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5 Tips to Generate High Quality B2B Leads Every Day

Posted on 16 June 20222 August 2023 by dukadmin

Discover how to generate high quality B2B leads with 5 effective strategies to help you keep your sales pipeline full of qualified prospects.

One of the top challenges businesses face is consistently generating high quality B2B leads that can then go on to be successfully converted into customers…

Whilst there are lots of lead generation tools and methods out there, naturally you’re only interested in the ones that provide qualified leads. In a classic tale of quality over quantity, there’s no use generating an extensive list of potential leads only to find very few of them are actually interested in seriously pursuing your products or services.

With this in mind, we’re sharing our 5 top tips for generating high quality B2B leads on a daily basis to help you keep your sales pipeline just as you like it – fully loaded with qualified prospects:

1. Install a Live Chat Function on Your Website

It seems as if almost every website these days has a live chat function, right? But for good reason, it’s so convenient for people who may not have time to browse your website or have a query they’d like answered as soon as possible.

It actively reduces your website’s bounce rate and delivers warm prospects straight into your inbox – from the moment they click on the chat they are ready to be nurtured by your sales team.

Implementing a live chat function from a technical point of view is easy with powerful CRMs such as HubSpot. Once your sales team are familiar with how it works, your potential customer is treated to a personalised experience where all their questions are answered, and their pain points addressed in an instant. If you don’t have live chat on your website already, we definitely recommend it!

2. Optimise Your Outbound Calling Strategy

A lot of B2B sales happen over the phone so taking advantage of every interaction with an optimised outbound calling strategy is a must. This strategy should include:

Clearly defined goals: what are your average handle times for calls and close rates? How can you improve them?
How will you qualify the lead with each interaction in order to move them down the sales funnel?
Follow-up processes – how will you increase your company’s connection to the contact after the call has finished? What channels will you be utilising to do this? Think emails, remarketing and more!

3. Social Selling

LinkedIn is the #1 platform for B2B lead generation and offers multiple touchpoints to connect with and nurture prospects. This is where social selling comes in – as you know LinkedIn is a platform full of professionals actively sharing updates about their jobs, wins and triumphs and crucially their pain points – so be one of them! But crucially also listen to what your prospects are saying in order to create meaningful content around their hopes and challenges that resonates with them.

Social selling is all about building credibility as a thought leader and offering the solutions your audience seeks without being overtly ‘salesy’ – i.e., no hard selling of your products or messaging people out of the blue with a sales pitch.

It’s actually shortened the sales cycle for a lot of companies but be aware that this is not a short-term win solution – it’s all about building authentic professional relationships with your target audience by interacting with their content and posting your own with which they can identify.

4. Aligning Your Sales and Marketing Teams

When sales and marketing exist in separate silos, it’s a recipe for chaos and means you’re far more unlikely to reach your overall business goals. Aligning the two teams from both a company culture and for every campaign will see both team’s performances soar. Some proven ways to align your sales and marketing teams include:

Clearly defining what a sales qualified lead is and what a marketing qualified lead is
Agree when marketing hands leads over to the sales team to avoid conflicts and confusion
Use lead scoring to qualify leads first and then prioritise the best ones second
Facilitate an open culture of collaboration, sharing ideas and feedback on campaigns. Encourage everyone to offer their views and listen to one another’s respective expertise.

5. Research Your Ideal Buyer’s Industry

When it comes to lead generation, time is money. You don’t have the time to waste nurturing companies that won’t engage with you. Whilst you have already undoubtedly looked into the company, having a wider view of what’s going on in their industry can make all the difference.

Sometimes warming a lead can be as simple as striking up a conversation about a piece of news relevant to their industry. It assures the prospect that you are tuned in to the needs of their industry, boosting your company’s profile in their eyes. You can then leverage this to explain why your business’ offering is relevant to them. The best salespeople subscribe to news or social alerts within their target market’s industries for this reason.

You could also get inside their professional world by browsing LinkedIn and Twitter accounts they follow, listening to a podcast targeted at them or even browsing videos on YouTube relevant to their sector.

Utilising all of these tips will see you generating high-quality B2B leads on a daily basis in no time but if you’re looking for a B2B Marketing partner to provide tailored lead generation solutions, then simply get in touch for an informal chat to discuss your business’ needs!

To gate or not to gate? That is the question

Posted on 26 April 202214 December 2023 by dukadmin

What exactly is gated content?

Gated content is any form of content that users can only access after entering some personal details – usually including at a minimum their name and email address. The user then gains access to the content and the company, in return, gets those all-important contact details for future campaigns. So far, so straightforward. Right? Well, there’s a lot more to consider so let’s have a look at how to ace gated content.

