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.

Fast-forward to today. 

We just wrapped up our most-successful pop-up sale to date. It even surpassed all three Black Friday sales we’ve held so far. 

Here’s how this worked out. 

The expected is good

We’re all aware of the most anticipated sale period of the year: the notorious Black Friday. We all know it’s coming. We ‘window-shop’ in advance. We make lists. And we rush to buy, buy, buy as soon as the offers drop. 

To make it even more intense, in recent years, retailers have gone past the long weekend of Black Friday and run full-on Black Months.

While the Black Friday model seems like a win-win scenario for retailers and shoppers, the rehearsed aspect of it being a global shopping event can be its main downfall, especially for smaller retailers who can’t even dream of competing with the Amazons of the world. 

Every business that sells something or another is advertising before and during Black Friday. Capturing the attention of your audience during this period can get very pricey, and even more expensive to keep the momentum going for multiple weeks. 

But if everyone does it, it must be worth it, right?

Perhaps. 

And perhaps there’s another way to run a limited-time promotion and meet – or even surpass – your Black Friday numbers. 

The unexpected is better

This is exactly what happened with the most recent Lucy sale. 

The special offer ran for four days in mid-May. It was just a random Sunday to Wednesday: no special occasion like Christmas or Mother’s Day attached to capitalise on. But the offer was really good – 25% off (almost) everything. 

Interestingly, this is the same offer Lucy had during their past Black Friday sales.

Four days later, we were looking at a 50% increase in orders, and a 34% increase in overall sales when compared to our most successful Black Friday sale to date – and all of that with only an eighth of the spend we had on the same Black Friday.

So what’s so different about this sale event that made it such a huge success?

For one, other than a few hints on Lucy’s social channels in the days leading up to the event, people didn’t really know what to expect. We got their attention by making them curious.

Secondly, we did not have to directly compete for attention with every other business in the world. 

And finally, even if the Lucy audience wasn’t really planning a shopping spree on a random Sunday in May, when the offer dropped, they were there to make the most of it.

But all of this did not happen by chance. 

Consistency and collaboration are key

When we say “the audience was there to make the most of the offer” we don’t mean “they just magically appeared in the right place at the right time.” 

Since the day Lucy opened its first retail store, the client has led a strong social media strategy. Through a consistent brand presence and communications via Lucy’s Facebook, Instagram and TikTok channels, Lucy built a loyal community of makeup and beauty lovers around the Lucy brand – so when we stepped in to assist with the launch of the new website and digital advertising strategy, we had solid foundations to continue building the Lucy brand on. 

In collaboration with the client, we developed a strong digital strategy to complement the existing social media presence. Keeping a consistent stream of brand and tactical communications throughout the year allows Lucy to always stay top-of-mind.

So if, and when, a really good offer comes up, our audience is primed and ready to shop with a moment’s notice, which allows Lucy to have successful sales outside of the globally-prescribed sales event calendar. 

The post How we beat Black Friday with a sale in May appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Hi ? I am Nicole, I am a marketing student pursuing a master’s degree in digital marketing and strategic management at University of Malta. My interest towards marketing started not so long ago as my first degree is in accounts and management, but I felt the need to top up my career by moving in the dynamic and creative world of marketing.

Where it all started

My first encounter with Switch was from a workshop organised by my university, whereby various practitioners were invited to give their professional advice on various business matters. I remember after I had heard Switch’s presentation my first thought was how interesting must it be to work with these guys, which followed with checking out their website and following their socials. So, I could say that I felt inspired by their speech, but things just moved on because at that time I did not aspire to start a career in marketing. Then I graduated and thought, was it next? After lots of thinking and up and downs I finally decided to take the masters I am in the midst of right now. 

However, I wanted the hands-on experience as well and started actively looking for an opportunity. 

It didn’t take me long to remember Switch. I looked the name up, went on their website, searched for an email and sent my interest for an internship. A few days later I received an email from my manager, Luke, asking for my availability for an interview. After the interview I eagerly waited for Luke on whether I got the position. 

I DID!

First day at the office

On my first day, all excited but a little bit nervous, I walked up to the office and was greeted with a smile, it was my manager Luke. He gave me a tour around the office and started setting online meetings to meet the entire team. After a few weeks in, remote working was still new to me so at first I did find it hard to establish connections with the team and getting used to the whole ‘not being in an office’ kind of thing, but soon I learnt the collaborative power of this agency that does not make you feel alone. Yes, online meetings can be tiring at times, but personally I found it useful as it helped me balance more my university stuff and Switch.

Fast forward to 6 months

I have become more familiar with the practical side of how B2C and B2B marketing works and the process to come with the final product as well as the tools used in the process for content creation, scheduling and posting. Additionally, being that I was involved in plenty of internal meetings I got to see real-life discussions and issues that a leading marketing agency experiences. With Switch I got the opportunity to work independently on my tasks but always found the help where needed.

What I learned about Switch

Overall the agency is a very forward driven and creative place to work, made up of wholesome and dedicated individuals highly committed for the success of the agency and their clients as well as the wellbeing of every person in the agency. What I love about Switch is the flatness of the organisation, that you can talk to anyone almost as a friend and everyone is ready to listen to someone else’s opinion without a problem. Every person’s opinion and expertise is valued. The unique capability and foundation of the agency is teamwork and seamless collaboration. Everyone is ready to help as much as they can without hesitation and work seamlessly as everybody knows what is their part in a task. Also, people at Switch know when it is time for business and when it is time to let loose and have fun whether it is 10 mins in a meeting or an organised internal event.

Final comments

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the entire agency from onboarding to the very last day of my internship for greeting me with a warm welcome and helping me to improve my skills in this field. Especially to Luke, Ernesta and Kim who guided me in every step of the way and trusted me with various tasks. I am very grateful and inspired to take with me what I learned and apply them to my future career.

The post Switch Spotlight: Nicole Borg, Intern appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Three years ago, in the throes of a worldwide pandemic, we launched a partnership that would take us past the woes of a country in complete lockdown into a learning experience about e-commerce.

Switch has a particular name for situations like the birth of Lucy’s online store.  

We call it being *RIKMAed.* This situation comes about when Rik drops a particularly impossible task in your lap with a seemingly insane deadline and tells you “we’ll do it ta, I have a plan!” 

And when he says we, he means we. 

With Lucy, we had 3 weeks to build and design the online store, organise a category system that made sense, load all the products (about 1000 to start with) with the correct tags and images, set up ads and accounts and design a launch campaign. 

After the Launch

The numbers show us that the Lucy online store was a success.

But to us the success of this partnership isn’t in the growth or sales or profit, it’s in the lessons we learned and will keep learning.

When we started working on the Lucy online store, stores were shut nationwide, and all shopping was funnelled into online channels. As a result, the Lucy online store was an instant success. 

But the lockdown wouldn’t last forever. And we knew we needed to keep that same momentum going once the physical stores opened back up and life went back to semi-normal. 

The Lucy team helped a lot with how we went about pushing the online store as yet another avenue for their sales. 

Working With your Client

One of the great things about the Lucy team is that the online store is seen as yet another store: it isn’t in competition with the brick-and-mortar outlets, but an opportunity to reach new customers and build new audiences. This means that we could look at all the sales channels as supporting each other, running promotions across all outlets, selling online tickets to live events and providing online support in-store. It all works seamlessly. 

