justinjslone

[justinjslone]

3 of the Most Successful B2B Social Media Campaigns

You've heard it time and time again: Every successful business needs a robust and engaging social media presence. And you’re probably already using social media in your marketing — but are you actually using it effectively?

Most of the time, B2C brands get all the attention on social media, but B2B social media use may surprise you. It's easy to fall into the perception that B2B marketing is boring and unfit for social media and, ultimately, many B2B brand gets overlooked (or under looked). But this is wrong!

Social media is an extremely effective tool for B2B marketers because it can help you:

Increase brand awareness

Humanize B2B companies

Establish your company as a thought leader

Connect with prospects, clients and industry influencers

Increase lead conversion rate

Don't believe me? Let's take a look at three brands with the most successful social media campaigns for B2B:

1. Drift

Drift, the first conversational marketing provider, has always been incredibly vocal about the care, effort and focus they put into their customers — and they show that care through their engaging use of social media.

Facebook Tagline: “Drift is changing the way businesses buy from businesses.”

Twitter Tagline: “Connect your sales teams with your future customers NOW.”

Campaign Strategy: By using a mix of questions, quotes, images, videos and links, Drift creates posts that are relatable and easy to digest by their audience. They frequently showcase their own customers in their social posts and shares, including this retweet that commends a user for their creative use of the Drift bot:

Additionally, they always take the time to respond to comments, questions and reviews left by their followers.

Why They Work: As Drift puts it, one of the core principles that directs everything they do as a company is to be “customer-driven, not company-driven.” By using their social media to emphasize their care for the customer, respond to reviews, offer advice for troubleshooting and optimizing their product and engage with both customers and prospects, they’ve infused their entire company philosophy into their social engagements.

In other words, Drift’s social strategy works because it’s:

Engaging

Human

Customer-focused

Brand-consistent

2. WeWork

WeWork is a creative company that provides shared workspaces and business services for entrepreneurs, freelancers, startups, small businesses and large enterprises. As they say on their website, “Community is our catalyst,” so it should come as a shock to nobody that they’ve used their social channels to build an authentic community of like-minded people.

Facebook Tagline: “WeWork is the platform for creators. We provide beautiful workspace, an inspiring community, and business services to thousands of members worldwide.”

LinkedIn Tagline: “Make a life, not just a living. Share your stories using #wework.”

Campaign Strategy: Focusing greatly on insights, tips and case studies, WeWork’s social posts offer 30-second educational videos demonstrating how to maximize your office space, beautiful images of their customers’ workspaces and a mix of non-product-related motivational posts like this one: 

Why They Work: Similar to Drift’s, WeWork’s social presence is less about their pushing their product and more about spreading their mission and helping their customers grow. They encourage their customers and prospects to engage by sharing their stories with the hashtag #wework, creating a thriving community based on shared values. As Michael Fitzsimmons, WeWork’s VP of Creative Strategy, puts it, the content on their social channels “represent[s] real challenges that a lot of businesses deal with on a daily basis."

In other words, WeWork’s social strategy works because it’s:

Visual

Educational

Community-focused

Brand-consistent

3. IBM

International Business Machines Corporation is a global information technology company that provides hardware, software, cloud-based services and cognitive computing to businesses. IBM has become somewhat notorious for their powerful social presence, and after taking a quick tour of their social media channels, it’s easy to see why.

Facebook Tagline: “Learn more about AI, cloud, data, security and systems and discover what’s possible. https://ibm.com”

Twitter Tagline: “Together with our clients, we're using technologies like AI, cloud, blockchain & IoT to transform business, industries and the world. Let’s put smart to work.”

Campaign Strategy: Using a mix of high-quality photography, videos, employee profiles, trending hashtags and more, IBM showcases their brand values and mission in every aspect of their social media campaigns. They often share interviews with their own employees, adding a human element to their brand, and they build their social community by emphasizing shared values and “togetherness.” Their campaigns are always highly unique, engaging and reflective of their mission, such as the post below:

Why They Work: IBM’s social strategy stands out because it connects each post with their brand values and mission, frequently tailors its content around current events and other trending topics, showcases the people, processes and progress that make up their company and creates a compelling brand identity that encourages users to join their community. As they say on their website, “IBMers believe in progress — that the application of intelligence, reason and science can improve business, society and the human condition,” and everything they post on social reflects this mission.

In other words, IBM’s social strategy works because it’s:

Timely/relevant

Eclectic

Values-based

Brand-consistent

The Takeaway

Even in the oversaturated social channels, each of these companies have managed to build social presences that truly stand out. All of their social content is relevant to their ideal buyers, consistent with their brand identity, reflective of their people and true to their values.

Images and video, of course, are more important than they’ve ever been, and each brand includes a healthy dose of these elements in their social campaigns as well. Lastly, by taking the time to engage with their followers and act more like a human than a business, they’ve been able to connect with their followers on a one-to-one level.

Keep in mind, it's not about B2B or B2C, but rather H2H, human-to-human, marketing. At the end of the day, whether your products or services are used by individuals or businesses, you're still selling to people — and including that human element in your social campaigns is what really makes an impact.

[justinjslone]

Boost The Value Of Your Content With These 7 Promotional Strategies

Content marketing is a key component of the inbound methodology — but if the content you’re creating is never consumed, shared or downloaded by your audience, then it won’t make any significant impact on your marketing goals.

“There are three main phases of marketing that should always be occurring,” says Guido Bartolacci, New Breed’s Head of Demand Generation Marketing. Those three phases are:

Planning: During this stage, you develop your strategy, including the amount and types of content you need to create.

Production: During this stage, you actually create that content, which could include writing, filming, designing and more.

Promotion: During this stage, you push your content out to different channels to get as many eyes on it as possible.

In this blog post, we’ll focus on the promotion stage of content marketing. We’re going to use blog content as an example for the many ways you can promote that content, but these strategies can be adapted for premium content offers, videos, guides and more.

7 Promotional Strategies to Amplify Your Content

Search Engine Optimization for Organic Growth

When you publish a new blog post, the first step to putting it in front of your audience is making sure it’s SEO-optimized. When Google crawls and indexes your page, it’s more likely to be found through organic searches.

However, getting your site indexed can take anywhere from four days to four weeks, and its performance could dip over time if you’re not consistently optimizing it for its relevance, timeliness and keywords. That means SEO strategy is a type of passive promotion, so you shouldn’t rely on it as your sole promotional technique.

“[Getting indexed by Google] is just going to happen and will likely grow over time,” says Guido. “But you need to work on promoting your content outside of that as well.”

If you manage and publish your content on HubSpot, for example, then it automatically gets added to your site map and indexed by Google, so there’s no additional work you need to do outside of simply clicking “publish.”

Email Blasts to Engaged Subscribers

According to this study by Campaign Monitor, you’re six times more likely to get click-throughs from an email than you are from a social channel like Twitter.

Why? Because email subscribers are already engaged with your brand.

“Ideally, these people have subscribed to your blog to learn more about who you are and to be educated by the content you’re creating,” explains Guido. “So you need to get your content in front of them first.”

Again, marketing automation tools like HubSpot can help you automate this process, and built-in personalization tools can help you retain that human touch.

Social Posts to Meet Prospects Where They Are

From LinkedIn to Instagram, social media sites offer a powerful channel for engaging with prospects, humanizing your brand and promoting your content.

Share your content on every social channel relevant to your personas. Almost always, those channels will include Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, but it ultimately depends on the unique online behaviors of your ideal buyers.

Social posting can also be automated using tools like HubSpot. “But if you start connecting your marketing automation platform to multiple social accounts, then you’ll start to see the same post go out from multiple team members,” says Guido, “which can look a little funny. So if you’re looking to get a bit more engagement and personalize your brand, then manually writing and posting on social has its benefits as well.”

Additionally, social groups exist for almost every area of business, and promoting your content within these groups can be valuable because they make up a more targeted, contextualized audience.

“The last thing with social that can be super beneficial is tagging influencers,” says Guido. Tagging influencers and encouraging them to share your content can be made more feasible by creating content like:

Round-up posts

Influencer profiles or interviews

Product reviews

Content Syndication to Reach New Audiences

Asking other leaders in your space to republish your blog content on their website is a great way to expose your content to new and interested audiences.

“New Breed gets our blog content syndicated on OpenView, which is super helpful for us,” says Guido. “We use a canonical tag which tells Google that our post should rank — so we don’t experience any issues with duplicate content.”

This strategy has mutual benefits for each company because they get to post a fresh piece of content on their website without much effort on their part, and we get to promote our subject matter expertise to a new audience.

However, without the ability to use a canonical tag, you could run into issues with duplicate content and have your republished piece outranking the original blog page. This problem tends to arise when you’re posting on websites that allow user-generated content like Quora or Medium.

Avoid this by altering your post slightly when you post to websites like these. Instead of republishing the full post, change the title slightly, condense the content and end with a teaser link to view the full post on your website.

Guest Posting for Mutual Promotional Benefit

“Guest posting in itself is a great way to amplify your brand,” says Guido, “and one of the things you can do is write a guest post in a way that promotes another piece of content you have to drive readers to your website.”

For example, New Breed could publish a post about SaaS marketing on an industry-related website, and then link to our guide, “The Definitive Guide to SaaS Marketing.”

Remember, though, guest posting should offer mutual benefit for both parties, so you can also solicit guest contributions from other professionals in your industry. When they post an original piece of content on your website, they’re likely to share and promote it to their own audience, so you’re still driving new visitors to your website.

Paid Ads and Remarketing to Bring Readers Back

“Paid ads and remarketing are typically going to be used to promote a gated content offer,” says Guido. “The reason for that is because you’re paying for that traffic, so you want to get as much value out of it as possible — and one of the best ways to do that is by collecting their information through a form.”

At New Breed, for example, we exclusively promote content offers via paid, not any of our bottom-of-the-funnel offers like free assessments. Of course, that’s not going to be the same for every company.

