Marketing best practices evolve frequently and often without notice, and it can be hard to keep up.
To help you remain on the cutting edge, we’ve compiled seven of the most effective ways to enhance your marketing campaigns.
1. Use fresh and accurate lead data
Stale data hurts your campaign conversion rates in a number of ways:
- It makes audience segmentation difficult.
- It skews marketing predictions and audience analysis.
- It hurts email deliverability.
- Ultimately, it hamstrings your ability to reach new ideal customers.
With all these costs in mind, poor-quality data should be your greatest enemy.
Thanks to technology, it’s also one of the easiest to slay.
With a searchable B2B database platform like Cognism, you can find compliant, accurate information about your target companies and contacts.
Data points range from the technology they’re using to their job title and contact info.
You can use this data to:
- Segment your audience and create hyper-targeted, effective marketing campaigns.
- Create relevant content that speaks to each lead’s unique pains and interests.
And with Cognism’s AI Search, you can simply and quickly build marketing lists. All you need to do is type in and tell our B2B database what attributes you’re looking for.
Or, you can use this wide range of filters:
For example:
Let’s say you’re a marketer who wants to run an email campaign. You’re promoting a new product feature for CIOs at financial services companies.
By typing in what you’re looking for into the AI Search prompt, you can quickly build a marketing list of hundreds of these ideal customers in minutes. Then, you can import that list to your email software and start generating leads.
Watch this video to see how it works 👇
Another great aspect of B2B intelligence tools is that they can integrate with your CRM or marketing automation tools, allowing you to set up ongoing data enrichment of your account and contact records.
So whenever a lead on your campaign list gets a promotion, the job title change is reflected in all your marketing tools.
That way, your email marketing campaigns always run off the best and most accurate data.
2. Incorporate intent data into your marketing strategy
Intent data is information about online customer engagement with your brand — like content downloads, social media activity, or visits to your product page.
It helps you spot high-quality leads and reach out to them when they’re most interested in talking business. This has the potential to boost campaign engagement rates and speed up sales cycles.
To illustrate, with Cognism’s intent data you can easily find leads who are actively researching a product or service like yours.
Once you’ve identified these ready-to-buy leads, you can run targeted digital marketing campaigns, sharing bottom-of-funnel content that helps them make their decision. Content formats that work at this stage include case studies, white papers, and recorded demos.
And you can get hyper-specific with what types of content you send.
For example:
If a CRM provider knows that an account has been searching online for a “marketing-focused CRM,” they can send them relevant materials about that product line.
If you use intent data correctly, each lead will think you’re reading their mind.
And even if they do feel a bit creeped out by that, it’ll be overshadowed by their appreciation for you speeding up their vendor research process.
3. Create content for each stage of the buyer’s journey
To make a successful marketing campaign, you need to track where leads are in the buyer’s journey and send them content that answers their current research questions.
Otherwise, B2B leads won’t consume the content you send them.
A case study will mean nothing to an ideal customer who is ignorant of their issue. And a marketing email listing the common causes of a problem will bore prospects who are already actively researching vendors.
To help you meet leads where they are, here are some content ideas for each stage of the customer journey:
- Awareness (Problem Aware): Buyers want expert insights into the causes of their problems, the benefits of solving them, and some possible solutions. Blog posts, social media posts, eBooks, templates, and webinars are great for this stage.
- Consideration (Solution Aware): Here, customers are actively searching for products and services that will solve their problems. They want product comparisons, buyer guides, lists of essential features, case studies, and customer success stories.
- Decision (Provider Aware): Now your buyers are deciding whether or not to buy your solution. They want to know what it will be like to be your customer. Help them out with free trials, invitations to live demos, and discount offers.
Content creation tip:
Focus on content quality. Inject personal anecdotes, real-world examples, expert quotes, and evidence-based arguments into your marketing efforts.
This will help you stand tall among the competition as a true expert in your field.
4. Start making more video content
Including more long- and short-form video content in your marketing campaigns can help you reach more members of your target audience, especially those who dislike reading.
According to Semrush’s recent State of Content Marketing Report, video is outperforming all other content marketing formats.
Videos are easy for customers to consume, and adding them to your marketing strategy enables you to gain traction on new channels where your audience may hang out, like TikTok and YouTube.
Plus, making videos that show your face increases your ability to connect with your audience.
You can make all types of video marketing, but here are the ones that marketers say perform the best:
(Source: Semrush Content Marketing Report 2023)
The report also found that articles with at least one video generated 70% more organic traffic than articles without any video.
Therefore, it’s a good idea to add a short-form video summarising your content to the top of each blog post.
And for how-to articles with lots of steps, consider using short videos to demonstrate someone performing the task. It’s a great way to boost the effectiveness of your SEO strategy.
Bottom line is:
Customers are starting to expect video content from brands.
To avoid disappointing them and losing out to a competitor, it’s worth hiring a video expert to spearhead your video content strategy or finding someone in-house with talent and interest in video.
For all you know, the Spielberg of YouTube shorts is hiding in your ranks!
5. Use AI to create successful campaigns in less time
Sprout Social found that 82% of marketers who’ve integrated artificial intelligence and machine learning tools into their workflow have seen positive results.
AI can help you be a more productive marketer in a number of ways.
By automating admin tasks associated with creating and analysing campaign performance, AI marketing tools empower your team to run more campaigns in less time.
For example:
With the help of AI writing assistants like Jasper AI, you can auto-generate drafts of marketing emails in seconds. Then, you can use your copywriting savvy and customer knowledge to improve them.
(Source: Jasper)
Depending on the email’s complexity, AI can easily cut the project time in half.
But AI doesn’t just increase marketing output. It can also help you improve the quality of your campaigns.
For example:
AI-powered marketing automation platforms use machine learning to analyse a buyer’s behaviour, identify their interests, and then suggest valuable content to send to them.
Large-scale data analytics tools represent AI’s greatest benefit to marketers.
There’s so much customer information out there that can help you understand your target market and create more personalised campaigns.
However, it can be time-consuming to collect and analyse this data manually.
Fortunately, AI tools can automatically draw data from various sources — CRMs, social media channels, Google Analytics, marketing tools — and turn it into insights in seconds.
That way, your campaigns are as relevant to your audience as possible.
6. Engage in frequent newsjacking
What is newsjacking?
It’s when marketing professionals create timely content that ties into current events or market trends, especially ones affecting their target audience’s industry. This helps them capitalise on real-time attention.
For example:
During the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies shared useful content, helping their loyal customers thrive in those challenging times.
SiteCompli, a property management software company, did newsjacking well here.
They created blog content like “What Property Managers Should Take Into Account Amid COVID-19,” which added real value to their confused and worried target audience.
In their articles, they found clever ways to promote their workflow automation feature, emphasising how it ensured that building staff followed standard operating procedures. This was an incredibly important benefit at a time when one staff misstep could cause an outbreak.
Many proptech solutions wrote articles like this:
To newshack effectively, you need to monitor your industry news.
That means following top industry publications and LinkedIn thought leaders in your space. You can also use social listening tools to figure out what buyers are talking about.
These techniques will give you a constant flow of ideas for highly relevant emails, ads, blog posts, and webinars that your audience just can’t help but click on.
7. Start sharing thought leadership content on LinkedIn
When it comes to organic content marketing, LinkedIn is the most effective social media platform for B2B marketers, according to a report from the Content Marketing Institute:
(Source: CMI)
That’s because its 1 billion users are there for business reasons like networking and industry insights, whereas a large segment of Facebook and Twitter users are on those marketing channels for pleasure.
Therefore, it’s a great place to start conversations with potential leads and spread the word about your brand.
One of the most effective marketing strategies to run on LinkedIn is a thought leadership campaign.
Thought leadership, or influencer marketing, is when business owners, especially CEOs and founders, publish a mix of opinion-based and educational content on LinkedIn.
These posts position them as experts in their industry, attract engagement from ideal leads, and expand their network of potential customers and referrals.
To succeed with this type of campaign, post content that satisfies the three As:
- Authentic. Draw from personal experience and give real-life anecdotes. For example, a CEO of a sales tech brand might share the story of his first big close as a newbie sales rep decades ago.
- Actionable. Give readers takeaways they can apply to their jobs. Going with the previous example, the CEO might share three reasons he was able to close that big client.
- Authoritative. Write in a confident tone and, without being jargony, reference industry concepts and trends to convince the reader you’re worth listening to. The CEO might connect their success in that meeting to an old tactic that today’s salespeople have lost.
When you can, tie the post back to your brand’s overall message, and when it makes sense, plug your product or service. That’ll ensure the posts always build brand identity and have the potential to generate leads.
Some executives write their own posts, but many hire ghostwriters or rely on their marketing team to write these posts on their behalf.
If you’re writing your executive’s LinkedIn posts for them, involve them in the process by asking them questions about their tips, frameworks, success stories, mistakes, favourite tools, and lessons.
This will help you nail their voice and create authentic content that resonates with the audience.
Boost your marketing campaigns with AI
There are many things you could do to improve your campaigns, but there’s no need to rush.
Take your time when adding new techniques to your campaign strategy. Pick one of the above tips and implement it. Then, once your team has the hang of it, you can move onto the next. This keeps you from spreading yourself too thin.
That begs the question — what should you improve first?
We’d say your customer data.
It’s the lifeblood of an effective strategy.
By helping you understand your audience, quality B2B data magnifies the effectiveness of all the other techniques on this list.
So where can you get that data?
You need to talk to Cognism! We have accurate, compliant B2B data and a pioneering AI Search feature that will help you find your ideal leads quicker than ever before.
