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12 Evergreen Video Marketing Strategies to Boost Conversion

12 Evergreen Video Marketing Strategies to Boost Conversion
12 Evergreen Video Marketing Strategies to Boost Conversion
Image Credit Brands&People/Unsplash

Video marketing is an integral and vital part of the digital marketing landscape. Many businesses are adopting innovative ways to use videos to engage audiences, build and increase brand awareness, and convert viewers into customers. 

There’s also a common misconception that video marketing is too expensive and not worth the investment. The stats tell a different story, though. Wyzowl’s 2024 video marketing statistics show that in 2024, 91% of respondent businesses said they were using video marketing, and 90% of marketers responded that video marketing gave them a good return on investment. 82% of consumers surveyed responded that they were convinced to buy a product or service by watching a video.

If you are considering video marketing for your business or are already doing it but not getting the expected results, this article will discuss 12 strategies to help you run successful campaigns.

Understand the Type of Video Message Your Viewers Will See

First, you must decide what messages you will give your prospects and clients and what channels you will use to reach them. There’s no right or wrong answer here; you can start small and expand later. Once you have decided on at least one or two messages, you need to look at channels where your potential clients are likely to frequent and target those channels to convey your message. For example, 

  • If you run an accounting firm or a dental practice—an introductory video showing your services will be a good start. This can be followed by a few more videos showing satisfied customer testimonials. All these videos can be hosted on the company website, and you can optimize the site for search engines and promote it via paid ads when there’s traction.
  • A Facebook marketplace merchant selling dresses and fashion products must regularly upload SEO-optimized videos showing new product lines on its business page. She may also want to boost engagement later through Facebook ads.
  • An online training provider may want to use a YouTube channel to showcase “teaser” videos of complete training courses. These can also be reused on Facebook campaigns.

Tell a Story to Create Emotional Connections

People connect emotionally with stories. Storytelling helps brands make their values, products, and services relatable to their audience, encouraging viewers to engage and share. Videos focusing on narratives tend to be more memorable and shareable.

There are a few examples of such storytelling:

  • Showcasing how your products or services have transformed your customers’ lives or businesses. This is the “hero’s journey” where your brand solves your client’s challenge.
  • Telling where your business stands on critical issues like environmental protection, race equality, gender discrimination, and other social issues, and how you have implemented best practices around those in your company.
  • Showing how your business builds something from start to finish. These are more like “behind-the-scenes” stories.

Storytelling videos are usually long-form, but keeping them within 15 minutes will keep users engaged. The more elaborate and involved the story, the more sophisticated the video-making process needs to be.

Use Personalization

Storytelling becomes even more effective when it is personalized. Personalization has increased conversions across various digital marketing strategies; video is no exception. Delivering customized video content to different audience segments can increase relevance and improve engagement rates.

You can implement personalization by:

  • Creating different video versions for various audience segments based on demographics, interests, or buying behavior.
  • Send personalized emails with video messages, such as a custom video thanking someone for a purchase or recommending related products.
  • Implement dynamic video tools that automatically change the video content (like names, products, or messages) based on the viewer’s profile, locality, or interaction history.

Feature User-Generated Content (UGC)

Another form of storytelling is User-generated Content (UGC). Consumers trust independent customer reviews and testimonials, short how-tos, and unboxing videos more than branded content. Featuring real customers endorsing your products and services builds authenticity and encourages potential buyers to trust your brand.

To use UGCs, you can encourage satisfied customers to share videos of their experiences with your product or service. You can also create social media contests where users submit videos for a chance to win prizes.

You can feature first-hand stories like these on any channel: reposts from social media, linking from email newsletters, or even hosting on the main website. Bear in mind that you need to get written permission from your customers before you can use their content.

Another particular type of UGC is influencer videos. For this to work, you must have the budget and manpower to reach out to influencers in your industry, onboard them, and incentivize them. Although this can be expensive, partnering with influencers in your niche can significantly boost your marketing efforts. Influencers can introduce your brand to followers and lend credibility to your offering.

Create Short, Mobile-optimized Videos for Social Media 

People love to hear and see stories on social media, and videos are an excellent choice to convey your brand’s story. Some interesting video marketing statistics published in a 2024 SocialPilot article show:

  • People view social media videos 48% more than other platforms, and 88% of marketers prefer YouTube.
  • Facebook accounts with over 100K followers typically publish 71% of their content as videos, and the conversion rate is highest for Facebook video ads with durations between 16 and 20 seconds.
  • Over 75% of all videos are played on mobile devices.

Short, bite-sized videos work particularly well on social media, where users tend to scroll quickly through their feeds. These videos are quick to consume and shareable, can drive engagement and traffic in a shorter time, and can lower bounce rates. Keeping videos within 60 seconds or even less also ensures they load quickly. Also, short videos don’t necessarily need an elaborate set-up. Examples of such videos are those made by influencers. Some videos are meant for mobile channels like TikTok or YouTube shorts, while others need to be optimized for mobile. To do this, use vertical and square format videos. Also, ensure any autoplay setting is enabled.

However, not all social media channels may be suitable for your brand. For example, if your target audience consists of corporate B2B entities and not Gen Z, you may consider platforms other than TikTok. On the other hand, you can distribute the same short video on multiple channels if your ideal customers are active on those platforms.

Create Educational and How-To Videos

Users often search for “how-to” and instructional videos to solve specific problems. By providing educational content, brands can position themselves as trusted industry resources. These videos can attract search engine traffic and help build traffic to your website. Also, educational videos with screencasting can be low-cost.

When choosing subjects for educational videos, consider common problems your target audience faces and provide solutions. To make the video more user-friendly, you can use step-by-step instructions—highlighting key areas on a screen—and expert tips. Also, consider breaking down complex subjects into multiple, stand-alone, bite-sized chunks viewers can easily navigate and jump between. Viewers will likely engage in twelve 5-minute videos rather than an hour-long tutorial.

Consider Live Streaming

Live streaming allows brands to connect with their audience in real-time, creating a sense of immediacy and exclusivity. It’s one of the most engaging video marketing methods because it fosters direct interaction with viewers. Live events can be hosted through platforms like vFair, Hopin, Zoom, or Livestorm. Once the event ends, the recorded version can be hosted on social media or YouTube for others to view. 

A typical live stream use case is a webinar where people register through a landing page for the event. The data captured from the registration is used to build a lead list. Other use cases can include: 

  • Live demos and how-tos
  • Keynote speeches
  • Live training 
  • Product launch events
  • Behind-the-scenes tours

Use Video SEO to Boost Organic Reach

Like text-based content, videos can be optimized for search engines like Google, Bing, and YouTube. Optimizing video content for search engines can increase organic traffic to your website or other online presence.

You can achieve video SEO in a couple of ways. First, you can transcribe your videos and include a closed captioning track to improve accessibility and searchability. Video transcripts are fully indexable and crawlable by search engines and follow all the SEO rules. This means you must design and write your video scripts carefully, considering what information and keywords users could search for that your videos can answer.

