1. So Marketing has changed! Time to stop complaining & leverage the change – 5 easy steps

As a new-age marketer, are you aware of the latest marketing trends. You may be already aware of the changed marketing landscape. If you have been doing it for a few years and are trying to grope with the change, here is a quick summary of latest marketing trends in marketing services and what you can do to leverage the change. You might also want to read Top 7 Digital Marketing Trends for 2018

Here are a few things that are making several of the old-school things that are taught at B-schools irrelevant.

1. Change in the customer buying process

 Customers are no longer interested in ‘knowing more about you’. Their only interest is to explore what you can do to alleviate their pain. While this has always been true, they are now increasingly taking control of their buying process. The result of this is that your sales efforts do not yield the results unless it helps the customer’s buying process. Companies worldwide are investing in strategic marketing content (via professional writing services) to influence the customer buying process. Marketing your services via the content you create gives you the opportunity to help prospects rather than over-sell to them. More info about this in ‘Invest in content marketing to build thought leadership and a strong following’ or our free eBooks like Planning for a content dashboard or Content project – Getting together a dream team.

2. Social phenomenon is here to stay 

Traditional marketers operate outside the community and try to make noises that will grab the attention of the community. With the social media and community based forums, it has become far easier to mingle with the community, as a part of the community, rather than as an outsider. How can you then leverage this changed dynamics and use this for the benefit of your product/services. There are several ways organizations and individuals can spend time in expanding and nurturing their social networks. More info about this in ‘Expand your social networks, Listen, contribute, participate’ or our free eBook Expanding your social networks

3. Managing quality and quantity of leads is getting to be a challenge

 Every company has stiff growth targets. To meet these, you look to your marketing teams to deliver a stream of warm leads. With most customers having strong blocking mechanisms (to reach them), generating these quantity of quality leads by using traditional marketing mechanisms is getting to be a challenge. Building and nurturing a community of leads through the content that you generate seems to be the answer. More about this in Publish Content & Nurture your leads

4. Marketing is more measurable

 For years together, CMO’s and marketing teams have executed a series of marketing programs without being able to track the important parameters that define the success of the program. This implies that there was no clear idea of which ones made sense and which ones did not. With the advent of measurable marketing, all of this has changed for the better. It is now possible to measure, analyze, track and take decisions on ready and available data. More about this in Measure, Analyze, Track and take decisions or in our eBook Analyzing your campaigns effectively

5. Technology is within reach

Too often, not having the right technology expertise used to create barriers in implementation for most marketers. Nowadays with most of the technology platforms freely available and easily configurable, you hardly need to know any programming to leverage the power of technology to aid your B2B marketing efforts.

A Summary of this series of blogs

1. So Marketing has changed! Time to stop complaining & leverage the change – 5 easy steps – This is where we summarize what has changed in marketing and how you can systematically plan to leverage the change.
2. Invest in content marketing to build thought leadership and a strong following – Content marketing is like any other project. Plan it well and create fantastic content that can then be leveraged in different campaigns that you plan to run
3. Expand your social networks, Listen, contribute, participate – Social networks offer you a great potential to manage viral marketing. It also offers you the capability of reaching a larger (& right) target audience very efficiently.
4. Publish content, be useful to your target audience – Having created content, make sure that you propagate it well across your various channels. Re-purpose content, cross-promote and analyze your efforts regularly
5. Measure, Analyze, Track and take decisions – No matter which channel you use to propagate your content, measure, analyze and track to take meaningful decisions. If thing are not working, change them in real time
6. Build and nurture leads – Nurture relationships with potential prospects till they are ready to do business with you.

I hope this post gave you some idea about the latest marketing trends in the marketing services space. Look our for more content on this topic