Tuesday, 8 September 2020

How to Generate High-Quality Leads For Your Brand

Lead generation is one of the top priorities of B2B marketers. New leads bring the possibility of revenue growth. Naturally, it is very easy to become hopeful when any person demonstrates the slightest interest in your product and consider them as a lead, while overlooking their quality. However, for truly successful revenue growth, you need to fill your pipeline with the leads who have a genuine interest and need for the product or service you are providing. Let us see how you can ensure this -

Have your marketing and sales team confer together
Often, marketing and sales team have radically different ideas for the qualification criteria of your leads. As a lead, majority of the sales qualified leads sent over by the marketing team are rejected by sales, leading to a poor conversion rate. Therefore, it is crucial that both these teams reach a common ground in their definition of a "qualified lead".

Establish a lead scoring process
Classify your leads on the amount of interest or enthusiasm they have displayed towards your brand. This will give you an idea of who is more likely to purchase from you.

Another way to evaluate lead quality is to use the BANT criteria -

 Budget – Does the prospect have enough budget to invest in your solution?
 Authority – Does the prospect have the authority to make a purchase decision?
 Need – Does the prospect have a pressing need for your solution?
 Timeline – Does the prospect plan to make the purchase within a reasonable timeframe?

The answers to these questions will help you weed out the leads who are unlikely or unable to purchase from you.

Have an efficient lead nurturing strategy in place
Even if a lead is promising, lack of nurturing can make them fall out of your pipeline. They are likely to have a lot of questions and considerations to go through, before they are ready to make a purchase decision. Make sure that you follow-up on these leads regularly, either through phone, emails and even social media. Let them know that you are always available and ready to resolve their queries and help them make the right decision to overcome their business challenge. This will help you drive them to the bottom of the sales funnel in a shorter amount of time.

Quality leads are essential to save a huge amount of your time, efforts, and shorten the sales-cycle to enable revenues. If you need help with lead generation, a digital marketing company can help you acquire quality leads from the desired pool of your target audience.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

5 Of the Most Important Strategies for Website Optimization

Optimizing your website is not only important for increasing ranking through SEO and driving organic traffic, but also to convert this traffic into business leads and ultimately into paying customers.

Let us the topmost important strategies you need to implement to optimize your website for SEO and conversion -

Page Speed
The importance of a fast-loading website cannot be stressed enough. Every extra second it takes to load can cost you a potential customer. An optimum page speed will result in reduced bounce rates and increased time-on-site, which is a good indicator for the search engine algorithms.

Mobile-First Indexing
Since Google has officially rolled out mobile-first indexing, mobile-friendliness is not merely a nice-to-have option. As Google will give priority to the mobile version of a website over the desktop one, your ranking might suffer even if you have a great desktop website.

Quality Content
Of course, no website optimization strategy can ever be complete without content. Google will actively demote thin content or content that provides little to no value for the intended target audience. For successful SEO, your content should be -

      Original and free of plagiarism
      Relevant to the website visitors
      Must provide value to the readers
      Inclusive of keywords mapped to the user search intent

User Experience
This is one of the most important considerations for website optimization. If your website does not provide a good user experience, the visitors will abandon it, leading to an increased bounce rate that adversely affects SEO. Some of the top factors that contribute to a good user experience are -

      Aesthetic website design
      Easy site navigation
      Optimum page loading speed
      Ease of accessibility

Link Building
Link building was and will always remain an integral part of website optimization. Quality links from high-authority websites act as an endorsement for your website and contribute to its credibility and trustworthiness.

If you need help for optimizing your website for SEO and/or content, you can engage the services of a digital marketing company.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

4 Key Elements of an Effective Content Marketing Process

A lot of considerations are involved when you are planning a content marketing strategy. However, marketers tend to overlook them in favor of the actual content creation. There seems to be a widespread belief that the more content you create, the more successful your content marketing efforts will be. However, the frequency of content posting matters very little in the favor of the value you are providing with it.

