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Modernizing Your Marketing Strategy - 5 Steps to G ...
Modernizing Your Marketing Strategy - 5 Steps to G ...
Modernizing Your Marketing Strategy - 5 Steps to Get Started in 2018
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Video Transcription
Good morning, everyone. This is Brian Shanahan. I'd like to thank you for taking the time to join the webinar. Today we're going to be talking about modernizing your marketing strategy, and then we're going to finish up with five steps to kind of kick start 2018. This presentation was also given during the summit recently in Las Vegas for those of you who weren't able to attend. So hopefully you find it valuable. And a couple of housekeeping things before we get started is everyone's in listen-only mode, and you should see on the left side of your screen a chat pane. So if you have questions as we go through things, please type them in there. I'll do my best to try and answer those. Or my contact information will be available at the end of the presentation. You can give me a call or shoot me an email. I'd be happy to chat with you about any questions you might have. As far as a little bit of background on myself, my company is Shanahan Strategy. I'm the president of it. We've been in business, it was founded about 12 years ago. And I've got about 30 years' experience in the equipment industry and kind of the industrial space. In terms of my background, I was formerly with a large Cummins distributor in California for about 15 years and ran the sales and marketing side of the business there and was also a partner in the business. So I'm familiar with the space, worked a lot in terms of general management, spent a lot of time in sales and marketing. The primary function, which is related to this topic, was to grow sales, to help penetrate markets and expand market share. In terms of my background product-wise, I've done a lot of work, obviously, with engines. Given my background with Cummins, also power systems, generators, worked a lot with our OEMs, as well as emissions, as well as engineering. So in terms of my work with Shanahan Strategy, again, we're a strategic marketing agency, work primarily in the industrial and equipment space, and we've done work all over the world. Most of our clients are based in North America. And as you can see on the map here, we've also done work in South America and in Southern Africa, West Africa, Europe, Russia, Middle East, India, as well as a number of countries in the Asia-Pacific area, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Philippines, Japan. And we're actually working on a new project right now in South Korea. So a little bit of background there on myself. Hopefully that helps. In terms of the agenda for today, we're going to talk kind of about two-thirds of the presentation about what are the factors driving change. Again, just to kind of level set in terms of what are the steps and why these steps matter. And then we're going to, towards the end, talk about the five steps to kickstart 2018. And then I'll have my – we'll try and touch on any questions that have come up towards the end there. In terms of starting off, one of the things I like to start with is a little bit of quote in terms of why modernize. I was actually – this week in California there's a very large farm equipment show which is down in what's called the Central Valley south of Fresno, California. It's called the World Ag Expo. It's a huge farm equipment show. And I was down there on Tuesday and spoke with a lot of dealers and a lot of equipment manufacturers. Again, ag-related, not construction, but I think there's a lot of similarities. And the common theme there was things are changing and we've got to adapt from a lot of the dealers and equipment manufacturers. But the quote here from Jack Welch, most of you probably know Jack Welch. He was the CEO and chairman of General Electric for 20 years. During his tenure at General Electric, the company's value rose 4,000%. But the quote is, control your own destiny or someone else will. And this is kind of – I think it's important to realize things are changing. Again, whether it's pressure that you're getting from a manufacturer to grow or to sell more equipment or to do things differently or from your own management team, it's a matter of start taking action, figure out what to do, and that's really what we're talking about today. In terms of the common questions, what I try and bring up is, again, we've been in business for about 12 years now, is what are the common questions that we get hit with with existing clients and prospective clients? And probably these are a lot of things that you're asking within your own companies. And we start off with how do we generate more leads, more revenue? How do we grow? How do we grow market share? Where do we invest to drive better results? There's a zillion options. We'll talk about that in a minute. There's a lot of places to spend money. A lot of them can be very helpful and a lot of them can be a waste of time and money. You just need to be careful. Next one is how do we measure ROI and results? And the point there is, which I try and kind of hit home, if you're taking money to invest, let's say in your own 401K, and the investment company or the manager said, yeah, we'll take your money, but we can't tell you what the results are going to be. We can't measure it. You're not going to get any type of reports. You probably wouldn't invest in that mutual fund. And that same thing applies here to marketing, in that you've got to be able to measure it. If you're going to invest in something, you've got to figure out, can we measure it, how we measure it? And that's really important. And then the last one here is where do we start? There's so many options. Where's the biggest bang for the buck to get going? And we'll talk a little bit about that in a few minutes. The thing we start with is the fact that the buyer habits have changed. And this came up when I was in Las Vegas at the summit. This came up on Tuesday at this big pharma equipment show. And the fact is, people are spending time. Technology is changing habits. The next generation is coming up through a lot of your customers, whether