Companies with frictionless funnel — for example, those with a product-led growth strategy — might be able to promote free trials and demos through paid ads and remarketing.

But if your sales process is a bit more complex, it may be worth pulling people into your funnel at the awareness stage and then nurturing them through.

Contests for Added Hype and Engagement

Contests might not be the obvious choice for content promotion, but they can be a powerful tool for creating and soliciting content that almost promotes itself.

For example, OpenView recently did a March Madness-esque contest about product-led growth. They solicited submissions from different companies about their product-led growth strategies, and the top-performing posts were compiled into an e-book at the end.

Companies that entered the contest were more likely to promote their submissions and, in turn, drive their audience to OpenView’s website.

Bonus Tip for Content Promotion: How do you choose which pieces of content to promote?

“If it’s a net-new piece of content, promote the hell out of it,” says Guido. “You’ve just spent all this time and energy on creating it, and you can’t just let that go to waste.”

That will also give you a sense of whether or not your new content actually resonates with your audience. If it does, you might want to consider creating more content on that topic.

For older content, you should lump pieces into three categories:

High-performers

Medium-performers

Low-performers

You should be constantly working your high-performing content into your regular promotional process. Your high-performers won’t always be your latest, freshest content, so be sure to loop them into your email newsletters, social shares and other promotional strategies from time to time.

For example, New Breed’s top-performing post was originally published in 2016, but it continues to drive new traffic to our website.

Medium performers should be revisited and re-optimized periodically to try to push them into the high-performing category and get more value out of them. Every time you re-optimize a piece of content, loop it back into your overall promotional strategy.

Lastly, low performers should be taken out of circulation over time.

“At New Breed, we noticed that we had two premium content offers that were consistently converting leads, so they appeared to be high-performers,” says Guido. “But literally nobody who converted on those offers ever became customers, so in reality, it was a low performer for us. We decided to un-gate it and convert it into a blog post so it would continue to drive traffic to our website.”

That’s not always how you’ll want to deal with low-performing content, however. In some cases, you have to face the fact that a specific piece of content simply isn’t driving value for your company and be willing to take it off of your website.

When it comes to blog posts, for example, Google’s ranking algorithm considers your domain in its entirety. If there are a high number of posts that nobody engages with, that can hurt your domain authority overall.

[justinjslone]

What is Contextual Marketing 🙇🏼‍♀️

Without a full understanding of your prospects' situations, you won't be able to position your marketing content effectively.

For example, if a prospect is reading SEO-related content on your website, a call-to-action to download an email marketing e-book isn’t likely to convert them. You want to make sure you have a full understanding of your prospects’ situations when you’re creating any marketing content. The more you know about them, the better you can understand what they need and how to position it for them.

That's why contextualizing your marketing strategy is so important: it helps prospects easily understand, relate to and find value in all the content they receive.

What is Contextual Marketing?

Contextual marketing is a strategy that’s guided by the behaviors and conditions surrounding your marketing efforts so all content is relevant to the person receiving it.

Contextual marketing is a pillar of inbound marketing but is applicable universally. To be effective, marketing content must be pertinent to the people it’s reaching.

And contextual relevance isn’t just defined by content. The timeliness matters as well, so the information stays relevant.

For example, say someone requests an email marketing e-book and you don’t send it until two months later. Even though the content is what they asked for, the timing made it irrelevant.

How Do You Deliver Contextually Relevant Content?

To deliver contextually relevant information, you need to understand the psychographics of your buyer personas to know how to speak to them in terms of voice and tone and what content will resonate with them.

For example, marketing director might be more concerned with demonstrating ROI as opposed to an entry-level marketing member who’s just interested in how to execute tactics.

The communication channels that are most effective may also differ persona to persona, so in addition to understanding what content works best and how it should be positioned, knowing where to deliver it is also important to contextual marketing.

If a persona isn’t on social media, then Twitter shouldn’t be your sole means of communicating with them.

In some cases, you might not know the next step that perfectly aligns with the behavior of a prospect. In that case, you need to frame the content to match the context. If you’re sending a prospect content that might not be their first choice, but you position it well, they might still download it if you tailor your message specifically to them.

For example, if someone has read everything you have to offer on SEO, you might follow up with content about conversion optimization and frame it with a message along the lines of:

“You’ve been working hard to attract website visitors, but what are they doing once they arrive on your website? Based on your interest in SEO, we thought you might be interested in our conversion optimization guide…”

The worst thing you can do is wrongfully insert context. If someone is from a B2C company, sending them marketing content referring to them as B2B will be detrimental to their impression of you.

The Importance of Buyer Persona Segmentation

Creating content around specific buyer personas and behaviors won’t work if you don’t have a way to deliver it to just those people. That’s where segmentation comes into play.

Every Customer Relationship Management platform (CRM) should have the ability to segment your contacts. CRM systems store different data points about each contact that you can use to organize people based on the criteria you have data for.

For example, you can use your CRM to create a list of contacts who work in the manufacturing industry at companies that have 100–200 employees.

There’s no “right” way to segment. Instead, it’s all based on the marketing activity you’re trying to do. If your goal is to generate awareness, you’re going to be targeting a much larger audience then if you’re promoting a product that only works for a portion of your target market.

How Do You Tailor Content to General Audiences?

If you have multiple buyer personas, it can be difficult to tailor your message on channels that could reach anybody, like on social media. So, when developing your strategy for Facebook or LinkedIn, you want to create content that is all-encompassing and can be applicable to all your personas.

If you sell your product or service to companies in three different industries, you want to highlight all three through your content. Or, if you’re hosting a webinar that’s only relevant to one of those industries then that needs to be clearly communicated in your promotion.

However, when possible, refine your audience.

Varying your content formats can also strengthen your contextual marketing strategy. If someone only consumes video content, chances are they won’t be interested in reading a 50-page guide.

To adapt to a variety of learning styles, make your content available in different formats.

While it might not be possible for you to have a visual and written version of every piece of content, there’s a wide variety of ways you can make your content more accessible.

A webinar can become a blog post or infographic. A blog can become a podcast topic.

Start by just getting the content out there, and then add different variations that can better appeal to different audience members.

Adding a Personal Touch to Your Content

Most marketing automation platforms that can integrate with CRM systems offer personalization, which can help add context to content that reaches general audiences, such as your website.

A name is a pretty universal piece of information you can leverage to create a more personalized experience for your prospects. While you wouldn’t want to use someone’s name in a blog post — content created and presented to general audiences is not the right context for personalization like that — you could have your chatbot greet them by name.

The same goes for company names. Targeting content around a company’s name and industry works well in email subject lines or chatbots.

You can also use variable content for CTAs and landing pages so you don’t show someone a CTA for a piece of content they already downloaded or include a form question they’ve already answered.

You can also personalize based on custom properties specific to what you look for in a customer base. For example, a finance software might need to know what currency a company uses.

You can also set properties based on events or engagements. So automation can be triggered by visiting a specific website page or registering for a webinar.

The Takeaway

Use all these strategies in moderation. Don’t make it obvious you’re automating contextualization or personalization by sending an email with 12 personalized properties in the first paragraph. You want prospects to feel like you’re catering to them, not like you’re stalking them.

Additionally, if you don’t have the capabilities to be super-granular, being broad and inclusive is better than being exclusive and incorrect.

When gathering information about prospects, don’t overlook the value of talking to them. Don’t rely solely on data enrichment tools to gather information. Once you’re talking to someone in person, make sure to verify the information you have is correct.

At the end of the day, every marketing strategy should be contextual because that’s how you’re going to deliver the most value to your prospects and customers.

[justinjslone]

10 Selling Techniques to Help You Become a Better Salesperson

We believe that every good salesperson (or any person at all) always has room to grow in their role and improve their skills.

That’s why we invest so much in the continued education of our team, encourage them to take time out of their days to read industry publications and let them test their ideas — all in confidence that they’ll use this information to get better at what they do.

Our salespeople have learned a lot along the way, so we decided to share some of our tips with you. Here are our top 10 techniques to help you become a better salesperson.

1. Understand Your Market

Above all else, you can't be an effective salesperson if you don't understand who you're selling to and what the market landscape looks like. We're not talking about just knowing their name, title, company name, website URL and email. We're talking about really understanding what makes them tick.

What does a day in the life of your prospect look like? What challenges are they facing? What could make their life easier?

Gaining this knowledge about your prospect will help improve your understanding of how they can benefit from your solution and enable you to position your product or service in a way that will resonate with them.

In addition to understanding your prospects’ pain points, you also need to know who else is trying to solve for them outside of your company. What does the competitive landscape look like? How does your solution stack up? Examine how the competition is selling and pitching, and then do something different.

You want to stand out and be unique, while still speaking to what your prospects need (and want).

2. Focus on the Right Leads

According to Ken Krogue, Founder & Board Member of InsideSales.com, "it's really about the leads." From our standpoint, this means understanding what makes a lead a good fit for your company so you don’t waste your time on people who will never become customers.

It starts with knowing who you're targeting (i.e. identifying your buyer personas and ideal customer profile). From there, you should be able to determine what they're struggling with, what their challenges are and how you can align your messaging and offers to their pain points.

When you focus on the right leads, you tend to see better win rates, larger average deal sizes and higher customer lifetime value. If you’re focusing on the people who are best served by your solution, it’s easier to close them as customers.

This way, you’re not spending as much time selling to them and you’re going to have a higher probability of closing them. You just have to ensure your timing is right and that they’re ready for what you’re offering.

3. Prioritize Your Company Above Yourself

At New Breed, we like to say that selling is a team sport. The marketing team helps the sales team. Sales team members help each other out. All the work each individual and each team does has the same end goal: Helping the business grow.

Keep that same ideology in mind anytime you make a decision. Prioritize your customers first, then your company second, your team third and yourself last.

4. Leverage Your CRM

At New Breed, we're big fans of Salesforce. Our sales team uses it as their CRM platform, but we've also integrated it with HubSpot, our marketing automation software, so there's full transparency between marketing and sales. Our sales team is able to see a prospect’s digital body language, or how they’ve interacted with our content.