From the start, the entire Lucy team recognised the value in changing people’s behaviour and buying patterns. 

Maltese people were not used to buying online. For the first year and a half in the life of the online store, we almost always had a special offer, discount or competition going. This kept people going back to the store to see what was coming next and it slowly changed buying patterns, even if the change was just slight enough to allow for more revenue in the online store.

Today, many people do their research online and then go in-store to purchase, or vice versa: the Lucy experience works seamlessly. Whether you’re shopping online or in-store, the Lucy experience is the same throughout, which has helped significantly and allowed us to pull back a little on offers and discounts to work on other ways of providing value to Lucy clients. 

So far,  we’ve introduced a loyalty club, seasonal subscription boxes, and a Diamond Club that rewards our best customers.

Lessons Learned

Even without the special offers, the Lucy store still reports strong numbers because our digital efforts are backed by a strong brand. The Lucy team knows who Lucy is: she’s practically a real person with a big personality and a very particular voice. When Lucy talks, she talks based on a very real set of values that is echoed by everyone on the team. 

It’s one of our most important lessons tactical communication is important, but not every piece of communication from a brand needs to be about sales. Use your comms to build community, to speak about who the brand is, what it likes and what it stands for. Lucy does a great job of mixing informational, tactical, and brand comms in a way that has created a fan base that is loyal to Lucy like she is a friend and not a brand.

There’s another important lesson we learned from working on Lucy.

 Plan everything ahead so that when you need to be spontaneous you have the space and time to dedicate to a fun, last-minute idea. 

At Lucy, we have monthly planning meetings in which we communicate any offers, new brands, product launches and sales efforts. These are put into a calendar and we structure communication and events around them. Then we brainstorm fun things like offers for lipstick day or decorating for Christmas or new Merch ideas. 

We plan so we can have fun.

The post Lessons Learned From the Lucy Online Store appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Fair warning, this is a relatively long read. If you don’t have the time to take it all in now, you can download the PDF version of Marketing Trends 2023: The Year of Endurance for free by clicking below. Otherwise, just keep reading!

Looking back on 2023 Marketing Trends

A lot can change in a year. 

This time last year, we were working with a different set of trends, a different understanding of the industry around us, and the knowledge that the early predictions for 2023 had already delivered some interesting results – but there was still a whole year left ahead of us to see if we’d gotten the early predictions right on the money. 

Trendwatching is usually right. But human nature is unpredictable, and some of the trends that crop up early either pan out early, or something else happens that overtakes their previous momentum and turns what could have been a big splash into a little ripple in the pond. 

Here’s how we did for 2023, looking back in 2024. 

And if you’re looking for the latest in trends, our new set of predictions for 2024 is available right here in a handy ebook so that you can download and read wherever you want.

2023 in Context

Things change slowly on the global scale. The problems customers have endured since the end of the pandemic and into the beginning of the post-pandemic haven’t gone away. Housing is still expensive. Climate change is still a pervasive worry. Work is still underpaid and overabundant. The word ‘inflation’ is echoing around the planet.

The last few years have been hard on everyone. 

2023 was no different. 

The war on Ukraine and the rampant energy crisis are going to push a lot of people into corners they can’t back out from.

Add in the decreasing trust in formal institutions, and you have a consumer culture that is desperate for change. 

Prediction: Active(ism) Listening

Brands needing to support a cause is nothing new. 

But they absolutely have to support the right cause in the right ways. 

2023 is going to put brands that thrive on doing social responsibility and good governance in the spotlight, and really make them justify their behaviour and what their brand stands for. It’s no longer a case of CSR-for-the-good of the brand, where companies help out to hide the fact that their operations are almost certainly not in line with their brand values. 

It’s more than that. It’s ESG: environmental, social, governance responsibility. An internal metric for a brand to behave right: for the brand to look at its impact in society and to make itself stand up to what its consumers want to see. To be fair. To be responsible. To be good because it wants to be, rather than because it has to be to court the most profit. 

Customers are especially feeling the pinch in the coming year, so finding empathic brands who can support them now is going to be a lynchpin for brands who have slowly been dormant to regain their place in the global marketplace. 

Did it come true?

Definitely. In fact, it’s become increasingly important for brands to identify, and quickly, what their values are to their consumers, what side of a divisive conversation they stand on – and it’s become critical that if brands don’t have a side to stand on, they find one. Brands no longer have the opportunity to remain neutral and hope for the best – and while we can argue that the consumer obsession with pure brands has been taken to astronomical extremes by social media, there’s no denying that it works. 

Prediction: ‘Just-Like-Me’ Marketing

Marketing is never going to look the way it used to before 2022. 

A big part of brand relatability comes from seeing people who look the way you look in their ads, and from seeing customers with the same life experience showcased, the same problems spoken about, and the same ideals championed. Brands will keep diversifying their ads well into 2023 and beyond, and we’re poised to see this turn into one of the strongest marketing movements of the ‘20s. 

Did it come true?

This isn’t a movement that was going to start and end in 2023, so while the progress is slow, we’re seeing ads with a much higher percentage of diversity than before. Just look at Adidas Sweden’s first-ever Ramadan campaign. 

Prediction: IRL Online

One of the best things that came out of the last few years is the sudden realisation that technology has advanced far enough that we can hold events online and have them stand alongside real-life events with no drop in quality; in fact, online activations can go farther than real-life activations can, and are available to a lot more people. In 2023, we’re going to see a lot more of these activations taking place despite the fact that real life events are coming back into the fray. 

Did it come true?

Well – sort of. We have unprecedented capacity to hold online activations, but as it turns out, people still prefer the lure of the IRL to the convenience of online, so while online activations are still happening, they’re online versions of IRL events. 

Prediction: In(scent)ive 

Scent-based marketing

The rise of perfume accounts on social media and the greater uptick in home scent purchases is heralding a new opportunity for brands to dig deep into their identity and bring scent as another facet of communication for their audiences. The rise of niche and uncommon scents also promises new territory for brands looking to diversify their product offerings – and with a ready stream of perfume and scent fanatics ready to review any new item that comes their way, it’s a trend that promises to be very rewarding to the companies willing to invest in it. 

Did it come true?

Sort of! Recently, McDonalds went viral for an activation that fanned the scent of their freshly-cooked fries to passers-by. That said, scent remains a niche trend that brands have yet to pick up on, and it might never grow to the same heights as makeup or cleaning or other trends that appear on Tiktok. Is it still a trend worth watching? Yes, for an opportunity to stand out from the madding crowd – but it didn’t turn into the behemoth we were predicting it would. 

Prediction: Helping Brands

Brands helping their community

There are a lot of problems in the world that brands can help with. 

The burden of taking care of consumers shouldn’t have fallen to brands regardless, but with consumers trusting brands more than they do official authorities, brands can capitalise on the current situation to build a lasting impression on their audience. 

But they have to be genuine about it. 

And they have to mean it. 

As we stated a year before, brand purpose doesn’t start and end at the financial quarter. Brands that opt to help their audiences with the struggles they’re facing – from higher prices in store to the increase in bills to the ongoing climate crisis – will benefit from the better world they help to build, provided that they find a cause they believe in and make the changes necessary in the ways they do business, whether it’s building a community around their product or making a sacrifice to profits and prices. 

Did it come true? 

