That’s why reps place so much emphasis on that first point of contact – like really knocking it out of the park with a riveting sales pitch or an engaging product demo. 

Yet, most prospects won’t immediately make a purchase, as they may need some time to weigh other options, gain approval from their team, or free up enough time to complete the sale. 

While this fact can discourage some, it’s crucial to stay persistent with your efforts – hence the need for sales follow-ups. 

According to data, 80% of sales require 5 follow-up calls, which may seem excessive at first. 

After all, many sales reps shy away from following up too much in fear of seeming too pushy. 

However, 5 follow-ups are par-the-course for most customers, as Marketing Donut points out with their research – 92% of reps give up after four ‘no’s,’ but 80% of prospects say ‘no’ four times before saying ‘yes.’ 

So don’t give up if a prospective customer doesn’t say yes straight away, as most will not. 

That doesn’t mean that you should go nuts and follow up with your prospects every single day, either. 

It takes tactfulness to determine when to follow up & which method to use (i.e., phone calls, text messages, follow-up emails, etc.) – so stay tuned to learn how. 

Why Should You Follow Up with Customers?

First, it’s important that we make a clear distinction. 

There’s a big difference between spamming uninterested prospects with messages and properly following up with qualified leads. 

The former will get you absolutely nowhere with your marketing strategy, while the latter will yield tons of new business. 

Many salespeople have an irrational fear that their follow-up messages will be seen as spam by their prospects, which is why they adopt such a skittish attitude towards it. 

They need to know that as long as you’re following up with a qualified lead that hasn’t outright declined interest in what you’re selling, follow-up messages are fair game.

While you still need to be tactful with how and when you send your follow-ups (i.e., don’t go crazy and call them every day), you can and should send as many follow-up messages as it takes to get a response. 

There are plenty of real-world examples where reps finally landed a sale after following up with prospects 40 – 100 times. 

As an example, James Altucher cold-emailed hedge fund billionaire Stevie Cohen for an entire year before finally receiving a response – a true testament to the power of persistence. 

The point is that you should never give up on a qualified lead that goes cold. If you continue to receive no response, keep trying to contact them every week until you do. Even if you get a definitive no, at least you saw it through until the end. 

According to the data gathered by Scripted, 44% of salespeople give up after only one follow-up call, which is leaving quite a few sales on the table, given the other stats that we know are true (such as 80% of sales requiring five follow-up calls). 

The Benefits of Customer Follow-Ups 

As long as you take the right approach, following up with your sales prospects will yield numerous benefits for your organization. 

Besides sending follow-ups to your most qualified leads, you should also follow up with your existing customers to ensure they’re satisfied with your products and services. 

That will ensure that your existing customers remain loyal and continue to choose your brand over the competition. 

Follow-up messages let your established customers know that you care, and they help boost conversions for your prospects. Here’s a closer look at the top benefits you’ll enjoy from improving your ability to follow up with customers. 

Following up shows you care 

Whether you’re pursuing a qualified lead or want to check in with one of your existing customers, follow-up calls and emails let your customers know that you care. 

That’s especially true when following up with your established customers. 

You’ve already made the sale, but you’re checking in to ensure their continued satisfaction with your products and services. 

Also, be open to customer feedback when checking in with existing customers. If you’re willing to listen to their suggestions for improvement, it shows that you care about catering to your customer’s needs – which can pay off in a big way. 

According to a survey by Acquia, 75% of American consumers are more likely to show loyalty to a brand that understands them on a personal level, which is why listening to feedback is crucial. 

Beyond that, the survey also found that once customers commit, they tend to remain loyal for life.  

Also, following up on leads shows that you care about landing the sale and that you’ll do whatever it takes to gain their business. 

82% of buyers will at least consider accepting meetings with sales reps that reach out to them for this very reason. Tenacity pays off and can even be flattering to customers, so don’t be shy about pursuing active leads with all your might to boost sales.

It improves your customer experience (CX)

While this benefit primarily applies to following up with your existing customer base, pursuing sales leads can also boost your CX. 

If you’re consistently following up with a lead in a way that’s tenacious yet tactful, it serves as a preview of what it’s like to be one of your company’s customers. In particular, your follow-ups can serve as a window into what your customer support will be like. 

So if you’re sending well-written follow-up messages in tandem with the prospects’ schedule (i.e., not calling them on a day when you know they’re busy) – it can reflect positively on your organization as a whole. 

That can actually help you land the sale – as stellar customer service is a top factor (56%) for building customer loyalty. 

Follow-up calls with existing customer relationships are even more important for your CX. That’s especially true if a customer has had a negative experience with your brand. 

The follow-up will give them a chance to vent about their experience, and you’ll get a chance to apologize, resolve the issue, and retain their business. 

Customers appreciate when brands care enough to reach out and resolve their issues. In fact, 59% of customers state that fast, consistent, and satisfactory answers to their queries is key to gaining their trust & loyalty. 

It gives you a chance to address any issues

You never know when a prospect or existing customer will run into issues with your products and services. 

It could be that they have an additional question regarding your product, or they could have run into a problem when trying to use your product. 

Either way, your follow-up calls and emails are the perfect opportunities for catching & resolving these issues before they can affect your reputation or cause you to lose a sale. 

It’s important to follow up with new customers (especially if they bought a new product) to see if everything is working out the way they wanted. To make your follow-up emails even more helpful, you can include a list of FAQs new customers tend to have about your products and services.

Following up also gives you a chance to address and resolve any issues your potential customers may have. 

For instance, let’s say you really impress a lead with a product demo, but you don’t hear back for a week. By following up to check in with the prospect, you uncover that they have additional concerns regarding pricing. 

They’d like to buy your product, but after convening with their higher-ups, it was determined that they lacked the funds to make it happen. 

Rather than losing the sale, you inform them of special offers that will knock down the price of your product (or of lower-tier subscription plans that won’t hit their wallet as hard). 

That’s a simple example of how following up can help you catch and address issues that would have cost you a sale otherwise. 

Following up reminds customers that you exist 

The average person today receives dozens of emails, phone calls, texts, and voicemails every single day. 

So if you send a qualified lead a follow-up email, the chances of them seeing it and actually spending the time to read it are quite slim. 

That’s why you shouldn’t get discouraged if your prospects don’t respond to your initial follow-up emails. 

In fact, it may take 10 or 20 emails before you actually get a response. 

Remember, keep following up with leads until they reply. If they tell you in no uncertain terms that they’re not interested, leave them alone and remove them from your follow-up list. However, if you’ve yet to receive a reply – it’s probably because the prospect is far too busy and hasn’t had the time to respond yet. 

Sending regular follow-up messages to your prospects will remind them that you exist, which is crucial to do in today’s oversaturated market. 

Don’t forget that while you’re sending emails in hopes of a response, your competitors likely are at the same time – so keep trying. 

The Best Ways to Follow Up with Customers 

Now that you know not to be shy about following up with qualified prospects, it’s time to learn the best methods for doing so. 

There’s a lot that goes into deciding how and when to follow up with a customer, not to mention which contact method to choose. 

Should you text, call, or email your existing and prospective customers?

Beyond that, you need to determine how often to reach out without overstepping your bounds or disappearing entirely. 

Checking in with prospects and customers is an art form, so let’s take a look at the best practices for customer follow-ups. 

Vary your contact methods 

There’s no one-size-fits-all contact method for getting in touch with customers, as everyone has different needs. 

For instance, if you only send follow-up emails to your prospects, you may run into customers that never check their email. As a result, every follow-up message you send shoots off into a black hole, never to be seen again.

However, if you do a little digging and discover that despite never checking their inbox, the client is very active on LinkedIn and other social media platforms – messaging them through there is the way to go. 

Conversely, sending an email may yield better results if you try calling a client but receive their voicemail every time. 

It’s important to utilize more than a few contact methods for each client until you receive a reply. 

The only exception to this rule is if the customer provides you with their preferred contact method. In that case, you should stick to it like glue – otherwise, you may wind up annoying the prospect. 

You should be mindful of your contact methods even when following up with your existing customers. 

If you’re trying to follow up with a new customer but aren’t receiving replies through text or email, you can try looking them up on social media or try calling their phone number. Going the extra mile to contact them can build trust and ensure total customer satisfaction. 

Write stand-out subject lines 

Your subject lines will make or break your follow-up emails. 

Since the average inbox contains hundreds of unread emails, if your subject line doesn’t immediately catch the eye, it’s likely that its next destination is the trash. 

Generic subject lines like “Just Checking In” should immediately be discarded for this reason. They’re far too easy to overlook, especially when they’re buried in a pile of emails with equally generic subject lines. 

Without a catchy subject line for your follow-up email, the odds of your customer seeing it are akin to finding a needle in a haystack. 

Want to know how to instantly boost your open rates with one simple trick?

Include the recipient’s name in the subject line. 

This small tactic has a powerful impact, as one study showed that personalizing email subject lines could boost open rates by 29% – and click-through rates by 41%. 

Besides personalization, other tips for writing stand-out subject lines include the following:

• Elicit a sense of urgency by including a timeframe (i.e., specific meeting dates, special offers about to expire, etc.)
• Ask direct questions to the recipient in the subject line (Is This Of Interest to You?)
• Mention the value included in the email (i.e., blog posts, videos, whitepapers, etc.)

Keep things short and sweet 

The last thing you want to do in a follow-up message is ramble on and overstay your welcome. 

You’re here to check in with a qualified lead or an existing customer, which means you need to get in, get to the point, and get out. 

Don’t waste a few paragraphs updating them on the state of your business, and get straight to the value you have to offer. After all, it’s a follow-up message, not a newsletter. 

Also, EVERY follow-up email needs to include a call-to-action (CTA) at the end. 

What’s that?

A call-to-action is a brief line of text that informs your customers what you want them to do next. Here’s an example of a CTA:

We’d love to offer you 30% off your first visit, so don’t wait to take advantage of this offer now. 

This sentence lets your prospects know you want them to take you up on your special offer. Also, you’d need to use the last few words of the sentence as anchor text for a hyperlink to one of your product pages. 

If you’re following up on the phone, you definitely need to be concise. People have busy schedules, and they won’t have long to chat with you, so you need to make that time count. 

To respect your customer’s time, it’s a good idea to let them know approximately how long the call will take at the beginning. A busy prospect will be less likely to rush you off the phone if they know the call is only going to take two minutes from the start. 

Don’t get too clingy but don’t disappear 

To follow up with customers like a pro, you need to master the balancing act of knowing when to follow up and when to leave your customers alone. 

Purchase decisions take time, and you can’t expect to make a sale overnight. 

That’s why you shouldn’t send too many follow-up messages at once.

In general, following up once a week is enough to suffice. It hits the perfect sweet spot between staying in touch and not getting too clingy. 

Of course, you also need to consider the specific needs of your clients. 

If you know that a prospect is taking a two-week vacation, following up with them during that time isn’t a smart idea. 

Sometimes potential customers will let you know the best times to contact them, which you should adhere to without fault. Sending a follow-up message at an unexpected or unwanted time can seriously backfire, so be mindful when deciding when to send your messages. 

Wrapping Up: How to Follow Up With Customers 

Are you being persistent enough with your customer follow-ups?

If not, it’s never too late to start being more tenacious when pursuing your qualified leads. 

You never know when you’ll receive a reply giving you the go-ahead for another meeting or to make a purchase. 

People are extremely busy today, so don’t be shy about following up numerous times using various methods until you receive a reply. 

Do you need help formulating your company’s winning digital marketing strategy, including effective customer follow-ups?

Get in touch with us to learn more about HOTH Performance, our premiere CRM tool.

Our marketing experts can also provide managed SEO services to take your online visibility to the next level, so don’t wait to check us out.        

The post How to Follow Up with Customers: Being Proactive & Tactful appeared first on The HOTH.

You need to set realistic expectations with new clients right from the very beginning. That includes being transparent about pricing & upfront about the results clients can expect from your services. 

That’s the best way to build trust amongst your clients, which will help you develop a loyal following. 

Setting clear client expectations is the best way to improve your retention rates, which are crucial to the success of your business. 

In fact, retaining your existing clients can boost your profitability from 25% to 95%, and about half of a company’s revenue comes directly from its most loyal customers. 

Beyond that, acquiring new customers can cost 5 to 7x more than retaining existing ones. 

That’s why it’s worth developing a client onboarding system where you set clear expectations straight from the get-go. Not only will this help you avoid miscommunications & false hope for services you don’t offer, but it’s also great for avoiding undesirable clients that will only cause trouble. 

That’s because setting client expectations isn’t just for the benefit of the client; it’s also a way for you to determine if they’re a good fit for your agency. 

Managing client expectations is a crucial skill for any agency to master, so stay tuned to learn effective tips for getting real with your clients. 

Why is it Necessary to Set Client Expectations?

Miscommunications are frustrating whenever they occur, which is why setting expectations matters so much – and that applies to more than working relationships. 

For instance, have you ever been waiting hopelessly by the phone in hopes of hearing back from a job interview, only to realize they filled the position a week prior without telling you?

That’s a perfect example of a failure to set expectations on behalf of your interviewer. They could have mentioned when they planned on filling the position or when you could expect to hear back. 

Since they didn’t communicate or set expectations, you wasted time waiting for a call that was never going to come. 

Similar things can happen if you aren’t transparent with your clients about how your agency works. 

Without setting the proper expectations in place, you risk disappointing your clients in ways you couldn’t possibly anticipate. 

For example, if you aren’t clear about the end goal you’re trying to achieve, your clients may expect more than you’re able to deliver, which can ruin your working relationships. 

The good news is those types of situations are completely avoidable if you’re upfront about what you can deliver for your clients. 

Good communication is another core component of setting client expectations. 

Staying in constant touch with clients will help avoid miscommunications, and it shows that you care about the work you’re providing for them.

Failing to set clear expectations is a leading cause of poor client retention rates, which is why it’s necessary to set them as soon as possible. 

Benefits of Setting Expectations for Clients 

Now that you know why you need to set client expectations for a better customer experience, how will they benefit your business?

There are quite a few perks you’ll enjoy from setting clear client expectations, including the following:

They get rid of any surprises 

The last thing you want is for a roadblock or pricing issue to come as a surprise to your client. Surprises are rarely a good thing in the professional world, especially for marketing strategies that require intricate planning. 

Setting expectations will ensure there are no surprises from either party, which is ideal for forming lasting relationships. 

They leave little room for confusion

Setting expectations is all about being upfront and laying everything on the line. As a result, your clients will have a clear understanding of the results you’re going to deliver and how long it will take to deliver them. 

Otherwise, your clients may feel left in the dark, especially when it comes to deliverables, so be sure to cover everything during your onboarding process. 

They provide boundaries for firing clients 

Not every client you work with is going to be a perfect fit for your agency. In fact, the truth is you’ll likely have to fire more than a few clients due to a variety of different issues. 

It could be that the client isn’t willing to pay your rate or that they’re expecting too much from your team. 

Whatever the reason is, if you set clear expectations from the get-go, you’ll be able to pinpoint why the relationship isn’t working when it comes time to part ways with troublesome clients. 

Setting boundaries is an integral part of setting client expectations, as the onboarding process is also there to protect you, not just your clients. 

They provide a clear direction for your team members 

You need to include your team in the client onboarding process, as it will provide them with clear direction on what to do as well. 

If your team is present when you’re laying out expectations for your client, they’ll know which direction to take with their marketing strategy, leading to better teamwork. 

If they aren’t around for client onboarding, your team may lack a sense of direction with their work, and they may even do something your client doesn’t want – which is why you need to include them in the process. 

How to Manage Client Expectations 

Being able to set realistic client expectations is a necessary skill for any marketing agency, regardless of your niche focus. 

From developing SEO strategies to managing social media campaigns, your clients need to know what you’re going to deliver and how you’re going to deliver it in no-nonsense terms. 

Here are some proven effective tips for setting client expectations that build trust & loyalty. 

Establish a client onboarding system 

To start, you need to develop an airtight client onboarding process that you can replicate for each new client you acquire. 

Also, it’s a good idea to set client expectations multiple times to really ride the point home. 

Ideally, you should set expectations during your sales pitch, when they sign your contract, and one final time during your client onboarding process. 

If that sounds like overkill, it really isn’t. 

The more you reiterate your expectations, the more likely they are to stick in your client’s mind. If you only state your expectations one time, your client may forget – which can lead to miscommunications and disappointment down the line. 

Also, since you’ll be setting expectations more than a few times, your script needs to remain the same. 

That’s why it’s worth establishing a client onboarding process that your employees can quickly & easily implement for new clients. Be sure to include all the necessary documentation, such as onboarding scripts, contracts, and pricing information. 

Set clear goals from the start 

It’s important to agree upon realistic goals as soon as you onboard a new client. These goals should align with your client’s plans for business growth while still being feasible for your marketing agency. 

