Eddie Saunders with Flex Machine Tools blew us away with his dynamic opinions on what it takes to be a unicorn marketer in an industrial marketing setting.
Traditionally, videos have been used mainly for customer service training, product demos, and internal sales. But in the new digital age, video marketing has become a necessity. B2B marketers have discovered how video marketing effectively grows their business’ bottom line. According to research, 88% of marketers say video marketing strategies provide their businesses with a positive ROI.
Jeff and Alex discuss some of the most overlooked aspects of marketing. Jeff had over a decade of experience in digital marketing and this helps him identify brands' why what, and how. Setting himself up as the perfect person to help a brand achieve its goals.
In the early 2000s, podcasts saw a surge of interest. Thanks to shows like This American Life and Radiolab, podcasts were a tool to tell stories. By the mid-2010s, it was ascending in popularity so quickly that it could even be called a podcast boom. Now, with nearly 40% of Americans saying they've listened to a podcast within the last month and 62% having ever listened to a podcast in their lives, it's time to recognize podcasts as the heavy hitters they are and the role they play in B2B marketing.
This episode is all about the power of zero-click content. You'll learn why you should be testing it in your marketing strategy and a new segment where we ask each other marketing questions that we have to answer in 30 seconds or less. Stay tuned for more Stori & Alex episodes where we discuss current events in marketing.
Hiring a new agency can be intimidating. In this episode, John Bertino the founder of The Agency Guide (TAG), discusses why he went into the business of pairing companies with the perfect agency.
He shares why it's important to have that perfect match, some overrated qualities that people look for when hiring an agency, red & green flags to look for, and why agencies need to be consistent.
In this episode of The B2B Growth Marketer Podcast Kyle Stout, the founder of Elevate & Scale discusses why email marketing should still be a part of your marketing strategy.
With changes in technology, you would think that email would have drastically changed as well, but according to Kyle, it has stayed close to its original roots.
Kyle shares some of his best practices and things to avoid if you're a small company starting out in email marketing.
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Social media continues to be all the rage in inbound marketing these days. However, oversaturation has made the droves of social media content feel impersonal which could be driving users away.
Your loyal customers have opted to follow you on social media, but every time they open an app, they see posts from companies that are not appealing to their needs... That's why you should reach them in a more personal way; through email.
Stori and I talk about everything from Pinterest for B2B marketers, how to get more interaction and networking done through LinkedIn, is Tik Tok a space that B2B marketers could ever start marketing on, and some more information on our newsletter, The Marketer's Basecamp.
Deciding what tool to use for your website is always a long process. You need to think about cost and ease of use, as well as if it will be able to grow with your business. Brian Serocke, our Director of Platform Operations, will tackle the WordPress vs. HubSpot debate and determine which is best for your needs.
Tom Hunt, Founder of Fame.so has cracked the code to become famous. Through podcasts, he has helped so many people achieve their dreams. Tom is the founder of Fame.so, helps you do two major things. Create amazingly good content around a specific niche, and make sure you are seen around other famous people in that niche.
Are blogs still a thing?
If you are in the content production space, you know the importance of creating content to nurture your existing clients, reach an even wider range of audiences and generate leads. But in order to do that, people must actually see and be aware of your content.
So, how do you ensure that your blog ranks high on search engines? The answer: search engine optimization (SEO).
On a scale of 1-5, what’s your experience level with SEO?
If you answered anything other than a 5 or if you’re looking for answers to some of your biggest SEO and blog creation questions, there might be a few things we can show you.
We met up with our content strategist, Sabina Hahn, and she walked us through some key points you can’t miss when you’re writing and building content. Gone are the stressful days when it comes to keywords, blog creation, or SEO.
HubSpot certifications are an excellent resource for keeping up with the latest trends and technologies in inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. These frequently updated, free video courses only require a few hours to consume. You’ll gain the skills, tips, and insights needed to improve your organization’s growth efforts.
If you run your business online, a firm grasp of keyword research is vital for your success. This article explains what keyword research is, why identifying keywords is so essential for research, and why you should research the keyword. Read on for useful information and helpful tips for keyword research.
