We’re in the last 100 days of 2019 and descending into the holiday season. For B2C marketers this is go time. Months of planning for the busiest season of the year are actively being deployed.
Yet for B2B marketers its business as usual. In the final three months there’s a lot of metric reviews and goal planning, preparing the business for 2020. While you’re thinking about your strategy, are you thinking of actual strategy or just the tactics?
Increasing social engagement, segmenting more emails and onboarding influencers is not a strategy, those are the tactics to accomplishing your strategy. Instead look at how all those tactics can work in concert to have a serious impact on the business. Its how you measure your success and how all the tactics come together.
Now get to planning.
Is that a strategy I smell?
What I love about this blog is the language it uses to pull you out of putting disparate tactics into a memo and calling it a plan. The business is counting on you to acquire, activate and nurture customers consistently. Increasing Facebook followers 10% isn’t a plan. Create the plan, add the tactics and measure, measure, measure.
How to Develop a B2B Marketing Strategy
Speaking of tactics…
Landing pages are top-of-funnel fun, right? When done well landing pages will help any other tactic, increasing the success rate of any campaign.
But it doesn’t get done in a vacuum. In order for landing pages to be successful you need great copy, UX and a clear CTA.
Landing Page UX Design Features For More Conversions
Email and Landing Pages: A Love Story
The vast majority of emails are a total waste of time. They’re one-sided, only benefiting the business and adding volume to an already noisy world. Giving value in email then sending them to a landing page that builds on that will give you the customers trust.
Here’s a quote that stood out to me:
“…ultimately, we want to be in the business of attracting lifetime customers, especially since it is five times easier to retain a current customer than acquire a new one.”
Your tools should work together instead of being a series of islands. Landing pages and email go together perfectly and with a good CRO strategy you can nurture those card fought relationships.
How to Use Landing Pages with Email Marketing
Taking Risk – Get Better Friday
Last time I talked about the feeling of just… Coasting. The times when you feel like the tide was pulled out and your boat is stuck in the sand. These are good moments because they give us the chance to look at the macro. But sometimes we have this feeling not because we have free time, but because we’re stuck in a loop. Recently I heard the phrase, “If you want the things you’ve never had, you have to do the things you’ve never done.”
I want you to imagine you wake up everyday, put on your shoes and go for a hike. You go on the same walk every day, you know the route well. You know where all the best points are and pause to admire. You also know where there’s danger and casually avoid those areas. On this trail at the very end great spot to view a mountain and you say to yourself everyday, “one day I’m going to climb that mountain.”
Along this route are several trailheads. You have no idea where they go. They might dead end, some might be dangerous, some might loop back to your path or they might go to the top of that mountain. Everyday you walk by these trails and want to go down one, but you’re afraid. What if you waste your time? What if it takes you somewhere you don’t want to go? What if you get lost? – Each day you longingly look at that mountain. But you continue to walk your same trail.
One day you see someone coming down from the mountain and you ask them, “How did you get there? Do you have a map?” The person says, “There is no map, one day I decided to try one of the other trails. Most lead to other places, but I learned a lot about the area and saw a lot of amazing stuff. So I just kept trying different trails. I knew I could always find my way back to this trail so I just kept taking the chance and one day I got on a trail and it led to the mountain.”
No matter how much you wish or dream, that trail you’re walking will never lead to the top of that mountain. If you feel like you’re stuck in a loop, find another path and just try it. What you learn along the way will be valuable and it might just lead you to what you’re looking for. The only thing to remember is to never, EVER look back. Walk that path being okay with the one you chose, you can always go back and pick another.