4 Tips to Elevate Your Marketing Communications
Ensure that you’re leveraging content to support your business and your bottom line.
Be clear about who you are speaking to when you write content. Know your audience and target their sensibilities. Image: Sergey Nivens/Stock.Adobe.com
Security business owners and marketing managers know that being top of mind with their customers and prospects can shift the market in their favor, fuel brand recognition, and support the achievement of sales goals. It’s important to have a sales team, revenue goals, and sales activity metrics to drive behavior toward your goals. Are you factoring in your marketing communications and its impact on your revenue and brand?
Below are four tips to help successfully approach and leverage content to support your business and your bottom line.
1. Consistent Content: Raising brand awareness among your prospects and client base requires consistent content production. Consistency is more important than perfection. Frequency and cadence can vary greatly based on the size of your organization and marketing bandwidth.
Once you determine a frequency that works for your team — for example, posting a mix of four blogs or case studies each month on your website and posting two-four social media posts each week — then you can create and plan out a content calendar in a simple tool like Google sheets.
Always use a graphic or image with your posts. Social posts should cover a mix of expertise (presented with the benefit it offers your clients), case studies (how solutions/products are used and problems solved), as well as company events, news, and announcements, such as awards.
Another valuable component is using emails to communicate with your existing customers and prospects. Set up a form to collect important data from these visitors and set up a process for your sales team to follow up. When you develop emails, write a catchy and concise email subject line, and a brief, concise body with three parts:
- Introduction to the topic that garners excitement.
- Main body paragraph with additional details.
- Closing statement with a clear call to action for your buyer, including a URL.
2. Resonate with Audience(s): Be very clear about who you are speaking to when you write content. Dealers may be working with both commercial B2B end users as well as residential homeowners. End users may want to learn about specific vertical-industry-focused applications, while homeowners may want to read about touchscreen entrance security and integration with smart home systems.
When writing case studies, identify the industry, challenge, and how you helped to solve the problem. Get a written release if you specify the end user’s name in public-facing communications. If you don’t have their approval, generically reference the application and industry. Note that most manufacturers and suppliers have their own marketing team and often they will coordinate and write the case study on your behalf, all they require is your participation and approval.
3. Make It Strategic: Define and outline these items before planning your content calendar:
- Who is your ideal buyer, and what matters most to them?
- Which product or service line provides your greatest revenue source, profitability?
- Which product or service line do you anticipate will be the source of your greatest growth?
- What is your positioning relative to other dealers in the market? Which keywords, tones, and brand ideas would help you solidify your unique difference?
- Why market this product or service now? Define the goal and what success would look like and keep that in mind when writing.
Once you’ve answered these questions, you can structure your content to cover the right mix of your core offer as well as growth components. Track your metrics from sales revenue and marketing statistics to constantly adapt your approach as needed.
4. Eliminate Communication Silos: Being strategic means actively eliminating communication silos. Your marketing team needs to stay actively engaged with your sales team and get their feedback to ensure maximum impact. Processes can help, but the most important factor is to decide that you will actively engage with the sales and leadership teams on a regular basis. Use monthly internal communications and check-in calls to engage teams across divisions to boost effectiveness and ensure the sales team is utilizing content.
Your sales team may find that customers have more interest in some products/services than others, and they’ll know why. Or there might be interest in a specific item amongst prospects in the market, but delays in product availability make it difficult to sell. You can leverage your strengths and stand out in the market by talking about how you are overcoming supply chain issues and helping customers solve problems now.
Heather Martin is owner of HRM Communications.
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