5WPR CEO Dara Busch Public Relations Blog

Advantages of Marketing Efforts

Dara Busch, 5WPR on December 10, 2022

The process of attracting customers to a business and its solutions is marketing where companies can create attention-grabbing campaigns that will pique the interests of their customers. Marketing also encompasses many different segments of overall business operations, from product, creation, and design, to marketing and sales techniques, customer service, and more. At the core, marketing, or all of the activities that a company executes and implements to promote the sale of its solutions. That means things like advertising campaigns, sales strategies, as well as packaging, and delivering the solutions to the customers are all elements of marketing. It’s important that companies invest in marketing efforts to get all the benefits that come from such investments.

Customers

Marketing efforts give the customers of a business the opportunity to make their own choices while improving their levels of consumption at the same time. Through marketing efforts, companies can figure out many different uses for their solutions that they might not have intended for the solutions to have, but those different uses can still benefit both the company and its consumers. Things like the product design, various features, the number of products that are going to be produced, and even small details such as the color of the product, are all things that companies can figure out and define by conducting marketing research and learning more about their customers. Not only that, but through marketing research, companies get to generate various utilities for their solutions including time utility, place utility, possession utility, as well as an information utility. Most of the money that the consumers spend on purchasing solutions is then invested in marketing efforts. At the end of the day, only an effective marketing strategy allows high-quality products to be available to just about everyone under the sun, at reasonable prices because the main goal of companies is to satisfy their customers.

Business

The success of every company can be determined by the ability of that company to meet the needs of its customers, which is actually the reason most businesses exist in the first place. Despite the fact that there are many other business activities that companies have to do to become successful in the first place, marketing efforts and activities are the only ones that actually generate any sort of revenue for businesses. Creating an outstanding solution doesn’t guarantee that the company will be able to generate sales. However, if the company invests in marketing efforts, including things like researching the current market, learning about the consumers, identifying opportunities, and developing product prices, various policies can directly contribute toward the growth of a company. All of those reasons and more are why every company should be investing in marketing efforts.

Top Influencer Marketing Tips for B2B Businesses

Dara Busch, 5WPR on December 5, 2022

There are a few essential tips that all B2B businesses should know before investing in influencer marketing campaigns to target their audiences.

Audience

Companies won’t be able to influence their audiences without knowing who comprises their target audiences in the first place. That means before companies can begin investing in influencer marketing campaigns, they have to conduct audience research and create buyer personas for each segment of the audience they’re looking to target. A buyer persona is a portrayal of the company’s ideal customer that’s based on research and data on the potential customers. To get a better understanding of who the target audience is, the company needs to know how it could characterize its audience, whether there are any websites or platforms that the audience frequently uses, their demographic and psychographic information, their needs and pain points, the amount of research they do before making a purchase, and more. Once the company has gathered all this information, it’s time to define each buyer persona the company is looking to target with an influencer marketing campaign.

Expertise

Most companies, before they even decide to invest in various types of marketing efforts, including influencer marketing campaigns, tend to have a thorough understanding of their industry and market. They can further build on that knowledge and their expertise by trying to engage with other members of their industry such as through leaders to create a more valuable resource of information for potential consumers that will help those consumers make purchasing decisions faster and easier. By presenting potential consumers with a big resource filled with valuable information that demonstrates the company’s knowledge and expertise, businesses can make the buying journey a lot faster for their audiences.

Performance

Finally, as with any other sort of promotional effort that a company conducts, it’s important to keep track of the performance of the influencer marketing efforts and overall campaign to understand whether they are all working and achieving the expected results. The best way for companies to do that is by setting measurable benchmarks that the company can keep track of before the campaign even starts, to get proof of the performance of the campaign. This can be in the form of social shares, click-through rates, or any other valuable metrics that can help the business track its success. There are plenty of other non-tangible metrics that companies can keep track of for this goal, such as the number of views or media coverage and even public sentiment. In fact, it’s important for companies to keep track of what others are saying about them throughout promotional efforts on both social media and traditional media platforms to figure out whether the company is doing the right thing and adjust accordingly to impact the results of the campaign in a positive way. Finally, the company can use all of this information to improve and adjust all influencer marketing campaigns and overall promotional efforts.