There’s less news about brands helping out their communities, but it doesn’t mean that it’s a metric that has gone the way of the dodo. Brand news tends to make the, well, news nowadays if it’s something controversial or something that’s tied into a current event. For every BDS McDonalds movement, there’s a similar and equal movement to uphold brands that have value, so while we’re not hearing more about the brands that are helping, it doesn’t mean that this trend is no longer viable. 

In fact, we’d probably consider this one of the more important trends to come out of 2023 – so much so that community-led values are probably considered the bare minimum for brands. 

Prediction: You Are What You Eat 

Food-based collaborations

One of the greatest undisputed pleasures in life is food – and in 2023, we’re going to see a lot more of where food shouldn’t be with off-the-wall makeup, clothing, and home goods collaborations. This trend isn’t new to anyone: previously, UK brand Greggs and German supermarket brand LIDL launched clothing lines to critical acclaim and sold out in mere hours. 

Quirky products and unique styles are back on the market and stronger than ever. 

Part of it is in the innovation of it all: people have grown tired of the minimalist, samey approach that has dominated the personalisation landscape for the last few years, and are looking to stand out with what they purchase. Add in the current obsession with telegraphing which brands you support and why, and you have a perfect recipe for 2023 to bring out some very interesting product tie-ins. 

Did it come true?

Yes. Quirky, food-led activations are growing more proliferous across the industry, though it’s likely that we’ve yet to see the full scope of what these collaborations are capable of. 

Prediction: Elusive Inclusive 

Deaf and blind inclusivity 

In 2023, we’re going to see a far deeper form of inclusivity in the way that brands address their consumers: from sign language and braille included in product packaging to a greater focus on creating products that everyone can use regardless of capability. While it’s likely to take a little longer to become a mainstream addition, 2022 has shown us that people want to see people like them in advertising, and that there are marked spaces that have yet to be filled. 

Did it come true?

It falls underneath the larger category of increased inclusivity across the board, but it has taken a step back in terms of where it was at the beginning of 2023. With so many other diversity issues rising to the fore, this one’s been subsumed in other approaches, but it’s still worth keeping in mind when creating ads. 

Prediction: Gaming the System

Gamified advertising

Interactive ads are memorable. Add in gaming elements and that memorability becomes even more potent.

Your consumers are inundated with information every second of the day. Brands compete for their attention, and it becomes second nature to ignore those messages and therefore the brand that is communicating with them. This is especially true when it comes to attracting new consumers. 

Did it come true?

The metaverse never quite picked up the way it was promised, but the rise of online gamified advertising increased exponentially throughout 2023, and keeps growing. As the technology becomes more commonplace, we’ll likely see more of this – and 2024 has already shown that they’re some of the most interesting activations for consumers to engage with and brands to build on. 

Prediction: CEO, Entrepreneur

Rise of the Public CEO

When governments can’t support people, people find a new place to turn to.

For many, that place is brands and the CEOs that lead them.

The idea of a celebrity CEO or an influencer CEO isn’t new: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, even Steve Jobs all had elements of celebrity CEO. What is different in 2023 is that we’re going to see more small and medium enterprises make their mark on their audience using their CEO as an identifier for their entire brand, and using their words to boost brand recognition. 

The last few years have been an investment in building brands that align with what consumers believe in. In 2023, your brand is your CEO – and what they can do fix the problems most consumers are facing. 

Did it come true?

Yes – and it’s going to keep growing.

In 2024, the public CEO is an asset that no business can put aside. As consumers become more selective about which brands they support, they’ll dig deeper to find reasons to or reasons for supporting the same brands. By making your CEO the public face of your organisation, you’re running the risk of isolating the segment of your audience that might not agree what he says – or attracting a larger potential audience of people who have never heard of your business, but have heard of your CEO before.

Prediction: You Had to Be There

Limited pop-up activations

Real-life events have come back – and in 2023, we’re going to see a lot more people seeking out experiences that take them out of the house and make them a set of new memories. 

Limited-run activations help brands connect. Brands that put their all into small events created specifically for their consumers, their fans, and their would-be consumers are going to see the benefits of what it means to have a community in a year that is going to thrive on building connections.

Did it come true?

Yes. Like online activations, this is a segment that might be growing slowly, but it’s growing nonetheless, and every year it evolves a little more. 

Prediction: Macro, mini, micro, meta?

Macroinfluencers are on the way out. 

They’ve been in steady decline since before the pandemic, but COVID-19 and the months after really put a stop to a lot of influencers’ climb. Additionally, the ongoing problems of Instagram mean that a lot of the original macroinfluencers have to find other ways of creating connection with their audiences – either by moving to a new social media, or by working in a different niche. 

For 2023, we’re going to see less macroinfluencers around, and more virtual influencers and micro-influencers, though this hinges on the platforms they’re using to communicate. With Instagram’s changes making it that much harder to create a meaningful foundation for influence, it’s likely that we might see a stop to influencer marketing in general, but a big leap in virtual influencers where brands can hinge on the technology and innovation rather than the human connection. 

Did this come true?

Yes, and no. Macroinfluencers don’t hold the same brand-partnership lure as they did at the height of their rise, but influencer marketing as a whole is still considered one of the more effective ways of marketing, regardless of what industry you’re in. Additionally, the diversification of influencer markets into different niches and platforms means that influencing across the board is on the rise, so we’re seeing a new generation of macroinfluencers come into their own – some made specifically to take advantage of the interest in AI. 

Other 2023 Trends of Note

Sometimes the trends we see are relevant for that year only. Maybe their importance drops; maybe they just become a part of the world we live in; maybe they were only relevant that year because of mitigating circumstances. 

It’s still worth knowing about them. Trends are cyclical; trends can repeat themselves, if the right circumstances are met. 

Here’s trends from 2023 that aren’t as relevant yet in 2024 – but it doesn’t mean they’ve stopped being important.

We are the World

There isn’t a moment before climate change that people remember. 

Brands can help change that – but it requires deep-down change. Fundamental change. 

Change that lasts through the rest of the brand’s existence. 

It’s true that corporations create a significant amount of waste. It’s true that there are ways of combatting that waste – but a lot of what we know about the eco-friendly movement has been built on greenwashing, and there’s enough confusion around what actually helps that brands need to make a clean slate of it. 

And that starts with education. Educate yourself. Educate others. Educate consumers.

The more education there is going around, the easier it is to put measures in place that can help everyone.

Is this relevant in 2024?

This is one of those trends where it’s become the norm, and doesn’t really stand out as a trend any more. It was very relevant in 2023 with the shift away from CSR and into ESG; in 2024, it’s a given that corporations need to change. The writing is on the wall for the ones that don’t, and while it might take a while for them to fall, the tolerance that people have for brands that don’t change is decreasing year on year. 

I Am Woman

Women’s rights the world over remain a pillar of social change that brands have yet to completely catch up with. However, the recent global events that have pushed them back to the forefront means that brands wanting to capitalise on this trend have a thorny road ahead of them. 

It’s impossible to please everyone. Women’s rights are the kind of issues that will prove divisive to your audience, and if that matters to you, do your audience research first. 

If it doesn’t, put women forward. Crowdsource information from the women who use your products, and not just the ones in your community. As we’ve said about the diversity measures brands undertake, a key metric to avoid is marketing to the smallest segment possible and still calling it inclusivity. 

The world does not work in small segments. 

And your consumers will not appreciate the obfuscation, either. 

Is it relevant in 2024?

