4 Things marketers should focus on for international growth by MPG BO Team, on 10/02/2022 As Chair of Renewd International, I recently had the privilege of chairing the first Renewd International virtual roundtable. These roundtables, as with other Renewd International events, are designed as a confidential space for senior executives from specialised media and events businesses to meet and share insights – with a focus on international growth strategies. You can read the full ‘key takeaways article’ written by Renewd International Committee Member Carolyn Morgan here. Following Chatham House Rule, Carolyn has only directly referenced, with permission, the contribution of one of the speakers – Andrew Hatcher, Mentor in Residence, Cambridge Judge Business School. Andrew shared some very useful and relevant frameworks and models that apply to growing internationally. These got me thinking about how marketers need to support the international growth of a business. Four important things stood out: #1 Marketers must have a deep understanding of the ‘What, Why, Who and How’ for an international growth strategy to work, with a focus on the ‘Why’ and the ‘Who’. Having marketers who understand your customers very well is business critical. Every person in your marketing team should know exactly WHO your customers are in terms of demographics, so they can identify and target the right people. And then having ‘deep knowledge’ of what your customers value most about what you have to offer, and, therefore, WHY they buy from you when they do, is essential for every marketer. It is impossible for your marketers to get the right message to the right person at the right time (i.e. do effective marketing), if they don’t take full responsibility for always having a strong understanding of the WHO and the WHY – especially as these change as a business grows and enters new markets. It often surprises me how many business leaders don’t hold their marketers accountable for gaining and deploying this knowledge in the right way – especially if they’re looking to grow internationally, and as the stakes get higher. #2 Marketers need to understand how customers currently perceive your value proposition, and what value attributes customers see as priorities. A good marketer can list the value attributes implicit in your value proposition. A great marketer knows that in order to do great marketing, customers need to be asked how they rate a range of value attributes. What is most important to the customer in what you do and how you do it? What is least important? And, as we well know, it’s all about perception.. The only way to fully understand the value a customer places on specific attributes of your product, is by doing good customer research. The very best marketers I have ever worked with will push for and champion this kind of research – for very good reason. The Renewd International discussion group had some quite firm views on research methods that deliver the most valuable findings – included in the article. Having an optimised martech stack, will also provide you with analytics and behavioural data that should give you some valuable customer insight as you see how customers are engaging with your products (the beauty of digital!). A good marketer gets this and makes it happen. Using findings from your customer research, along with behaviours visible with a good martech stack and data setup, will enable your marketers to not only target the right people, but also develop a very effective marketing messaging strategy to engage them well. When growing internationally, customer insight is especially important as new customers in new markets may well value different things and behave differently to your more traditional customers. #3 The best marketers know how to leverage your existing value proposition and existing market presence to build ‘growth marketing’ strategies. There are several ways a product/brand can grow, and leveraging what you already have in place is often the smartest move. Marketers who can successfully leverage strong engagement and support from existing customers to gain new customers in new markets are winning! A key success factor for marketers is being able to capture customer data in a marketing database that makes their marketing work better over time. See the recent MPG Insights article on how a well-structured, growing database supports a resilient and growing business. #4 Marketing leaders, and business leaders, know that good marketing skills are valuable and in short supply. A progressive approach to building a hybrid marketing function can support international growth. When launching new or existing value propositions into new markets, the question is often raised about whether or not to hire people based in those markets, particularly sales and marketing people. The normalisation of remote working through the global pandemic has changed the game, meaning it doesn’t really matter where your marketers are based. The most important thing is to have the right marketing skills and resources applied to your growth opportunity. And building a high-performance marketing function doesn’t mean that you need to increase your head count or overheads. We’ve seen a hybrid approach to strategically building a high performance marketing function working well for many organisations, all over the world. A hybrid approach, executed in the right way and with the right partners, means that you can focus on maintaining a ‘minimum viable’ internal resource while having the option to ramp marketing activity up and down, and adjust expertise plugged in to your marketing, as needed – with carefully selected, well embedded and well supported external partners . This approach allows for a much greater focus on the ‘science’ elements of marketing, such as marketing strategy development, data, and analytics – which are absolutely critical when enabling any kind of growth, and even more important when ‘future proofing’ international growth initiatives. At MPG we believe the marketing function should be held accountable for directly supporting a business strategy, and that a strong investment in marketing is essential for growth. If your strategy is focused on international growth, and you have the best marketing skills integrated into your planning and execution, you’re more likely to get a great return on your international growth investment! If you are a senior executive in a specialised media/events business, with an interest in international growth strategies, make sure you join Renewd and sign up to our next Renewd International virtual roundtable. Working closely with our internal team, MPG developed a strong marketing strategy focused on achieving revenue growth for a key product in our portfolio – including recommendations for a virtual offering. We were impressed by the science and rigour they put into the process. I would recommend MPG as a good strategic marketing partner for a B2B brand. Anna Knight , VP Licensing, Informa Markets Do you need help defining a marketing strategy that drives growth and delivers strong ROI? MPG’s marketing strategists have a wealth of experience and expertise in developing high impact marketing strategies for B2B brands. Get in touch to find out how we can help you build a robust marketing strategy that drives revenue growth and consistently delivers against business objectives. FIND OUT MORE Continue Reading Topics: Digital marketingMarketing operationsMarketing strategyMessaging
What’s going on with email marketing? by Sharise Wilkinson, on 14/10/2021 Email is a challenging area for B2B media and events businesses right now. Several companies have recently told us they are struggling to maintain strong levels of engagement and good enough results from their email campaigns – especially where email marketing had been a strong channel for them until relatively recently. When investigating this email marketing challenge for a range of clients, we are finding that declining email performance is due to a similar set of issues, all of which have similar solutions, regardless of the market or product in focus. In this post, we share MPG’s five key recommendations for fixing an email marketing performance problem: #1: Messaging strategy development There are 4 things to get right with your database to achieve strong engagement and conversions: (1) relevance (2) currency (3) size/number of contacts you can email (4) how your contacts are tagged, or organised. Simply put, you need a database of enough of the right kinds of contacts (those who will find your value proposition relevant and valuable), that are up to date and correct, in order to achieve engagement and conversions at the required level. To understand how much room there is for growth in your database, you must understand your total addressable market (TAM). Lead generation tactics such as downloadable content pieces, powered by inbound marketing, are a very important way to constantly and reliably grow your database with relevant, interested, and engaged contacts, all year-round. Additionally, dedicated, targeted database research is a very effective way of filling key gaps with relevant (high quality) contacts. Get in touch with MPG to find out how we can help you invest well in this kind of research – to achieve a strong return on investment, short term and longer term. Find out more about MPG’s Database Development & Optimisation services #2: Segment and target Segmentation and targeting well have always proved – in MPG’s projects – to almost instantly improve email performance. The main purpose of segmentation and targeting is to make sure the content of the email as relevant as possible to the person receiving it. Firmographic, behaviour-based, and demographic segmentation are the three methods we recommend – often to be used concurrently. The exact segmentation method chosen should always be based on the desired outcome of improving relevance to the audience. More relevance = more engagement, which usually = more conversions, which usually = more revenue. To enable segmentation, ensure your lead generation (data capture) and data research efforts include the categorisation needed to organise your contacts well to enable segmentation and targeting. Emails targeted as specific segments should be used to present the most valuable and compelling benefits and features from the perspective of the email recipient. As with all marketing, measure to understand results and improve as you go along. #3: Get and use a messaging strategy To make sure your email copy is highly relevant, and to ensure the relevant messaging is consistent and reinforced at every stage of the customer journey, you need a dedicated messaging strategy. As part of this, it is important to consider which stage your customer is currently navigating in their journey in purchasing from you. Using progressively more product-focused, persuasive language as customers become more engaged will support your conversions. #4: Make your website work