Actually, I love April because the warm days finally start to creep in between these cold-and-nasty ones, and make us think about backyard barbecues and all the pleasures of spending time outside. I have noticed many hospitality industry suppliers ramping up their spring marketing efforts too, by promoting solutions for the nearly upon us al fresco dining season.

With your marketing, the way to be prepared for anything is by following a plan. And that plan must start with a solid understanding of what motivates your ideal buyers. Thank goodness we have technology to help with this process.

Marketing automation platforms can make that task easy by offering a roadmap for your marketing efforts. But can your marketing team truly be prepared for everything, even if they are using marketing automation?

For instance…

• Is your marketing team prepared to produce and publish marketing content that targets your ideal buyer personas?
• Assuming your marketing team is able to produce regular blog content, are they also prepared to leverage those blogs and turn them into magnets for converting your website visitors into prospects?
• Is your marketing team prepared to answer your sales team’s questions about which marketing content is generating the best prospects? Or answer questions about what changes are being made to your marketing content to increase your conversions?
• Is your marketing content able to respond effectively to buyer objections?
• Are you measuring up to your competitors, in terms of website traffic?
• Does your marketing team know how to create a sustainable content marketing plan that helps your company tell its story more effectively?

If you would like a free evaluation of your marketing plans, please drop us a line; we will get back to you right away. And if you would be interested to compare your website traffic to some benchmarked data for the construction, consumer products, eCommerce, manufacturing and real estate markets, please click on our offer below and you will get instant access to this free report.

Nestle’s announcement about simplifying ice cream ingredient lists was focused squarely on an unstated message that ran throughout its corporate PR statement: the company cares greatly about the health of its customers. But it also demonstrated that the company clearly understands what trends are important to consumers today: simple and real.

By announcing the change to its ice cream products, Nestle appropriately touted an important improvement in its ice cream while also reminding its customers, the neighborhood supermarkets of the world, that it was supremely aware of the established food trend: simple and real. And by doing so, Nestle also provided a great reminder to all foodservice manufacturers and suppliers about the importance of keeping up with market trends.

Has your company introduced any new solutions that should be perceived as either a response to market trends or an understanding of your customer preferences? If so, have you connected these dots in your marketing efforts around these new solutions?

Today, an effective B2B marketer not only needs new content, but also needs to demonstrate the real value of that content. New product or service launches should provide this opportunity, but if you are too busy talking about the features of your new offering without connecting it to a bigger business issue, then you are missing the boat!

Of course, you believe that your new product or service offers a relevant benefit for your market. You have already invested tons of resources to transform your idea into a new revenue-generating channel for your business. But if you aren’t easily connecting it’s value to a bigger picture through your marketing messages, including your PR, then you are missing a real opportunity to communicate with your target market in a more meaningful way.

Never? Then perhaps all the content your marketing team is generating doesn’t actually serve the right type of audience. OK, I just have a couple other quick questions.

Is your company’s website making it easy for your inside sales team to quickly qualify prospects?

Does it have enough useful content to enable your visitors to understand whether your company is able to be a viable solution partner?

This brief article, which should only take about five minutes to read, will shed some light on how to improve your website’s inbound marketing capabilities so that it begins to consistently generate quality leads, while also serving your ideal prospects in a more meaningful way. It features expert sources from the hospitality and commercial foodservice markets.

PWMG recently had an article published in Foodservice Consultantmagazine on this topic. You may view the article by clicking on the image to your right or the highlighted phrase above, or you can view some of the highlights from this article below.

Step 1:

Planning Your Content

One of the experts we spoke with, Paul Molinari of Boston-based CrunchTime! Information Systems, Inc., advocates highly targeted website content that focuses on solutions to specific problems your ideal customers are dealing with on a regular basis.

Step 2: Sharing Your Content

Another expert featured in this article, Aurora, IL-based web solutions consultant Curt Vance, said that some of his favorite tools for generating quality website traffic are applications that sit outside your website, but can be tethered to your website: including social media, email and search advertising.