2023 had a lot to say about women’s rights. Not all of those things were equal or fair, and brands responded by working to highlight and draw awareness to those things. 

In 2024, women’s rights are still relevant, but there are other causes to be elevated and spoken about, and brands have to make a choice on which gets their attention. It isn’t that this has become less relevant; hand in hand with the next trend, it has just simply become part of established communication. 

I Know You 

Relatability. 

It’s the hardest attribute for brands to pull off. 

A lot of brands simply broadcast sales messages so they are, by definition, unable to listen. 

However, the people behind the brands need to learn to relate to their audiences. 

Your consumers are changing. Your consumers are always changing, in myriad ways: growing older, growing poorer, growing richer, growing more. A big part of your brand’s success is to understand those changes and to adapt to them, rather than waiting for your consumers to adapt to you. 

That’s what builds community. It’s what builds relationships. 

Brands need to relate to their audiences. If you haven’t started by now, there’s still time until the end of the year to do so – but make it your priority. Consumers are quick to shift their loyalties to brands that relate to their experiences more. 

Is it relevant in 2024?

It’s still relevant in 2024. Brands still need to communicate to their consumers, and they still need to relate – but the cost-of-living crisis has set this back a little, and highlighted the importance of price alongside being able to relate to your consumers. As the cost-of-living crisis worsens, price and budget take priorities over whether consumers opt for that brand. 

Conclusion

Last year, we spoke about trends as the result of change. 

To a certain extent, that still holds water. 

But in 2022 and 2023, we predicted that the trends we’re seeing will be the catalyst of change. Brands and small businesses have more power over the consumer than ever before, and those that understand how to use that power will set the pace for the innovations we’ll see after. 

This is all true.

In 2024, we are in the heart of that changing landscape, and brands who haven’t yet found their footing are going to struggle with the way the world is working. 

But you don’t have to struggle alone. 

Our goal as an agency has always been to help, to push good causes, and to make your business work better. If you’re struggling to understand where your brand fits into all this, that’s why we’re here. 

Drop us a line: we’re always happy to help. 

And if you want to check out the trends we have for 2024, you can download them here. 

The post Marketing Trends 2023: The Year of Endurance appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

One thing led to another and a few months later we were onboarding his business as one of our biggest new clients of the year.

Another email started with: “From your emails it’s abundantly clear that we are on the same wavelength, and we’re currently looking for someone to redesign a pitch deck for us – would you be interested in quoting for the job?”

We got the job, then we got another one, and we’ve been working with them for over two years now. And we do have a great cultural match, she was right.

It’s funny. Back in 2013, when we took our second client on board at Switch Digital (when Digital was still a sister agency to Switch), it was for email marketing. I was surprised at the time. We had been told that email is dying. Young people don’t see their email, they don’t even have email addresses any longer, everyone’s just on Facebook.

But things change. The world changes. And oh, the world has changed.

And as the world changed, email marketing just kept getting more and more important, recovering from its “inevitable demise”. 

Here’s why:

Social Networks are like Drug Dealers for businesses

They make it extremely easy for your business to get its first fix for free, and they get you hooked, but once you get going your organic reach declines, no matter how good your content is. So you start paying, a little at first, then you just increase your spend as time goes by until you’re funding some of the world’s biggest businesses.

And to make matters worse, at the moment social networks are fragmenting greatly, so it’s becoming even harder to find the best place to get your fix.

The other issue with social media is that you’re constrained within the parameters of the medium, email gives you much more flexibility.

Your email list is yours

No matter how much you might feel like your followers on social channels are yours, they’re not. They’re tied to the platform they follow you on and you’re at the mercy of the platform’s whims.

We just had a client’s account blocked on Instagram without warning. They did not break any rules. They didn’t spam anyone. They might get the account (which has close to 10,000 followers) back, but they’re not sure if they will. 10,000 hard earned followers, lost until someone at Meta support finds the time (and will) to help.

Your email list is yours, as long as you’ve collected it in ways that conform to the various rules that govern the practice (GDPR and CAN-SPAM, mainly), you can email to your list to your heart’s content, and if your email platform goes bust you can switch to another in minutes (well it’s a bit more complicated than that, but it’s just technicalities that stand in your way).

Email is personal and intense

You can only open one email at a go, so if you use email marketing well you can grab someone’s attention completely for the time they’re reading your email. The frame of mind is very different to a social network, which is actively working to make you spend more time consuming more content on the platform.

Email lists are easier to communicate with

One of the biggest challenges for small businesses, especially if they’re starting up, is to build an active community on social media. And if you don’t have an active community, your pages look dead. With email you don’t have that problem. Even if you have a list of 20 people, you can still communicate with them as if you have 20,000 people in your list, and as long as you write and communicate as if you do have 20,000 people in your list, your audience is none the wiser.

It’s much easier to build a position of authority with email marketing than it is with practically any other channel.

Email marketing is (relatively) cheap

As long as you’re OK with sending an email, even just a completely normal one to your clients, then you are good to go with basic email marketing. Setting up and running an email tool is also extremely intuitive and relatively cheap, so the barrier to entry is low there, too. And, to make things better, for B2B marketing we’ve found that the best-performing emails are the ones that look like a regular email sent from gmail or outlook, so you don’t even need a visual component.

Email Marketing is Good for Business

The bottom line is simple. Even if you don’t compare it to any other channels, email marketing is good for business. 

• 73% of consumers in the UK stated that email is their preferred marketing channel, the favourite by far. 
• Email marketing delivers the highest ROI of any channel – you see this consistently across multiple studies (from 36X to 122X!) Even at its lowest, it’s a fantastic return.
• 60% of people prefer receiving promotional emails, while only 20% want to see ads on social media.

Email Marketing allows for granular segmentation

Since your list is yours you have all the possibilities to communicate with the people in the list as a series of multiple lists, infinitely segmented in ways that allow you to send much more relevant messages to people.

Do you have a group of people who are regular customers? Split them out and send them offers before anyone else, giving them extra value and increasing loyalty. Or send out an email to everyone who’s bought running shoes when you get a new consignment of running socks. The possibilities are endless.

And in the end…

Email marketing is great, but it is still not enough as a marketing strategy itself – it’s not what we’re advocating here. What we are suggesting, rather strongly, is that you don’t ignore it as a medium.

Take the time to work on a strategy and develop the medium as a new channel. It will take time, we know it took us time to figure it out well for our audiences, but once you do there’s a good chance that you’ll find it incredibly useful. 

So don’t wait any longer if you don’t have an email marketing strategy in place. Get cracking on it, integrate it with your overall efforts and you’ll see returns that grow together with the effort you make, building and growing as you put more time and effort into the list. If you’re stuck, feel free to reach out, we have over 15 years of experience with the medium by now.

The post The Importance of Email Marketing for B2B appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

We’re going to explore 5 key performance indicators that any business just beginning to dip its feet into the world of B2B marketing needs to keep track of for an accurate reading of where it currently stands, and where its best opportunities lie.

The only thing required for any business to assess these KPIs is access to their own website’s analytics (this is usually Google Analytics – ask your web developer for more information if you’re not sure) and access to their social media pages analytics too. As long as data has been gathered on these platforms for a few weeks, we should be able to get a general understanding of where the business stands from a marketing point of view.

Let’s get started.

1. Website Traffic Volume

Your website should be the landing point of any marketing efforts you’re doing. Whether its social media, search engine marketing, outdoor advertising, or handing out flyers, sending people to your website provides you with the best opportunity to give potential clients a strong idea of what your company is all about.