well As the end destination of all your emails, your website is a key component in the success of email marketing as a channel. Your website is where customers should end up when they click on an email, so it is essential the journey from email to landing page is logical and seamless. For example, if an email recipient clicks on a Download Brochure CTA, they should be directed straight to a page where this is possible – not a website homepage where they then need to hunt for the thing they’re looking for. As the purpose of email marketing is to drive traffic to your website, it is essential your website is easy to navigate and presents the most relevant information to the email recipient. Your website is also essential for strong lead generation, so having your website properly optimised will both increase your pool of contacts for future email campaigns, and improve the lead conversion you get from existing contacts. Find out about MPG’s Optimised Website Services #5: Get a good mix of content-led, product-led, and offer-led emails Having a variety of content-led, product-led, and offer-led emails ensures dynamic and engaging messaging and CTAs, which in turn improves email performance. Avoid fatigue and messaging stagnation by using a good mix of email content. For event marketing in particular, plan well ahead with a marketing timeline where emails tell a story well based on how your product is developing. For subscriptions and membership marketing, map dynamic and relevant content in to an automated workflow. This will keep your content fresh and engaging for your audience. And of course, before drafting an email, you should have a good idea of what your objective(s) are, e.g. pushing downloads of a new brochure, or registering interest. This will ensure focus on a core message, and make measurement of success more valid and viable. There is a lot more to be said about how to make email marketing work well – it is a formidable topic! Considering the above 5 recommendations as a first step will ensure you have are covering all your bases. A comprehensive guide on email content best practices could populate several blogs! For now, here are the key points to keep in mind: 1) Test & learn When it comes to email, small changes can make a big difference, so it’s important to test and learn from your emails about what drives the best engagement. Areas for testing include: Subject lines – your subject line will indicate straight away whether your email is relevant and interesting to the recipient. Using an open ended question is a great way to capture people’s attention, and you can then go on to answer the question within the body of the email. The best way to to approach this will depend on the email content and audience. Try different approaches and measure results to identify the optimal one. Sender names – in the same way that you A/B test your subject lines, monitor your open rates to see which “from” name leads to the best results. Depending on the focus of the email, you may find your recipients prefer to open emails from your event director or sales reps/account managers (e.g. for offer led emails, or spex campaigns). We usually find with B2B emails that includethe sender’s full name alongside the company’s name work well, e.g. “Full name @ MPG” Call-to-action variations – test a variety of CTAs to see what makes your audience click e.g. ‘View full agenda’ vs ‘Discover key themes’. See more on CTAs below. Format – experiment with different combinations of plain text/designed, brand sender/personal sender info, and short/long content. Run A/B split tests constantly and track results (focus on click through rate) to identify the content style the audience prefers for the different types of comms. Don’t forget: when doing email tests, you should always only test one variable at a time. 2) Clear call-to-actions (CTAs) Limit yourself to two, max. three CTAs in each email, thinking about the action you want your audience to take, and prioritising that. Your CTAs should always contain a verb and it’s a good idea to vary the terms you use. For example, rather than saying ‘Book now’ for every purchase CTA, you could use ‘Secure your place’, or ‘Register today to claim your discount’. Ensure that the landing pages you are driving traffic to are optimised for a smooth and consistent user journey between channels. Start and finish with the primary action you want the reader to take so that there is an obvious next step when reading (or skimming!) the email. 3) Use personalisation Short, plain-text emails from a personal sender name tend to work best for ‘personal’ reminders to leads and other warm contacts, e.g ‘I want to make sure you don’t miss the earlybird’ or ‘I’m the Sponsorship Manager at x, I thought you’d find this useful…’ Combine personal sender names with personal subjects lines, e.g. ‘Will I see you there?’ 4) Sender email Email marketing requires trust between the sender and the recipient. Using ‘noreply’ email addresses can erode this trust, and can harm your deliverability if noreply email addresses are automatically filtered to spam folders. Using a reply email that appears to be a personal email will build trust and will provide an open channel of communication between your organisation and your customers. The email can direct people to a shared inbox which can be monitored for genuine responses from your customers. In this article we have presented a set of strategic and holistic suggestions, alongside practical and actionable tips. This holistic approach is important because all elements of your marketing are interrelated. You cannot view a particular marketing challenge or opportunity in a simplistic, one-dimensional way. All digital marketing channels are dynamic and connected, so a dynamic and connected view and solution is also needed for your email marketing! Do you need to improve the performance of your email marketing? Team MPG includes email marketing experts who can help you create, refine, and execute on an Email Marketing Strategy. Or we can create an Email Marketing Playbook for your team, with a set of guidelines, examples, and templates that will drive stronger engagement, and growth-driving results. Please get in touch to find out more. The work MPG has done with my team has been really valuable. Their strong strategic and operational marketing expertise, and the way they have shared it with us, has been highly relevant for our business – helping us address multiple challenges and opportunities we face. David Laird, President & CEO, Strategy Institute Continue Reading Topics: Database developmentEmail marketingMarketing automationMessaging
What’s HOT right now and is likely to get even hotter before the end of 2021? by MPG Development Team, on 12/08/2021 As you lead your business and your marketing function into a post-pandemic world, it will be more important than ever to make smart investments, and ensure they pay off. High performance marketing will need to play a key role as companies aim for a return to strong and sustainable growth. Marketing strategies and marketing ROI will come under the spotlight in a big way. In the coming months you will need to make some important decisions – with lasting impact – about your marketing investments. Based on MPG’s perspective across a range of organisations, we have highlighted in this newsletter the areas we recommend you pay particular attention to as you move your organisation forward. What’s HOT right now and is likely to get even hotter before the end of 2021? #1: Messaging strategy development With increased competition in an already crowded digital space, a top priority for marketers should be developing messaging strategies based on a deep understanding of your customers’ pain points and motivations. Effectively communicating your products’ unique value is essential – but not always easy. MPG’s guide on how to create high impact messaging starts with mapping your market and identifying key market segments to focus on before articulating USPs (unique selling points) and benefits that are highly relevant and compelling for your most important customers. Here are all 5 steps MPG recommends you take to build an impactful messaging strategy: Step 1: Map your market and identify key market segments Step 2: Identify and articulate key ‘needs to be met’ and ‘jobs to be done’ Step 3: Define USPs and benefits for key market segments Step 4: Write your core copy Step 5: Execute – down the whole funnel Well planned and executed marketing messaging is not optional – it’s critical for success. Do you need better messaging to unlock revenue growth in your business? Get in touch with MPG to discuss how best to approach this. #2: Well implemented and well-integrated marketing technology With marketing impact coming under scrutiny, and with a high standard of digital marketing essential in every organisation, a well optimised marketing technology stack is essential to create a good customer journey and to reduce time consuming (and wasteful) manual marketing processes. And your marketing function will not be the only area of your business that benefits from a well implemented martech stack. Your sales function will benefit greatly from robust and well-integrated marketing systems. Automated lead nurturing and lead scoring could be game-changing for the performance of your sales team. A strategic investment in making your martech work harder for you will be essential to scale more profitably. Do you have the martech in place, but it’s just not working for you? Or do you need new tech and don’t know what to buy? Get in touch to find out how MPG can help you get, and keep, your martech stack in good order. #3: Optimised websites backed up by deep analytics “Your website is – by far – your most important marketing channel.” This is an MPG mantra. All too often we see marketers being distracted by other channels and investing in marketing tactics, but ignoring the optimisation of their websites. This could be a fatal error. The first step in getting your website working hard enough for you is ensuring it is well optimised for search engines. If your potential customers can’t find your website easily, how will they buy from you? However, good SEO is only half of the battle. Once a potential customer has landed on your site, you need to keep them there, engage them and convert them to a lead or online sale. To ensure you have a website that performs well for search engines and conversions, MPG recommends the following: Don’t make your web users think too hard. Make it really easy to find what they’re looking for and take action on your site. Don’t try to make everything stand out – or nothing will! Build in lead generation intelligently Make sure your website is search engine optimised MPG’s full article on this subject can be found here. It is also essential to make sure you have set up your web analytics in a way that provides insight on your customer behaviour on your website, and on how they got to your site in the first