Let us have a look at the top essential elements that are the marker of successful content marketing, apart from the actual content creation -

Audience
When you are focusing on what you should write, you cannot forget who you are writing for. Consider what your audience would like to read and not what you want to write. Research all the channels that will be viable for promoting a particular piece of content, and decide an objective for it. Consider whether your content provides an actionable takeaway for the audience.

SEO
If you don't optimize for SEO, you will have a hard time making sure it reaches the right audience no matter how great it is. Optimize your content for intent-based keywords, and make sure that it is free of duplicacy, is relevant and adds to the knowledge of the reader.

Promotion
Promoting the content you have created is just as important as creating it. You cannot rely on SEO alone to attract traffic to the content piece. Actively promote it on your social media accounts. You can also send an email with the link to the content the subscribers who might be interested in it; however, make sure that you do not appear as a spammer by sending it to irrelevant subscribers.

Repurposing
You might have a content piece that had performed really well when it was published, but is now past its shelf life. Repurposing it will give that content a fresh chance to rank online and reach new people. It will also help you save the time and efforts required for creating new content from the scratch.

A digital marketing company can help you strategize a comprehensive content marketing and content creation strategy that caters to your business goals, and attracts the right kind of audience.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

How to Become a Social Selling Specialist


The concept of social selling is not new, however, marketers tend to forget that it is not about selling your product or service at all. Rather, the ultimate goal of social selling is to engage your customers and develop long-lasting relationships with them.

The correct social selling practices give a humanized touch to your brands so that your customers and target audience can relate to you, encouraging more engagement and lead generation and overall brand awareness.

Let us have a look at some tips to help you excel at social selling and successfully practice it as a part of your B2B digitalmarketing strategy -

Update your professional profiles
As social selling focuses on brand and customer communication, it is natural that they will visit your business profile to know more about you as a brand. In such cases, incomplete or outdated profiles will contribute to a negative first impression.

Thus, the first step for successful social selling is to dust up your profiles from top to bottom. Include a professional photo, and update your bio to include things that will be useful for your target audience such as who you help, what problem are you solving and how.

It would also be useful to include case studies or testimonials from your previous clients so that new prospects will find it easier to trust you.

Share useful content
Of course, any social media strategy is incomplete without content. Create and share useful content that adds to the knowledge of your target audience, engages their attention, and above all provides business value. Such content will generate more encouragement in terms of likes and shares, leading to increased brand awareness and visibility.

Encourage communication to drive engagement
You cannot rely solely on sharing content to generate engagement. Participating in relevant group discussions and forums, responding to or leaving your own comments will give you the opportunity to directly engage and communicate with your target audience in a meaningful conversation.

Don't push for sales right from the start
Remember, as we mentioned before, social selling is not about selling. Do not try to make them purchase when you are just starting to converse with a new prospect. Instead, exert yourself to understand their business challenges and helping them find the right solution. This way, the prospect will be more likely to remember and turn to you when they are finally ready to purchase.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

Monday, 7 September 2020

How to Create an Effective Editorial Calendar For Your Content Marketing Strategy


Why do you need an editorial calendar?
Content marketing involves a lot more than haphazardly scribbling a blog whenever you have the time. You also need to think about the objective you want to accomplish with every single piece of content you create, along with planning the distribution of content on relevant digital platforms.
                                          
Creating an editorial calendar would greatly help you streamline and organize this entire process. It will leave you plenty of time to properly strategize and create content before the actual publishing. Thus, an editorial calendar will not only help you save time and efforts, but will also improve the overall quality of your content.

Let us see how you can create an effective editorial calendar

Select an editorial template
Often, the main reason content marketers hesitate to create a calendar is that they have no idea where to start, or think that the task will take up too much time. You can use one of the many online calendar tools available and use readymade templates to make the process easier.

Establish your content objectives
If you haven't already, now is a great time to determine your content marketing objectives. They could include -

 Increasing your brand awareness
 Improving your SEO efforts
 Portraying yourself as an industry thought leader
 Driving more traffic towards your website
  Generate leads for a product or service

Make sure that your calendar prioritizes and reflects and all these objectives.

Research and come up with content ideas
Conduct an in-depth research to get an idea of what kind of content is performing well in your niche, and the kind of content (and formats) that is preferred by your target audience. Based on this research, you can start coming up with different ideas for topics and headlines.

