. 

2. Your connection should be personal. 

Nobody likes receiving unsolicited anything – and as people become ever more reliant on email and text as a communication medium, reaching out to someone out of the blue with a really good offer might not manage to cover the initial irritation of reaching out at all. Fortunately, you can mitigate this a little by making sure that you’ve done your research as stated above, and making sure that however you reach out, you make an effort to connect personally with your prospect. 

This could be something simple as checking their LinkedIn profile while you’re drafting your email and including a reference to something they posted about. 

3. Don’t take forever to get to the point. 

Get to the point as quickly as possible. This grabs attention immediately and is respectful of the time of your readers. Make it clear what you’re offering and how you can help – and in plain language. Respecting your prospect’s time will leave a positive impression, even if the answer is ultimately no. 

One of the inherent risks of cold outreach is that you can put a lot of effort into reaching out only to get a no in response – and that’s fine. You won’t always connect with the people you’re reaching out to every time, and this is an acceptable part of cold outreach. 

Is cold outreach worth the time and effort?

Yes. Absolutely.

You might not ever meet your perfect client through networking or in-person connections – they could be located in another country, or they could simply be working with another company and you might have reached out at the wrong time. 

With cold outreach, however, the numbers are on your side. If you do your research, the number of potential leads you can reach out to increases exponentially, and a few replies will definitely come your way. 

Ultimately, cold outreach is a good way to connect with potential clients, whether or not they ultimately say yes. Making sure you have a good impression right at the outset will help keep you top of mind for when the client does need your help – and pass on your details to other clients who could potentially use your services. 

The post Is cold outreach for SMBs worth it? appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Fortunately, you’ve already done part one of the work that comes with scaling up your tech business: you know your audience. To open up a tech business, knowing your audience is often the first fundamental step, the one that will dictate what will happen next in your business journey. Once you have that background ready, the next steps are figuring out what value you can add to their lives beyond the product.

This is where content marketing comes in. Content marketing adds value to your consumers by using your expertise to generate information for them. From blogs to customer insights to sector-specific expertise, content marketing showcases a side of your business to your audience that they might find difficult to see just through using your products.

Here are a few content marketing tactics that work to continue scaling up your business, no matter what business you’re in.

Know your content’s value proposition

There’s a hell of a lot of content out of there, and most of it is great content, and that opens up the next question: why should people read your content over anyone else’s? This is where your content needs to shine. So, before you actually get started producing that content, know what you’re going to deliver with it that makes it impossible for your intended audience to skip past it.

Bite-sized content

As we said: there’s a lot of really good content out there, and it can be difficult for your audience to decide which content they should focus on, especially if your content tends to be on the longer side. While we’re not saying you should shorten your content fully, a summary or a bite-sized piece of content that draws the most salient facts to the forefront is a good way of attracting attention and providing value while not taking up too much of their time.

Build a success template

If you already have an idea of what a successful piece of content does and delivers, this step will be easy. Once you’ve had a good, crafted piece of content already, recreating that success is a matter of understanding the formula you used to get to that Is it a combination of the colours that you used for a graphic, a certain structure for a blog? Whatever it is, identify and create templates based on what a successful piece of content looks like, and then strive to push past that limitation with every consecutive piece of work.

Identifying and setting KPIs will work well here. Additionally, knowing what results you want to strive for can help you build a successful pattern that is easy to replicate for future content.

Vary your content

It’s easy to just stick your content creation in one basket and hope for the best, however varying your content throughout the month has a much better chance of attracting the interest of your audiences. Your audiences might not read every blog post you put out, but varying your content between blogs, charts, polls, and personal opinions will give your consumers a much fuller view of the scope of your company’s capabilities.

Content marketing tactics can be tricky to get right to start with and then easy to replicate the success of once you do understand what sort of content works best, but until you get there, it’s just a matter of trial-and-error testing until you see results.

Using content to scale up your business isn’t quick, but providing content that adds value to your consumers’ lives with no necessary requirement for purchase is necessary for positioning your brand as an expert in its industry. It helps build a significant amount of trust – and it’s trust that will encourage your customers to work with you and to stick around for a long time.

The post Scaling Up Your Tech Company: Content Marketing Tactics that Work appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Positive, recent testimonials showcase the best of your ability to please your clients and fulfill their business needs. They function as a high-speed word-of-mouth, telling prospective clients that you can be trusted and, more importantly, you can exceed their expectations.

Here are five ways you can get those great client testimonials right where you need them: online, where everyone can see. 

1. LinkedIn recommendations.

If you’re not on LinkedIn yet – or if you’re on LinkedIn, but you’re not using it to its fullest extent – this is step one to take into consideration. LinkedIn recommendations allow your clients to tag you personally, but those recommendations will be visible to everyone in their network, giving you a much bigger platform than your own website might provide. 

2. End-of-work survey. 

Put a little bit of effort into creating a survey that you can send out to your clients when you complete a job for them – and make sure to make it as easy and as painless to fill it out as possible. The best time to get the client testimonials you need is right after the work is complete, when the job is still fresh in your clients’ mind. While we’re sure you have a feedback form in mind, this is slightly different: it asks your client what the overall project experience was like, and it doesn’t need to be as complicated as a feedback form, making it much more likely that your client will fill it out fast. 

3. Showcase your projects. 

All the client testimonials in the world won’t help you generate business if you don’t show the proof of your work – but it goes deeper than that. It can’t just be a case of putting your favourite projects into a slideshow on your website and hoping for the best: you need a dedicated section where you can show your work, talk about the thinking behind it, and add in that client feedback that we mentioned above. The more detailed an explanation there is, the more insight a prospective client gains into the way you work – and the more your existing testimonials will be put into perspective. 