Knowing what blog posts they've read, what pages they've visited and what emails they've opened can give us a better sense of what they’re interested in, what their pain points are and how they came to know about us in the first place can better inform our outreach.

If we see someone is reading content about conversion strategies, then we can then look at how they are converting people on their website and provide personalized input through our initial outreach that demonstrates our understanding of their pain points and illustrates how we can address those challenges.

5. Be Data Informed

When you're a small company like us (actually — this rings true even if you're a large company), efficiencies can help tremendously. Pay close attention to your metrics and marketing funnel to find out what's working and what isn't. What's helping your sales team close more deals? What seems to be something they're stumbling over?

Data doesn't lie, so listening to the numbers is a critical component to your sales success.

We know that data analysis can take a lot of time, so if you're not accustomed to measuring your sales efforts, start with biannual reports and make them as in-depth and detailed as possible. Once you've gotten to that point, start doing quarterly reports. These can be a little lighter than the biannual ones, but should still contain detailed metrics. Then go as granular as monthly. This can be the lightest of the three versions and just looks at your sales on a higher level.

The goal for each of the reports should be to show you something from a different perspective. By looking at different trends you can make smarter decisions that will improve your results in the long run.

6. Really Listen to Your Prospects

According to Mark Roberge, the former CRO of HubSpot’s Sales Division, "You know you are running a modern sales team when selling feels more like the relationship between a doctor and a patient and less like a relationship between a salesperson and a prospect."

So, what does he mean by that?

In order to be effective salespeople, we need to be able to listen to our prospects. We tend to be a self-centered culture, in part thanks to social media, so it's important that as a salesperson, you care about your prospects — and not just on the surface. That will shine through in your conversations, help build trust and help close deals.

7. Build Trust Through Education

Building trust can be difficult when you're trying to sell someone a product or service. We've been conditioned to have a bad reaction to a "salesperson," as they've been made out to be slimy and untrustworthy.

So today, it's important that you foster that relationship and build trust with your prospect. A great way to do that is through education.

When we say education, we're really talking about your content. Use your blog, your premium content offers, your webinars and other content to help educate your prospect on what your organization offers.

Don't just go in for the hard pitch right away. If you help to educate them, enabling them to make their own decisions (which you've helped guide toward your solution), they will begin to trust you. And once you have trust, you're much more likely to win the relationship.

To benefit the most from your educational outreach, personalize your efforts. Sending the same blog post to 20 people is just marketing. Sales is a one-on-one conversation.

Instead of sending along a blog post or webinar by itself, take a quote from a relevant content offering and apply it to your prospect specifically to provide education, leverage the content you have and still be human.

8. Focus on Helping

How often do you get a call from a salesperson and all they talk about is the brand new features of the product they're offering? You listen politely, but think to yourself, "Yeah, but how does this help me?"

The truth is: features don't help you. At least in the way they're usually positioned by sales. What you really want to know is, "How is what you're selling going to solve X for me?" Essentially, you want to know how the offer will address your challenges.

As a salesperson, this differentiation is key. Rather than focusing on the features of your solution, think about how those features can help your prospect. How are you solving one of their challenges or pain points?

If you understand who your buyer personas are, then you know what their challenges and pain points are and how your solution aligns with that. This is the opportunity to focus on the benefits of your product or service — i.e., how you can make that person’s day a little easier.

When you can talk up the benefits, you'll have a much easier time convincing prospects that your organization can most effectively solve their needs.

9. End Each Meeting with an Action

When you leave your next meeting, rather than saying something like, "I'll follow up with you on our next steps," create your next steps right then and there.

We tested this methodology on our own sales team and saw huge results. We used to end our meetings with a prospect by indicating they could expect to hear from us in a few hours with a few times that worked for our next meeting. We kept finding it was increasingly harder to book that next meeting.

So we decided to switch our strategy. Now, when we're ending a sales call, we finish on a concrete action. We all pull up our calendars and book our next meeting on the spot. And guess what? We've seen our conversion rates increase as a result of it.

So next time you're in a sales meeting, don't leave empty handed. Set up your next meeting while you're there with the prospect, or at the very least, have a concrete action plan that both sides have agreed upon.

10. Use Your Marketing Team

Your marketing and sales teams need to be aligned. There's so much these two departments can learn from each other to help the organization reach its main goal of generating more revenue.

On the sales side, use your marketing team to your advantage. Talk to them about what your prospects are saying — are they responding well to a piece of content? Did they not enjoy the webinar they attended? Share these insights with your marketing team so they can continue to feed you higher and higher quality leads. You should also share your reports with the marketing team. Full transparency will help you both be more effective.

Marketing should be enabling your sales team to be more successful. Part of that is delivering leads, part of that is enabling sales with good content and part of that is ensuring a smooth handoff. But marketing needs to work with sales to do all those things.

At New Breed, we have a revenue team instead of separate marketing and sales teams, so marketing and sales are aligned behind the same goal: generating revenue. Because marketing is measured on their contribution to revenue instead of the number of leads they generate, they’re more incentivized to bring in high-quality leads that have a high likelihood to become clients.

But if there isn’t transparency between the two teams, marketing won’t have the information they need to ensure they’re providing sales with qualified leads.

If these tips weren't enough and you want to dig even deeper into the world of inbound sales, download our Complete Guide to Inbound Sales for even more information and best practices:

This post was originally published January 8, 2014.

[justinjslone]

What is Product Marketing?

Content marketing involves boosting brand awareness and nurture prospects into customers through content like blogs, eBooks or webinars. Conversational marketing does the same thing through one-to-one conversations with your prospects. Lifecycle marketing involves tailoring your content marketing efforts to the different lifecycle stages.

Although “product marketing” follows the same naming convention, it doesn’t actually refer to marketing through your product or with your product as a channel.

What Is Product Marketing?

Product marketing is the process of bringing a specific product to market. The end goal for product marketers is ensuring the product is successful.

Product marketing starts with the go-to-market strategy. The marketer understands the need that exists within the market, has a product that satisfies that need and is now developing the positioning and value proposition that will resonate within the target market.

A product marketer might not necessarily be performing outward-facing marketing — they might not be creating promotional content or even speaking to consumers. Instead, their efforts are focused on guiding the strategy internally.

They’re responsible for developing the messaging for the product and passing it along to everyone else within the company. Similar to the way marketing enables sales, product marketing enables all the other marketing activities.

How Does Product Marketing Help You Improve the Product Over Time?

Product marketing doesn’t stop with the sale of the product. In addition to helping deliver the product to users initially, product marketing also helps create a feedback loop to help improve the product over time.

Overall, marketing won’t necessarily be concerned with the onboarding process, but the experience established during the first 30 days of use is a critical component of a product’s success.

When a consumer buys your product, they understand the problem they have and why your product can help, but they might not know how to actually use your product to solve that problem.

Therefore, product marketers want to ensure a smooth transition from sales to service. They help develop and execute an onboarding process that provides value to the user and enables adoption of the product.

With complex SaaS products like HubSpot, managed services channel partners like New Breed can do majority of the product marketing. We help users gain value from HubSpot and ensure their product actually helps users grow their business.

Collecting Feedback

Understanding the way that users actually engage with your product is a key component of improving it. Align your marketing messaging with the actual user experience to ensure consistency throughout the buyer's lifecycle.

There are a number of ways you can collect feedback about your product, including:

Analyzing usage: You can observe product usage by measuring the frequency of logins and which features are being utilized. Tracking and understanding those patterns will provide insight into user behaviors and help product marketers and product developers decide where to focus their efforts.

NPS and customer satisfaction surveys: Soliciting feedback through net promoter score (NPS) surveys and customer feedback surveys can provide insight into how customers feel about your product. The results of these surveys can reveal strengths and weaknesses in your positioning, onboarding and product.

During the initial product development and launch, the product marketing and product development teams should work closely together to ensure that the product has everything it needs to satisfy the target market. They also need to be on the same page about what is and isn’t included, as well as the plan for future development.

When you’re first developing a product, you’re going to come up with your MVP, the minimum viable product, that will satisfy the market. In addition to that, you’ll probably have a list of features to consider adding over time.

Once the product is launched, the teams should work together to choose which additions and improvements to focus on based on the feedback coming in.

The Takeaways

Marketing focuses on your business as a whole, while product marketing focuses on a specific product — but there is some overlap between the responsibilities of product marketing and general marketing functions.

Marketing is responsible for creating general sales enablement materials, and product marketing is responsible for developing sales enablement materials for specific products.

Both teams work with a company’s buyer personas and need to understand the challenges they have. But creating those personas is the responsibility of general marketing teams, whereas product marketers focus more on understanding which persona pain points their product addresses and how to create a message that speaks to those.

However, if a product is created to expand your company’s reach into a new market, then product marketers may be involved in developing that new persona.

On top of the shared general marketing tasks, product marketers have specific responsibilities related to the individual product. The go-to-market strategy (GTM) entirely falls within the product marketers purview. When developing and enacting the GTM, product marketers need to:

Define the target market

Identify which buyer persona pain points the product addresses

Develop the product’s value proposition

Conduct competitor analysis

Pick a pricing strategy

Determine purchasing methods

Ensure internal alignment around the product’s purpose, functionality and messaging

Provide useful onboarding resources that enable successful product adoption

Assuming that all the steps of product marketing have gone well, then your product might be well-positioned for product-led growth, where your product will sell itself through the value it provides.

[justinjslone]

What is Omnichannel Personalization?

You’ve probably heard the term “omnichannel” to describe any business practice that extends across channels, both digital and in-person. When it comes to the omnichannel customer experience, the idea is simple: you’re appealing to one human, so you need to deliver one cohesive experience, because people don’t think about their interactions with your company in [...]

[justinjslone]

SaaS Growth Strategies: How to Build Strategic SaaS Partnerships for Business Growth

While inbound and content marketing may be key to generating leads and pumping up your pipeline, the successful growth of a SaaS business depends on so much more than those techniques.