place. In this MPG Insights article you can find a list of the 15 metrics that really matter in digital marketing for B2B. Can your potential customers easily find your site? And when they get there – are you successfully converting them to leads and sales? Have you set up your web analytics to monitor customer behaviour and do you use data to drive decision-making in your business? MPG’s website and analytics experts can help you optimise your website and other channels for best performance. Find out more. #4: A well maintained, and growing, marketing database Databases may be a bit less exciting than marketing technology and automation, but this ‘unsexy’ part of marketing could be your key to growth and riches… Not having enough data, or too much of the wrong data, can be detrimental to success. You could have the most creative communications with the strongest messaging in the world, but if you aren’t getting it in front of the right people, you won’t achieve anything. In this article, MPG’s data experts cover more on this, plus other common mistakes we see when it comes to databases. Smart business and marketing leaders know that ongoing growth and maintenance of your database is essential to ensure your marketing drives good reach, engagement and conversions from your target audience. They also understand that investing in martech and automation without investing in a strong database is pointless. If you’re ready to invest in cleaning up, expanding and structuring your database to deliver a strong ROI, get in touch with MPG today. #5: Biddable media – taking your inbound marketing to the next level Sometimes called digital advertising or PPC (pay-per-click), biddable media, when well planned and managed, should deliver a strong marketing ROI. Biddable media is constantly evolving with new trends frequently emerging. But, marketers can easily get distracted by ‘the new and shiny’. Based on MPG’s extensive work in biddable media, we see the following types working best for B2B media/events (broadly speaking): Google paid search and display, LinkedIn sponsored posts and Facebook sponsored posts. But, it is important to be mindful that investing in this area comes with a big ‘beware’ sign! When executed poorly, biddable media can be very expensive, with no demonstrable return on your investment. Whether your biddable media is being managed in-house, or by an agency, the very first thing you should do is ensure you have a well-constructed biddable media strategy that dovetails with your overall marketing strategy. And before you spend any of your biddable media marketing budget, you also need to ensure that you have all the necessary tracking and performance measurement in place to track your ROI. If biddable media is an integral part of your marketing mix, but you don’t have the resources to create a robust strategy and execute it well, MPG can help – get in touch today. Continue Reading Topics: Database developmentMarketing technologyMessaging
A practical guide to building a robust B2B membership acquisition strategy by MPG BO Team, on 15/07/2021 Effective member acquisition (sometimes referred to as member recruitment) depends on the fine art of building an integrated marketing and sales strategy that creates a pipeline of relevant, engaged prospects who then convert to members. The holy grail of membership marketing is to achieve strong member retention to build high value, recurring revenues, but it all has to start with strong membership acquisition. Through our work with companies offering memberships to their customers, MPG has developed a methodology for creating strong member acquisition strategies. Here we share with you our tried and tested 5 step approach. 5 steps to developing a strong acquisition strategy for B2B membership growth #1 Reach your target audience – build routes to market An essential first step to your acquisition strategy is to understand which of your market segments has the best potential for delivering the desired member growth. To do this, you will need a deep understanding of the composition of your end-user market. Market mapping and sizing is essential to understanding what the gap is between your high growth segment and your existing database. Depending on the size of the gap, you can work out how to deploy your inbound channels, and you might need a database build project. You can read more about MPG’s recommended market mapping and sizing approach in this related article. #2 Create your outreach marcomms strategy Your next step in the pursuit of new, high quality members is to build your marcomms strategy. Creating a well structured outreach strategy is centred around getting the right messages to the right people at the right time. To make this effective based on a fully integrated communications plan, you will need to consider: Brand and tone of voice – have you documented these to ensure your marketing and sales people are fully aligned? This also ensures they stay top of mind Core communications and channels – not only will you determine which communications will be used in which channel, and the frequency of those communications (ideally largely automated), you will need to factor in how often these will be reviewed and revised to suit your members’ changing needs and life cycle maturity Content – what pieces will resonate with your potential members, which channels you’ll be using to distribute and amplify your content, and when this content will be released? How can you customise this based on the specific profile and interests of your targeted members? Quantified, measurable objectives – do you have clear objectives for each communication piece? And have you specified how performance will be measured against each of those objectives? #3 Communicate effectively for awareness and interest Now that you’ve defined your outreach strategy, you should turn your focus back to ensuring you deploy the most impactful, relevant messaging for each target audience group. This means articulating your membership USPs (unique selling points), and membership benefits considering the specific motivations, needs, challenges and opportunities that your product addresses, and are being faced by your target persona’s. There is now more noise than ever with competition from your traditional competitors, and also from disruptors and new entrants who are taking advantage of rapid digitalisation to move into your space. As your competition and the noise everyone is making escalates, attracting, engaging and converting your target customers will require highly relevant and carefully crafted messaging. If you are not sure where to start with your messaging strategy, have a look at our step-by-step guide for building a winning messaging strategy to steer you through the process. #4 Engage and convert You’ve grown your database, defined your target segments and relevant messaging, and built your outreach strategy. The next priority is to get those prospects to convert to leads and ultimately sales. You need to ensure your entire customer journey is mapped out and optimised to drive those coveted conversions. A fundamental element in this customer journey is your website – you need to get more of the right people to visit your website, complete forms and ultimately sign up to your membership offering. Investing in your website is critical to ensure all your marketing works. Good SEO and a seamless user experience, with intelligent lead generation and calls to action (CTAs) that drive conversions are all a must. There are many factors that will impact how well optimised your website is, and in this article we share the top 4 things you should be doing for a high performance website. #5 Measure ROI and improve If you’ve been reading our blogs for a while, you know how much emphasis we put on the importance of tracking and analysing results to adjust and optimise your marketing approach in a responsive and agile way for the best outcomes. It’s so important in fact we’ve dedicated articles to measuring membership marketing success and the 15 metrics that really matter in digital marketing for B2B. When it comes to marketing metrics, it’s easy to go down the rabbit hole and lose focus on what really matters. The below areas are an essential starting point when measuring the success of your membership acquisition marketing: Database size and growth Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) Sales qualified leads (SQLs) Sales achieved Length of sales Cycle Revenue achieved Average yield DOWNLOAD MEMBERSHIP MAKRETING KPIS Coming soon… In the final installment of our membership marketing series to be published later this summer, we’ll be looking at the best way to build events (in all forms) into your membership offering. Not every events business needs a membership offering, and not every membership offering needs events (or at least large, in-person events). But when your product portfolio includes membership and events it is very important to tie them together in various ways to ensure your events support member retention and acquisition for steady member revenue growth. So, if you have not already signed up to MPG Insights – now is a good time! Subscribe here to get an email in your inbox every time we publish a new blog like this one, or create a resource (e.g. webinar, guide or report) that will help you achieve high performance B2B marketing. MPG’s marketing strategists provided us with clear direction on how to establish strong brand positioning. Their work for Outsmart Insight included a thorough competitor analysis, customer persona development, messaging strategy development, branding upgrade and website design & functionality recommendations. Having MPG as collaborative and creative marketing partners, focused on delivering marketing assets we could immediately put into action and gain ROI from really helped us move forward as a business. Alex Ayad, Manging Director & Founder, Outsmart Insight If growing membership revenue is a strategic focus for you, MPG can help. Our team of marketing specialists can create, and execute on, a robust membership marketing strategy for you. Find out more about our approach – get in touch. Continue Reading Topics: Audience acquisitionCommunity marketingContent marketingMembership marketingMessaging