4. Give your clients somewhere to put their reviews. 

Building a good relationship with your clients aside, making their lives a lot easier is part and parcel of generating the kind of testimonials that you’d be proud to display on your website. If you’re in constant contact, you might want to provide them a link to somewhere they can leave feedback; if not, make sure your website is easy to navigate, and include a testimonial page as a matter of course. The easier you make it to leave reviews, the much more likely your clients will be happy to provide you with reviews – and to recommend you to their business partners, friends, and family. 

5. The personal touch is key. 

Beyond ease and convenience, there’s a single important factor you need to keep in mind: no client is going to review your work if they feel like a simple entry in your business process. While it’s going to take a little extra time on your end, building a relationship with your client isn’t just important – it’s becoming increasingly necessary just to do business, let alone to generate feedback on your work. Above everything else, a good relationship with your client will smooth the road for that testimonial you can put your company reputation behind – and open up new opportunities for growth. 

Testimonials are an effective and cost-effective way to build your brand reputation within the industry, and it can definitely lead to new work opportunities in the long run, but it can be complicated to navigate on your own. If you need help setting up your external communication as a B2B company, drop us a line, and let’s do this!

The post How to Generate Testimonials: B2B Tech Edition appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Writing about tech when it’s your main offering you’re never be 100% sure what level of tech knowledge your audience has. As a small business, you most likely rely on your content to make it through to your audience so you can generate more business, so you can write more content, so you can generate more business.

One way to mitigate the issue is to tune your writing has to cater to a wide range of possible knowledge. Then comes the concern that your writing will ‘dilute’ the power of your tech. But there are ways around this.

Here’s a few ways to make sure your content always hits the right marks. 

Publish different kinds of content. 

A good content strategy doesn’t build itself on one kind of content only: it works in different types of blogs, surveys, personal posts, outbound links. This will help on two fronts – it’ll keep your audience engaged if they’re not quite sure what they’re going to read about at any given point in time, and it’ll make it a lot easier for you to put out excellent content every time. 

Consistent brand voice. 

People follow your brand for a reason, and that reason may vary between audience members. The only way you can capture and hold their attention without knowing why they follow you is to make sure that your brand is as much itself as it can be – and that means creating a consistent brand voice for your audience to connect to. The familiarity can help push a connection to audience members that will take the heavy lifting out of establishing trust between your brand and your audience. 

Light on the jargon. 

This doesn’t mean don’t use any kind of jargon: as a company with a specific purpose, sometimes you have to call a spade a spade. What is important is to make sure that the jargon you use has a place and a purpose in its use, and you’re not just throwing out difficult concepts for the sake of establishing yourself as the cleverest brand in the room. Your audience needs to know what you’re talking about. Your audience also has other things to do. 

Think deeper about current issues. 

One of the best things about the tech industry is that it’s a constantly growing, adapting, changing industry, and good ideas come out of nowhere. One of the worst things about it is that it can easily become an industry where thought leadership gets put on the back burner in favour of just giving an opinion on what’s currently happening. For your brand’s sake, go deeper than that. Make new connections, come up with solutions to current issues, think farther than the limits of what’s being spoken about. 

Establish yourself as a thought leader. 

Opinions are great. Thought leadership is better. Establishing your business as someone to follow not to get an opinion, but to get the idea of where the current tech landscape is heading off to is an excellent way to build up both your own and your brand’s social currency – and to keep people following you not for the latest news, but for understanding the latest news and how it impacts their lives. 

Avoid sales speak. 

You have to generate revenue, and that’s understandable – but humans are storytelling creatures at their core. Speaking to your audience as a storyteller instead of a salesman helps you build trust, and making sure that they know they can follow you because you have their best interests at heart, rather than because you want to make a quick sale. 

Use visuals. 

With tech, text can be confusing to follow along, especially when you’re trying to explain a concept that might be better explained with a diagram or a graphic. Besides the ease of explanation, having visuals included in your content breaks up text-heavy feeds, and makes it more likely that your audience will remember and interact with your offerings. 

Follow up and interact with your audience. 

When all you do is publish content, it can be easy for your audience to think of you as only a business. Interacting and following up on your content will help build a connection to your audience, which can then help your content stand out further on their feeds. 

Use your own experiences and case studies.

Tangible proof of your expertise is an excellent way to amplify your position of authority with your audience, and can go a long way towards building your credibility and your business’ ethics online. 

Create interactive content. 

Content, by its definition, tends to be a broadcast rather than an interaction: if it’s a blog, video, or graphic, your audience can’t really interact beyond commenting. However, polls and quizzes can help add a much-needed element of interactivity that can break up a normal pattern of non-interactive content, and thus create a deeper connection with your audience. 

The post 10 Content Marketing Tips for Tech SMBs appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Trends and emerging behaviours can affect an entire industry. This applies to your brand or company if you’re in the industry that’s seeing this shift. New opportunities, drastic shifts, or even a stable, long-term change to the industry situation can be the result. Here are some insights we have gained from a retrospective look at industry trends:

• Be strategic in Content Marketing and document it
• Have a dedicated Content Marketing Team
• Measure the effectiveness of Content Marketing through ROI accurately
• Prioritise the audience’s needs over yours when it comes to Content Marketing
• Instagram was the platform with the highest ROI

It’s all about communities (and valuable content)

• 54% of surveyed technology companies are confident in investing more in creating communities.

Companies should try more than ever to build a community that has an interest beyond just products/services. Values, vision, mission, and goals are a powerful mechanism to keep people engaged and interested.