Improving Influencer Marketing Efforts for B2B Companies

Dara Busch, 5WPR on November 30, 2022

Companies in the B2B industry are missing out on a lot of revenue and resources if they haven’t started investing in influencer marketing yet because most of the consumers in the market tend to look for solution recommendations and suggestions from other people in the industry that know more than they do. If a company decides to promote itself and its solutions on its own, a lot of these consumers are going to overlook the business and its solutions because it’s not being recommended by anyone else, or at the very least, the company will have to invest a lot more efforts in persuading these potential consumers to make a purchase. However, when a company in the B2B industry starts to invest in influencer marketing, it can improve its reach and credibility, which automatically generates more leads and consumers.

Influencer

According to many studies thus far, consumers these days tend to put a lot of trust and faith into earned media, which includes recommendations and suggestions for solutions from people they know or are familiar with, compared to any other marketing effort a company can pursue. That means companies will have to choose an influencer that the target audience is already familiar with and even trusts that person. There are many different types of influencers that companies can decide to work with, from influencers that are popular in specific and niche markets, to celebrities that have millions of followers. However, the best choices for a company in the B2B industry would be people that already operate within the market or the industry as the business, customers or employees that use the solutions from the company already, industry thought leaders or bloggers, as well as anyone that works in a field that complements the company’s own.

Communication

Most of the time, when companies invest in influencer marketing, especially companies in the B2B industry, they tend to want to use the influencers they’re working with as something of a company representative in terms of their performance. However, that’s not the main or the best way that companies should be pursuing working with influencers on marketing campaigns. The goal of working with an influencer on a marketing campaign is for the company to gain more credibility with the target audience with the influencer working as a third-party validator of the business and its solutions. That means companies shouldn’t be persuading any of the influencers they’re working with to stick to a specific script or only state previously approved comments to their followers. Instead of doing that, companies should communicate with the influencer about the company’s goals and how the influencer can help the business achieve those goals. Then, the influencer might have their own ideas on the best way to engage the target audience and get them interested in the business and its solutions, because, at the end of the day, they’re also a specialist in a particular field.

Importance of Search Engine Optimization for Companies

Dara Busch, 5WPR on November 26, 2022

Effective search engine optimization is an ongoing process that takes a lot of time and effort for companies to do right. Even if a company has established its presence and created a search engine optimization strategy, that’s generating organic website traffic and leads, and even hitting some of the key milestones that the company has outlined, that doesn’t mean companies can’t improve their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts for adapt to the latest changes in search engine optimization.

Strategies

There are different types of search engine optimization that companies can utilize, and the most effective strategies are able to cover each type. When it comes to digital marketing, search engine optimization has four different categories that companies should be keeping in mind with the first one being on-page SEO. This type of search engine optimization is able to optimize the content of a website, as well as its structure so that the website can show up higher on search engine results pages. That means the company should be optimizing its meta and title tags, the images, meta-description, as well as any other element that can have a direct effect on the ranking of the website on search engine results pages. Then there is off-page search engine optimization, which means generating backlinks to the company’s business website from other websites and platforms. When a company has a lot of high-quality backlinks from relevant platforms then the search engine algorithms and the search engine results pages will end up increasing the authority of the website domain. Next, there is local search engine optimization that helps companies ensure that they will appear at the top of the search engine results pages for any relevant search queries in their location. Finally, technical search engine optimization is used to optimize a company’s business website for search engines so that the website ranks higher and generates more organic website traffic, which includes efforts such as optimizing the website for loading speed and making it more mobile-friendly.

Algorithms

The algorithms that search engines use to show results to their users are constantly evolving and changing, with the most popular one conducting the highest amount of changes being the algorithm that Google uses. Some of the changes that are implemented in the Google search engine algorithm tend to be small, while others are bigger and more significant, and companies have to take into consideration both the small and the big changes when they are looking to improve their search engine optimization efforts. Despite the fact that not every change to the search engine algorithm can significantly impact the results that the search engine shows to its users, it’s important for every company to stay on top of the latest updates and changes to be able to adjust their search engine optimization efforts, according to the latest trends.

Ad Targeting and YouTube

Dara Busch, 5WPR on November 22, 2022

Through placement targeting on YouTube, companies can display their video ads on specific channels and videos on the platform, or have their ads show up under specific keywords or topics.