Pros and cons of gated content

Pros

The pros are obvious – you’ll gain valuable information from individuals who are willing to provide their details. This will almost certainly be their name and email address but possibly a lot more depending on your gated content form. These individuals can then be added to your CRM system and if they are the right fit for your ideal client profile (ICP) could be added into a nurture follow-up campaign. If you read last month’s blog, The Know, Like, Trust Funnel, you know you’ve successfully moved the prospect down the funnel from the know stage to the like/trust stage. Excellent! Depending on the initial form, you may also find out useful demographic information about your potential customers such as location, age, job title etc which can then be used for segmentation.

Cons

Not everyone who lands on your gated content page will complete the form and download the content. Many will just move on. Would these individuals have gone on to become prospects/customers if the content hadn’t been gated? We’ll never know for sure. Making sure you ask for the minimum amount of information you need to nurture a lead is a good way to ensure you’re capturing the most leads possible.

Bear in mind, however that quantity of leads does not necessarily mean quality. Although you may be driving targeted direct traffic to this download, if it is on your website it’s also visible to all users so the individual may not be your ideal customer profile. This may mean that some lead details will need to be stored but flagged as not priority individuals for your marketing & sales team to contact.

To gate or not to gate? That is the question

So, this brings us on to the question of whether you should gate a particular piece of content or not. Luckily there are some ‘rules of thumb’ that you can follow when deciding whether or not to gate content. Firstly, consider the type and length of content that you’ve produced. Certain types lend themselves better to gating – longer form content such as e-books are perfect, whereas standard blogs for example should almost never be gated. Think too about the stage of the customer journey, the further down the funnel they are, the more likely it is that they will be happy to enter their personal details. Gating content early in the marketing funnel can scare away prospects so having un-gated content at this stage can improve your brand’s visibility and enhance your credibility. Make sure your gated content is relevant for prospects who are near the buying stage; this may mean the content is more in-depth or specialist.

What types of content should be gated?

If it could be considered as ‘Premium content’ then it could be gated. A perfect example would be an e-book or guide. This will be a longer length, seen by the prospect as valuable, and offer an in-depth answer to the question they want answered. E-books will also give you brand authority and build up trust with your audience. Similarly, whitepapers will help your brand become a trusted ‘industry expert’ on a topic.

Don’t just stick to the tried and tested though. You could gate templates, in-depth how-to guides, webinars, a free trial of your product, checklists, free consultations, analytical reports into your industry. Get creative to come up with something original for your particular industry.

Gated content best practises

Make sure your gated content ticks these boxes and you won’t go far wrong.

Create a strong headline to ensure that prospects don’t click away. Never over promise! It’s no good offering an in-depth guide if they download it to find out it is 2 pages long.
Make sure the title explains exactly what they are going to get. A spammy title will lead to disappointment and a lack of trust in your brand.
Ensure the content is valuable and relevant to your audience.
Decide what sort of customer information should be collected. Only ask for data that will be meaningful to you for future segmentation so you don’t deter people from completing the form.
Finally, build a strong landing page to host the offer. Make sure you create a strong headline, write compelling copy, and generate an easy to complete form.

How to use the details captured

You’ve created the gated content, it’s getting noticed, and the email addresses are piling up. What next? Make sure you segment your email lists, using any demographics you captured. Follow up campaigns can then be targeted via demographics or be based on your existing customer personas. As with any marketing strategy, measuring your success is extremely important. This data will help you understand your audience better and improve your content strategy.

What’s next

Gating content is a critical aspect of a content marketing strategy used to generate the leads that your business needs to grow. When done well, gating content can benefit both the individual and the business, and the key for successful gating is to produce high quality content for which your ideal prospect is willing to trade their personal information. How often you produce gated content and how much of your content should be gated very much depends on your industry and the size of your business but often less is more. If you’re new to gated content, we recommend that you start with quarterly downloads. Saving gated content for just a few carefully chosen and well-targeted and correctly positioned pieces will mean you’re soon capturing valuable leads that ultimately convert into happy customers.

Want some help with using gated content for your lead generation campaigns? Get in touch. Give us a call on 01392 796 702.

Gated vs non-gated content and how to use it for lead generation

Posted on 4 January 202222 August 2023 by dukadmin

What exactly is gated content?

Pros and cons of gated content

Pros

Cons

To gate or not to gate? That is the question

What types of content should be gated?

Gated content best practises

Make sure your gated content ticks these boxes and you won’t go far wrong.