Consumers want to know more about your company. Today more than ever, buying a product is often a personal statement. Therefore, companies should do all they can to build a community that has an interest beyond just products/services.

What do I do about this?

To build a community, it’s important to figure out what your specific audience finds interesting. More specifically, ask yourself who the company wants to target and why. Community building is not about imposing your will on potential customers. Rather, it is a two-way game of positioning yourself (in terms of values) and recognising what is important to your target audience. People out there build the community, not the employees, the CEO, or the company itself. Content should be created to match the current customer journey. Content should add value to the community.

Class, not mass

• Experts predict that a mass of (low quality) content will be produced with AI and flood the market.

Generative AI is now accessible to everyone and can be used for content creation. Therefore, many will not check or adjust the content in detail, which can lead to an immense wave of unqualified and undifferentiated (or even factually incorrect) content.

What do I do about this?

Generate high value content. What does high value mean? Tailor it to your target audience and their needs. You could do good and talk about it, show your workflows, and engage in discussions with your audience. Help readers reach their goal and understand the reason for their search and pain points. Ask yourself what is the benefit of your content for each of your audiences regarding their goals. Use AI as a tool not as the solution. HubSpot mentioned that Generative AI can be very good for idea generation, text improvement or information retrieval. At the same time, be critical, check the content, and give it a personal touch.

The new use of Social Media

Social Selling

• McKinsey predicts that in 2025 5.2% of all e-commerce will be  made by Social Commerce.
• Hubspot anticipate that in 2023 more sales will be generated via social media platforms than via the company’s own website.

Social media is increasingly being used for sales transactions. Social Selling is a major selling point in China and even in America it is too big to ignore. Someone scrolls on Instagram and sees a great piece of clothing or is reminded of their recently broken cable and has the opportunity to buy the products directly on the platform.

What do I do about this?

To sell on social media, brands need to establish trust on these platforms. Users ask questions about security, legitimacy and quality. This raises questions such as: Can I return it? Is it really genuine? Is it of the same quality as on the brand website? At this early companies can develop structures to exploit this new sales source.

Customer Service

• About 20% of GenZ, Millennials or Gen X have sent a message on social media to contact customer service.

Social Media is an easily accessible source for consumers to contact a company. Therefore, it’s no wonder that customers are increasingly contacting companies via social media.

What do I do about this?

Companies should train their customer service department on this and work closely with the social media team. As part of the emerging trend of “social selling,” these inquiries may become more frequent. See it as a chance to gain trust and to build a long term relationship with a customer, if you are able to solve their problems fast and with patience.

Social SEO: Social media as search engines

• Social media are supplementing search engines. This is a prediction from Hubspot.

The reason lies in the change in search behaviour. Consumers use various sources of information, including YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc.

What do I do about this?

Evolve your information points to take advantage of this as a company and stand out. The integration of keywords/hashtags is essential and an easy and consistent username is convenient for consumers to remember. Make it as easy as possible to find your company throughout the whole internet. You can use these sources for research as well to be up to date.

Your opportunity

Trends can change drastically from year to year, but they will still affect the way your business will grow and change in the coming year, and so it’s vital that you pay attention to what’s happening around you. Whether you’re a small enterprise or a large corporation, trends can still bite into, or create profits.

If you’re struggling to make sense of how to use these trends, we’re always happy to help, so drop us a line and let’s do this!

The post Navigating industry shifts with trends in content marketing appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

What is SEO and why is it important in Malta?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is about increasing the quality and quantity of user traffic a website receives from organic search results. Basically, SEO is every effort you make towards your website ranking at the top of Google Search results for relevant search terms. For most businesses in Malta SEO is normally something they’ve heard of, but haven’t looked into properly, or brushed it off as an unnecessary marketing expense that they can do without. This results in a huge amount of missed opportunities. Here’s why.

Think about the way you research and purchase a product. We’re willing to bet that most of the time, your journey starts with a Google search. You’re either researching the product type, a specific brand or perhaps you already know what you want. You might just be looking for a website that delivers to your country. 

With that in mind, think about just how many purchasing journeys in your industry are started each day. How many of those is your business missing out on because your website isn’t optimised for SEO, and not appearing at the top of search results?

Another reason that for businesses in Malta SEO is a must is because of international competition. More and more businesses are looking overseas for customers thanks to the boom in eCommerce and the shift to remote work. This means that many businesses are less limited by geographic locations and can offer their services more broadly. This is where SEO efforts & Google Search results become essential. If you can rank well against all your competitors, including international ones, you’re guaranteeing that a large number of potential customers will find you organically.

SEO Services by Switch

At Switch, we understand that your website’s performance can make or break your company’s goals in a number of ways. While we can help you build a beautiful website, it would essentially be worthless without a steady stream of high-quality traffic. That’s where our SEO services come in.

Optimising your website to attract high-intent users from search is one of the first things we suggest. A large percentage of business leaders underestimate the power of SEO in Malta. And in doing so, miss one of the most effective ways of generating leads.

We get this done through a specific process that’s tailored to each of our clients. In the following paragraphs, we’ll take you through what the steps we take usually are. We’ll talk about why each step is so important, and what sets us apart from others in the field. You can also learn more about the importance of SEO in a little more detail if that’s what you’re looking for. Especially about how it can affect your brand’s trust & authority.

If you’re ready to talk about how to introduce SEO into your business, click here and let’s get the ball rolling. Otherwise, keep reading!

How Switch handles SEO in Malta

Context

Understanding the Industry

Before even looking at your website, we study the context of your business and its place within your industry. This is where we will need the majority of your input. At the end of the day, you know your industry and business better than anyone. During the process of onboarding a new client, we also set our research team loose. Their task is to gather every shred of information they can from all the sources available.