Videos and channels

Companies that want to show their video ads on any sort of content that’s published on specific channels on YouTube need to select the YouTube Channels in the Placements option of the YouTube advertising platform. Then, they’ll have to enter the links to all the YouTube channels that they want to target. If a company wants to show its advertising campaigns on its own YouTube channel, it should also invest in advertising those same videos on other relevant industry YouTube channels that the target audience prefers to engage with. On the other hand, if a company wants to show its video ads on specific videos on the platform, it should select the YouTube videos option in the Placements tab of the YouTube advertising platform and input the links for the videos that it wants to target specifically. Companies can use the strategy to target specific industry-related videos, or viral and evergreen video content on the platform. Additionally, with this capability, companies can also target specific videos on their own channels, especially if the ad video that they want to promote provides a solution to the issue or pain points that are discussed in that specific video from the company. Finally, companies can also use this placement targeting to exclude specific videos or channels from their ad placements, so that they can prevent the advertising campaigns from becoming too broad.

Keywords

To be able to target potential customers through the ad targeting options on YouTube with specific keywords, companies need to use a couple of dozen keywords for the content targeting capabilities on the platform, which is quite different from the traditional keyword use for other types of advertising campaigns on other platforms. Then, once the company publishes its campaign, it can monitor the performance and remove any keywords that are not performing as intended from that list.

Topics

Finally, companies can also utilize placement targeting on YouTube to display their video ads under specific topics which allow businesses to reach a lot more content as well as potential customers with their advertising campaigns on the platform. This is a beneficial strategy for companies that want to reach potential customers that are consuming content of a specific topic or category and might be interested in what the company has to provide to them. However, it’s important for companies to remember that when using this targeting strategy, not every video on the same subject is going to have the same level of quality, the same target audience, and the same perspective, which means that by targeting topics companies can end up reaching potential customers that have very different levels of brand awareness about the company, or that are at different stages of the buying journey. To create more narrow targeting, companies should be selecting the most defined categories, and include multiple topic options, and category levels.

Identifying Ideal Customers

Dara Busch, 5WPR on November 18, 2022

Many companies in the B2B industry tend to have a difficult time getting potential consumers to convert, however, when using the right strategies, they too can succeed. The best way for these types of companies to get consumers to convert is by figuring out their ideal customers, also known as the buyer persona, and honing in on their interests, values, pain points, and more.

Buyer persona

A buyer persona is a simple profile of a company’s target audience that is made up of their demographics, psychographics, purchasing behaviors, values, pain points, and more. The reason why companies need to know who their ideal customers are is because of the fact that this type of analysis can help businesses get a better understanding of their target audience, which then, in turn, helps them to create more personalized communication efforts and offers for those customers. In fact, these days, over 70% of customers these days expect companies to provide them with personalized experiences according to their interests, and when they are being treated as people instead of data points, they’re a lot more likely to do business with that company. All of these reasons and more are why companies should conduct audience research and create buyer personas for each segment of their target audience, and learn about that audience in detail.

Tools

Once a company conducts audience research and creates buyer personas for each segment of that audience, it’s time to bring each one of those buyer personas to life by creating a story around them and their lives, and even giving them names. Companies can also create visual designs of their buyer personas and share that information with the rest of their teams across various departments to keep everyone on the same page. However, at the end of the day, it’s important for businesses to remember that these types of buyer personas tend to change or evolve over longer periods of time, just as peoples’ interests, habits, and purchasing behaviors tend to change throughout their lives.

All of this means that companies should be conducting audience research and learning more and more about their target audience, as well as creating buyer personas for each segment of the target audience on a regular basis, to be able to keep up with the changes in their behaviors and interests and keep those consumers coming back for more. One of the best ways for companies to do all that is by consistently having an open line of communication with the customers to stay on top of all of the changes in their demographic, psychographics, and more, along with any industry news and trends to ensure that the company and its communication efforts remain relevant to the customers.

Creating Effective Sales Pages

Dara Busch, 5WPR on November 14, 2022

Put simply, sales pages are quite similar to landing pages, and many companies consider them to be a subset of landing pages. However, on most types of landing pages, the main goal that companies have is to generate more leads, while on sales pages, it’s to get potential consumers to make a purchasing decision. With a landing page, companies make the first impression on potential consumers and start developing a trusting relationship while educating those customers, and the company should be directing those same customers when they’re ready to make a purchase to the sales page. Companies that want to create more effective sales pages need to know all of the different elements that go into creating such a page.