One proven way to accelerate SaaS growth is building a powerful partner program.

Don’t believe me? Take HubSpot, for example. With one of the most successful SaaS partner programs in existence, HubSpot has demonstrated the power of partnerships for rapid business growth. Soon after the partner program launched, it began generating a substantial amount of monthly recurring revenue with limited effort needed by HubSpot’s partner team. In fact, the first quarter of the program produced approximately 42 percent of the company’s customers and 33 percent of its revenue.

In today's post, we're going to take a deep dive into the key mechanisms, goals, structures and business questions that you need to consider when developing a SaaS partner program.

Why Are SaaS Partner Programs So Successful?

The B2B SaaS industry comes with a number of unique challenges that set the stage for partner programs to flourish:

SaaS products are a significant investment.

Because B2B SaaS investments typically affect multiple stakeholders, the buying process is notoriously cumbersome.

Almost every software on the market has a bit of a learning curve and requires dedicated upkeep to avoid it becoming shelfware.

Partner programs can soothe some of these challenges by enabling other companies to sell your product on your behalf. For example, as a Diamond-Tier HubSpot partner, New Breed can sell, upsell, renew and service the HubSpot platform without ever needing to consult a HubSpot representative.

This kind of touchless sales cycle that occurs outside of your internal resources can reduce the cost of acquiring new customers and free up your internal team to pursue higher-value, more complex opportunities.

Plus, because we can onboard and service HubSpot customers on our own, we can help ensure that customers are using the platform to its fullest potential and getting the most return on their investment. In that way, a partner program can act not only as another sales channel but also as a client success channel.

Partner programs serve as a brand-building channel as well. Often, your partners will also be your customers and evangelists, so building a robust partnership network can create an engaged and dedicated community around your brand.

An important note: a partnership should be mutually beneficial

Yes, building a partner program can reap incredible rewards for your SaaS company — but it’s important to remember that the program should benefit your partners as well.

By offering attractive incentives like recurring revenue sharing, insider information such as product updates and discounted event tickets, you’ll help your program grow. Ultimately, the more successfully your partners can use, sell and extract value from your product, the more your partner program will contribute to your overall business growth.

Is a Channel Sales Partner Program Right For My Company?

Before diving in any further, you need to determine whether or not a channel sales program is a good fit for your company in the first place.

When making this decision, consider:

1. How much training and support does your product require?

The easier your product is to use, the easier it will be for your partners to sell. However, that doesn’t mean that products with a complex onboarding process can’t be sold successfully via a channel partner.

Ultimately, the success of your partner program comes down to whether or not you’re providing the right training, resources and support to your channel partners to sell the product on your behalf.

2. Will you be able to effectively train your partners to sell your solution?

You need to have the infrastructure in place to train and support your channel partners.

Typically, companies will assign a partner program manager or a channel account manager to act as the liaison between your company and your partner companies. Similar to a customer success manager, this person is tasked with ensuring the success and satisfaction of each partner, and they’re probably the one who’ll conduct training sessions if needed.

3. Is your product ready or are you still ironing out the kinks and building out important features?

Partner programs are a great strategy for scaling your business, not for gaining initial traction in the market.

Before you can implement a successful partner program, you need to have a well-developed minimum viable product that meets the needs of your target market. You should be familiar with your ideal customer base and have an in-depth understanding of the sales cycle. If you can’t convey these important sales elements to your partners, then a partner program probably isn’t right for you.

4. Do you have a scalable and repeatable sales model internally?

If you’re struggling to develop a streamlined sales model for your internal sales team, then it’s unlikely you’ll be able to train your channel partners to sell your product successfully. Before you even think about developing a channel sales partner program, make sure you have your own internal ducks in a row.

The bottom line is: Companies that are still in the startup phase should not be investing in a channel sales program. Instead, startups should dip their toes into lower-stakes, more easily controlled partnerships like co-marketing or affiliate programs.

How Do I Get Started With A Successful SaaS Partner Program?

Once you've decided that a channel sales program is right for your business, here are a couple challenges you should keep in mind as you work to get it off the ground:

Building partnerships with established resellers will take considerable time and effort up front. The pitch to your potential partners must illustrate that you clearly understand their business.

You will need to enable your partner's sales team to resell your product. Therefore, sales enablement content will be critical to success.

It will take time for your channel to start to generate revenue. In fact, it's not uncommon for it to take 12–18 months before you start achieving your channel goals.

The product-development feedback cycle from your partners will be slower than from your direct customers, which means you should make sure you've reached product-market fit before you commit to a partner network.

Don’t worry, though. These challenges are certainly not insurmountable. However, this will take time. Start experimenting with a small number of partners and reasonable customer goals, and then increase your partner personnel and marketing budget as your program proves successful.

As a SaaS company, you might want to offer your product for free or at a significant discount to partners to gain traction for the program. After all, giving value before you ask for value is a key component of any kind of inbound endeavor.

How Do I Establish Goals and Mechanisms For My Partner Program?

At a high level, the goal of your partner program should be to generate customers through this new channel (at least) as effectively as your internal sales efforts. To achieve this, you'll also need to be ready to track the same key metrics in your partner program as you do in your direct efforts (CLV, CAC, payback period, etc.).

Depending on the size and complexity of your partner program, you might want to hire a partner manager, invest in a tiered partner relationship platform like PartnerStack or both. For smaller, co-marketing or affiliate partner programs, you might not need something so robust.

The primary mechanism used to create a partner program must be a model that can be easily communicated to your channel partners and empower them to be working advocates for your product and brand, and rewarded as your company grows (while helping them grow their own).

This way, you can reach their networks as a trusted source and lower your cost of acquisition. If your resellers offer services that complement your platform, your partnership will also act as an outsourced customer success engine.

However, you need to determine internal figures before setting goals for the partner program. Assess your current business performance. Look at past data to understand your growth patterns and forecast based on those goals.

When you’re just starting out, don’t count on the success of your partner program. The infancy of your partner program is not a time to set goals that could make or break your business, but rather a time to start collecting data and creating benchmarks for your program in the future. As it becomes more robust and begins contributing more predictable revenue, then you can start forecasting partner goals for the future.

What Are the Different SaaS Partnership Models?

A great way to structure your partner program is using tier levels to acknowledge how successful a given partner has been in reselling your product. Tiered structures can also help create a competitive ecosystem that provides achievement levels and rewards, such as additional support from your channel team.

If you’re new to partnerships, you may want to experiment with different levels of involvement  and start building relationships without high risk. Co-hosting webinars, guest blogging and exchanging backlinks or social mentions in exchange for lead shares are great ways to get started, even well before your business is ready to scale.

How Do I Compensate My Partners For Their Involvement?

For the program to be successful, you'll need to have a clear financial model built out to compensate your agency partners. This model should be built based on your business's growth goals and align with your direct marketing and sales teams. This way, the partner program is being compared against the same metrics used across the organization.

It’s important to dabble in low-barrier monetary incentives before you implement a full-blown reseller program. For example, if a partner drives a lead to your website and that deal later closes, you could reward them with a flat rate of $200 or a revenue share percentage.

The best part is, these kinds of incentives don’t need to be restricted to your partner network. You could offer gift cards for customer referrals or affiliate companies to generate demand and interest in your partner program as it grows.

What Kind of Assets Do I Need to Create for My Partner Program to Be Successful?

Once you have the model and framework in place and have experimented and proven that the channel is viable for your business, it's time to take it to market.

Here are a few key assets you should create:

A public partner overview site page: This page should discuss the structure, goals, financial models and mechanisms of your partner program. It should talk about what you expect from your partners and what they can expect from you.

Partner sign-up landing page: This is where interested partner prospects can go to request to join your partner program, ask for more information or discuss different partnership models they might be interested in.

Brand asset/sales enablement library: This asset should be the go-to resource for your partners to find important information like brand guidelines, product messaging and updates. It could take many forms, such as an e-book, a partner forum, a Facebook group, etc.

Partner contact channel: Give your partners a simple way of contacting you in the case of discount questions, product troubleshooting or else. This could take the form of a chatbot, a form, or an account executive.

Marketing content: Depending on how robust and complex you hope your partner program to be, you’ll need to create content to market the partner program and generate interest.  

Partner-tier site page: This shows each of your partners’ statuses by tier. It doesn't show exactly how many customers or revenue each partner has generated, but provides high-level insight into everyone's standing. Here's an example from HubSpot. This provides great visibility for your partners, and also incentivizes them to reach the next tier level:

With this business framework and your marketing assets ready, your business is now ready to launch its own partner program.

Remember, partner programs aren't right for every SaaS business and require a clear strategy and time to develop. Start small and set clear goals and performance indicators up front. When executed correctly, a successful partner program can be a huge driver of your business growth and the success of your customers.

[justinjslone]

Podcast Marketing: Build Your Audience to Promote Your Brand

A podcast is an audio recording available to download or listen to on various platforms and apps. Podcasts are similar to radio in many ways, except they’re pre-recorded and not live.

People have been using podcasts to listen and learn about topics varying from true crime to Hallmark movies to economics. Over the past few years, more and more businesses have started to use them to reach new audiences, and there are numerous statistics to support incorporating podcasts into your marketing strategy.

According to Podcast Insights:

51% of the US population has listened to a podcast.

27% of US podcast listeners have a 4-year college degree (only 19% of the total US population has one).

49% of podcast listening is done at home and 22% is done while driving.

Normally, marketers’ access is limited to audiences on their computers at work. Podcasts enable marketers to speak to people when they’re in their cars or at home doing chores.

Additionally, podcasts have the potential to engage greater attention from listeners than emails or blog posts. For example, more often than not, when I do a Google search, I’m looking for a quick answer in the moment. On the other hand, when I listen to a podcast, I’m trying to expand my understanding of a subject that interests me.

I don’t have time to just learn about a topic while I’m at work, so I do that at home with a podcast.

It is important to keep in mind that the podcast field is getting diluted — there’s a podcast for everything at this point — but if you can stand out and provide value for your listeners, then this medium can still help your business.