Audience Identification

One cannot really understand an industry without also analysing the market that it serves in-depth. Audiences can range from an entire country’s worth of purchasers to a handful of individuals responsible for purchases within organisations. Each audience that we identify always requires a unique approach, as they always differ in their behaviour and interests. Accurately understanding what attracts the right audience is already half the SEO content battle won.

Competitor Analysis

As part of our research, we deep-dive into all marketing being done by all local & international competitors in your industry. This usually results in an understanding of audiences that are currently already being targeted. Along with those that are currently left out and might be worth communicating to. When appropriate, we also analyse overseas players in the industry for further industry insights.

Website Technical Audit

Consistently high-ranking websites are created and optimised in a very particular way. This allows Search Engines like Google to easily scan them to understand their structure and content. The result of this scan judges whether they’re high-quality enough to rank well on search result pages. If your website was not built with SEO in mind, it may be lacking in certain key technical SEO areas, stifling performance.

We’ll perform an in-depth analysis of your website, then highlight and prioritise changes that would greatly improve SEO performance. Suggested adjustments can be related to any of the following:

• Indexing errors
• Low-quality content
• Incorrect Robots.txt usage
• Mobile page issues
• Structured data errors
• Inaccurate metadata
• No internal link optimisation
• Lack of https security
• Slow page speed
• Duplicate content
• Broken links

Content Strategy & Production

Keyword Research

With a strong foundation of research and knowledge of the industry, we can now begin our keyword research. Using cutting-edge industry tools, we determine which attainable keywords are most relevant to your business. These will also depend on what resources we have at our disposal. This is where our creativity and industry knowledge shines.

Attempting to rank for the most obvious industry keywords is a tempting idea, however, it’s usually an extremely expensive endeavour. Many-a-time there are other keyword opportunities hiding beneath the surface. These would allow us to capture specific parts of the market with significantly less effort and required resources. Capturing ancillary keywords gives a website just starting to optimise for SEO the chance to begin collecting useful traffic, while also building its authority through great content.

Effective, Long-lasting Content

Putting all the research and technical jargon aside, you still need excellent content to be able to attract your target audience. At Switch, we are a multidisciplinary team of writers, designers, illustrators, photographers, video specialists, and audio dabblers. We’re happy to push ideas around and see how they grow and flourish as each mind adds something to the story. 

With a broad and eclectic set of sources of inspiration and an unusual way of connecting the dots, we’re known for creating work that’s beautifully innovative.

Authority & Link Building

Ranking well in competitive keyword landscapes also depends on the number of times other websites have linked to yours. We call these backlinks. The more backlinks you have, the more authority you have in Google’s mind. And the more highly you’ll rank for a given keyword. Google also takes into account other factors, such as your social media presence and online conversations about your brand.

Building quality backlinks and authority is extremely important, but it’s also a complicated process. One of the most challenging but effective ways of building backlinks is to create content that other websites want to link to. The more authority the website that has linked to you has, the more valuable the link.

Through our content strategy and keyword research, we’ll identify the absolute best opportunities available to build these links. With time and effort, ranking for more and more competitive and valuable keywords will become easier.

Optimisation & Reporting

Just like any other marketing campaign, reporting and analysis of results is an essential part of the process. Here’s how:

• Keeping constant track of our progress on each individual keyword we’re attempting to rank for.
• Monitoring the performance of each piece of content we produce, along with what the competition is actively doing.
• Using a combination of our years of experience and the industry tools available to us.

Through an extensive set-up process, we’ll also make sure to be constantly analysing the behaviour of the traffic we’re drawing. This way, we make sure we’re pulling in the intended audience. At the end of the day, getting huge amounts of traffic is useless if nobody is converting into paying clients. Regardless of the results, we will always aim to boost the conversion rate of all the traffic we send to your website through a live content strategy and constant keyword research.

What are the benefits of SEO?

Matching user intent to useful content.

The whole point of a search engine is simple. It takes what people are searching for, scours the internet for it, then provides the closest matches. That may be the mother of all oversimplifications, but that’s the basic gist. This happens really quickly, and it happens literally billions of times per day.

If you want a little more detail on how search engines (mostly Google) have gotten this done over the years, take a look at this video by Google themselves.

With all that context in mind, SEO is basically the act of making it as likely as possible for a search engine to pick your website when someone searches a term that’s relevant to your business.

Quality Traffic

Digital marketing efforts are often measured in clicks. Your marketing team might give you a report on a particular campaign and hail it a success because it generated so many of them. 

But this begs the question – how many of those clicks were actually worth anything?

The click is only the midway point of the journey towards a conversion. If your campaigns generate 1,000s of clicks, but 95% of those clicking users never got past your homepage, how successful are they?

This is the most obvious reason for investing in SEO, and, in turn, investing in traffic from organic search results. Think about your own behaviour. If you’ve Googled something and clicked on a result you found interesting, you’re going to give a decent look at that website. Especially if the site has what you’re looking for.

Trust & Awareness

If a website ranks at the top of Google search results for a relevant query, that result alone provides it with some level of authority and credibility. You’re much more likely to trust a website that occupies the spot usually kept by Wikipedia. Then, if that website ranked #1, the user clicked, then had a positive experience, a relationship has been formed. Even if it’s the first time that particular user is interacting with that brand.

If SEO is properly implemented on a website, it will achieve high rankings on a number of relevant industry keywords. Then, it can enjoy a flow of organic traffic and leads without having spent a single cent on paid digital advertising.