The best way to set goals that yield results is to use the SMART system. Here’s a breakdown of the acronym:

• Specific. You need to clearly define your goals by including the specific results you want to achieve, a timeline to make it happen, and key milestones to hit along the way. 
• Measurable. Speaking of milestones, you’ll have a much easier time achieving your end goal if you have a way to measure your success. Milestones and essential marketing metrics (think organic traffic, leads, and sales) will help you ensure that you’re on the right path. 
• Achievable. You want to ensure that achieving the goal is within the means of your marketing agency. Overpromising only to then underdeliver isn’t the way to forge long-lasting client relationships, so make sure you can realistically achieve any goals you set. 
• Relevant. Any goals you set must align with the overall business goals of your clients. For instance, if they want to grow their presence on Instagram above all else, setting goals for other social media platforms isn’t relevant to their needs. 
• Time-bound. Goals without deadlines lack the sense of urgency necessary to get things done. That’s why every goal you set needs to fall within some sort of time constraint. Whether you’re planning for a 12-day strategy or 12 months, giving your goal a deadline is a must. 

Be completely transparent about pricing 

There’s no reason to beat around the bush when it comes to clarifying how you’ll get paid with your new clients. 

Money is often the #1 factor that makes clients uneasy, so being upfront about it will put their minds at ease. That will enable you to move on to more important matters, such as explaining the value of your services.

When discussing how you’ll get paid, don’t forget to cover the following:

• How your invoicing structure works (how often you’ll send invoices if you have a net-30 policy, etc.)
• Your rates for the services you provide (i.e., SEO, content creation, etc.)
• If any additional fees may show up on their invoices (late fees, interest, additional services)
• Your preferred payment methods (ACH Transfer, physical check, PayPal, Wise, etc.)

Besides setting these expectations early on, you also need to notify your clients whenever changes will show up on their invoices. 

Remember, setting expectations is all about getting rid of any unwanted surprises, and a higher invoice than usual definitely qualifies as such. 

As an example, if your client gets billed the same amount each month but orders an additional service this time (such as a promotional video or extra blog post), you should notify them of this via a phone call or email. 

That’s because if the client receives the invoice expecting the same amount as usual, the unexpected increase can cause tension in your relationship – and it could affect their budgeting strategy. You can avoid these issues by giving your clients a simple heads-up whenever their bill changes. 

Under-promise & over-deliver 

This goes in hand with the Achievable part of the SMART acronym, and it’s a great way to ensure that you don’t wind up under-delivering – which is terrible for client retention. 

Instead of promising the moon to your new clients, guarantee only the bare minimum of what your efforts can yield. 

For instance, say that you offer SEO services and you regularly boost organic traffic by 50% or more for your clients. By only promising a 25% increase in traffic, you’ll be able to ‘wow’ your clients when you’re able to actually boost it by 50%+. 

Yet, if you get too big for your britches and promise a 75% increase, you’ll only wind up disappointing your clients when you’re only able to provide a 60% boost. 

That’s why under-promising is the way to go. 

Not only does it serve to impress your clients, but it gives you a bit of wiggle room should any unexpected roadblocks arise. 

As long as you under-promise and do all you can to exceed your client’s expectations, you should wind up wowing their socks off. 

Don’t forget to set boundaries 

Setting client expectations also serves as a way to protect yourself, and setting boundaries is a big part of that. 

Your clients need to know what’s on the table and what’s not; otherwise, they may wind up crossing a boundary without realizing it. 

An example?

Lots of people are working remotely now, and if you don’t send boundaries for working hours, your clients may assume that you’re available 24/7. If you don’t want clients blowing up your phone at 3 AM, it’s imperative to establish some boundaries when setting expectations. 

Avoid bad clients sooner rather than later 

During the client onboarding process, you need to keep an eye out for a few red flags yourself. 

That’s because getting stuck with a bad client will only hurt your marketing agency, so it’s best to terminate those relationships before they even start – and the onboarding process is the perfect time to make that judgment. 

Common red flags to avoid:

• Not wanting to pay your full rates by constantly asking for discounts
• Unsure of what they want 
• Unrealistic expectations (i.e., get us to #1 on Google by tomorrow for cheap!)

While it may be tempting to accept every new client you speak with (especially early on), it’s best to heed these warnings when you see them and not pursue them any further. 

Doing so will save you a lot of headaches in the future and will free up your time for better, more reasonable clients. 

Wrapping Up: How to Set Client Expectations 

Developing a rock-solid client onboarding process is the best way to form stellar client relationships that stand the test of time. 

Setting expectations will help you set the stage for success and help you avoid nightmare clients that will only bring your agency down. 

Do you need assistance setting realistic client expectations at your marketing agency?

Then you need to consult with our marketing gurus at The HOTH. We’ve dealt with countless clients over the years, and we know how to set clear expectations that yield results & fruitful relationships.

And if you’re looking to expand your product suite, we’re one of the world’s top white label digital marketing solutions. We work with thousands of resellers who work with thousands of their own clients, so don’t wait to book a call today.      

The post How to Set Client Expectations at Your Marketing Agency appeared first on The HOTH.

In particular, AI solutions are popping up left and right in the digital marketing space. AI technologies like ChatGPT & GPT-4 are capable of generating entire blog posts, landing pages, and images from scratch, which have massive potential for the future of content creation. 

Many companies & digital marketing agencies are already using AI tools to curate, generate, and proofread their content – with varying rates of success. 

While AI systems are definitely the way of the future for many industries, there are still plenty of risks involved with implementing artificial intelligence. 

After all, AI is still in its infancy, and programs like ChatGPT aren’t without their issues, such as factual inaccuracies, plagiarism, and writing robotic-sounding text. 

Before onboarding AI applications at your company, it’s crucial to understand the do’s and don’ts associated with the technology. Do it right, and you’ll save a ton of time and money on content creation, all while attracting new customers and improving SERP rankings. 

Do it wrong, and you can wind up tanking your budget & reputation. 

That’s why you need to consult this guide before you start adopting AI on a large scale. Stay tuned to discover the primary AI do’s and don’ts of content creation. 

Understanding AI-Generated Content 

Services like Copymatic offer users the ability to generate original blog posts, landing pages, & FAQ sections in real time, but how does it work?

AI content generators use neural networks that attempt to recreate the structure of the human brain within a machine. 

These deep neural networks are a form of machine learning known as deep learning, which replicates the way human intelligence works. 

In other words, these advanced AI algorithms are able to ‘learn’ from the large data sets they analyze, recognizing intricate patterns and building upon previous knowledge. That’s how the AI is able to write text, play games, and even generate images. 

Deep learning imitates abstract thinking and has the ability to generalize facts. 

While it’s a form of machine learning, deep learning is different from the traditional machine learning model. In a nutshell, machine learning algorithms learn from experience, while deep learning algorithms involve a trainer. 

That means deep learning systems are trained on specific data sets that contain tags, classes, and indicators. If the AI contains no training on certain data sets, it won’t be able to produce content about them. 

For example, the chatbot ChatGPT only has training for online data up to September 2021, which is one of its most significant drawbacks. As a result, it can’t produce content covering recent events, as it has no knowledge of them in its database. 

The different types of AI tools 

There are many AI-powered tools available that can assist with everything from taking customer service calls to automating patient text reminders for healthcare providers. 

Here’s a look at the most popular AI tools in use today:

• Natural Language Processing (NLP). Natural language processors mimic the way people communicate to generate & proofread content. Platforms like Copymatic use NLPs, as do tools like Grammarly. 
• Text generators. A text generator is capable of producing content based on its training data. Text generators are handy for automating blogs, articles, landing pages, and more. 
• Video generators. There are even tools that can create videos based on sets of still images. Some tools can even create short videos based on your blog posts, which is excellent for generating short product demo videos. 
• Image generators. Certain chatbots can generate images based on text prompts, and the results can be quite impressive. 

As you can see, there are plenty of powerful AI tools that you can start using at your company right now. Yet, it’s best to do plenty of research before spending time and resources on implementing an expensive new AI tool. 

That doesn’t mean that you can’t use these tools to improve your customer experience and boost your SEO profile; you just have to be thoughtful about your approach. 

What is ChatGPT?

If you’ve read any mainstream news article within the past 6 months, you’ve no doubt come across the hype surrounding ChatGPT. 

But what is it?

ChatGPT is an open-source natural language processing tool made by Open AI that enables users to have human-like conversations with an AI chatbot. Using text-based prompts, users can get ChatGPT to answer questions and generate college essays, poems, songs, articles, and more. 

Launched on November 30th, 2022 & fully open to the public, users flocked to try out the tool for themselves. It’s been able to produce incredibly impressive results while also revealing a dark side that’s surprised some. 

Ever since ChatGPT exploded in popularity, lots of major tech companies started releasing their own chatbots, such as Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. 

While the tool is reliable most of the time, sometimes it hallucinates, makes up results, and can even exhibit racist & sexist biases. 

GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer. The GPT-4 model is trained on over 175 billion machine learning parameters, making it the largest neural network to date. 

The Controversy Surrounding AI Tools 

The prevalence of AI has its fair share of detractors, stating serious concerns surrounding security, malware, and losing the human touch. 

Programs like ChatGPT are highly intelligent when it comes to writing code, as they’re capable of writing entire applications and software. The flip side to this is that hackers can use AI chatbots for nefarious purposes, such as writing malware & phishing emails. 

ChatGPT can also write fake news stories and imitate others, leading to concerns about identity theft & spreading misinformation. 

Then there’s the issue surrounding plagiarism. Whenever content generators produce text, they aren’t forming new ideas from scratch. Rather, they’re collecting information contained in their training data to generate content. 

While most content generators are able to pass plagiarism checks, the content they produce contains no original research, insights, conclusions, or data. For this reason, most companies only use AI to generate small pieces of text – as the algorithms still aren’t capable of producing thought leader-tier content. 

Open AI CEO and Loopt co-founder Sam Altman went so far as to tweet that Chat-GPT  is overhyped and that while it’s impressive, it still has a long way to go and sometimes makes silly mistakes. 

Altman also points out that AI will change the world, but we still have a long way to go before that happens. 

The AI Do’s and Don’ts 

Now that you’re up to speed on the current state of artificial intelligence, it’s time to dive into the AI do’s and don’ts as they relate to digital marketing & content creation. 

Besides learning how to form a rock-solid AI digital marketing strategy, learning the best practices related to AI will help you avoid incurring penalties from Google and other search engines. 

AI Do’s 

Let’s begin by taking a look at what you SHOULD do when implementing AI at your organization. 

DO create relevant content using AI 

High-quality content won’t benefit you at all if the subject matter isn’t relevant to your target audience, which is why relevancy should be at the top of your priority list when creating content. 

The good news is that AI can help you create highly relevant content in more than a few ways. 

First, using AI tools to analyze your customer data will reveal valuable insights into your target audience’s interests, preferences, and behaviors – which is a goldmine for developing content topics. 

After that, you can use other AI applications to conduct thoughtful SEO keyword research, such as our free keyword planner tool from The HOTH. With it, you will uncover the keywords your audience searches for the most, complete with helpful metrics like keyword difficulty and search volume. 

With valuable customer insights and a set of SEO keywords, you’ll get the best & most relevant results from AI text generators when creating content. 

DO check for plagiarism 

As stated previously, the content that AI text generators create is compiled from the amount of data they’ve been trained on. As a result, the content comes from other sources, even if it’s reworded & rearranged. 

That’s why it’s always necessary to run a plagiarism check before publishing AI-generated content. 

The last thing you want is for a piece of your content to get flagged for plagiarism, which will hurt your reputation & delay your content creation efforts.

One of the most reliable ways to avoid plagiarism is to use a combination of AI-generated text & your own insights and opinions on a particular topic. That way, you still gain the benefit of speeding up content creation while ensuring that your content isn’t copied & contains at least some original insights. 

DO use the right tools 

If you want to find success with AI, it’s imperative that you use the best tools available. That includes machine learning frameworks, APIs, open source platforms (like ChatGPT), and AI-powered analytics software. 

Before you decide to start using a tool, conduct thorough research on it online. To do so, check user reviews on multiple different sites, read professional reviews from trusted websites, and look into their competitors. 

That way, you’ll avoid wasting time and resources on a substandard tool or a tool that doesn’t perform the functions you need it to. For instance, if you need an AI chatbot that can generate images, ChatGPT will only disappoint you (it can create prompts for tools like DALL-E to create images, but it can’t by itself). 

DO use AI for content curation 

Arguably the most effective use for AI is to curate content instead of creating it. 

What does that mean?

It means that AI tools can help you brainstorm blog topics, create detailed outlines, conduct keyword research, and gain insights into customer behaviors.

As such, you’ll be able to get rid of writer’s block for good. If one of your writers is having trouble writing a blog intro, they can use AI text generators to get the ball rolling. Content strategists can use AI systems to develop relevant topics to fill their editorial calendars. 

There are AI-powered tools for coming up with blog titles, outlines, conclusions, and more, which makes the content curation process quicker & easier than ever before. 

DO double-check factual content 

AI programs like ChatGPT are not infallible, nor are they always correct. That’s why you should double-check all factual information generated by AI chatbots and tools. 

These programs have the tendency to make up facts out of thin air, and they’re only as smart as the data they’ve been trained on. Posting factually inaccurate content will tarnish your reputation as a thought leader, so make sure you go over all AI-generated blogs with a fine-toothed comb. 

AI Don’ts

Now let’s take a look at what you should avoid when working with AI. 

DON’T overly rely on AI 

While AI tools can certainly help with content creation and other tasks, you shouldn’t rely on them entirely. That’s because of their tendency to get facts wrong or misinterpret your prompts. 

Also, keeping some in-house writers & creators will maintain the human touch to your content, which is essential. It’s too early to let AI programs completely run your content strategy. 

DON’T expect perfection 

It’s easy to view AI text generators as all-knowing beings that create perfect content 100% of the time, but that’s simply not the case. AI deep learning algorithms are still developing technologies, and there are bound to be mistakes here and there. 

As such, you need to closely review every piece of content generated by an AI to ensure it’s free of plagiarism, factual errors, and any biases. 

DON’T attempt to do it alone 

Since this type of AI is so new, few people truly know how to use it properly. That’s why you shouldn’t attempt to implement AI systems by yourself. Instead, seek the help of seasoned AI experts that know how to get you set up for success. 

Final Thoughts: AI Do’s and Don’ts

AI chatbots, image generators, and text generators show a ton of promise for the future, but there are plenty of kinks left to iron out. 

That’s why there are clearly defined AI do’s and don’ts to follow; otherwise, you could wind up ruining your reputation. 

As long as you don’t overly rely on AI, double-check all facts, and use AI for content curation, you’ll find success using the AI tools currently available. 

Do you need help forming a winning digital marketing strategy for your company?

Then don’t wait to check out our white-label digital marketing services at The HOTH. We offer managed SEO services through HOTH X and content creation services through HOTHBlogger. Our gurus are well-versed in current AI programs, so don’t wait to book a consulting call today.       

The post AI Do’s and Don’ts in Digital Marketing appeared first on The HOTH.

However, the steep competition doesn’t mean there’s a lack of demand. On average, companies use 130 SaaS apps in their day-to-day processes. 

Everything from designing websites (WordPress) to chatting with your in-house staff (Slack) uses some type of SaaS subscription. 

That’s not to mention CRMs like Salesforce, web conferencing software (Zoom), and countless other types of SaaS apps that many organizations use. 

While SaaS applications are undoubtedly useful, the oversaturation of apps & content makes marketing these services quite the challenge. 

In particular, SaaS marketing strategies involve long & complex sales cycles, rigorous brand-building, and a healthy amount of lead generation. In fact, it can take anywhere from 6 to 18 months to acquire a new customer for your service. 

As a result, SaaS marketing is very much its own thing, so you’ll need to learn its best practices if you want to get the word out about your app. 

You can’t expect to mimic the marketing tactics used for eCommerce, real estate, healthcare, or any other type of marketing and find success in the SaaS space. 

That’s why we’ve put together this guide containing 10 real-world SaaS marketing examples that are effective, successful, and, most of all, fun. 

Read on to discover how you can mimic the success of these examples with your SaaS product. 

What Makes SaaS Marketing Unique?

The very nature of offering software-as-a-service makes SaaS companies different from other types of businesses. 

Why is that?

It’s because you’re not selling a service; you’re selling a subscription to a service. In other words, your transactions aren’t ‘one-and-done’ as most purchases are with companies selling goods and services. 

For instance, once you buy a hat from Amazon, you’ve converted into a customer. They receive the revenue from your purchase, and they hope that you choose them again whenever you need something else. 

To rack up revenue, eCommerce stores focus on customer acquisition. The more paying customers they can acquire, the more money they make. Repeat business is definitely important, but it’s not their main focus. 

SaaS is completely different because the name of the game is customer retention. 

Once a customer subscribes to your service, the goal is to hold onto them as long as possible. That way, they’ll continue paying their monthly fee, and you’ll continue to earn revenue. It’s for this reason that you’ll also place a lot of emphasis on customer lifetime value than other types of companies. 