Whether you're in B2B, B2C, C2C, or any other business model, you know how challenging it can be to get your leads to convert. Even after all the effort you've put into generating leads in the first place, you still need to engage your audience and lead them further into the buyer's journey.
Today’s internet users demand an ever-increasing amount and quality of high-performing content.
To keep up with that insatiable demand, you have to invest large amounts of time, energy, and money. It’s a shame to let all the premium content you’ve created in the past sit there when you could easily use content repurposing for breathing new life into it.
It doesn’t take a marketing expert to understand that you need to think like your customers if you want to draw them to your business. One way that marketers achieve this is by creating buyer personas. A buyer persona is a hypothetical character archetype meant to represent the type of buyer you want to reach: perhaps “Martha the Stay-at-Home Mom,” “Pete the Plumber,” or “Gina the Grad Student.”
Inbound marketing offers B2B companies a way to reach and educate their customers directly—something that's becoming more and more important every day. But what is inbound marketing?
As the name suggests, Inbound marketing is the opposite of outbound marketing. Instead of interrupting potential customers with spammy calls, unwanted emails, and other intrusive advertising, inbound marketing allows customers to learn more about you and your business on their time. Here, they find exactly what they're looking for which is specific information about your business and its offerings. Customers are attracted to your business through content they enjoy on the sites they're already visiting. They'll buy from you because they have a very high-interest level in purchasing from you.
Buyer personas form the base for much of your inbound marketing efforts. When used properly, they can help you hone your marketing messages to attract your ideal customers to your business.
Personas help create the context for your messaging to ensure you’re delivering relevant content to engage with your ideal customers.
Alex Meade our VP of Sales & Marketing, and Sabina Hahn, our Lead Content Strategist here at Beacons Point invited Rebecca Devaney and Kate Babcock of Culture Theory to talk about why emotional intelligence in the workplace is important. Culture Theory is a business consulting firm that focuses on bringing emotional intelligence to your workplace.
In our digital world, webinars have become one of the most efficient ways for companies to further their brand. These low-CTA forums enable companies to position themselves as industry thought-leaders, collect leads, and move prospective clients further down the funnel — but they're only as effective as the engagement they create.
If companies want to make the most of these online summits, they need to evaluate how they plan to maximize webinar attendance and foster as much participation as possible. That means thinking through broader goals like timing, planning, and deck layout (strategy) as well as specific means of implementation like deliverables, recordings, and repurposing content (tactics). We'll take a look at both in this article, and show you where to go after your webinar is complete.
Quality content has the ability to take your SEO game to the next level. Search engines are looking for original, optimized content that includes links, keywords, and overall strong content. Quality and SEO are both crucial for search success. Read more to understand why.
HubSpot is a great tool for inbound marketing and sales, but sometimes it can get a little messy, especially when you’ve had your account for a long time. Accounts may switch hands or multiple people may be using the same account.
Without regular database hygiene practices, it can easily become unmanageable. In some cases, you may find you are sending out irrelevant content to contacts and actually hurting your marketing, sales, and service efforts. However, you may now know it’s happening until one of your contacts lets you know.
Alex Meade, our VP of Sales and Marketing at Beacons Point was able to interview Ashley Lawson, our Vendor Manager. Ashley provides insight into why vendor management is necessary and how she does her job so well.
Vendor management does not have to be complicated; by following our best practices, understanding the process, and knowing what you plan to achieve by hiring a sales or marketing vendor, you can have a stress-free vendor management experience.
Potential buyers will always be skeptical about your product or service until you've satisfactorily convinced them. So while it's wise to perfect your marketing strategies and craft engaging brand awareness content, testimonials are the most effective way to build trust with new customers. Research shows that business websites that regularly use word of mouth from delighted customers have the potential of generating 62% more revenue from each of their customers on every visit. Although you can use written reviews, video testimonials are more engaging.