those are contractors. If they're family-owned companies, and if they're not family-owned companies, the new generation is coming along. They're tech-savvy people. And the bottom line is, digital technology has brought efficiency gains and insights for businesses and customers. And that means changes for the way companies do business, both as sellers and buyers. And I think that's something that we all need to embrace, that things are changing and we've got to adapt to these changes, because people are accessing information and making decisions online. How do we make sure that we're taking advantage of that situation? The next thing is to talk a little bit about the new technology. And, again, this isn't a technology presentation, but it ties into it. And a lot of companies are overwhelmed with so many different options. How do you choose what works, what will work? And the point of this slide is there's an organization in Seattle that does an assessment of all the marketing technologies that are available. And so they went back in 2011. There were about 150 different products or platforms. And this, in some cases, includes some sales technologies as well. But when you run down to 2017, in the lower right, you can see now there's roughly 5,000 options. So this has grown exponentially, and it's hard to keep up. And it's also a lot of the change that we're talking about today is driven by these new technologies. The next thing to talk a little bit about is the traditional channels. And when I was at this farm show earlier in the week, obviously that's one of the more traditional approaches to marketing, whether you're a manufacturer or a dealer. The trade show, print ads, direct mail, billboards, again, depending on your business, where you're located, your competition, and how you access your potential customer or existing customers, what we've found is that traditional channels are less and less effective. The next one is they're easier to block and ignore when you think of voicemail systems, when you think of DVRs in your behavior, when you watch, let's say, television. I don't watch that much television, but most anything I watch I record and I skip over any type of advertising where possible. Everyone's doing that via technology, and we need to realize that's the case. In many cases, these traditional channels are difficult to measure, such as a trade show. It's hard to quantify. Print ads are often hard to quantify. You can measure them, but you've got to think strategically before you get going. How are we going to measure this? What are we putting in place? Whether it's tracking codes or tracking phone numbers, how are you going to measure the program to determine, does this work or does it not work? The next one is it's often very expensive, traditional channels. Again, not that they don't work. It's a matter of finding the right mix for your business, but in many cases with these traditional channels, you're going to spend a lot more money than you would on some of the newer digital channels. And then the last point, and probably one of the most important points, is the fact that these are not the channels where the next generation of buyers, maybe the more digital savvy or tech savvy buyers are going. Those buyers are going to Google. They're going to your website. They're going to a manufacturer's website, and that's where you need to be, and that's where you want to invest. So that brings us to what are the top sources for buyers today? And again, this is based on our research, our experience. We deal with this day in and day out, and kind of what we've found is regardless of age and location, that Google or a search engine, I say Google in this case because Google's market share in the search engine, at least in North America, is about 80%. So you really need to focus on how do you perform well in Google? But that's the number one source. When you think of how you buy something personally, it's the same thing for folks looking for answers for construction equipment or machinery. They're going to go to Google. They're going to go to the next step. They may start with the supplier or vendor website, but both of those elements you need to be performing very well because that's where your buyers are going today. And then the bottom line here is if you're not performing well in Google, if you're not showing up, essentially in many cases you may not be able to get on the first page, so you've got to figure out how do we get present on Google so that we show up for terms that are really important to our business, and that's what we're going to talk more about. The next point is online research. We talk about people going on, the next generation come along. Again, it may be age-related. It may not be age-related, but people are doing study show, study after study show. This was a topic that was brought up many times at the summit in Las Vegas at different presentations that I attended, but the fact is people are going online doing a lot of their research before they talk to a company or reach out to a company. The first quote is, from serious decisions claims that buyers invest 67% of their buying process by searching online before they reach out to a company for a solution. That essentially says that they're looking at options. They're narrowing things down, and if your company can't be found, you don't have content for them to consume relevant to what they're trying to purchase or resources they're looking for. You may not even be considered when it comes down to looking at the various options. The next one is from Forrester Research, same kind of thing. 