Implementing ABM in your business: a ‘how to’ guide by Sharise Wilkinson, on 26/05/2021 In our last MPG Insights post, we defined Account Based Marketing (ABM) and explained why it’s a marketing approach that B2B businesses should be looking to integrate into their marketing and sales strategies and processes. In this post we focus on the ‘how’, and outline a guide to getting ABM up and running in your business. Refresher: What is Account Based Marketing (ABM)? ABM is a marketing approach to identify, target and engage a specific set of high-value accounts by creating highly personalised messaging and customer experiences for key individuals within these accounts. Well executed ABM should deliver strong ROI through higher conversion rates, shorter sales cycles and higher average order values. Your ‘how to’ guide to building an ABM strategy 1. Identify your target audience members within ABM accounts Before you can conduct ABM, you need to know who your high-value customers are: draw up a list of the potential members, subscribers, sponsors/clients or delegates who would be most valuable to have as customers. From this, conduct deeper research to map out the full Decision Making Unit (DMU) around these individuals – including any key influencers of decisions as well. Ensure that on your database, you have the customer data required to target these decision makers and influencers. If you lack this data, first see if you can use research to fill these gaps. If data research is not possible or compliance issues make it difficult to hold or target these contacts, narrowly focused PPC campaigns can get your brand and message in front of key stakeholders with targeted companies. Alternatively, you could try and leverage advocates to pass your marketing on to these individuals. At this stage, an important action is to identify, understand and document the DMU members in each account. What challenges and opportunities are these people facing, right now? What questions are they desperately seeking answers to? What peers and businesses do they want to connect with? What would make them join your community, purchase your membership or attend your event? What would they hope to achieve by investing time, money and attention into your products? 2. Create relevant messaging and content The key to making ABM work is delivering highly relevant messaging and content. Every touchpoint should deliver a message that is compelling in isolation, but also cohesive with the wider journey. Before you can get into the details of customer journeys and specific channel tactics, first formulate the key messages, focused on products and features, USPs and benefits – that will resonate with each identified account. What is it about your value proposition that meets the specific needs of each organisation (or group of organisations)? The more relevant and specific you can be here, the more impactful your messages will be. If you can explicitly mention one of an account’s most pressing challenges or opportunities in your messaging, and explain how you can help them address this, you will grab their attention. Next, consider the content you are creating and distributing to individuals within targeted accounts. These are your reports, whitepapers, interviews, webinars or any other type of content piece that is used for marketing and lead generation. While designing content specifically for your ABM needs is likely to deliver a strong result, a practical (faster, cheaper & easier), while effective method is to integrate content by ‘packaging’ it in a way that creates relevance for your targeted accounts. This can be done by prefacing it with context on why it’s relevant to a specific industry or challenge e.g. when using an industry report, you could pull out the section that is the most relevant to the DMU you are contacting. 3. Map the desired customer journeys for targeted individuals From first contact through to final conversion, understanding the journey your accounts will take through your marketing funnel helps you make better decisions on how to optimise each stage of the journey or touchpoint by putting the right content and messaging in front of the right person, at the right time. Consider how quickly you expect accounts to move through the funnel and how often and when they will receive comms. Refer back to the research you did on their motivators: how will they be fed relevant and useful information, specific to their needs? Get customer journeys down on paper, laying out the various options you think targeted individuals might take. Lucidchart is a great tool for this kind of customer journey mapping. 4. Create a campaigns plan based on these customer journeys Using your customer journey maps, map out the specifics of the particular channels and tactics you are going to deploy. A combination of emails, social media outreach and engagement, PPC ads, content pieces and landing pages should create a compelling and engaging journey that feels relevant and effortless – ‘made just for me’ from the customer’s perspective. You don’t have to recreate everything from scratch for each account (or group of accounts), but at a minimum consider each touchpoint from the perspective of individuals within your targeted account DMUs. For example, grouping contacts by job function and sending them an email tailored to the challenges/needs they will personally experience in their roles will still deliver a relevant and personalised message, while the grouping saves you time and resources as well. 5. Execute sales and marketing campaigns Once you have a detailed plan in place, you need people in your team with the skills, time and motivation to execute it. Rigour and agility are valuable traits for marketers working on ABM. Getting targeted messages out to the right people at the right time requires careful forward planning, especially if your ABM efforts are running concurrently to your ‘standard’ marketing campaigns. Adjustments to your targeting, channels, and messaging are likely to be needed as campaigns progress, so critical thinking, an analytical mindset and the ability to execute well and at speed are all essential. Project management tools – such as Clickup – can make even complex campaigns easy to manage, especially when multiple stakeholders across sales and marketing are involved. Consider whether your current methods of project management and lead processing are fit for purpose to handle the extra complexity of ABM. Integration between sales and marketing must be seamless from your targeted customers’ perspective. Sales should be picking up the conversation that marketing already started, and marketing should only be pushing leads to sales teams when they are ready for the harder sales message. 6. Measure and optimise As with all marketing approaches, ABM relies on measurement and analysis of results. It is important to build to your ABM programme user behaviour and goal completion tracking from the outset, ideally in an automated report that highlights the most important metrics. (Google Data Studio – working in tandem with Google Analytics is a good combination here). Look for areas where accounts are dropping off or left to ‘cool down’ for too long if not contacted by sales quickly enough. In ‘standard’ marketing, it is expected that a large number of targeted customers will fall out of the funnel on their way down. With ABM, this drop off needs to be minimised, and understanding where and why accounts are disengaging is vital. You’re already placing extra emphasis on the marketing comms for individuals targeted within ABM, so make sure that applies to your reporting too. ABM is a powerful approach when planned and executed well. But, do ensure that if you go down this path, your plan is to invest well for the longer term. The careful engineering of campaigns and targeted comms takes time to set up, run and show results. As is usually the case with high performance marketing, a strategic mindset and support from senior stakeholders is essential to make ABM work for you. MPG can help develop your ABM strategy From creating a robust ABM strategy, to strong execution for maximum impact, MPG has you covered. Our team of B2B marketing experts have the toolkit to ensure your sales team gets focused support to target and convert your most coveted customers. With our well mapped out process and martech/salestech set, MPG will help you better integrate your sales and marketing to positively impact your revenue growth. Get in touch MPG have been a valuable marketing strategy partner to Kademy’s leadership team. They have helped us decide how best to invest in marketing based on the stage we’re at with our business, and have also given us very practical advice on various marketing initiatives around ABM, content marketing, social media, PPC and website optimisation. Having MPG’s marketing expertise plugged in to our business gives me confidence we’re moving our marketing function forward in the right way. Alex Hentschel, Managing Director & Co-Founder, Kademy Continue Reading Topics: Account based marketingContent marketingDatabase developmentMessaging
Build a winning messaging strategy: a step-by-step guide by Sharise Wilkinson, on 29/04/2021 As competition intensifies in an already very crowded digital world, demonstrating a deep understanding of your customers’ pain points and motivations, and effectively communicating your products’ relevant value, is more important than ever. But, like many aspects of marketing – this is easier spoken about than done well! In MPG’s recent blog, we shared some uncomfortable ‘home truths’ about why your marketing probably isn’t working as well as it should – due to poor messaging. This issue usually boils down to 2 things: your marketer lacks deep enough knowledge of your customers, and/or your marketer is not able to identify, articulate or lacks confidence in the USPs and benefits of your offering. Good messaging is not simply about having good copywriters on hand. As with almost all aspects of marketing, a robust, integrated strategy makes all the difference. So, here we’re sharing with you MPG’s tried and tested strategic approach to creating and deploying strong, on-point, impactful messaging. Build and deploy your winning messaging strategy – in 5 steps For every product, you should have a messaging strategy documented that outlines what you want to say and how you want to say it – informed by your product’s USPs, and your audience’s needs. This is often missing from the marketing toolkit of those put in charge of marketing your events, memberships, subscriptions and growing your engaged communities. Or if this kind of documentation does exist, it is often over-complicated – so doesn’t lead to practical, efficient and impactful execution. Or it is under-developed, missing key pieces of the puzzle. Here are the 5 steps MPG recommends you take to create your well documented messaging strategy: Step #1: Map your market and identify key market segments When you create your market map, you proactively define and size your market. This is essential to gain a better understanding of the composition of your audience, and to identify the most important market segments to focus on for growth. Step #2: Identify and articulate key ‘needs to be met’ and ‘jobs to be done’ Note down the specific needs your product is meeting for key market segments, as well as jobs they are getting done by using your product. Also work out, and capture in your document, how your product is meeting these needs and helping them do the key jobs they need to. Step #3: Define USPs and benefits for key market segments Using the insight gained from steps 1 & 2 above, do two things: Identify what makes your product different from the