Alex Meade, VP of Sales and Marketing at Beacons Point, sits down with Ken Lundin, president of Ken Lundin & Associates and RevHeat, to discuss the new era of sales on The B2B Growth Marketer Podcast.
Adding videos to your website can drastically improve your SEO ranking. Video marketing has become an increasingly popular tool for savvy digital markets. Today, more than 87% of marketers incorporate video into their digital marketing strategy. What makes video marketing compelling is that it can break down complex topics, which drives more people to your website and boosts your SEO ranking.
A strong brand voice will help you stand out from other companies and deliver a unique message to your customers. Having an inconsistent voice will hurt your brand by weakening the message you are trying to send to your potential customers. Your business may be at risk by not creating a relatable voice that your target audience can easily identify with. The following are a few ways a weak voice can hurt your brand.
Alex Meade, VP of Sales and Marketing at Beacons Point, sits down with Jeff Coyle, Co-founder, Chief Strategy Officer at MarketMuse, to discuss how to make SEO work for you in 2022 on The B2B Growth Marketer Podcast.
Interviews are vital for helping businesses scale content, grow their network, and boost company contributions. However, unless you’re in a field that traditionally requires interviewing, most people haven’t been taught how to conduct interviews. Here are the 10 essential do's and don'ts of conducting interviews that will help you refine your interviewing skills and create better content all around.
It's hardly a secret that videos are a pillar element of successful marketing campaigns. With almost 90% of consumers asking to see more videos from their favorite brands, marketers work hard to meet these demands but often hit roadblocks.
While keyword research is the backbone of your SEO strategy, it doesn't have to be expensive. If you are stretching your marketing budget to accommodate a variety of tactics, it's possible to save on keyword research.
Podcasts have been around since 2004 when MTV video jockey Adam Curry, and software developer Dave Winer, found a way to download online radio broadcasts to an iPod. Thanks to Curry and Winer, listeners gained a way to store radio broadcast files on their portable players.
The fact that you're here means you understand how important video marketing is. Whereas previously, brands could rely solely on images and written content to market their products or services, those days are gone. The present-day consumer's inundation with interactive 360 videos, augmented reality, and live streaming has resulted in video marketing strategy being a key determinant of how successful a given brand's marketing efforts are.
The world of sales and marketing is a rapidly evolving landscape. As technology and tools grow more sophisticated, a successful sales process will change according to new standards and best practices. When organizations don't recognize and address this fluidity, the underperforming sales may not fall entirely on the shoulders of the sales team.
Providing the right resources to promote healthy sales requires creating a culture and infrastructure that adapts to new challenges and executes a cohesive strategy throughout your entire sales process. This process is called sales enablement. You can utilize many tools to streamline your process and deliver more inbound sales with better sales enablement, but it all starts with the right content.
With 93% of marketers believing that video is an important part of their marketing strategy, implementing it into yours is a must. To stay ahead of the competition, you need to know when, how, and where to take advantage of your video content.
HubSpot workflows are a powerful tool to automate much of your marketing process to achieve greater efficiency. You can use workflows to automate your email campaigns, score and nurture leads, move leads to sales, track data, and more.
However, like most software, many users only scratch the surface with what they can do. This blog will focus on how you can get more out of your HubSpot workflows and optimize their impact.
TLDR; You can use interviews for more than vetting prospective hires. When you integrate informational interviews into your content process, you can:
2020 was a challenging year for most businesses and marketers. But, where there are challenges, there are also opportunities.
2020 was tough. I was often close to losing it and breaking down. The stress of the pandemic, the company, and my family’s health and happiness certainly took a toll.
As we come up on the end of what’s been a particularly difficult year, I think it’s fair to say we’ve been through a lot as a global community. And while it has been a challenging year, I think it’s offered a lot of us an opportunity to reflect on all of the things we have to be thankful for.
Marketing results are only as good as the goals you set. Without a clear objective, the campaign turns into a random set of tactics to no defined end.