74% of business buyers conduct more than half of their research online before making an offline purchase. They may look at forums. They may look at industry websites, but the top two things, again from studies, are looking at Google to find those different resources and going to dealer and manufacturer websites to get information. The next topic is inbound and outbound strategies, and this kind of relates back to we talked about traditional channels and the digital channels. The earlier slide that was featured, the fact that some of the traditional channels are less effective, but most companies that we're seeing, they're leveraging a mix of what's called inbound and outbound strategies or digital and traditional strategies. So anyway, just to compare the two, inbound marketing is any tactic that relies on earning people's trust and interest instead of buying it. When I say buying it, what I mean by that is producing content that people are engaging with and want to read. Maybe it's videos that they want to watch on your video channel. Again, not an hour long, but a few minutes long on a topic. Maybe it's safety or maintenance or technology or telematics related. Maybe it's about a new product. But it's providing, earning the trust of your existing customers and prospective customers by producing content that they're interested in and it's helpful to them running their business. The next side or the flip side of that is outbound marketing, and this is any tactic that pushes products or services on customers via a paid placement. Again, this could be a trade journal ad. It could be a banner ad on an industry website. It could be an advertisement in a trade show directory. It could be Google AdWords. But you're paying to interrupt that prospective customer to get in front of them via some type of paid placement. Again, the point of this slide is most successful companies are leveraging both of these strategies, and the goal is to find the right mix for your business. Next, we want to talk a little bit about the leading triggers for change. What's pushing dealerships? What's pushing manufacturers to make changes? This kind of relates back to the common questions that we started off with. I think most of you would probably agree that the drive for revenue and market share growth is always kind of the number one topic in terms of manufacturers looking for you to be selling more equipment to growing your market share. The other trigger is, in some cases, shrinking pipelines and lost business. Why are we losing business? Have we not adapted to how people are buying today in terms of using some of these digital tools? How do we make sure our pipeline is not dropping up and understand why we're losing business? A lot of that may relate to tech-savvy competitors. They're leveraging tools that are connecting with that new generation that's coming online, and we need to figure out how do we take advantage of that situation and embrace that new technology. And then the last one that always comes up, almost without a doubt, is we're not on page one. How do we get found in search engines for certain topics? It can be done. It's not easy. But many clients we've worked with, it's amazing how, if you put together a strategy and implement it, it takes time and you need to be patient. But you can get on page one for certain topics. It just depends on what those keywords are. These are the triggers that are driving people to make those changes. Next would be a little bit about the risk of non-adapting, and maybe this is obvious, but as competitors use and pursue improved sales productivity and marketing productivity via technology, if you're not embracing these and understanding how do you leverage these tools, your company risks being left behind unless you adapt to the change. Again, not to keep bringing up this farm equipment show, but I think there's a lot of similarities. And that is that things are changing quickly and the companies that adapt are the ones that are going to be around for the long term. And some that don't adapt may not be around because this is changing so quickly. Next we want to talk a little bit about standing out in the crowd and how that occurs in today's using today's digital tools. Because that's another thing. How do we separate ourselves? How do we stand out as the supplier or dealer or brand that people want to do business with? And again, this is something that was brought up many times during the summit in Las Vegas. And that was to focus less on the product pitch, less on the specs, the features and the benefits, and more on how do we help our customers be more successful? How do we understand what their challenges are, what they're dealing with, and how do we share our expertise to help them be more successful? And that comes down to sharing your expertise and insight via content. And what I mean by content is it may be videos, it may be articles, it may be tip sheets or guides, but how do you help them in aspects of their business and leverage your expertise to share that with them? And the goal is that customers see you as a valued partner, helping them be more profitable and successful. So the goal here is to help customers answer pressing questions and then the bottom line here is in today's world your growth is going to be fueled by engaging content, not just pitching product. Next we're going to talk a little bit about content. What is content? I think if you look at some of the different manufacturers in the construction equipment space and go to their websites and look at whether it's video channels or kind of segment-related topics, you'll find a lot of content. You'll find articles, guides. Some of them may be on maintenance or technology. But content is what Google indexes. Google has an algorithm and it looks at all different aspects of your website, your content, what the customer's typing into Google and content is how you all get found. And those are things like articles, guides, tip sheets, videos, case studies. It's not just a matter of produce this and throw it out the door. It's understand what are your ideal buyers looking for and how do you produce that to connect with them. But the point of this is everything you do with regards to content you own and you can build on. And when you compare this to let's say an ad you place in a trade journal which may have a shelf life of a day, it may have a shelf life of a month, a week, it just depends on what it is the type of publication. But when you produce this type of material, it's on your website, it's on your YouTube channel, whatever it is, you're actually investing in an asset that continues to grow and produce over time. So it's something that customers, prospective customers, existing customers may come back and view and realize this is really good stuff. I'm going to subscribe to whatever their email updates to get more of this because it's really