If you’re a marketing professional, you strive to keep up with the latest and greatest tactics and platforms every day. If you’re a small to medium sized business (SMB), you’re likely wearing many hats from marketing to sales to customer service at any given time and prefer someone deliver a cliff notes version of the trends you need to know. That’s exactly what this article is meant to do! Here are four marketing trends that will help grow SMB revenue in 2018:
-
Marketing Automation
By definition, marketing automation refers to software that supports a company’s ability to automate some of their repetitive marketing functions. These include thank you emails after downloading an e-book, nurturing and demand generation email campaigns, newsletters and updates and social media scheduling. Some of these functions can be done with free tools but ongoing and consistent marketing automation typically requires purchasing a subscription to a service.
Here is a list curated by Entrepreneur of the top marketing automation platforms for small businesses.
-
Content Marketing
Some how you found this blog and you’re reading it. You might have come through a Google search, seen the link on social media, or happened upon our website via another channel and clicked our articles tab to see what we’re talking about. That right there is content marketing in a nutshell and it’s the reason the term “content is king” was coined. At this point, B2B organizations are creating millions of blogs that are published every day.
Content is critical for marketing because of all the deliverables, it’s the easiest for search engines to index (SEO), each piece of content you create acts as another entry point to your website and anyone can do it. However, the more successful you are at understanding your buyer’s pain points and being able to speak to them, the more successful your content will be.
Here is a study by Moz and Buzzsumo outlining two of the most important factors that contribute to creating well-read content. (hint: links and sharing top the list.)
-
Mobile Marketing
By now, most websites are mobile responsive and the main exceptions to this rule are some very small organizations and a few local and state government websites. You will definitely recognize them when you see them on your phone! For the rest of us, there was a change in Google in 2014 that caused everyone to scurry to adopt mobile friendly website platforms or risk being downgraded in Google search. The mobile trend hasn’t stopped or slowed down and for this reason, it’s highly important to cater to computers, tablets and phone screens when creating and socializing content.
Here are four tips for mobile marketing success from Entrepreneur.
-
Social Media
Research shows that for B2B companies, LinkedIn and Twitter are still the best platforms for engagement. A close third is Youtube followed by SlideShare, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Google+ in that order. But it’s not enough these days to have a social presence, you have to actually engage and post frequently in order to gain traction and generate demand.
Here are 100 tips for generating demand on social media.
For more business accelerations tips and tricks, visit our blog. For help choosing the best office equipment and technologies to support your Phoenix or Flagstaff business growth goals, contact us!
