Internet marketing is a diverse arena. Using everything the internet offers to market a business is challenging but exciting nevertheless. Of the many approaches in digital marketing, marketing automation is probably the most unique.
 

What is Marketing Automation?

 
Simple on the outside, but complex on the inside. This pretty much sums up marketing automation. In a nutshell, marketing automation is a digital marketing solution or approach that’s aimed at improving relationships with customers.

It uses automation software for delivering personalized emails and messages to leads and customers. This ‘personalization’ depends on various factors including but not limited to the spending habits of your contacts, where they are in the sales funnel, their past interactions with the website etc.

Marketing needs to make sure people get content tailored to their needs and aligned with their interests. Marketing automation pretty much does that after determining what the user would want. This helps build stronger relationships subsequently increasing conversions. Automation also streamlines your operations to an extent letting you focus more on other tasks.

So Marketing Automation essentially combines various aspects of digital marketing including email marketing, conversion rate optimization, lead generation etc.

Now let’s take a look at the common misapprehensions about marketing automation.
 

It isn’t personal

 
People tend to think that because it’s automated, marketing automation isn’t personal. In all fairness, it can be impersonal if not done properly. When done properly, marketing automation is certainly personal. A solid marketing automation strategy will have a human touch as well. The process just makes it easier to get the right messages out to the right people. The right messages are often tailored by marketers.
 

It’s spam

 
When it comes to spam, a marketer knows best. Spam is essentially an unsolicited message from a company, promoting something that’s not relevant to the recipient. Marketing automation, on the other hand, delivers relevant messages to interested users who have provided the sender with their email addresses.

Though marketing automation can be completely promotional, the end goal is to build better relationships. This means they can deliver non-promotional content that are valuable or relevant to users.
 

It’s a fully hands-off process

 
The word ‘automation’ in marketing automation is easily misunderstood. It gives people the wrong impression that the whole process is completely automatic, and that they need only set it up, run the software, and watch it work like magic. That’s not how it works. An effective marketing automation process should always be monitored, tweaked, and refined to ensure that it retains the success quotient.  The marketer will also have to run tests and analyses to understand how people respond to specific types of content, designs, CTAs etc.
 

It’s just email marketing except that a software sends the mails

 
Though marketing automation mostly involves sending various types of emails (Welcome mails, Thank You mails etc.), it isn’t necessarily a synonym for email marketing. There are fundamental differences between the two. In email marketing, emails are sent to every contact in the list. Marketing automation avoids this, and tunes each mail depending on the recipient’s interests and needs.

There is little segmentation in conventional email marketing, while marketing automation allows segmentation and is systematic. The latter is also easily measurable, and offers better insights but is generally effective only if the business has a large enough contacts database and the resources to use the automation software to its fullest potential.

Search engine optimization is ever-changing mostly due to Google continuously upgrading itself to serve searchers better with more relevant, good quality search results. So, a business needs to constantly adopt and adapt so as to improve its search engine ranking. They should seek the latest and best techniques to improve website authority and ranking, and then devise a search engine marketing strategy that can give results.

There are many ways to boost SEO but there are things that should be taken into account. Here are a few tips that can help you in your SEO journey.
 

Content that adds value

 
Content is king when it comes to SEO. Google emphasized it with the Panda update, rewarding high quality content or relevant content that actually adds value. Google wants the searchers to find relevant content that is useful for them, and have a good experience finding them. So for a search engine marketer, knowing the audience is key.

This way, the marketer can make sure to provide content that are useful to that audience, get the search engines to notice it, and subsequently raise their rank in search engine result pages.

Here are a few tips to add value to content.

• Research and identify the most popular topics relevant to your business and your audience
• Find questions that the audience seek answers for pertaining to the topics you selected
• Prepare a high quality content with infographics, and publish them at the right time

Website that gives impressive browsing experience

 
User experience is a critical factor for search engine optimization, and it starts not from the moment users visit a website but from the moment they search for the website.

