Do you ever feel like you could go hours talking about the technicalities of your business offerings, only to feel like you’re shouting into a black hole? Showcasing your value proposition and strengths isn’t about how much you say – it’s about how effectively you say it. Think about it: technical products are niche by nature, solving very specific problems. Marketing them demands the same level of precision to ensure your solutions are understood and valued.

Why We Believe in a Fractional Marketing Team (And Why We’re Biased)

At Switch, we’ve seen firsthand the power of fractional marketing teams for technical SMBs. It’s true – we’re biased because this is one of the core services we provide. But our belief in this approach isn’t based on what we do, it’s based on what we’ve seen work. We chose to focus on this service because we believe that it’s the best way to grow a business sustainably.

Too often, businesses tend to look for piecemeal solutions to solve an immediate need (or want): a one-off SEO audit, a standalone content strategy, some social media content, or sporadic ad campaigns. These services can help in the short term, but they rarely address the bigger picture. Marketing isn’t just a collection of tasks – it’s a cohesive, long-term effort that connects your brand with your audience, strengthens your positioning, and enables you to partner with clients at a strategic level. By aligning your marketing with your business objectives, you unlock the potential for more meaningful and sustainable growth.

When we work as a fractional marketing team we don’t commit to a certain number of tasks, but instead we promise to put a team of experts together to help you build, and run, a long-term marketing strategy for your brand. Since they’re not contractually beholden to a certain number of posts or efforts, they will do whatever it takes to help you grow your brand. 

With more traditional agreements, if you buy a set of services from an agency, it’s hard for them to come and tell you they’re not working, because the implication is that you’ll reduce their business. So while a long term contract for 8 posts a month might be a very comfortable thing to have for an agency, it’s absolutely not in the interest of the client to have something so rigid in this day and age.

Explore Our B2B Marketing Services

Discover how Switch’s fractional marketing team can help your business grow with tailored strategies designed for long-term success.

The Growth Bottleneck in Technical Companies

Technical businesses thrive on precision, innovation, and problem-solving. But marketing in this context is rarely straightforward. Business leaders often face three key challenges:

1. Complex Products Need Clear Narratives

Your audience doesn’t just need to know what you do, they need to understand:

• Why it matters,
• How it’s different,
• And why it’s better than the alternatives.

Communicating this effectively requires a mix of industry insight and creative storytelling, which is an uncommon combination that’s tough to maintain in-house.

2. Overloaded Teams and Leadership

Marketing often falls to internal teams who are already stretched thin or to C-suite executives whose focus should be elsewhere. This creates a bottleneck:

One of our early conversations with a now-client highlighted this challenge perfectly. Their issue wasn’t closing deals – once they got in the room with potential customers, their conversion rates were exceptional. The problem was getting into those rooms in the first place.

Inconsistent outreach and sporadic communication left their sales team struggling to secure those all-important initial conversations. Marketing gaps weren’t just frustrating, they were holding the business back, even though it was clear where the problem originated from.

3. Fragmented or Inconsistent Communication

When marketing becomes an afterthought, it shows. Inconsistent messaging:

• Confuses potential clients,
• Undermines trust,
• And ultimately reduces conversion rates.

The Case for Smarter B2B Marketing

Whether in-house or outsourced, effective B2B marketing is built on a few key principles:

• Clarity Over Complexity
  Technical products often address niche problems. Simplifying your messaging ensures that your audience understands your product while also seeing its relevance to their challenges.
• Consistency is Key
  The modern B2B buyer engages with brands across multiple touchpoints. A consistent voice and regular communication build trust and keep your company top of mind.
• Strategic Resource Allocation
  Marketing today requires expertise across a range of disciplines: SEO, content creation, paid media, analytics, and the ability to craft thought-leadership content that provokes meaningful conversations. 

Building an in-house team with this breadth of knowledge is a significant investment. Outsourcing gives you access to these capabilities without the overhead.

Why We Think This Works (And Why It’s Different)

Many agencies offer marketing services that feel templated: a fixed number of blog posts, a standard ad package, or off-the-shelf SEO recommendations. These services might fill a gap, but they don’t solve the problem.