If the customer finds a different app that they feel better suits their needs, they may cancel your subscription and go with one of your competitors, which is referred to as churn. 

Once a customer churns, they disappear from your funnel, and the revenue they’ve been providing follows suit. 

As such, SaaS marketing is not only about attracting new subscribers but also keeping your existing subscribers happy so they don’t abandon ship. 

The ‘freemium’ SaaS business model 

To attract subscribers, many SaaS companies use the ‘freemium’ business model, where they provide a free demo or free version to reel in users. 

Once a user downloads the demo or free version, the goal then becomes nurturing them into becoming a paying customer. 

The idea is that once the customer sees the true value in your SaaS product by trying it out, they’ll want to commit to one of your paid plans. After that, you’ll have to take measures to ensure they stick with your product for as long as possible. 

Most SaaS companies try to retain subscribers for years at a time. This keeps churn rates low and revenue high, which is the perfect balance that you want to achieve. 

The freemium model is also an excellent way to compile many qualified leads without lifting a finger. Once your demo is live (and has been promoted properly), interested users will flock to it to try it out. 

You’ll know that they’re qualified because they have a vested interest in the service you provide; otherwise, they wouldn’t bother downloading the free version. If they aren’t a qualified lead and don’t show interest in the demo, they’ll simply go away, and you won’t have wasted any of your precious time on them. 

Yet, the prospects that are qualified leads will stick around and will opt for one of your paid plans if the demo is able to meet their needs. 

Countless competitors within the SaaS industry

Another factor that makes SaaS marketing plans unique is the vast amount of competition in the industry. 

It doesn’t help that SaaS is an umbrella term that encompasses a great number of software types. For instance, let’s just take a look at CMS (content management systems). 

The most popular CMS platforms are WordPress, Wix, & Squarespace. 

Does that mean there are only a handful of CMS platforms out there?

Not at all; try 1,000 – 2,000, and the number is still growing every day. That’s A LOT of other programs that all have SaaS marketing campaigns of their own. 

It’s not just CMS platforms that have this type of oversaturation, either. 

Whether your SaaS product is a CRM, CMS, project management tool, ERP (enterprise resource planning), or another type of application, there will be hundreds or thousands of direct competitors. 

That reinforces the need for staunch product marketing techniques to differentiate your service from all the others. 

Building brand awareness is a gigantic part of this, as the more trusted & recognizable you can make your brand, the easier it will be to make your SaaS products stand out from the rest. 

The good news?

Despite the sheer number of SaaS companies in existence, there’s no shortage of demand for them. Companies now heavily rely on SaaS products for their daily operations, from startups to enterprise-level businesses. 

Going with the CMS example, while there may be 2,000 services available, 64 million active websites use CMS platforms. Granted, WordPress accounts for 44% of it, but there’s still 38% that use other platforms, so there’s plenty of business to go around. 

Pricing structures 

Another unique feature of SaaS marketing is the way companies structure their pricing. 

SaaS companies rely on subscriptions with tier-based pricing models for their users. 

It’s common for a SaaS company to have at least 3 pricing tiers, including basic, advanced, and premium options. 

Sometimes companies will correlate each pricing tier to company size. For example, their basic plan is for startups, the advanced plan is for mid-sized companies, and the advanced plan is for enterprise-level organizations. 

To boost conversion rates, pricing tiers need to be clearly defined. It shouldn’t take a user more than a few seconds to understand your pricing structure. Beyond that, you need to list the perks users receive with each tier. 

For instance, the basic tier may only include a few features or limitations of some sort (such as only being able to start 3 projects on the basic plan), whereas higher plans get more robust and freeing (unlimited projects & advanced features). 

If you offer a free version, make sure to list it alongside your paid plans while not forgetting to highlight all its limitations. If a prospect is still using the free version, seeing all the attractive features your other plans have may convince them to start a paid subscription. 

It’s also common for higher tiers to boast prioritized customer support & advanced security features to entice users into opting for a more premium plan.

Complicated sales cycles 

The sales funnel for a SaaS company is very complex, and it requires creating a boatload of content for various funnel stages. 

As an example, let’s say you sell an SEO tool as your SaaS product. 

Well, visitors at the top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) likely don’t even know what SEO is yet, which means you’ll need to create educational content defining SEO and outlining its best practices. 

Conversely, visitors at the middle and bottom of the funnel (MOFU and BOFU) will already know about SEO and will actively compare your product to others. For them, you’ll need to create content that differentiates your product from your competitors. 

The challenge comes not only from creating all this content but also from not oversaturating your target audience with it all. 

For instance, the prospects comparing your SEO product to others won’t want to waste their time reading your educational blogs covering the SEO basics. In the same vein, total SEO newbies won’t be able to make heads or tails of your more complicated articles comparing your services to others. 

To avoid drowning your audience in content, you’ll need to strike a balance between the content you produce for the different funnel stages. 

The best way to do that is through targeted keyword research for each funnel stage. 

Your keyword research is what will save you from displaying content to the wrong audience. If you do it properly, your prospects will only ever see the articles that answer their questions and solve their pain points. 

It all has to do with the types of queries prospects use at different stages of the funnel. 

By aligning the content you create with the appropriate funnel stage for each query, your users will always find the articles most relevant to them.

For example, if a user searches for what SEO is on Google, that’s a top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) keyword. 

What makes it TOFU?

It is because the user is making educational inquiries. They don’t know what SEO is yet, so they can’t possibly know if they need an SEO SaaS tool. 

If you create educational content defining SEO for the keyword ‘what is SEO,’ you’ll have perfectly matched the search intent. Conversely, creating content comparing your services to others for the same query wouldn’t work. 

Instead, you’d want to create that content for a query like ‘best SEO tools online.’

Keywords at each stage of the sales funnel 

Here’s a brief breakdown of each funnel stage and its corresponding keywords:

• Top-of-the-funnel (TOFU). At the top of the funnel, the goal is to build awareness for your SaaS products. Users at this funnel stage are looking for educational information about your type of service, so the keywords you use and the content you create should center around that. 
• Middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU). At this stage, potential customers know they need a service like yours, and they’re evaluating all their options. Keywords & content for this funnel stage should reflect why your SaaS product rises head and heels over the competition. 
• Bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU). By now, your prospects are on the verge of committing to a SaaS service provider. They’ve met with key decision-makers at their company, and they’ve narrowed it down to about two or three options. Here, your keywords & marketing efforts should focus on converting prospects into new customers. 

If you align proper keywords & content with each stage of the sales funnel, your target audience will always find what they’re looking for on search engines. 

That means TOFU prospects will get directed to your informational/educational content, and BOFU potential customers will see your most convincing product & service pages. 

The Bread & Butter of SaaS Marketing Strategies 

Now that you know what makes SaaS marketing so unique, let’s look at the most common marketing channels and tactics. 

SaaS marketers make use of tried and true digital marketing techniques like SEO, email marketing, PPC, influencer marketing, social media, paid ad campaigns, and more – so let’s find out which are the most effective. 

SEO (search engine optimization) 

SEO should not be ignored by SaaS companies, as generating targeted organic traffic to your website is one of the best things you can do. 

In fact, digital marketing consultant Mike Snoders discovered that organic traffic was the leading source of leads and conversions for SaaS companies – as it accounted for 68% of them. 

That means you’re missing out on a ton of potential business if you don’t incorporate SEO into your SaaS marketing strategy. 

A reason why SEO is so big for SaaS is that lots of key decision-makers at companies are doing their own research into providers. That means they’re using search engines to learn more about SaaS companies and products, which is where SEO strategies come into play. 

If you structure your keyword research around your sales funnel stages (see above), you’ll be able to guide these decision-makers through each funnel stage with targeted content. 

SEO & content marketing 

It’s also crucial to note that SEO and a content marketing strategy go hand-in-hand. 

Educational content like blogs, podcasts, and videos for TOFU leads is the way to go. For BOFU prospects, you’ll want to transition into live demos, case studies, product comparison sheets, and webinars. 

Blogging can and should account for a large part of your SEO strategy as long as you remember to use the right funnel-stage keywords. 

Blogs are inexpensive to create and can serve a multitude of different purposes. For instance, you can blog about educational and informative topics(TOFU), but you can also write blogs comparing your products to others (BOFU) and format them as relevant quizzes or surveys (MOFU). 

Videos provide a high level of engagement with users, and they can also be inexpensive to create (i.e., using a smartphone and free editing software).

You can also create video content for each stage of your sales funnel, so don’t be afraid to get creative. Instead of blogging about a topic like ‘What is SEO,’ you can make a video for it to share on your YouTube channel – which can help with your brand-building efforts. 

Another powerful form of SEO content is the infographic. 

If you use an in-house or freelance graphic designer, you can get them to create fun infographics to educate, inform, and convert your audience. Infographics can teach your audience something new, compare your products to others, and more. 

Posts with images boast a 650% higher engagement rate than those without, so even if you aren’t using infographics, include high-resolution images in your blogs. 

Email marketing 

Emails play a significant role in marketing SaaS products, especially for B2B SaaS marketing. Primarily, emails help fill the gaps in contact during the lengthy SaaS sales cycle. 

As an example, say you attract a prospect with one of your TOFU blogs that introduces them to the world of SEO & your products. As business owners, the prospect of gaining more traffic catches their eye, so they enter their email addresses to sign up for your mailing list. 

They’ve now become a lead for you to nurture through various types of emails, such as:

• Onboarding emails (introducing a demo or new product) 
• Quizzes and surveys (that you can use to gain insights into your target audience/buyer personas) 
• Discounts and special offers 
• Upcoming webinars & new blog releases 
• Announcing new features or add-ons
• Check-ins (seeing how your prospects are doing and if they require your services) 

As you can see, there are many ways to use emails to entice prospects into becoming full-fledged SaaS customers. 

It’s also essential to use emails to keep your existing subscriber base happy. Remember, the goal is to retain your users for as long as possible because once they churn, the monthly revenue they are providing is gone forever. 

That’s why check-in emails are so useful. They allow you to see how your customers are feeling/enjoying your product and convey that you care about your subscribers. 

Emails & user feedback

Accepting and responding to user feedback via email is another piece of the puzzle. Nothing will make your churn rates rise faster than if you don’t listen to the wants and needs of your existing customers. 

That’s why you need to pay attention to the customer service emails your team receives. 

Are there any noticeable recurring issues? Do subscribers keep bringing up the same pain points? Is there any confusion around one of your new features?

These are all essential questions to ask yourself when evaluating customer feedback. 

If you’re able to address and solve the most pressing issues with your platform, you’ll make strides toward gaining long-term loyalty from your current customers. 

PPC (pay-per-click) ads 

Besides SEO, PPC ads are another way to market your SaaS products. This is especially true for startups that haven’t had the chance to gain traction with their SEO strategies. 

One of the main appeals of PPC ads is that they start providing immediate results.

Where SEO takes several months of grinding before gaining traction, you’ll start generating traffic and leads from PPC ads on day one. 

How do you conduct a SaaS PPC strategy?

To start, you can use our free Google keyword planner tool to conduct some keyword research. It will provide you with two essential metrics for PPC keywords; CPC (cost-per-click) and Comp. (competition). 

The CPC refers to how much you’ll have to pay each time someone clicks on your ad. You’ll need to determine your budget first to know how much you can allocate to the CPC of each keyword. 

Next is the Comp. statistic, which refers to how much competition exists for that keyword in the PPC space. Ideally, you want to find keywords with high search volume, moderate to low CPC, and not much competition. 

Since you’re paying for the ads, it’s best to focus entirely on BOFU keywords & content. That’s because TOFU keywords are often informative in nature and don’t lead to sales, which would be a total waste of money. If you pay for a BOFU keyword that links to one of your product pages, you’ll have a much greater chance of landing a conversion. 

Webinars 

Last but not least, webinars are extremely effective for generating SaaS leads and conversions. In fact, a quarter of all webinars are put on by SaaS companies – according to GoToWebinar. 

That’s because a webinar is a perfect environment to show off demos, conduct live tutorials, and announce/show off new product features. 

To generate hype for your webinar, advertise it on your social media & send an email out to your subscriber base letting them know about your event. That way, you can accrue a considerable live audience for your webinar. 

What’s even better is you can record your webinars and upload them to your website, social media accounts, and YouTube channel. As a result, your webinars will continue to generate leads for you well beyond the moment you switch off your webcam. 

10 Fun Examples of SaaS Marketing 

By now, you know what goes into a winning SaaS marketing strategy. Yet, one of the best ways to truly grasp a concept is to witness it in action. 

Here are 10 real-world examples of clever SaaS marketing campaigns that will get your creative juices flowing. 

#1: Zapier 

SaaS company Zapier put together a brilliant SEO campaign to market their business, generating 7.3 million organic visitors per month to their website. 

How did they do it?

First, their marketing team had the idea to rebrand their automated workflows as ‘Zaps,’ which is catchy and memorable. In all their content, they referred to automating a task as ‘Zapping’ something. 

Next, they created 25,000 unique landing pages that ranked within the top 100 on Google. To achieve this feat, they leveraged resources from their partnerships to create individual landing pages for each app, workflow, and integration. 

They also conducted rigorous keyword research and made use of high-quality images and videos to outdo the competition. Zapier’s campaign is a testament to the power of SEO for SaaS companies. 

#2: Slack 

Slack stands as a shining example of how well the freemium model can work if you have a truly outstanding product. 

The company provides an unparalleled user experience, and the app has some genuinely appealing features in its paid versions. 

Another genius marketing tactic Slack employed was enabling so many 3rd party apps to integrate with their software. This allowed them to gain lots of new customers who had only heard about them through another program, like the project management platform Asana. 

#3: Hubspot 

The team at Hubspot is the king of inbound marketing techniques. Hubspot continuously tops the Google SERPs with its educational & informative guides, tutorials, and videos. 

In other words, they have many methods for drawing their audience to them instead of the other way around. Their internal Hubspot Academy also provides many valuable educational resources to anyone interested, which generates even more traffic.

#4: Holded 

Business management software company Holded went all-out with a genius Black Friday campaign where they offered a 50% discount for six months to anyone that signed up. 

The result?

They were able to create over 6% MRR growth from the Black Friday campaign alone.

It was so successful because of how bold they were with their discount. Most companies will offer a discount code or a limited-time offer that only lasts a few days. By daring to offer such a significant discount for such a lengthy period, Holded was able to acquire loads of new paying customers. 

#5: Pitch 

Pitch creates presentation software, and they wanted to find a way to raise awareness for their brand. 

They started a brand-building campaign to let prospects know what they do after closing a funding deal. 

They created videos starring their CEO where they described the new features coming due to the funding. The CEO directly addressing the audience gave the campaign a human touch, and it was amazingly successful as a result. 

#6: Shopify 

eCommerce giant Shopify does several things remarkably well with its SaaS marketing campaigns. 

Like Hubspot, they’ve mastered inbound content marketing by providing podcasts, videos, blogs, and case studies. If you Google eCommerce-related topics, Shopify is bound to show up with various pieces of content. 

Besides being a lead-generating machine, their content’s prevalence works wonders for building brand awareness. 

Next, they’ve embraced their bustling community of users and third-party app creators. Shopify design experts, theme creators, and gurus are ready to advise new customers. These communities provide word-of-mouth referrals and raise more brand awareness, so it’s a win-win for Shopify. 

#7: Buffer

Buffer provides a social media scheduling software that automates posts so influencers can write them in advance and automatically release them during peak engagement times. 

They found incredible marketing success through blogging, but in a slightly unconventional way. 

While they create blog content that’s relevant to their users, they also blog about very general topics – like psychology, life hacks, creativity, and multitasking. This has led them to build a fanbase consisting of social media users with large followings. 

#8: Apple Music 

To compete with Spotify, Apple Music had to shake things up. This led to them adopting the SaaS subscription model instead of sticking with the iTunes Store.

To generate buzz for the new move, Apple made brilliant use of celebrity influencer marketing. In particular, their Taylor Swift treadmill video drew in 20 million viewers worldwide. 

#9: MailModo

Email marketing company MailModo put their flagship service to fantastic use. They started a brilliant campaign showcasing how effective their email marketing features are – through email. 

In other words, they used their own platform to market their services. 

They sent out lead generation emails with interactive elements, which served as a mini product demo for recipients. 

In addition to that, they also made use of social media marketing by posting clever Tweets that linked to their product pages. 

#10: MailChimp 

A noticeable issue the folks at MailChimp noticed was that many users would misspell their brand name. 

Instead of letting it annoy them, they decided to use the issue in a humorous way for a new ad campaign. 

In it, they purposely misspelled their brand name, with variations like ‘MailShrimp,’ ‘JailBlimp,’ and ‘’KaleLimp.’ What’s even funnier is they didn’t include their true brand name anywhere on the image, just a link to a video ad. 

The results?

They generated over 67 million organic searches and $3.52 million in revenue – which proves the power humor can have in marketing campaigns. 