So it’s important to make sure that the website gives a great experience to visitors. To do that,

• Fix broken links
• Test navigation to make sure the users can browse through pages with ease
• Make the interface and the content appealing to keep them engaged
• Test page loading speeds
• Make sure the website is responsive, and get started with AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

Extensive research

 
One of the biggest mistakes a search engine marketer can make is to think like a search engine to understand how the search engine ranks websites. At present, they should think like readers to identify what the reader wants or expects from a website, and then provide it.

It’s wise to monitor keywords, user engagement, and website statistics to figure out what users expect from your website. This research should be extensive and requires significant time investment, because if you don’t know your users, you will never be able to give them what they need. The research can even expand to online communities where users discuss issues, and seek solutions.
 

Visual content optimization

 
Visual content adds to the website’s overall appeal, and affects the website’s loading speed. It also supplements the textual content in the website, and plays a role in keeping users interested enough to completely go through the content.

Such content including infographics and videos should be optimized for search engines. This optimization can include SEO-friendly titles, alt text, metadata, file size etc. The content should be unique and shareable, and should load as fast as possible even if it’s image/video heavy.
 

Up-to-date online footprint

 
Though your website is critical to your online presence, it’s not the only factor. The more online presence the website has, the more value it will get from search engines. This is why it’s important to make sure that your online footprint is up-to-date across various platforms including the popular ones like Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc.

Building online presence involves sharing valuable content to various platforms, and then promoting them to attract readers. The end goal is to ensure that the details you share should be accurate, and make it easier for users to find more about your business. You can either monitor the online presence yourself or hire a SEO consultant or an online reputation manager to do it for you.
 

Conclusion

 
SEO is a long process that wouldn’t get you results overnight. As for 2017, there is still time to start fixing your SEO and keep publishing good content so your website can have a great start next year with a higher rank in search engine results.

Content is a critical factor for successful digital marketing these days. A couple of years back, all you needed to do was do some extensive research, shortlist a few effective search engine marketing techniques, and then just begin. However, search engine algorithms keep changing rendering many SEO techniques obsolete over time. Including keywords in titles, descriptions, and alt tags to get your website’s rank up is not that effective now. Some techniques do work though, but it’s simply harder to surpass competition now.

Many optimizers have started to believe that old school SEO is dead. Might be, but a bit of ‘Googling’ will reveal that it’s very much alive albeit in a different form. The difference is that new age SEO and content are deeply interconnected now.

A successful content marketer should be able to leverage the power of content, making it beneficial not just to the business but to customers as well.

Here are a few tricks that could make a successful content marketer.
 

Behavioral Factors

 
The key is to figure out the problems of your audience, and solve them with educative/informative content. Google has been trying to do the same for years, trying to teach crawlers to assess the relevance of content. They are not yet there but quite close.

Semantic analysis was replaced with an assessment of the interaction indicators like bounce rate and the time a visitor spends on a website. If a user spends more time on a page before going to other pages in a website, it could mean that they found useful content there. This is a behavioral pattern that establishes the informative value of content.

This also makes it evident that well-written content can indeed make Google happy unlike uninformative articles stuffed with keywords.
 

Video Content

 
With Youtube, Instagram, and the likes growing in popularity, it is quite clear that video content will play a bigger role in digital marketing soon. Social media networks like Facebook have added live streaming features now, giving more opportunities for businesses to engage their customers and present their services in a more appealing manner. Besides, a video can hold a viewer’s attention better than long-form text content.
 

Effectiveness of Content

 
Developing content strategies is no simple feat, which is why a content marketer can always use a content manager or auditor. Content managers will have to carefully monitor the content even by the geographical factor, and measure and analyze how each article, image etc. influence buyer’s actions from the first click. Behavioral factors along with the data above can give you great insight on how the content affects conversion.
 