All PWMG clients leverage regular email marketing, which allows them to start a conversation and invite interaction. And more and more, this is happening via mobile interactions. Yesmail analyzed billions of emails sent in the first quarter of 2015, and found that mobile clicks now account for 45 percent of all email clicks, up 10 percent from the previous quarter.

Step 3: Speaking of Mobile Marketing…

Is your website responsive? Responsive design means your website will easily translate to any platform, from desktop to tablet to smart phone, thereby making it easier for your prospects to easily and conveniently digest information from it, no matter where they are or how they are accessing the site.

Did you know that cell phones drove 18 percent of all e-commerce orders in Q1 2015? This was nearly a 60 percent increase from 2014.

Step 4: Analyze Your Data

Web analytics collect a lot of different data about incoming traffic from different search engines that allow you to see how well your website, your social media, your email blasts and your pay-per-click ad campaigns are performing. There are a number of free analytics tools available, too.

Vance says it isn’t enough to just be monitoring visitor traffic each month.

“You also need to see what your customers do when they visit,” said Vance. “Your analytics data allows you to make targeted adjustments to your site, and when used with your company’s other digital marketing activities, they allow you to measure the strengths or weaknesses of your marketing campaigns.”

Molinari said CrunchTime! analyzes traffic growth and its relationship to lead quality from all the channels that are driving this traffic.

Step 5: Marketing Automation Brings It All Together

A marketing solution like HubSpot is designed to help companies manage digital marketing efforts through a single platform, including integration with your sales database.

So how do you identify best practices for your own website?

You can start by asking some of the following questions:

• Do our sales representatives have the marketing and sales content they need?

• Is the website content up to date and current with our latest marketing campaigns?

• Does our website engage our commercial foodservice industry customers?

Do you see a pattern developing? Yes, the strategic content you use in your website, on your blog and through your social connections is truly the key driver of your website traffic. It is also the place where a business owner gets to inject his/her passion and secret sauce. It helps a business stand out.

It’s a known fact that most retailers do not achieve their annual revenue projections until after they have survived the year-end holiday season. Employees of B2B companies may be relieved that they don’t have to suffer the long hours of retailers over the holidays, but they can take a few lessons from the B2C companies when it comes to their own marketing efforts, especially when it comes to the focus and the message, as well as when it comes to loyal, repeat customers.

Chances are, you won’t see new customers lining up in the middle of the night outside your door or forcing your website to crash from too much activity, a la Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. But why would you want to consider such a scenario when you likely have an untapped source of revenue in your existing customers?

According to a customer retention study by Kissmetrics, 63 percent of marketers felt that new customer acquisition is the most important advertising goal. However, it costs up to seven times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one, according to Bain & Company.

Consider some of these simple social media tips for staying in front of your existing customers over the holidays. In the process, you will be investing in valuable customer retention efforts.

1. Send out a hearty thank you from your social media connections to your customers

Retailers are always taught to emphasize customer service, and to say thank you to everyone. It’s a simple gesture, but the message will still get across to your customers that are connected to you on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. This is known as social sharing, and allows for wider reach through your network, as well as the potential that your customers will share your message of thanks with others.

2. Social media channels can also be used to send simple updates on your company’s success this year

Plan to send out at least two social media updates over the holidays that tell your network about highlights of your company’s year. This is known as social connecting, and helps your company create a more personal connection between your network and your brand.

3. Not-so-secret Santa

Offer your social media networks a special discount or gift, that can be claimed during the holidays, and potentially applied to their next project with your company.

CONCLUSION:

By embracing social media platforms, your company can enjoy some of the same loyalty and renewed interest that retailers are seeking. This simple activity can help fill your sales pipeline in the year ahead, and may even possibly make or break your year-end sales efforts. In the process, you will give your brand the gift of more engaged and active followers.

While people still recognize these famous magazine titles, times have certainly changed for the publishing industry.