I have to admit something. I am a complete nerd. Star Wars, Star Trek (anything space, really), and Harry Potter are just a few of my favorites. So much so that I have read the Harry Potter books twice now. You know this and can now make a personal connection, a personalized outreach to connect. Even if I don’t know you, I will most likely open the email or read an article if you tap into my nerdom.
If the “content police” showed up at your office asking to see your content plan, would you be able to show them one?
Now, content jail may not be a real thing, but the effects of patchwork and poorly planned content strategy on your business can be criminal short and long-term.
Adapt to the new ways of doing business through persona research and strategic goal setting
Business was already in flux heading into the infamous year 2020. Trends in communication emerged and shifted the marketing, sales, and service departments’ goals in almost every industry. Video-first communication, the rise of B2B podcasts, and the growing emphasis on personalized messaging are only a few examples.
Writing content without a plan is like building a house without a blueprint. You can come up with a stellar-looking wall that everyone loves, but it wouldn't do you any good without a foundation.
B2B marketing is not easy. You work in a competitive, complex industry, and your customers demand informative and persuasive information. Because so many B2B deals are viewed as “partnerships,” as opposed to pure “transactions,” marketers and salespeople are under immense pressure to develop trust and relationships with target customers long before they sign a deal.
Topic clusters are revolutionizing SEO and content marketing strategies all over the internet. Their goal is to please Google algorithms while providing a seamless experience for the target audience.
If you are building an inbound marketing strategy for your company, you probably know about HubSpot. The platform offers a wide variety of useful tools for your sales and marketing efforts along with an impressive knowledge base and Academy.
The internet runs on content — relatable and engaging content the public can easily find, understand, and apply. In today’s information age, consumers have endless information at their fingertips 24/7/365. They expect more from companies than ever before, and rightfully so.
Baseball cards. Such a simple concept. Or so that’s what many (sane) people think of them. How many kids like me feverishly collected baseball cards decades ago and have them collecting dust in the basement of their parent’s house today?
The key to a successful content campaign is the ability to measure the results. You’ll have no real idea of how well or poorly your campaigns are doing if you can’t understand how it’s performing. You must know which key metrics you’re tracking and how to evaluate them to help you improve your content to maximize conversions.
When you develop a plan for new content, envisioning how each piece will work together to turn strangers into eventual customers is paramount. The traditional marketing funnel is an easy, familiar way to visualize a particular lead or prospect’s progress.
We’ve talked a lot about personas lately and understanding your customers. That’s because we believe it gets to the core of how we successfully help our customers.
Creating content is difficult, but aligning a content strategy might be a more significant challenge. Should you focus on gated or ungated pieces? Should you emphasize video? Should you start a podcast?
If ramping up content production is your goal, a thriving blog has to be a top priority for your marketing team. If you aren't utilizing your blog the way you should, you could be missing out on an opportunity to comment on industry “hot topics” and establish your position as an authority in your space. Regular blogging increases traffic, improves your credibility online, and supplements your website to improve conversions and sales in the long term.
You can write all of the content and cover every topic possible in your industry to build a complete content strategy, but that content won't get you anywhere if it isn't engaging. Even if you do everything you can to implement a reliable SEO strategy across your website, you won't get the results you want if Google sees that people aren't interacting with your content.
These are the opening thoughts from the first issue of our new newsletter, The Basecamp. If you want to see us in your inbox every month, sign up here!
Alex Meade, VP of Sales and Marketing at Beacons Point, sits down with Darren Reinke, founder of Group Sixty Executive Coaching, to discuss communication and its importance especially with the global shift to remote work.
What is a buyer persona? A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
Undergoing your first buyer persona research cycle can seem a daunting task. You have to contend with scheduling interviews, sourcing quality research, dedicating internal resources to planning and executing a persona report, and then following up on tracking personas throughout an inbound marketing campaign. There will be some experimentation involved to determine how to approach the development of personas, but with the right guidance you can skip over common persona pitfalls.
After you've built your buyer personas and are eager to start unveiling powerful content to them, it can be challenging to determine which persona you should target first. It can be particularly difficult if you've developed multiple personas based on a variety of ideal customers. The key is determining which persona is the most valuable starting point. You can prioritize your personas in a variety of ways and yield optimal results from your marketing efforts.