Creativity

 
The only thing that’s more important than SEO strategies for a content marketer is creative ability. Back in the days, some SEO texts and a few SEO-based tweaks here and there on the website would get its rank up on search engine results. Now it all comes down to the time a user spends on the website as well as social media influence. So if a website is brimming with high quality materials created by creative content writers and designers, visitors will want to spend more time going through it all.

Interesting headlines, appealing subheadings, and a unique style of writing can catch readers’ attention.
 

LSI

 
Stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It’s basically how search engine crawlers use mathematical methods to identify patterns and relationships between the components of text. The analysis determines whether the content is relevant to the search criteria and what the website is about. LSI has been around for a while, and is still effective.
 

Social Promotion

 
Social media is the next best thing for a content marketer. Leverage it wisely, and your content would grow in value. This is why a part of the marketing budget should be allocated for social promotion of content. The key is to find influencers – people having a large number of readers for their blogs and pages, and have them promote your content. This way, publications reach a lot more audience.

Not just people but even businesses of all sizes benefitted from the immense popularity of social media platforms in many ways. This was when social media was just out of its infancy. Now it’s become a part of digital marketing amongst businesses. Social media networks are now invaluable marketing tools that can provide good insights to businesses and engage with customers.

This is why it’s important to make sure that social media marketing strategies align with the business’ goals, which is of course the most challenging part of the whole campaign. By setting the business goals for a year first, it’d be easier to develop social media marketing strategies accordingly. This can lead to big positive impact for that business.

There are a lot of things a business can do to make sure their social media strategies align with their goals.
 

Knowing what to achieve

 
This is what the business should determine first, and it requires them to spend a significant amount of time to work out the company’s objectives for that year or for the coming years. It could be anything from expansion to new markets and launching new products to increasing existing customer base and brand visibility.
 

Determining the most effective social media platform

 
Now that the business goals are worked out, the company can proceed to figuring out the right social media platform that can help them achieve those goals. This is where companies generally go out of their way. They tend to put all the eggs in one basket by working on several platforms at a time. Though this definitely increases their brand presence to an extent, it may just do the opposite when it comes to achieving business goals.

The better way is to focus on a single social media platform with well-devised strategies. It not only enhances brand visibility but also makes it easier to achieve business goals in a relatively short time.
 

Devising an optimal strategy

 
With a goal and a platform to reach that goal, the next step is to work on a ‘route map’ to reach that goal – not the strategy itself but a general idea of the route they want to take in achieving the pre-determined goals.

For instance, if the company wants to increase their customer base, they can start working on a strategy that prioritizes customer engagement through social media. If they want to expand the business to a new market, they can connect with people or businesses that can connect them to potential new markets or even get them a competitive edge in those markets.
 

Creating a step by step strategy

 
This step is where the business has to piece everything together so that everything falls in place – business goals, social media platform, and route map.

To expand to new markets, the company will have to connect with people that can help them do it. So step 1 is to compile a list of such people, and feasible ways to connect with them.

To increase customer base, the company can implement a content strategy by sharing the right kind of articles and blogs to keep existing customers engaged, and attract new ones.
 

Setting priorities

 
This is where resource utilization comes in. After preparing a strategy, the business should prioritize their tactics to make sure that resources are used efficiently. Analyzing the already prepared step-by-step strategy, and the time and effort required for each tactic can give them an idea of the ones that are more important than the rest. They can then tweak their plan so that it can be executed in priority order to obtain the best results.

The objective here is to set priorities by comparing the value of each tactic, its complexity, and the resources required to execute the tactic.
 

Have appropriate people handle the tactics

 
Once the business is aware of the resources each tactic demands, and the results each offers, they will have to choose the right people to implement them. Delegate each tactic to individuals who are more suited to execute it. Give them deadlines so they can come up with plans to get the job done at the right time.
 

Being flexible

 
Even a well-devised strategy might not give the desired results. So it’s always wise to be flexible when it comes to social media marketing. Even business goals might change over time. Even a small change in business goals is important. The company will then have to review their strategy and fine tune it necessarily so as to keep it in line with the goals.
 