Final Thoughts: SaaS Marketing 

Hopefully, these examples will inspire innovative SaaS marketing campaigns of your own. 

As long as you take into account the long sales cycle, proper funnel stage keywords, and structure your pricing in a way that’s fair – you’ll have the perfect foundation for a successful campaign. 

Do you need top-tier SaaS marketing services from a trusted & reliable marketing agency?

Then don’t wait for another second to check out our white-label marketing services at The HOTH. Our team of experts has what it takes to take your SaaS company to the next level, so don’t wait to get in touch today.     

The post 10 SaaS Marketing Examples That Are Actually Fun  appeared first on The HOTH.

If you have, you’ve experienced the magic of scarcity marketing tactics. 

The idea is based on the scarcity principle – which states that we place more value on items we believe are scarce than ones we believe are abundant. 

Once you realize this, you can see the principle at work all around you. 

For instance, have you ever known anyone that had an extremely rare action figure that was worth thousands of dollars?

By itself, the plastic toy holds no practical value, so it shouldn’t be worth anything. The value comes entirely from the fact that it’s scarce. The figure is OOP (out of production), so there are only a limited number of figures left in the world, which is why a useless plastic toy is so ridiculously expensive. 

While this may seem odd, scarcity tactics are extremely powerful, and you can and should use them in your digital marketing campaigns. 

If you take a quick look around the internet, it won’t take long for you to see limited edition products, limited supplies, and other examples of the scarcity principle at work. 

While you shouldn’t make every product you sell scarce, a touch of scarcity here and there can boost sales dramatically, so read on to learn how you can take advantage of scarcity marketing for your business. 

Why Scarcity Marketing Works So Well 

If you’re a millennial, you’ve undoubtedly heard the term FOMO or fear of missing out. In fact, 69% of millennials report feeling FOMO on a regular basis, but it’s certainly not a phenomenon exclusive to younger generations. 

Nobody wants to feel like they’re missing out on something exclusive, fun, useful, or exciting. 

As it turns out, FOMO is the psychological effect that makes scarcity marketing such an effective tactic. 

By offering products with limited availability, you’ll trigger the FOMO inside your audience. It’ll also spark some intrigue and discussion concerning your products, which can make them seem even more impressive. 

What if you have plenty of products to sell and don’t have any genuine scarcity?

That won’t matter, as according to the scarcity principle, people assign increased value to items that only have perceived scarcity. 

That means you can choose to sell limited quantities of a product that you normally would be able to keep in stock – all just to take advantage of the scarcity principle. 

A study confirming the power of scarcity 

The scarcity effect is definitely real, as there have been many studies proving its existence. 

A recent study published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science used scarcity marketing to promote limited-time beer products. 

By making beer products scarce by only being available for a limited time, they saw a rapid increase in demand pre-launch. 

The study also made use of umbrella marketing, where they included several beers in the limited-time promotion, which led to a spike in sales for all products. 

As you can see, the perceived value of a product increases as its perceived demand increases. That leads people to believe that the item is high-quality and valuable; otherwise, why would they sell so fast?

The good news is you can use this way of thinking to your advantage. Whenever you’re developing limited-time offers for your scarce products, you should always give the impression that you’re low on supply due to huge levels of demand & hype, never supply chain issues.

Scarcity makes prices less of a concern for potential customers

Another study on scarcity marketing by Indiana University declared that perceived product scarcity makes prices matter less to customers. 

The study involved two phases. The first experiment is highly similar to the beer experiment, where a group of students was shown one scarce good and one abundant good. Once again, the students preferred the scarce goods by a large margin. 

The second experiment went a step further. In this phase, 171 students evaluated the WTA (willingness-to-accept) price of two goods – one scarce and the other not. 

Unsurprisingly, the scarce product received a higher WTA price than the abundant product by a significant margin. 

That means whenever a product is scarce, consumers are willing to spend more than they would have otherwise. 

Once again, this is definitely something you can adopt in your marketing techniques. 

For example, if you have a top-tier product with an expensive price tag that isn’t selling too well, try advertising that you’re running low on your supply. You can do this in a number of ways, including listing how many copies you have left on the product page (more on ways to implement scarcity marketing in a bit). 

By making it scarce, you’ll increase its perceived value, and your prospects will suddenly be willing to pay more for it. 

This tactic can also increase your average ticket size by strategically using it for high-end products. 

The power of an exclusive product 

FOMO is the only reason why scarcity marketing works so well. The other reason why consumers love scarcity so much is the lure of an exclusive product. 

Why is that?

It’s because we love being only one of a few to own something, which can boost our sense of uniqueness. As a result, owning something rare can increase its product utility drastically. 

Consider the collectible action figures we brought up at the beginning of this article, as they perfectly exemplify the power of exclusivity. 

A plastic sculpture of a figure from popular culture doesn’t have any utility or function. You can’t mow your yard with it, nor will it help you lose weight. Yet, people are willing to shell out thousands of dollars for one, primarily because it’s rare. 

The rarity is what drives the value of the figure, or any other type of collectible, for that matter. 

When you own something rare, it becomes more than a product. It becomes a sign of your status and can make you feel special. 

Exclusivity’s superpowers aren’t limited to products, either. 

There’s tremendous value in becoming an exclusive brand, too. 

For instance, do you have a friend that brags about the lavish invite-only clubs they attend or a family member that revels in the trendy bar they frequent that not many people know about?

Both are examples of how being an exclusive brand attracts loyal customers. The fact that your brand or location is ‘their little secret’ is a major part of the appeal, as it makes your customers feel special for finding you. 

Scarcity & Urgency: How are They Different?

Marketers often view scarcity marketing and eliciting a sense of urgency in customers as the same thing, but they’re actually two different concepts.

Urgency is another psychological factor that convinces customers to buy, but it’s different from scarcity in that it deals with limited-time offers instead of limited quantities. 

In other words, customers will have a limited amount of time to take advantage of discounted prices or some other type of perk. The products available during these limited-time offers are abundant instead of scarce, which is why eliciting a sense of urgency is different from scarcity marketing. 

Urgency is another FOMO tactic that can be equally as powerful as scarcity, so you should definitely use it in your marketing strategy.

Here are some examples of urgency marketing:

• Countdown timers for special promotions that end once the timer reaches 0.
• Flash sales are discounts that appear out of nowhere and only last for a short period of time, creating a sense of urgency that encourages customers to act now (and buy now). 
• Limited offers, such as heavy discounts on Black Friday or other special times/holiday seasons. 

The goal of urgency marketing is to make your customers feel as if the clock is ticking on special discounts and offers, and if they don’t act now, they’ll miss out (which is why urgency is another FOMO tactic). 

Scarcity vs. urgency: either use one or the other 

Pro tip: When using these techniques in your content, you should only use one FOMO tactic at a time. That’s because if you try to use scarcity & urgency on the same product, it’ll come off as overkill and can backfire. 

Using a countdown timer on a product that already has a low supply will raise eyebrows from your potential customers. It may also cause them to ignore the sale due to the fear that they may not receive their product due to the low stock. 

That’s why it’s best to choose one FOMO tactic and stick with it. If you’re going for a limited edition product, the scarcity will be more than enough to motivate buyers, so you don’t need to add a sense of urgency on top of it. 

Scarcity Marketing is Best in Moderation 

Scarcity marketing tactics are like drinking alcohol in that moderation is king. 

If every product you sell is a limited release with low stock, your customers will quickly notice what you’re doing. It’s not hard to tell when a company overdoes it with scarcity & urgency tactics, and they usually backfire when they do. 

It’s akin to the boy who cried wolf. The more scarcity campaigns you start, the less impact they’ll have on your customers – as your scarcity claims will become more and more inauthentic. 

For scarcity tactics to work, they have to seem 100% genuine to your customers. They’ll take their business elsewhere if they suspect you’re trying to pull the wool over their eyes. 

Yet, when scarcity & urgency tactics are used tastefully and appropriately, they provide outstanding results. 

Using Scarcity Marketing & Urgency to Your Advantage 

Now that you know the correct way to approach scarcity & urgency marketing, it’s time to learn how to put it into practice. 

It’s crucial to distinguish which tactics involve scarcity and which involve urgency to ensure that you don’t mix and match them. 

Here are some of the most effective scarcity & urgency marketing tactics that you can start using today.

Urgency: flash sales

A flash sale should involve attractive discounts that pop up seemingly out of nowhere and only last for a brief period. 

Since they’re rare and show up with no warning, they elicit a strong sense of FOMO in customers. They’ll feel as if they missed out if they aren’t able to take advantage of your incredible deals, which is a fantastic motivator to get them to place orders now. 

The discounts you offer must be very appealing for a flash sale to be especially effective. $50 off a top-tier product is a great way to turn heads, especially if you create advertisements for the sale. 

To reward your existing customers, you can tell them about the sale first (don’t forget to mention that fact in the email you send out to them), which will make them feel valued. 

If you desperately need a surge in your cash flow, starting a flash sale can boost your sales. You can also promote your flash sales through various channels, such as social media, email marketing, and SMS, to ensure as many people know about it as possible.

After all, just because the sale springs up out of nowhere doesn’t mean that you don’t want people to know about it. As such, don’t hesitate to take your promotional efforts to an 11 once you announce the sale. 

Scarcity: limited stock 

A classic scarcity marketing technique is to advertise a limited stock for a particular product (whether it’s actually true or not is up to you, just remember not to overdo it). 

The most popular way to draw attention to a limited supply is to include the number of items you have left on the product page, such as:

“There are only 3 left in stock, so don’t wait to place an order now!”

If that’s too on the nose for you, there are other, subtler ways to let customers know that you’re almost out of stock of a particular item. 

Popular options include brief messages that say something like ‘almost out’ or ‘nearly sold out’ to get the message across. While they’re shorter in length, these simple phrases will still trigger the FOMO response in your customers, so they still achieve the desired effect. 

Besides that, limited stock messages are very easy to automate. 

All you have to do is set up a trigger to fire once you hit a specific stock level that automatically displays the limited stock message of your choosing. 

This highly effective technique will put the scarcity principle to work without you having to move a finger. 

The best part?

Automated limited stock messages are a 100% genuine form of scarcity marketing, so they shouldn’t raise any eyebrows from customers. 

Urgency: countdown timers 

Eliciting a sense of urgency is about establishing a ticking clock, which is why countdown timers are the ultimate urgency marketing tool. 

A countdown timer displays how long customers have to take advantage of a sale in real-time. It displays next to all products that apply to the sale, and it constantly ticks down, making the customers’ desire to act more urgent with each tick. 

It’s crucial that you implement an actual timer that counts down to the end of the sale in real-time instead of just listing the end date of the sale. 

Why is that?

It’s because a static end date can’t compete with the anxiety-inducing visual of a literal ticking clock. 

Your customers are watching a golden opportunity slowly disappear before their eyes, which will light a fire underneath them to act now and capitalize on your sale. 

You should also be strategic with the placement of your countdown timers, as you want to place them in spots where customers can’t miss them. 

For instance, it wouldn’t be a good idea to place your countdown timer at the bottom of your page or next to the similar products you recommend. The two best spots for countdown timers are either at the top of the page or directly above the Add to Cart button. 

Scarcity: limited edition product drops 

Besides letting customers know whenever one of your products has a low supply, you can also release ‘limited edition’ products – where you only produce a set amount of them to sell. 

This makes the item scarce from the very beginning, which will drive up its value.

This practice runs rampant in the fashion world, especially for sneakers. Brands like Adidas often feature drop models that have limited quantities, which typically causes their sites to crash due to the massive spike in demand. 

Limited edition products are effective not only because of the scarcity principle but also the exclusivity. 

People love owning something rare or one-of-a-kind for the elevated status it brings them, which is why product drops are so effective. 

Even if you don’t sell sneakers or fashion items, you can take advantage of the power of product drops at your business. To do so, try releasing special versions of your flagship products and only produce a set number of them. 

Don’t just shoot in the dark here, though. Ensure that your limited edition products are relevant to your audience. 

For instance, if you sell pocket knives and your primary audience consists of hunters, fishers, and veterans, release a limited ‘patriotic’ edition featuring an American flag & eagle decor and only manufacture 1,000 or so. 

From there, get the word out about your limited product release through every marketing channel that you have (social media, blogs, emails, texts, etc.). In your promotional content, make sure to feature the limited supply front and center. 

Do it right, and your customer base will be tripping over themselves to order one of your amazing limited-edition pocket knives. 

Scarcity: social proof 

Another way to utilize the scarcity principle is to provide social proof for your scarce products. 

What’s social proof?

A perfect example is a perfect five-star rating for a product with thousands of positive reviews online. The message this sends is clear – that the item in question must be high-quality because tons of people in society are enjoying it. 

So if you can use social proof to convince your customers that your products are low in stock because they’re extremely popular, you’ll make your products appear far more attractive. 

In fact, according to a local consumer review survey, 49% of shoppers said they trust positive customer reviews just as much as they make personal recommendations from friends and family.

Ways to add social proof to your product pages include:

• Displaying the average customer rating out of five stars 
• Including detailed customer reviews with high-resolution images
• Showing positive quotes from user testimonials 
• Linking to in-depth customer case studies and testimonials 

Using social proof in combination with urgency & scarcity marketing tactics will help each product page earn more revenue. 

Urgency: Reserving shopping carts for a limited time 

Cart abandonment is a problem that plagues every eCommerce store, regardless of the products they sell. 

Customers abandon carts for a variety of reasons, including a lack of funds, forgetfulness, and finding equivalent products elsewhere. As a store owner, this frustrating issue actually poses a great opportunity for creating a sense of urgency in your customers. 

How do you do that?

You do so by reserving the customer’s cart for a limited period of time and then sending them an email or SMS message notifying them how much time they have left to recover it. 

Also, be sure to include how long the customer has left to claim the order before it expires, which will create the sense of urgency you want. A message like this may be the motivation they need to revisit your store and complete their order – which can boost your conversion rates. 

These types of messages are also something you can automate with certain types of software to save you from having to send them all manually. 

Real-World Examples of Scarcity Marketing to Inspire You 

Since you know some effective scarcity marketing techniques, let’s look at some well-known examples to see the principle in practice. 

Companies are always using scarcity & urgency tactics to encourage their customers to act now and spend more, and you can copy their techniques in your campaigns. 

Example #1: Starbucks 

Even if you’ve never set foot inside a Starbucks, you’ve likely heard of their infamous pumpkin spice latte. 

Every year, thousands of excited customers line up to sip on the fall-themed beverage, as it’s not available for most of the year. 

It’s an example of the scarcity principle at work, as the return of the pumpkin spice latte generates massive hype during the fall season. If they made the available beverage year-round, it wouldn’t receive nearly as much buzz or have the same mystique, which is why it needs to retain its scarcity. 

Example #2: Amazon 

Amazon puts the scarcity principle to work with its ‘only x left in stock’ message that appears for products that are low in stock. 

The online behemoth has mastered the technique, with the message being near impossible to miss. 

It appears directly above the ‘Add to Cart’ button in red (or green) bolded text. It draws attention to itself, and customers will undoubtedly see it whenever they check out a product, which will trigger the FOMO response. 

Amazon’s limited stock messaging is something all eCommerce stores should implement, albeit in their own style. 

Example #3: Aldi 

Like Starbucks, Aldi supermarkets have a limited edition product that only rears its head several times a year.

What is it?

An outdoor chair in the shape of an egg. 

While the egg chair is certainly novel in appearance, the fact that it’s able to generate so much hype whenever Aldi restocks it is proof of the magic of scarcity marketing. 

People go nuts whenever they hear that there are new egg chairs at Aldi, with 74,000 users searching for them each month. 

Once again, if Aldi made their egg chairs readily available at all locations, the magic would wear off. The rarity of the egg chair is equally as important as its eccentric design, if not more so. 

Final Thoughts: Scarcity Marketing 

Putting the scarcity principle to work in your business can help you boost your revenue and generate lots of hype for your new products. 

Eliciting a sense of urgency in your customers will also encourage them to take action sooner rather than later. 

Both tactics take advantage of the FOMO response, but they’re both best used in moderation – and never at the same time. 

Do you need professional help putting together a digital marketing strategy for your company?

Then don’t wait to check out our outstanding white-label marketing services at The HOTH. Our team of digital marketing experts and SEO gurus is also available for consulting, so feel free to schedule a call today.    

The post How Scarcity Marketing Has Changed the Way Everybody Buys appeared first on The HOTH.

That’s why it’s imperative for small business owners to focus on the big picture beyond growing their business to the enterprise level in a matter of months. 

Instead, you’ll first need to consider things like your company culture, core values, internal processes, cash flow, and business model. 

In other words, you need to learn how to crawl before you take off on a Forrest Gump-style sprint. 

One of the best ways to learn how to scale your business successfully is to look at examples and advice from companies that have done it. 

That’s precisely what we’re here to do today, so you’ve come to the right place if you’re after a scaling strategy to enjoy sustainable growth. 

