Marketing is essential for building your brand, but it can take a lot of time. How do you effectively grow your business while also operating it? Brian Amick, creative director at Werkbot Studios, believes that the use of a “marketing stack” can help you visualize marketing strategy, better understand tools, and pick the best tools to help you fill your pipeline.
As the wheel imagery suggests, the gears rotate a central hub and keep the vehicle (your business) moving forward. In this metaphor, the hub is your website – the central tenet of most B2B digital marketing strategies. All other activities that go into your marketing, like paid advertising, social media activity, or PR, help move the wheel through:
- Awareness
- Engagement
- Interaction
- Measurement
No matter which tools you are using (and there are many to choose from), an understanding of how your website drives and interacts with these activities will help your brand cruise in the proper direction.
Website – the hub of your marketing endeavors
The website is the key marketing piece for most businesses. On your site, customers can: learn about your organization, discover what you offer, determine why you are the best choice compared to competitors, and even make purchases through an ecommerce solution. Ultimately, the goal is to drive people to this core hub of your marketing stack and provide adequate design and functionality to give your clients what they need.
At Werkbot, we build most client sites on SilverStripe CMS – a content management system that allows the client to make changes to the website in a secure and streamlined manner. Other CMS solutions you may see include Hubspot, WordPress, Shopify, or event Squarespace. The choice on what CMS you use and how you build your website comes down to how much specialization or customization you need on your site (for example, do you need a custom database that integrates with your billing or shipping software?) and how much you want your site to stand out from the rest.
Awareness - Connecting people to you and your brand
Awareness is about connection. You may hear phrases like “increasing brand awareness” or “increasing engagement,” but when it comes down to it, awareness is all about making a connection with the audience that matters so that they remember to come to you for what they need. Ultimately, making good connections while building awareness will lead to an increase in web traffic and a funnel to help generate both leads and sales (if you are running an ecommerce site).
At Werkbot, building awareness is our bread and butter. Through search engine optimization, Google Ads, and Social Media, we are constantly creating campaigns that connect customers and businesses to products and services. These are activities that take a lot of time and require unique expertise. Read more about our offerings here, and contact us for a free quote that uses the awareness building tools that are right for your business.
Engagement – Connecting through narrative
Connecting with your audience through quality content will keep people on your site and lead towards a conversion or sale. Every business is different, and engaging content can be in any medium as long as it conveys your brand and showcases your particular expertise in a persuasive and compelling way. This could mean describing a process of your business, telling a story of a client’s recent success, sharing a personal experience, relating to a recent event, or even just asking a question to provide a basis for conversation. This builds trust and should happen alongside visitors viewing what your business has to offer, both on your website and through your social media presence.
And when it comes to content, quality reigns supreme over quantity. That’s why we recommend using original photography over stock footage and recommend content marketing to boost SEO through a blog that supplements your email and social marketing. However your business chooses to engage, you need to make it unique. There is no silver bullet, no one-stop solution to how to engage your audience because every market is different and goals change constantly. We have storytellers on staff who are experts in this and ready to help make sure you keep your audience engaged with you, recommending you and buying from you.
Interaction – Providing follow-up with customers
As you build and deepen connections, it’s important to follow up with the right people at the right time. This can mean strategically bringing them back to your site (retargeting), having them sign up for a newsletter and knowing through their digital behavior that “Now’s the time to call.” How can you be sure to reach them at the right time to turn the connection into a conversion?
Werkbot often sees businesses get the best interaction results through tools like email marketing with MailChimp or lead generation software like HubSpot. The key here is to establish trust and not spam customers with information, but to target them and reach them at the right time. Interaction can be some of the most time consuming marketing activities, but also the most worth your time as it moves people through the sales funnel. Make sure to use tools here that give you clear measurement, help you meaningful reach and stay connected with your audience and that you don’t “spray and pray.” Werkbot can help you plan these activities with the right amount of time and money to meet your goals, without overspending or reaching “dead leads.”
Measurement - Understanding the data behind it all
While the most important data point is revenue, the path to increase that varies from campaign to campaign. By using tools like Google Analytics you can fine-tune your strategy, scaling them up and down as needed, and refine the process of awareness, interaction, and engagement. By iterating again and again, constantly AB testing, your marketing goals will slowly but surely come to fruition, even in the most turbulent of economies.
The Wheel Keeps Turning
One of the key aspects of this philosophy of marketing is that a jack of all trades is master of none – that is to say, concentrate your efforts where you see results. Ask yourself, “What is your central goal, and how can you get there?” Remember that marketing is always an iterative process – you do not “set it and forget it,” you need instead to be constantly adjusting and rotating the wheel.
If you could use help assessing your marketing stack, or want to chat about any of the tools mentioned, reach out to us and one of our specialists will get in touch with you.