Keywords must also be used in other relevant places, like video titles, descriptions, and tags. Don’t cram too many keywords into one place: target one or two per video.

Another way to boost search engine visibility is to use compelling titles and thumbnails. These can increase click-through rates (CTR), which signals to platforms like YouTube that your content is valuable, improving its ranking.

Use Full Suite of Technology When Needed

Although we discussed keeping video marketing simple, you must invest in the right tools, technologies, and expertise when and where needed. For example, your law practice’s video may need a simple iPhone and its built-in mic and a simple tripod to get started, but your real estate property videos will need a professional video camera, perhaps a drone, a lapel mic for the agent, and more post-production editing. Apart from the cost of equipment and software, you will also need to consider the fees for any contractor doing the job for you. 

Use Simple Video-making Techniques When Possible

Not every professional-looking video message must be created from scratch with expensive cameras, lighting, props, and sound gear, though. Clips you have already shot for other videos can be reused, reducing cost. 

Another way to leverage existing content is to use stock footage libraries. Sites like Adobe Stock, Pond5, or Shutterstock have video footage of almost every possible scenario. You can purchase royalty-free clips from sites like these and use them in as many videos as necessary. Similarly, applications like Canva or Figma come with many customizable video templates, and you can also use AI video generators to create simple videos. 

Doodle videos are another way to convey your message. Using drawing animations in tools like Doodly, you build videos that are just as powerful. 

Implement a Strong Call to Action (CTA) on EVERY Video

This is probably the most important strategy to implement, yet many videos lack clear CTAs. A call to action is anything you want the viewer to do once s/he has finished watching the video—whether it’s subscribing to your newsletter, visiting your website, or making a purchase. Many video marketers think the viewer will get the inherent message by watching the video, but remember, it’s a funnel; you have to explicitly tell the viewer what the next step should be. Place your CTA prominently in the video and the description.

Here are some ways to provide strong CTAs:

  • Provide a URL to your site or landing page on the video or description. Use shortened links. Ask the user to visit the page.
  • Ask the viewer to send inquiries to the email addresses or phone numbers shown in the video or the description.
  • Use interactive elements on the video, like clickable buttons, quizzes, or polls.

Follow a Consistent Plan, Analyze Results, and Adapt

Like any other content marketing, video marketing also needs consistency. As with blogs or social media posts, you must plan your video content, its messaging, call to action, target audience, and posting schedule. This may sound trivial, but making videos takes more time than other forms of content, so you must be well-prepared. For example, if you plan to release a series of short videos for the Christmas sales period, you should start planning the whole campaign a few months ahead. 

Keeping an eye on critical metrics like view counts, shares, likes, comments, click-through rates, and play rates can help you find the subjects, formats, and posting schedules most relevant to your viewers. Comments and feedback can be effective mediums for initial engagement, which can be used to build a lead list. You can also use events like clicks and completion rates to understand if your videos are making an impact. 

You must collect metrics over time for each type of video you post across each channel. Carefully analyzing the data will help you determine what’s working and what’s not and make necessary adjustments.

Final Words

Hopefully, you will now have some solid guidance on video marketing campaigns. As a marketer, you must implement the most relatable strategies to your business that will likely build viewership, engagement, and inquiries. Also, don’t expect overnight results: video marketing is a long-haul game, just like content marketing, SEO, or email marketing. Patience and adaptation are the key.

At Professional Data Skills, we help clients build and run video marketing campaigns. Check out this YouTube page for some educational video examples. You can also contact us to learn more.

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The Ultimate Guide to a Winning Email Marketing Strategy

The 8-Step Ultimate Guide for Creating a Winning Email Marketing Strategy
The 8-Step Ultimate Guide for Creating a Winning Email Marketing Strategy
Image Credit Felix Mittermeier/Unsplash

Email marketing remains highly effective and cost-efficient for businesses to engage their target audience, foster brand loyalty, and boost conversions. However, to run successful email campaigns in today’s competitive digital environment, companies must build (or review) their email marketing strategy. Such a strategy will dictate the why, when, and hows of all email campaigns. This article will discuss seven key areas to consider when developing a successful email marketing strategy.

Set Clear Objectives and Scenarios

The first thing you need to understand is why you want to use email marketing and when you want to use it. What are the top 5 or 10 goals you want to achieve through email campaigns? Is it to thank newly signed-up clients and give them 5% discounts on their next purchase? Is it to drive traffic to your website for a new product or an eBook? Will it be for cold outreach? 

Write down every use case. Every scenario will have a different audience, campaign frequency, message content, and tone. For example, the email sent to a newly signed-up customer won’t have the same content, frequency, and purpose as the email you would send to a disengaged client. In the first case, you send a single email; in the latter, you may want to consider a sequence of emails.

Build High-Quality Email List

Next, you must consider building and maintaining a high-quality email list.

Let’s say you don’t have an email list, so you need to build one. You can do this in two ways: buy an email database from a third party or collect email addresses from all your prospects and customers.

We wouldn’t recommend the first approach for two reasons. First, the third party needs to be very reputable and guarantee almost 100% correctness before you can use its list. Such lists are not cheap. Second, these lists may not reflect your ideal customer profile.

Consider a few options to build your email list. One scenario is to capture emails through lead magnets like gated content on your website. You can also capture email addresses when people sign up for your newsletters, webinars, and physical events like expos or when people take some actions on your website, like submitting a “Contact Us” form or buying a product. Typically, users have to explicitly agree to receive marketing emails before you can use their addresses. Building a list like this takes time but is worth the time and effort. 

Consider the second scenario, where you have an existing email list. You may have ten thousand recipients in that list, but have they all consented to receive emails? How many users have opted out of your previous email campaigns? How many emails have bounced because of wrong addresses? Have you considered users who are not opening your emails at all? Have you removed all those users from your list? 

If you haven’t considered these factors and updated your list, sending blanket emails can severely damage your domain reputation and negatively affect your email deliverability.
In short, you need to decide how you will build or grow an email list and how you will maintain it. In fact, marketers spend a lot of their time maintaining email lists.

Segment Email List

You won’t send the same email to every contact unless it’s something generic, like apologizing for site downtime, a policy update, or wishing everyone season’s greetings. Most email lists must be segmented for different use cases—this is where the objectives and scenarios you identified in the first step come into play.

For example, you may want to segment your list into a few groups:

  • People who have signed up for something.
  • People who have purchased something from you over the last three months, six months, or a year.
  • People who have abandoned their shopping carts.
  • People who have left a negative review.
  • People who are opening your emails but not taking actions like clicking on a button.
  • And so on…

There are no hard and fast rules for segmentation. You can remove, create, and modify the conditions of any segment. Fine-tuning is an ongoing process. We recommend starting with a few segments specific to your business.

Spam-proof Emails

Next, there’s another critical step: spam-proofing your emails. In other words, you want to ensure your emails don’t end up in people’s junk folders.