Create a strong headline to ensure that prospects don’t click away. Never over promise! It’s no good offering an in-depth guide if they download it to find out it is 2 pages long.
Make sure the title explains exactly what they are going to get. A spammy title will lead to disappointment and a lack of trust in your brand.
Ensure the content is valuable and relevant to your audience.
Decide what sort of customer information should be collected. Only ask for data that will be meaningful to you for future segmentation so you don’t deter people from completing the form.
Finally, build a strong landing page to host the offer. Make sure you create a strong headline, write compelling copy, and generate an easy to complete form.

How to use the details captured

What’s next

Want some help with using gated content for your lead generation campaigns? Get in touch. Give us a call on 0345 241 3038.

Covering All Bases: How Air Marketing’s Approach Solves The Know-Like-Trust-Buy Funnel

Posted on 8 December 202120 October 2022 by Hannah Sanders

The know-like-trust-buy funnel is a fairly common term in the world of sales and marketing—but what exactly is it? And why is it so important?

Essentially, the funnel details each vital stage that a potential consumer/business goes through before purchasing a product or service from your business. Within the concept are four fundamental touch points—each of which should be treated with equal and careful consideration to achieve the end goal of a successful customer journey and sale.

At the top of the funnel, we have ‘know’—the point at which a person discovers you, or your offering for the very first time. Whatever method this may be—social media, PPC, traditional advertising, etc—any experienced salesperson will vouch that these early impressions are critical in ultimately generating revenue further down the line.

The second stage is ‘like’. However you position yourself and whatever messaging you use needs to resonate with your target market, to the point they’re willing to delve further once their attention has been caught.

Next, we have ‘trust’. We live in an era where people have learned to be more and more sceptical about who and where they’re making a purchase from. This wariness has placed an even greater importance on the trust stage of the funnel, particularly for less established and emerging brands trying to break into a sector for the first time.

This is also the point where you really need to position yourself as an expert within your field. What can you provide this person with that gives you an edge over your competitors? If you don’t have that, or you aren’t clearly communicating it, odds are they’ll find someone who is.

Once you’ve ticked all of the above boxes, your customer should be ready to ‘buy’, or at least extremely close to it. We often see companies falling into the trap of thinking once a person reaches this stage, their business is secured—but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Despite all of the hard work that has gone in prior, it only takes a split-second for a person to be turned off by a bad sales experience, which is why it’s crucial to have an expert team on-hand to get things over the line at this final stage.

Streamlining the funnel with Air Marketing and Marketing Services

Naturally, making the funnel as smooth a journey as possible for the consumer is not only going to benefit in terms of this one sale, but a pleasant and memorable buying experience is exactly what is required to build a base of loyal, repeat customers in the long-term.

To successfully achieve this, both the marketing and sales elements of the experience need to work perfectly in tandem, complimenting each other throughout each stage and designed in a way that from that very first moment, the journey is pushing towards that last hurdle of a successful sale.

One of the most common problems we see with businesses is a struggle to combine both the marketing and sales elements of the funnel. They may be able to capture the person’s attention and their story is well-received, however, when it comes to trying to convert that interest into the all-important ‘buy’ stage, things begin to unravel.

Our Marketing services team, specialise in marketing with a sales attitude—producing high-impact lead-generation campaigns and creative marketing strategies, to seamlessly and successfully deliver this entire buying process to brands.

Outsourcing all elements of the consumer journey to one supplier doesn’t just save you time and resources in terms of communication and coordination between separate parties, it ensures each touchpoint is better aligned due to it all being built and handled by a single entity.

This massively reduces the chances of mistakes or drop-offs due to misunderstandings and incoherent messaging, and allows a strategy to be altered and optimised in a far more efficient manner than if you were having to arrange with two or three different contacts.

From a sales perspective, being able to share our input immediately in the initial stages provides a massive benefit, as it allows us to truly ensure that by the time the consumer/business reaches the final part of the funnel, they’re actually ready to buy as all messaging before has been tailored specifically towards this moment.

By operating this way, we are able to constantly knowledge share from both a sales and marketing perspective, while possessing the, often vital, ability to act with agility and deliver genuine ROI for our clients.

The results

A recent campaign with one of our clients who operate within the SaaS industry saw us take this two-pronged approach with Air and Air Marketing services.

The client, who helps UK businesses apply for Series A funding and prepare for periods of growth through an expertly-led training programme, found that while their offering was indeed incredibly strong, it was difficult to market and they weren’t getting the conversions they had hoped.

In our collaborative approach, our Marketing services team crafted a full marketing strategy that combined email marketing, social media marketing and user journey consultancy. As the prospective customers shared details of becoming marketing qualified leads (MQLs), all the vital information was fed back to the Air Marketing SDR team, who were then instantly able to pursue and convert the most qualified leads.