What we’ve found works better is an approach that’s deeply tailored to the business. At Switch, this means starting with your business objectives, understanding your technical product, and building a narrative that aligns with your goals. This clarity forms the foundation for every piece of communication, ensuring all efforts – whether content, design, or lead generation – work together to move your business forward.

It’s not about quick fixes; it’s about creating a sustainable strategy that grows with you.

The Switch Way

We work with purpose-driven, innovative B2B companies in technical sectors, to align their marketing with their broader business objectives. From building unique narratives that capture your value, to creating marketing strategies that attract your ideal clients, and executing a plan that provides you with concrete and tangible results, we’re here to work side by side with you in the long term. And we’re committed to helping you grow in a sustainable way with all of the tools you need.

We know outsourcing isn’t for everyone, and that’s okay. But for companies ready to focus on their core business while letting a dedicated team drive their marketing forward, it can be a game-changer. And, based on what our clients say about us, we don’t feel like an outsourced team. We feel like we’re part of your team, your favourite part, most of the time.

A Transparent Invitation

We’re upfront about it – this is what we do, and we’re passionate about it because we’ve seen it work. If you’re exploring how to make your marketing more impactful, let’s have a conversation. Whether or not working with a fractional team is the right step for you, we’re happy to share insights and help you think through your options.

The post Fractional Marketing:  B2B Marketing Teams for Technical Companies appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

If you didn’t join live and would like to access the recording, click the Access Recording button below.

This webinar explores what commoditisation is, why it’s a trap, and, most importantly, how to escape it.

It covers:

• Understanding commoditisation
• Recognising the symptoms
• Strategies for de-commoditisation
• Switch’s Journey & the CATALYST Framework
• Q&A

Presented by Richard Muscat Azzopardi, CEO at Switch

The post A Guide to De-commoditisation for B2B Businesses [Webinar] appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

It also covers the common symptoms of being commoditised, so you can identify if you’re heading down that path (and hopefully correct your course early enough in the process).

The post A Deep-Dive into De-Commoditisation [eBook] appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Of the 5% of businesses that are ready to make a purchase, it is statistically unlikely that they are on the initial day-one list that B2B buyers have in mind when seeking out vendors. 90% of B2B purchases are made off that initial list, where companies land as a result of marketing, strategic influential partnerships, and a robust content marketing plan. 

Challenges for Small and Mid-Sized B2B Organizations

For larger B2B organisations, the cost of doing business, while exponentially higher, can be readily absorbed by ongoing business. Larger B2B organisations are in a better position to play the long game, providing more opportunity to take their time to reach marketing leads, and pivoting when planned returns do not materialise. Smaller B2B organisations, in their initial start-up phase, do not have the luxury of pivoting or big-spend marketing, so the client acquisition decisions are removed from operations until they reach a point where leads start to dwindle. 

The problems arise when those smaller businesses do grow into a mid-sized entity. To move from a mid-sized business to a larger one requires more business, and to escalate to more business, more clients are needed — however the statistics of new client acquisition are far from ideal. 

Smaller and mid-sized entities, with less of a marketing budget, and facing a marketing landscape that is outright difficult to break into, can thus decide that the cost of professional marketing is too high, and attempt to advertise the business themselves. While it’s an effort worth trying for smaller businesses that have some room to grow, mid-sized entities will not see the greatest benefits of marketing with DIY efforts. 

The Importance of Content Marketing and Brand

To quantify the value of marketing, it’s prudent to identify the value of a good brand and a good content marketing plan. 

• Companies that excel in personalisation generate 40% more revenue from those with little or no personalisation. 
• 89% of B2B buyers engage with content before talking to a sales rep. 
• 49% of B2B spending happens online. 
• There is a 55% increase of buyers relying on content to research and make purchasing decisions.  

Content marketing and brand are increasingly serving as differentiators in a crowded and noisy B2B marketing landscape. They function in similar ways to B2C marketing, primarily because the variations between B2C and B2B marketing are narrowing as a new cohort of B2B buyers – millennials and Gen Z – take over decision-making roles.

B2B buyers are online, overwhelmed, and looking for easier decisions to make. Marketing and a strong brand have become a non-negotiable aspect of B2B. 