As we’re explaining above, it’s obviously not something that can be achieved at the drop of a hat. It requires technical knowledge, a sound strategy, the means to produce great content, and a little bit of grit.

Does your business need SEO services?

If you have (or need) a website which will generate leads/purchases with the right traffic sent to it, then you definitely need SEO services. If you had to take potential leads and spread them out on a scale from cold to hot, the majority of leads that are generated through SEO are definitely on the hot end due to their intent. And what business doesn’t need more hot leads?

For businesses that want to be ahead of the curve in Malta SEO is a no-brainer. That’s because of a combination of competition from overseas markets, along with the apathetic approach to SEO that many local businesses suffer from. If you’re ready to take the next step and are looking for a guide, click here.

Free SEO Audit

Still unsure whether your website needs an SEO strategy? Why not start with finding out where your website stands from a technical SEO point of view? Just fill in the form below to get a free, no-strings-attached audit of your site, sent straight to your email.

SEO Trends in 2022

If you want to read about the very latest trends dominating SEO in 2022, and how they will affect your SEO efforts in Malta, click below.

Further Reading

If you’d like to learn more about SEO, here’s a list of articles we’ve put together at Switch on the subject. These are based on our decades of experience, and include tried and tested tips & suggestions. We hope you find them useful.

Planning 2022: SEO

Local SEO in Malta: 3 Essential Tips to Get Started

Why Writing for SEO in 2021 is Bad SEO Advice

Is SEO worth it for you? Here’s how to find out.

SEO Trends 2022: More Human

The post SEO Malta: A Complete Guide appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Are you well known in your industry? Do you have a good relationship with your consumers? Are you top of mind for recall, or do you rely on word of mouth?

Are you frustrated that your product or service is awesome, but there don’t seem to be enough people who know just how great it could be for them?

Or are you frustrated that your product or service is leagues better than the competition but you don’t seem to attract as much attention as they do?

In other words: what’s more strategically important to you – lead generation, or demand generation? 

Or do you focus on both?

Here’s our opinion on it: lead generation, demand generation, it doesn’t really matter which one you focus on so long as you include a little of both in your strategy. Missing lead generation for demand generation, or vice versa, means your brand is potentially operating at half capacity, half reward, and half demand. 

What is lead generation?

People already know that they have a need. You need to turn them into customers. 

Convincing them that you’re the right option for them is lead generation (well, technically convincing them that you’re interesting enough to have a conversation with them about a solution) . 

Lead generation works by turning brand awareness into hot leads – customers who are 100% on board with your brand and, ideally, ready to make a purchase. 

In the B2B sales funnel, lead generation takes place after you’ve already created some demand for your product, and you’re pushing your social media or your homepage. When customers click-through to learn more, that’s when lead generation starts: once there’s enough interest in you to look up what you do, what benefits you can give to people who buy your brand, how you differ from the people you’re competing against. Lead generation puts your product or your brand at the centre of a customer’s problem and tells them, this can help. 

What is demand generation?

You offer a service. People don’t know what it is and how it can help them. 

Teaching them how your service (or product) helps is demand generation. 

Demand generation works on establishing demand for your product or service in situ: on social media, on your website, using free content, using paid content – regardless of the place or the method, demand generation works to put your offering on the map. Consumers don’t come into it, necessarily; while content for demand generation is created for consumers, the end goal is awareness, not to generate revenue. 

In our B2B sales funnel metaphor, it’s the first step you take: raising awareness about your service offering. Strictly speaking, it also forms a big part of lead generation, hence why these two steps always work better together. 

Think about it: it’s not just about generating demand. That demand has to be met; you have to attract consumers. Demand generation posits a theory – here is your problem, and potentially, there is a solution for it.

Lead generation posits the solution itself – you have a problem, here’s how WE fix it best.

What’s the difference between lead generation and demand generation?

In essence: a lot. 

But those differences play off on each other. 

Demand generation is about your customer: their life and the theoretical issue they want to fix. Demand generation offers them information for free; on social media, in blogs, in flyers, on billboards. Your brand is always present, but it’s the problem that has the centre  

That’s stage one. 

Lead generation is about you: the way you can solve that problem, why your product can address this issue better than other products. Your resources are no longer free; they’re behind a subscriber mailing list, or a locked blog post – anything that requires contact information so you know who’s actually interested, who’s ready to make the purchase. 

That’s stage two (and three, once they follow through). 

Can I just work with either lead gen or demand gen?

Lead gen on its own will net you results. So will demand gen. 

But they won’t be on the same level as if you focused on both lead gen and demand gen. 

You can still make people aware of your brand. You can even grow your audience. 

However, it’s harder to make lasting change with half a plan. 

Why do you need both lead gen and demand gen?

Here’s why. 

Everything in marketing relies on each other. If you have a narrative, you need a brand look to go with it. If you have an audience, you need a strategy to court that audience. 

If you have lead generation, you need demand generation. People just being aware of a need doesn’t make them into paying consumers; it just means more people are keeping watch for what you put out. 

But in terms of business growth, time, and money, it means very little. 

Reverse that. 

Say your brand has customers. 

They just don’t know it’s your brand. They see a product or a practice; they have to put in the effort to figure out who you are, what you sell, what’s your story. By the time it comes to purchasing, they can go with half a dozen other prospects. 

Lead gen. Demand gen. 

Both. 

Say you decide to focus just on lead generation – who is actually listening to you? Is there demand for your product? 

What if you just focus on demand generation – what are you doing with all your free content? How are you generating interest in your brand?

Alone, lead generation and demand generation don’t have the same power. Customers might get the solution to their problem, but no explanation as to why, or content will explain why but customers aren’t there to see why they should invest in your brand. 