How Do You Market Your Business Through Podcasts?

In addition to the benefits brought by the extended reach of podcasts, podcasts are also great for marketers because people enjoy doing them.

The interviewer needs to do some prep work, but the interviewee typically just receives a couple of questions or conversation topics in advance they need to be able to speak to. As long as they’re an expert on the topic, they shouldn’t need to do that much work to participate.

Participating in a podcast is easy. Someone can do a podcast from their house in their pajamas. They don’t need to look presentable, they just need to be able to speak on a topic. That ease of content creation aides marketers in finding new subject matter experts and extending their network of people who can participate in content creation.

Building relationships with thought leaders and subject matter experts can add credibility to your brand and allow you to draw on their networks. The first time I heard of Drift’s Dave Gerhardt was on OpenView’s Podcast. That podcast introduced me to Drift, who we’re now partners with, and now I follow Dave Gerhardt. If I see him pop up somewhere else now, I’ll listen to that too.

Once you’ve created a podcast, you have at least three content assets from each recording. A 10–30 minute interview can lead to the podcast itself, a related blog post and a downloadable transcript. The blog post can help promote the episode, and the transcript can act as a lead generation tool if you gate it. Blog posts and transcripts can also help with searchability.

For example, when I was working on a post on Customer Lifetime Value, I wanted to reference a story I’d heard about Hootsuite reducing their churn. I was able to re-find the podcast episode because the transcript appeared in my search results.

If you have a strong presence on Youtube or another social video platform, you can also post your podcasts with a cover image or motion graphics to spread awareness.

Ultimately, podcasts can strengthen your marketing strategy by helping you reach new audiences, form relationships with subject matter experts and influencers and establish yourself as a thought leader.

How Do You Provide Value Through Podcasts?

Your podcasts don’t necessarily need to be completely different from what you’re already doing. If you’re a B2B marketer, you’ve probably already created a webinar, a blog post, a premium content offer, a white paper or any sort of guide.

Typically, those pieces of content aren’t created by the subject matter expert themself. For example, I don’t write New Breed’s guides. I provide subject matter expertise where applicable, but the final pieces of content are written and edited by our writers.

Podcasts allow audiences to learn directly from a subject matter expert instead of gaining that information through the lens of a writer who’s translating that content into a more readable format.

Even when subject matter experts write their own content, they still write differently than they talk, so by presenting the same information through a different format, you’re providing value by adding a new perspective to existing content.

So how do you format that content? There are two main styles of podcasts:

1. Interview Style

This style is where one person hosts the podcast every week and brings guests in to be interviewed from both within and outside of the company.

For this format, the content strategy will be dictated by the available interviewees. Once you find a subject matter expert, you allow them to dictate what topic to speak about as long as it doesn’t contradict any of your existing content.

In this style, the interviewer guides the conversation and creates cohesiveness from episode to episode while the guests provide new information and outside perspectives.

2. Panel Style

In this podcast style, there are 2–3 people who are always on the podcast talking about different subjects.

The content strategy for this style can be driven by areas of expertise, where you agree on topic areas you want to provide information on in a similar way you’d plan out a blog editorial calendar. Or, you can allow your podcast to be documentation where you discuss things like what you’ve been doing lately or what you’ve learned recently.

With both styles, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can discuss the same things you already write about on your blog.

You’re going to be reaching people who have never heard of you before, and if you happen to gain listeners who also read your blog there’s nothing wrong with that — you’re still providing more value to people who already engage with your brand.

How Do You Market Your Podcasts?

The people already engaging with your content are the ones who will find the most value in your podcasts. Reach out to your current subscribers to promote your podcast and get people within your company to subscribe and rate your podcast to gain initial reach.

Subscriptions and reviews will help your visibility to start off. Plus, not everyone in your company will have helped create your podcast, so internal feedback can help you identify ways to improve it.

As more people listen, subscribe and rate, it’ll be easier for people to find your podcasts across hosting platforms. Creating blogs and posting transcripts from your podcasts will help increase visibility from the SEO perspective as well.

Additionally, you should have a web page devoted to your podcast on your website and make sure there are a clear CTAs promoting subscriptions.

Within your podcast, reference your company at the beginning and end of each episode. Just because people are listening doesn't mean they subscribe, so ask for that every time and reference where else they can find your content.

When creating podcast descriptions for other platforms, make sure to mention your company name and what you do so listeners can find their way back to your website. Even if it’s a personal podcast, mentioning where you work can add a trustmark.

If you have interviewees, ask them to plug your podcast the same way you’d ask guest bloggers to promote their posts on your site. Their promotion is beneficial for both you and them because it increases your reach and helps their credibility.

Because they’re growing in popularity and easy to consume, podcasts are a great way to offer content. Not everyone likes reading and podcasts offer another way people can engage with your brand.

[justinjslone]

How Creative Should Web Design Really Be?

It’s the age-old debate among the web design community: Should a website be creative or functional?

Some insist that using creative elements like interactivity and animation can make a site truly stand out. Others, like Neil Patel, insist that a website should be simple, intuitive and clean. Petar Stojakovic of the UX collective calls purposeless design “pretty pixels” that lack usability and relevance for web visitors.

We may never settle upon a definitive answer to this question — but as marketers, salespeople and web designers striving to create conversion-driving websites for our businesses, it’s still an important question to explore.

So we decided to explore it at New Breed. Chris Mathieu, our Chief Design Officer, and Kelly Molloy, one of our Web Strategists, met for a friendly debate about the level of creativity and functionality that should go into a website.

Here’s what they had to say.

So, how creative should web design really be?

“Websites should be intuitive,” started Chris, citing Patel as an advocate for the predictability and functionality of web design. In other words, they should allow users to find and consume the content they’re looking for as quickly as possible.

“But,” he continued, “there’s also something to be said about the value of those unique, compelling experiences. So the question is: How far do you go?”

Kelly, who acted as a key influencer in New Breed’s decision to transform our web process to focus on content strategy and user experience design, believes the answer to that question lies in UX. “At the end of the day,” she said, “users [visit websites] to do something, so giving them the path of least resistance to get there should be the objective of the designers.”

But how do you create that path of least resistance?

“I think setting proper expectations is the proper way to do that,” Kelly said. For example, you might want your website to be as visually compelling as possible, but you can still ensure it’s user-friendly by providing users with clear and predictable methods of engaging with the interface.

“The objective of the website can define where that balance falls — whether it’s more creative and less clear or more clear and less creative,” she continued. “That’s a really important distinction.”

A website like Amazon, for example, should give users the ability to find and purchase the products they’re looking for as quickly and easily as possible. The design should be clean and simple so as not to interfere with the actual function and objective of the website.

“But that’s not a blanket statement,” noted Chris. “It really depends on your audience, your content and your industry.” In other words, Craigslist might be able to get away with its stripped-down interface, but a creative B2B firm like Duarte, one of New Breed’s former web clients, should showcase some style, personality and creativity through their web design.

With these many nuances in form vs. function, how would you define “good” web design?

“Good design doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s very creative,” said Chris. “[A website] can be very simple, yet very polished too.”

Apple is a classic case study for the power of simple design. Their sleek, clean web design manages to intrigue and inform users at the same time. Some would argue that this simplicity is the secret to effective web design; research indicates that companies who simplify the decision-making process for their customers were 86% more likely to make a sale.

On the other hand, simplicity isn’t everything. “Even if you are a B2B company with a utilitarian audience and you need a very clean, traditional website,” said Chris, “you should still partner with someone skilled in web design in order to make it sing.”

A good example of this is New Breed’s work on the SpringCM website. When SpringCM realized that their creatively-driven homepage was suffering from poor scroll rates, Chris and the rest of New Breed’s web team worked with them to pull the key creative elements from the original design into a new, more functional design that would ultimately perform better for their business.

In other words, there’s no one, all-encompassing definition of “good” web design. Instead, it’s a matter of balancing the necessary utility with just enough of those unique, eye-catching elements to help your brand stand out from the crowd.

“I am glad that people in the industry sometimes choose creativity over usability, though,” said Kelly, “because it enables us to push forward. If you think about the internet even five years ago, it was a completely different environment. The only reason we’re seeing as beautiful of websites as we are today is because people took those risks. I’m sure some of them were less user-friendly and maybe not as effective for their end-users, but that sort of trial-and-error is what enables us to continue moving forward.”

In that way, web design could be likened to the music industry. If musicians only made the type of music that they thought popular audiences wanted, the industry would get stuck in a cycle of sameness that eventually becomes boring, white noise. When musicians do take risks, there’s no guarantee that everyone will like those risks — but ultimately, it’s those risks that help shape the future of the industry.

“The main problem with overly-creative websites is that users will have to take some time to understand how to actually engage with them,” said Chris. “The main pro of creativity is that you’re memorable, for better or for worse.”

What comes first in web design: functionality or creativity?

“Function comes first,” said Chris. “That’s why we’ve shifted to this content-first approach, but even that is shaped in part by the client intake and how much they want to push the creativity.”

“Plus,” added Kelly, “the content-first approach is kind of interface-agnostic. So no matter the level of creativity, you can begin to plug-and-play based on the interface where you’re sharing content and the audience you’re trying to engage.”

That flexibility is one of the key benefits of a content-first approach to web design. For example, if you’re looking for a very visual website, the type of content you include on each page might skew toward sliders, pictures or drawings. The function or purpose of the content and the creativity with which you present that content should work to enhance each other, not interfere with each other.

“It’s always a chicken-and-the-egg scenario, right?” said Kelly. “As I’m planning out web content, I feel fortunate that I can visualize the modules in my mind that would work best for that content — but without much prior experience in web design, our clients can’t necessarily do that. So that’s one of the difficult hurdles to get over. You may not be able to visualize the creative possibilities of your content, but a good web designer can, so you need to learn to trust them.”

So how do you actually bridge that gap between staying true to the purpose of web content and making room for the creative possibilities of that content?