Conclusion

 
It’s not that a social media strategy is useful only if it’s aligned with the company’s goals. If leveraged properly, it still presents many benefits for a business. But the platforms are the most effective if the marketing strategies are aligned with a business’ goals. Executing a strategy without a solid plan might end up as a waste of resources and time without significant benefits.

Over 320 million monthly active users…

Close to half a billion tweets every single day…

This is where Twitter stands now. Seven years ago, it had only about 30 million users. But not all of them use it to socialize. A significant number of the users are businesses. You might be wondering how it can be of use to a B2B business, as Twitter is generally a platform most leveraged by B2C companies.

B2B companies can also wield this particular weapon. However, the way they use it is what actually matters.

Today, social media platforms provide users with an experience like none other. The impact is big enough to influence the decisions those users make. When you consider a business, you should realize that it’s run by people too. So, it’s actually people who do business with other people.

Companies with an established digital profile and active social media presence becomes quite appealing to potential clients. This means, people can start working on building relationships with potential clients on behalf of the company.

To market your B2B business better on Twitter, you will need to take a few things into account and make sure you don’t make those common mistakes many companies have made already.
 

Bots Won’t Work Anymore

 
Building followers is part of the first phase of Twitter marketing. A large number of followers indicate that the business is quite successful. So to raise the numbers, many businesses relied on bots. Twitter estimates that there could be over 25 million bots on the platform. But studies by many universities claim that there could be well over 40 million bots.

Twitter is already on a rampage bringing down the bots, and other tools have started popping up that can filter bots from actual users. This means, businesses won’t be able to use this tactic anymore. In the long run, it could do more harm than good if you get caught.

It shouldn’t be about increasing the number of followers to show off your influence and success. It should be about having real followers who are actually interested in your company and the services you offer. For a B2B company, the followers can be other companies. A reputed, well-established company following your business on Twitter would speak a lot about the way you do business. It gives you credibility and some amount of brand value. A lot of such businesses following your company would make things considerably easier for you to market your company.

Now, how will you find and get such an audience to follow your business on Twitter?

Understand them first.

To understand your audience, there should be a lot of market research. You can use various tools for that. One such tool that is getting a lot of praise is ‘Audiense’. A consumer panel which will help you discover the right users to follow your business based on their interests, remove followers that aren’t necessary for your Twitter marketing campaign, target your content at the right time and to the right audience, tweet to your followers at opportune moments etc.

However, you still won’t be able to specifically find out what they are reading. But once you get the followers, you can start focusing on the next phase.
 

Generating the Right Buzz

 
To create the right buzz, you need to deliver the right content in good quality. For that, more research is in order. For starters, try to figure out an answer to these three questions.

• What are the most effective influencers in your industry?
• What types of content give the best results?
• What types of content are regularly shared?

The third question is quite important considering the ever-changing nature of social media platforms. You need to keep an eye on content trends. As for the first question, you can use tools to identify Twitter accounts that get a lot of retweets for their tweets.

If you can get some of those influencers to follow you, your tweets can be retweeted and it will reach hundreds of thousands of users in no time. The key is to find the top influencers in your industry, and start building relationships with them.
 

The Essence of B2B Marketing on Twitter

 
Strategy.

Nothing is more important than strategy for marketing a B2B business. By now, you may have realized that harnessing the power of Twitter demands a significant investment of time.

A perfect strategy is a combination of efficient tools and best practices that can maximize your reach. Once you have the reach, it’s all about engaging with users. But that won’t be enough. You will have to tweet consistently while using appropriate hashtags.

The objective is to make sure your posts reach the right audience. With the right type of content that’s reliable and relatable, your chances of turning them into customers go higher.

With that said, mind you that these are just the fundamentals to help you get started the right way. A proper B2B digital marketing is quite intricate. But if you stick to the basics, you won’t find it as challenging as it really is. If you don’t have the time to do it all yourself, you can hire a team or a reliable digital marketing expert.