Email service providers like Google, Yahoo, Apple, or Microsoft have stringent rules about email deliverability. They consider several factors before sending an email to a recipient’s inbox. To ensure your emails are not marked as spam, your strategy should consider the following steps:

  • Configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC in your DNS record and email service provider.
  • Check if your sending IP has a history of sending spam. If it has, you must use a separate email server.
  • Check your domain reputation. The Google Postmaster Tool can help you see how your domain performs against compliance and user-reported spam requirements. If you have a consistently high rate of recipients marking your emails as spam, it signals to email providers that your emails might be unwanted.
  • Maintain your email list by removing users who have opted out or whose addresses are incorrect.
  • Ensure your emails do not use spammy subject lines, certain trigger words, or all caps in the subject or body. 
  • Don’t attach files from, or links to, third parties—unless necessary. These are typically used in phishing emails, and such attachments or links will cause security systems to quarantine your emails. There may be some legitimate use cases, though, like when you want to provide a link to a resource like an eBook or a PDF copy of a purchase receipt hosted by a third-party provider. You can address such scenarios by hosting on reputable providers or your own servers.
  • Link shorteners can also obscure the destination URL, which can be seen as suspicious by spam filters. Use full links in your email copy.
  • Ensure you are including a plain-text version of your email. Not having one can make it look suspicious to spam filters.

Create Great Email Content and Fine-tune

How you craft your email will decide whether your intended recipients interact with it the way you want them to. Your emails are as effective as the subject line and the message content they convey. There’s no magic formula: it’s a continuous trial and error and fine-tuning process. However, your strategy should stipulate at least the following.

Use Short but Catchy Subject Lines

A compelling subject line entices recipients to open and explore the content. Different types of emails need different approaches to generate curiosity and urgency or offer a solution to a problem. Your emails should generally use short, punchy subject lines that are not overly salesy or dramatic. Avoid using all caps and emojis in subject lines.

Here are some examples of email subject lines from some well-known brands:

  • Disney+ Channel: “What’s New on Disney+”
  • Amazon Web Services: “Optimize your databases strategy at AWS re:Invent”
  • Coursera: “Level up for less: Save $120 off Coursera Plus”

Each email here is trying to sell you something but notice the difference. These are brief, simple sentences that convey the core message.

Convey a Single Message

Each email should focus on one—and only one—specific message. Even two separate messages in a single email can confuse your recipients and, worse, prevent them from interacting with it. For example, you wouldn’t want to inform your audience about a newly published eBook and an upcoming webinar in the same email—unless they are related.

There are exceptions to this, though: for example, when you want to inform your customers about upcoming new products from different product categories, much like what supermarket promotions offer. 

Don’t make emails too long. The more concise your message is, the better the recipient will feel. Nothing annoys people more than scrolling through a long email message. Make the message clear and sharp, perhaps one or two paragraphs or a table with two rows and columns, and then provide the call-to-action (CTA).

Make it Personal

Personalization is where you address the recipient by name to make the email more appealing. This is usually done in email marketing applications software using placeholder variables like “{first_name}” in the email subject line or the email body. Research has shown that personalization increases open rates by 35%. It’s much better to use no addressing than ”Dear User” or “Dear Customer”.

Use Consistent Look and Feel

Your emails should have a consistent look and feel that reflects your brand. This means following a consistent approach for color schemes, relative sizes, and locations for headers, texts, buttons, fonts, images, logos, CTA, social media icons, and footers. Email marketing software these days comes with built-in templates for common email types. You can fine-tune those to your needs or build from scratch. As your business creates more and more email types, you will build a library of these custom templates.

Make it Mobile-friendly

As more people use their mobile devices for work, your emails must be readable on those devices. Fortunately, most email marketing software automatically builds mobile- and tablet-friendly versions of your emails, allowing you to preview them.

Always Provide CTA

Call-to-action (CTA) is what you want your email recipients to interact with. It’s usually a link or a button in the email body you want recipients to click on and take further steps. There can be multiple CTAs, but the best practice is to keep a single message and provide a single CTA. Again, it has its exceptions. For example, a movie theatre chain may send a list of new movies coming the following weekend. Against each movie image, it may show two buttons: “View Trailer” and “View Timetables”. Each button has a separate but logical purpose.

Obey the Laws

Every email you send to your audience must follow some legal requirements. These can include a short description of why the client is receiving the email, the copyright of the content, the privacy policy, and the option to unsubscribe from the email list.

The unsubscription feature is critical because your emails need to follow the CAN-SPAM Act. The CAN-SPAM Act is a law that regulates commercial emails in the United States. It requires that all commercial emails be clear and concise and that subscribers can opt out of receiving future emails. Similar regulations exist in other jurisdictions, like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Run A/B Tests

One key activity in email marketing is A/B testing. This is where you see the effectiveness of an email by using two variations (A and B) of the same email. The two versions are sent to two different sets of recipients, and the effectiveness of each is measured through metrics like click-through rate. A/B testing can be done to measure the efficacy in variations of subject lines, personalization, placement of images, time of sending, text content, call to action (CTA), and so on. The winning version is then adopted for future email campaigns. 

There’s no hard and fast rule to create A/B tests. Perfectly crafting an A/B test can take some time. Your email marketing strategy should specify which type of emails should be tested. For example, there is no reason to check A/B tests for a password reset or invoice email. On the other hand, an email meant for Black Friday Sale needs it.

Choose a Great Email Marketing Platform

Unless you have a handful of recipients in your list, you will need an email marketing platform for managing and segmenting your lists, sending emails, automating workflows, and tracking results. Most modern email marketing applications are sophisticated tools with tons of features. For example, these allow you to build landing pages and forms on your website to capture email addresses. Other features include built-in templates for common email types, complex automation, and advanced reports. 

When choosing an email marketing platform, consider some of the core functionalities:

  • Ease of use: The solution must be easy to use with a user-friendly interface.
  • Powerful features: The application should allow you to:
    • Visually design and test HTML emails using built-in customizable templates or templates you have created from scratch.
    • Add personalization and other placeholder variables for dynamic content.
    • Perform comprehensive list management functions, like importing from different sources or segmenting based on various criteria.
    • Create online forms.
    • Create sophisticated email automation workflows using sequences, timings, filters, and other triggers.
    • Track email campaign results with key metrics and reports in dashboards.
    • Perform A/B testing.
  • Deliverability and spam compliance: The platform should allow you to comply with email regulations like the CAN-SPAM Act.
  • Scalability and Performance: The platform should be scalable and performant as your email lists grow and you build complex workflows.
  • Integrations: The platform should integrate with other software you use, like CRM, website, and e-commerce platforms. It should also allow you to import data from popular sources.
  • Great customer support: The vendor should have 24×7 customer support available.
  • Flexible pricing: The product should offer flexible pricing tiers. Usually, you don’t need to start with the top tier unless you have a large email list or need advanced automation features. However, be aware of free tiers. Typically, these tiers force you to keep the vendor’s logo and link on your emails, which may not always look professional.

Use Automation

Most email marketing campaigns use some form of automation. For example, you may schedule your emails at specific times or days of the week and month. You may even want to fine-tune the timing based on the recipient’s time zone.