DIY Marketing: a consideration of price

The reality is that, while B2B brand and content marketing is a non-negotiable aspect, smaller brands can be priced out of the conversation or have to rely on DIY marketing just to get by. This will work until the next growth stage is reached, at which point professional marketing becomes a necessity to continue meeting business demand and scale outside of existing clients. 

While DIY marketing can definitely have a short-term benefit of growth, there are some things that hamstring its efficacy in the long-run for larger businesses. 

1. Time spent on marketing. 

On average, B2B marketers at medium-and-large enterprises spend 82% of their work hours on creating content, including social media posts, newsletters, and blog posts. In addition, they send a significant amount of their time on content strategy creation, managing existing campaigns, and posting content. 

Social media and blogs alone take, on average, 3.4 and 4.7 hours respectively; ebooks, whitepapers, videos, and webinars all average nearly 5 hours. This is a significant amount of time to take out of a packed work day to create content. The hours also do not average out when taking into account that it takes upwards of seven interactions with a brand before purchasing. 

2. Lack of expertise across marketing disciplines.

Effective marketing requires expertise across disciplines, and an eye on current research, trends, and consumer shifts. For an untrained professional to specialise in one aspect of marketing, such as SEO or Google Ads, is possible, but the efficacy of those campaigns can be limited. As the discipline becomes more complex, the reality is that it will be harder for DIY marketing to reach the same level of benefit as professional marketing. 

3. Fundamental misalignment. 

A misalignment between sales and marketing can be difficult to overcome, primarily because it might be considerably harder for a non-professional to identify which of their marketing efforts is producing the misalignment. Regardless of understanding the root cause, a misalignment between sales and marketing can lead to a 10% revenue decline, as discovered by Hubspot. 

It is also one of the most common issues for B2B organisations, with 92% of companies admitting to weak alignment between sales and marketing to Forrester Research, and 52.2% of sales professionals citing lost sales and revenue as a direct cause of misalignment.

4. Inconsistency in marketing efforts 

The B2B buying cycle is fundamentally a personal one, and consistency is key to attracting high-quality leads and triggering the purchase process. Businesses that prioritise lead nurturing and engagement can generate up to 50% more sales-ready leads that they can continue to grow as a result.

Furthermore, brand consistency is another key metric that DIY marketing can struggle with, with consistent brands seeing 10-20% more revenue but more than 47% of brands admitting that they publish off-brand content a few times per year.   

5. Lack of strategic approach.

92% of B2B marketing budgets are spent on short-term, bottom funnel objectives such as lead generation, which has little effect on future buyers, and does not take into account future developments for your business. By targeting engagements that focus only on bringing short-term opportunities through the door, it is likely that the B2B marketing cycle will eventually stop producing leads and new clients, which can be difficult for a smaller business to overcome. A strategic approach ensures that clients trickle in at a steady, manageable pace that allows for the business to scale reasonably. 

6. Cost-effectiveness in the long run.

With an understanding of the right tools to use, the right metrics to monitor, and the time taken to ensure that campaigns are continuously maintained to deliver high results, professional marketing is cost-effective, a promise that is far harder to achieve with DIY marketing. On average, professional marketing will base any marketing on information generated through business operations, allowing them to tailor marketing tactics to generate the greatest possible opportunity for sales. DIY marketing may have access to the same information but without the necessary skills to adapt marketing tactics to serve that information, therefore leading to lost costs. 

Misconceptions about marketing for DIY marketers

While 67% of companies outsource their marketing needs as a matter of course, the ones that prefer to DIY their marketing have specific considerations for why they opt to keep control of their marketing. 

The top two reasons appear to be based on misconceptions. 

1. Lack of control over brand. 
2. Lack of discretionary budget to conform to agency fees. 

These matters are considerable worries, however they can be easily amended by finding the right agency to partner with. Effective marketing partnerships can allow a growing business control over the fundamental aspects of their identity, and merely strategise and build communication around what already exists. 

Budgetary concerns, on the other hand, are a little harder to overcome. For businesses that are still in the primary start-up it can be effective to retain all marketing efforts and keep them in-house – but as the business does start to grow, marketing in-house will lead to a lot of missed opportunities. 