Over a three month period, this process meant we were able to deliver all the required benchmarks that allowed our client to run their next cohort. The campaign’s results included:

40% average email open rate
+14 marketing qualified leads
58,000 reach on Twitter
300% increase in website traffic from email
20% increase in direct website traffic
95% increase in website traffic from social
5% minutes on average spent watching video content on Twitter

Want to learn more about how we work as a full-stack marketing agency to optimise the customer journey? We’d love to chat. Give us a call on 0345 241 3038 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

Outsourced Marketing And Sales: How Air Marketing Succeed In The Know-Like-Trust-Buy Funnel

Posted on 1 December 20213 August 2023 by dukadmin

In the simplest possible terms, the know-like-trust-buy funnel is a reference to each stage involved in a person’s journey towards buying a product or service. Each segment represents a fundamental factor that ultimately combines and leads to a successful sale.

The first step, know, is all about discovery and brand awareness—someone getting to know your business for the first time. No matter which industry you operate within, initial impressions are often make-or-break, so developing a strong and memorable marketing strategy is an absolute must.

For people to begin progressing through the funnel, your impact must be both instant and meaningful—without this, you run the risk of simply fading into the noise.

Next is like. You’ve caught the eye of a potential customer, now you need to give them a reason to stick around. This is where having a clearly-defined story and ethos for your brand proves invaluable.

Why should this person choose you over one of your competitors? The consumer needs to hold some kind of affinity towards not just your product, but to your organisation and what you stand for.

The third stage is trust—it’s here you need to form a meaningful connection with the person which means authenticity becomes key. It’s also at this point you must be able to clearly convey that you’re an expert within your field, and that your knowledge or offering is superior to those around you.

Finally, we reach the stage of the funnel where the consumer is ready to buy—even at this last stage, there is still much to be done. Given the work that’s already gone in by this point, it can be easy to overlook and see this final hurdle as a given.

The buying process should be as straightforward as possible—you’ve brought them this far and the last thing you want is for a complicated checkout or signing-off process to throw a spanner in the works at the very last minute.

How Air Marketing streamline the customer journey

Right throughout the journey we see essential touchpoints contribute to the process from both a marketing and sales perspective. When both of these elements are properly aligned, the customer journey becomes significantly smoother, which in-turn will naturally benefit your business in terms of both resource and ultimately, revenue.

Ensuring both elements are optimised to truly complement each other is something we have found a lot of businesses struggle with. Whether it be due to a lack of resource or knowhow, many organisations we’ve encountered have had notable gaps where their sales strategy should intertwine with their marketing strategy.

That is why, since 2018, Air Marketing, who are experts in outsourced sales, we’re able to create high-value campaigns that harmoniously blend both marketing and sales.

The benefits of outsourcing your whole sales funnel to one supplier

When it comes to the know-like-trust-buy funnel, our Marketing services department specialises and flourishes in the initial know and like stages. Our approach to marketing hones in on creating genuine ROI, meaning we begin building the foundations for eventual sales right from the very beginning.

We craft creative campaigns that help grow brand awareness, reputation and demand, meaning by the time the consumer reaches the latter stages of the funnel—trust and buy—a huge chunk of the work has already been done, and we can easily hand things over to the Sales department team, who are able to use their in-depth knowledge of sales generation to consistently convert and deliver genuine results.

That ‘handing over’ portion of the funnel is so often where customers are lost. Even if you have the best marketing strategy in the world, that work can be undone in an instant if a separate sales team isn’t on exactly the same page—or vice versa.

A slight miscommunication or misunderstanding as the consumer enters the final stages of the journey can be detrimental. Unsurprisingly, those errors occur far more frequently if different parts of the funnel sit with different suppliers who have minimal knowledge of one another’s operation.

The results we’ve seen

This collaborative approach was something we utilised in a recent campaign for one of our clients within the SaaS industry. Specialising in helping UK businesses apply for Series A funding and prepare for periods of growth through intense, expertly-led training programmes, they had found it difficult to market and sell their services.

Within the Air Marketing Group, we formulated and implemented a full marketing and sales strategy, which combined SDR outreach, email marketing, social media marketing and CRM user journey consultancy.

We ensured all messaging was consistent across social and digital channels, generating high-value leads through an education-focused email campaign, targeted content marketing and HubSpot integration. The results of these efforts were then immediately fed back to the Air Marketing team, whose specialist expertise in sales meant we were able to capitalise and convert the necessary numbers that meant our client could run their next cohort.