Last year, the publisher of Ebony and its sister publication, the web-based Jet magazine, was sold to a private equity group. And also last year, the CEO of Playboy walked away, to be replaced by a managing partner of the private equity company that is majority stockholder of Playboy.

Neither of these titles carries much influence in the media world today, at least compared to their heydays, and there are myriad reasons why, from not paying attention to trends to not playing to strengths and not paying attention to demographics. But when you are great at something, it can be hard to change and adopt new ways that may have been seen as forbidden approaches only a few years ago. And according to the Wall Street Journal, you’re not really a media company these days unless you have a dedicated studio to make bespoke videos and articles on behalf of brands.

This graphic shows how B2B marketers are using and re-using marketing content through multiple channels. This is a trend that B2B publishers have begun to adopt as well.

The B2B publishing world has seen similar changes, where publishers are recasting themselves as data and event management companies and also embracing native content like never before. Funny how B2B publishing trends change, huh?

One shift that makes some journalists really bristle is the change of defining a journalist’s department and work as ‘editorial’ to now being referred to as ‘content’. And I can understand that. But I also see this new label as a minor issue.

Call it whatever you want, I say. As long as you understand what is happening with ‘editorial content’ today that is making it more resourceful, effective and useful, thanks in large part to interactive media (i.e., webinars) and social media sharing.

Years ago when I was a full-time journalist, people may have called me a purist or an idealist for the way I looked at the profession and my work. I know that when I jumped to a new career in marketing and public relations, some of my old journalist friends were shaking their heads. But even though I’m dedicated to placing my clients in front of the right journalists, or helping them to find and engage new prospective customers, I’m also active in journalism as a contributing writer to a number of B2B magazines.

I’m also a board member for ASBPE’s Chicago chapter, working to create education and networking opportunities for B2B journalists throughout Chicago. While B2B media continues to weather changes as once-proud titles fade into obscurity, new magazine titles still outnumber closures.

As Abe Peck of Medill’s Media Management Center told a room full of journalists at the ASBPE Chicago Chapter Spring Bootcamp recently, B2B journalism still has the ability to thrive and deliver amazing value to its audiences. This starts with an astute understanding of a publisher’s audience, as well as an ability to embrace disaggregation. And the funny thing is that this is a relevant message for B2B marketers as well. The ability to recognize and communicate the value of their work in terms of audience needs, data marketing, and even the ability to recognize new, transformative markets will open new opportunities for those willing to find them.

The funny thing about avocados that you may have noticed recently, there seems to be a collection of ‘experts’ that are now advocating that you eat the avocado pits as well as the delicious green flesh everyone already loves.

Um, yuck. But to each his own, right?

And my family eats enough avocados that I actually started to consider following one of the recommendations I saw about grinding up the pit and mixing it into smoothies or other sauces. I’m a waste-not-want-not kind of guy, so I was willing to consider the idea.

Well, then my wife found this article that questions the avocado pit eating experts, and certainly changed my mind about considering whether I should feed my family the avocado seed. And then I found this article from the official California Avocado blog, again warning people to not trust everything they read.

Yikes! Social media viral marketing story gone bad, eh? But my wife and I certainly did get a good laugh about the nature of social media articles that go viral.

It also reminded me of another viral campaign we wrote about way back when, and underscored the importance of targeted and simple marketing messages that include trustworthy data, references and sources.

Do your prospects trust your marketing messages? Are your marketing efforts generating the desired response? If you would like a free marketing consultation with the goal of strengthening your marketing messages and presenting a trustworthy and engaging digital presence, please let us know.

Do you think that social media marketing is just for kids and consumer companies?

If so, it may be time for you to accept the fact that B2B buyers today favor do-it-yourself online options for researching and buying products and services. A recent Forrester report forecasts that one million US B2B salespeople will lose their jobs to self-service ecommerce by 2020.

That makes it sound like you still have time to prepare for this change, right? Not so fast.

The Forrester research also found that nearly 75 percent of B2B buyers say that buying from a website is more convenient than buying from a sales representative. Further, 93 percent say that they prefer buying online rather than from a salesperson once they’ve decided what to buy.