The opportunity to outsource

Over half of B2B marketing teams outsource at least one aspect of content marketing. What this provides the company is the flexibility to prioritise their in-house operations while simultaneously benefitting from the expertise of a fractional agency. Outsourcing marketing activities allows for a better opportunity to generate content that drives leads, and leave the internal team free to continue with the work of running the business. It takes the pressure of the intensive, day-to-day monitoring and content creation away from upper management and puts it into the hands of experts who can focus solely on your content. 

For B2B organisations to thrive within shrinking market share, there needs to be an adjustment made for the state of the industry at the moment. The B2B buying cycle is long and complex, and communicating at the right time and with the right idea will make a significant difference to the business — but that path is time-consuming, and complex in itself. 

Outsourcing your marketing will at least enable you to both prioritise your business and your marketing, without one sacrificed for the other. It’s the most sustainable, economical way forward, particularly for businesses who want to pay for proven results. 

And all it takes to start with this path is the right partner. Get in touch to see how we can help you create lasting growth and success through strategic, results-driven marketing.

The post The Cost of DIY Marketing appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

The right and wrong ways to implement AI into your business.

It’s becoming harder and harder to ignore AI in your business. If you use any sort of software, the likelihood is that it’s currently integrating some form of generative AI. Heck, even fridges and microwaves are injecting AI into their software, let alone your favourite software.

It’s a great time to be alive, and it’s incredibly exciting to see all the benefits we’re reaping from AI tools, but it can also be scary.

How do you keep up? How do you know which tool to use? How do you discuss the tools you’re using with your clients? How do you control what your employees are doing on AI?

There’s no easy answer. 

But I can practically guarantee that most of these questions are being asked by your peers, so do not feel like you’re the only one who’s confused.

Before getting into some specific advice, however, I just want to give one word of warning. Don’t assume this is just going to go away. This is not the Metaverse. This is not AR and VR. This is not 360-degree videos. Their time may still come, but they exploded onto the scene before the world was ready for them. AI is here today, and here to stay and its transformational effects on businesses are profound.

And while I don’t think that you’ll lose your job (or your clients) to AI just yet, I am pretty certain that you’re going to lose your job (or your clients) to a company that’s leveraging AI better than you are.

It’s like living through the industrial revolution and ignoring automation of manufacture. Sure, there’s still room for small-scale artisans, but the people with big machines are always going to outgun anyone manufacturing manually.

Right ways to implement AI tools

Overall, the first thing to look at when considering AI tools and technology is that these are tools to help you do your job better or more efficiently. You should look for areas of your business that could do with assistance in automation or in making sense of large swathes of data. In general, any task that’s heavily process driven and is repeated can probably be helped by some AI tool or another.

I’m not going to cover many examples of good ways to use AI because most of the tools that make your life easier are industry-specific, but if you go over the few examples I’ve chosen below, you can see the thought process.

Help with Research

Most of our work needs a deep understanding of the industry we’re working in with our clients. AI tools can be invaluable at quickly getting up to speed with industries, markets or areas of specialisation. This can be true for any industry, I can’t think of any industry in which a better understanding of your industry will not prove to be useful.

It’s also an excellent way to learn more about other roles within your company. Especially as a business leader, if you can learn to leverage AI tools well you can ask far better questions of your more technical reports.

Help with Decision Making

If you have large swathes of data or a large amount of information about a specific subject, AI is an excellent way to make sense of it all, to query it and to help collect all the background information you need to make a decision about something. Think about the benefit you could extract from dumping all your meeting notes about a subject, or all the historical data from something, into one large dataset and having the ability to query it in easy to understand, human commands.

Help with Automation of Repetitive Tasks

AI is excellent at helping with repetitive tasks. Think transcribing voice notes, for example. Or recognising text and handwriting in large volumes. These are tasks that an AI tool can do in minutes what a human can do in days or weeks. As long as you can describe the process well, then you can probably find someone to leverage existing AI tools to do the job for you. 

Help with Time Management

One of our favourite tools to use at Switch is Clockwise, a calendar tool that saves us hours of time every week to find time in our schedules. It also looks at your individual calendar and optimises it to give you more focus time. You can always override its suggestions manually, but the benefit of using it has been massive for us.