Read on to learn how you can scale your business to handle rapid growth with ease. 

The Difference Between Growing and Scaling a Business

Formally defined, growing your business is when you increase your revenue by adding new resources, such as capital, team members, or technology. 

The problem there is that a steadily growing business will require a ton of resources to sustain it, which becomes self-defeating at a certain point. 

For instance, say that your business is humming along at full capacity serving 10 clients. In an effort to grow and expand, you take on 10 new employees. 

Sounds great, right?

The only problem is that your team currently has all they can handle, so you won’t be able to cater to those new clients without hiring new employees (unless you want to overwork your staff and see a noticeable dip in performance and customer satisfaction). 

Hiring new staff means spending even more resources, which can create a vicious cycle of unsustainable growth. 

Scaling, on the other hand, is when revenue increases without a significant increase in resources. 

An example would be making the switch to cloud-based automation software, enabling you to take on new clients & earn more revenue without having to hire more staff or spend more resources. 

With this type of software on board, you will enjoy scalability and sustainable growth without drowning in debt. 

You can think of scaling as how you plan for your growth. A scaling strategy, then, is the fertile soil that you plant your business in to grow. 

Learning How a Company Scales 

Scaling your business is about staying true to your original vision while managing the impact growth has on your company. 

It’s about setting yourself up to handle new customer acquisitions en masse without blowing a ton of resources or overworking your team to get them. 

To scale a business, you need to establish systems and processes that will set you up for rapid growth – such as developing your brand identity, creating a customer avatar, setting up core values, and optimizing workflows. 

This stage is also where you must build your client experience and business plan to take your products and services to market. 

In essence, the scaling period is the most important time for your business if you want to make it in the long term. 

Do it right, and you’ll be set up for success, no matter how rapidly you intend to grow. Skip a step, or don’t take scaling seriously, and your business will never be able to grow beyond a certain point. 

When should you start the scaling process?

It’s never too early to start establishing a solid foundation for scaling up, so you can start planning whenever you’d like. When scaling your business, it’s best to wait until your business plan is in place and you have very few customer complaints. 

That’s a sign that what you’re doing is working, and with the proper foundation in place, you can begin selling your products and services on a larger scale. 

Successful Examples of Companies That Scaled Up 

Now that you know what scaling your business is and why it matters, it’s time to look at some examples of companies that have been there and done that. 

These are companies that took scaling their business seriously, and it paid off in a big way, so let’s learn what they did. 

Example #1: VanMoof 

Dutch company VanMoof sells state-of-the-art city bicycles that feature integrated alarms and intelligent motors. 

They’re an example of a small brand that was able to scale internationally due to their tenacity and smart planning. 

While they’re now a highly successful international bike company, they didn’t start out that way. Instead, VanMoof had very humble beginnings in the Netherlands, starting out with a simple bike model that had integrated lights and not much else. 

Their sales were high locally, but the founders were dreaming far bigger than that – they wanted to go international. 

So they went back to the drawing board and devised a plan to make their dream a reality. 

They completely retooled and revamped their bicycles and created a new business plan (a direct-to-consumer or D2C model) that made vital cost-cutting improvements on staffing and manufacturing through automation and other methods. 

With that, they had the capability to take their bicycles beyond the Netherlands, and they would do just that. By 2018, they had opened six new stores around the world, and 70% of their revenue was coming from international sales. To sweeten the pot, Rabo Investments partnered with them and provided a €12.5 M growth loan. 

Example #2: Zevo 

Zevo is a plug-in insect and pest remover that’s safe around children and pets. Once they developed their product, they began selling it online with successful results.

At that point, it was clear that they were onto something. They had a unique product that outdid the competition by being non-toxic and pet-friendly. 

The only things that needed to be added were a team and a budget large enough to scale the business. 

Their solution?

They heavily implemented D2C testing straight from the get-go, and the investment paid off. They A/B tested their ad copy, subject lines, calls to action, images, and other types of content with their audience and stuck with what worked the most. 

Zevo’s senior director attributes this testing to shaping their brand communications, which led the brand to strike deals with major retailers Target and Home Depot. 

Example #3: BE-CI

BE-CI is a building envelope consulting firm that was able to grow from $3 million to $11 million in revenue due to its scaling strategy. 

Once the company hit $3 million, the CEO wanted to start scaling up. 

The only issue was communication issues were holding the company back. That’s when the CEO hired a certified communication coach to work with his team. 

Besides that, BE-CI also defined its core values, built accountability by setting employee goals, and held regular ‘rhythm’ meetings with the team that included essential reading for everyone to align them on a central vision. 

The results?

The company was able to grow to nearly $11 million in revenue, and they’re now expanding their offices to the West. 

Tips for Scaling Your Business 

Your business can become just as successful as the examples above with the right strategy. 

That’s why we’ve put together these proven effective tips for scaling any type of business. As a result, you can start building the foundation to scale right here, right now. 

That way, whenever your genius business ideas cause you to start growing like wildfire, you’ll be prepared for it. 

Tip #1: Map out your milestones 

Any great strategy requires a roadmap for success, and scaling your business is no different. 

To start, you’ll want to identify key milestones along the way toward your ultimate goal, which is scaling up. 

First, define where it is you want to be, or in other words, how high you want to scale. Do you want to grow to become an enterprise-level company, or are you content with being a smaller business?

Once you’ve got a goal in mind, start by identifying when your business will completely run out of cash. 

From there, define the milestones you need to hit to ensure that doesn’t happen, complete with a timeline. That will help you keep your eye on the prize without going over budget, which is essential for scaling a business. 

Tip #2: Optimize your products & services to perfection 

You won’t be able to scale up if you don’t already have valuable products and services that your customers need. 

As such, you should strive to perfect your products and services before thinking about scaling your operations. That means taking plenty of time to work out kinks, fix bugs, and ensure the quality of your products. 

Otherwise, these issues will only become more severe as you grow. 

The early days of your business are when you should focus on perfecting what you do by improving your offerings, listening to customer feedback, and finding potential issues. 

All too often, entrepreneurs want to grow like crazy before they do anything else, which is usually a huge mistake. 

If you take the time to perfect what you do early on, scaling your business will become a breeze as you’ll have already fixed most growth issues that companies run into as they expand. 

With airtight products and services, there’ll also be plenty of demand for what you do, so it won’t be hard to reach new customers. Are you eager to scale up your small business so you can start competing with the big dogs in your field?

If so, you’ll first need to realize the difference between scaling a business and growing a business. 

Early on, many young startups & entrepreneurs become obsessed with business growth, but this can lead them to grow beyond their means, which can bring their performance to a screeching halt once they really start to gain momentum. 

Properly scaling your bu

Tip #3: Construct your dream team 

Another mistake startups make they want to grow before establishing a team that can handle the increased demand. 

A gigantic aspect of scaling your business is forming a winning and sustainable team of managers, supervisors, and base-level employees. 

Yet, your in-house staff only comprises one part of your team. 

You’ll also need to develop positive and long-lasting relationships with suppliers and form partnerships with outside organizations to scale successfully. 

Tip #4: Create a customer avatar 

You need to understand your target audience intimately if you want to scale your business with any degree of success. 

The best way to do so is to create a customer avatar that represents your niche audience’s wants, needs, and desires. 

How do you do that?

You do so by conducting audience research and then creating an actual living, breathing persona. Your customer avatar should have a name, address, job, relationships, spending habits, hobbies, and more. 

That will help you understand what types of content and new products your audience wants to see the most, which will help you scale your business. 

Beyond that, you can use your customer avatar to build your sales funnel in a buyer-centric way. Instead of focusing your sales funnel on your needs as a business, focus on your customer’s typical behavior instead. 

For instance, you may discover that your audience prefers discovery calls over filling out lengthy online forms. 

Tip #5: Develop Your Story and Brand 

To be able to scale and find success, your company needs a strong brand identity. 

That means clearly identifying what it is you offer, which problems you solve, and how you’ll improve customers’ lives through your products and services. 

Standard brand-building techniques include SEO & content marketing, social media advertising, and influencer marketing. 

If your business has a clearly defined brand identity early on, it will make scaling your business that much easier. 

Final Thoughts: Scale Your Business 

Growing your business is fantastic, but it can’t happen without first establishing a foundation to scale. 

That way, your team will be able to meet the increasing demands of taking on more clients and projects. 

Automation software, SaaS (software-as-a-service), partnerships, and brand-building are all candid ways to set yourself up to scale. 

Do you need some outside help with scaling your business?

If so, don’t wait to check out our white-label marketing services at The HOTH, as we’ll equip you with everything you need to scale successfully. Our digital marketing gurus are always available for consulting, so feel free to book a call today.      

The post How to Scale Your Business (Advice From People Who’ve Grown and Succeeded) appeared first on The HOTH.

Setting up a digital marketing agency that sells SEO services takes a ton of time, effort, and money.

Yet, once your agency is up and running, you face the additional challenge of building a robust client base – which means you need to have an airtight system for lead generation. 

There’s a significant reason why the salesmen of the famous movie/play Glengarry Glen Ross place so much stock on obtaining high-quality leads. 

Why is that?

It’s because, without qualified leads, it’s next to impossible for companies to achieve consistent, sustainable growth. 

For the salespeople in the movie, the premium leads are like golden tickets for snagging potential top-tier clients – which means big-time commissions for them and the chance at winning a new car. 

For SEO agencies, qualified leads are just as crucial, albeit for the growth of your company & client base, instead of scoring a brand-new Cadillac Eldorado. 

In fact, 95% of marketers claim that lead generation is their #1 goal, with 53% allocating half of their marketing budget to it. 

However, to find new leads on a consistent basis, you’ll need a lead generation strategy, which is what we’re going to provide you with today.

Learning how to generate qualified leads & potential customers that transform into new clients is an art every SEO agency needs to learn how to master if they want to find continued success in the future – so read on to learn how. 

What are SEO Leads?

An SEO lead is an individual or a business that’s shown interest in your SEO services. It may be that they need help building backlinks, making technical SEO adjustments, or they might need a fully managed SEO campaign. 

Their needs will vary, as the SEO industry is vast. 

Inside the umbrella term search engine optimization, there are many different specialties, including:

• Law firm SEO 
• eCommerce SEO 
• B2B SEO 
• CBD SEO 
• B2C SEO 
• Retail SEO
• Real estate SEO
• Healthcare SEO 

And the list goes on and on. For every type of industry or business, there’s an SEO specialty that goes along with it. 

Due to how inclusive the term SEO is, it can be challenging to source the right kind of leads for the services you provide. 

That’s why there’s great benefit in getting highly specific with the types of SEO services you provide. 

Many new SEO agencies make the mistake of going too broad with their approach. They go for the jack-of-all-trades method, where they try to provide every SEO service under the sun for every type of business. 

Keyword research, link-building, on-page & off-page SEO, they offer it all to anyone interested in doing business with them. 

The results?

They wind up not finding very many clients at all due to how all-encompassing & vague their services are. 

That leads us to the first rule of thumb with SEO leads; the more specific you can get with your services, the better. That’s because the more well-defined your services are, the easier it will be to find clients in need of what you provide. 

Selecting a Niche Focus for Your SEO Services

The first step in learning how to generate SEO leads consistently is to give your agency a concise focus for your services. 

It’s crucial to cater to your talents here, so think about what you do best. 

Does your team always knock it out of the park when acquiring backlinks for clients? Then you should consider making that your primary focus. 

If keyword research is your forte, you can make a considerable living selling that service to agencies & companies. 

Or maybe content marketing is what earns you the most accolades. No matter the service, it’s imperative to pinpoint your strongest areas and then focus on them the most. 

The point is to make what you provide as specific as possible, as that will make generating leads easier down the line. 

Besides identifying the services you excel at, you should also choose a niche for your SEO agency. 

The idea is to carve out a corner of the SEO market for yourself, where you can clearly define what it is you do and why you outshine the competition. 

As stated above, there’s a version of SEO for just about every type of business out there, so you should choose one to focus on. 

Instead of being the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none SEO agency, you can become the healthcare SEO agency specializing in premium keyword research & link-building. 

See the difference?

The second agency has a far clearer idea of what they do, and they seem more convincing and experienced as a result. 

How Do You Find SEO Leads?

Now that you know why it’s essential to have a niche focus, how do you start generating SEO leads?

There are many methods for acquiring leads, including using lead generation tools, referrals, Google ads, and inbound & outbound marketing techniques. 

Yet, finding SEO leads is only half the battle. 

Once you have an extensive list of qualified leads, then the challenge becomes contacting them, convincing them to use your services, and then signing a contract. 

For now, let’s focus on the top ways to find SEO leads so you can work on building a list of prospects. 

Inbound & Outbound Marketing Tactics for SEO Lead Generation 

When it comes to marketing strategies, there are two primary types of techniques – inbound and outbound. 

What are those?

Inbound marketing refers to tactics that bring your customers to you instead of seeking them out. Examples include helpful blog posts and videos that solve user pain points and answer common questions. 

Users will directly seek out this type of content to educate themselves or solve a problem, which is why they’re so effective. With a concise CTA (call to action) at the end of the piece of content, you can convince readers to become customers. 

You can also use inbound content to generate leads via acquiring email addresses. You can use a lead magnet, which is a free piece of content you give users in exchange for their contact information. 

Lead magnets can be PDFs, videos, eBooks, and other types of content. The only rule of thumb is they have to provide significant value to your audience. 

Outbound marketing refers to your efforts to bring your brand to customers, which means using things like PPC ads, YouTube ads, and manual outreach via social media. 

While outbound techniques can sometimes be viewed as obstructive by users, they can be just as effective at generating leads and sales as inbound content. Outbound techniques are also best for discovering new leads outside of your current base of SEO clients. 

It’s best to use a combination of inbound & outbound techniques to uncover the most SEO leads. 

Inbound: listing your website in digital agency directories

We’ll start with the inbound technique of listing your website in essential SEO directories. 

What are those?

A digital agency directory is a website containing a list of marketing agencies with varying specialties. 

These directories are perfect for generating SEO leads because they attract individuals, businesses, and web admins that are actively looking for marketing partners & agencies. 

Here are a few examples of digital agency directories:

• HubSpot 
• Marketo 
• Digital Agency Network 
• Clutch 
• Google Partners 

Some of these examples, such as Google Partners, are completely free for any agency wanting to get listed on the directory. 

Other options, like Marketo, require you to be an existing member of their platform to get listed in their directories.

In addition to digital marketing agency directories, you can also list your SEO agency on traditional directories like Yelp, Craigslist, and Yellow Pages to further expand your reach and online visibility. 

These directories are ‘catch-all’ options that provide listings for many different types of businesses, but they still get millions of hits each day, so listing your agency can be worth your while. 

Outbound: finding websites in desperate need of your SEO services 

Switching to outbound tactics for a moment, there’s no reason why you can’t actively seek out web pages that desperately need your services. 

For instance, if your SEO business involves doing stellar keyword research for healthcare agencies, you could look for physician’s websites struggling to rank on page one of the SERPs due to their poor use of keywords. 

How do you find these types of websites?

The easiest way is to do what nobody ever thinks to do – venture beyond the first page of Google results. 

Dive deep into the SERPs, going to page 10 or so, which is an SEO dead zone. Any healthcare website ranking on this page is definitely in need of your help, so don’t hesitate to reach out. 

Once you’ve found a few promising leads, do some outreach and get in touch with the web admins. Let them know about a few ways to improve their website to prove you know you’re stuff and to intrigue them to learn more. 

How to handle the outreach

Here’s an example of an outreach email you could send to a web admin in need of your outstanding keyword research:

Dear Prospect,

I noticed your website during my research and noticed that despite your excellent design, talented staff, and top-notch services, you’re ranking on page 10 of Google. 

My SEO agency specializes in keyword research, where we target specific search queries and optimize our client’s content for them to rank higher. We’ve identified many keywords that we could target and increase your rankings by a significant margin (think page one of Google, generating tons of organic traffic, leads, and sales). 

If you’re interested in what we do, please don’t hesitate to get in touch for a call. 

Thanks, 

SEO expert 

Just like that, you’ve made a convincing case for the prospect to at least hear you out on your offer. To increase your chances of landing a client even further, you can link to your case studies and testimonials to provide proof of your effectiveness. 

Inbound: creating high-quality content to attract prospects to your website

A classic inbound technique is to create useful content (blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics, etc.) to attract lots of website visitors that are interested in what you do. 

This will help you generate qualified leads for your services. 

The best part?

While many outbound techniques are unsustainable in the long run (such as spending money and resources on PPC ads), content marketing will continuously generate leads for you. 

Once you publish a blog, video, or infographic, it will remain there indefinitely, continuing to attract leads for you well into the future without requiring further investment. 

Something as simple as a well-written blog article can generate leads for you for months and years down the line. 

Yet, for your content to have the desired impact, it needs to be relevant and valuable to your target audience. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting time and resources creating content. 