helpful information. And that's kind of the driver behind why content makes a difference. And this is something that Google is going to index and that's how your website and your business gets found is by indexable content. So what does that mean? And that comes to the next slide which is content is essentially today's sales currency. Content is the currency of sales and marketing today. It's about getting found. It creates consideration. It tells people they're looking for a problem and if they find your company because you understand that problem and you've produced some material, it helps build preference for your brand because you're helping them and it builds trust and relationship that when they're ready to buy, they may send the salesperson or pick up the phone and call your company because you've created this relationship and this level of trust with them. The next thing is to touch a little bit on the risk of content paralysis and I bring this up because on a regular occasion we have clients that are very resistant to producing any content. No, we don't want to do that. We're just going to put our spec sheets on our website or what we have available right now and our contact phone numbers and the concern with this or the risk with this is that there's very little reason for engagement with your company if you don't have any content, any useful content. You're not probably going to be considered. There's limited consideration for your product if all you have is the equipment specs. You don't have the opportunity to build credibility and trust with prospective buyers and customers and there may be limited brand preference beyond what's the price and in this case without content, without building this connection with your customers, you're probably putting yourself in a weak competitive position that at the end of the day means they may be buying on price when they look at your company and that's the situation you do not want to be in. The next thing is to talk a little bit about staying top of mind. Everyone, when you look at your customers, when you look at prospective customers, they're not ready to buy all the time. They're thinking about things. They're looking at options. They're looking at where do we go next if it's a landscape contractor. What do we need to be doing? What are other companies in our space doing with regards to small excavators or compact equipment? But 97% of your leads are not ready to buy and content is another way that you stay top of mind. As you deliver helpful information that's targeted to certain types of buyers in your particular situation, this is going to help your company stay top of mind. The next point is over 90% of these prospective or existing customers face the same problems and challenges. And what I mean by that is you look at, let's say, landscape contractors. They probably have a lot of the same issues and concerns. So if you write content for that segment, even you understand that segment, that material could be very useful for that segment if that's a target segment for your dealership. And that can be applied to other segments as well. The bottom line is stay top of mind is you stay connected with these prospective customers through your expertise and insights. And buyers will tend to see you as a partner in their business because you're trying to share this information and help them be more successful. The next thing to touch on, which relates back to the slide on software, is a tool that's called marketing automation. I think some companies, definitely manufacturers are leveraging marketing automation platforms and some dealerships are as well. But marketing automation is a tool that helps you automate a lot of tasks in this nurturing process with prospective customers or existing customers. And it allows you to automate repetitive tasks such as email. It's not just an email blast, but marketing automation platforms in many cases allow you to create what are called custom workflows by buyer type or persona. Buyer type and persona are kind of the same thing. And behavior. So a marketing automation system could send a sequence of emails on topics relevant to, let's say, our landscape contractor segment. It could also trigger emails or information sent to a customer based on behaviors on your website. If a person gets an email, clicks on this, and goes to this section of your website, it could trigger additional follow-up emails. As long as that customer has provided their email address and information to you all. But marketing automation allows you to nurture or warm those leads up through the buying process. And again, staying connected with these different segments or buyer personas as they're looking to solve different questions and problems. Marketing automation also has the ability to score leads based on their behaviors. And when I say score leads, based on their interaction with the different emails. Their interaction on your website. If they're spending a lot of time, let's say in the rental section of your website, maybe they're ripe for becoming a rental customer. Or the rental team needs to reach out to them. But marketing automation can be a very valuable tool as people leverage digital tools more and more. And marketing automation platforms is a number of platforms. The most common ones are probably, I don't know if you've heard of them, but Marketo is one. Pardot is one which is owned by Salesforce, a CRM system. HubSpot is one. Infusionsoft is one. There's a huge number. They're kind of the top platforms. Eloqua is one that's used by a lot of very, very large companies. And the last point there is that these marketing automation platforms can also be integrated with CRM systems. So when you go in to look at a specific content or a salesperson does, you can see all the interactions that a particular contact as a company has had. You can see what they've downloaded, what they've opened, how often they're on your website, what parts of your website they're looking at. And that can be invaluable in terms of how you approach them in terms of next steps. Next we want to talk a little bit about finding your formula and this relates back to your mix of inbound and outbound marketing. And the thing to keep in mind is it's a mix based on your