Title

The first step that companies need to take when creating an effective sales page is to create a title that’s going to be catchy. That means making the titles longer compared to regular landing page titles to hook the readers in and keep their attention. To do that, the title should be a short statement or a single sentence that consumers will read and immediately understand what they can get from the offer that the company is presenting them with. The best way to create this type of title is for companies to figure out the biggest change or benefit that consumers can get when they purchase the solution and put the answer as the title.

Benefits

Most companies tend to focus on the features that their solutions have on a sales page, instead of focusing on the benefits that the consumers can get. However, it’s important for companies to distinguish between the fact that their solutions provide their customers with features, and the reason why consumers make purchases is because of the benefits that they will get from those features. All this means that the benefits are going to be a lot more interesting to consumers compared to the features, which is why companies should be focusing on them instead of the features. Then, if a company wants to include the features as well, it should turn each one of the features of the solution into an advantage for the consumers.

Reviews

One of the best ways for companies to get more people to convert with a sales page is by including social proof on those sales pages, in the form of customer reviews and testimonials. In fact, according to research, nearly 90% of consumers tend to trust other people’s reviews online in a similar way that they trust the recommendations that they get from friends and family. Showing potential consumers that other people have trusted the business, made a purchase, and were satisfied with their purchases is simply showing that the company can be trusted, while also showcasing to the potential consumers all of the benefits and advantages that they can get from the perspective of another customer.

Marketing strategies for healthy foods

Dara Busch, 5WPR on November 7, 2022

Consumers now prefer healthy foods to sugary drinks and junk food. Gluten free and vegan food are becoming increasingly popular and people seek such products when they make such informed decisions. People are willing to pay more money for healthier food options for food that is made of healthier options. A brand that wants to establish itself as a healthy food brand needs to think carefully about its marketing strategy.

Given below are some things to consider while marketing or doing food PR for healthy foods.

Do research on market positioning

Competitive research is important for brands to understand where they can fit in their products in the market. Research should also be done on branding and packaging and growth of online presence. Understanding competition is important , enough research should be done on local and national competition and how they are planning their advertising. Rigorous research is important so that a brand understands everything from certification to right pricing.

Have a clear idea of the target audience

It is essential to have a clear idea of the target audience. Is the target audience composed of young people, busy workers, or anybody who is too busy to prepare healthy food? Developing a customer “avatar’ is also helpful as it helps the staff to understand the ideal customer. After the customer ‘avatar’ has been developed, it is time to answer some questions. Would the products appeal to the ideal customer? Why would they choose the brand above others? The messaging targeted at them has to be authentic and not sensational as customers these days are wary of sensational messaging.

Distribute newsletters

Clubs, spas, and clinics can be requested to distribute newsletters. The newsletters should have relevant information about products. There can also be information on how the product is unique and how it is made. The benefits of the products can be highlighted. For instance, if the products are organic or gluten-free, then that fact can be emphasized. To earn the trust of customers, the best thing to do is to tell them how the product has been made and from where the ingredients have been sourced. Providing evidence from health experts will also create a sense of trust. The newsletters can also include articles on nutrition. Ideally they should be brief and should include contact information.

Get YouTube exposure

YouTube amplifies brand awareness and also helps in the overall SEO performance. The viewers enjoy videos from brands that sell healthy foods. There are customers who want to know about the nutritional benefits of different food items and teaming up with influencers who can do that on this platform can be extremely helpful. Meal prep ideas and healthy recipes make great content. Some people are interested in weight loss and weight management and if the products of a brand can help customers with such needs then marketing on YouTube can be very effective. The videos should include relevant keywords particularly in the transcript so that the audience can easily find the videos through search.

Consumer Trust and Influencer Marketing

Dara Busch, 5WPR on October 11, 2022

According to research, consumer trust in brands is at an all-time low, and it’s continuing to decrease.

In fact, most people have also lost trust in the media and government, looking at both parties as divisive elements in society instead of as sources of trustworthy information.

This large gap in trust is a great opportunity for companies to fill and gain the trust of the consumers, but it’s not an easy thing to do.

Fortunately, there are several different ways that companies can gain the trust of their target audiences, with the best one being influencer marketing campaigns.

Omnichannel Marketing Basics

Dara Busch, 5WPR on October 8, 2022

With omnichannel marketing efforts, companies get to integrate both online and offline communication channels to market themselves, including websites, social media, email, billboards, flyers, and more.

This type of marketing approach creates a unified experience for the target audience on every single touch point that a company has with the customers, and ensures that the brand is present everywhere that the target audience is.