Email marketing applications call these automatons “flows” or “sequences”. Typically, you design an automation workflow in a blank canvas and stipulate conditions like which email segments to target, what time to send the email, or what conditions will trigger the email. The workflows can be simple or complex. For example, if your users are abandoning their carts, you want to immediately send them an email gently urging them to complete their purchase and asking if there’s anything you can do to help. If they haven’t finished purchasing within three days, you may want to send another follow-up email and, finally, after seven days, notify them that their cart has been cleared.

The automation you build must be thoroughly tested. For this purpose, you may need to use dummy email accounts.

Track Key Metrics

You won’t know how successful or otherwise your email campaigns are unless you are tracking the metrics. Your email marketing strategy, therefore, should stipulate what metrics are to be monitored and how often they are to be reported. The metrics you monitor will depend on the campaign goals you set up. For example, if your campaign purpose is to sign up as many recipients as possible, there will be three metrics to capture: 

  • The number of recipients clicking on the email’s CTA.
  • The number of people visiting the sign-up page after clicking on the CTA.
  • The number of people signing up after clicking on the CTA.

The first metric can be found in most email marketing applications. When custom links for the CTA are used, the other two can be found in your site’s digital analytics system, like Google Analytics.

There are other key metrics you can monitor: 

  • Open Rate: The percentage of recipients who opened the email. Open rate is now generally considered mostly unreliable. 
  • Click-through Rate (CTR): The percentage of recipients who clicked on one or more links embedded within the email. This is considered a reliable and important metric. 
  • Share and Forward Rate: The percentage of email recipients who shared the content on social media or forwarded it to another email address.
  • Bounce Rate: The percentage of emails that could not be successfully delivered. Bounce can be “soft” or “hard”. A soft bounce typically means an issue with the recipient’s email server. A hard bounce means the email address is invalid or non-existent.
  • Unsubscribe Rate: The percentage of email recipients who opted to unsubscribe from one or more email campaigns.
  • Disengaged Users: This metric is not a rate. It shows the number of email recipients not engaging with the content (e.g., not opening emails or not accessing the links).
  • Subscriber Growth Rate: This is the rate at which the email list is growing. A growing email list doesn’t necessarily mean high conversion: email lists still need to be updated and segmented.

Finally, the most important metric is the return on investment (RoI). This shows the financial benefit (or otherwise) of the email campaign. It can be calculated as:

[ (total_value_attained_from_email_campaign – email_campaign_investment) / (email_campaign_investment)] x 100

Conclusion

Effective email marketing is a long-term game, so be patient. As you build your email marketing strategy, don’t expect it to remain static over time. Things will change: some strategies may work, some may not. What we have listed here are the best practices. You will need to revisit the strategy every three to six months and fine-tune it. 

Also, don’t expect to see results overnight. It takes time to build a strong list, create compelling content, and earn the trust of your subscribers. A consistent approach and following best practices will make the difference between a bad investment and a successful return.

At Professional Data Skills, we offer a full suite of email marketing services and will be more than happy to help you in this journey. Contact us to know more.

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Why You Need Email Marketing as an Effective Digital Channel

Why You Need Email as an Effective Digital Channel
Why You Need Email as an Effective Digital Channel
Image Credit: Talha Khalil/Pixabay

Many businesses don’t consider email as an effective marketing channel. Yet, it remains one of the most effective and cost-efficient methods for businesses to connect with their target audience, build brand loyalty, and drive conversion. If you Google for email marketing stats, you will see some supporting figures.

  • HubSpot says the Return-on-Investment (RoI) for email marketing is $36 for every $1 spent.
  • MailChimp gives a break-down of different email marketing KPIs.
  • In its 2023 “B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends” report, Content Marketing Institute (CMI) shows that nearly three out of four marketers it surveyed use email newsletters to distribute content.
  • Other stats from Oberlo shows:
    • 81% of SMBs still rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, and 80% for retention (data from Emarsys, 2018).
    • Average email open rate is 20.81%, but with personalisation, the open rate increases by 50% (data from Yes Lifecycle Marketing, 2019).

Common Resistance Against Email Marketing

However, when it comes to email marketing, many small-to-medium-sized businesses don’t consider it as a channel worth pursuing. Some common resistance include:

  • It’s dead. B2B customers won’t read our email to make a decision.
  • We don’t have the budget for it.
  • It will end up in their spam folder. The rest will simply unsubscribe.
  • How do you measure success? Simply because someone is opening an email doesn’t mean they will read it.
  • We have run it before and didn’t have much traction.

Let’s talk about these points one by one.

Email Marketing Isn’t Dead

Email marketing is very much alive. Take Netflix for example. How do they tell you what’s coming to your screen next Friday, or when the second season of your favourite crime drama will stream? They send you an email every week. How do you keep updated with your favourite industry, fashion, food, or travel topic? Chances are, you signed up for a few newsletters.

So, it really depends on what you want from your emails. Most companies will pay for a marketing campaign as long as it helps some kind of conversion. While email marketing can be used for direct conversion (think about the times you looked at an unbeatable bargain for a holiday, a dinner, or cruise, and clicked on the link), you also need to remember who you are sending the email to, and for what purpose. For B2B prospects or customers, chances are, your cold email won’t go very far. That’s what sales pitches are there for. On the other hand, if you are an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and want your subscribers to update to the latest software version because it offers some great new feature, there’s a higher probability of conversion.

Cost Can be Minimised

You can minimise email marketing costs in multiple ways, not least by integrating it with existing resources, collaterals, tools, and processes. Here are some examples:

  • The same graphics you are using for blog posts or printed collaterals can be reused for emails. The eBook or whitepaper you are promoting through a social media campaign can be the subject of the next email. Not all your email contacts may be following your company on social media. How do they know about the eBook if you don’t tell them?
  • You can create templated emails for different types of campaigns (for example, welcome emails, product or service update emails, special offer emails, outreach emails, or news update emails), and most of the content will be reusable, saving significant time.
  • Your CRM tool will most probably have an email automation facility. It will either be free or come with a relatively small price tag. It will be able to tap into your existing list of prospects, leads, and customers. Also, some of the well-known email automation tools come with a free plan for up to a certain number of emails per campaign. Unless you mind having a link back to their website from your emails (“Powered By” – in very small font), these can help you get started quickly.

You Can Spam-Proof Your Emails

The chances of your emails automatically ending up on your recipient’s spam folder depends on a few factors (this list isn’t exhaustive though):

  • The IP address or domain you are sending it from.
  • The subject line you are using.
  • The absence of an unsubscribe link.
  • The reputation of the links you are using in the email body.
  • The account you are using to send the email.

With careful planning, emails can be made not to end up in the user’s spam folder. This is one area many businesses don’t pay enough attention to. You can control some of these aspects using DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Sender Policy Framework (SPF), and the cybersecurity-related measure: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC).