That means you’ll need to do some research to uncover which types of content your audience values the most. Beyond that, you’ll need to learn their pain points, problems, wants, desires, and needs. 

To do so, take to relevant social media groups and forums related to your niche audience, and listen to what they have to say. You can also use keyword research tools (like our free keyword planner from The HOTH) to see which keywords are trending and gaining the most traction – as they can give you content ideas. 

For example, if you notice lots of users searching for the keyword ‘back pain remedies,’ you can write a blog post about the most effective ways to relieve back pain. 

Content marketing ideas for generating SEO leads 

There are many different types of content you can use to generate leads and even boost your sales. 

Blogs are extremely popular for content marketing and SEO, primarily due to how easy they are to produce and how effective they can be at generating traffic, leads, and sales. You can choose to write blogs yourself, or you can seek the help of freelancers to knock out the writing for you. 

If you want your blog posts to actively generate leads for you, it’s crucial to include CTAs and lead magnets in them. 

Videos are another prevalent form of content that can generate leads for you, but they’re a bit more time-consuming and expensive to produce than blogs. 

Yet, video content is the way of the future, as video content is expected to account for 82.5% of all web traffic, which will make it the #1 type of content online. So if you aren’t already producing video content, now is the time to start. 

If your budget is limited, you can produce inexpensive, high-quality videos by shooting on a smartphone and using basic video editing software. To generate SEO leads with your videos, go over the top reasons why you provide the best SEO services in your niche. 

You can also create videos featuring powerful customer testimonials and case studies to encourage your prospects to give you a call or, at the very least, leave their contact information. 

Podcasts and webinars are other types of content that are effective at generating leads. For podcasts, do your best to interview lots of relevant guests from the digital marketing and SEO industry. For webinars, let your attendees know how your SEO services can transform their business for the better. 

Inbound: using word of mouth and referrals 

Referrals are one of the most powerful ways to acquire SEO leads and qualified new customers. 

Why is that?

It’s because these leads come from your existing customer base, who can prove to your prospects that you do amazing work that provides real results. 

Nothing holds as much merit as a word-of-mouth referral from a close friend or colleague, which is why you should definitely pay attention to referrals. 

In fact, referrals are so powerful that there are entire businesses (including SEO companies) that thrive off referrals and word-of-mouth hype as their primary marketing strategies. 

How do you get your clients to refer others to you?

The best and most reliable way to do so is to simply provide excellent services for your clients. That alone is enough to get your clients singing your praises to their friends, family, and coworkers.

From there, you can also let your clients know that you’re looking for referrals and that you’d appreciate any they can provide. 

To sweeten the pot for your clients, you can offer discounts or special rewards for referrals. You can see this tactic at work with all sorts of companies, such as getting $50 for referring others to your internet provider. 

Your clients have the incentive of the reward you provide for the referral, and you benefit by gaining a new, qualified client. 

Outbound: outreach using social media marketing 

Social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn are goldmines for lead generation if you know where to look. 

In particular, you should take to groups related to the SEO services you provide and then become highly active within them. 

If you sell healthcare SEO services, then joining health & wellness groups on Facebook is the way to go. You can also frequent medical forums where physicians and nurses post about their jobs. 

Yet, you won’t be able to go for the hard sell approach here, as many social media groups prevent users from outright plugging their products and services. 

Instead of creating posts advertising your services, engage with the users in the group instead. Read their posts, and chime in with some relevant advice. If you can, bring up times that you’ve solved similar problems for your clients with your SEO services. 

By doing this, you’ll build trust within the group, and they’ll appreciate your insights. 

That’s a far better approach than pitching your services without any context, as that will come off as tacky and disingenuous. 

After you’ve engaged with the group for a while, members may begin messaging you for help with their SEO-related issues or even actively seek out your services. 

Outbound: attending relevant webinars and SEO online meetups 

This is a proven effective tactic that many SEO agencies fall back on when they need leads. 

It’s a social technique that involves chatting with attendees and seeing if they require your services. 

To find the most success, you should come up with several different pitches and then use them accordingly. 

Why is that?

It’s because there will be a wide variety of attendees with different needs at each meetup. 

For instance, if you’re speaking with a prospect that’s already very familiar with how SEO works, an in-depth explanation of search engine optimization isn’t necessary and will likely lose their interest. A better pitch for this type of client is to be succinct and get straight to the point. 

Conversely, if you’re speaking to a potential client that has no clue what SEO is, a more in-depth explanation is perfectly acceptable and even necessary. 

That’s why it’s crucial to adapt your pitch to each client, as it will help you acquire as many SEO leads as possible while attending meetups. 

Inbound: generating leads with your website 

Last but not least, you can transform your website into a powerful lead-generation tool with the right tweaks. 

This is where it pays off to have invested in your own website’s SEO. 

If you’re ranking in top spots for keywords like ‘healthcare SEO agencies near me,’ you can turn the traffic you generate into viable leads with the right types of landing pages. 

For the service pages users land on, don’t just offer your services. 

Instead, use a lead generator like a free tool to use in exchange for the user’s email address. You could offer an SEO audit, keyword research, or other types of freebies like PDFs or eBooks. 

These are useful because not every visitor to your website will be ready to enlist your services. 

However, that doesn’t mean that they won’t need your SEO services eventually. 

If you’re able to salvage their email address, you can send them follow-up content and offers. That way, whenever the time comes that they do need healthcare SEO services, your agency will be the first one that comes to mind. 

They already know you, and they regularly receive emails containing helpful and relevant content. As a result, going with your agency will be a no-brainer. That’s why you should always include a lead generator on your landing pages. 

Qualifying SEO Leads 

Now that you have a long list of SEO leads, it’s time to whittle it down to only the most qualified prospects. 

In particular, you need to pay close attention to the company’s structure and any key stakeholders that will be involved in the SEO process. 

You should also examine their online presence, including their current performance on search engines. This will help you not only determine if they’re a qualified prospect, but it will also help you start forming your SEO strategy for their website. 

Include a qualifying form on your website or through email 

A no-nonsense way to qualify your leads is to include an inquiry form on your website or through email. 

This form should contain all the important information you need to determine a qualified lead from an unqualified one. 

While it’s entirely up to you to create this form, here are some suggestions for what it should include:

• What types of SEO services do they want or need
• Their current budget level and how much they’re willing to allocate toward SEO
• When they want to get started 

If they provide satisfactory answers to all three questions, that’s a great sign that they’ll make a valuable client for your agency. 

If the answers aren’t satisfactory, you can ask them to sign up for your newsletter instead of booking a consulting call. That way, if they ever do become a qualified client, they’ll already be in your database, and they’ll know about your services. 

Contacting Your Qualified SEO Leads 

Once you’ve separated the wheat from the chaff in terms of qualified leads, it’s time to get in touch and start to seal the deal. 

Whether you choose to contact your prospects by email or over the phone, here are some pointers you won’t want to forget to include.

Keep things concise 

You’re not here to talk your prospect’s ear off or to send them an email the size of an eBook. Instead, include just enough to hook them and generate interest in your services. 

In other words, you don’t need to harp on and on about the benefits of working with your agency, especially at this stage. 

If you’re typing an email, the sweet spot is to keep it between 50 to 125 words to heighten the chances of receiving a response. 

Make it effortless for clients to take the next step 

Before you pick up the phone or type a word in an email to your client, first think about what you want them to do. 

Do you want them to schedule a consulting call, or would you prefer a face-to-face meeting?

Either way, make what you want explicitly clear in your call or email. If you want them to schedule a meeting with you, make that apparent by saying something along the lines of:

We’d love to meet with you to discuss our SEO services in more detail. Can you please provide a few dates when you’re available?

Just as with CTAs for blog posts, you can’t expect prospects to read your mind when it comes to what you want them to do, so be clear and direct about it. 

Concluding Thoughts: SEO Leads 

If you want your SEO agency to grow and expand in the future, then you need a way to generate a consistent pipeline of leads. 

Referrals, creating content, attending meetups, and finding existing websites in need of your services are all great ways to acquire SEO leads. 

Beyond that, you need to carefully qualify and contact your leads to heighten the chances of them converting into clients. 

Do you need help obtaining leads for your business?

Then don’t wait to check out our white-label digital marketing services at The HOTH. Our team comprises link-building, SEO, and digital marketing experts, so don’t wait to book a call today to revolutionize the way you approach your marketing.

The post How to Get New SEO Leads Without Spending a Ton of Time or Resources appeared first on The HOTH.

Is communication between your team effortless, or do you struggle to get everyone on the same page? Do you have a reliable system for assigning and completing tasks, or are you constantly switching back and forth between email threads and messaging apps?

If you relate more to the second part of each question – that’s a sign that your marketing agency isn’t equipped with the right tools. 

Marketing campaigns involve many moving parts, such as brand-building, content marketing, social media, and CRO (conversion rate optimization), among others. 

Digital marketing tools like CRMs, project management software, and messengers like Slack can help you avoid drowning in work. Access to crucial analytics and metrics is also necessary if you want to find any sort of repeatable success with your marketing efforts. 

There are many types of marketing software, so it can be a bit confusing to know which programs you need and can do without. 

That’s why we’ve put together this extensive guide containing essential tools for marketing agencies in the following categories:

• Analytics Tools 
• SEO Tools 
• Team Collaboration & Project Management Tools 
• Website Creation Tools 

By the end of the list, you’ll know about a ton of helpful marketing agency tools you can use to increase your productivity, communication, SEO, and revenue in 2023. 

Why Digital Marketing Agencies Need the Right Tools 

You may wonder why you need to invest in many expensive platforms, programs, and applications. 

After all, you’ll save lots of money by not using these tools, so why should you bother?

Let’s consider a quick example to illustrate why marketing tools are so essential. Say that you start an SEO campaign with the goal of ranking in the top spot for a certain keyword on Google. 

For 6 months, you plug away creating content, auditing your site, making technical tweaks, and building backlinks. However, you don’t check any analytics during this time, which means you’re basically shooting in the dark. 

Sure enough, when you finally do check your rankings, you discover that Google hasn’t even indexed your site, meaning you’re MIA from the SERPs (search engine results pages). 

As a result, all the time, effort, and money you spent during the last 6 months were for nothing. 

This scenario could have been avoided by using the proper tools to monitor, analyze, and tweak your strategy (not to mention that Google Search Console would have let you know if your site was indexed or not in about 5 seconds, but more on that in a bit). 

Besides analyzing your performance, you can also use tools to improve your productivity through marketing automation software drastically. 

Collaboration tools such as Asana and Trello make knocking out projects a breeze, and tools like WordPress allow you to design gorgeous web pages without having to write a single line of code. That’s why you need to equip your agency with the proper tools if you want to grow your business and scale at the same time. 

Top Analytics Tools 

To learn what works and what doesn’t, you need a way to pour through your data and make sense of it.

You need to make sense of website visitor behavior and a way to judge how you’re doing in relation to your competitors. 

That’s why analytics tools are an absolute must for any marketing agency that wants to find success. Without further ado, here are our picks for the best analytics tools available in 2023. 

Google Analytics 

If you want to gain in-depth insights into your web visitors’ behavior, Google Analytics (GA) is a must-have reporting tool. 

The best part?

It’s completely free, so implementing it won’t cost your marketing agency a dime. 

Whether you’re checking to see how long visitors spend on each page or how well your landing pages are converting, Google Analytics is your one-stop shop for it all. 

Another plus is that the website data comes straight from Google, so it’s far more accurate than marketing platforms that rely on page tags. 

While GA has many features, some of its most helpful reports for marketers and SEOs include the following:

• Customer Behavior Report. Running this report will reveal your target audience’s trends & spending habits – which is great for personalizing content and predicting customer value.
• Browser Report. This one is a necessity for eCommerce businesses, as it will let you know where users are finding your site, which devices they use, and which browsers/devices are getting the most conversions. 
• Keyword Performance Report. SEOs need to pay special attention to this report, as it tells you which queries are bringing in the most traffic, leads, and conversions – which will guide your keyword research efforts going forward. 

One downside to GA is that the program is a bit complicated due to its extensive features, so it will take a considerable time investment to learn all the ins and outs. Still, you can’t beat free, and GA has invaluable data – so it’s worth the learning curve. 

Google Tag Manager 

In order to track a metric, such as the conversion rate of a web page, you need to set up a tag for it. 

What’s a tag?

Broadly defined, a website tag is a tool used to gather data or add new functionalities to a website. Tags often take the form of a snippet of Javascript, a transparent image, or a small pixel that you install onto your web pages (some, not all). 

More often than not, tags are used to track user behavior and gather data. 

For instance, you need to install a conversion tag in the code to track how many conversions a landing page gets. 

Google Analytics, remarketing, conversion tracking, Google Ads, and other digital marketing tools require the use of tags, which is why Google Tag Manager is such a useful tool. 

It allows you to easily manage and update all your website tags in one location. 

You can also come up with your own ways to track user activity using tags, as the tags are highly customizable, so you’ll be able to make full use of your creativity. 

Hotjar 

Sometimes it’s nice to have more than static metrics to analyze website user behavior – and that’s where Hotjar comes into the picture. 

What does it do differently?

Hotjar lets you view videos of your user sessions, making it effortless to identify their pain points and the content they engage with the most. 

All user sessions on Hotjar are available for playback and review, granting you invaluable insights into common user behaviors, activities, and their overall impression of your website. 

This tool is particularly useful for graphic design UX designers, as viewing videos of user sessions can help them perfect your user experience, which will boost your dwell time, lower your bounce rate, and increase conversions.

Funnelytics 

Every aspect of Funnelytics is designed to bolster the effectiveness of your sales funnel, as you’ll be able to take a step back and see the big picture with its visualization tools. 

By visualizing your sales funnel in an easy-to-digest format, you’ll be able to identify gaps in your marketing strategy. Many inbound marketing agencies don’t utilize such a tool, so you’ll be able to push ahead of your competitors by optimizing your funnel. 

Other features include the ability to perform A/B testing on your marketing campaigns, as well as the ability to plan, build, & optimize a new sales funnel from scratch with its forever-mapping tool. 

Funnelytics also has:

• Heat mapping to see which areas of a web page see the most action 
• Enhanced security & data protection 
• ROI reports seeing how effectively your funnel is working 
• An extensive vault of sales funnel templates 

If you’ve been having trouble with the conversion rates of your landing pages, Funnelytics may be the tool you need to raise them again. 

Helpful CRO Tools 

Next, let’s take a look at some tools that will help you optimize your conversion rates. CRO is a necessity for any marketing campaign, especially SEO and content marketing. 

Many beginner agencies make the mistake of focusing entirely on SEO and neglecting CRO, which generates lots of traffic but doesn’t lead to an increase in revenue. 

That’s why you’ll need to incorporate CRO techniques & tools into your marketing strategy to find success with any type of campaign. 

Designing a website to convert means providing an intuitive, fast, and pleasant user experience, engaging and persuasive content, and a convincing CTA to encourage the desired action. Here are the top tools available to help you boost your conversion rates. 

HOTH Conversion Rate Calculator 

You won’t be able to improve your conversion rates if you don’t know what they are, so don’t be shy about using our free Conversion Rate Calculator from The HOTH. 

To use it, you only need to know two simple metrics; how many website visitors you have and how many orders they placed. Once you plug those numbers in, you’ll get to see your conversion rate. 

How do you know if you have a reasonable conversion rate?

As a rule of thumb, rates between 2 – 5% are considered ‘good,’ and anything above that is outstanding. 

So if your conversion rate is below 2% (or if you’d like to get it above 5%), you’ll have some work to do. 

Google Optimize 

This offering from Google is free for medium to small-sized businesses, and it’s an excellent CRO tool. 

With it, your marketing team can test their hypothesis and assumptions on what will increase conversion rates. There are tools to run split and A/B tests, as well as to personalize user experiences. 

Google Optimize boasts many integrations with other Google tools, such as Google Analytics and Google Ads, so you’ll be able to dive deep into your user data to find the most valuable insights. 

While its free version contains plenty of features for smaller companies, enterprise-level businesses will benefit from opting for Optimize 360, its paid version. 

Optimizely 

A bit of a pricier option, Optimizely boasts one of the best user interfaces for split-testing software. It has a myriad of features for running experiments & A/B tests on your web pages and mobile apps. 

Optimizely is complex enough for technical users yet approachable enough for the casual business user to feel right at home. 

It’s definitely one of the most robust ways to carry out tests and experiments on your platforms, but the $36,000 annual price tag may deter some smaller companies. As a result, this tool is best for larger agencies that require complex experiments or A/B testing on a large scale. 

Convert 

This is another CRO platform that offers templates, experiments, and A/B tests, but it’s considerably less expensive than Optimizely. 

At $699 per month, Convert has an annual price tag of $8,388, which is far more reasonable for smaller companies than $36,000. 

Convert still has many in-depth features for multivariate tests and experiments, and the setup process is pretty straightforward. While the program can be a bit complex at times, they offer 24/7 live support from professionals who know the platform inside and out, and they’ll be able to answer any questions you may have if you become confused. 