The very first step when starting a buyer persona build is deciding which customers and prospects are important to the sustainability and growth of your business. With that in mind, it’s crucial for the marketer or businessperson leading the initiative to involve their sales executives in the process.
Detailed, in-depth buyer personas provide a foundational understanding of your prospective customers' wants, needs, and personalities. You should know how to share your buyer personas properly with the different departments whose work affects customer experiences.
Buyer personas already make up the backbone of your outreach strategy, whether you’ve been relying on formal personas or not. Think about it. If you are an ophthalmologist marketing Lasik packages to an older demographic, would you choose to run ads for those services on Snapchat or TikTok? Probably not. Common sense dictates your audience won’t be found there. But what about the rest of the consumer story? The details within the details that paint the picture of how your customers operate are what unearth insights that have huge impacts on your business.
As you developed buyer personas in an attempt to better understand your customers, you probably conducted hours of interviews, performed ample research on buying behavior, and gained a clear, full picture of your ideal customers. You've done your best to empathize with your target audience and identify their pain points, their favorite online hangouts, their likes and dislikes, and general attitudes.
Before taking on your first buyer persona interview, it’s necessary to understand not only the top-line questions to which you need answers but also how to reach the answers appropriately. In this blog, we’ll break down the five top-line questions you can’t build your personas without, including demographics, goals, challenges, research habits, and values.
There is no easy way around it. The Coronavirus has hit many industries hard and some will have to fight hard to bounce back.
Video inbound marketing utilizes the buyer’s journey to create valuable, helpful, and meaningful video content to attract, convert, and delight your customers.
Grab your mallow, graham and chocolate, and have a seat for this week's Around the Campfire! You may be thinking to yourself, "I didn't know Beacons Point sends out awesome newsletters with helpful inbound marketing and sales content." Well, you are right! This is our first of many, so sit tight and enjoy the content.
The age of “Always be Closing” is over. No, I am serious, it’s no longer about closing. So, what is it about? Providing value and being helpful. One of the ways to do this is by using 1:1 sales videos to personalize your sales process.
The buyer’s journey really is unique to every business according to what you offer, your customer types or personas, and the time it takes your customers to weigh all the options before making a purchasing decision. It’s important to understand videos aren’t one-size-fits-all, and you can’t expect to just put out a video and watch the new customers start rolling in.
Over the past few weeks California has experienced some of the worst fires in state history. The recent fires scorched over 245,000 acres and claimed 88 lives with over 250 people still unaccounted for.
As a company we knew that we wanted to do something to help the firefighters and first responders to express our gratitude for their bravery and relentless efforts to keep our communities safe.
Like many of you, I set some personal and professional goals at the beginning of the year. One of mine was to feel more confident and be a better public speaker. I wanted to feel better talking with prospects over the phone, feel more confident giving talks or presentations on inbound marketing, and overall public communication.
One of the biggest mistakes people can make when using video is trying to make one video serve too many purposes. That doesn’t mean one video can’t serve two or three audiences at the same time. However, you have to keep in mind that folks are at different stages of the buyers journey. Taking them through each stage of the buyer's journey requires a different type of video. We’ll start from the top and work our way down with how to attract, convert, close and delight.
A brand voice is essential when starting a business. A good brand voice will encourage customers to engage with your company and motivate them to use your services and products. Your brand voice is what people associate your company with and makes them stay or come back to your content. With a strong brand voice, you’ll be able to create a successful and memorable business.
Video is key to a successful inbound marketing campaign. With a predicted 80% growth of people watching videos online by 2019, video marketing is crucial to driving traffic to your business. If you’re new to video marketing, you may be wondering where to begin. Thankfully, there are many apps, tools and platforms available to help you produce, edit and leverage your video content in your inbound marketing efforts. Here are some of the top tools and apps available for those just starting out with video marketing.