Unsubscribe Is Not the End of It

Simply because someone has unsubscribed from your email list doesn’t mean you are doing something wrong. An unusually high unsubscribe rate should ring alarm bells of course, but people who have opted in for emails do that for a reason. Most unsubscription will happen for a few reasons:

  • Your recipients don’t know you. They have not opted in for your emails, or they have never heard from you. This often happens when you purchase email lists from third-party providers.
  • You are targeting the wrong people for the wrong campaigns. Think about it. If your CRM is not updated, you may not know that the CxO of a client has changed jobs. They may have awarded you business when they were working for an IT company, but now they are the CxO of a weight-loss program. Chances are, your emails about the latest software offer won’t be relevant to their job.
  • Your emails are too pushy, too salesy, and lack any empathy for the recipient.

Whatever the reason, if someone unsubscribes from your list, it’s actually good, because it gives you an opportunity to look at your campaign more critically, and your email list is one step closer towards becoming more targeted.

Measuring Success Depends on Defining Success

Measuring success in email campaign depends on what you define as “success”. Your email marketing campaigns (or the very reason of using email as a digital channel) should have clear objectives. What is that objective? Is it informing prospects and clients of the upcoming webinar and getting them to sign up? Is it following up a lead after someone has downloaded an eBook? Is it a welcome pack with links to more resources?

Most people see email campaign success through the lens of technical measurements like open rates, bounce rates, or click through rates. These figures are necessary, but you also have to remember, those technical KPIs will change with the objectives you set.

For example, when you want to measure the conversion of a webinar sign-up email campaign, the click through rate (CTR) shows the overall effectiveness of your email in getting people to interact with it. To get more value from this KPI, you can create a custom link with parameters to the webinar lading page and include that link in your email. Once users click on that link and go to the landing page, analytics tools like Google Analytics can accurately show the unique traffic coming from the email source.

To dig deeper, you can get a report from your email automation tool about the contacts who clicked on the link. You can then compare that list with the actual sign-up attendees and see how many email recipients actually signed up for the webinar after clicking the link.

Now, consider another use case where you want to inform people of an upcoming policy change. You will probably want to track only one KPI, the open rate, to measure its effectiveness.

Why Email Campaigns Fail

As the saying goes, “people don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.” Before writing off your past email marketing initiatives as ineffective, think about the reasons they may have failed. Ask yourself these questions:

  • How did you define success for the email campaign? Was your expectation realistic? How did you know the campaign was not successful?
  • Was the email list updated with the latest contact information?
  • Did you target the right audience for the right campaign? Did you segment the recipients?
  • Was your subject line poorly written, too pushy, salesy, or spammy?
  • Was there a lack of personalisation in your email subject, salutation, or email body?
  • Was your email designed poorly? Was it too cluttered with too much information?
  • Did it have a single and clear call to action (CTA)?
  • Did it open in browser correctly? Was it mobile-friendly?
  • Were you sending too many emails too frequently?
  • Were all the links in the email working properly?
  • Did you include unsubscribe links? Did you add other necessary links like your privacy policy or social media channels?
  • Did you use automation to ensure emails were sent on time, at the right time or season?
  • Did you try a variation of your email campaigns with A/B testing?

Chances are, when you consider these questions, you will find one or more reasons why your campaigns might have failed (or still failing). Once you address those issues, results should improve, often dramatically.

Final Words

Hopefully, this post has given you some food for thought about email marketing. So how do you get started, or bring your existing campaigns to frutition? To manage successful email marketing campaigns, the first thing businesses should do is create need is a strategy. In the next part of this article series, we will talk about questions you should consider when building that strategy.

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How to Write Great Case Studies for Successful B2B Marketing

Writing great case studies for effective B2B marketing needs careful planning
Image Credit: Scott Graham/Unsplash

Case studies are a great way to showcase your brand’s authority to the rest of the world. Simply put, a case study shows how your product or service has been crucial in solving a B2B client’s real-world problem in the most effective manner. This is persuasive advertisement because it comes with the power of storytelling. Everyone loves to hear a great story, and you are doing exactly that. Companies often name case studies like “Customer Stories” or “Customer Success Stories”.

Why Should You Create Case Studies?

Case studies are meant to build .your brand’s credibility by highlighting your expertise or offering in a particular area. Its goal is to grow confidence in the minds of prospects who might be looking for a solution to a similar or even the same problem. In that sense, case studies can make great content for the consideration phase of inbound marketing. In fact, according to a 2020 State of Marketing Trend Report from HubSpot, 13% of marketers consider case studies as one of the primary components of their content strategy.

How Do Case Studies Look Like?

Typically, case studies are freely available from a company’s website under the “Resources” section. However, in some rare cases, a business may decide to share gated case studies with its existing customers only.

Some businesses may have many case studies on their website. Canva is one example. Others may not have any or only a few. Depending on how much potential your story has for conversion, you can highlight it on the home page or a landing page.

Some case studies can be downloaded like an eBook in PDF format, while others are available as web copies. This case study from well-known data management software company Talend is a dowloadable PDF file that shows stories of seven of their customers, written in a concise form. The same company took a unique approach by incorporating video in this featured customer story.

What Should Case Studies Contain?

The way you want to present your case studies will depend on what type of information you want to convey to prospects. We will talk about case study structures shortly, but effective case studies are backed by data. Such data can be supplied by the customer, collected by you, or even be available in the public domain. You can present the data using charts, graphs, numbers, infographics, bulleted lists, or screenshots. For example, if your marketing agency specializes in SEO service, your case study can include screenshots of your client’s website traffic behavior from Google Analytics—before and after your changes. But here’s what you need to remember: the information you include must be verifiable, proven, and collected from a respectable authority. This case study from the [M]System Agency is an excellent example of using data in your stories.

There’s no hard limit to the length of a case study. However, since these are targeted at decision-makers, overly long content can easily distract readers or cause them to abandon reading before reaching call-to-action (CTA). We recommend keeping case study lengths between 1,000 to 1,200 words.

What Should You Consider Before Writing Case Studies?

The number of case studies you should publish, or the type of content you should include in those will depend on a number of factors. For example:

  • Who’s your target audience, and what information could they seek in a case study? Will they want to see your product or service’s performance in the market? Will they want to see why other companies are choosing your product or service?

    It could be difficult to know, but this is where your sales team can help because they will have some insight into customer inquiries. If you have no such information, write your case studies for the buyer personas you created for your ideal customer profile.
  • Do you want to highlight one product or service or more in your case studies?
  • How well do you know your customers, and how well do they know you? Do you have a business relationship close enough that even your customer will highlight the story on their social media channel or various events?
  • How willing are your customers to share their stories with you for publishing? Some clients may have regulatory requirements which prohibit vendors from disclosing any information.
  • Was your story with the customer already published or talked about elsewhere? Do you want to highlight it as a star use case?
  • Did your product or service play the most pivotal role in solving the customer’s problem, or was it a small part of the solution?
  • Was it a once-off solution from your product or service line, or the product/service was used by multiple customers in different situations? A flagship product or service is always a good candidate for case studies.

Ideally, you would want to hight the best of your customer stories where the solution played a huge role. Many companies highlight case studies of their well-known and often famous customers.