Leading SEO Tools for Marketing Agencies 

In the current era, SEO is nearly impossible to avoid if you want to find success. 

68% of experiences begin with a search engine, even when the intent is local. 

That means even if you run a local mom-and-pop store, you’ll still need to have a presence on search engines if you want to stay competitive & grow your business. 

Yet, SEO is a marketing tactic that requires lots of monitoring, analyzing, and tweaking to do correctly. There’s no shortage of competition out there, so you’ll have plenty of websites working eagerly to dethrone you once you climb to the top of Google’s SERPs. 

In short, you’ll need an assortment of helpful tools to secure a top spot on Google (and other search engines) and hold onto it. Here’s a list of SEO tools that cover all the bases. 

Free Google Keyword Planner Tool 

SEO campaigns are only effective if you’re able to find the perfect keywords for your website. 

To do so, you need to conduct rigorous keyword research to locate keywords that are A) relevant to your target audience, B) get lots of search traffic, and C) don’t have much in the way of competition. 

How do you find these keywords?

A fantastic place to start is by using our free keyword planner tool from The HOTH. 

SEMRush’s massive database powers it, and it’s an excellent tool for compiling a large list of relevant keywords. 

Using the planner tool 

To use it, all you have to do is enter a keyword or phrase related to your industry, and you’ll get an extensive list of rankable keywords related to your search. 

For instance, if we enter ‘garden’ into the tool, we get a list of 50 real keywords that users are actively searching for, complete with detailed metrics for each, which include:

• Volume. The first metric is the keyword’s search volume, which is how many users are searching for that term each month. 
• CPC. This refers to cost-per-click for PPC campaigns, which is how much the keyword will cost (on average) each time a user clicks on an ad. 
• Comp. Another PPC metric, comp, refers to how competitive the ad placement is for a particular keyword. 
• Difficulty. Some keywords are easier to rank for than others, which is due to a lack of competition. As such, a keyword’s difficulty score represents how hard it will be to rank in one of the top spots for that keyword. 
• Search trend. A high search volume can be deceptive if the keyword is on a downward trend, which is why the search trend feature is useful. It’s a line graph that represents the interest in a keyword over time. If the line is trending up, the keyword is gaining momentum. If it’s going down, the keyword is starting to lose traction. 

Once you find a list of suitable keywords that have good search volume (although there is a case to be made for zero search volume keywords), a low difficulty, and are trending up in popularity – you can move on to the next step of your SEO strategy. 

SEMrush  

There’s a reason why legacy companies like Apple, Samsung, Forbes, and IBM choose SEMrush as their SEO tool of choice – it’s one of the best ways to increase your visibility online. 

The platform provides keyword research, tracks competitor strategies, runs SEO audits on your content, & looks for backlink opportunities all in one convenient location. 

Besides that, you can use SEMrush to manage your content marketing efforts, initiate PPC campaigns, and manage your social media presence. The platform also provides in-depth SEO metrics such as the following:

• Domain authority 
• Total organic search traffic
• Total paid search traffic
• Backlinks 
• Traffic distribution by geographic location 
• SERP features 
• A growth report 

These advanced metrics will help you effectively gauge the success of your SEO efforts as well as develop innovative new strategies. 

And we’ve got even better news: a special SEMrush offer, so you can try it for free and see for yourself how powerful this tool is. Just click here to get started. 

HOTH SEO Audit Tool 

Conducting a thorough audit of your existing content is an integral part of SEO, especially once you know which keywords you want to target. 

To discover the areas that you need to optimize the most, you can use our SEO Audit Tool. 

Once you enter your URL and the keywords you want to include, the tool will work its magic. You’ll get to see your overall SEO score (on a scale of 1 – 100), as well as how well you’ve used your keyword in your content. 

The tool will let you know if:

• You didn’t use your target keyword in your title tag 
• If your title tag doesn’t begin with your keyword 
• If your title tag/metadata has too many characters 

The audit tool also provides a thorough page analysis of your backlinks, outbound links, Page Trust score, and domain authority score. 

Last but not least, the Tasks section provides a checklist of integral action items for your SEO profile. These include:

• Improving site speed 
• Cutting down on page requests 
• Not overusing your target keyword (no more than 2 – 4 times, any more is overkill and may get flagged as spam) 
• Whether you have a link to a sitemap 

With all these insights, you’ll be able to properly optimize your existing content to increase its chances of ranking higher on Google and other search engines. 

Google Search Console 

If there’s one free tool from Google that every marketing agency should use, it would undoubtedly be Google Search Console (GSC). It allows webmasters to monitor their website’s search engine rankings, visibility on Google, and technical issues. 

GSC will even send you automated notifications in real time whenever they detect a technical problem with one of your web pages. 

This is a lifesaver for technical SEO, as your site won’t experience any issues for long without you knowing, which can help you avoid sudden, drastic drops in rankings (believe us, it happens). 

GSC is so valuable because it provides detailed information on how Google views your website. For instance, you can use GSC to quickly determine if Google was able to index your website or not.

If your website isn’t getting indexed, the most brilliant SEO & content marketing strategy in the world won’t amount to anything, which is why GSC is such an essential tool for marketers and SEOs. 

If you discover that Google hasn’t indexed your site, you can remedy that by uploading a copy of your sitemap to GSC. This is a good rule of thumb, even if you are indexed, as a sitemap will help Google’s crawlers better understand your site’s content. 

Free Backlink Profile Checker 

Link-building is an extremely important aspect of SEO, as high-authority backlinks will have a positive effect on your search rankings. 

Yet, building quality backlinks is a time-consuming and difficult process. 

The best way to give yourself an advantage in the link-building game is to check out and target backlinks from your competitors. It’s also necessary to have a way to check the number of dofollow backlinks that you have. 

Our free Backlink Profile Checker can perform both functions for you. It will provide the backlink profile of any URL you enter into it, whether it’s yours or not. 

This is valuable for confirming that your hard-earned backlinks are active and for analyzing your competitors’ backlinks. If you discover some high-authority backlinks that you want to target, you can try to outdo their content and snag the link for yourself – which is the skyscraper method. 

Team Collaboration & Project Management Tools 

For a marketing campaign to reach its desired outcome, you need to have perfectly optimized workflows and solid communication with your team members. 

Those tasks are surprisingly difficult without cloud-based, all-in-one project management tools. For instance, trying to assign and monitor tasks through traditional means can quickly turn into a chaotic mess. 

To check any project’s progress, you’ll have to sort through countless email threads, Slack messages, and Excel spreadsheets. As a result, you’ll spend quite a bit of your precious time just trying to stay organized. 

Here’s a list of the best project management tools on the market to help you save time and increase productivity. 

Asana 

Asana is one of the most popular project management platforms due to its extensive features yet intuitive and easy-to-use interface. 

Whether you’re keeping track of freelance writers or your in-house sales team, Asana can easily handle your needs. You can assign team members tasks that contain detailed instructions and attachments – complete with due dates and a built-in messaging system. 

Asana also has several different dashboard views for visualizing your workflows, such as:

• A calendar view 
• A list view 
• Kanban boards 
• Gantt charts 

With all these options, you have the freedom to organize your projects the way you want. If deadlines are the most pressing factor, you’ll benefit from the calendar view. If you’re more of a visual learner, the Gantt charts and Kanban boards will likely suit your fancy. 

Asana integrates with plenty of apps and platforms, including Salesforce, Hubspot, Canva, and Zapier – which allows for further integrations, like Mailchimp. 

Asana has a free version, which is perfect for startups, freelancers, and small businesses. 

Trello 

If you love the Kanban visual style and have simple project management needs, Trello is an excellent tool. 

Trello relies strictly on Kanban boards, and the free version is excellent for marketing agencies that do not want to spend money on another application. 

Yet, Trello’s main selling point is its ease of use. 

If you don’t feel like sitting through tutorials to learn a new program and want a simple, effective way to manage your tasks, Trello is the way to go. Its interface is so user-friendly that you’ll be able to jump in and start using it on day one. 

Website Creation Tools 

You can’t have a robust digital marketing strategy without a website of your own, which is why you’ll need a high-quality CMS (content management system). 

Social media posts and marketing are certainly effective, but they could never take the place of having an original website, so let’s take a look at the best website design tools. 

WordPress 

Want to start a blog or an eCommerce website to make money online?

If so, then you’ll benefit from trying out WordPress, especially if you don’t know any programming languages. 

WordPress is an open-source CMS that powers over 810 million websites worldwide. It’s a fairly complex program, so new users will have to take some time viewing video tutorials and FAQs. 

Yet, WordPress has top-tier security and support, including a community of experts ready to answer your questions. 

If you’re a web developer that does know how to write code, WordPress has a ton of advanced features you can use to customize your site the way you want. 

Squarespace 

Another popular CMS is Squarespace, which is a more user-friendly alternative to WordPress. 

If you don’t feel like viewing lengthy tutorials to learn how to design a simple blog, Squarespace is the way to go. 

Other perks include unlimited storage space and tons of beautiful templates and stock photos. SEO-wise, Squarespace offers meta descriptions and custom URLs for every web page you create, and Google Analytics is available for all its pricing plans. 

Final Thoughts: Top Tools for Marketing Agencies 

If you want to scale your marketing agency to take on more clients, you need to equip your team with the right tools to keep up with the growing demand. 

All the tools on this list are essentials for marketers, so don’t forget to include at least one tool from each category in your bag of tricks. 

Do you need help devising a winning digital marketing strategy for your agency?

Then you need to drop everything and check out our white-label marketing services at The HOTH. Our team consists of marketing gurus and SEO experts that are always available to chat, so don’t wait to book a consulting call today.  

The post Top Tools for Marketing Agencies (Updated for 2023) appeared first on The HOTH.

Yet, top marketing professionals don’t stay available for long, as according to LinkedIn, the best candidates are off the market within 10 days. In addition, it can be difficult for small businesses and startups to acquire top marketing talent on a limited budget. 

For instance, most small to medium-sized businesses won’t have the funds to keep a top-tier marketing agency on retainer. 

Does that mean you have to settle for subpar talent or rely on a jack-of-all-trades that handles everything?

Not at all. 

With the right tactics, it’s entirely possible for smaller companies to form great marketing teams that are on par with larger enterprises. 

You just need to know where to look. 

Between social media channels, freelancer websites, internships, and specialty job boards, there’s a massive talent pool of marketers just waiting for you to call them. 

Moreover, you’ll succeed more if you can provide a set of reasons why your organization is the place to be for marketers – which can include desirable company culture, valuable experience, and innovative products and services. 

It’s our goal to help you form the marketing team of your dreams, which is why we’ve put together this post showing you how to do just that. 

Stay tuned to learn how to find marketing talent for your business. 

Avoid Dumping Everything On One Marketer 

It’s tempting for startups on a limited budget to rely on one professional to handle all their marketing work. 

While this can certainly work at first, and you should hold on to these types of versatile marketers, it’s not a sustainable solution. 

If you want to enjoy continued growth year-over-year, you’ll need a marketing team where each member focuses on one specific task full-time – such as content marketing, lead generation, and increasing revenue.

Otherwise, personal limitations will hold back your jack-of-all-trades from handling every aspect of your marketing strategy. 

That’s because it’s impossible for one person to provide the right amount of focus on each area, as they’ll only be able to devote small amounts of time to each part of your marketing campaign. 

For example, in order to generate more organic traffic, you’ll need to regularly create SEO-friendly content for your audience, which takes quite a bit of time and effort. 

To knock that out, your full-stack marketer will need to:

• Conduct detailed keyword research 
• Brainstorm topics and create post outlines 
• Write informative and SEO-friendly blog posts 2 – 4 times a week
• Make technical SEO tweaks like adding alt tags and improving page speed 
• Monitoring search ranking progress and altering the strategy accordingly

That’s quite a bit of work that’s enough to fill up a full-time job. Yet, that’s only a fraction of what a full-stack marketer has to do. They also have to focus on building brand awareness, generating and nurturing leads, and finding ways to increase revenue. 

That’s why it’s best to hire more marketing positions as soon as you have the option. 

Forming a Winning Digital Marketing Team 

Since you know that marketing should almost always be a team effort, let’s learn what a successful in-house marketing team looks like. 

When you break down a company’s digital marketing needs, you wind up with three core concepts:

• Content creation 
• Lead generation 
• Revenue maximization 

As such, if you’re going to form a bare-bones marketing team for your small business, you should hire at least one marketer for each one of these concepts (if you have the budget, you can hire more). 

That way, you’ll have someone focusing on creating content to rank higher on search engines, someone else to work on acquiring new customers, and another marketer to work on growing your money. 

Content creation team 

Your content team is in charge of not only creating all your content but also developing a content strategy. That means setting a goal for your efforts (such as ranking #1 for an important keyword in your niche) and then building a content release schedule to get you there. 

What types of content should they create?

That will depend on your budget, but the most popular types of content include the following:

• Blog posts
• Videos 
• Infographics 
• Podcasts
• Social media marketing 

Your content creators should also understand how content changes at each stage of the sales funnel. As a result, they should create content specifically for the funnel’s top, middle, and bottom stages.

Lead generation team 

If you want your business to grow, you’ll need a steady influx of new customers, which is where your lead generation team comes into play. 

In particular, they should focus on email marketing and nurturing campaigns to spark relationships with new customers and maintain existing ones. 

They should also oversee your paid and organic campaigns and track your primary KPIs (key performance indicators). Analytics play a huge role in marketing, so you’ll want to dedicate some of your lead generation team’s time to examining them. 

Revenue maximization team 

Last but not least, you need to dedicate at least one marketer toward maximizing your revenue. That includes tactics such as split testing ads and brand messages, optimizing SEO content, and finding ways to increase conversion rates and click-through rates. 

As long as you have at least one person working to maximize your revenue, you’ll know that you’re squeezing the most value out of your marketing efforts, which will help you grow your business. 

How to Find Marketing Talent for Your Company 

By now, you should have the roles of your marketing team mapped out. Now all you have to do is locate top talent and make the best possible marketing hire. 

Of course, this is easier said than done, as there’s fierce competition out there for the best marketers, especially at small companies and startups that can’t afford robust marketing agencies. 

That means you’ll need an airtight recruiting strategy if you want to land the right talent for your company. 

The good news?

We have plenty of effective tips for convincing skilled potential candidates to choose you over the competition. 

Tip #1: Positive company culture attracts the best talent 

Which company would you rather work for?

Company A has a strong employer brand and a notoriously excellent company culture. As a result, its employees sing its praises every chance they get. They’re constantly telling you how rewarding their job is and how enjoyable it is to show up to work every day. 

Company B is constantly harassing you with recruiters on social media and through email. They’re adamant in their claims that the company is a great place to work, but you haven’t heard a peep from their actual employees. 

It’s clear that Company A is the better place to work, as its actual employees are thrilled to work there. Since there are positive testimonials from the staff, it’s more convincing than Company B, which entirely relies on a sales pitch from recruiters. 

It’s the equivalent of seeing glowing customer reviews for a product you’re considering buying. It’s far more convincing to read a review from an actual customer than it is to read sales copy written by the company. 

If you elicit a positive and rewarding company culture at your organization, your employees will become loyal brand evangelists who will help you with the recruitment process immensely. More importantly, the most talented marketers out there will be chomping at the bit to apply to your company. 

Tip #2: Use Employee Referrals 

Speaking of using your employees to attract top talent, a great way to put that into practice is to start an employee referral program. 

That’s where you offer a bonus in exchange for your employees helping you find qualified new hires. A popular tactic is to offer cash rewards for onboarding new employees that last. 

For instance, you could offer a $1,000 bonus for any employee that brings in a new team member that lasts at least a month. 

The incentive for your employees is two-fold. 

First, they’ll be motivated to go after the monetary reward (or another type of bonus), especially if they already know some qualified candidates. 

Next, they’ll want to bring talented new marketers in to help lighten the workload for themselves. For example, if you only have one or two team members handling the entire marketing workload, they’ll be more than happy to look for prospects for you in their existing networks. 

Also, if you already have skilled marketers, the chances are high that they’ll know other skilled marketers, either directly or through their social networks. 

Tip #3: Check online communities, marketing forums, and LinkedIn Groups 

Take to online communities and groups on sites like Reddit to find marketers with a particular skill set. Groups like r/SEO on Reddit are great places to find talented SEO gurus looking for a new home. 

Twitter and LinkedIn are enormously valuable for this reason, as is Facebook.

Do a search for groups related to the types of professionals you want to recruit, such as digital marketing, graphic design, and lead generation. 

Your best bet is to follow the groups that have the most users and clicks, so pay attention to those metrics on platforms like LinkedIn. The more followers there are, the greater the chances you’ll find a talented professional that’s looking for a new company. 

Also, look for the users that are providing the most value in the discussions. 

Who’s considered the ‘guru’ of the group?