Most website analytics suites, such as Google Analytics, will provide you with overall volume data, but more importantly, it will also give you a rough breakdown of where that traffic is coming from. Normally, you’ll see traffic sources such as ‘direct, ‘organic social’, ‘referral’, ‘organic search’, etc. Each of these will give you a clear picture of where your current website traffic is originating from.

Always keep an eye on these volumes of traffic as you conduct any new marketing efforts, as any spikes or changes can help you identify changes in your digital presence. For example, a sudden increase in organic search traffic likely means that your website has started ranking well in search engines for a particular search term that many are looking for. Based on which page is receiving that traffic, you can find out what that search term is, and whether it’s beneficial to your business goals.

Likewise, an increase in traffic from social media can indicate that a particular social media post of yours has done particularly well. Knowing where you’re doing well is an excellent way to achieve repeatable results.

2. Website Traffic Quality

As you may have guessed, website volume is not the only important factor. You can quite easily bring in very high traffic numbers by creating an online advertising campaign, but if you’re not attracting the right kind of traffic, it will all be for nothing. There are a few KPIs that most website analytics suites provide that can also show you whether the people being sent to your website through your marketing efforts are actually interested in the services or product you’re offering.

For example, the latest version of Google Analytics (GA4) provides us with a metric called ‘Average engagement time per session’, which basically tells us for how long the average website visitor engages with our content. Traffic sources that generate a higher average engagement time per session are likely ones that are being presented to individuals who are more likely to be interested in the content of our site. 

This may sound obvious, but it’s very important to keep in mind when measuring campaign performance. Here’s a practical example:

Over the last 3 months, our own website has generated 147 sessions originating from Facebook.com. In that same period of time, LinkedIn.com has generated 105 sessions. At first glance, it looks like Facebook is the more effective medium. However, the average engagement time per session on Facebook was 20s, while the same metric for LinkedIn was almost triple that number, at 57s. LinkedIn also provided us with a higher percentage of total engaged sessions.

This is something we discovered a while back, and since then we’ve made a much more concentrated effort to create great content for LinkedIn, which has resulted in better overall traffic to our website, and more business opportunities – all because we’re communicating to a more interested audience.

3. Website Goals

You might be asking yourself – great, I’m getting traffic to my website and they’re spending time engaging with my content, but how do I know whether these are generating actual business? A very fair question that can be answered in 2 ways.

First off, it’s quite likely that if you are attracting the right kind of traffic to your website, you’re probably also getting more requests for quotes, or simply more people are getting in touch to request more information about your services. 

Quite often, this uptick in requests for business is enough for most B2B SMEs to be satisfied with their marketing efforts. However, if you’d like to get even more granular about how you’re generating business through your website, you can set website goals. These metrics need to be custom configured on most analytics platforms, but can give you an even deeper insight into where business is coming from. 

For example, the amount and source of contact form requests can be tracked, giving you a clearer picture of which traffic source is generating the most actual requests for information. The same can be applied to clicks on a phone number or email address you have listed on your website’s footer (or anywhere else). 

This said, the way people get in touch can often be difficult to track exactly. Someone might just copy your phone number directly into their phone rather than click on it if they’re on a desktop, for example – a non-trackable action. This can be solved by simply asking those who get in touch with you where they heard of your services from and recording that information manually.

4. Content Click-Through-Rate

This one mostly applies if you’re posting with some consistency on social media, and whether you’re running any advertising on those platforms. Click-through rate (CTR) of each piece of content you’re posting that leads to your website can help you understand whether the combination of target audience and content is driving the right sort of traffic to your website.

By analysing and testing different combinations of posts and audiences, you can begin to understand what content works best for each audience, and build future content and targeting strategies based on those results.

Remember, it’s always better to have a thought-out social media strategy with goals and tests in-built and posting less often, than posting frequently but not being able to take any learnings from the results.

5. LinkedIn Data

There is no doubt in our minds that LinkedIn is by far the most effective social media platform for B2B SMEs to build business. We’ve talked about this subject at length in separate articles such as this guide to LinkedIn for business leaders and this LinkedIn strategy for CEOs, written by our very own CEO.

By posting frequently and advertising on LinkedIn as a business, and also posting on LinkedIn as a business leader and professional, you can get access to a very specific, highly engaged audience that is likely to be interested in your services – if you do things strategically.

Not only that, LinkedIn also provides very detailed demographic information of those individuals who have seen your content. You can view data split by their job title, just like the screenshot below. You can also split by location, industry, job seniority, company size, and even by individual company name.

This data allows you to fully understand who you’ve been reaching with the content you’ve been creating, and who has actually been engaging with it. 

Wrapping up

KPIs are extremely important to monitor, however always keep in mind that if you try to measure absolutely everything, you’ll likely end up hitting a wall. Use all these metrics to help you shape your strategy and measure success, but they are not the be-all-and-end-all of B2B marketing. Make sure you have a strong strategy that makes sense for your business goals, and go about executing it with consistency and quality.

If you need help getting that done, we’re happy to provide a no-strings-attached 30 minute consultation to help you understand how to get started. Just get in touch. 

The post The Top 5 B2B Marketing KPIs for SMEs appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

And you’ve missed out on watching a company written off for insolvency has started to climb its way up from rock bottom. 

As a website, Tumblr.com is experiencing a renaissance. 

As an experience, it’s same old, same-old on hellsite high, and that’s what’s bringing money in. 

Here’s some thoughts on Tumblr.com’s resurgence. 

Tumblr: A History

2007: Founded by David Karp as a microblogging/social networking site with a focus on short-form blogs. 

2012: Tumblr launches its first major brand campaign.  

2013: Tumblr bought by Yahoo. 

2014: Tumblr reaches peak popularity at over 100 million blog posts per day. 

2016: Yahoo writes off $712 million of Tumblr’s value. 

2017: David Karp leaves Tumblr. 

2019: Tumblr bans adult content and sees 30% user traffic loss. 

2019: Tumblr sold to Automattic, operator of WordPress.com, for less than an estimated $3 million.

The best way to explain Tumblr is through a meme. 

Tumblr – and tumblr users by extension – have weathered a lot. People who were on the site in the early days of its rise definitely remember it as a kind of ‘positive’ 4chan, a place on the internet where community was the bottom-line – before ads made it onto the internet, before we even had the idea of what a social network was capable of, there was Tumblr and the 

idea that you could be anyone you wanted on the internet, and nobody would be able to track it back to you. 

When David Karp launched the site, Tumblr quickly became a go-to for people who wanted a niche community where they didn’t need to put their best foot forward. The earliest reiteration of Tumblr has always been a place you can make home regardless of your interests, and for an entire generation of tweens and teens left unattended on their family’s computer, it was the best of what the internet had to offer. 

As it grew, and became a powerhouse for fanworks, other companies and outside advertisers wanted a cut of that. At the height of its heyday, Tumblr could see up to 91.7 million posts created per day: what advertiser wouldn’t want to have that kind of audience?

However, innovation has never lain easy with the people that brought Tumblr’s fame: the users who used, curated, and embedded themselves into the Tumblrverse.

What Tumblr Cannot Do

Tumblr’s entire website has been host to some pretty interesting controversies.