That’s why lead generation and demand generation work better together: the follow-through. Explain the situation. Explain how you help. Provide the content. Provide more content they can access if they’re really interested. Lead generation feeds into demand generation feeds into lead generation. 

How do I use demand generation and lead generation together?

Demand generation and lead generation work well together naturally. 

But – as with anything in marketing – you need to know your audience. 

Putting out good, free content that’s designed to appeal to your audience is a good idea regardless – but good, free content won’t grow your business on its own. At some point, you need to see a return on the time you invest in creating that content. 

So you keep specific leads in mind. You keep the point at when they’re likely to invest in mind. 

Every content has an audience. Every brand has a consumer in mind that will purchase from them. 

With those leads in mind, creating demand becomes easier, and with easier demand generation, more leads are likely to come your way through methods that are harder to measure, such as word of mouth or private messaging apps. 

If you narrow it down, it’s a three-step process. 

Step one: research your leads. Know everything about them – what’s their biggest pain point? How much are they willing to research to fix it? What can you do to convince them?

Step two: generate your demand. Where are you posting? What social media are you keeping active above others? Where is your free content going? How many people are watching?

Step three: reach out to your leads. Create gated content (or soft-gated content, like we do at Switch). Create content they need to talk to you about. Create content that answers their questions and posits more questions. 

There’s a caveat: your content, your leads, are only ever as good as the effort you put into creating them – especially now, when brands have to deal with a global audience and global competitors. 

How do I start?

You always start with the audience, your brand, and your story. 

These are things you have already. 

You already know who your audience is. You already know what your brand is like. 

You know your story. 

Now you need to figure out which members of your audience are the most valuable. You need to figure out how your brand is speaking to these people. You need to figure out at what point in your B2B sales funnel will new demand turn into new leads. 

Research. Experiment. Go back to the drawing board. 

Repeat. 

Or you can ask for help. 

Whichever way you choose, choose both: lead generation and demand generation. 

The post Lead Generation vs Demand Generation: An Explainer appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

A lot of advertising communication happens between businesses, and it’s quite a different ball game than when communicating to everyday consumers. The biggest difference between the two is that one is usually a much longer-term project than the other. 

There are relatively very few ‘impulse’ purchases in the B2B world. Patience and strategy are the name of the game.

In this article we’re going to discuss the basics of B2B marketing and how to set yourself up for success when trying to generate leads & sales. Let’s start with the fundamental tools you’ll need to get started.

What are the Essential B2B Marketing tools?

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Before getting your feet wet, you’ll need to identify what your targets are. You won’t know if your marketing efforts are succeeding if you’re not measuring the right numbers. So, first figure out what would be the ideal outcome of your marketing. 

Is it a contact-form submission? A purchase on your SaaS eCommerce site? Somebody clicking on the Call Now button on your Facebook page?

One thing we always advise our clients is to try and ignore the vanity metrics, or metrics that can be increased simply by increasing the budget. Getting a high amount of impressions or clicks on a PPC campaign usually just depends on how much money you’re putting in. Instead, look at the Click-Through Rate, for example, as a measure of how effective your PPC ads are.

In most B2B settings, the main metric is cost per lead. How much you’re spending to generate a single lead. You could also go slightly further than that if you’re qualifying your leads and filtering out the ones with little or no value. In that situation, cost per qualified lead is your golden number. This can be easily calculated by dividing your marketing spend by the number of useful leads you’ve generated in that time span. 

Throwing in your generated revenue can also give you your ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) – another metric most marketers use. 

All of this said, KPIs are not just about taking a couple of main metrics and ignoring the rest. As we’ll discuss later on, there are a myriad of smaller metrics you should pay attention to depending on the sub-goal of your marketing efforts. Especially when you’re just starting to communicate with your audience. 

B2B marketing is a long-term game. Expecting the leads to start flowing from the word go is a good way to disappoint yourself. So, for each piece of content or marketing effort your produce, have a metric in mind that will help you judge its effectiveness, and make sure you’re gaining knowledge about your audience based on what they react to. More on content later.

Technical Set-Up

Everything we just mentioned above sounds great, but if your business’s online setup isn’t giving you these numbers, or you don’t know where to find them, you’re DOA. 

Answer the following questions to make sure your technical set-up is ready to give you the numbers you need.

1. Is Google Analytics (or an equivalent) installed on your site, and do you have access to it?
2. Are goals & conversions (such as “Call Now” clicks and contact form submissions) set-up on Google Analytics (or an equivalent)?
3. If you’re advertising on Google Ads, are conversions set-up, and is it linked to your Google Analytics account?
4. Is Google Search Console set-up and linked to your Google Analytics account?
5. If you’re communicating on Facebook, is your Facebook Pixel set-up correctly on your website, and recording conversions?
6. Is your Google My Business account properly set-up with the right information and assets?

If you’ve answered no to any of these questions, or you’re unsure, make it priority number 1 to fix it. These technical issues are usually not too difficult to sort out, but can take time. If you begin communicating without this technical setup complete, you’ll be losing valuable information about your efforts that you won’t be able to recover later.

If you’re not sure where to start, speak to an expert.

How do you identify your B2B audience?

Thoroughly identifying exactly who your audience is has two main benefits.

1. It helps you understand where you could reach them
2. You can tailor your content to what they’re looking for

While business decision-makers are usually the main target, it’s quite unlikely that any B2B business will have just one target demographic. The decision-maker is influenced by a vast and complex set of factors that could encourage them to contact a business. Word of mouth remains one of the most powerful motivators. This means that if you’re a financial services business looking to target CFOs, it doesn’t mean you should limit all your communications to CFO-friendly content. That CFO likely has a wide professional network and colleagues who could influence their decisions.