Not only that, but another study by CEB found that 57 percent of the B2B purchase decision is complete before a prospect even contacts the supplier. Before you get so scared that you stop reading, it is important to consider that customers with a clear idea of what they want to purchase – such as inexpensive and transactional purchases or re-ordering a similar solution – will surely be conducting most of the purchase research online.

But complex solutions that require the consent of multiple stakeholders will lead a prospect to seek out potential vendors earlier in the engagement process.

Yes, it is true that your prospects have more power than ever before, but this fact also leads to an opportunity for businesses that are able to differentiate themselves earlier in the sales process. The best way to do this is through great content on your website and through your marketing channels – including social media!

So, do you know if it is important for you to get in front of your prospects earlier? Is this trend relevant to your target customer? If you know your ideal buyer as well as you think you do, then you also know the answer to this question. The answer is that you need to take your content marketing strategy more seriously.

And if your marketing team keeps recommending that you drop another $10,000, $20,000 or more on the same old tradeshows that only yield a list of poor prospects for you the past few years, then we should talk. Unless you would prefer for your sales and marketing team to keep marketing to these lists of lukewarm prospects and wasting your precious resources, that is.

Otherwise, we’d love to look at your content marketing plan and see if we can help you boost your numbers. PWMG has helped many suppliers to commercial foodservice, hospitality, manufacturing and supply chain industries to improve their ability to be found by the right buyers through our proven inbound marketing approach. We’d love to help you, too!

You see, when Facebook announced its earnings at the end of 2015, the company also said for the first time that its users are watching an average of 100 million hours worth of video daily. Whoa. And yet, these numbers aren’t even close to the unbelievable traffic Google is seeing on YouTube. And the fastest growth is coming from mobile platforms for both.

Clearly there is a voracious and growing demand for quality content marketing. And from a marketer’s perspective, it is encouraging to see a growing appetite for this via mobile devices. If only it were as easy as linking to a silly video in the B2B world, though.

When it comes to B2B PR and content marketing for our  clients here in Chicago, Aurora and Naperville, the ability to create and deploy content that actually draws qualified prospects to a website takes more effort than posting 15 seconds-worth of adorable kitten videos. I include PR in this discussion because today, our clients want their PR to not only raise brand awareness, but to also engage their prospects in a meaningful way by generating website traffic and website queries.

PWMG’s clients leverage PR and content marketing as key components of their inbound marketing strategies, where analytics and keyword data are studied on a regular basis, where new content that is targeted to not only their keywords but also to the ideal buyers they want to attract is flowing on a regular basis. It is only through this steady and studied approach that our clients are able to enjoy more qualified website conversions and effective prospect nurturing.

If your company would like to improve its inbound marketing efforts , and have struggled to boost your website conversions, please drop us a line. We would be glad to help you examine your current inbound marketing strategy and help you come up with a plan to get your marketing and sales team  back on track and hitting your growth objectives. This includes improving your ability to generate more qualified interest in your key products, services, or even a special event.

If your company would like to improve its inbound marketing efforts , and have struggled to boost your website conversions, please drop us a line. We would be glad to help you examine your current inbound marketing strategy and help you come up with a plan to get your marketing and sales team  back on track and hitting your growth objectives. This includes improving your ability to generate more qualified interest in your key products, services, or even a special event.

However, in the great effort your team expels to make sure that your keywords are effectively used throughout your website, you can overlook an important factor: publishing information that’s actually useful to your audience.

Considering that people today have worse attention spans than goldfish, this is especially important if you are actively blogging for your business.

So how do you know if your digital marketing content is not only serving the search engines but also effectively serving your increasingly distracted audience?

This short list will help you understand some of the boxes you should be checking when publishing new marketing content and help make sure your blog doesn’t sound like it was written by a robot for robots.

When you are regularly publishing blogs, it is a fact that you will also boost the number of links to your website, improve your search engine rankings, and see an increase in website traffic. And using a strategically selected collection of keywords will help ensure that you attract the right traffic even.