Help with Customer Service

If you have a good enough description of all the normal queries you usually get with customer support, then it’s relatively easy to teach an AI tool to answer your customer queries online. This won’t replace human interactions when needed, but AI can offer an amazing customer experience if it can solve most of your customer queries in seconds. Your customers can get a much better service if most of their queries are answered quickly.

Wrong ways to implement AI tools

There are many more ways to leverage AI tools than the ones I covered above, and I’d be happy to discuss them in more detail if you want to reach out to me at any point. But I’m even more concerned about people looking at AI tools and seeing them in the wrong light. Just like they can be extremely helpful, they can be extremely dangerous (or downright stupid).

To Save on HR Costs

This is more of a question of approach than of actual implementation. If you’re looking at AI tools as a way to cut down on your HR costs, then you’re probably looking at it from the wrong perspective. Yes, by looking at the massive layoffs that big tech companies are making, you might be inclined to think that AI is definitely going to help with savings, but that’s just missing the woods for the trees. Big tech companies are laying off people from non-AI areas because it’s a business decision to focus on AI tools, not because AI tools are replacing humans. In most cases, they had overhired for growth and are actually now just doubling down on AI solutions instead, clearing out people from other divisions.

AI tools still need humans to make sense of them, and if you think otherwise you’re going to be very disappointed.

To Take Decisions on Your Behalf

AI tools are excellent at helping you make sense of information to make better decisions, but they should not be relied on to make decisions themselves (at this point in time), especially with tools that are more generic in nature. AI tools can definitely make better decisions in specialised scenarios. But don’t use AI tools to make decisions on your behalf when screening CVs, or when figuring out who to hire or fire, for example. Don’t rely on generic AI tools to tell you where to invest or where to spend your money. Use them to gather and make sense of information, but you should be the ultimate decision-maker.

To Produce Content on Your Behalf

I’ve seen so much obviously AI-generated content that it’s scary. It’s even worse when the person generating the content has clearly not even bothered to learn how to prompt well or how to make sense of the content that’s being output. I recently received an email from a potential supplier who very obviously just asked ChatGPT to write an email to help sell me something. The email could be seen as a ChatGPT effort from miles away, and what made it even worse was that the context of the email made no sense, so if the person sending the email had even bothered for a minute or two to read the email they were sending out, they’d have smelt a rat before sending it.

Think about the content you’re putting out there on behalf of your brand. Think about what your audience thinks of you. If you’re going to rely on a tool to create your content, at the very least take the time to learn how to prompt well and how to edit your content to make it make sense, but by the time you do that you can probably have produced the content yourself.

And in the end…

There are hundreds of ways to use AI to try to get ahead of the game (or at the very least to not be left behind). Not all of them are good. Not all of them will offer you a real advantage. 

Think about the sustainability of your decisions, learn as much as you can about the tools there are out there, keep up to date and keep an open mind.

It might seem scary, especially because there’s so much happening at any given time, but trust me, it’s just as exciting as it is frightening. Once you start seeing the real benefits of finding tools to take the boring bits of your work away, you’ll be a convert.

The post Using AI tools for better business appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Every few months, we take turns in hosting a “Member Spotlight,” where a member has the opportunity to showcase who they are and what their business is all about. Last month, it was my turn. But instead of the usual approach in which I present myself and my role within Switch, I felt there would be more value exploring a topic close to our hearts at the agency: leveraging brand for business growth.

What made this presentation particularly enjoyable was the absence of any pressure to present myself or Switch within a sales context. It wasn’t about pitching services or showcasing case studies. It was a candid exploration of the risks we’ve taken, the decisions we’ve made, and the steps that have shaped our journey. 

At the heart of it all is our brand: the key element to our growth.

Normally, I’d pass the microphone to Ed, our Head of Brand, who has a unique talent for articulating our business and our clients’ brands in a tangible, relatable, and authentic way. However, this time, one of the goals was for me to step out of my comfort zone – I am not one who particularly enjoys presentations –  to share our story myself, offering a personal perspective on how we’ve used our brand as a cornerstone for success.