Perform a thorough keyword research
Before you start creating content on these topics, conduct a thorough keyword research and include the high-ranking keywords in your content so that it will easily show up in search results. As far as possible, try to categorize your keywords according to user intent (navigational, transactional or informational), so that it will have better chances of ranking for the relevant searches.

Analyze your results periodically
Regularly monitoring the performance of your content will allow you to optimize your strategy for better results.

A digital marketing company can help you create a detailed editorial calendar, as well as create content that is mapped to your marketing objectives.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

Content vs Backlinks: Which One is Better For Your Website?


There are many different strategies and techniques available for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of a website, each of them effective in their own way. While it is neither practical nor possible to implement all of them, content and back-links have always been counted among the most important strategies for any website. Ideally, both of them should be exercised, but if it comes to prioritizing one of them, content will always gain the upper hand.

Let us see the reasons for this preference -

The purpose of back-links and content
Back-links from a high-authority website increase your brand awareness, as well as act as a vote of confidence for your own website.

Now, imagine that a user sees such back-link and decides to visit your website. There, if he finds that the content is not useful or relevant to him at all. It does not provide him any new information or does not convey how your solution can help them overcome a particular business challenge.

This will lead him to abandon your website. Therein lies the difference between the purpose of content and backlinks. Backlinks will merely serve to bring people to your website. Thereafter, it depends on the content to engage the visitors and encourage them to convert into leads which you can nurture into revenue-generating customers.

As a matter of fact, if your website does not already have high-quality content, you will find it nearly impossible to get a backlink from a reputed source. On the other hand, keyword-optimized and value-rich content has fairly high chances of ranking.

Content for site structure
Content is also integral for building your site structure. It enables your visitors easily traverse your website and access the information they want. Not only this, but this also helps search engine spiders to discover the most important topics your website is covering.

To conclude, backlinks are important for SEO and do help you rank, but only when the efforts for them are backed up by strong content. If you have to make a choice between the two, your best bet will always be to go for content. You can engage a digital marketing company if you need help to strategize and create quality content for your business.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

Why Should You Incorporate Videos in Your Digital Strategy in 2020

Humans have been visual creatures right from the primitive ages. Long before the alphabet came into existence, our ancestors used visuals to communicate with each other.
                    
Thus, our brains are naturally inclined to respond and process visuals faster than plain text content. In the age of information overload, marketers have been quick to realize this fact and act upon it. From images and info-graphics to charts and presentations, engaging visual content is widely used along with textual content so that the target audience can easily consume the information. 

Among all these, videos are, and will continue to remain for the foreseeable future, the favorite visual medium of marketers. Today, any B2B digital marketing strategy is incomplete without some form of video content. In fact, according to Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing Survey, 85% of businesses use video in their marketing strategy, and 99% of current video marketers plan to continue using videos in 2020.

Let us see the reason for this popularity, and why you should seriously consider incorporating videos in your digital strategy in the near future -

Encourages audience engagement
Business executives are pressed for time. Serving them text-heavy documents warrants a cursory glance at best. A short, engaging video will work better to catch and hold their attention completely.

The interactive nature of videos will give your audience the sense of 'speaking' directly to you. This not only adds a personality to your business and brand, but also targets both the analytical and emotional mind of your potential clients, enabling them to form a better connection with you.

A format favored by social media
A solid social media presence is necessary for every brand to increase their digital outreach and strengthen relationships with their customers. Videos are much more likely to be shared and viewed on the social media platforms than huge blocks of textual content, giving way to increased visibility and engagement rate.

Improves Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engines favor websites with videos, as they are a marker for quality content. A good quality video, along with proper SEO-optimized meta description and title can increase your chances of ranking higher.

Boosts your conversion rate
90% of consumers believe that a video can help them make a purchase decision. Including an explainer video or product demo video on your website and landing page can potentially increase your conversion rate.

If you are held back by the thought that video creation or editing is a tedious and time-consuming task, there are plenty of online tools which can make your task easier. So, start planning for including videos in your B2B marketing strategy to take it to the next level!

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.