The Tumblr user who stole human bones is the most famous but dig a little deeper than that, and you’ll find others: the ongoing fandom wars and drama in virtually every popular media content, the 4Chan vs Tumblr spam battles, and DashCon are some of the events that are passed around like campfire cautionary tales: the tale of the little social media network that could, and probably shouldn’t have. 

What we take away from nearly 20 years of Tumblr in operation is that it’s an absolutely awful social media website for virtually anything that isn’t community-based – and it’s not great at building something community based outside of the thin scope of reality that Tumblr already deals with. When you bring in outside influences such as advertisers and marketing agencies, Tumblr’s netizens – already pretty hostile to change – turn outright malicious. 

Up until 2022, that was the understanding that the three prior owners of Tumblr had. David Karp got out early enough that he didn’t see the downswing of Tumblr becoming what Kotaku called ‘a black hole of joylessness’. Yahoo’s efforts to make Tumblr profitable are the stuff of legends: from trying to build Tumblr as their main advertising platform at all costs to the porn ban that wiped 30% of traffic out over the following few months, Yahoo’s cultural misalignment with what made Tumblr so profitable has become the posterboard for not rocking the boat so much that you capsize – which is what happened with Yahoo! and why they ended up selling Yahoo to Automattic for less than a portion of what they paid for it. 

Automattic took the reins in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic was already a blip on the radar, and for the most part, Tumblr had entered into a kind of overgrown post-apocalyptic dormancy. 

It wouldn’t last long. 

What Tumblr Can Do

Tumblr can serve as an excellent way to build your brand. 

But don’t expect to see megamillions in sales and engagement coming from it.

The same ungovernable quality that makes ads on Reddit such a thorny prospect is doubled on Tumblr, the last place on the internet where you can be anonymous, unpalatable, and insane on main. Even Twitter, with its text-based slant, is more of a social media network than Tumblr, where writing your blog is still better built than the image and video capabilities and your worst nightmare is having a post go viral. 

But there’s a benefit to using Tumblr for brand: you get to pick the way your brand comes across to its audience. And, at the end of the day, you can get people talking about you – even if the conversation can be a double-edged sword. 

Tumblr is a community-builder. It’s a place for conversation. It’s where the userbase is fiercely dedicated and also reactionary. You can learn a lot about building relationships with your community, and tempering innovation with patience, just by watching old users on Tumblr interact with each other. 

After four years of chaos, that’s the trick to working with Tumblr that Automattic has discovered – and it’s giving Tumblr a new lease on life. Add in the Y2K revival and how users on the internet are looking for different corners of the web to make their own, and Tumblr’s resurgence isn’t really a surprise: it’s what’s always been at the end of this road. 

Web 3.0 is happening. A lot of people are unhappy about it and trying to find their way back to the old internet where most of the people you’re speaking to spent their formative years. 

Tumblr is that old guard. The internet at the early days of the social media rise still offers opportunities for brands to capitalise on, but they won’t bring in the big dollars immediately, and you need to put effort into them to see a payoff. 

That said, look at the alternative: Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok won’t be as powerful as they are now forever. We’ve seen it working within those three already: Facebook’s advertising strength giving way to Instagram giving way to Tiktok. It might take more for them to come out of fashion but investing in a new social media platform now gets you in on the ground floor before you change.

And Tumblr – with its Hellsite High guide and the renewed effort to make a profit out of the site by catering to, instead of against, their userbase – gives you the perfect platform to try it out. 

Tips Taken from Tumblr’s Takeovers

1. Crowdsource

Tumblr is one of the best case studies for working with, and not against, your users – its entire decline is because the companies in charge didn’t take into account who Tumblr’s primary audience was before they made decisions that fundamentally changed the way it worked. Once they brought in measures that were palatable for Tumblr users to engage in, interest in the site went up. 

Tumblr’s BLAZE is – at its core – a pointless service when you take into account what Tumblr’s core user-base is. Tumblr Blaze allows you to boost a post of yours so that it shows up on everyone’s timeline, something that could work great for advertising if there were advertisements on the platform and if it allowed you even a tiny slice of control or insight into how your post is doing. 

Instead, the thing it’s used the most for is to project Tumblr’s users to a series of shitposts and pictures of their animals. You can’t control who sees your post, only the amount of impressions you get, which makes it useless for advertising – but just what the Doctor (Who) ordered for Tumblr. 

2. Connect

Tumblr staff has made a real effort to reach out and speak to their users, something that hadn’t been touched upon in previous years. Mayer’s takeover only spread as far as moving Tumblr staff to headquarters, and Tumblr users had a far more benevolent but hands-off relationship with creator Karp. 

Automattic wanted it to be different. Take a look at their staff blog on Tumblr, and you’ll see a complete turnaround in how the staff chooses to communicate with and interact with their users.

Here’s a post from January 2013 where staff mostly reblogged popular posts: 

Here’s a post from January 2016, where efforts to engage with the users started changing by tapping into fandom – although still on the level of just reblogging popular posts: 

Here’s the final reiteration of Tumblr staff, in 2022: 

You’ll see that there’s still some element of reblogs, but the depth and breadth of content is much more refined. Tumblr staff had nothing to lose by engaging with its users on the same level: removing that last layer is likely what led to tumblr users talking positively about the staff rather than as a nuisance to overcome. 

And it’s made the site better – for its core users, anyway.

Everyone in the world wants to connect with someone, or to feel that they’re understood. When we talk about company culture and brand values, we’re talking about them because they’re fundamentally what makes you connect with an audience. 

Tumblr staff has realised it’s better to join them then try to beat them. The benefits speak for themselves. 

For example: In 2022, they wanted to increase their clicks. They designated April as their month for a click-a-thon. If they approached Tumblr users directly, tumblr users would resist the idea. 

So they made up a character called Brick Whartley, a businessman with a brick for a head. 

He has a LinkedIn profile. He engages with users. 

He wants your interactions. 

Under the guise of Brick Whartley and a ‘we-help-you,you-help-us’, Tumblr staff coded in a mode for the site that allowed users to see tiny little widgets on their dashboard which they could click on and change. 

It looks like this at peak Tumblr: 

The aim was to increase engagement. 

It worked.

3. Convenience

Tumblr is archaic, and finding your way around isn’t easy. For new users streaming to the site as part of the early-internet-nostalgia resurgence, this is a clear and distinct barrier: you need to know how to use Tumblr to benefit from Tumblr, and knowing how to use Tumblr isn’t something you can stumble upon. 

Well, not until Tumblr launched their Hellsite High microsite. 

It’s an ingenious strategy: fold in a new series of potential clients by guiding them through the process to potentially make it big on your platform – or at least, have fun. By embracing and building on the idea of Tumblr as a kind of fundamentally void social media, Tumblr staff has managed not to alienate old users, not to chase off new users, and put themselves on the inside of the joke: amazing, considering that Tumblr was written off as a dying social media not less than a few months ago, and even more amazing considering that Tumblr is a true vestige of the old internet: its updates, tagging systems, and the way users work the platform are all obsolete forms when you consider newer social media such as Tiktok and Instagram. 

Tumblr is not a bastion of the old internet without good measure. Its early history is still rife with the same controversies that other social media networks have: bots, racism, doxxing. 

The difference, however, is that Tumblr is looking forward. Where other social medias are stumbling in a bid to elevate their platform to the best and the biggest, Tumblr is content in being the platform that feels like home – and it’s reaping the benefits. 