These results included:

40% average email open rate
+14 marketing qualified leads
58,000 reach on Twitter
300% increase in website traffic from email
20% increase in direct website traffic
95% increase in website traffic from social
5% minutes on average spent watching video content on Twitter

Want to learn more about how Air Marketing Group work as a full-stack marketing agency to optimise the customer journey? We’d love to chat. Give us a call on 0345 241 3038.

The 5 key marketing metrics you should be measuring

Posted on 19 October 20217 July 2023 by dukadmin

Marketing isn’t all about writing snappy subject lines, designing eye-catching graphics and crafting compelling copy. Underlying the creative, you need to have solid foundations to measure its effectiveness.

There’s no point having a clever campaign that doesn’t deliver results. We focus our marketing efforts on demand generation. We apply a sales attitude to our marketing in order to generate results.

So for us, it’s imperative to gather and understand key data for our clients. Knowledge is power, and the right metrics can provide essential details to boost business and increase ROI. That data can arm us and our clients with powerful insights to inform business decisions.

We don’t use fluffy metrics. We won’t try to wow you with amazing charts that look good but are rather meaningless. We focus on information that is actionable. We realise how important it is to track and learn from the data that can enable your business to reach its goals.

The three key metrics that every business should focus on:

Leads
Opportunities
Conversions

Identifying the importance of these factors and how to generate them is fundamental for business success. But how?

Our 5 recommended key marketing metrics:

1. Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)

“A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead that the marketing team has deemed more likely to become a customer compared to others” according to HubSpot.

That qualified piece of data (the MQL) is really valuable to a business. The marketing team can determine how and where the person has engaged with the business’ content. Be it a particular webpage they’ve visited, email they’ve opened, social post they’ve shared, video they’ve watched, event they’ve attended or campaign they’ve clicked on.

The marketing team can work out which leads make the best quality prospects by interpreting their data. Say the business has specified that their ideal clients meet specific demographic criteria, or have particular problems or pain points to solve. Those factors can be identified by a lead’s interactions. That information is extremely valuable for sales teams to act upon and nurture.

2. Email marketing

Emails provide a great way to build relationships with customers and potential customers. Discovering how your customer has reacted to the email they’ve received is very telling. Did they open it, delete it, read it, click on a link within it or unsubscribe from the list? Delving deep into email analytics will help you to test and make calculated adjustments to engage your audience better.

3. Digital content

Publishing digital content is a two-way street. It’s not enough to just set it live. You need content that grabs people’s attention and prompts them to act. That action could be sharing your content to help others find it (yes please!), commenting on it, downloading it, watching it or reading it, for example.

Knowing what people have done with your content is incredibly useful. It can inform future content decisions and it can identify potential customers. It tells you the key areas in which to invest time and money for the best ROI.

4. Social interactions

As we mentioned earlier, we don’t do fluffy metrics. The number of likes and follows on your social channels are not the be all and end all. You want content that makes people stop scrolling when they see your post and engage with it.

A share from a follower is a form of endorsement. A comment means that your content motivated somebody to write something about it. Similarly, submitting a rating or review has taken up somebody’s time. That’s time that they’ve spent interacting with your brand. Knowing which social posts have garnered those reactions is powerful information.

5. Website analytics

Tracking website data with Google Analytics or other packages is imperative. We gain valuable insights from understanding who is visiting the site, where they’re coming from and what they’re looking at. For us, time spent on site is a key metric. If customers are spending time looking at a range of website content, we know that we’re providing relevant information that is valuable for the audience.

Bounce rates can highlight areas that need attention. If people are clicking away from a page without interacting with its content, changes need to be made.

The importance of measuring marketing ROI

Data takes the guesswork out of marketing. It shows you which aspects are delivering results. That information proves which areas of spend are providing good ROI.

Tracking and collating marketing metrics doesn’t have to be laborious. We’re a HubSpot Gold Partner, so we recommend using this powerful tool to monitor marketing metrics. There’s a variety of reports that can be set up easily to provide amazing insights. You can attribute leads, deals and revenue to social posts for example. You’ll get a clear view of all marketing activity in one place.

If you don’t use HubSpot, we advise tracking data in a spreadsheet, or using another great tool on the market. Monitor stats regularly to understand patterns of behaviour, set benchmarks and reflect on performance. That knowledge is extremely powerful for businesses and can make the difference between reaching your revenue goals or not

Want to know more about marketing metrics and setting-up performance tracking? We’re here to help. Call us today on 0345 241 3038.