competition – in the most important way that your customers value. This is your all-important USP that needs to shine through in all your marcomms. State the specific benefits your product delivers by solving important problems and helping your customers get important jobs done. Keep asking yourself ‘so what’ to find the benefit in amongst all your product features – and capture the benefits in a way that is specifically relevant to your most important target market segments. Step #4: Write your core copy Using what is produced in Step 3, add the following to your messaging document: A strap-line that incorporates your USP A series of succinct bullet points focused on your benefits This becomes the core copy you should then repeatedly use in various creative ways in multiple channels – ensuring all channels are well aligned. Step #5: Execute – down the whole funnel Using your messaging strategy document as your ‘bible’, start building out messaging using copy, images and content at the top of your funnel that consistently and repeatedly communicate your USP and benefits. As your customers move down the funnel and become more engaged, you should share more detailed and persuasive pieces with them, expanding on the key needs to be met, problems to be solved and jobs to be done, and how your products USP and benefits match these. This is what creates the ‘desire and action’ you need from your customers – making them enquire or buy. Well planned and executed marketing messaging is not optional – it’s essential. B2B business leaders who don’t invest well in marketing messaging are effectively throwing money away on things like martech and data. Without the right messages reaching your audience, the money you put into your marketing systems and digital platforms won’t deliver a strong enough return. So don’t delay – get your marketers to follow the steps above as soon as possible. And if you’re working with a marketing consultant or agency to develop your messaging, make sure they are following an equally robust process to earn their keep! Do you need better marketing to unlock revenue growth in your business? Team MPG works with a select group of companies as a key part of their marketing function, providing ongoing strategic insight and direction, as well as consistently strong execution. Our marketing strategists, marketing operations experts, and digital marketers form MPG’s well-oiled marketing machine that has delivered strong results for our clients since 2014. If you would like to find out more about working with MPG, please get in touch. Get in touch to boost your marketing performance Working closely with our internal team, MPG developed a strong marketing strategy focused on achieving revenue growth for a key product in our portfolio – including recommendations for a virtual offering. We were impressed by the science and rigour they put into the process. I would recommend MPG as a good strategic marketing partner for a B2B brand. Anna Knight, VP Licensing, Informa Markets Continue Reading Topics: Brand strategyCommunity marketingEmail marketingMarketing strategyMessaging
“Our messaging is just not as good as it should be!” by Sharise Wilkinson, on 21/04/2021 “Our messaging is just not as good as it should be!” This is one of the most common concerns CEOs and senior executives share when they first approach MPG for help. And we’ve been hearing this one a lot lately! As the digital space is now so crowded with products – legacy, pivoted and new – messaging to make brands and products really stand out and attract the right customers has become much more challenging. It has also become more important than ever – which is why we’ve included it as one of the 5 areas of particular attention for marketers as we return to live events. Good CEOs and business leaders instinctively know when what they see going out in their marketing campaigns is not hitting the mark. They know what is most relevant to their customers – what addresses their pain points and highlights their opportunities. But, at the same time, they find it hard to put a finger on what is wrong with or missing from their marketing messaging. When we ask CEO’s what they think their messaging is lacking, the common answers are “the copy just isn’t strong enough”, or “what we’re saying in our marketing isn’t compelling enough” or “we don’t feel like we’re getting our message across”. So, why is this happening? When we dig a bit deeper, the causes are usually one, or both, of the following: Marketers don’t have a deep enough understanding of the market they serve – the pain points, motivations and what is most important/relevant to their customers. They don’t understand ‘the jobs to be done’ in the customers’ world. Marketers don’t feel confident in product USPs and don’t know how to articulate the benefits their customers gain from buying and using a product. This usually happens because they don’t understand their customers well enough (as above), or because the product is not strong enough and maybe doesn’t have a clear USP or set of benefits ‘built in’. This lack of customer knowledge, product knowledge and confidence in their value proposition permeates everything from high-level strategic marketing planning right down to individual social posts. This is often not the fault of the marketing department. The truth is that marketing is often set up to fail by not being given the investment and support needed. And often marketers are expected to – without complaint – regularly ‘put lipstick on a pig’ (no amount of good marketing messaging will save a product that is not relevant and compelling…). And then they are blamed when the messaging is not strong enough, and other things go wrong. So, it is no surprise marketers’ can be shy of tackling messaging head on! So what’s the solution? Firstly, CEOs should ensure the right level of investment is going into marketing and that those given the task of creating and pushing out compelling messaging have all the support and resources they need to get this right. Secondly, whoever is entrusted with creating the right marketing messaging should be approaching this strategically. Often products that are not market leaders or do not have clear USPs still need marketing, and impactful messaging can still be created in this situation – with the right approach. In next week’s blog, we will share the process MPG follows to build a messaging strategy that ensures your messaging hits the mark – every time. Make sure you’ve subscribed to MPG Insights to get the next installment! Want to build & execute a watertight B2B marketing strategy? MPG has a proven track record in creating and executing marketing strategies that deliver sustainable, long term growth and success for our clients. Learn how we build winning marketing strategies I cannot recommend MPG highly enough. Their commitment and unique expertise in data-driven, digital and integrated marketing has been very valuable to Social Media Week. They’ve been instrumental in helping us build our brand and community online and offline, and their product marketing performance has also been very strong. We’re delighted MPG has been on our team! Toby Daniels, Co-founder & CEO, Crowdcentric Media (Social Media Week, acquired by Adweek) Continue Reading Topics: Brand strategyContent marketingEmail marketingMessagingSkills training
The future of event marketing by MPG BO Team, on 06/04/2021 In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the world of B2B events into a very sudden and deeply disrupted state, which is continuing well into 2021. The Share Theory’s recent expert-led report ‘Re-imagining B2B events, How has 2020 changed the way event companies will operate in the future?‘ includes some excellent insights from senior events professionals on the profound changes that will shape the future of events. As a marketing consultancy and agency, Team MPG has worked with a range of event organisers globally to not only cope with this rapid change, but to also make the most of emerging opportunities. And it is quite clear, from MPG’s vantage-point, that the disruption to B2B events is still peaking. In our day-to-day work with senior executives in the events world, many have asked us the following question: “To future-proof my events business, how will our event marketing approach need to change?” To find the answer to this question, here are some key things every events leader should consider: Event marketing (not just your event) should now follow a community-first approach Some leading events were already moving towards a more community-focused, year-round offering; COVID-19 just accelerated this trend and has turned it into a necessity. So, when building your event marketing strategy, consider first and foremost how you need to build your community. MPG’s recent blog on how to approach building communities will be a good guide for you here. Building digital-first, community-led, hybrid brands is the way forward. In a well-balanced portfolio of digital and F2F products, events of various types are likely to always play an important part in how brands engages with their audiences throughout the year. But, digital needs to come first and we need to switch our thinking from ‘event’ to ‘brand’. See MPG’s blog on how 2021 will be the year of hybrid communities. Marketing databases need more attention and investment than ever before Focusing on ensuring you have a very strong, well organised and compliant database to use for email campaigns is not ‘old school marketing’. It is more essential than ever. For virtual events, email is still one of the best ways to engage and convert people to turn up and stay tuned in. And there is little point to investing heavily in content marketing, inbound marketing and lead generation via data capture forms if the data you capture does not feed into a well organised database. Digital event content is rocket-fuel for community engagement and lead generation Virtual events deliver easily created videos, slide decks and intelligence captured via audience interactions such as surveys and polls. If you’ve got your virtual event content strategy right, these will be very relevant and valuable to your community, resulting in extended digital engagement and sharing within the community. This ultimately results in a good number of high quality leads (if your marketing is set up properly to capture and manage these!) Optimising customer journeys via journey mapping, data and analytics is essential for success Content, messaging and medium need to be as personalised as possible in terms of relevancy and convenience. Your digital offering and F2F events will be most ‘sticky’ if you give the audience what they want, where they want it and when they want it – in a seamless and integrated way. Event marketing campaigns and event consumption need to be more deeply integrated with other products i.e. memberships or subscriptions and other events. A strong messaging strategy is needed as virtual events become more than just