So, should you create content that appeals to every individual a CFO might have in their lives? Not exactly, but thinking slightly wider than a typical CFOs interests will help broaden the scope of your communications. 

Spend time figuring out where your target audience is most easily reachable, and what sort of content they would find truly valuable. Let’s start with the first bit.

Which Channels should you use for B2B Marketing?

The most common digital B2B marketing channels are:

• Social media
• PPC/Display Advertising
• Paid Search (SEM)
• SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) & Content Marketing
• Email Marketing

There are others, but these are the main ones from a digital point of view.

All of that said, choosing B2B communication channels is definitely a subjective choice. It should be based on where you feel your audience is most receptive to communication and can vary from industry to industry, from company to company.

It may still make sense in your particular case to rely on cold-calls, but studies have shown only around 2% of cold-calls actually result in an appointment. And as time goes by, the prospect of cold-calling potential clients in an age of high-quality B2B communication strategies seems more and more inappropriate.

The main B2B communication channels mentioned above can be split into two; inbound and outbound. Let’s start with the latter. Outbound communication can be simply defined as communication that happens when the receiver isn’t looking for it. They’re scrolling through their social media, browsing a news site, or watching a video on YouTube when they’re suddenly faced with an ad. 

This type of advertising is extremely common, yet is essential for brands looking to build awareness around their company, product, or service. The effectiveness of this type of advertising is heavily reliant on the quality of the content. Many-a-time, brands resort to fantastical claims or clickbait to draw attention away from other content that their audience is looking at. With that said, there are versions of outbound marketing that are common, and extremely useful for B2B communication.

LinkedIn

Before you ask, no, we’re not talking about creating a company profile on LinkedIn and posting the exact same content you post on Facebook. LinkedIn can be used for much more than that from an individual level. Having company leadership active on LinkedIn can be an excellent way to share knowledge and industry insights to everyone in their network – most likely, individuals with a sphere of influence that will include potential clients. 

If said leadership has curated their LinkedIn network well, posts high-value content, and communicates genuinely, word-of-mouth can spread organically and effectively. 

There are countless studies showing that word-of-mouth is likely the most effective business generator. LinkedIn is a channel that very much encourages post virality based on its engagement. If a post gets traction, it’s reach can expand exponentially, very quickly. 

It’s also one of the slower mainstream social media channels. In the sense that the lifespan of a post can sometimes be several weeks long, versus the immediacy of posts on other platforms such as Facebook & Instagram. On the latter channels, even successful posts don’t last longer than a couple of days before losing relevance. 

For the reasons mentioned above, LinkedIn is the best outbound form of B2B marketing when it comes to social media, but your mileage may vary based on which industry/location you’re in.

B2B PPC/Display Advertising

As we’ve mentioned, the typical B2B audience is usually a relatively small one. Standard targeting methods offered by ad platforms such as Facebook & Google Ads can provide some measure of success, but as time goes by, these methods are becoming slightly less effective due to privacy updates. This slight inaccuracy makes it difficult to justify the advertising spend required to generate decent quality traffic.

That said, however, using PPC/Display advertising for retargeting purposes can have major benefits. Once someone has shown interest in a piece of communication you’ve created, then visits your website, you likely want that person to revisit soon. That’s where retargeting comes in. It’s also the main reason your technical setup needs to be on point – without it, accurate retargeting isn’t possible.

Just make sure your communication when retargeting is tailored to those who are already aware of what you offer.

B2B Email Marketing

Another highly-effective outbound form of B2B marketing is email, but it works slightly differently to the rest. Obviously, before you start sending out emails, you need to build a list. This can be done in quite a few different ways, including the use of lead magnets, website pop-ups, or simply getting all your business cards you’ve collected over the years and inserting them into a database (not exactly recommended). Building a database of useful contacts is not easy, but it is essential, and a subject that requires its own deep-dive. In the meantime, read this to get more acquainted. 

Once your list starts growing, you can start emailing. But do so with caution. Here are some tips to keep in mind when writing your email marketing content.

Provide valuable content

Don’t invade someone’s inbox with sales language from day one. You need to give your list a reason to open your second email, not just your first. Email marketing (like most other good marketing) is about building a value-based relationship over time. Put yourself in your reader’s shoes and think about topics and information that they would find interesting, coming from you. 

Be Consistent

Set clear expectations in terms of frequency and content, and stick to them. If you only get in touch when you need a sales boost, you’ll start to see your open-rate plummet. Be a consistent voice in your audience’s inbox.

Foster Conversations

Email marketing is normally a relatively one-way street in terms of conversation. It doesn’t have to be. Speak like a human and invite conversation. If your content is genuine and engaging, you’ll likely have a few individuals wanting to prod the subject a little further. These individuals could be extremely valuable ambassadors for your business.

There is a lot more to email marketing than the above, but the best tip we can give you is to go ahead and get started. Create a plan and start understanding what kind of email communication works best for your business.

Paid Search (SEM) for B2B

If you’re leading a fledgling B2B company, or one that has been around for longer but has never invested much in terms of SEO, then paid search is probably the best place to start. It’s the first form of inbound marketing we’ve talked about so far. Inbound marketing refers to traffic or interest generated from those who are actively searching for something related to your business. The most obvious version of this is traffic generated through search engines.

With paid search, you target particular keywords that are relevant to your target audience and your business with text ads leading to your business’s website. Sounds simple, because it is. That said, there’s still quite a bit of nuance that goes into it. The most important aspect to keep in mind is the journey your audience goes through.