LIVE Roundtable: Achieving Sales & Marketing Alignment

Posted on 4 October 202120 October 2022 by Helen Young

We hosted our sixth roundtable as part of our NEW annual content series, around setting up an outbound sales function. Get ideas, inspiration and advice from our panel of experts, who share and discuss their own experiences and open the floor to questions from the live audience.

We’ll be going live every month until March 2022, chatting about all topics relating to outbound sales and the stages of building a team.

Agenda

We answered questions around (but not limited to):

The need to work in partnership with one another
Creating an environment that integrates well
Processes
CRM and tech stack
Sharing well-defined objectives
Implementing a feedback loop for better alignment throughout your organisation
Evaluating the results, and adjusting your strategy to respond to your customer
Celebrating success

Host

Owen Richards – Founder & CEO at Air Marketing

Speakers

Neil Clarke – Commercial Director at Air Marketing

Gareth Mapp – Director of Sales & Marketing at Software Solved

Louis Fernandes – Vice President, Sales, EMEA at Uberall

Who is it for?

Founders, Sales Leaders, and Revenue Leaders.

The benefits of working with a HubSpot Solutions partner: getting the maximum value out of your HubSpot investment!

Posted on 24 September 20217 July 2023 by dukadmin

HubSpot is a powerful platform that delivers valuable results, but it takes expertise to get to grips with it – like anything complex and feature-rich. For organisations that want to explore their options before jumping in feet first, free HubSpot is a great way to kick things off and allows you to try out some of the platform’s features with no upfront cost. And maybe that’s more than you need right now, but if you want the full functionality and the full benefits HubSpot has to offer, you’ll need to invest in a paid subscription.

If you decide to go down the route of a paid subscription, there are many CRM options available: each with a different feature set, cost, and level of expertise required to implement them. HubSpot split this functionality into Marketing, Sales, Service, CMS and Operations.

For example, HubSpot’s Sales Hub is designed specifically for sales teams looking to drive more revenue from existing customers through lead nurturing campaigns that map out multiple stages of contact between buyer and seller. The Sales Activity Hub provides a centralised view of all sales activity across your team with detailed reports on opportunities and pipelines. The result is enhanced insight and a closer understanding of your customers.

So if I can buy directly from HubSpot, why would I work with a partner?

Money will buy all the functionality you need, but without the knowledge and experience to properly manage it, you won’t get the most out of your investment. Working with a HubSpot Solutions Partner is the best way to improve your marketing engagement and ultimately increase conversion rates. An experienced partner will create custom solutions that will help you get more leads, convert those leads into customers, and turn them into long-term clients.

All the support you need, from implementation and strategy to live campaigns

A HubSpot Solutions partner can offer you that additional level of expertise and assistance when implementing your marketing strategy. That means looking at all the teams that need access to HubSpot and rolling out onboarding and training that ensures everyone is engaged and understands the processes for getting the most out of it. They will have experience in the change management aspects of implementing a new system and can work with you however you want – whether that’s providing advice, strategic direction, or creating and delivering the strategy for you. That means you get professional assistance with content, strategy, and implementation, ensuring your team uses HubSpot successfully.

Save time and empower your sales and marketing teams!

Working directly with a HubSpot Solutions provider can also save valuable time for your in-house development teams to focus on what they do best, while bringing excitement back into work by being more creative about their approach to marketing campaigns. This is hugely empowering for teams and is the perfect starting point for marketing and sales alignment. Because HubSpot’s reports and analytics provide such a detailed and accurate picture of what works well (and what doesn’t), you can see where you need to optimise at any stage of the funnel.

Access a depth of experience and get up and running right away

A solution partner’s additional (reassuring benefit) is that they will typically have an existing customer base across multiple sectors and draw on their depth of experience in helping customers fast track getting started. Meaning you can get up and running efficiently without the need to build extensive knowledge from scratch.

In a recent episode of ON AIR: With Owen hosted by Air Marketing’s Founder & CEO, Owen Richards, we were are joined by Caleb Buscher – Senior Channel Account Manager (EMEA Region) at HubSpot, to discuss how to make the most out of HubSpot as a revenue growth business tool.

We explained how we’ve had first-hand experience of the difference HubSpot can make to a business: “We have had some truly inspiring conversations with clients who had zero experience of using a joined-up marketing automation CRM tool and now have a newfound love for HubSpot and what it can do for their business. Our work is about helping our customers energise the way they approach marketing, giving their business a single point of truth and empowering them to deliver better customer experiences that fuel loyalty and growth.”

Need some help getting started?