“For the most part, we like to say that the sky’s the limit, outside of budget and timeline constraints,” said Chris. “But if clients bring us creative ideas without a solid content strategy to back those decisions, we’d push back against that.”

In other words, you have to remember that your website is really meant to function as a digital hub for your business. You need to use it to convey certain messages and encourage users to take specific actions, so if you can’t justify your creative decisions, then those probably aren’t the most profitable decisions to make for your business.

Unlike paintings, poetry or other art that could arguably exist just for the sake of art, the quest of good B2B web design should be to present specific messages, features and images that ultimately lead to commercial gain for your company. However, you can bolster this functional, purpose-driven design with high-quality imagery to elevate the creative component of your website.

“You could have a really traditional layout and UI,” said Chris, “but it’s the type of imagery you use that evokes that creative, unique feel. Those visual assets can make or break how daring something feels.”

Damotech’s website, another project led by New Breed, is a great example of how a website can use visual elements to truly stand out. Though the website’s interface is clean, intuitive and easy to navigate, the Damotech team used custom, high-quality photography to emphasize their brand personality and style where pure user functionality couldn’t.

Now, imagine the same site full of stock images of men wearing hard hats. Would it still have the same effect?

“There are some great and hilarious stock photo options out there,” said Kelly. “But if you fill your website with stock photography, users will recognize that even subconsciously and feel deterred from staying on the site. Cheesy stock photos degrade user trust.”

The Takeaway

The ultimate consensus from New Breed’s web experts is that:

B2B web design should, first and foremost, fulfill the company’s basic utilitarian needs. Creativity can be layered on top of that.

Creativity and functionality should work together, not against each other, to elevate the design of a website.

There’s no ubiquitous definition of “good” web design. Instead, it’s up to you and your web designers to work together to decide what “good” web design means for your business.

As long as you’re working with experienced web designers, you should trust them to find the right balance between creative, brand-boosting design and a functional, purpose-driven interface.

As Kelly said, “really smart, driven, entrepreneurial people can have the right messaging and ideas — but man, maybe they just suck at design.”

So when it’s time for your next website redesign, come prepared with your wildest ideas and your non-negotiable site objectives — and then leave it up to the experts to sculpt a killer website that drives tangible results for your business.

[justinjslone]

Stop Frustrating Your Customers: Treat Them Like You Know Them

There’s a lot of work that goes into converting an account from prospect to customer. Still, it’s important to realize the journey doesn’t end there. In many instances, your website is still a valuable source of information for customers, and the homepage is often their gateway to log into their accounts. For that reason, your [...]

[justinjslone]

Our Top 12 B2B Marketing Blogs

No marketer or sales professional knows everything, and reading blogs by others in the industry is an excellent way to remain innovative and keep your competitive advantage.

From raving over Drift’s use of “tl;dr” in their post about how Glossier grew to geeking out over the implications of neuromarketing, we New Breeders love gaining inspiration and knowledge from experts and thought leaders in the B2B space.

Here are 12 of our favorite B2B Blogs:

1. Drift

Drift is a conversational marketing platform that is working on changing the way B2B sales are done. They have a strong brand that epitomizes their promotion of conversational, personal marketing.

Their blogs are formatted in ways that promote scannability with lists, are often conversational in nature and feature images of real people who work for or with Drift. In addition to providing case studies about client success, subject matter expertise and podcast transcripts, they also publish blogs that provide insight into how they run things.

2. HubSpot

HubSpot's blog is a wealth of information with everything from best practices to how-to's to infographics and more.

As the founder of the inbound methodology, HubSpot basically invented the idea of using a blog to grow your business and has done a fantastic job of maintaining a blog that exemplifies the inbound marketing methodology.

Their blog categories of marketing, sales and service align to the flywheel, and each category provides an abundance of valuable content created with the readers in mind.

3. Neil Patel

For a long time, Neil Patel has been one of the pioneers of SEO and an expert on how to increase your traffic. Since growing organic reach is something every B2B company with an online presence should aim to achieve, his content is universally relevant.

Neil Patel has worked in agencies, helping companies grow their traffic in addition to growing his own business through SEO, so he’s had exposure to multiple industries.

His blog provides usable, actionable information through videos, written posts and podcasts. The topic coverage is comprehensive, and the posts are specific enough that you can read a blog or watch a video and then implement what you learned into your strategy.

4. OpenView

OpenView is a venture capital firm that focuses exclusively on B2B expansion stage SaaS companies. Because of their hyperfocus, they have a variety of specific, well-researched content aimed at businesses in that space.

In addition to creating original content for their blog, OpenView also will curate or syndicate blogs from other relevant thought leaders to make it easy for readers to gain a comprehensive understanding of the covered topics.

5. Vidyard

Vidyard is one of the premier video hosting platforms available to marketers today, and their content speaks to the value of video in marketing.

Not only does their blog cover the big picture “why” around integrating video into your content strategy, they also cover how, and include videos in many of their posts to illustrate its value.

6. InsightSquared

InsightSquared is a sales analytics tool that provides reporting on marketing and sales functions.

Their blog provides extensive content on pipeline management and the use of analytics to hone your marketing and sales efforts and bridge the gap between marketing and sales.

7. Salesforce

Salesforce built a model that countless SaaS companies have tried to replicate. They’re doing an incredible job of growing their business and have been named the #1 CRM Provider for five years in a row.

They are on the cutting edge of technology, which is reflected in their blog content. Their blog covers a wide range of topics from sales, marketing, software and the industry as a whole, in addition to featuring posts about their company culture.

8. Sirius Decisions

Sirius Decisions aims to bring actionable intelligence to B2B execs, and they conduct a lot of research to do so.

They provide benchmark data and conduct studies on databases alongside partnering with other companies for research and reporting.

Their blog covers a wide range of topics and features data from their reports and studies.

9. PPC Hero

PPC Hero focuses on paid-per-click (PPC) advertising and provides information related to how to leverage paid advertising.

While their content does branch into industry news and PPC-related careers, the majority of their posts are about specific aspects of PPC like social, search and mobile.

10. Business2Community

Business2Community has grown beyond a blog into more of a publication. They cover a wide range of topics and accept contributions.

Because of the wide range of business-related topics covered, finding content relevant to you and identifying subjects you can write about in guest blogs for them is easy.

11. B2B Marketing

B2B Marketing publishes marketing reports, hosts conferences and offers educational content to help B2B marketers grow their companies.

Their blog features posts on marketing operations, social media and tech stacks.

12. Sales Benchmark Index

Sales Benchmark Index (SBI) conducts market research and develops growth strategies based on the information discovered in that research.

Their blog posts are labeled as “insights” and cover topics ranging from revenue growth to segmentation and customer success. Their content is comprised of a variety of video interviews and written articles, and they offer podcast versions of their video interviews.

Check out our Introduction to Business Blogging eBook to learn how to use a blog to increase traffic and leads for your company.

[justinjslone]

How to Design Your Website to Match Visitors’ Intent

Your website is a sales rep that’s always on the clock.

When thinking about website design, UX and strategy, focus on the overarching goal of your website. If your main objective is to get site visitors to book a meeting, then your website should make that process easy to do.

Your website is like a microcosm of the buyer’s journey. Every page on your website should have specific intent behind it, nurturing visitors toward the most valuable next step to eventually convert them into customers.

The entirety of that journey might not happen in one visit, but if you can get the prospect to take the first two steps and convert on something, then maybe they’ll progress even further on the next visit.

What Should the Intent of Each Page Type Be?

Homepage Intent

If people are going directly to your homepage, then more often than not, they typed your URL directly into Google. This indicates that they know who you are and wanted to visit your website for a specific reason. Usually, those visitors learned about your company through another channel, be it a referral, ad campaign or offline source, and they’re searching for more information. You can capitalize on that intent by promoting your BOFU offer.

Homepages typically have one or two main CTAs: one in the right-hand corner of the page and the other in the center of the page. Those CTAs are promoting the ultimate goal of your site, whether that’s starting a free trial, booking a meeting or registering for an assessment.

Below the fold on your homepage, you can provide a secondary action for visitors who aren’t ready to take that ultimate BOFU action.

For example, the primary goal of New Breed’s homepage is for visitors to request an assessment. If visitors don’t want to do that, they can scroll down and be directed to our solution pages instead. That same thought process concerning primary and secondary actions can be applied sitewide.

Solution Pages Intent

When a site visitor navigates to a solution page, they’re looking for information about that solution. Once they’ve learned about your solution, your next goal should be to get them to speak to sales or request a demo of that product or service.

Therefore, the next best step a visitor could take is downloading a resource related to that solution in a way that enables you to capture their information and start a relevant conversation.

Capture their information through a pop-up, a chatbot or a form. One of these options might work better for your site and audience than the others, so play around with each and see which tactics garner the best results.

Blog Post Intent

When someone visits a blog post, they usually have the intent of learning about a specific topic. Your blog post should provide as much specific information about that topic as possible and then lead them to the next step, which is typically downloading a premium content offer.

Readers of your blog content don’t tend to have as much buying intent as visitors going directly to your homepage or solutions pages. In general, people don’t go to B2B homepages or solution pages just to learn about something — they’re looking for a tangible offer.

But if you can get a blog visitor to convert on a premium content offer that provides more context, more information and more value, you increase the likelihood of them taking the next step during their next visit.

They might not be ready to schedule a consultation yet — that can take months or even years — but the long game is part of any inbound marketing strategy.

Does Your Page Design Match Visitor Intent?

Once you have your desired conversion points designed in each webpage, you can measure how well they align with visitor intent.

Look at how many people take your primary action, your fallback action or no action at all in relation to how many visitors a given page has. Once you have that data, think about how you can increase the number of people taking neither of those steps to take at least one of them.

Tools like Hotjar and Crazy Egg can help you understand how visitors are interacting with your website. Hotjar allows you to see how far people scroll down a page, which areas their mouse hovers over the most and where people click on the page.