These users are often the most talented and have the most experience, so they make fantastic starting points. If you can’t tell if they’re currently employed (or even if they are, don’t let that discourage you), reach out to them via a private message and introduce yourself. 

Let them know that you’ve been paying attention to their posts and that they’d make an excellent fit for your organization. From there, throw out your best elevator pitch for why working for your company is an upgrade for them and will lead to bigger, better things. 

If you’re convincing enough, you may end up acquiring a solid new hire that wouldn’t have known about your company otherwise, so it’s worth the effort. 

Tip #4: Scout the competition for talent 

Your competitors can become a source of new talent, so don’t get discouraged if all the best marketers are currently working for the competition. 

You shouldn’t be afraid to aim big, either. 

Go to the biggest competitors in your field, and take a look at their top performers on LinkedIn. From here, you can reach out to them – or you can scour their network for marketers with similar titles and experience. 

Remember to bring up your unique differentiator (what makes your company different from the others), including your unique and rewarding company culture. 

There’s no shame in going after the best, and there’s no ethical breach in targeting another company’s employees, so don’t be afraid to be a bit tenacious in your approach. 

Tip #4: Check specialized marketing job boards 

When most people think of job boards, they think of sites like Monster and Indeed. While there’s nothing wrong with those types of boards, they’re far from the only ones out there. 

There are plenty of specialized marketing job boards where you can find marketers with unique skills and experience. 

This is an excellent option for recruiting top marketing talent, especially if you’re open to remote workers. 

Where can you find these types of job boards?

There are plenty of lists online, but here are a few of the most popular:

• American Marketing Association 
• MarketingHire
• Society for Marketing Professional Services
• ProBlogger (for content writers) 
• Insights Association 
• Communo 
• VentureBeat Careers 
• We Work Remotely 

It’s crucial to note that many of these boards will require you to pay to create job posts, but it can be worth it to access their extensive talent pools filled with skilled marketers that you won’t find elsewhere. 

The Top Sites for Hiring Freelance Marketers

We’ve only scratched the surface of how to find marketing talent so far. Besides job boards, social media platforms, competitors, and referrals – there are also many websites that allow you to hire freelancers to take care of your marketing needs. 

You can find writers, editors, marketing managers, graphic designers, web developers, and many others on these types of sites. 

They’re especially popular amongst startups and small businesses that lack the budget for hiring full-fledged marketing agencies. You can also use freelancers to bolster the efforts of your dedicated marketing team. 

For instance, your content creation team may consist of two in-house employees that brainstorm topics and outline posts. From there, you turn to freelance writers and designers to actually create the content and then have your marketers edit it/tweak it, so it fits your brand. 

It’s a winning strategy because it’s effective and affordable, so let’s take a look at the most reliable freelance websites online. 

UpWork 

UpWork is one of the largest freelance marketplaces on the internet, with millions of registered users spanning nearly every industry. 

With a few quick searches, you’ll be able to find musicians, writers, designers, developers, and, you guessed it, marketers. What’s great about UpWork is all the information they provide about each freelancer. 

You’ll be able to see their user reviews, hourly rates, resumes, skills, credentials, and examples of their past work. 

That way, you’ll be able to quickly gauge if a freelancer is an appropriate fit for your brand or not. 

They also have an internal messaging system that enables you to conduct detailed job interviews for potential candidates. In fact, you can use this system for interviewing multiple candidates at a time to ensure you wind up with the best possible fit. 

Last but not least, UpWork has an escrow system that ensures you won’t have to pay a dime until you’re 100% satisfied with the end product/service. 

iWriter 

If you need content writers, iWriter contains one of the largest networks of freelance writers across the globe. 

It’s a reliable service you can use to generate content for your blogs, ebooks, video scripts, press releases, and whitepapers. 

There’s a rating system you can use to show the level of satisfaction you have with a writer’s work. If the work is completely unsatisfactory, you can reject the article and won’t get charged. Once you find a writer that suits your needs, you can send them special requests to collaborate with them again in the future. 

ClearVoice 

ClearVoice provides managed freelance teams to its clients, and they have many talented individuals in their database. 

You can find top digital marketing experts, SEO gurus, content strategists, videographers, and other marketing specialists with ease. 

ClearVoice works in a unique way, as you start by setting your guidelines and budget level. From there, the platform will recommend a team for you based on your needs. You can accept or deny as many freelancers as you want to ensure you wind up with your dream team. 

Final Takeaways: How to Find Marketing Talent 

You should now know how to find marketing talent in several different ways. 

Between social media, freelance recruiter sites, specialized job boards, and your competitors – you’ll have more sources of great talent than you know what to do with. 

From there, you should have no problem growing your business and expanding your influence. 

Do you need help with your digital marketing strategy?

Then you need to consult with our digital marketing specialists at The HOTH. Our team will revolutionize your marketing approach, so don’t wait to book a call today.

The post How to Find Marketing Talent for Your Small Business or Agency appeared first on The HOTH.

If so, you may run into a snag. 

While search engine optimization is a popular topic amongst digital marketers, it’s less understood by C-suite executives and stakeholders. 

SEO tactics are undoubtedly effective, with 61% of B2B marketers reporting that SEO (and the organic traffic it generates) drive more leads than any other marketing channel. 

Then there’s the fact that 70% of digital marketers claim SEO is more effective than PPC (pay-per-click) ads for generating sales. 

While these types of stats are common knowledge for marketers, the chances are high that your executives have never heard of them. Not only that, but they may need to learn what SEO work looks like. 

As such, you’ll need to do a lot of educating and convincing to obtain SEO buy-in from your leaders. 

That means sharing SEO success stories, case studies, statistics, and SEO-related KPIs to get your executives on board. 

Not only that, but you’ll want to lay out a detailed timeline for your SEO strategy, including when your stakeholders can expect to see an ROI. 

Since you’ve got such a daunting task on your hands, we’ve put together this guide to getting SEO buy-in from your C-suite executives. Read on to learn how to compile a rock-solid case for implementing SEO at your company. 

Top Challenges Surrounding SEO Buy-In 

Many C-level executives don’t understand SEO, which leads many digital marketers to have to fight for every cent they get to allocate toward it. 

Most executives are concerned with what will affect their bottom line above all else. As a result, they tend to favor paid search ads, as they’re the fastest way to climb to the top of the search engine rankings. 

While that is certainly true, PPC ads are more of a short-term game. After all, you lose all your rankings and momentum when you stop paying for them. 

SEO efforts boast long-term benefits, as you’ll retain any rankings you acquire without having to pay for them. As a result, SEO has a compounding effect, where your past efforts continue to generate traffic, leads, and conversions. 

The problem?

SEO takes a notoriously long time to start showing returns. 

In fact, it can take up to 4 – 12 months to start showing a profit from your efforts, which presents a serious challenge for obtaining buy-in. 

Most executives won’t want to hear that it will take that long before you see an ROI, so you’ll need to focus on obtaining quick wins and the exponential benefits of being patient. 

Also, a lack of education surrounding SEO is part of the problem for some executives, so you’ll want to do what you can to change that during your pitch. 

What’s Most Important to Your Leaders?

To gain SEO buy-in, it’s a good idea to hone in on what matters most to each executive in the C-suite. 

In other words, what makes your leaders tick? What type of metrics or SEO initiatives would get them the most excited?

To give you an idea of what we’re talking about, here’s a quick summary of what most C-level executives find appealing in marketing pitches. 

CEOs 

Most CEOs are results-driven, so you’ll want to hammer home the benefits they’ll see as a result of your SEO campaign. Above all else, they’ll want to know why they should invest in SEO and how long it will take to see an ROI. 

It’s best to be completely honest here, but don’t forget to mention quick wins. 

While most of your SEO tactics will take at least six months to gain traction, SEO quick wins can provide traffic boosts within as little as a week. 

What are quick wins?

There are a few types of quick wins, but the term most commonly refers to ‘striking distance’ keywords. These are keywords that you’re already ranking for, just not on page one or in the top 10. 

Well, with some much-needed optimization (technical SEO tweaks, proper keyword usage, backlinks, etc.), you can move up to a top spot in a few weeks instead of months, enjoying a boost in traffic as a result. 

CEOs will also want to know the main KPIs you’ll use during the SEO campaign, so don’t forget to include them (more on KPIs in a bit). 

Let your CEO know how SEO will positively impact your conversion rate, website traffic, reputation, and brand awareness. At the same time, point out how the company will miss out on all these perks if you either ignore SEO or don’t allocate enough money toward it. 

CFOs

Your CFO will primarily be concerned with the marketing costs associated with an SEO campaign. As a result, winning them over will take a well-thought-out budget. 

At the same time, be upfront with how much it will take to achieve your goals, including how long it will take to start seeing an ROI. 

It’s best not to sugarcoat things here, as the last thing you want is to run out of funding in the middle of a content marketing campaign. As such, let your CFO know how much it will take to maximize your SEO success. 

While they may cringe at how much it will take to see results, remind them of the compounding effect of SEO content. 

Once you start to rise through the rankings, it’ll become far easier to maintain a top spot once you acquire it. That means you can let your foot off the gas after around 12 months, and your spending will drastically decrease as well. 

It’s also wise to bring up SEO quick wins with CFOs to let them know that it’s possible to recoup some marketing costs before you start gaining serious traction. 

Your CFO will appreciate it if you come prepared, so it’s a good idea to compare prices from SEO agencies beforehand. That way, you’ll already know which agency will provide you with the best deal. 

Or, if you plan on handling your SEO in-house, you can include a comparison table illustrating how much money you’ll save by doing so. 

CMOs 

CMOs are all about operational tactics, so they’ll want to know everything about your SEO strategy. In particular, they’ll want to know who will be involved and what processes will go into it. 

Not only that, but they’ll want to know how many qualified leads you can generate through SEO. Don’t be shy about the fact that lead generation is one of SEOs strongest selling points. 

You can mention this study from 2020, which discovered that leads generated through organic SEO efforts show greater loyalty and engagement than those generated through paid ads. 

CMOs will likely want to know what your competitors are up to as well. 

Take a peek at your top competitors’ websites, and see how well they rank on Google search for keywords related to your niche. 

Why is this important?

It is because if there’s anything C-level suite executives love, it’s outdoing the competition. As a result, competitors performing well and generating leads from SEO will serve as a fantastic motivator to gain SEO buy-in from your leaders – as they’ll be eager to compete. 

CMOs and brand exposure 

Last but not least, your CMO will want to know how SEO will impact brand exposure. 

You should be rubbing your hands together in anticipation of this one, as SEO is fantastic for widening your reach and influence. 

Through content marketing combined with clever keyword research, you can establish your brand as a thought leader in your field, which will build customer loyalty like crazy. 

A common tactic is to research some problems and pain points plaguing your target audience and then create content that teaches how to solve them. 

For example, if you provide home renovations for your customers, you can create a blog or video content centered around topics like:

• How to spot mold and mildew in your home 
• The best ways to maximize space in your living room 
• How to find the best general contractors in your area
• Undermount vs. drop-in sinks

These are all content topics that your audience will find helpful, and they’ll appreciate that you educated them. 

As such, the next time they have a question about home renovations, your website will be the first one they visit. CMOs will eat that kind of stuff up, so don’t forget to mention it. 

Tips for Getting SEO Buy-in From the Entire Company 

Now that you know more about what your C-suite wants to hear about implementing SEO services, it’s time to learn some candid tips for getting everyone at your company on board with your SEO projects. 

After all, you’ll find more success if everyone on your team is aligned and has faith in your SEO strategy. 

Otherwise, you may run into resistance from key players beyond the C-suite, such as your in-house writers, graphic designers, and digital marketers. If you’re handling SEO yourself, these employees will form your SEO team, so it’s imperative that they’re bought in as well. 

Tip #1: Educate the company on the importance of SEO 

A significant problem facing SEO buy-in is the lack of knowledge surrounding it outside of digital marketing circles. 

In fact, many executives and associates won’t even know what the acronym SEO stands for, so it’s up to you to do some educating. 

There’s also the common misconception that SEO and organic traffic are entirely free, which couldn’t be further from the truth. While you don’t have to pay whenever someone clicks on one of your links, SEO takes time, money, and effort, no matter how you slice it. 

Rising to the top of Google and other search engines takes:

• A consistent content release schedule 
• Link-building tactics such as acquiring backlinks 
• Regular SEO audits 
• Technical SEO tweaks 
• In-depth keyword research 
• Lots of monitoring and analyzing data 

As you can see, an SEO strategy involves lots of work that takes a team of people working around the clock to achieve. 

It’s crucial that your company is aware of this fact to acquire enough of a budget for your SEO campaign. 

Your goal should be that everyone at your company knows the answer to the following questions:

What is SEO? How can it help our business? What role do I play in our SEO strategy?

If your team can answer these three questions with ease, you’re doing it right. 

Tips for educating your team 

Here are some quick tips for educating your staff on the basics of SEO and why it matters:

• Be vocal at meetings. Don’t be afraid to speak up about SEO during marketing meetings, as they’re one of the only times that the entire team is together in the same room. Educate everyone on the importance of SEO and what it takes to see results. 
• SEO training sessions. This is an imperative step for your SEO team. Bring all your writers, designers, and editors together for dedicated training sessions where they learn SEO best practices. 
• Lunch and learn. You can also educate your staff while they eat with lunch and learn meetings. You can introduce concepts like link-building and keyword research while also sharing SEO quick wins and other updates. 
• SEO onboarding. It’s also a good idea to include SEO education as part of the onboarding process for new employees, especially those directly impacting your SEO campaign. 

These are all reliable ways to educate your team on not only the importance of SEO but also the techniques involved with it. Before you know it, your team will consist of tried and true SEO experts, which is what you want. 

Tip #2: Share a clear action plan 

Once everyone is educated on SEO and why it’s worth the investment, you’ll need to lay out a clear action plan to put your strategy into place. 

How do you do that?

The best way to do so is to lay out a 12-month action plan for your campaign. Your action plan should include a budget, all the required personnel, and a detailed content calendar. 

To find success with SEO, you’ll need to release content for your target audience steadily. 

Posting blogs one to four times a week will help you gain traction online, and it’s all about consistency. 

Blogs shouldn’t comprise the entirety of your content strategy, though. While they should be the cornerstone of your content releases, you should also pepper in the following:

• Videos 
• Podcasts 
• Infographics 
• eBooks 

Video content is a must in today’s age, and you don’t have to go broke to produce it. Instead, it’s possible to create high-quality, viral videos only using a smartphone and basic editing software. 

Why bother with video content?

You should because the average internet user devotes 33% of their time online watching videos, and 54% of consumers state they want to see more video content from the brands they support. 

It’s also easier for consumers to sit and watch a brief video instead of reading a lengthy blog post. That’s especially true if the goal of your content is to teach users how to do something. 

With a detailed roadmap for how you plan on achieving your goals, it’ll become far easier to gain SEO buy-in from your leaders and employees. 

Tip #3: Share Essential SEO KPIs 

Your CEO and employees will want to know how you plan on measuring the success of your SEO efforts. 

Enter SEO key performance indicators, which will serve as the way you measure your effectiveness going forward. 

Here’s a quick list of the most critical SEO KPIs. 

Conversion rate 

Your C-suite will definitely want to know how your SEO efforts are affecting your conversion rate. Google Analytics will provide the metrics you need here, but you’ll need a benchmark. 

After all, how will you know that your conversion rates are increasing if you don’t have a benchmark to compare it to?

To gain this benchmark, calculate the average amount of conversions you saw within a three-month period BEFORE starting your SEO strategy. That will let you know how much your efforts have improved conversion rates. 

Organic visibility 

A significant benefit of SEO is getting your brand’s name in front of the masses, which is also known as organic visibility. 

To measure this KPI, take a look at your total number of impressions in Google Search Console. If your impressions are on the rise, it’s a sign that you’re increasing your organic visibility, which is a great sign. 

Return on investment 

Lastly, SEO’s ROI tends to be the most valuable KPI, as it lets you know how much money your SEO efforts are generating compared to how much you spent on it. 

As such, you’ll want to keep a close eye on your ROI, especially as you approach 6 – 12 months. 

To calculate your ROI, measure how much you spent on SEO against how much revenue is generated via leads and conversions. If you aren’t seeing a return after six months or so, it’s a sign you need to go back to the drawing board and tweak your strategy. 

Final Thoughts: SEO Buy-In 

While SEO is an incredibly effective marketing channel, convincing your higher-ups to invest in it is an uphill battle. 

That’s because there’s a lot of confusion surrounding SEO outside of the digital marketing space. Not only that, but the amount of time it takes for SEO to start working also raises the eyebrows of C-suite executives. 

Yet, with proper education and strategizing, you can successfully convey the benefits of SEO to your leaders while obtaining the budget you need to make your goals a reality. 

Do you not have in-house staff to focus on an SEO strategy?

Then you need to drop everything and check out our renowned managed SEO services at HOTH X. Our team of SEO gurus will work tirelessly to implement a winning SEO strategy at your company, so don’t wait to reach out today.    

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