As you can see, planning for case studies can take some time, but once you have set some basic reference rules, you can start creating case stduy templates and workflows your content creators can use. If you want to get started quickly, you can try out HubSpot’s case study templates.

How Do You Gather All the Information for Case Studies?

The central part of any case study should be the customer you helped. That’s why you first need to discuss with your client if they are happy for you to highlight their story on your website. Nobody likes negative coverage, so you must assure your clients—and ensure—the case study you want to write does not show them in any way that hurts their reputation.

Once you have the go-ahead, you need to set up times with their key stakeholders for interviews. You should interview those who were directly involved during the project and those who can talk about the impact your solution has made on the company. People consider their time valuable, and you will probably get only one appointment with your subject, so make sure you are asking the right questions.

For the interviews, start by asking questions your subjects are most familiar with, and then build upon the answers. Ensure all the questions are open-ended. Also, make sure you are recording the interviews with their consent.

Here’s a sample list of questions you may want to ask.

The Business
  • Tell me about your company—what industry are you in, and what does your business do?
  • Can you please provide figures about your organization, like turnover, number of staff, office locations, type of clients you have, or similar?
The problem
  • What was the business problem you were trying to solve?
  • Was there a particular trigger that made you decide it was time to act?
  • What were the key challenges you needed to address?
  • How was the problem affecting your business? Can you give some quantitative figures?
The solution
  • What were your project objectives?
  • When did the project begin and end?
  • Why did you choose our company?
  • What technologies, processes, and workflows were used?
  • What was the process for developing the solution? (If you’re an IT company, provide the technical details of the solution yourself.  Don’t rely on your client to provide this information, as they may not be aware of the depth/breadth of your work).
  • Were there any extra challenges during the project that our company helped you solve?
Results
  • How is the solution now being used?
  • Has it achieved the project objectives?
  • What quantifiable benefits can you attribute to the solution (e.g., return on investment, dollars or time saved, dollars earned, customer happiness index, number of enrolments, etc.)?
  • What other business benefits have you experienced as a result of this solution?
  • How does this compare to how you were doing things previously?
  • Who are the main users, and what changes has it made to their roles?
  • How have the users reacted? 
Future plans
  • Do you have plans for future development on this solution?
  • Off the back of this project, are there any other projects either underway or in the pipeline?
  • Will you be considering our company for future projects? If so, why?
Testimonial
  • If you were to recommend our company, what would you say?
  • How would you describe your relationship with our company?

This is not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea. The basic rules of interviews apply here: you need to be on top of your questions to get all the answers within the allocated time, but you also don’t interrupt people when they are talking about the project passionately.

Depending on how in-depth you want to go with your case study, you may need to interview stakeholders from your company too. They can be salespeople who closed the deal, presales engineers (if you are a technology company), support staff, or project managers.

How Should You Structure Your Case Studies?

Once you have gathered all the information and data for your case study, it’s time to write it is in a structured manner. A case study structure should include the following:

The Problem

This is where you describe what challenges your customer faced and how those impacted their businesses. Relevant figures and insights can be a powerful driver here. For example, the problem can highlight the money the company was losing daily, the time it took to complete a business process, or the number of opportunities the business was losing.

You, the Solution Provider

This is where you describe how your business was involved and why. Did the client approach you? Did you apply through a bidding process and win the work? Why did the client decide to hire you? More importantly, why did you feel confident you could help the business?

Your Magic Formula

This is the crux of the content. This is where you describe how you approached and solved the problem. Describe in detail:

  • What products and services you used for the solution?
  • Why you chose that path as the best possible solution?
  • What problems did you and the client face when adopting this solution, and how you overcame those hurdles?
  • How long did it take?

Once again, you can use figures and insights to back your points. For example, the client was using an older class of machine that could churn out only X widgets per hour. Knowing the customer’s industry well, your company recommended the newer generation Y machines, which could be easily calibrated to produce more or less than X widgets per hour, giving the customer the benefit of scalability. In doing so, you found many existing pipelines integrated with the older machines could not interoperate with the Generation Y version, so you created a custom integrator in record time.

Points like these not only prove your brand’s expertise but also shows that you care for your clients and are prepared to go the extra mile.

The Happy Customer

In this part, you describe what the client got in the end and how it affected their businesses. As with other parts of the story, figures and charts are a great means of communicating your findings. Side-by-side comparisons of before and after states are a powerful way to show prospective buyers that they, too, can get such benefits by hiring you. As an extra bonus, you can add client testimonials here. Nothing assures prospective buyers more than great testimonials from buyers who have done business with you.

Call to Action (CTA)

This is the last part of the case study, where you ask prospects to contact you if interested. This section should be fairly small and not look like you are making a sales pitch. The CTA should briefly introduce your company and what it offers and include a link to an online contact form or provide other details like an email address or phone number.

Letting the World Know

To ensure your case study is discoverable by organic traffic, it should follow all the basic rules of SEO. These include things like title length, meta descriptions, keywords, headings, and so on.

But you also want to tell the rest of the world about it. As we mentioned before, sometimes a case study can be so important your marketing department may want to highlight it on the home page or a landing page of the website.

You should also run a social media campaign once the piece is published. Another great way to promote is to run an email campaign to let your leads and clients know. If available as a web copy, the case study page should also include social share links.

Final Words

So there you have it: our tips for creating great case studies for effective and successful B2B marketing. Although it may seem complex, writing effective case studies mainly depends on getting the right information from the right people and presenting them in a compelling way.

Here at Professional Data Skills, we are really passionate about telling great stories about our customers, and we would love to create great case studies for you. If you want to know how we can tell your story, why not drop us a line?

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Beyond Blogs: 6 Types of Content B2B Marketers Should Create

Image Courtesy: Arisa Chattasa/Unsplash

There’s a lot more to content marketing than just posting regular blogs to your website.

The industry knowledge your business possesses and the client experience it has gained over time are potent sources of information for creating a range of digital assets. With the right content strategy, you can tap into this knowledge to produce content that:

  • Showcases your business’ expertise and experience
  • Positions your company as an industry leader
  • Educates your audience and help them along the sales funnel.

Producing content other than blog posts can initially seem daunting. Why do you need to write a whitepaper? What’s the point of creating an eBook, and when is a video more appropriate for capturing leads? 

To answer these questions, consider the big consulting or market research companies. These companies produce in-depth trend reports and content on specific topics and industries every year. Such content is usually gated and targeted toward decision-makers. Where do these firms get their information to produce such reports? You guessed it right—they tap into their organizational knowledge. Not only that, they repurpose the content over time.

You may not be running a global multi-billion dollar company, but you too can produce valuable content for your clients and prospects and use those as powerful lead magnets.

Here are six types of content we recommend every B2B company should produce. You should also recommend these to your clients if you are a digital marketing agency.