The Human Touch in Branding

The core theme of my presentation was simple, and a recurring one: a strong brand needs to feel human. Without this human touch, there’s a disconnect—whether with clients, employees, or partners. We are inherently wired to connect with brands that exhibit human qualities, making it essential for our brand foundations to reflect these attributes.

At Switch, our success is a direct reflection of the people who make up our agency. We have a team of twenty incredibly talented, driven, and kind individuals who I proudly refer to as business partners—because “colleagues” simply doesn’t capture the essence of our collaboration. Despite our diverse backgrounds and interests, we are united by the shared values that define Switch.

When we think about our brand fundamentals, our team is at the forefront of it: our goal is to make it tangible and clear for every team member to live and breathe it, effortlessly.

Building a brand that feels human starts with cultivating a team that embodies your core values.

When we talk about values, we’re not referring to generic slogans often seen on office posters. Instead, our values are deeply ingrained principles that guide every decision we make—especially the tough ones. 

We don’t consider values like ‘trustworthy’ and ‘caring’ as core because, frankly, if you have to say you’re a good human rather than show it, something’s not quite right. These are what I’d call ‘telling’ values, that don’t demand specific actions or behaviours. In contrast, at Switch, our core values are about ‘doing.’ They are deeply embedded in how we actively achieve our goals and make decisions, guiding us even through the toughest challenges.

As an agency, we frequently encounter a few key questions:

• How do you recruit talent remotely that fits your business vision?
• How do you manage a remote team spread across continents?
• How did you transform your clients from mere numbers on an invoice into long term partners?
• How have you successfully implemented a 4-day work week?

The answer to all of these questions lies in our strong brand foundations. These foundations provide the stability needed to navigate challenges or innovating in our work practices. Without them our agency would crumble at the first sign of trouble (looking at you, COVID-19!). They enable us to take bold risks that define who we are today.

Our brand fundamentals are the attributes that define who we are as an agency. They shape our beliefs, thoughts, and actions. Typically, we share these fundamentals only with our team during onboarding and regular agency reviews, but for the Vistage presentation, I made an exception. I wanted to highlight how these core principles translate into tangible outcomes, and the confidential, supportive environment of our Vistage group was the perfect setting for this deeper exploration.

Presenting to a group of different business leaders was a refreshing experience. Their insightful questions and thoughtful challenges pushed me to reflect even more deeply on our principles. The discussions reinforced the importance of looking inward to grow—whether it’s about attracting new clients, expanding relationships, recruiting the right talent, or building lasting brand equity.

Personal Branding Exercise

To conclude the session, each Vistage member was invited to reflect on their personal positioning statement and participate in a portrait session that represented their personal brand. This exercise underscored the importance of personal branding alongside the corporate brand—reminding us all that our individual identities are integral to the broader brand narrative. This exercise was a powerful reminder that a brand’s strength lies in the authenticity and alignment of its people.

The photoshoot was a courtesy of Ed, who shot some incredible portraits of each member—keeping in mind the essence of who they are, allowing it to shine through.

The Enduring Power of a Human-Centred Brand

In summary, the journey of Switch underscores a simple yet profound truth: brands that are able to clearly articulate their fundamentals are the ones that succeed at building authentic, human connections. Whether it’s within our team or with our clients, these connections are the true drivers of growth and resilience.

This Vistage presentation was an opportunity to share our journey, offer insights, and inspire other business leaders to leverage their brand for growth. As you navigate your own journey, I encourage you to reflect on your brand fundamentals. What story does it tell about your business or leadership? How is it guiding your growth, your decisions, and the connections you build?

Enjoyed this blog post? Follow Melissa on LinkedIn for direct access to her insights and more valuable content.

The post How to Leverage Brand for Growth appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

In 2023, the big shakeup of generative AI, a growing dissatisfaction amongst consumers, and ongoing crises around the world have led to trends that we’ve already seen before, but given them newer, sharper importance.

2024 could be a year of diving profits, increasing dissatisfaction, and an impossible-to-overcome disconnect. Instead, the trends we’ve seen coming for this year leave a lot of room for hope: brands are still going strong, consumers still look to business as their guide into a more sustainable and supportive future, and small changes in the way we work have led to gigantic leaps for the better.