The post The Unmarketable Tumblr Hellsite: Lessons in User Management appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

But the way you speak to them can make the difference between success and failure – and it doesn’t help that B2B conversations have undergone a radical transformation. 

Here’s how. 

What’s the difference between B2B and B2C?

When you’re a B2B brand, your audience is other businesses – and when you market, you market to a single person that is responsible for an entire business. Think of Microsoft: while they market Windows to their B2C audiences, Microsoft 365 targets a single person in charge of an office: A CEO, HR representative, an upper-level manager who has a budget to maintain and a list of benefits they expect from their software. 

In theory, the way they think about a sale is different to B2C consumers.

In theory, the way B2B brands market themselves needs to appeal to corporate clients: benefits over emotional connection, facts over fiction.

Why do you need to know why B2B and B2C are different?

When we talk about marketing strategies, we need to take audiences into consideration: the people your company targets are who they’ve earmarked as their most important consumer. Understanding how to speak to those consumers makes the difference between a successful marketing campaign and a campaign that blips into existence and leaves without much of an impact – and not much of anything to show for it. 

B2B Marketing in a nutshell

B2B marketing has a slower – and a longer – sales cycle. Customers vary, and are less: businesses are much smaller in volume than the masses, and when you account for different industries, the pool of potential customers for any B2B corporation shrinks further. 

What matters to a B2B corporation is the bottom line: how much they can get for the amount that they invest.  

Marketing to any B2B organisation puts the product at the heart, and people need to take value away from the time they invest in that product or message. When you market B2B, you’re marketing to teach your clients, so content has to give them something to take back. 

Think about Hubspot. 

Hubspot writes blogs about marketing. Because their primary audience is marketing agencies, their content isn’t SEO-optimised for nothing: instead, they write content intended to show their expertise to the people that matter the most – marketing agencies who they can potentially work with. 

And, yes: B2B marketing has to be rational to a certain extent. It has to be on the corporate side of conversation. 

But it doesn’t have to be just corporate. 

B2C Marketing in a Nutshell

B2C marketing targets everyone.

A B2C marketing strategy has end-users in mind; someone for whom the product or service can enhance their day-to-day life. The sales cycle for B2C is shorter, the volume needed to make a profit less, and marketing messages occur more frequently. B2C marketing messages need a higher rate of conversions in order to profit, and so their messaging can skew towards trying to build a personal relationship with the people they’re speaking to. 

With B2C, the message is familiar: your audience knows you, knows your product, and has a place for it in their lives. You don’t need to justify why it should be something they buy, or to talk about the benefits of owning that product, and for every missed conversion, there is another one to take its place. 

Do I need a different strategy for B2B and B2C?

Yes. 

B2B and B2C marketing strategies address different audiences. While the intent is always to sell and make a profit, the way you market your product has to be different if you’re going to appeal to both the client in the street and the client in the boardroom. 

That said, there’s a misconception that B2B marketing has to be dry and dull and corporate. 

This isn’t the case. The idea behind professionalism has changed a lot, and we’re seeing a big difference in how B2B marketers approach clients today.

But B2B marketing still has to be boring?

No. 

Marketing is fundamentally a game of emotions. Regardless of whether your client is an entire office or a single person, the fact remains that you’re ultimately talking to people; people who are more likely to go with their gut decision whenever they’re thinking of branching out or investing in a product. 

And when you build a relationship with your audience, B2B or B2C, that is an emotional element that any client is going to take into consideration, even when they’re making ‘rational’ decisions. If the person in charge of buying for your company has to pick between two products, and one B2B brand has made more of an effort to connect, that B2B brand is going to stand out in their minds. 

Most B2B brands have similar services, similar products, and similar clients. Standing out is always going to be a challenge, and with a global playing field to contend with, any little advantage is an advantage you should take. 

Building emotional ties with your B2B clients is one of those advantages. 

And that’s a cue you can take from B2C marketing.

SEMRush takes on Twitter

Semrush needed to grow its Twitter audience. 

The only problem: professionalism is a hard sell for a website that prides itself on 140-character messages and memes and SEMRush didn’t just want to have a conversation; they wanted to go viral and to make sure that they didn’t get lost in the noise on Twitter. 

So they talked the talk – literally. 

Armed with memes and a hefty dose of snark, SEMRush carved out a niche on Twitter for microcontent that generated over 250,000 impressions in a month and pushed their Twitter engagement rate up to 7.16%. Not bad for an SEO brand talking the talk on a platform most businesses avoid marketing on! 

Doconomy

Doconomy is a data expert, and their expertise lies in calculating impact on the environment. 

Specifically, they calculate environmental impact for lifestyle, transactions, corporations, and products – and they created a free calculator to allow any brand and corporation to calculate how much their product is going to affect the world. 

The 2030 Carbon Calculator was created to solve the biggest problem of impact calculations: how much time, effort, and money it cost. It generates a result in minutes, and allows brands of any size to make decisions that works for them – without the heavy cost normally associated with generating a carbon footprint study. 

Conclusion: B2B is a different beast

B2B marketing doesn’t have to be boring. In fact, it shouldn’t be: at the end of the day, you’re having the same conversation as you would have with a B2C client, just on a much bigger scale – and the more you get into the habit of creating a relationship with the people you’re communicating with, the easier it will be to see that relationship change the way your brand looks.

The post B2B vs B2C Marketing appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

You can deal with all of those without having to add coming up with fresh, new B2B marketing ideas to your mental business to-do list. 

Like we said, it’s a tough world out there. We could all afford to be a little kinder to each other, pool our resources, and tell better stories. 

So here’s our tip for telling better stories: read B2B marketing blogs.

I’m a busy person and I don’t have time to read B2B marketing blogs.

Then your best bet is to find a company who’ll read the B2B marketing blogs for you. 

Look, there’s no way to get around the fact that the world we know is changing faster than most businesses can keep up with. Consider this: in the space of a year, Facebook went from a social media company to a virtual reality company (success notwithstanding) and that’s a megacorporation. It might not affect you today, but businesses who have already started to capitalise on the trend for virtual reality and online lives and digital business will make it affect you eventually. 

And if you’re absolutely positive that it won’t, think smaller: your consumers are changing. Your consumers will keep changing. 

The only way to stay ahead of that change and anticipate where it’s going to take you and your business is to research yourself, or trust someone to do the research for you. 

Can’t I just wait for B2B marketing trends and then jump on the bandwagon?

If you like. It’s not an effective strategy: in this reality, the first company to offer the newest product and keep innovating on it is going to win out. If you don’t believe us, then believe brand history. 

Okay, so do you have any B2B marketing blogs you recommend?

Glad you asked! Here’s our best recommendations. 

Best General B2B Marketing Blogs

1. HubSpot

No B2B marketing blog would be the same without Hubspot; if you’ve got a question you want answered, a social media you want broken down, or you’re just interested in getting the latest news, you can never go wrong with subscribing to Hubspot. Their State of Marketing Reports are perfect if you’re looking to keep up with what’s happening in marketing globally, but our favourite articles are the ones written by Roberta Risberato, who has a knack for explaining complex topics in simple words. However, everything that Hubspot puts out has high value to it, so what we would really suggest is just taking a deep dive into their website. 