Whitepapers

Whitepapers may have a reputation for being bland and dense, but well-written whitepapers can truly differentiate your business from your competitors. As we mentioned in another blog post, people read them because they have to, not because they want to.  This is because whitepapers usually have a formal tone, are written for specific audience types, and focus on a single topic from a high level. The audience is usually well-versed on the topic but needs guidance to solve a problem or make a critical decision. When you give readers such information at their fingertips, a well-written whitepaper becomes a well-received resource that establishes your company’s authority. It becomes an essential resource for gaining trust.

Your whitepaper should explain a single problem and offer a solution without being too hands-on or coming across as overly promotional. It’s a high-quality report that persuades your audience with evidence rather than hype. You are educating your readers, not selling them anything.

eBooks

The cool and casual sibling of the whitepaper is the eBook. Presented in a less-formal style, they can be a how-to guide, highlight company research findings, or explain a new service. Typically, eBooks are not as specific as whitepapers when it comes to topics. Oftentimes eBooks cover a broader topic with the content broken up into chapters covering various subtopics. Thus, the content flows less cohesively than in a whitepaper because whitepapers have sections instead of chapters, but the eBook is designed for the reader to skim through.

Also, just like printed books, eBooks often have tables of contents. They also make heavy use of diagrams, imagery, or infographics. Another feature of eBooks is that critical points are often highlighted for the busy reader. 

Like whitepapers, eBooks are high-value resources that can improve your lead nurturing processes.

Case Studies

Case studies are a written portfolio of your company’s work. Unlike eBooks or whitepapers, case studies are usually not gated. They are primarily available as web copies instead of downloadable documents, although exceptions exist.

Like eBooks and whitepapers, case studies show your business’ expertise and commitment to solving customer problems. A case study structure is divided into distinct parts:

  • The client problem: what challenges was the customer facing?
  • The effect of the problem: how was it affecting your customer’s business? For example, losing revenue, lower customer satisfaction, and complex processes taking too much time.
  • When and how was your business involved: how did the client find you? Why did they hire your business?
  • What did your business do to solve the customer’s problem: this is usually a detailed description of which products or services you recommended and how those were pivotal in solving the problem.
  • What else did the customer get: other tangible and intangible benefits besides the immediate solution?
  • Testimonial: did the customer leave any feedback?

As you can see, properly-written case studies can become persuasive social proof. In some cases, long-form case studies can be written as eBooks, or multiple case studies can be bundled into a downloadable resource.

Videos

When it comes to video marketing, everybody seems to know its importance, yet nobody seems to do it enough. The thought process behind this is that videos are too time, resource, and cost-consuming to produce, and there is not enough ROI. Yet, videos are a compelling means to convey your message. And they don’t always have to be created with professional actors, lighting, and studio setups.

Your video library can reside in a few places. For example, an introductory video from the CEO can be featured on the main page or landing pages. How-tos, onboarding, and explainer doodle videos can be featured on public or private documentation sites. These can also be on your YouTube channel. People subscribe to such channels when you convey enough helpful information. Think about Google or HubSpot video series as an example.

The types of videos you post can be as varied. Many companies post their webinars online. Similarly, you can post client interviews, new product launches, or award ceremonies, to name a few.

Sites like YouTube allow you to add closed caption subtitles to videos. The text is fully crawlable by search engines and, if SEO-optimized, may often feature on the first page of search results.

Another place to post videos is your social media channels. Social media videos can have a broader impact depending on your type of business. Think of TikTok as an example. Many people think of it as too consumer-oriented, yet brands are slowly but surely using it for awareness and conversion.

The key to video success lies in the content’s quality. When presented succinctly, valuable information can leave a long-lasting effect on the viewer, priming them to return for more.

Infographics

If pictures are a thousand words, infographics are worth the adage (beside videos). These are short forms of content, usually freely downloadable and not gated. Infographics are often part of eBooks as well.

As the name suggests, Infographics show information in a graphical manner. The information is typically statistical in nature. They can show current status, predictions, comparisons, or even how-tos. For example, if you are a luxury car wholesaler, you may want to add an infographic on your website showing the top ten cars based on their market shares, user satisfaction level, and features. By showing such statistical figures through images, you are advising your B2B customers (retail car dealers) on which cars they should buy from you and stock up on. If you are a Fintech company, you may want to advise your website visitors about the top 5 sources of cloud waste.

Outreach Content

The final item on our list is what we call outreach content. We named it so because although such content can be used for inbound marketing, you are not hosting it on your website—you are reaching out on the Internet for potential leads.

The first type of outreach content is your guest blogs (yes, we know, we said this article is not about blogs). You write these blogs on reputable third-party sites where many of your target audience may congregate. For example, if you are a digital marketing firm, you may want to start a publication on Medium or create irregular LinkedIn articles. If you are a tech start-up, you may want to publish on sites like InfoQ, Dev.to, or Hackernoon. Writing in industry-famous publications and linking to your site can help build brand awareness and develop quality leads.

You can create the next type of outreach content on Q & A sites. Your B2B content marketing strategy can target sites like Quora and Stack Overflow and answer questions from possible leads. Again, such content establishes your brand authority. However, such sites usually have algorithmic rules to deter brand promotions. For example, your answer in Quora will not be directly visible if it contains links to your products or services. But the best thing about such content is that it can be featured on Google Answer Box for some queries.

Finally, we have social media posts and email newsletters as outreach content. You may not be creating something new here but using these channels to promote existing content. Writing email copy or social media posts requires careful planning and targeting specific customer segments (email) or hashtags (social media). And unlike blogs, whitepapers, infographics, or videos, social posts or email campaigns happen on a recurring schedule.

Besides promotion, emails are often used to announce new products or service offerings, explain a business decision to customers or suppliers, or even acknowledge and correct previous mistakes. Social media is a powerful tool for answering customer queries and highlighting user-generated content.

Final Words

So there you have it—our list of six types of content you should consider for your B2B business. It may not be possible (or even relevant) to tap on all six, but that’s where you can talk to an agency like ours. We are always keen to hear about your content needs and help you create both content strategies and content.

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6 Ways to Get Your Blog Posts to Reach a Wider Audience

Image Courtesy: Yvette de Wit/Unsplash

So you have published your latest and greatest blog post.

You have worked hard writing it, ensured you have primed it with carefully-researched keywords, and followed all the golden rules of SEO. Catchy titles, meta descriptions, H2 headings, and perfect header images are all there. In fact, the blog might have been written by the talented folks of ProDataSkills. Google Analytics is showing traffic hitting your page.

But not at the rate you would have loved. 

It’s been a week, and the schedule for your next post is in about another week. Why isn’t traffic spiking? You know you did everything you could have done to attract more traffic.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works anymore. As much as we’d like our blogs to go viral on their own merits, it doesn’t work in a crowded world wide web. You need to tell people about it. Don’t depend on just Google.

So how do you reach a wider audience smartly and effectively? Here are six techniques you can follow.

Technique #1: Make it Shareable

The first step to getting more traffic to your blog post is to make it shareable. Even if your blog post attracts healthy traffic, you want to build on that success and keep the cycle going. What better way to do it than to get the people who read it to share it too? That’s why your blog site should have sharing option. Many sites allow their blogs to be shared on social media, email, or even instant messaging apps. This helps people to share your article without manually copy-pasting the URL.