Documenting your brand’s guidelines has several benefits for your company. Not only will you be able to always deliver a uniform message to your customers, but it will also help your team members as they create new content. A style guide will assist team members in staying consistent because they will understand all the rules that your brand voice follows. In addition, you’ll have a stronger connection to your target audience and higher engagement with potential and returning consumers.
Having a brand voice helps your audience remember your company and what you are known for. Being consistent with your language, staying uniform with your brand’s core values, and engaging with your consumers will help people become interested and stay interested in what your business has to offer. There are several key factors that help to create a successful brand voice:
Sales has changed. High pressure closing tactics are a thing of the past. The power has shifted from the sales person to the buyer and therefore we must change our strategy.
Asking a stranger to connect with you on Linkedin can feel like a daunting task. At times, it may even feel down right intrusive, but when done right, you can form a connection that will grow and be beneficial for both people involved.
I'll be honest...the last 12 months have been AWESOME. We have worked with great clients and produced fantastic work, the Beacons Point family grew by two, we moved into a bigger office in Carlsbad, and became a HubSpot Gold partner agency. While there are many factors as to why these past 12 months have been so great, I want to focus on one tool that has helped Beacons Point succeed the most.
This may seem like a no brainer. Being nice to people makes a better impression than if you are a jerk. You have at least a 90% chance of a smile back if you smile and say “hello” to a stranger walking down the street or in the grocery store. We try to be nice to our neighbors (unless their dog never stops barking) to create a happy and comfortable community in which we live. So, why don’t we do this more in business? Sure, we talk about our weekend plans at the water cooler in the office and we’re polite in meetings, but I’m talking about being a person others actually want to be around.
If you’ve ever struggled to navigate a website due to poor usability, you can imagine how much more difficult this would be for someone with a disability. Close to 1 billion people across the globe have some type of disability. If you fail to design your website with these users in mind, your message will likely never reach a great portion of your audience.
With more content hitting the Internet at an increasing rate, it becomes more difficult to gain attention for your blogs with each passing day. If you want to attract your audience, you need to focus on headlines. Without an intriguing headline, no one will bother to check out your post — and the engaging content that you created will go to waste. Lucky for you, there are proven strategies for creating headlines that you can use to make sure all your blog posts receive plenty of clicks.
Before you can even think about gaining sales, you need to be driving traffic to your website. This can be particularly difficult for new businesses, as with many marketing tactics, however effective they are in the long term, you need to wait to see results. SEO is a great example, as Google favors websites that have a long history online and backlog of content.
Every content marketing strategy has the same goals: to make your target audience aware of your brand and to convert users into customers. Content marketing can be very effective but often simplified to just creating content. No matter how interesting, unique or useful the content is, it can be considered virtually useless if you’re audience is not engaging with it.
Let’s get personal… with our email marketing. The data shows that when you personalize your emails, you get higher open rates, click rates and increase ROI. We have laid out 5 simple ways to make your emails more personal.
Businesses that practice the video marketing automation techniques get up to a whopping 43% conversion rate! That’s HUGE!
Marketers and business owners have come to accept that it takes 8 to 12 “touches” or interactions with a company before a prospect converts into a buyer. More and more, content is the vehicle that’s providing those touches in today's online world. A combination of lead magnets, social media posts, email content and blogs posts (text or video) synergize to win that conversion. All of these aspects are content.
Like most people and businesses, we took some time at the turn of this year to look back and reflect on 2016. Well, 2016 was an interesting year, to say the least. Don’t get us wrong, we had some fun, did some great work for awesome clients, and met some new friends along the way. We even got to see our very own Brian get married to his wonderful wife, Jessica. But, like most, we had our ups and downs as well.
If you’re unsure what outfit to wear or which new Netflix show to binge on, Instagram has officially introduced a new interactive tool for your friends and followers to weigh in on your tough decisions. For marketers, this is a great new addition to be able to interact and engage with your followers in real time.
We get asked all the time, "How do I get more people to engage with my content and brand?" Engaging content - everybody wants it, but few are actually able to offer content that gets people's attention and ‘engaged’ with it.