online versions of their in-person counterparts. A poll conducted during MPG’s recent webinar on B2B event marketing found that three-quarters of event organisers plan to run virtual events even when COVID restrictions no longer demand them. We should expect virtual events to continue to evolve and improve. Event marketers will need to focus on developing strong messaging for virtual events focused on value, benefits and the enjoyment factor – all important for convincing easily-distracted office workers to commit their time and attention (and in some cases money). Optimised websites will become an even more important focus area for marketing. Website performance should be a key KPI for event marketers – demonstrating how both inbound and outbound channels are performing to attract, engage and convert customers online. And how the event website is integrated with the product delivery platforms will be a key part of enabling strong performance. A lot of this is very new to event marketers, so this is likely to be a very challenging area for some time to come. The right skills and mindset are critical. Event marketing experience is more optional, but definitely helps. Event marketers need to think strategically and execute with sharp digital skills. It is essential they grasp the concepts above and have the ability to incorporate what is required into their virtual event marketing approach. The disruption to B2B events over the past 12 months has been as painful as it has been exciting and rewarding – so the change to how event marketers need to work will be painful, exciting and rewarding. And, as with all change, this needs to be carefully managed and your marketers need to be supported through the change. Having a strong event marketing function, backed with the right level of investment and executive support, will be critical for success. If you’d like to explore how your marketing can achieve a stronger ROI as the ‘future of events’ becomes a reality, please get in touch here. We’re always happy to have a chat with anyone who is as passionate about great events and high performance marketing as we are! How will you grow your event and community revenue in 2021 and beyond? With strong audience acquisition and commercial marketing knowledge, MPG delivers all aspects of marketing for virtual, hybrid, in-person events and B2B communities. From strategy development to delivering digital campaigns, MPG is the chosen marketing partner for organisations who want to achieve strong revenue growth. Get in touch Looking to upskill your team in events or community marketing? Upskill your whole marketing team with direct access to our trainers in our digitally delivered, interactive masterclasses: Audience acquisition Digital marketing for events Commercial marketing Community marketing Want something bespoke? We can create a training programme for your team that is specific to your needs – in a format that suits you best. Get in touch today We’ve worked with MPG across a range of our most important events for a number of years. They are a key part of our team. Operationally, they are knowledgeable, focused, open-minded, creative and disciplined. Strategically they are good thinkers, blending an ambition for the possible without losing touch with the practical. I highly recommend the MPG team as value creators and a safe pair of hands! Tim Lucas, Managing Director B2B, BAUER MEDIA GROUP Continue Reading Topics: Database developmentDigital marketingEvent marketingMarketing strategyMessagingWebsite optimisation
How to create an effective messaging strategy for a virtual event by Dominic Bird, on 21/08/2020 Virtual and hybrid events are here to stay. Questions remain around how long it will take to get the in-person event components up and running again, but one thing is for certain: digitally enabled events are no longer a temporary solution until in-person events return. A sizeable chunk of events in 2021 will surely remain virtual, potentially with some never returning to large scale in-person equivalents. It is therefore time for marketers to confidently move forward with communicating the value of these events to their audience. We’ve observed a trend of event organisers viewing virtual events as ‘damage limitation’ – something to retain their audience and revenue until things return to normal. This mindset permeates the organisation, and can lead to marketing messages that are almost apologetic of the virtual format, ignoring the very real benefits digital offers. In this blog we share how to create an effective messaging strategy for digital events. The fundamentals we outline aren’t exclusive to virtual events – they can be applied to hybrid, in-person and even subscription and membership offerings. How to construct a messaging strategy There are 6 key concepts involved in successful messaging. Use these as guiding principles when putting together your marketing strategy and you’ll be able to consistently push out comms that engage, excite and convert. 1. Relevancy This is about hitting the right people, in the right place, at the right time and – crucially – with the right message. Missing the mark on any of these 4 ‘pillars of relevancy’ will hamper the effectiveness of your messaging. To understand how to create relevant comms, ask yourself: What is keeping my audience awake at night – right now? What important and current problem(s) of theirs does our event solve? What are we helping them achieve that is hugely valuable and important – now or in the near future? 2. Positioning Your audience will have a very particular perception of your brand and product. The position of your brand in their minds, when compared to other events and information sources competing for your attention, will have a huge impact on how they engage with your event. You need to ensure your USP (unique selling points) and benefits of attending your event very clearly position your event as ‘must attend’. 3. Brevity The objective of any piece of messaging is to communicate something. The faster and more concisely you communicate your message, the more effective it will be. In the digital world, attention spans are short and distractions are aplenty. In simple terms: construct messaging that gets to the point fast and leaves readers in no doubt of what you’re trying to say, and what action they should take. 4. Holism No communication should ever be written in isolation. Your marketing efforts consist of various touchpoints – from a single social post to your website itself – where your audience will interact with your product and brand. Consider how your messaging at different touch points work together to tell the story of your event and create a consistent view of your brand/product and its benefits. 5. Repetition This doesn’t mean making all your comms identical. Instead, clearly define what your USPs and benefits are and agree a consistent way of presenting them. ‘The rule of 7’ dictates that people must see your message at least 7 times before they fully process and accept it, so bake in your core benefits messaging to all comms. 6. Keep it consistent and simple Combine all of the above into a formalised messaging strategy captured in an accessible, centralised document. This will allow you and your team to agree on what your key benefits are, how they should be communicated and what tone of voice best fits the brand. A simple messaging strategy structure consists of 3 parts: who your audience is (what’s relevant), who your competitors are (what’s different) and what the messaging should contain (USPs and benefits). Understanding these points will naturally improve your messaging. A simple, concise and specific message that ‘hits the mark’ with what matters most to your reader right now will beat a generic, verbose message that shows you don’t understand them. Messaging for virtual events The important first step in forming messaging for virtual events is to avoid seeing a digital event as temporary ‘damage limitation’ while you wait for live events to return. This mindset will be apparent in your messaging and compromise how effectively you’re able to communicate the unique benefits of a virtual event. Common examples are: Attend from anywhere – while still getting the same content/insight as a live event Join and network with a truly global audience – connect with your peers all over the world Catch sessions you missed on replay – any time, any place Interact directly with speakers – get your questions answered via easy, online chat Depending on your event format and audience – there are likely to be many more! Consider what is specifically important and valuable to your audience and highlight how your virtual event will work to serve these needs. For virtual events, two concepts are important to communicate – particularly if it’s your first online event: The value of the event How the event will look/feel Potential attendees may have reservations about the value of a virtual event compared to an in-person offering, and/or they may be intimidated by the unfamiliar format and technology involved. It’s your job as a creator of event and messaging to clearly communicate the value of your event, and gently educate them on what to expect and how to get the most out of their digital event experience. Remember: you are still presenting the same brand – a brand which has an established reputation and level of trust within your community. Leverage this to confidently speak about your digital event and turn your community members into advocates. Continue Reading Topics: Content marketingEvent marketingMarketing strategyMessaging
The Marketing Mix | Summer Newsletter by Helen Coetzee, on 06/08/2020 Newsletter • Summer 2020 Virtual Event Marketing • Website Optimisation Guide • Marketing Training The pace is intense. In our last newsletter we shared the story of MPG’s work with Social Media Week – a remarkable eight week pivot to create and successfully deliver #SMWONE. The pioneering spirit and ability to think fast, act fast and deliver a great, innovative virtual event experience inspired many. We thank Toby Daniels and Brian Leddy for their vision and leadership in a very challenging time. Since #SMWONE’s successful delivery, the MPG team of marketing strategists, martech specialists, data specialists and digital marketers have been working with Toby and Brian on the launch of their new SMW+ live and on-demand streaming service. This rapid product and marketing strategy development to deliver a digital subscriptions service for SMW’s community has once again been an exciting and inspiring journey. And the important work of strong execution and ongoing improvements to the approach for ongoing improvements to outcomes is only just beginning! More MPG clients and community members have been moving rapidly through ‘test and learn’ cycles. The analytics and data collected over the past months on how professionals are engaging with digital offerings – and the marketing of these – has surfaced some interesting benchmarks. We shared some of our key learnings in our latest webinar. MPG’s Summer newsletter focuses on four important areas that present great opportunity for every organisation focused on growing, engaging and monetizing their communities: Attracting new sponsors for digital content packages, including virtual events Attracting a great, engaged audience to your virtual events Ensuring you have the best combination of ‘must have’ marketing knowledge and skills to successfully take to market your digital events, subscriptions and memberships Optimising your website to do a great job at engaging and serving your community, while also delivering conversions to customers and revenue So, take a break from your desk, step out into the August sunshine – and have a good read! SIGN UP TO OUR NEWSLETTER INSIGHTS Helen Coetzee | 16/07/2020 How to use marketing to get new sponsors for your digital events Growing digital revenue by sourcing new sponsors is a great opportunity for many organisations. Marketing has a key role to play here in generating marketing qualified leads for your sponsorship team. Our recent blog gives you a step-by-step approach to acquiring new sponsors via marketing. Read more here > How to use marketing to get new sponsors for your digital events Read More Helen Coetzee | 19/06/2020 Creating a robust, sustainable marketing function: a strategic, hybrid approach In these financially stressed times, the question should not be ‘should we use internal or outsourced marketing’, but rather ‘what does the most effective and cost-efficient marketing function look like for us?’. Read more here > Creating a robust, sustainable marketing function: a strategic, hybrid approach Read More READ MORE INSIGHTS VIRTUAL B2B EVENTS WEBINAR Marketing Virtual B2B Events: 9 Key Success Factors In our latest webinar, which took place on Thursday 6th August, MPG’s Founder & CEO, Helen Coetzee, uncovered the ‘secrets of success’ in developing the right marketing approach to attract the audience of the size and profile you need to your virtual B2B events. You can now download the comprehensive content package including: Presentation slides – including additional detail on 9 success factors Full webinar video replay All Q&A responses All poll results ACCESS CONTENT PACKAGE SPOTLIGHT How to optimise your website Your website has always been your most important marketing channel. As the end destination that all other marketing activity pushes to, the hub for your content and the place where your target audience converts to leads or registrants; getting your website right can mean the difference between success and failure. But how can you improve your website, generate more traffic and, most importantly, get more leads and revenue? Know your user: As with all marketing, the key to success is understanding your audience. Put yourself in the shoes of a new visitor to your website. Does the site load quickly and look professional at first impression? Is it immediately clear who you are and what you do? Are there obvious and compelling CTAs that will pull them further into the site? A user will be considering all these points within seconds of landing, and if they encounter any friction with their journey they may leave, so first impressions really matter. Create great website content: Once you’ve hooked them, it’s time for your website content to do the heavy lifting. Write copy that communicates the value of your product, focusing on benefit-led copy. How does your offering address a particular challenge your target audience faces? Avoid focusing too much on the ‘what’ and instead focus on the ‘why’. Understand the rules of design: Design is crucial, and not just because it makes your website look attractive; it’s fundamental to the quality of the user experience. Avoid overly-cluttered pages. Use size, position and colours to emphasise important elements and create a structure. Visitors won’t read line-by-line, they’ll skim read to the parts they’re interested in. Keep it simple! Create a seamless journey: Effective navigation is what ties it all together. You are taking your visitors on a journey, so make sure you never leave them at a dead end. Link content together naturally, provide CTAs to related pages and push them to a lead gen form or booking page when you think they may convert. Users visit your website to achieve a goal, whether that’s to find out more information, submit an enquiry or make a purchase – make it easy for them to move through your content and present them with things they can’t help but click. The smoother the experience, the more conversions you’ll get. These are just some of the points you should have in mind when upgrading an existing website or creating a new one. The MPG team has been designing and building high impact websites for 6+ years. To find out how we can build a great website for you, get in touch. VOICES “MPG delivered a great series of tailored marketing workshops for the team at China-Britain Business Council. This training helped us formulate our membership growth strategy and gave us some very useful, practical guidance on improving our digital marketing and sales tactics.” Claire Urry, Executive Director, China-Britain Business Council The world is presenting every organisation with significant challenges and great opportunities in our quest to innovate and transform to become more resilient and sustainable. The global economy is relying on each of us playing our part. As dramatic as that may sound – it’s true! The MPG team is grateful to be working with the fantastic people that make up our community. We sincerely hope to help you find the best way to push forward – with strength and confidence! Continue Reading Topics: Audience acquisitionMessagingSponsor acquisitionSubscriptions marketingWebsite optimisation
Standing out from the virtual conference crowd: MPG’s top 10 tips by Helen Coetzee, on 02/06/2020 In every industry, the second half of 2020 is going to be packed with virtual conferences. With all the postponed events from H1 now crammed into H2, along with most of the events that usually happen in H2 still planning to go ahead, we’re entering a unique six months of an over-abundance of virtual events – at a time when the world is coming out of lockdown and people won’t be spending as much time staring at screens as they have been over the past few months. So, how will you ensure your conference stands out from the crowd of digital events and keeps your audience glued to their screens? The most engaging events will be those with the most relevance – in content, speakers and attendees. Having decent tech that works should be a given. Tech is not your point of differentiation. The winning virtual events will be those with: The most relevant product The most relevant marketing Product and marketing usually go hand in hand, and as we enter the virtual events world, the two will become more blended. Where virtual events are free (or very cheap) to attend, your digital event is essentially a substantial content marketing initiative. As has always been the case with content marketing, attention and engagement relies on relevance. The more relevant your content and marketing is to your target attendees, the more likely you are to get, and keep, their attention. And if you have the audience’s attention, you have the sponsorship dollars (and hopefully also some delegate revenue!). To stand out from the crowd, here is what you need to do: #1 Know what is keeping your audience awake at night right now Put together event sessions and marketing messaging that specifically address the issues that are most important and relevant to your audience at the moment. Not only will your registrants turn up to your digital event if it’s highly relevant, they’ll also share your content and marketing with their colleagues and network. #2 Get a speaker line-up your audience really wants to hear from at this moment in time The people who have the most relevant and important things to say about the current situation faced by your audience will be your ‘must-have’ speakers. Pay them if you have to – at least you won’t need to also cover flights & hotel costs! For virtual events, having fewer, highly relevant speakers is better than having lots of mediocre speakers. In fact, don’t have any mediocre speakers – only invite the very best and most relevant onto your digital stage. #3 Create a good customer journey Your customers need to move seamlessly from landing on your event website, registering for the event, receiving registration confirmation, being updated/reminded of the event, attending the event and then receiving the post-event comms. So, once you have chosen your event product tech, make sure it integrates well with your marketing tech. At every touchpoint, make sure your brand identity is strong, consistent and feels relevant to your audience. #4 Invest in developing a robust, content-led marketing strategy A marketing strategy is not only about how many emails you send out or whether or not you use PPC. It’s about so much more than that. It should focus first and foremost on the following two things: A detailed market map and market segmentation plan: ensure you reach the most relevant audience in large enough numbers, with the most relevant messages Strong messaging strategy: focused on relevant USPs and benefits addressing your target persona’s needs and motivations at this time It is essential to nail down these two strategic priorities to make your marketing relevant. #5 Deploy an integrated, multichannel campaign – focusing on the most relevant channels A businessperson – regardless of industry – probably spends most of their time hanging out in three places: their email inbox, on LinkedIn and on websites (found via Google). So, when you’re trying to get the attention and build ongoing engagement with your audience, focus on these relevant channels – ensuring all the words & images you put out there (your marcomms) are relevant, consistent and reinforce one another. #6 Have a great project manager on your event team to make sure things get done When running a virtual event, you will have many plates spinning and a very long list of tasks that need to be completed in a highly co-ordinated way – at speed. It’s great if your team is using good project management software, but it is even more important to have a person responsible for ensuring the right things get done at the right time. The most relevant content and marketing will fall flat if your execution is not synced. Project management software is not accountable to anyone. Put an actual person in place who is. #7 Measure all your marketing and make data-led decisions As you move through your event cycle, measure the impact of all your marketing across all channels. Do this in a granular way and make sure you pull out the most important, relevant insights on at least a weekly basis to inform your marketing going forward. The beauty of digital is all the wonderful data it gives us on audience behaviour and engagement. If