Those tools allow you to visualize the intent as it plays out. If page visitors are not interacting with your site in the way you intended, their intent might not be what you thought it was.

Experiment to Optimize Your Webpages for Visitor Intent

Using their actual interactions with your page, create an experiment to optimize your page.

If people are interacting with your page as intended, think about how to foster those interactions at a higher rate. If they’re not interacting with your page as intended, try to identify the intent you’re overlooking.

Think about why visitors are coming to that page, what information you’re providing for them on that page and what the ideal next step would be for those visitors. Remember, the best step for the visitor might not match with the best step for your business.

For example, if your homepage visitors aren’t clicking on your CTAs above the fold, and they’re not scrolling to your secondary CTAs below the fold, your page might not be set up properly.

On the other hand, if visitors are scrolling and clicking below the fold, but not clicking on your primary CTAs, think about how can you frame that above-the-fold offer to resonate more strongly with your audience.

If the visitors scrolling down aren’t clicking on your secondary offers, reconsider how well those offers align with intent. If no one is clicking on solution pages, maybe educational content will work better.

Once you hypothesize a proposed improvement, A/B test it.

You can test a micro change, such as button text or color, or a macro change, such as a whole new version of the page. Micro changes aim to optimize something that’s already working well, and macro changes aim to improve something that isn’t working.

In both instances, A/B testing is critical. If a different button color ends up reducing clicks, you shouldn’t keep that change. Moreover, if you’re testing a whole new version of a page, you need to be able to establish an apples-to-apples comparison to make sure your fix is actually improving performance.

The Takeaway

As you gain a better understanding of how visitors are navigating your site, you’ll be able to better predict visitor intent sitewide. An insight you learned from the homepage could apply to a blog post. Predicting starts with learning and understanding how visitors navigate the site in relation to how you design the site.

Your navigation and page elements should all have a purpose behind them; they shouldn’t just be there to be there.

You should never just hope people find meaningful content on your website. Instead, you should be guiding them toward it. If your website is not designed with the visitor’s intent in mind, it might not be easy for users to find the content valuable to them.

[justinjslone]

The Online Marketing Mistakes You Don’t Know You’re Making

Every business owner knows that marketing is essential to success, but making a few mistakes in your marketing strategy can cost you big bucks – and customers. Many of the most common mistakes we see are easily avoidable, so if any of the points on this list sound a bit too familiar to you, make...

Read More

The post The Online Marketing Mistakes You Don’t Know You’re Making appeared first on Internet Marketing Agency | Wordpress Website Design |Vision Fillers Inc.

[justinjslone]

Salesforce Announces It Is Now Building What Evergage Already Offers

As a customer data platform (CDP), we're often asked how Evergage compares with Salesforce. This is a fair question. Salesforce has been the leader in CRM for a long time, and the CRM was long considered to be the central repository of customer data in an organization. The CDP is a natural extension of Salesforce’s [...]

[justinjslone]

What is Inbound Sales?

The world of sales and marketing has evolved rapidly over the years. Consumers now have more buying power, more access to information and more control over the entire buying cycle.

That means salespeople need to adapt as well. Pushing a quick sale on a disinterested consumer is no longer going to work. Instead, you need to learn the ins and outs of the inbound sales methodology.

What is Inbound Sales?

Inbound sales is a sales methodology that prioritizes the needs, challenges, goals and interests of individual buyers. Instead of focusing on closing the sale as soon as possible, inbound salespeople work to meet consumers where they are and then guide — not push — them through the decision-making process.

By analyzing a buyer’s digital behavior during the awareness and consideration stages of the buyer’s journey, the smart inbound salesperson will be able to craft a helpful, personalized sales approach for each individual.

Ultimately, the extra time and care you put into educating your prospects will increase your likelihood of converting them into successful, long-term customers.

What is the Difference Between Inbound and Outbound Sales?

Outbound sales is the traditional sales approach involving cold calls, trade shows, purchased contact lists and other activities some would deem spam-worthy in today’s day and age. In other words, outbound sales is the act of “pushing” your message out to a large number of people who may or may not be interested in your product.

On the other hand, the inbound sales methodology is the act of “pulling” interested prospects to you and then qualifying them based on their fit.

Think about it this way: When you're cold calling a lead, is it because they've expressed a need for your product or service, or are you making an assumption? The bread and butter of inbound sales is that it encourages buyers to hand that information to you, so you don’t have to make sweeping “outbound” assumptions.

But contrary to popular belief, you can use outbound sales tactics in an inbound way. In fact, you should!

How Do I Use Outbound Sales Tactics in An Inbound Way?

The right mix of both inbound and outbound sales tactics is necessary to truly grow as a company. In some ways, you could consider outbound sales as synonymous with prospecting: it’s the act of sourcing leads, whereas inbound sales is the act of following up with and nurturing those leads.

The crux of inbound sales, then, is context, resources and research. Even if you’re following up with cold-sourced leads, you can perform some quick research to understand the explicit fit and implicit interest of those leads and then contextualize your follow-up message to fit the inbound framework.

To use outbound sales tactics in an inbound way, you need to:

1. Define your buyer personas. 

Your buyer personas are fictionalized representations of the types of customers who would benefit the most from your product or service. A buyer persona description should include information like job role, company size, challenges, goals, preferred social channels, level of buying power and more.

In order for the inbound methodology to work, both your sales and your marketing teams need to be aligned on personas you’re targeting and the process for targeting them. This alignment ensures the scalability of your team and the success of your outreach efforts.

2. Analyze your leads’ digital body language.

As your lead engages with content and information, they build up what we call their digital body language.

Digital body language is an aggregate profile of all the actions they’ve taken on your website, including the content they’ve engaged with, the pages they’ve viewed and all of the personal information they’ve submitted through forms. This information can help you understand which buyer persona bucket they fall into, what challenges they’re experiencing and which solutions they might be interested in.

Thanks to closed-loop reporting, capturing all of this information is pretty simple. Once you have the “inside scoop” about what your prospects are looking for, you can prepare yourself to have a more helpful, meaningful conversation.

So, before you get a prospect on the phone, study their digital body language. Know what products they’ve been researching, know the buzzwords to listen for and understand the pains they're experiencing that have led them to check out your organization.

Remember: You can also check social channels like LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram for any additional information you might be missing. Your goal for the follow-up process should be to add value before you ask for value, so the more contextual information you can gather, the better.

3. Align your sales and marketing operations.

All of the information your marketing team captures during the initial lead-generation process is the information you’ll use to tailor the cadence of your sales outreach and the content of your messages.

However, you need to make sure your sales team has access to the same information that your marketing team has — so if your sales and marketing teams aren’t working within the same platform or if those platforms aren’t integrated, you need to figure out how to enable easy access to that information from both teams.

Understanding where marketing and sales outreach overlap can help you streamline the handoff process so your prospects aren’t bombarded with redundant content or irrelevant messages.

Additionally, you need to have the operations in place to differentiate between inbound- and outbound-sourced leads. In HubSpot, for example, you can quickly and easily differentiate between inbound and outbound leads by checking whether the source category is “organic” or “offline.”

Why Should I Use Inbound Sales Tactics?

Research shows that up to half of all closed-won sales go to the salesperson who followed up first. If you’re not trying to capture your prospects’ interest at the early stages of the buying journey, you could be missing out on thousands of leads.

By taking the time to build trust, educate your prospects and position yourself as a trusted resource early on in the decision-making process, you can ensure that you’re the first person that prospect reaches out to when they’re ready to make a purchase.

Obviously, this long-term process can be difficult for salespeople who are eager to close the deal — but it’s important to remember that it’s not about you. Instead, it’s about how you can help the buyer.

Always Be Helping: The Problem- And Solution-Oriented Approach to Inbound Sales

Prioritizing the buyer’s needs before your own is essential for inbound sales success. Instead of the classic “always-be-closing” sales strategy, the inbound sales motto is ABH: Always Be Helping.

As you build a relationship with your prospects, keep the conversation problem-oriented and help them identify their issue. Then, once their challenge has been clearly defined, you can supplement the conversation with solutions-oriented content.

For example, if a lead has converted on a bottom-of-funnel offer for a website redesign, but also downloaded a top-of-funnel content offer on inbound marketing, we would be sure to speak with them about inbound first and avoid an unsuccessful sales pitch. Based on their actions, it's clear a website redesign is their primary goal, but they’ve also shown interest in inbound marketing. Thus, we would want to structure the conversation around the benefits of running inbound marketing on their new sales-ready website.

Obviously, if they want a demo and are ready to talk to sales, speak with them right away. If they’ve downloaded a few content offers, reach out to them by the end of the day. If they’re an email subscriber, you might not want to contact them until the end of the week. By identifying every leads’ buying stage, you can approach them with the strategy that’s likely to work best.

The Takeaway

With the right tools and guidance, organizations of any size can effectively implement inbound sales. Working with an experienced HubSpot Partner Agency like New Breed can help establish the strategy and structure of your inbound marketing and sales process. That's key to success as you roll out this new methodology.

Because inbound marketing is a constant stream of flowing content, your inbound sales team should be supplied with the sales-qualified leads needed for success. If you're already running an effective inbound marketing program, it's time to embrace the power of inbound sales as well!

Soon enough, prospects will be flowing with the help of your unified marketing and sales teams to accomplish your organization's — and most importantly, your customers' — goals.

Download our Complete Guide to Inbound Sales to better implement the tactics mentioned in this blog post:

[justinjslone]

Why Every Marketing Team Needs a Copyeditor

While the difference between a writer and an editor is clear — writers produce content and editors revise it — the difference between an editor and a copyeditor is a little more nuanced.

Editors make improvements to a piece’s content, typically in collaboration with the writer, whereas copyeditors make corrections and improvements regarding a piece’s grammar, punctuation, accuracy and formatting.

An editor might suggest restructuring a narrative article as a list for scannability. A copyeditor might point out that you’re inconsistent with your hyphenation of “product-led growth.”