HubSpot is an incredibly powerful platform, but it’s not the only one out there. There are other great solutions available, and we’re happy to work with any of them and apply the same principles to deliver precisely what you need. If you want to discover how HubSpot could be a game-changer for your business, we’d be happy to guide you. Equally, if you’d like to talk about any aspect of your marketing strategy, get in touch today on 0345 241 3083.

Sales And Marketing Alignment: Working As Equals Drives Better Revenue Generation

Posted on 22 September 202120 October 2022 by Helen Young

A sales and marketing alignment strategy is more than just mandating two teams work together; it’s a finely-tuned mechanism that drives better sales for your company. To implement a successful alignment strategy, you need to change to tackle behavioural change, culture change and leverage technology and processes that drive mutual respect, understanding and genuine collaboration between sales and marketing professionals.

Louis Fernandes, VP of Sales at Uberall and SaaS marketing and sales thought leader, talks about the need to work in partnership: “In B2B sales organisations, behaviours need to change; it’s not about marketing serving sales or sales ruling the roost. Sales and marketing need the same drivers; that’s how you build an authentic environment for success where all functions work towards a common goal and deliver revenue generation. It’s that simple! It’s all about working in partnership, I’ve worked in both marketing and sales, and I’d strongly advocate for congruence of goals that we work towards together, where we’re measured in the same way. It has to be a meeting of equals. And profitability will certainly follow.”

If sales and marketing aren’t working together towards a common goal, it’s impossible to maximise your inbound and outbound strategies; and improve your overall understanding of your market and customers. The key to this process is sharing information and promoting transparent ways of working. For example, marketing and sales must understand where the budget goes and what that activity drives. Without this visibility, they’ll likely misinterpret their spending, leading to wasted money and effort and negative perceptions. The end game is teamwork and trust, investing time and resources in a focused and efficient way. Sales teams feel far more supported in their efforts, and marketers feel invested in sales follow-up processes and accountable for optimisation throughout the entire journey.

Creating an environment that integrates well:

Putting the right processes in place means that you can move quickly and efficiently as a team. Choosing the right tools and having an effective marketing and sales tech stack allows you to create an environment that permeates and integrates well, so everyone feels comfortable and supported.

Historically, marketers used their own methods of tracking conversions and determining profitability, while sales teams focused on relationships and closing. Sales teams could email contact lists and make recommendations to the marketing team based on sales success or where’d they achieved cut-through. And while this strategy was solid for quick results, it naturally excluded many profitable or high-converting prospects in the pipeline. It was harder to measure, and many implementations required high levels of collaboration and coordination between teams.

Businesses with a more holistic view of their marketplace are more likely to succeed. With the insights afforded by a high-performing CRM and tech stack, it’s far easier to shift focus to solving customers’ problems rather than trialing a range of products and services for traction and success. It’s for this reason Account-Based Marketing strategies see such a solid return on investment. It’s often the first concerted effort to align marketing with sales and pull together to achieve the same vision.

Our Marketing services team are demand generation specialists, and experts in optimising the sales-marketing relationship. HubSpot Gold Partners are hyper-focused on using the platform’s leading technology to deliver more for customers. Associate Director, Verity Studley-Wootton, said, “The most significant benefit of bringing marketing and sales touchpoints into one powerful system is the ability to create a single version of the truth in a business. By doing this, we uncover a far clearer picture of customer behaviours and the opportunity to understand better and ultimately successfully market to them and convert them into happy, loyal customers.”

Create a list of objectives that you can agree upon, and action them:

Having well-defined objectives is a prerequisite to successful alignment. However, it’s not enough to have goals in mind; you need a plan to deliver. Talk to your sales team to find out what questions they get asked by your customers. From there, you can analyse sales processes alongside campaign performance and integrate any improvements that would come quickly and easily to your sales team. Once you start a conversation with your ideal customers, you can build consistency and brand into the customer journey by empowering your sales team with the assets and content they need to convince prospects, solve their pain points and close deals. And this is where you can map what’s required, at what point, and assign ownership.

Implement a feedback loop for better alignment throughout your organisation:

The key to getting buy-in for your sales and marketing alignment strategy is to give your entire organisation visibility of the implementation process, so customer service, IT and operational units can mobilise to support.

Implement a feedback loop. Tell people in the business what you’re going to do, why it matters and share the results. This way, they’ll know what they can expect, and you’ll see if you need to make any changes. When you share why this is important and how it will make the entire business more profitable, perceptions change. When you share how it will improve your customer’s experience and drive growth, accessing the technical and administrative support, you need to improve processes around automation, customer service, and CRM suddenly becomes a much easier sell.