2. Seth Godin

Everyone in marketing has read, or heard about, Seth Godin’s ‘Purple Cow’, his explainer book on creative advertising – and the ongoing issue of people who just plain avoid all advertising, no matter how good it is. ‘Purple Cow’  has pride of place in our bookshelves at the office, so recommending the blog that follows on from that is kind of a no-brainer. If you’re not sure where to start with this one, we recommend working your way through Seth’s top 100, a list of the most popular articles on the blog; otherwise, we suggest starting with ‘Portfolio Thinking’, a very brief exploration of how portfolios with wide-ranging projects help companies to make a better impression when they pitch. 

Best B2B Marketing Blogs for SEO

3. Neil Patel

SEO is a beast of a discipline; get it wrong, and you’ll struggle to realise without wasting precious time, money, and effort, get it right and as the discipline changes, you might get it wrong again or just miss out on a lot of opportunities until you find your new method. That said, getting SEO right and keeping it that way is a lot easier if you just keep up with Neil Patel’s blog. One of the OG SEO experts, Patel’s blog is on the cutting edge of what’s happening in SEO but it’s also more than that – and he’s always eager to recommend stuff that will make your life easier.

4. AhRefs

AhRefs is an amazing resource for SEO, and we could leave it at that, but if you haven’t checked out their blog yet, you’re missing out. They don’t just go into how AhRefs, the all-in-one toolset, works; they also test out and explore competitors and free to use products, such as the Google Keyword planner, and have a wealth of case studies and research to look through. If you’re especially interested in understanding SEO from a technical perspective and building on that knowledge for far better rankings, AhRefs is the blog that you should keep on-hand as a reference tool. 

5. Backlinko

Brian Dean, a globally-renowned SEO expert, created Backlinko to give back the lessons he learned during his early ventures: everything that helped him set up, survive through a few hard failures and slow starts, and ultimately succeed at online entrepreneurship. On Backlinko, you’ll find easy to understand articles about squeezing every last conversion out of your SEO technique, and it’s all up to date. If you want to take just one article as a taster, the one we recommend is the on-page SEO guide, which is updated every year and an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to optimise their on-page SEO. 

6. Semrush

SEMrush’s business is based around SEO: keyword analytics, market exploration, and data metrics, and the blog really highlights why you should be using best-in-class methods for your SEO. As we said before: the internet is big, and your webpage or business is only 0.000001% visible on there, so you definitely need all the help you can get in order to push viewership and make sure people actually come and see what you have to offer. SEMrush’s blog on choosing long-tail keywords is a must-read for anyone who has even a fragment of interest in SEO (so, everyone), but don’t stop there: we also encourage you to check out their ultimate keyword research guide for 2022. 

7. Moz

Moz was founded in 2004, and their blog reflects that: they’ve come a long way from the blogs they wrote about the early ideas of SEO. Their article on B2B storytelling is one we recommend to everyone who says ‘hi’, but if that’s not your speed, check out their advanced SEO category for tips on how to use SEO far more effectively and generate the kind of results that you want to see. 

As a business, Moz is all about generating localised SEO and managing your reputation with a dedicated tool, but regardless of whether you download their software or not, their blog should be on your must-read list. 

Best Social Media B2B Marketing Blogs

8. Social Media Examiner

You could spend years testing out the best way to use your social media to really make a difference to your business, or you could still test out your social media in different ways but use information backed up by the experts writing at Social Media Examiner. Social Media Examiner has a way of going back to basics and overhauling everything you know about social media, so even if you think your socials are doing well, we recommend you have a look at this blog and see if there’s something you can improve upon. For a start, check out their guide to improving your Instagram ads performance. 

9. Content Marketing Institute

Companies struggle without good, memorable, eye-catching content, and they have ever since the businesses started to invest more in digital and online marketing, when the internet became a giant playground for businesses. As the internet becomes more populated, louder, and smaller, the only way your business is going to stand out is by making content that people come back for. Content Marketing Institute is one of those blogs with content that you keep coming back for: our favourite most recent one is all about content marketing’s role in 2022, but we also have a soft spot for this 2017 article about the differences between content and content marketing.  

10. Copy Hackers

You can have good content without good copy – but it won’t be as effective or as long-lasting as good content with good copy.  Copy Hackers is a blog all about conversion copywriting, bringing together copywriters from around the world to share their expertise on everything from writer’s block to figuring out how length factors into copy effectiveness. If you haven’t overhauled your copy style yet for 2022, this is the website you should look at to help you through it – and it isn’t just for long-form copy, as you can see from this article about using copy to engage Instagram followers. 

Best B2B Marketing Blogs with Case Studies

11. B2B Marketing Insider

Every article on B2B Marketing Insider pulls together a lot of data, experience, and personal knowledge to create dozens of self-contained articles where you really don’t need to look up any extraneous data to understand what they’re trying to explain to you. Their primary focus is simple, clear explanations and how-to guides for businesses that know they want to boost their conversions, but don’t quite know how to go about it yet. 

This infographic on emotional marketing is one of our favourites, but if you’re looking for food for thought, you should definitely check out their article on thought leadership, one of the currently biggest topics of conversation for marketers. 

12. Drift

Drift’s blog has been around since 2014, and they’ve been consistently churning out excellent B2B content since then. If we had to absolutely pick a favourite article, the classic breakdown of how D2C brand ‘Glossier’ grew would be one of our top ones, however you can’t really go wrong with any of their case studies (check out the related stories at the bottom of the Glossier article, and enjoy the trip down the rabbit hole!) If you’re not a fan of case studies, there’s also their ‘ultimate guide’ series which goes into proven ways to help your business grow. 

13. eMarketer

As a resource to stay up to date with what’s happening in marketing, eMarketer is excellent for those people who like to put a name or a link to their marketing news – and eMarketer does both with their deep dives. Their latest exploration into the Super Bowl is a good example of the kind of in-depth marketing journalism we aspire to: clear, easy to understand, and with data you can quote and build reports around. 

If case studies are not your thing, their podcast episode on current marketing events bears mentioning as they do an excellent job of explaining why data privacy laws are still leaving marketers struggling. 

14. Databox

Databox is an excellent blog if you want to learn how to make actionable changes to the way you do business. We’re a fan of how easy some of the blogs are to understand and how Databox packages each one of its articles with practical, doable solutions that anyone can undertake, no matter their background. For example, this article about sales reports also features 18 examples from top sales professionals that you can use, and if you’re interested in analytics, their analytics category has dozens of articles that go into everything from KPIs to what makes a good profit margin for a new business. 

15. Duct Tape Marketing

Duct Tape Marketing is an interesting one; it’s a professional marketing blog created specifically to help small and medium sized businesses who might not have the same resources available to them as other bigger entities, and who still should have the same opportunities for growth. Duct Tape Marketing talks about affordable ways to boost your business, and while it does feature podcast interviews with leading experts, each interview comes with a transcript – we’re particularly fond of this one about humanising your brand, something that every brand should keep in mind as we head into another year of highly competitive marketing.

Bonus! Ours

When we write, we write about the stuff that matters to us: good stories, the best ways to tell them, and what’s happening around the world that will change the way you tell your story, and how many people it will reach and how many people it could reach. Our business is to make sure that you’re always equipped with the understanding and the background of what’s going on – so we have to recommend our own blog, if you don’t subscribe to it already. If you want an idea of what kind of content you get when you read our blog, check out our free ebook. 

It’s like that, but just slightly smaller. 

The post The Top 15 B2B Marketing Blogs to Follow in 2022 appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.