Always think about the flow that is created from the moment someone searches for a particular term. They’ve written their search term because they’re looking for something in particular, and that’s what you need to make sure to deliver. Don’t target keywords with content that is wildly different from the intent of the searcher, otherwise you’ll just get ignored. 

Make sure your copy is topical, clear, and makes a promise your audience is interested in. That’s only half the battle though. You may have won a click, but the content that they see after clicking is just as important. Now you need to deliver on your promise. The landing page needs to provide exactly what they’re looking for with the right amount of detail, along with a strong CTA – either to purchase, read more, or to get in touch. 

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) & Content Marketing

SEO is a beast of a subject. The amount of content available on the subject is nearly limitless. That’s why we wrote a simple guide for you to figure out whether SEO would be worth a try for your business.

On average, traffic generated organically through search engines is usually one of the highest volume traffic channels for websites, along with the most valuable. Users arriving organically through a search term you’ve ranked for are high-intent individuals who’ve decided that you have what they’re looking for. Therefore their bounce-rate is low, their engagement with your website is high, and they are the most likely to convert. Building this audience is probably one of the most cost-effective, long-term ways to build business.

That said, SEO mostly begins and ends with great content. Obviously, you need to figure out what content you’re going to create for your audience, along with understanding the feasibility of ranking for certain keywords. With that said, SEO is a long-term game that requires strategy and long-term thinking. Here are the basics of what you need:

1. A well-designed website with a solid technical SEO foundation
2. A set of high-traffic keywords with low levels of competition
3. A malleable content strategy that provides value to searchers
4. Analytics that provide real learnings of what’s working

With those four beats covered, you can begin to build organic traffic that provides value to your business. We’ve written a fair share about SEO if you want to keep on learning. 

How do you create the right B2B content?

That’s the golden question. 

Building great B2B marketing content is a test of your understanding of what your audience finds valuable. 

Think about what would attract you, as someone who is probably targeted by B2B communication on a consistent basis. We’re willing to bet that it’s not an email with a subject line in all caps screaming about a new product launch. Or an insistent social media ad, constantly throwing sales figures and percentages in your face, telling you that their offer expires in 24 hours. 

Write and create content (or get someone else to do it) that provides something of value to those you want to be communicating with, and leaves out the rest. Don’t try to be something to everyone, otherwise you’ll be nothing to everyone. 

Also, if you’re writing for SEO, make sure you’re not writing for SEO.

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This SEO tip uses intelligence coming straight from the horse’s mouth – i.e. the source of the data is coming from Google itself – specifically Google Search Console.

Google Search Console, formerly part of Google WebMasters, is a toolset that offers quite a lot of insight into the way that Google’s search engine algorithms interact with your website – specifically your website’s content and the way that organic search traffic is arriving at your website. 

The idea behind this tip is to reverse engineer the search queries which are arriving at your website – and then tailor your content to the user intent behind those queries.

(Proviso: for this trick to work, you already need to have some traffic coming from organic search)

How do you decipher user intent?

In Google Search Console under Performance > Search Results you can see what queries are sending traffic to your website. The Queries tab provides a lot of intelligence. By skimming through the queries, you should immediately see some patterns of user search intent emerging. What you see is also an accurate reflection of your best content marketing work.

Here’s an example. We worked on a content marketing piece that compares two pieces of software for one of our clients. Through Google Search Console we can see which search queries led to that particular page, as seen below. (N.B. The red & blue boxes represent the two pieces of software that we were comparing directly in our piece of content.)

It’s clear from this set of data that we’re clearly covering the intent of those searching for a direct comparison between the two. However, our digging shouldn’t stop there. We’ve satisfied the user intent of these individuals, but there may be others that arrived at our page through search queries that may provide us with hints to improve our content.

In the above screenshot, which is taken from the same search queries list as the one before it, we can make a couple of interesting observations. Several individuals have searched for the comparison of the two pieces of software, but for a different use case than the one we covered in our content. There’s also a cohort of individuals looking for a 3-way comparison with another, newer product that’s come on the market.

Using this information, there are several paths we can take to improve traffic, and fulfill user intent in a more complete way. Firstly, we can improve the content of the original piece of content to cover these queries. Or, if appropriate, we can create a companion piece that would link directly to the existing one.

Based on this lesson, here’s a list of things to keep in mind when performing this exercise with your, or your clients’’, sites.

The following are guidelines, rather than rules but they’ve worked for us

1. First and foremost, make sure your content is answering the users’ search intent exactly. If you can expand your content to hit all aspects of that intent, so much the better.

2. Use MORE of the keywords that are being searched for within that content. Whilst expanding the content on the user search intent, drop a few more keywords around the search queries.

3. Add more images and use search phrases as part of the name of the image, and in the image alt and description.

4. If possible – add a YouTube video that is also tuned towards the users’ search intent. If it doesn’t exist – create it yourself!

5. Tune your H1 title to the search query which is generating the most hits in this case.

6. Tune your meta description and meta keywords to the user’s search intent. If there are missing keywords, try to include them.

7. Be prudent – don’t overstuff your content with keywords – just make sure you have killer content for the user’s search intent.

If you do this for both the content that is generating good CTRs and especially for that content which is not generating good CTRs, you should be able to get a very good organic traffic boost.

This won’t happen overnight of course, but working in conjunction with your other SEO efforts, you should see your organic traffic climbing steadily. We’ve seen instances where the organic traffic increased by more than 30% using these techniques.

As always, also work on retaining the increased traffic. Make it easy for your new visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter or at least follow you on social media. 

Hope this helps you out!

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