Evaluate the results, then adjust your strategy to respond to your customer:

Once you’ve put together a strategy, it can be easy to get complacent and assume that it’s working just because you see traffic and sales. However, it’s essential to ensure you’re still getting the results you want by regularly checking your analytics and sales numbers.

The absolute joy of alignment happens when you win! Marketing and sales teams can celebrate success together. Equally, when something falls flat, the learning opportunities are so much more valuable in a naturally joined-up environment, so you fail fast and, hopefully, rarely.

Air Marketing Group has been working hard since 2016 to address this need and help deliver results-driven marketing that better aligns with sales goals. With an increasing number of clients unsure of how to run aligned marketing campaigns and turning to us for expert advice, we saw an obvious gap in the market. Today, we rely on the combined expertise from both services withing the group to deliver the best possible results for clients.

If you’d like to talk more about driving better sales and marketing alignment in your business, we can help. Get in touch today.

Are you ready for social listening? From a brand and personal perspective.

Posted on 19 August 202120 October 2022 by dukadmin

Having regular content going out on your social media sites isn’t enough anymore – you need to be tracking, analysing and responding to conversations relevant to your company and industry. Enter social listening. By listening to your audience and target market, you can start to make changes and personalisations that really convert.

Social listening isn’t to be confused with social monitoring however. Social monitoring is used to look back over the last period, gathering information, focusing on detail and measuring success, serving as the baseline and bare minimum for any social marketing efforts, whereas social listening takes that information and digs a little deeper, allowing you to look forward and at the bigger picture. Social listening is a process that seeks to surface insights from listening data (much of the same data captured in social monitoring activities) that inform broader marketing decisions – think audience/market analysis, competitive intelligence, uncovering trends, etc.

Did you know that…

Customers who feel engaged by companies on social media will spend up to 40% more with them than other customers? (Sprout Social)
79% of consumers expect brands to respond within a day of reaching out over social media, but average brand response rates across all industries are lower than 25%? (Sprout Social)
When surveying 264 marketers across the globe, nearly 40% of participants desired more knowledge about their audiences? (Socialbakers)

For B2C companies, social listening allows you to understand your direct customers. Whereas for B2B companies, it allows you to understand your client’s customers. This gives you an opportunity to lead with a broader view of what the general consumer is doing. You can then provide thought leadership pieces and posts from a perspective that a prospect or client may not have considered. This sends the message that you are investing in their customers too, and that you’re paying attention, giving you the edge over your competitors.

Using your company’s socials also isn’t enough anymore. People buy from people so it’s crucial that you engage with your target audience from a personal perspective as a face of your business, showing thought leadership and creativity.

It can be overwhelming if this isn’t something you’ve thought about before, so here are a few top tips to get you started:

Make sure your personal and company profiles are optimised
Post regularly and consistently before you start
Monitor your channels for mentions of your brand, competitors, products, and related keywords
Analyse your findings and think about how you can use it to shape your future posts – you may find that this information starts to re-shape your brand and tone of voice

Integrating MarTech (Marketing Technology)

Integrating a useful MarTech tool to help you listen to online consumer conversations not only makes the job easier, but takes up less of your resources so you can concentrate on strategy development.

3 MarTech tools to make social listening easier:

1. HubSpot’s social media marketing tool helps you prioritise your social interactions and connect with all the right people. You can build marketing campaigns, share content like blog posts and landing pages, automatically share content to various social channels, and discover the best times to post.

You can also create custom keyword monitoring streams, and trigger email alerts so your sales team knows when your prospects mention you – perfect for combining your marketing and sales efforts.

The tool also allows you to monitor your performance across all social channels and keep track of the number of visits and leads you receive.

2. Sprout Social offers a social media management software to offer solutions that will ultimately improve your social media interactions with customers and prospects. With the help of the Sprout Platform, you can access in-depth data analytics to inform strategic decisions, streamline and scale your engagement efforts, publish content and campaigns, and, most importantly, uncover trends and insights through social listening to drive strategic changes.

The platform uses real-time brand monitoring to track direct messages and brand-specific keywords. It also offers advanced social listening to help you notice emerging trends and influencers.

3. Falcon.io’s new listening addition to its platform is great for integrating social listening into your strategy. From AI smart alerts to social inbox integrations, you get access to insights from across 100 million online sources helping you become better at listening!

So, we’ve explained WHY you need to consider social listening as a key marketing tactic, now you just need to start! At Air Marketing, we can integrate social listening into your marketing strategy and execute our suggested activity on both your company and personal social media channels, helping you to connect to your audience on a deeper level for leads that convert. If you’d like to talk more about developing your social listening strategy, get in touch today on 0808 503 8978.

Category: Marketing