We’ve looked at BI. We’ve looked at consumer macro trends. We’ve looked at social media, marketing, brand and storytelling trends.

Now we’re handing it over to you. Everything we’ve researched, everything we’ve put together, everything you need to make sense of 2024 and start strengthening your business for the now, and the beyond-now.

May it serve you well!

P.S. Want more of this kind of content? Sign up to our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn!

The post The Big Book of Trends 2024 [Free eBook] 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.

While you can quickly put out posts and hope for the best, it’s likely that what you’ll manage to achieve with this style of marketing will be a lot less impactful than taking it slower, steadier, and more strategically. Results will still be there – they’ll just be less of what you can hope to see, and your marketing team might struggle to continue to meet communication objectives without the benefit of a strategy. 

There are four ways to tell whether your marketing is working for you. 

But before we get to that, there’s an underpinning principle to explore. 

How the right KPIs help you grow your business

Before you look at your marketing strategy, you need to look at what your business objectives are, and what communication goals you can set to help you achieve those business objectives.

KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are the metrics you’ll use to track whether or not you’re reaching your goals. KPIs tell you how your business and your marketing is performing in the moment: they’ll be factors such as customer satisfaction, churn, turnover, and return on investment. If it can be tracked through data, it can be monitored, and if it can be monitored, then that will influence how you move forward. 

Setting those KPIs is the first step you need to take before you start looking at progress. Your marketing team should be helping you to meet your goals; this means that they’ll need to start by looking at the KPIs you want to meet, and figuring out how best to work towards them. For example, if your ultimate goal is return on investment, the marketing team should use that as the underpinning of your marketing strategy. 

Once you’ve set KPIs that you can reach, there’s a few things you can look at to see if your marketing is working for you. 

Why are the right KPIs important?

Think of your business as a plant. 

There are plants that will grow just about anywhere, plants that need specific conditions to achieve the best environment, and plants that will be happy with just a few adjustments to the baseline. Understanding the conditions that will push that plant to thrive is part and parcel of ownership. 

Your business has a reason to exist. 

That reason can be achieved through a number of different goals. 

And those goals can be met through KPIs. 

How does a good marketing team use KPIs?

Say your primary business objective is to increase your customer satisfaction ratings. You can then focus on tasks such as increasing your net promoter score and improving your customer loyalty or addressing your brand perception. These KPIs will feed into an overall marketing strategy that looks at more than just straight-up communicating with your consumers. While it’s important to put out good content frequently, communication is not the only end goal of all marketing plans. 

In fact, communication may not serve your business goals well if the way you go about communicating with your audience is to post on your social media just for the sake of posting. 

Think about the brands you engage with; the brands you actively, and consciously, support and follow. Think about the way that those brands speak to you. 

We’re willing to bet that those brands talk to you about the stuff that matters most to you. We’re willing to bet that those brands talk to you only when they have something to say – about offers that interest you, or content you want to know about. We’re willing to bet that their posts will teach you something about the brand, or about yourself. 

Brands that have something to say are brands that know how to communicate in a way that is useful to their audiences, which is why we build connections with them easily. Brands with nothing to say  – or brands that struggle to get their message across – miss the mark in trying to connect with their audience because they don’t know what that valuable communication metric is. 

KPIs feed into a content strategy that will look at more than just communication. Your marketing team should be able to handle both the strategy that underpins your communications, and the communications itself, and to tweak one or the other depending on whether or not you’re meeting the KPI you’ve set for yourself. 

What does a good marketing team look like?

A good marketing team understands your business goals and comes up with a strategy that ultimately reaches to address those goals. A good marketing team doesn’t focus just on getting you to communicate, but on getting you to communicate with purpose. This is the benefit of a KPI-driven marketing strategy.

If you’re unsure about the performance of your marketing team, request the KPIs they’re working to and observe the way these perform over a specific time period. Your team should be assessing the performance, optimising their efforts, and creating a virtuous cycle of improvement across metrics. If you think your team could do with some support, we’re here to help.

The post How to Tell If Your Marketing is Working 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.