The argument can be made that the average reader won’t notice minor details like that, and hiring a copyeditor is an overhead cost that doesn’t bring in clear ROI. However, just because their value isn’t tangible doesn’t mean their work isn’t worthwhile for your business.

7 Reasons You Need a Copyeditor

1. Typos cost money!

Mistakes illustrate a lack of care. If you’re not being meticulous, you’re indicating to the readers that notice your errors that you didn’t bother to double-check your work. Errors may even lead site visitors to abandon your website before they get to know what you’re all about.

A report by the BBC in 2011 found that typos could be costing millions. On one site, they found that the revenue per visitor doubled after an error was corrected.

The cost of typos isn’t just hypothetical. An eBay seller lost about half-a-million dollars when they listed a bottle of “Allsopp's Arctic Ale” as “Alsop’s Arctic Ale.” The typo prevented collectors from discovering the auction. The bottle was purchased for $304 and then immediately resold for $503,300 when listed under the properly spelled name.

2. Copyeditors help contextualize content in the buyer’s journey.

Copyeditors don’t just proof existing content, they think about how all your content works together.

A writer focuses on the message of the individual piece of content they’re creating. When editing, part of a copyeditor's job is to examine how the reader got to this piece and where they’re going next.

Copyeditors can look at conversion paths and next steps to determine if appropriate CTAs are being used. They also will ensure the language driving conversions is consistent sitewide.

You don’t want to contradict yourself from webpage to webpage, and copyeditors make sure the reader experience stays consistent.

3. What’s being said differs from how it’s said.

When you’re writing, the rules are secondary to the topic itself. First drafts tend to be written as the writer thinks through the piece — and they read like that too. The focus is on whether or not the message is conveyed coherently, not whether or not the capitalization or hyphenation is consistent.

Those smaller details are important for the end reader. If they’re stumbling over grammatical errors or inconsistencies, the reader is going to have trouble absorbing the message. However, for the writer, there’s no point perfecting those details framing the message if the message is poorly communicated.

Writers don’t want to agonize over how ending punctuation needs to be used in a bulleted list if they might end up deleting that list entirely.

The creation of a piece and the perfecting of it are different steps of the writing process and need to be done by two different people. The writer’s job is to think through the value of the message and what’s being said. The editor’s job is to analyze how it’s being said and ensure it conforms to your organization’s rules.

4. Copyeditors add a perspective checkpoint.

It’s difficult to see something you’ve already overlooked. Once you’ve written something and read over it once, it’s very difficult to catch mistakes you missed in that readthrough.

You could have an obvious error like “the the” in a sentence from when you restructured a paragraph, but once you skip over it the first time, your brain will continue to do so because your brain is focused on other aspects of your writing.

However, a mistake like that would be obvious to someone reading the piece for the first time who has distance from the creation of the piece.

The way pitchers view the curve of their ball is different from how a catcher sees it, and the way a writer examines their own work is different than how an editor will. It’s hard to be objective about your own creation.

Copyeditors can also pick up societal nuances that you might not be aware of. That can range from language-level errors like a writer using the British form “towards” instead of the American “toward.” Or, it could be more implicit, like textbooks that use men as all of their fictional STEM characters and females for their more artistic scenarios.

In both those cases, the writer may not be aware they did anything wrong because of their internal biases.

5. Consistency does matter.

The average reader might not notice whether you use an en dash or a hyphen for a numerical range, but they might notice if in your header you say a process takes “7–10 days” and later on you write “7 - 10 days.”

They may not be able to put into words why the second seems wrong, but they’ll feel that inconsistency. It’s similar to when you visit a poorly designed website: you may not be able to explain what’s wrong with the website, but you know the UX isn’t optimal. Small inconsistencies in your writing can detract from the reader’s experience and weaken their understanding of the information you’re trying to convey.

6. Copyeditors encourage growth and skill development.

Through editing, you’re going to improve as a writer, and through writing, you’ll improve as an editor. Part of the goal of the relationship between writers and copyeditors is growth.

Just as they pay attention to patterns across your entire brand, copyeditors also pay attention to patterns within a writer’s work. If a writer is consistently making the same mistake, like mixing up “number” and “amount,” a copyeditor can point that out so the writer can learn.

The writer-editor symbiotic relationship will add value to your company because both participants will improve their craft through their interactions with each other. You’ll then have more effective employees on your team.

7. Your site is a portfolio for your company.

You want to look like you know what you’re talking about. Especially if you’re selling content, your content needs to be impeccable.

But even if content isn’t part of your product, you never know what’s coming down the line or when you’ll need to reuse copy. You should have your content ready at any time in case you want to apply for an award, speak at an industry event or re-publish a blog post on another site.

Your content should already be in a good place. You don’t want to have to reinvest resources into perfecting it.

Copyediting Can Be a Task Instead of a Role

Your copyeditor doesn’t have to exclusively be a copyeditor — they could be a writer or SEO team member who does copyediting tasks. But if there’s no one filling the designated role, feedback mechanisms need to be built into your content creation process.

At New Breed, our writers take turns editing each other’s work so every blog and PCO has at least one other set of eyes on it before it’s finalized.

It’s important to have someone other than the writer review each piece before it’s published, regardless of who that other person is. Ideally, the editor would have training in writing and be familiar with your clients, but even if they don’t, they still catch things the writer might not.

Even the best editors need editors. Having a step in place for internal review is an essential part of the writing process.

Depending on the volume of written work you’re creating, it might be better to have someone whose sole focus is copyediting though. While you don’t want copyediting to bottleneck the process, it’s beneficial to have a single person accountable for the quality of the published work.

Copyeditors can provide a final seal of approval to make sure everything is up to par, whereas it’s very likely even the most impeccable writer will still overlook errors in their own work.

[justinjslone]

8 Landing Page Designs We Fell In Love With

Landing pages capture information about your site visitors through a form or chatbot. While that’s the main purpose of a landing page, we at New Breed believe that if a landing page offers no further value to the site visitor, then forcing them away from their current location adds unnecessary friction.

Additionally, while all landing pages have the same goal, they don’t have to look the same. Common landing page formats include:

Standard Classic: The standard landing page has a form above the fold and a clear value proposition. It’s easy to understand and fulfills the visitor’s expectations.

Long-form: A long-form landing page offers more value upfront than the standard classic. There’s still a clear value proposition above the fold, but the page goes more in-depth into the offer and may provide a sneak peek. With this page style, the form is at the bottom of the page as you can see on our Inbound Marketing Assessment landing page.

Video landing page: A video landing page is very similar to the standard classic, but instead of placing content next to the form, there’s a video explaining why you should download the offer.

Conversational Landing Page: Instead of using forms, conversational landing pages use a chatbot to help users download the content offers.

But you don’t have to stick to those page styles. As more and more content is becoming ungated, businesses are getting more creative in how they position their forms and landing pages to collect visitor information.

Here are a few of our favorite landing page designs:

1. Ceros

Ceros’s platform is designed to create interactive, experiential content. Their resources are examples instead of how-tos. Because they can create awesome content about anything, showing off what they can do is more beneficial to them than showing off how they do it.

Their CTA, “Get Inspired,” speaks to that. It’s nice, clean and simple. Underneath, there’s a short paragraph that clearly lays out what to expect if you subscribe to their newsletter.

Everything a page visitor needs to know to sign up for the newsletter is clearly laid out above the fold, and below the fold, they showcase additional examples and resources.

2. Drift

Instead of using a form, Drift uses a chatbot to guide page visitors through the process of downloading the guide.

We also like how below the fold, the landing page lists all the chapters to better illustrate what’s inside the guide.

Drift’s landing page is a great example of strategically gated content. This is where the online version of the guide is available ungated for anyone to look at, and then if someone wants to download the PDF, they’ll need to interact with the chatbot and provide an email address. This allows Drift to provide value before asking for anything in return.

3. Accelo

On Accelo’s homepage, everything is above the fold. You have immediate access to all the info you need to know, and there’s a simple sign-up action to take.

Plus, the video acts as an interactive value proposition that doesn’t fill up the page in the same way written content does. Unless copy is really dense, you typically can’t see written content all at the same time. This use of video allows a significant amount of information to be cleanly packaged above the fold in a visually appealing way.

4. Uber

The more complex your solution is, the more you want to nurture people through the funnel. One way to make it easier for you to effectively nurture leads later on is to segment them initially the way that Uber does.

There are two ways people can use Uber: as a driver or as a rider. This form allows users to immediately segment themselves into the proper audience so they receive the information relevant to them.

5. Airbnb

When people go to Airbnb’s homepage, they know exactly what they’re looking for: to book a vacation. Their website works pretty similarly to other hotel landing pages; they want to know where you want to go and your check-in and check-out dates.

They don’t add friction by requiring an initial sign up but instead start by providing you with their service offering. Once you find a place to stay and start booking, then you sign up.

We particularly like this page because Airbnb’s value proposition is all about creating unique experiences and the image they use illustrates a unique offering.

6. Tesla

The main product Tesla is pushing right now is their Model 3. It’s their economy car and featured prominently in the main above the fold CTA on their homepage.

The product page for the Model 3 acts as a long-form landing page, providing information about all the car’s features and how they offer value for the consumer. Each section of the page features an “Order Now” button that makes it easy for page visitors to take the next step and start designing their car once they’ve obtained the information they’re looking for.

7. Slack

Slack’s landing page for downloading their platform segments users by the platform they’re viewing the website on and provides the appropriate download button.

The page contains a minimal amount of text, but still clearly illustrates the value proposition and shows an example of what the product looks like.

If you’re viewing the page from a computer, the page also provides an opportunity for you to receive the Slack mobile app link by text so you can easily access their mobile product as well.

8. Neil Patel

The spin to win wheel on Neil Patel’s blog is big and different. It provides the opportunity to win something, which feels exciting and intriguing.

This subscription form is different from other subscription CTAs, and in this case, we think different is effective. We were definitely tempted to enter our emails and try our luck. 

Create an awesome landing page for your site with our Landing Page Best Practices Checklist: