Does your audience trust your brand? Do they engage with you in a positive way?
If your answers are yes to both questions, then you’re one of the few lucky ones. Because the truth is, the consumer’s trust in brands is very low – and it continues to fall. These are issues that many brands struggle with: gaining their audiences’ trust and driving positive engagements with them both online and offline.

But luckily, every brand has an amazing asset that can help: their very own employees.

“A company’s employees are its greatest asset and your people are your product”
Richard Branson

Employee advocacy is a tactic that is slowly gaining traction in the marketing world, with more and more brands leveraging their employees to promote the brand in all kinds of unique and exciting ways. And the results are often amazing.

One great example of employee advocacy comes from Johnsonville, a sausage company based in Wisconsin. For one of their advertising campaigns, they tried something completely unique: they asked all of their employees that were willing to participate to come up with ideas for the ads. Over 100 of their employees came up with ideas – and the best ones were turned into actual advertisements, like the Regular Speed Chase, by Brett:

Not only that, but they also created behind-the-scenes videos from when they were filming the ads and posted about the campaign on their blog and social media, including reactions from their CEO. With well over 1.5 million views generated just on YouTube, it’s safe to say that the campaign was a huge success.

Other brands, like Starbucks, regularly leverage their employees to talk about their brand on social media. So much so, that they created accounts on most major social networks – Facebook, Instagram and Twitter – where their “partners” (aka their employees) can post updates regularly:

Starbucks Partners Instagram Page

Their accounts have accumulated over 500k fans and followers and they often drive very high engagement rates on posts.

There’s a big reason why brands are increasingly using this tactic: people will always trust other people more than they will ever trust brands. Plus, your employees probably have a bigger reach than your brand does – and they’re likely generating more engagement as well. In fact, a study from the MSLGroup found that brand messages shared by employees reached 561% more people than the same messages when shared via the brand’s official social channels. Not only that, but they also see more engagement – 8 times more engagement than content shared by brand channels, to be specific.

And the thing is, it’s quite likely that your employees are already posting content about your brand: 98% of employees use at least one social media site for personal use – and studies found that about 50% of them are posting updates about the company they work for (source).

So, the question now is, how do you get your own employees involved in your brand’s marketing campaigns? How do you get them to contribute, engage and become an integral part of the company?

Start a Dialogue with Leadership

Before you go to your employees and ask them to participate, you first need to discuss this project with the executives in your company – not just the leadership, but all the various departments as well.

After all, you’ll be using up some of their team’s time to create content so you need to get all of the team leaders and department heads on board to establish:

• Whether they can dispense any time and resources
• How they can contribute
• How much time they can spend on this project

Once you’ve got the go-ahead from everyone, you can start planning your employee advocacy program.

Develop Clear Brand Guidelines

Another essential step you need to take before your employees start posting any content is to develop brand and employee advocacy guidelines. Even better, provide some training – this way, your employees will know exactly what they can and can’t post and how they can ensure they’re in line with brand policies and guidelines.

Here’s a great example from Humana, the health insurance providers:

Their advocates – aka their employees – can attend a training webinar to learn what they need to know. They call employees to use a specific hashtag whenever they post something about the brand. And they provide a resource where employees can find content to share on their personal profiles, as well as submit content for others to share.

Get Your Employees to Participate

Employee advocacy should never be mandatory since this isn’t a part of their normal role. Making it mandatory will likely put off a lot of your employees which defeats the purpose of this campaign. Rather, you should simply invite them to participate if they want to:

• Send a company-wide newsletter talking about your employee advocacy program and explaining how it all works
• Make it as easy as possible for people to create and share content: use a centralized platform where everyone can share content and ideas, provide your employees with content they can share and suggest hashtags they can use
• Consider offering free training for blogging, social media, and content creation to entice your employees to take part
• Explain why they should take part and start sharing: what’s in it for them? What’s the incentive?

Offer Rewards for Employee Participation

One of the easiest and most effective ways to get your employees involved in your employee advocacy program is to offer them rewards for participating. After all, you need to make it worthwhile for them too – not just for your brand. A great way to do this and to encourage even more participation from your employees is to gamify the experience: offering rewards based on performance using leaderboards.

A great example of this comes from Cisco; their idea was to leverage summer interns to promote their brand on social media. In order to do this, they created a contest for all interns, whereby everyone could post updates on their social profiles using the #WeAreCisco hashtag – the intern who got the most engagement would win an Apple Watch.

You don’t necessarily have to do a contest; there are numerous other ways you can encourage your employees with rewards:

• Highlight top sharers and any employees who generate great results with their blog posts, social media content, vlogs and so on
• Offer rewards such as coupons and gift cards for reaching certain milestones
• Re-share your employees’ best content on your brand’s official channels to recognize their efforts

Increase Trust, Engagement and Sales by Leveraging Your Employees

Your employees can be huge assets for your brand – not just for the work they do for you, but also because of their huge marketing potential. In fact, they can be your very own micro-influencers and help you reach more people, increase trust in your brand, products and services, and help increase your sales.

To create a successful employee advocacy program, start by discussing this project with your company and department leaders. Then, develop clear guidelines and provide your future advocates with all the tools and resources they need to create and post content about your brand.

And finally, invite your employees to participate in your program and encourage them to start posting by offering various incentives and rewards.

The post Why You Should Involve Employees in Your Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on Alexa Blog.

As marketers, we’re always in search of the best digital marketing strategies to promote a product or service. Should we focus on Google Ads? Facebook Ads? Email marketing? Organic search?

With so many different strategy options, the problem is figuring out which ones are really paying off and which ones we should avoid investing more time and money into.

The Growth Share Matrix can help with that.

What Is the Growth Share Matrix?

The Growth Share Matrix is a competitive analysis framework that divides your company’s products into four different classifications, based on their success. The framework was created by Bruce D. Henderson, founder of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which is also why the Growth Share Matrix is sometimes referred to as the BCG Matrix. It was initially designed to help companies decide what products to invest in or cut, based on market attractiveness and competition. But the Growth Share Matrix has evolved over time.

When the framework was first introduced in 1970, the business landscape was much different from what it is today. BCG revisited the Growth Share Matrix concept in a 2014 article that highlighted how it had changed since 1970. The article pointed to how the often unpredictable and rapid pace of today’s business landscape, brought on by technological advancements, has shaped the Growth Share Matrix for the modern era.

One of the key takeaways from the 2014 article was also a question about whether the Growth Share Matrix had lost its value in the modern era, to which the writers — Martin Reeves, Sandy Moose, and Thijs Venema — respond: “No, on the contrary. However, its significance has changed: it needs to be applied with greater speed and with more of a focus on strategic experimentation to allow adaptation to an increasingly unpredictable business environment.”

The 4 Classification Types of a Growth Share Matrix

The Growth Share Matrix follows a pretty simple premise. Essentially, you divide each of your company’s products into one of four matrix quadrants, or classifications, which follow:

Cash Cows

Low-growth but high-share products. These are products that bring in cash and can fund investment in your Stars. An example of this might be Coca-Cola, because it can’t really grow — the flavor doesn’t change. That said, the Coca-Cola Company can always count on this product as a consistent top seller in their market and fund other soft drinks with its profits.

Stars

Products that are likely to achieve high growth and high market share. Your company should invest heavily in these products. One example would be the iPhone. Apple knows it’s going to sell a boatload of their smartphones every time they hit the market, and they keep evolving with every iteration.

Question Marks (?)

High-growth but low-market-share products, often new products with high potential. These should be invested in or let go, depending on how likely a product is to become a star. Think about a product like Tesla’s Cybertruck, which certainly has a lot of potential in the electric car market but has received mixed reviews in terms of design. The jury is still out on whether this car will become a top seller.

Pets

Low-share, low-growth products considered failures. Your business should reposition these products or stop investing in them. One example that comes to mind is Twitter’s foray into the mobile phone space back in 2009 with TwitterPeek. The device itself cost $200 and could only send and receive tweets. Safe to say, Twitter didn’t invest in this product for very long.

How Do You Create a Growth Share Matrix for Digital Marketing?

Normally, you’d put growth and market share on the axes of a Growth Share Matrix to help you decide which products your company should invest in or cut. But, in digital marketing, put individual strategy growth and ROI on the axes of your matrix to help you assess success across your different channels and strategies.

We’ve created a Growth Share Matrix that shows hypothetical ad campaigns by location. Because our hypothetical Google Ads campaign has low growth but a high ROI, that’s our cash cow. Our SEO strategy yields high growth and ROI, so it will be positioned as a star.

Our cash cow, a Google Ads campaign, also gives us some room to experiment. We have more flexibility to invest in our Facebook or Instagram strategies, and there’s an opportunity for us to try these question marks out without absorbing massive financial risk. Meanwhile, our LinkedIn strategy is proving costly, with no growth, so we’d cut it.

It’s also important to revisit your Growth Share Matrix regularly because the success of your marketing strategies can change quickly. Those question marks can quickly become stars, cash cows, or even pets. If you suddenly see that your Instagram strategy is bringing you a high ROI and growing, you can make it a star. If a Facebook strategy you invested money in isn’t performing the way you had hoped, and has minimal growth and a low ROI, you can safely categorize it as a pet and move on.

Analyze Your Digital Marketing Strategies with Growth Share Matrix

Digital marketers sometimes forget to analyze strategy performances holistically. As in, they look at the success of an individual campaign but don’t always judge it against similar campaigns. A Growth Share Matrix puts all of your efforts in context by pitting your strategies against each other.

Equipped with the information from your Growth Share Matrix model, you can make better-informed decisions about the digital marketing strategies that generate the most profit and growth for your company and the ones that generate the least.

Let’s say you look at metrics for that hypothetical paid marketing campaign you ran, and it appears to have an ROI of 300% while maintaining a low CPC. Not bad, right? But if you compare this to an organic campaign for the same budget that drove an ROI of 600% and an even lower CPC, you would understand that your paid marketing campaign may not be the star you initially thought it was.

If you’re looking for specific ways to determine the ROI of a marketing strategy, you can use KPIs like customer lifetime value (CLV) and conversion rate. These types of key performance indicators (KPIs) can give you better insight into how much value individual customers have from a buyer perspective. CLV, for example, can tell you how much money to expect from a customer over the time they remain a customer.

If you’re looking for specific ways to determine the ROI of a marketing strategy, you can use KPIs like customer lifetime value (CLV) and conversion rate.
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You can use these KPIs to understand your most valuable channels in driving growth. By analyzing this quantitative data, you can understand customer patterns, especially since they change over time. Keep in mind, however, that with changing algorithms on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc., this Growth Share Matrix should be evaluated on a quarterly basis, at the very least, so you are most accurately planning your growth strategy.

Get More Competitive Insights with Alexa

The Growth Share Matrix allows you to take a step back and determine how your digital marketing strategies are working compared to one another at a high level. That said, you need to get more detailed with your competitive insights to get a fuller picture.

Well, look no further. Alexa offers comprehensive competitive website analysis that can help you find competitors and compare metrics, such as website traffic and share of voice.

Try a free 14-day trial today!

The post Using Growth Share Matrix to Improve Your Digital Marketing Efforts appeared first on Alexa Blog.

When it comes to email marketing, better open and click-throughs result in more sales. It is a very effective way to drive sales, but how can you make sure that more of your emails get opened and acted upon by your target customer? One way is to start running tests on your email campaigns. It is essential to test elements of your campaign to ensure your emails are read by potential customers. Then once armed with information, you might need to try a different tactic to ensure that you’re properly targeting your audience and giving them the content they need. A/B testing is one way you can determine exactly what your email subscribers want rather than guessing. Here’s how to use it.

What Is A/B Testing?

It may sound complicated, but A/B testing is nothing more than sending one variation of an email to a subset of your email subscribers and a different version to another subset of subscribers. Your ultimate goal is to work out which version of the email garners the best results. Simple A/B tests can include sending multiple subject lines to test which one generates more opens, while more advanced A/B testing could include testing completely different email templates against each other to see which one generates more click-throughs. By A/B testing your emails, you can ensure that your emails are performing at their best. When it comes to A/B testing your emails, one thing you need to know is that small changes can make big differences.

Here are a few things you can test out:

• Subject line
• Personalization
• Sender name
• Images, Video & Graphics
• Email copy
• Call to action or CTA copy
• Button/link copy
• Send time

You want to see what small tweaks you can make to boost whatever metric you’re focusing on: the number of people who open your emails, click a link or make a purchase.

The subject line is one of the most prominent elements of your email marketing campaign as it’s the first thing viewed in the inbox. You can test the length of the title, word order, or the content featured in the title if you are doing a newsletter with multiple pieces of content to select from.

Personalization is very effective. Could adding someone’s name to the subject line get them to open an email? Research has shown it absolutely makes a difference.

The sender’s name can make a difference. See if your recipients are more responsive to emails coming from a person’s name or from the name of your company or organization. You’ll provide the sender name and email address that you want to use for each combination to see which combination works best.

Images, videos, and graphics are very powerful in email marketing. Not everyone responds to the written word. So you might want to create podcasts, videos, and infographics, to draw your target audience to your email. Try to A/B test video testimonials against written ones, include your latest podcast vs. leaving it out or try short infographics against longer versions. Even stock images can impact your A/B testing. For instance, if you have a photo of someone pointing at your CTA, the image will naturally draw viewers toward that element. People process visuals much faster than words, which means using images in your email campaigns can be an effective way to get your message across.

Email copy is your main point of engagement with your target customer. But consumers’ attention spans have eroded to the point where less is more when it comes to email copy these days. Unfortunately, great writing is a lost art. It’s best to be short and sweet. If you can’t quickly and easily explain your product or offer, you’ll struggle to get your subscribers to click-through on your emails. To determine what great copy looks like for your audience, try A/B testing different copy in your emails. You can test copy length using personalization and tone. From my experience, staying positive in your messaging is always a winner.

Calls to action/CTAs are one of the most important parts of your email marketing campaigns. They help increase your email click-through rate by making it clear to readers exactly what the next step is. You’ll want to test using buttons vs. hypertext links.

Button copy is another area you’ll want to test. Regardless of whether you choose to use buttons or text links, you must also consider the copy you’re using for those buttons and/or text links, as it can have an effect on the number of people who click-through from your campaigns. Using specific, action-oriented copy such as “Get the guide” is often better than using generic copy like “Click here.”

Send time could be a factor in your emails. Learn when your recipients are most likely to open your campaigns. Since this option tests specific days and times, you must send your combinations to all your recipients at once because the winning combination can’t send at a time that has already passed, of course. Instead, use this data to inform when to send or schedule future campaigns.

How NOT to Do A/B Testing

The really crucial thing with A/B testing your emails is only changing one component at a time. If you, for example, change the subject line, the copy, and the button copy in the email, and you see better success with that email, you won’t know which single factor was the contributor to that success.

So change one thing for each test. You might end up testing all of these potential variables, but only change one element at a time.

Decide What Your Goals Are

Before you send your first email test, you need to have at least an idea of what you’re trying to accomplish. It could be your open rate, click-through rate, sign-ups, or sales. The open rate is a percentage that tells you how many successfully delivered campaigns were opened by subscribers. The click-through rate is a percentage that tells you how many successfully delivered campaigns registered at least one click. Your click rate reveals general trends but isn’t particularly detailed unless it’s based on a call-to-action. Maybe your open rates have been abysmal, and you want to increase those. Or maybe you want to boost sales from your emails by 5%. These are goals you can measure against once you have the test results.

Where to Send Your Test Emails

Let’s say you have an email database of 5,000 contacts. You don’t want to send the entire group Email A or B, otherwise, what good will the information you get from the test do you? Instead, choose a percent of your total contact list, like 10-30%, to be your test group. Send half of them one email, and the other half the other email.

Once you have the “winning email” — the one that gets you more opens, clicks, or sales — you’ll send it to the remainder of your entire email list. You’ll have some assurance that the winning email is one that will do well with your larger subscriber list.

Using Your Test Results

Once you have data on each email you sent, it’s time to evaluate it and use it to your benefit.

Let’s say Email B was identical to Email A, except the call to action button was red instead of green. You saw 10% more people click the button. That’s good news! So for this specific email campaign, you absolutely should use a red button.

But you can also use this information for future email campaigns. Every time you need a button in a similar context, make it red.

A/B testing takes the guesswork out of email marketing. And since email is still one of the best ways to connect with your past and future customers, it’s worth your time to figure out what your audience best responds to. Most email marketing platforms have a testing feature built-in, which makes it simple to test. For your next campaign, try testing two versions of the same email and see if you can’t improve the results you’ve been getting. You may see an increase in opens or click-throughs but, if you don’t, you’ll learn something about your audience that can help you create better campaigns in the future.

Here’s what to remember about A/B testing your emails:

• Create a goal for how you could improve your campaign
• Test all critical elements of your email one at a time
• Use the right tools to improve the impact of your emails

A/B testing is one of the most powerful ways to collect information about your email marketing efforts. Try it today.

The post How to Use A/B Testing in Your Email Marketing appeared first on Alexa Blog.

All work and no play will get any marketer stuck in a rut. One way to open up your thinking is to step away from it all with a good podcast. But, to be honest, a lot of marketing-centered podcasts are just plain boring and often focused on specific strategies and tactics. Save those for the workweek.

If you’re looking for some brain candy that will trigger creative ideas, you’ll want to check out those not-so-obvious podcasts that will entertain you, educate you, and up your marketing game.

So, here’s a weekend podcast playlist for all of you marketing junkies.

How I Built This with Guy Raz

If you love hearing the entrepreneur stories behind your favorite products and brands, How I Built This hosted by Guy Raz is a winner. One great example is an episode with Jerry Murell, the founder of Five Guys.

This is a case study for creative low-cost market research and strategic planning ideas. Get this: to prove their concept, they rented an out-of-the-way place where no one could see it. “The idea was that if the place was hard to find and we can get people to come there, then we’ve got a winner.” And that’s not the only one, there are at least another ten awesome marketing ideas stuffed into 34 minutes.

While you don’t have to, you’ll probably want to keep a notebook with you to jot down some ideas that you can use in your next marketing campaign.

Hidden Brain with Shankar Vedantam

Shankar Vedantam is an author, journalist, and social scientist. In 2010, he published the book Hidden Brain and soon after, launched a podcast with the same name. The Hidden Brain Podcast explores how people become influenced by their unconscious biases. While the episodes are timeless and evergreen, they often pivot on a current conversation.

In a recent episode titled “Playing Favorites: When Kindness Toward Some Means Callousness Toward Others,” the conversation is all about feeling special and unique. He interviews psychologists who reveal that we crave special treatment from those who are closest to us.

Vednatam uses engaging interviews with experts to weave together stories and lessons that you can take with you as you craft marketing messages and campaigns.

Imagined Life

Talk about engaging and interactive! Imagined Life is like a game of Clue or 20 Questions. The podcast tells the story of a famous person from their perspective and in their voice. But — you don’t know who it is until the very end!

Your job is to see if you can guess whose life story is being told. If you’re really up on your celebrity biographies, see how quickly you can guess who the main character is.

Imagined Life is essentially a study in personal branding. You’ll experience, first hand, the obstacles, setbacks, and challenges that these celebrities faced and how they overcame them.

Freakonomics with Stephen Dubner

Where can you find answers to questions like “How to make meetings less painful” or “Does creativity come from pain?”

The Freakonomics podcast has the answers. Host, Stephen Dubner, co-author of the popular business book Freakonomics, explores the economic issues you thought you understood, but really didn’t.

Marketers will appreciate the focus on data analytics. You’ll leave each episode with ideas about new questions you could be asking or new ways to look at data that might give you fresh insights or even uncover a competitive advantage.

This is Uncomfortable with Reema Khrais

What’s more uncomfortable than talking about sex? Talking about money! This is Uncomfortable is a podcast about money and all the ways that money creates awkward moments, messes with relationships, and creates all kinds of unintended consequences.

In an episode highlighting the confessions of a shopaholic, marketers will get an insider peek into a young woman’s experience with getting access to credit and her decline into the life-crushing debt.

Revisionist History with Malcolm Gladwell

If you’re a fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s books such as Outliers, Tipping Point or Blink, you will LOVE his Revisionist History podcast. In each episode, Gladwell goes back and reviews something from the past: an event, a person, an idea. Usually, it’s something you’ve heard of in the news or know a little bit about, but that either has been misunderstood or where certain details have been overlooked.

One episode looks back at the PR crisis that Toyota went through regarding unintended acceleration. And another explored whether McDonald’s made a good decision in moving to frying with unsaturated fats. If you think you know what really happened — think again.

As a marketer, you’ll experience multiple a-ha moments and lessons that will inspire you and give you ideas about how to look beyond the obvious.

Story Corps

If you’re looking for insightful and powerful examples of interviews that touch, move, and inspire, look no further than Story Corps.

Story Corps is a non-profit organization with a mission to collect and share powerful stories between people in the form of interviews. Their story began with a recording kiosk in Grand Central Station where people would go in and record a short interview. In 2013, they took their kiosk on the road in the form of an Airstream trailer.

As every marketing professional knows, storytelling is a powerful aspect of every brand. And Story Corps interviews are unique in that the questions that are asked in each interview are so powerful, so revealing and so engaging that you’ll want to swipe them for your own podcasts and content. In fact, you can check out 17 years of Story Corps questions here.

99% Invisible with Roman Mars

Roman Mars is a radio host and producer who is known for his commitment to powerful storytelling on the radio. Fast Company even listed him as one of the 100 most creative people in 2013. His philosophy on creating and producing popular podcasts is to focus on simple concepts because they resonate best with audiences. Another strategy he shares is that the best stories center on the things you just kind of notice but don’t really notice. And this is exactly the focus of 99% Invisible.

This podcast is ideal for content marketers because it’s a study in finding topics and content that triggers that “I’ve seen that everywhere!” reaction with audiences.

Where Will Your Next A-ha Moment Come From?

If you haven’t realized it, the pattern that runs through all of these is that they explore untapped, unrealized, or ignored pieces of life.

The lesson that all of these podcasts offer to marketers is the same as that famous line from Ferris Buehler — “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.’

The post Podcasts for Marketers That Will Open Up Your Thinking appeared first on Alexa Blog.

Be honest: how many times have you watched a TED Talk from the likes of Simon Sinek or Gary Vaynerchuk when you’re faced with motivational challenges at work on a rainy Monday morning?

Well, we can’t blame you. People like Sinek and Vaynerchuk are motivational masterminds and, perhaps more importantly, are viewed as important thought leaders within their respective fields of expertise.

So what makes them special? We’re glad you asked. Because there are characteristics that make them special. We’ll break down the characteristics that make them thought leaders so you can identify and support them in people at your own company.

What is a Thought Leader?

A thought leader is a recognized expert in their field of expertise and, as such, is often sought out for their input and knowledge on that particular subject.

Thought leaders are different from influencers — a term often lumped into the same category as thought leaders by the uninformed public. An influencer doesn’t necessarily have to be an expert in anything. You can look no further than reality television and socialites who are famous for being famous with Instagram followers in the tens or hundreds of millions. In some cases, however, a thought leader can be an influencer as well.

Source: TED Blog

For example, Neil Patel is often viewed as a digital marketing thought leader and is constantly sought out for different speaking engagements and interviews. Patel has built a name for himself by consistently delivering meaningful insights in the digital marketing space. He is also seen as an influencer in the space, but the reason people recognize and trust him is because of his status as a digital marketing expert. Patel’s identity as an influencer is directly linked to his success as a thought leader.

The trust and recognition that a thought leader has can also come with financial rewards. The 2019 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study found that 58% of decision-makers at companies purchased a product or service because of thought leadership. In a B2B marketing context, company decision-makers not only recognize the value thought leadership content marketing can have but also buy products and services because of it.

The 2019 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study found that 58% of decision-makers at companies purchased a product or service because of thought leadership.
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Check out our list of content marketing thought leaders you should be following in 2020.

How Do You Become a Thought Leader?

There’s a common misconception that thought leaders can only be high-level company executives, which isn’t true. A thought leader can be anyone at a company who has a specialized area of expertise that they thrive in. That’s why you need to identify the people at your company who have the best thought leader qualities, not necessarily those who hold the highest position.

Remember, being a thought leader is not a title you can suddenly bestow upon yourself — it’s earned. The very best thought leaders in their space cultivate their reputation over time and through their actions. The more time and effort you put into mastering the nuances of your field of expertise, the better your chances of people recognizing you as a thought leader.

5 Traits Your Company’s Thought Leader Should Have

Being a thought leader comes with a lot of responsibility — that’s why you really need to dig deeper to determine who is best suited to take on that mantle at your company. Ideally, a thought leader should be:

Knowledgeable

A thought leader needs to be an expert in their field. Whether that’s marketing, sales, or IT, they need to have a specialized area of expertise that makes them the go-to person at your company for that subject matter. Constantly adding new and meaningful insights to greater industry conversations is what makes a real expert.

Expertise is what drives people to be viewed as thought leaders. It’s the same reason people trusted famous film critics like the late Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. The duo consistently showed their level of expertise as film critics by doing it over a long period, to the point that people associated Siskel and Ebert with being the top authorities when it came to opinions on movies.

Supportive

Thought leaders aren’t just out to prove how knowledgeable they are within their field of expertise — they want to actively share that knowledge with others. They can do that by helping people at their company or by reaching a wider audience through things like speaking engagements and interviews.

The primary goal of most thought leaders is to help people. That makes thought leaders problem-solvers at their core. If there’s a person at your company that other employees are consistently going to for help on a particular subject, that person may be a good thought leader candidate.

Communicative

Thought leaders need to be able to take complex ideas and make them palatable for a wider audience that wants to learn about them.

We all know thought leaders are brilliant, but what does that brilliance mean if they can’t convey it to a wider audience? The simplification of industry-specific terminology and information needs to always be on a thought leader’s mind. That’s why the late Steve Jobs always broke down Apple’s latest innovations in layman’s terms — he wanted to make them easily digestible for the audience so everyone could clearly understand the benefits.

Studious

Thought leaders recognize that there is always room to learn and grow within their field of expertise. They are constantly looking to refine their skills and knowledge base so their expertise stays current.

Being a thought leader comes with the understanding that their days of learning are never over. As things change within their field of expertise, they’re always hungry for that new knowledge. They go out of their way to make sure they learn whatever new piece of information may be applicable to their field.

Passionate

Above all, thought leaders are passionate about their area of expertise. They take great pride in it and view it more as a lifestyle than as work.

If you look at a famous thought leader like Simon Sinek, passion oozes out of him. Not only is he able to share his insights in a compelling way, but he also believes in it wholeheartedly. Audiences can sense a fake guru who only has a surface-level understanding of the subject matter. Real thought leaders have passion that projects onto their audience, which helps build trust.

Helping Support a Thought Leader at Your Company

Not every thought leader is going to be a world-class speaker or writer, but that doesn’t mean their insights aren’t as valuable as thought leaders who are. If you recognize a thought leader in a person at your company, make sure you give them the proper tools to succeed. Here are few thought leader strategy tips to create content centered on your thought leaders:

Tip #1: Record a Conversation with Them

Decide on a topic your thought leader would like to discuss, and record a conversation with them. When you’re done, help them produce a piece of content for your blog (or other company blogs), and ghostwrite it in their own voice. This will take the pressure of writing the piece away from your thought leader, so they can focus instead on offering detailed insights.

A great tool to take advantage of is the LinkedIn Publishing Platform. Once you’ve written the blog post, get your thought leader to post it through the LinkedIn Publishing Platform; it’s a great platform for thought leadership and reaching other industry professionals.

Tip #2: Create a Podcast Episode Centered On Them

Create a company-hosted podcast, and feature your thought leader. Make sure they’re not alone, though. Having a host who asks great questions will set your thought leader up for great answers. If your company doesn’t have the resources to host its own podcast, try to get your thought leader on other industry podcasts.

Tip #3: Host a Live Panel with Other Thought Leaders

Get your thought leader to participate in a live panel with other thought leaders within the same industry. That way, they have other thought leaders to interact with, and the audience gets more value and experiences a greater sense of community among these experts. You can broadcast this type of panel live on your site and make it gated content as an additional revenue stream as well.

Measure Your Thought Leadership Content

Always let your thought leaders focus on what they’re good at and find creative ways to relay that information to your audience. It’s up to your company to support your thought leader with great content.

Measuring your thought leadership content not only helps your company find valuable topics to cover but also helps you find the right channels to distribute that content, all while giving more time back to the thought leader to focus on the message they want to convey. 

Alexa’s Content Exploration Tool can help your company understand how thought leadership content is performing by offering insight into what articles and topics people are sharing and talking about most from your site and sites in your industry.

Sign up for a free 14-day trial of our Advanced Plan to give it a try today.

The post How to Identify and Support Thought Leaders at Your Company appeared first on Alexa Blog.

Consistently coming up with content ideas to fuel all your various web properties and social channels can be a challenge, especially with new formats and platforms popping up all the time (Hello, TikTok!)

Here are 25 content prompts to help inspire you to tell stories, share your message, and engage your audience in new ways.

Content Prompts

1. Profile the Prominent: Most organizations and industries have thought leaders and advocates who can change the conversation with a single quote. Find one of these experts, within your organization or your community, and —

2. Shine the Spotlight: There are often people within our organization or industry who don’t get a chance to stand in the spotlight. Employees, engineers, groundskeepers, servers, and other crew members have valuable experiences and perspectives to share. Create a piece that offers one of these lesser-known experts to share their expertise.

3. Give a Vocabulary Lesson: Most industries are packed with words, phrases, and acronyms that experts know, but new entries might find confusing or alienating. Create a piece of content that defines these common terms to help onboard new clients and customers, or create individual pieces that explore each term in-depth.

4. Examine a Trend: Identify a trend in your industry or space, and dedicate a content piece to explaining how that trend came to be and what the implications might be for your industry and more specifically, your audience.

5. Bust Myths: There are undoubtedly several misconceptions that your prospective customers and clients have about your business, product, services, and the industry as a whole. (If you’re not sure what they are, speak to your sales team, customer service team or anyone who is client-facing). Create content that debunks these myths to aid in the sales process.

6. Answer Social Questions: One of the best ways to ensure your content will have an audience is to build your content with an audience in mind. Search through your social media replies, comments, and DMs to find questions your audience is asking, and create content that answers those questions.

7. Offer a History Lesson: Our content is often looking forward, but there are lots of stories hidden in the past, too. Create a piece of content that shares the history of something, whether that’s your company, industry, product category, a specific product, an ingredient, a process, a tool, or something else.

8. Share Information About a Process: No doubt your audience finds themselves wondering “how did they do that?” Share the steps in a process they may not know about, or your experience going through that process. They may not be trying to replicate it, but they’re likely curious how it happens.

9. Walk Through Instructions: Sometimes our audience does need our help completing a process, and it’s helpful to share step-by-step instructions showing just how they can do it correctly. It could be a recipe, a tutorial, or some other educational instructions. Remember to be as detailed as possible so they can follow your lead.

10. Go Behind the Scenes: Most businesses have a portion of their activities that happens outside the spotlight or parts of their operations that the end-user doesn’t get to see. Create a piece of content that takes your audience behind the scenes to see how things happen in the background.

11. Curate a List: Don’t let your audience search for the things they need to potentially end up somewhere else. Create a list that collects similar items to make it easy for your audience to get where they need to go. You can create a list of resources, blogs, tools, products, gifts, people, events, books, podcasts, shows, movies, people, or almost anything else.

12. Calculate the Numbers: Consider creating a new piece of content about a topic you’ve addressed before, but this time, tell that story primarily through the numbers around the topic. This type of content tends to work well as an infographic, so you can share those numbers quickly and easily without making the content too dense.

13. Collect Some Data: Think about what data you may have within your organization that you can share, or spend some time collecting available data from other reputable sources to compile useful stats for your audience on a specific topic.

14. Product Reviews: Reviews won’t work for every brand, particularly if you have to remain objective on specific platforms, but consider whether you may be able to create a review of coordinated, compatible, complementary, or other similar products that can help your audience improve their experience with your own.

15. The Sounds Around You: When we think of audio content, we often default to podcast series, which can be intimidating for individuals without audio production experience and a wealth of guest ideas. Instead, consider the value of environmental sounds and how you can add those to your content. Share the sounds of your destination or workspace, or a list of clips of possible malfunction sounds to help customers identify potential issues.

16. Time Lapse: You know how they say that a picture is worth a thousand words? Well, a timelapse is a series of photos that tell a chronological story in a shortened time span, allowing you to share a compelling visual glimpse of a process that would normally be too long for your audience to see in its entirety.

17. Archive Dive: We often focus on telling brand new stories, but many of us have wonderful stories and assets from our past that have never gotten the proper attention. Spend some time digging through the archives for old content that can still have its moment to shine.

18. Timeline: Identify a story you have to tell that features some chronological element and plot that story on a timeline. These can be static images or interactive experiences that allow the audience to explore a story at their own pace.

19. Test Audience Knowledge: Most of us think we’re pretty savvy, and we can’t resist the urge to prove it. Create a quiz that lets your audience test their knowledge on a relevant topic. Be sure to identify potential content you have that answers each question so you can serve up helpful information when the audience might get things wrong.

20. Make a Map: Identify a brand story you can share with a geographic component, and create a map that plots the points of the story visually. This can be a static map, like an image, or an interactive map that allows the audience to explore only those points which are relevant for them.

21. Multiply by Time: Identify a piece of content that has done well in the past, and consider resurfacing it and refreshing it for a new time period. Create a new annual recap, a new monthly bestseller list, or a new tutorial that adapts for a different season or holiday.

22. Multiply by Demographic: For an upcoming content piece, consider breaking it into several pieces that are customized for different types of audiences. Instead of one guide, create three or more similar guides that are each targeted to specific subsets of your audience.

23. Multiply by Location: Identify a piece of content that can be split and adapted by several locations. This could mean creating altered versions of instructions customized to different climates, adapting a list of recommendations based on the room in the house, or splitting a list of stretches based on the ailing body part.

24. Multiply by Resources: Oftentimes our instructional content pieces or recommendations require certain resources—an amount of money, specific tools, necessary ingredients, a certain number of people, or something else. Create altered versions of these successful content pieces that change or reduce the number of resources needed to ensure all segments of your audience can benefit and take action.

25. Update Old Content: If you’re really stuck for content ideas, find an old piece of content that could use some refreshing. Remove inaccurate information, correct out-of-date information, add in new information, and link to other relevant content you’ve since created. In doing so, you give your audience new reasons to appreciate the quality content you’ve already worked so hard to create.

Which of these content ideas are you most excited to bring to life?

The post 25 Content Prompts to Spice Up Your Marketing appeared first on Alexa Blog.

Strategic frameworks are an integral part of any marketing strategy. They help us identify where we are, where we want to go, and what steps we need to take to get there as a business.

Marketers use dozens of different strategic frameworks. But how do you know which is the right one? We’ve collected the opinions of five marketers who’ve put their strategic framework of choice to the test.

What Is a Strategic Framework?

A strategic framework is a type of structuring method that details how a project or initiative will help reach important company objectives.

From a marketing perspective, it can be used to outline specific marketing projects or initiatives to make sure they’re always in line with the overarching business plan. For example, you can use strategic frameworks to guide new product or service offerings or determine how the marketing team can help increase revenue.

What Makes a Strategic Framework Successful?

Oren Greenberg, managing director at Kurve, says there are generally two key pieces every successful strategic framework should include: it needs to align with the overall business strategy, and it needs to be measurable.

Greenberg also says it’s important to provide people in the organization with the research and data they need to formulate their own thinking. He underlines the importance of aligning the goals of the framework with all people in the organization, specifically in reference to KPIs.

Which Strategic Frameworks Do Marketers Find Most Useful?

We’ve compiled opinions from five different marketing experts to find out what they think is the most useful strategic framework.

Objectives and Key Results (OKR)

Hiba Amin, content marketing manager at SoapBox, says, “OKRs are able to communicate the what and why super effectively across all teams, which leaves room for the experts to determine the how.”

“OKRs are able to communicate the what and why super effectively across all teams, which leaves room for the experts to determine the how.”
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Popularized by early Google investor John Doerr, OKRs are divided into two parts: objectives and key results. Think of the objective as the why, a clear goal for team members to follow. The what comes in the form of the key results — specific measurable ways to track the goal. Once you have those two pieces in place, it’s up to your team to determine how you’re going to reach that objective.

How to Use This Strategic Framework

OKRs are often set on a quarterly basis to sync up with current company priorities. Set a high-level objective (e.g., increase revenue, bolster employee engagement, etc.), and come up with one to three key results that can help you track the objective in a measurable way. If your objective is to increase revenue, for example, you would come up with one to three measurable ways your company could do that. That could mean anything from getting a certain number of new clients to reducing churn by a specific percentage.

Using this strategic planning framework, each member of your team can contribute to these high-level objectives, and you can update them as needed. If you’re on the marketing team, for instance, you will be finding ways to support high-level objectives through different marketing initiatives.

Objectives, Goals, Strategies, and Measures (OGSM)

James Story, senior content manager at Lead Tech, points to simplicity as being one of the biggest benefits of this strategic framework model and underlines that “you don’t need any special software or technical skills — you just need a single page.”

Like the name of this strategic framework states, OGSMs are divided into four parts: objectives, goals, strategies, and measures. Unlike some of the other strategic frameworks included on this list, OGSM is a relatively simple framework to implement. You can simply take your overarching objective and come up with goals, strategies, and measures to help achieve it.

How to Use This Strategic Framework

To understand how to use OGSMs, it’s best to break down each individual piece of the strategic framework to highlight what its function is:

• Objectives: High-level company priorities.
• Goals: Create measurable results that support the high-level priority.
• Strategies: How to achieve your objectives and goals.
• Measures: Determine if strategies are working.

As you can see, there are some general similarities between OGSMs and OKRs. Both strategic frameworks include high-level objectives at the top, but they differ in how to achieve that objective.

Balanced Scorecard

Tom Wright, cofounder and CEO of Cascade Strategy, says, “the benefit of implementing the Balanced Scorecard is that it forces your organization into a level of focus that spans leading KPI indicators as well as lagging ones.”

The Balanced Scorecard looks at goals and measures through four different perspectives: customer, internal, innovation and learning, and financial. It’s known as the Balanced Scorecard because of its well-rounded approach to goals and measures. It doesn’t just focus on objectives that are organizational priorities; it creates a balanced approach that considers different aspects of the company at all times. This allows you to stay on top of objectives that are already making good progress and focusing on others that may be behind.

How to Use This Strategic Framework

The Balanced Scorecard is, for lack of a better term, all about getting a more balanced view of your goals and measures. Create four separate scorecards that address each of the aforementioned perspectives:

• Customer: Value, retention, churn, etc.
• Internal: Quality, efficiency, productivity, etc.
• Innovation and learning: Culture, technology, leadership, etc.
• Financial: Revenue, ROI, cash flow, etc.

Once you’ve done that, create goals and measures for each perspective and you will create a holistic view of your company’s objectives:

The Ansoff Matrix

Kim Moore, marketing strategist at KG Moore Limited, says the Ansoff Matrix should be used on an annual basis to “determine whether a business needs to improve or adjust existing offerings or venture into new markets.”

The Ansoff Matrix is centered on growth and innovation and divided into four parts: market development, market penetration, product development, and diversification. It can help guide the direction of a marketing strategy that is focused on improvement and expansion of product or service offerings. This is why it’s important to use the Ansoff Matrix every year. It helps you evaluate your current product or service offerings and adjust when needed.

How to Use This Strategic Framework

Similar to the OGSM strategic framework, the Ansoff Matrix also takes four different perspectives into consideration. These are focused specifically on marketing efforts for product and service growth versus broader objectives, such as increasing revenue:

• Market penetration: Grow existing product or service offerings in existing markets.
• Market development: Expand into new markets using existing product or service offerings.
• Product development: Create new product or service offerings in existing markets.
• Diversification: Grow market share through introduction of new product or service offerings in new markets.

SMART Goals

Ryan Shelley, chief growth officer and founder of SMA Marketing, says to think of SMART Goals as “a map as you continue to go towards your destination, as you continue to build your business, as you continue to market your company, as you continue to grow your influence online.”

SMART is an acronym for smart, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound — which is exactly what these goals need to be. Your goals will continually change as your company shifts priorities and grows; SMART Goals allow you to set goals that are always in line with your current business needs.

How to Use This Strategic Framework

To create a SMART Goal, you need to ensure that the goal you are setting takes all five elements of SMART into consideration. It’s important to note that there are a few different takes on SMART Goals, and the letters can represent slightly different qualities in some cases. Here is a common version used by many companies:

• Smart: The goal is clear and concise.
• Measurable: You can measure the goal in some quantitative way.
• Attainable: The goal can be achieved; it is not impossible to accomplish.
• Relevant: The goal is in line with the bigger company vision.
• Time-Bound: The goal has a clearly defined timeline; test and pivot when needed.

Use Strategic Frameworks to Strengthen Your Marketing Strategy

Strategic frameworks map out business objectives and goals that can help inform your marketing strategy. They give you a clear path to success and need to be addressed and updated regularly.

Some companies evaluate company performance with these strategic frameworks quarterly, while others do so annually. The important piece is to have consistency. Strategic frameworks are meant to be revisited regularly. This is not a set-and-forget method.

Once you have your strategic framework in place, Alexa can help you measure your marketing metrics to ensure your marketing efforts are always aligned with business goals. Try our free 14-day trial today!

The post Seriously Useful Strategic Frameworks According to 5 Marketing Experts appeared first on Alexa Blog.

Approximately 96% of your website’s visitors are not ready to buy. The odds are stacked against you. If you attempt to convert every visitor that comes to your website, for every dollar you spend trying to convert them, 96 cents are wasted. So how do you know which leads to pursue and which to ignore? The answer is lead scoring.

We’re here to help guide you through the fundamentals of scoring leads and how to create an effective lead scoring model that helps find purchase-ready customers for your company.

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is a data-driven ranking system used by marketing teams to determine a lead’s buying potential. While every company has its own lead scoring model (e.g., letter grades, number values, percentages), each model is designed to give a “lead score” that helps companies distinguish between how hot or cold a lead is.

A higher lead score means the lead is closer to becoming a customer, while a lower lead score means they’re less likely to become a customer. The ultimate goal is to determine all the potentially sales-ready leads through the lead scoring process.

Why Is Lead Scoring Important?

Lead scoring allows marketing teams to more accurately rank their leads based on different data points. These rankings help marketing teams spend more wisely. Lead scoring prevents wasted marketing spend by redirecting precious working hours to customers with the most likely ROI.

Lead scoring prevents wasted marketing spend by redirecting precious working hours to customers with the most likely ROI.
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If your marketing team knows which leads are more likely to make a purchase, they can make decisions to target the best leads. Once you know which customers are most likely to make a purchase, you can also direct your marketing and lead nurturing efforts toward them.

Lead Scoring Data You Should Be Tracking

Since lead scoring is a data-driven ranking system, you need to know what types of data point values you should be tracking. There are generally two types of lead scoring data to consider: explicit and implicit.

Explicit Data

Explicit data encompasses information that you’ve collected from a lead, generally information they’ve provided through forms, phone calls, emails, etc. This data includes things like an individual’s job title, salary, location, and even their company’s size and industry.

Implicit Data

Implicit data looks at different user activities and behaviors. Tracking information like a lead’s level of email, social media, or website engagement is important because it can tell you what activities and behaviors purchase-ready customers have in common.

Are they reading certain web pages longer? Are they commenting on social media channels? Are they opening company emails regularly? If a lead has a high level of engagement with your company, you can use that knowledge to target them more aggressively to make a sale because they’re already showing interest in your product, service or brand on some level.

Implicit data also includes negative data. If leads are unsubscribing from your newsletter or not responding to your marketing email offers, it means you’re dealing with a less engaged lead who is less likely to make a purchase.

For B2B marketers, an example of negative data might be someone who isn’t a company decision-maker and, therefore, less likely to make a purchase. That’s why you should also be keeping a close eye on the decision-makers at companies you’re targeting — a junior finance assistant may be an influencer or end user of a new product or service, but will have less authority to close a deal than a CFO.

Scoring Your Leads

The simplest way to score your leads is by setting different thresholds and assigning points to each, which will result in a ranking.

Let’s say you want your leads to come from large companies, and you’ve determined certain actions that a lead may perform on your website are more likely to convert. You can create a lead scoring model divided into three thresholds: hot, warm, and cold. A target persona from a company with 250-plus employees that downloads an eBook from your site may be considered “cold.” Someone in the same role at a similar sized company that schedules a demo of your product, however, may be considered “hot.” 

Once you’ve decided on your thresholds, you can then assign points to each. For example, the target persona at a company with 250-plus employees that scheduled a demo would get a 100-point score if you’re using a 100-point system.

Below is a lead scoring model example put together by ActiveCampaign. They’ve attributed a certain amount of points to each type of lead using a 100-point system: 100 for sales qualified leads (SQLs), 75 for marketing qualified leads (MQLs), 50 for more general leads, and 10 for prospects.

Source: ActiveCampaign

While it’s obvious that the leads with 100 points are purchase-ready, it doesn’t necessarily mean the ones that don’t currently have 100 points can’t achieve that status at some point. Over time, a prospect, lead, or MQL can become an SQL and move up the rankings based on their actions. More engagement, such as email opens, social media comments, or eBook downloads, can move a lead up the rankings as well because it shows increasing interest.

Two Types of Lead Scoring

Generally speaking, there are two ways to create a lead scoring model: traditional and predictive.

Traditional Lead Scoring

Traditional lead scoring refers to when a marketing team manually assigns scores to leads and ranks prospects to determine how hot or cold they are. The decision is made based on a comprehensive list of the explicit and implicit data.

The downside to traditional lead scoring is that it’s often seen as a solution that doesn’t necessarily track down great leads, but simply eliminates bad ones. That’s because traditional lead scoring is based on subjective opinions about what great leads and bad leads look like. It’s much easier to find leads who definitely aren’t going to make a purchase; it takes far more effort to find the great ones because there’s generally less data available about them.

While eliminating bad leads is a good starting point, it doesn’t achieve the ultimate goal of lead scoring — finding purchase-ready customers. It’s also a more time-consuming process that may not be as effective for lean marketing teams.

Predictive Lead Scoring

Predictive lead scoring is done using lead scoring software. This software implements algorithmic tools to automatically track different data points that identify purchase probability tracking patterns through conversion data. They also use marketing automation and machine learning to better predict what part of the sales funnel your leads are in and even get smarter over time to understand purchase motivations better.

Lead scoring software takes all heavy lifting of lead scoring out of the equation. You don’t have to worry about manually assessing all your potential leads and making a human error. The machine learning functionality of lead scoring software can tell you the good and bad leads based on how likely they are to become a customer. You can then deploy sales reps to follow up with the ones who are pre-qualified by the software.

However, this software does come at a cost. If you want to get the most out of your lead scoring software and all the best features, you may be looking at a significant monthly investment. Depending on how much you’re willing to spend, it may not be the most viable option for your company.

Lead Scoring Software You Can Try

• 6Sense
• ActiveCampaign
• HubSpot
• Infer
• Salesforce

Create Better Lead Generation Strategies with Lead Scoring

Once you’ve scored all your leads, you can create better lead generation strategies that focuses on sending the right message to leads that are in different stages of getting to know your brand and what you offer. That can mean anything from offering gated content like an eBook or a research report to cold leads, or marketing events like webinars and workshops to warm and hot leads.

To come up with a lead generation strategy, you need to understand your target customer’s pain points. For example, if your target customer is looking to build up their in-house marketing team and streamline their SEO process with intuitive software, you could use an eBook to provide value on “The must-have marketing toolkit when scaling your marketing team.” The goal here is to nurture prospects into leads. By creating content that adds value, credibility, and trust, you are nurturing leads to find out more about your product or service.

It’s also important to use gated content such as an eBook to get the contact information of your leads. This allows you to add them to an email workflow to continue nurturing them toward a sales call or purchase. Doing so gives you the control of being able to communicate directly with leads — giving you more insight and data.

Learn More About Your Customers With Alexa

In essence, lead scoring comes down to customer psychology. Using distinct data points, you’re trying to understand as much about quality leads as possible. That information will be the difference between knowing who’s ready to make a purchase and who isn’t.

Alexa can also help with that. Our Target Audience Analysis tools identify keywords your customers use when they’re ready to make a purchase, and can help you find topics that make them more likely to convert. Try all of our tools free for 14 days with the Advanced Plan.

The post Lead Scoring: The Best Way to Discover Purchase-Ready Customers appeared first on Alexa Blog.

Market research is at the core of every great marketing strategy. It’s the only way to truly understand your industry, customers, and competitors on an intimate level.

Generally speaking, every market research execution can be broken into one of four overarching types of market research.

To make it easier to refine your marketing research efforts, we’re breaking down the four types of market research to make sure you have all the necessary data and information to fuel your marketing strategies and make them successful.

Why is Market Research Important?

Market research is vital because it helps identify the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing strategy. While it’s important to follow your own marketing intuition as a business, you need to have that analytical understanding of what your customers want and what your competitors are doing to succeed over time.

Market research can help you uncover quantitative data such as size and demographics, and even qualitative research data like psychographics to get a better understanding of the size and scope of your industry.

Another benefit of market research is the ability to identify competitors within your industry. Market research can give you a better understanding of your competitive landscape by answering questions like: Are you competing against small businesses or big businesses? What do their target markets look like compared to yours? Does your company have enough brand awareness to compete?

Perhaps most importantly, market research also gives you insight into your target audience. You need to do market research to have a better understanding of customer preferences. The data you find can help your company better cater to the specific group of people you’re targeting and even open the door to new products they might want to purchase in the future. Market research is the driving force behind a customer’s purchase because it helps you understand exactly what they want and need.

What are the 4 Different Types of Market Research?

There are four main types of market research that you’ll likely come across. Each of these can help you extract data and information about your market in different ways.

Primary Research

Primary research refers to first-party data or information. First-party data or information is all the data and information you’ve collected on your own—you’re not citing any other source’s work. Examples of primary market research include:

• Focus groups
• Interviews
• Polls
• Surveys

This type of market research can help strengthen your marketing strategy with data and information that comes directly from your customers. It’s arguably the most valuable type of market research because it’s particular to your customer base. This allows you to get candid details on business strengths and weaknesses to understand the overall customer experience.

Good examples of primary research are online surveys and polls, which are a great way to get a large number of responses from your customer base. Maybe there’s a question about your product or service that you’re dying to get feedback on. Well, why not ask your customers directly? You can broadcast your survey or poll on a social media channel or add it to an email newsletter you send to subscribers. A larger response like this will help you determine what your customer base is thinking, and you can identify shared pain points or praise they may have.

Learn more about market research questions, what to ask, and how to ask it.

Secondary Research

Secondary research refers to second-party or third-party data or information. Second- and third-party data is collected from what already exists within the market. The research is not done by you, but by other businesses or organizations. Examples of secondary market research include:

• Articles
• eBooks
• Infographics
• Videos
• White papers

This type of market research can help you get a better understanding of your industry as a whole. You’ll be able to identify how competitors operate, important industry statistics, and other valuable insights that you can use to help create a more informed marketing strategy overall.

Secondary research is the best way to get a feel for the data and information that already exists within your industry and among your competitors. Identifying that data and information not only gives you a better idea of what you’re up against from a marketing perspective but also where you might be able to improve. Maybe a competitor has written a great article that’s bringing in a lot of organic search traffic or social shares, and there’s an opportunity for you to formulate a counter-argument that has the potential to be similarly popular. That contrary point-of-view not only shows that you understand your competitor’s content, but that you’re also willing to step in with an original perspective to add to the greater dialogue surrounding the topic.

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research refers to the collection of data that can’t be measured. 

Qualitative research can be primary or secondary. You can use primary market research methods such as interviews, polls, and surveys to find out how customers feel about your product or service. The goal is to understand how they think. You can ask open-ended questions like:

• What made you buy our product or service?
• How do you think our product or service stands up to competitors?
• What features do you like about our product or service and why?
• In what areas do you think our product or service could improve and why?

This type of market research gives us insight into what customers are thinking; it’s the only way to discover why a customer decides to trust your—or another—brand. When you conduct customer research, you can ask customers specific questions about your product or service. The answers to these questions will help you form better marketing strategies that take all their feelings and thoughts about your product or service into consideration.

A great way to utilize qualitative research is to do it during a product launch. The goal is to get as much customer feedback about your new product as possible. Qualitative research can help you gauge whether it has met customer expectations or falls short. If it does fall short, dig deeper and find out in what areas it doesn’t meet customer expectations. Is it a quality issue? Price point? Competitors offering better products? Qualitative research gives you that critical insight into how customers feel about your product or service.

Qualitative research can help you gauge whether your product has met customer expectations or falls short.
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Quantitative Research

Quantitative research refers to collecting numbers for statistical analysis. Like qualitative research, quantitative research can be primary or secondary in nature.

This type of market research is all about having the figures to back up your marketing strategy. The stats aren’t interpretations—they’re empirical evidence. Quantitative market research can look like:

• Alexa Rank
• Bounce rate
• Pageviews
• Share of voice
• Social media followers
• Social media engagement
• Subscribers

This data can act as a benchmark for where to spend more time and money in your marketing efforts. Once you know where you stand in a market among certain dimensions like your pageviews or subscribers, you can adjust your marketing strategy accordingly to reflect your findings.

Unlike some of the other types of market research featured in this article, quantitative research has a very distinct advantage in that you’re able to use analytics platforms to track your progress. For example, Alexa’s Content Exploration tool allows you to enter a site and see how much engagement its content gets on Twitter and Reddit. You can then compare these metrics side-by-side with other sites in your industry. 

Revisit Your Market Research Regularly

Remember, the dynamics of your market can change rapidly and often without much warning. That’s why it’s always important to make sure you’re conducting the market research process regularly. This will help you stay up-to-date with your industry, customers, and competitors at all times, which will, in turn, help you create stronger marketing strategies.

Alexa also has tools that can help you conduct market research with access to important engagement, traffic and reach metrics that can help measure the performance of your website within a market. Try it out with a free 14-day trial of our Advanced Plan

The post 4 Types of Market Research to Fuel Your Marketing Strategies appeared first on Alexa Blog.

The better you know your customers, the better off your business will be. It’s business 101.

To address the hypercompetitive nature of today’s marketplace, businesses need to think smaller instead of bigger. This is where micromarketing comes into play. This type of marketing strategy is specifically designed to address a very niche market within your wider target audience.

A strong micromarketing strategy can help your business nail down very specific pockets of people to market a product or service to. Here’s what you need to know about building a scalable micromarketing strategy.

What is Micromarketing?

Micromarketing is a type of marketing that targets a small group of your customer base. These are highly targeted customers who share very specific traits, such as their location, age, interests, household income, shopping behaviors, or occupation. In essence, micromarketing targets specific individuals as opposed to general groups.

For example, a marketing agency may generally market their product or service towards small to mid-sized businesses. They may find, however, that the digital advertising services they offer appeal to small retail stores as well. They may decide to create a micromarketing strategy that targets owners of retail stores with less than a specified number of employees.

Why Businesses use Micromarketing

Micromarketing is used by businesses, both large and small. For example, it can be a great way for a large business to introduce new products or services or help small businesses gain a footing through local advertising efforts.

The primary reasons businesses use micromarketing are to find a very specific market segment of the population that they can sell their product or service to. It’s even more specific than niche marketing in that sense. If a company can match that specific audience with the right product or service, it can generate a higher ROI than if they were to cast a wide net. Many businesses do this to test new offerings as well as advertising ideas.

If you look at a large corporation like Coca-Cola, for example, there’s only a small and specific group of people within their target audience who will drink a product like Diet Coke with extra caffeine and a toasted vanilla flavor. Coca-Cola has likely implemented a micromarketing strategy to determine that there is indeed an appetite for that particular soft drink.

The Pros and Cons of Micromarketing

There are a few micromarketing advantages and disadvantages to consider before carrying out this type of marketing plan.

The primary disadvantage that comes to mind when thinking about micromarketing is how much of a time commitment it can be. Since you’re targeting a very specific group of customers, you need to know them on an intimate level. You also need to create detailed buyer personas and really dig into your market research.

With that in mind, there are some distinct advantages that come with running micromarketing campaigns as well. Chief among those benefits is how highly targeted these efforts can be. You’re really getting to know an individual customer based on things like their age or job title. Equipped with this information, you can better understand their overall needs.

Another benefit is that micromarketing is generally more cost-effective in increasing ROI than a sprawling countrywide mass marketing campaign. Since you’re targeting fewer people, you spend less money targeting them.

Micromarketing is generally more cost-effective in increasing ROI than a sprawling countrywide mass marketing campaign.
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Brands With Successful Micromarketing Strategies

There are many great examples of companies that have built successful micromarketing strategies, and each has done so in different ways. We’re going to highlight a few big winners:

Coca-Cola

One example of a successful micromarketing strategy implemented by the Coca-Cola camp is their 2014 “Share a Coke” campaign, where they replaced the Coca-Cola label on their 20-ounce bottles with first names. They developed a micromarketing strategy to analyze what names would sell the most according to their customer base.

The personalized touch became a huge success for the company, and Coca-Cola saw their largest-ever year-over-year growth for the 20-ounce bottle at 19%.

Source: The Independent

HubSpot

HubSpot co-founder and CEO Brian Halligan is often credited with creating the term “inbound marketing” back in 2008. Since then, inbound marketing has become a marketing staple that is used by thousands of companies around the world. HubSpot has owned the inbound marketing niche and created books, a conference, and an academy built around the concept.

The micromarketing strategy HubSpot implemented to create the inbound marketing concept was born out of targeting small to mid-sized businesses that specifically couldn’t afford to build expensive advertising and marketing campaigns. Inbound marketing served as a low-cost solution to this issue.

Uber

One of the best examples of a company that developed highly targeted micromarketing campaigns to target specific customer needs is none other than Uber. In fact, they didn’t actually start out as the ride-hailing service we all know and love today. Uber used to be an app-based black car limo service that only served San Francisco because of the city’s taxi problems.

Word about this new service spread through San Francisco quickly, and soon other states were clamoring for it as well. As they moved from state to state, Uber created localized micromarketing campaigns that catered to those markets. This was centered on using social media data to identify specific transportation issues in different cities and states. Uber then created localized online ads with different promotions and referral benefits to entice people in these markets to use the app.

How to Build a Scalable Micromarketing Strategy

There are different types of micromarketing strategies you can implement for your business, but each strategy is predicated on these important steps:

1. Establish Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are the most important piece of any successful micromarketing strategy. Without them, you’ll lack an intimate understanding of your customer base.

To create a well-rounded buyer persona, you need to consider both quantitative and qualitative components.

For the quantitative components, you should pull metrics from as many data repositories as possible. Some places to pull data from include Google Analytics, Instagram Insights, Facebook Insights, and YouTube Analytics. These analytics platforms can provide insight into demographics, age, gender, location, and interests. The reason you want to pull this quantitative data is to understand, from a high level, how your current customers are engaging with your website and content.

Quantitative data tells you the general characteristics of your buyer personas, while qualitative data is designed to understand what fuels those customers on an emotional level.

The best way to find this information is to conduct a survey or interview a set number of customers. If you’re interviewing customers, you’ll want to talk to a minimum of 10 to get a fair scope. Since you’ve already pulled the quantitative data points, it can help guide more in-depth questions such as where do they shop, what makes them trust a brand, and what made them feel confident trusting your brand.

2. Determine the Best Way to Reach Them

Now that you know who you’re marketing to, it’s time to figure out how you’re going to do it. Each buyer persona you create may have different preferences when it comes to the platforms they use most. A 19-year-old college student may spend a lot of their time on Instagram, while a 58-year-old parent may be on Facebook most of the time. Factors such as demographic data can help you determine what platforms may work best for certain people.

It’s ultimately up to you to determine the best way to reach your buyer personas. With that in mind, here are some common ways you can connect with them online:

• Online ads (Google, Facebook, etc.)
• Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)
• Podcasts (iTunes, Spotify, etc.)
• Video-streaming services (YouTube)

3. Come up With Your Messaging

Finding the right platforms to reach your target customers is one thing, but it won’t do much without the right messaging to convert them.

This is why the qualitative component of building buyer personas is so important — you need to understand how your personas think on an emotional level. It’s best practice to conduct interviews and write down key phrases they mention about why they felt confident trusting your company. These phrases are strong emotional drivers to purchase, so using them in your advertising or organic messaging will resonate with your buyer personas.

4. Implement and Test

Since you’re using micromarketing to test what resonates with a niche audience, messaging will give you insight on how to best convert them. For example, when creating a Facebook ad campaign, you’ll want to always create two ad variants to A/B test two different messages to see which one has a higher conversion rate. Once you find your winning formula, you can leverage this in subsequent ad campaigns to scale your micromarketing strategy.

Once you have these building blocks in place, it’s time to implement your micromarketing campaign. Make sure you’re constantly testing different messaging to see how the audience responds. From there, you can optimize the campaign to make sure you’re getting the best ROI.

Refine your Micromarketing Efforts With Alexa

Micromarketing is really about getting as specific as you can with certain members of your audience. You want to get into their head and find out what products and services they will be most inclined to purchase.

Alexa can help you track important information about your niche audience, such as their content preference, websites they frequent, and more. Try a free 14-day trial today to find out how Alexa can help you connect with your audience to better refine your micromarketing strategy.

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