But the goal isn’t just more visitors. It is more sales (and newsletter sign-ups, qualified leads, etc.). So your goal isn’t really about improved search engine rankings, it is actually about getting more conversions.

Karon Thackston’s eBook from 2011, The Write Way to Build More Links, offers four points that are still relevant today for marketers that may be guilty of giving little or no consideration to what their website visitors may actually want to learn, as well as who their specific readers (i.e., ideal buyer personas) even are.

1. Who is your reader?

Has your marketing team gone to the effort of profiling your ideal customers, and mapping out the different types of industry professionals that are considered decision-makers that are in the process of purchasing your products or services? If so, then it should also be focused on creating content that it knows will serve these audiences. How well do you really know your ideal customer?

2. What is his/her relationship to the subject matter (and how experienced are they)?

Again, this question points to your understanding of not only your ideal customers, but where they actually are in their buyer’s journey. Because not every visitor to your website can be considered an active lead who is ready to buy today.

Does your company’s strategic marketing content, blog and emails spend most of its effort talking at your ideal customers about your products and services? Or is it educating your visitors in a way that helps them make smart choices?

I can’t emphasize enough that today’s consumers are more distracted than ever, and are aware that they have more choices than ever before for gathering information that will help them solve their problems. Are you doing enough to be considered a trustworthy source they will want to visit again and again?

3. Why is your reader interested in your content?

The more you know about your target audience and trends that motivate this audience, the better quality you will produce in your marketing content. In the B2B world, you just don’t get married after the first date.

4. Does your reader have fears/skepticisms/anxieties about the topic?

What makes your website visitors hesitant to invest in your products or services? If your marketing and sales teams understand what motivates your ideal customers, then you should be addressing these issues so that you can build bridges with them.

Your blog content, as well as your social media pages, provide your organization with countless opportunities to engage your prospects with compelling content that not only serves your SEO objectives, but also builds trust with your ideal audience.

Well, when you understand what sources are generating your website traffic, you can then take strategic and data-driven steps to try and improve those numbers.

For instance, look at this table of average source data from manufacturing companies that use HubSpot as their marketing automation platform and you will notice some interesting trends, including the fact that direct traffic and organic traffic generate, by far, the bulk of their website traffic.

This chart represents the average number of monthly website visits for 15,000 manufacturers from each traffic source, January 2014-May 2015.

If you are a manufacturing supplier interested in growing your sales volume in X, Y and Z commercial manufacturing brands, then you can understand whether your content marketing goal targets are realistic and reachable or not by comparing them to this benchmarked data.

These valuable website traffic benchmarks provide useful targets for manufacturers that are actively engaging in digital marketing efforts such as blogging, social publishing, keyword testing, and refining the understanding of their ideal buyer profiles. And the ability to understand your ideal buyer personas, and how those individuals move through the buyer’s journey, will turn your marketing and sales teams into heroes.

In order to get your website traffic to consistently climb, you must regularly test and refine your marketing messages. Your test results gain more value when you can compare them against a relevant benchmark, too. We have helped our clients for years to leverage benchmarked survey data to drive marketing success.

Your time and resources are far too valuable to be executing  in a vacuum; you can’t really make sense of your data if you have nothing else to compare it to besides your own history. After you’ve looked at your own data and tried to identify some trends, you should then be comparing it to some relevant third-party data, as well.

We are pleased to be able to share this powerful benchmark data that not only offers perspectives on traffic trends for B2B and B2C organizations, but also looks at website traffic trends that are based on:

1. Company Size

• Ranging from companies with 1-5 employees through companies with more than 1,000 employees

2. Industry

• Including construction, consumer products, eCommerce, manufacturing, marketing services, and real estate

3. Geography

• Including Asia-Pacific, EMEA, Latin America and North America)

We hope you are able to use this free, benchmarked website traffic data and that it moves you further down the path of measuring your digital marketing data more effectively. Just drop us a line and we will be glad to send you the free report.