Technique #2: Share on Social Media

This is the most straightforward strategy but one that’s often missed. You must inform your followers about your blog post on every social media channel your company has a profile on. LinkedIn, Twitter, Meta company page—you name it.

You can use a free tool like Canva to create a simple graphic with an intriguing excerpt from your blog and post it on social media. And don’t worry—it’s totally fine to post the same graphic on multiple platforms. If you aren’t using graphics, you can use the same or different text-based messages in all the channels. There’s a high probability your audience is different on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Instagram. So copy/paste and post away.

What’s also essential is using relevant hashtags in your social media posts. These will show your post in the timeline of whoever subscribes to those hashtags. This will help those people find your blog.

And don’t think you can’t post the same message about your blog multiple times on the same channel. The Internet (and social media in particular) is a superfast freeway. People won’t remember what they saw three weeks ago. Even if they do remember your post about the blog, at worst, they won’t click on it, and if it resonates with them, they will repost or share it. We recommend you follow this strategy for blog posts with strong potential to increase your viewership, followership, or sales.

So, how often should you post about the same blog? It depends on your number of followers, how often you post, and the channels you are posting to. As a rule of thumb, wait at least two weeks before posting about the same blog.

Finally, if you have the budget, consider purchasing social media ads to boost your post. Although doing it for every post isn’t practical, it certainly helps to spread the word about blogs you want most people to see. 

Here at Professional Data Skills, we promote our blog posts through social media. We also ensure any articles we have written for our clients are promoted on social media channels.

Technique #3: Send an Email Newsletter

Think nobody reads your email newsletters? Well, you might be surprised to see some stats from this HubSpot blog. The average email open rate across all industries sits between 20% to 30%, and the clickthrough rate is between 1.2% to 3% (see Mailchimp and Smart Insights). 

However, think about the 1.5% of your database who open the email and click on your blog’s link. If you have 5,000 email addresses in your database, that’s still 50 people who are getting interested. Many of them might share it on their own social media channels.

Technique #4: Use Backlinks

If your blog post is part of a topic cluster, adding links from the pillar page and the other posts to your blog (and vice versa) makes sense. It doesn’t have to be only for topic clusters—as long as your article can be referenced from another blog, put a link pointing back to it. That way, traffic hitting your newer blog posts can also be aware of the original article.

Technique #5: Post on Multiple Platforms

Most publishing platforms will have strict rules about publishing duplicate content. But some may have more lenient policies. You could post your blog on those platforms (e.g., Medium) and add a disclaimer like “this article was first published on…”. Like topic clusters and backlinks, you can reference your original blog from articles you publish on different platforms. By submitting your blog to an external publication, you are spreading your knowledge to an already established network that could be far larger than your existing following. 

Rule #6: Use Q&A Sites

This goes back to our social media promotion technique. People look for answers on sites like Quora, Reddit, or Stack Exchange. Regularly answering industry-related questions on these sites establishes your brand as a thought leader and allows you to promote your blogs.

Let’s say your company offers a SaaS solution for workspace health and safety management. One of your blog posts is about the top 10 similar platforms. When you answer questions related to such topics (e.g., “what are some well-known workplace incident management tools?”), you could answer the question and provide a link to your blog.

Final Words

So now you have seen a few techniques to present your blogs to a broader audience. As you can see, apart from running ads, all these methods are free. All that’s needed is a little time and effort.

If you want to create thought-leadership or deep-dive, hands-on blogs for your technology company, our expert content creators will be more than happy to help. We can create well-researched content related to your products and services, promote them through social media and email campaigns, and report on subsequent engagement rates. To know more, contact us today.

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Professional Data Skills is Now a HubSpot Solutions Provider

Today, we are really excited to share some great news.

Professional Data Skills has joined HubSpot’s Solutions Provider Program. HubSpot, a leading growth platform, works with partner experts like us to grow their businesses through inbound software, services, and support. 

The Solutions Partner Program is an ecosystem of experts that offer marketing, sales, customer service, web design, CRM, and IT services. It’s a global community that believes putting customers first is the key to growth. It enables its members to offer a wide breadth of more sophisticated solutions across the entire customer experience.

Why HubSpot?

Today, technology is more essential than ever to help marketing, sales, and service teams develop the best possible experiences for their customers. And Hubspot is one of the best platforms out there. In fact, its Sales Hub product has been nominated as the world’s #1 CRM in G2’s Spring 2022 CRM Grid Report.

At its core, HubSpot comes with a free Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database. It’s unique because what comes free with HubSpot isn’t usually free in most other CRMs. And that’s why companies looking for a robust solution to get all their sales and marketing efforts in one place can get a headstart using the free tool.

Sitting on top of the CRM are HubSpot “Hubs”: the Marketing Hub, the Sales Hub, and the Services Hub. Tightly coupled with the CRM backend, these applications offer 360-degree marketing, sales, and service automation. Everything from creating landing pages to complex sales playbooks is there. You can create anything from multiple email templates to a service ticketing system and run everything from marketing campaigns to sales funnel dashboards.

The licensing is easy, and you can mix and match different tier licensing of each hub. What’s more, you can save costs by assigning paid features of your licenses to specific roles only.

What Does This Mean for You?

Adopting HubSpot as your one-stop sales, marketing, and service solution means you will save costs and time and eliminate complexity. No more paying for multiple tools, no more Excel spreadsheet hell, and certainly no more dashboards showing the wrong data. Your teams become more effective than ever, and your customers see a single point of contact for all their needs.

To see what we mean, here’s a video we really like.

How Can We Help You?

Although it’s easy to start with HubSpot, most organizations need a roadmap to get the maximum value out of its powerful features. After all, you may or may not need all the features and want to ensure they all integrate with your existing IT stack and business processes. And you don’t want to give your IT team another tool to manage.

This is where we come.

We will work closely with you to understand your need. This is the first step of any service we offer our clients – not just HubSpot. Once we know where you are, we will run a comprehensive workshop. Here, we will chat with your stakeholders, learn about your pain points, and the tools and processes you’re currently using.

Once we have all the details, we will design a solution tailored to your current and future needs. We will demo our proposed roadmap for HubSpot adoption to you, and once you agree, we will get to work implementing it. To give a picture, some of the work we may be doing will involve onboarding users, getting the most cost-effective licensing, building sales workflows, or migrating existing CRM data to HubSpot.

Whatever it is, we will deliver a turnkey solution. But this doesn’t have to end there. If you want, we will offer you a managed service – where we look after your HubSpot installation, so you don’t have to call tech support if you need any help.

Why Us?

We have been using HubSpot for our sales and marketing team, and we are also always getting certified in different HubSpot learning tracks. Becoming a Solutions Provider makes it even easier to help our clients harness its CRM and marketing automation power. We are now better able to tap into Hubspot’s resources and expertise. We can now help clients ramp up with increased speed and less friction.

Want to have a chat? Reach out to us today!

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