you’re ignoring this data, you’re ignoring your customers. #8 Make sure your marketing database is well structured and includes enough relevant contacts You cannot reach out directly to the right people with your relevant content and messages if they’re not on your database. And you won’t be able to find them in your database or pull them into a targeted email list if they’re not correctly categorised. The competition you will face in the coming months from other virtual events will be very intense. Having a strong, well-structured database so that you can run effective, targeted email campaigns will give you the edge. #9 Automate as much of your marketing as possible Virtual event marketing campaigns work best with a shorter lead time than what we typically would plan for face-to-face events. This means you need to push out your marketing messages in a shorter space of time at a faster pace, and this needs to be highly responsive – so automation is essential. If your marketing is all manual, it will feel clunky and less relevant to your audience and will put a huge amount of strain on your team. #10 Follow through with strong conversion-focused marketing Don’t stop your marcomms to an individual once they have registered for your virtual event. Make sure that once they’ve registered they continue on an engagement journey with you – remind them regularly of the value and relevance of your event content and speakers, update them on any valuable new features, such as new networking opportunities, and encourage them to log on at the right moment to participate in your virtual sessions. It is in the last few days and hours before an event when automated marketing really comes into its own. Nobody said creating a great virtual conference and marketing this effectively would be easy. If it was easy, you’d have started running virtual conferences years ago! We know that conference organisers, sponsors and attendees are pining for ‘the good old days’ of simple, face-to-face events. But these are not coming back. For the rest of 2020, the world will have an abundance of virtual events to choose to attend and sponsor. Beyond 2020, the standard format will be hybrid events – taking ‘the best of virtual’ and combing this with the ‘best of face-to-face’ to create some very valuable experiences for our customers. So, at this moment in time, you now have a choice: either embrace the challenge and aim to make your virtual event’s content, speakers and marketing more relevant and valuable than your competitors, or don’t – and get lost in all the noise – in 2020 and beyond. For further insight on virtual events and advice on how to maneuver the ‘pivot’ from live to digital, read about our webinar case study looking at world-leading B2B events brand, #SMWONE. Continue Reading Topics: Attendee acquisitionContent marketingEvent marketingMarketing strategyMessagingVirtual event platforms
How do you get registrants to turn up to your virtual event? by Dominic Bird, on 05/05/2020 For all the opportunities virtual events offer, one of the biggest challenges vs an in-person event is ensuring registrants follow through to becoming engaged attendees. This is where conversion marketing, the practice of converting registered delegates (especially those who registered for free) into attendees via targeted comms, plays such an important role. Achieving a strong conversion rate is essential. Just like in the real world, events live or die on their attendance rate. Too low and sponsors and exhibitors become frustrated at lack of lead opportunities; speakers will in future seek larger audiences elsewhere; and delegates will tune out as they’ll think their peers don’t value the event enough to attend, and will also recognize that without their peers, attending the event loses its value around opportunities for discussion/Q&A and networking. An inherent benefit of in-person events is that their very nature encourages participation. Attendees often need to make prior travel and accommodation commitments that further tie them to attending, they clear their calendars and shift deadlines to commit to attendance and often also schedule face-to-face meetings with current and potential clients and partners. The virtual world requires far less commitment. Attendees can be very focused on something else up to 5 minutes before the ‘doors’ open; with notifications, emails, to-do lists and their immediate surroundings fighting for their attention. We’ve been working hard at MPG on our clients’ conversion campaigns – i.e. the very important marketing you need to do leading up to the event and during a multi-session event – to get attendees to turn up, get fully engaged and stay engaged. And we’re very pleased to be able to share some of these learnings with you now. Six essential ingredients for a high performance conversion campaign #1 Evaluate your audience’s needs and consider your event format Every event and event audience is different. If your event takes places over several days or even weeks, you will need to construct a plan that keeps delegates engaged throughout. Do not think that just because they attended the first few sessions that they will stick around. If your audience demographic means they’re less keen on or comfortable with the digital event format, you will need to carefully construct comms that educate them on the benefits and process of attending to make them feel more confident they’ll have a good experience engaging with your virtual event. If you’re offering free tickets, your conversion campaign is even more vital. These delegates may think they will lose nothing by not attending, so you need to convince them the event will deliver value in return for time and attention. #2 Start early Your conversion efforts should start as soon as your first registration comes in. While it can be tempting to focus email, social and other comms on getting people to book, neglecting the people who have already registered will probably mean you lose them. Consider also how you can leverage conversion marketing to generate additional registrations – encouraging registrants to share information about your event with their network not only increases your reach, but people are more likely to attend if they can see the event is being supported by someone in their peer network. #3 Get to grips with and leverage the capabilities of your virtual event system (+ the rest of your tech stack) Many virtual event platforms have features baked in that can support your conversion efforts. For example, Bizzabo features both push notifications and session summary emails, which can be sent to registrants a set time before a session to remind them to attend. When marketing teams are likely already strained with running an effective acquisition campaign, these automations can save precious resources. Often they come pre-set with useful integrations like ‘Add to calendar’ links too! Other elements of your tech stack are also important. For example, email providers like Mailchimp offer easy segmentation of data and PPC platforms like Google Ads let you build intelligent multi-touch campaigns based on past behaviour. #4 Build a dedicated conversion marketing communications plan Once you understand your audience, the implications of your event format and the capabilities of your digital platforms, it’s time to formulate a detailed and robust plan to execute the required marketing. Map out what your registered delegates will be receiving and when; including emails, targeted PPC campaigns and automated messages and notifications. Consider all touch points, e.g. do they need an automated message that reminds them to save sessions to their agenda? And what social media announcements are needed just before the event to create a sufficient buzz and fear of missing out? Email is your most important channel here, mostly focused on targeted, automated campaigns. Social media is also important and can be used to create discussion between delegates about what they’re looking forward to. PPC also has a part to play in creating highly targeted ‘micro touchpoints’. Think about how you can use chat platforms (like Slack) to provide a space for delegates to interact both in group and private channels. #5 Ensure you have the right skills and resources in place A vital piece of the puzzle is ensuring you’ve got enough knowledgeable people to plan and execute your conversion comms well. Ensuring your plan is achievable from a workload perspective – when you also need to put a huge marketing effort into generating registrants in the first place – could mean the difference between success and failure. If the volume is not feasible: Identify what can be automated or pre-scheduled to avoid crunch periods. Remove less critical elements to lighten the load. Consider engaging additional support to add some much needed marketing muscle. #6 Track results and adapt Measuring ROI on conversion campaigns is a bit trickier than measuring the performance of acquiring registrants. While data on the channels that influenced a sale should be quite easy to access and analyse, understanding how effective your conversion marketing is in getting someone to sign in on the day is less straightforward. Generally, there is a direct correlation between how a person engages with conversion marketing and how likely they are to turn up – so make sure you measure this and analyse after your virtual event what behaviors lead to the best outcomes, so that you can predict for future events what is most likely to be effective and what results are likely to come through in terms of event attendance. Getting in people’s diaries/calendars is a simple and highly effective way of encouraging attendance. Not only will it prevent them making other commitments, but most calendar apps will do a lot of the work for you – providing automated reminders of the upcoming event. The usual suspects of reporting (interaction rates, open rates) are still useful indicators of performance, and tracking clicks on important CTAs like ‘Add to Calendar’ can help you understand how effective your comms are in achieving your objectives. When you know your most effective channels and techniques, focus your efforts (and money) on them. Don’t be afraid to cut a channel if its performance isn’t up to scratch. The data you gather from your first conversion campaign will also contain vital lessons for your next one, so spend time examining the data to understand what was effective. The key to success in conversion marketing is to apply the main principles of successful B2B community marketing in the current age: Be community-focused and ensure your creative approaches to messaging and visual branding hit the mark. Automate as much as you can to enhance the customer experience and achieve scale and essential efficiencies. Measure all you do and makes sure your decisions are data-led. Get converting! Continue Reading Topics: Analytics and intelligenceAudience acquisitionEvent marketingLead generationMarketing strategyMessaging