business, your competitors, where you're located, and the markets that you're trying to pursue. And the most important thing to keep in mind is there's no silver bullet. It takes a strategy and it takes consistent execution and it takes patience. The thing you want to try and do here is you want to start as you explore some of these new technologies and new tools. You want to start small. You want to run low risk, low cost pilots. Find out what works. It's an experimentation process that you need to go through. And again, as we talk about content, content and information that helps your customers is the foundation to your success today in today's marketplace. You've got to have information that engages your prospective customers and existing customers. The formula is all, in most cases, it's not going to be all inbound or all outbound. It's not just advertising. It's a combination of earning people's trust and their traditional channels or outbound strategies. And then the last point, which I already touched on, is you need to find the best combination for your particular business and your particular situation. And that's often what we help companies do. The next thing we want to move into is talk about the five takeaways, which all of these tie right into what we've talked about so far, what's changing and why they're changing. And it's all about embracing how the market has changed and growing your business and your market share. The first one, just to talk about the format of these slides, in the upper right you can see kind of a little scale that shows the value and the difficulty. And again, this is going to vary. It depends on the company and your situation. But buyer personas is something that if you're going to start developing any type of content or content strategy, you really need to understand who the buyers are and who your ideal buyers are by segment. And this isn't just a gut feeling based on a salesperson. It's actually going out and talking to customers, existing customers, customers that maybe are looking to make a purchase. And in many cases, the most helpful ones would be customers that bought from a competitor. Why did they buy from the competitor? How do they buy? What are their concerns? But you want to understand what are their most pressing questions and problems? How do they go through the buying process? You need to understand kind of their demographics and psychographics, which is how old are they typically? What's their background? What's their education? What's their gender? What do they do in their spare time? Are they hunters? Do they fish? What do they do? And how might you connect with those folks? But the key is you need to understand how they go about making decisions in order to connect with their process for buying. And again, the foundation for this is content. Then you use a clear understanding of personas. And there's not one persona. You may have a persona for heavy construction. You may have a rental persona. You may have a landscape contractor persona because they all make decisions differently. But you need to understand those. So it's critical that this is one of the first steps that you document and understand. The next one, number two, is a website audit. And a website audit is something, again, a lot of companies don't do. I think the top tier companies do on a regular basis. But how does your website stack up? What are the best practices today? And when was the last time you looked at your website in terms of how it performs? And some of the things we're talking about here, and it's not just internally, but have you actually talked to customers about what are they looking for in a website? Do they find your website useful? Do they find it frustrating because they can't find what they want or lack in terms of information? But usability is a big point. These are all factors that if we were to audit a company's website, we would look at these and others. But is the website mobile friendly? You're probably going to see that 30 to 50% of your visitors to your website, again, the part of the country and the segment, but people are on their phones. They're in the field and they're on the go. And if your website isn't mobile friendly, you don't appear to them and Google is also going to ding your search rankings. We'll look at other things like content quality, search engine optimization, which is SEO practices. Are you adhering to the practices that Google recommends? Are you following the practices that will improve your ranking with Google and will help you get indexed with Google? These are factors. Many of them, the Google algorithm will look at. The next one is site speed and page speed. If your site's slow and clunky, Google knows that and Google will rank your site. So if your site's slow and it's not mobile friendly, if someone does a search for your product in your area, it's likely that you may not even show up in the search results. The next thing is, does it include gated content? And when I say gated content, that ties into the next group, which is landing pages. Do you have, I don't know, the top ten tips for landscape contractors when it comes to equipment? That equipment or that document is what's called gated content. When the visitor to your website needs to exchange to get that information or that tip sheet or guide, they need to provide their email address or name as well as maybe their company information. But do you have means on your website to engage visitors to your website? And if you don't, that's something that you definitely would want to take a look at. The next one is, how does your site stack up to your competitors? That's always part of it of the review that the people, the companies that you're competing with in your area, in your territory. How do you stack up? And could you make changes and step above your competitors in terms of what your website can do and what they can deliver to your prospective customers? Do you have analytics on your website? Google Analytics is one of the most often, it's a free tool, I would say most websites have that, but how often are you looking at that? And are you monitoring trends? What are the most common pages that people visit? What's your bounce rate? How much time are they on your site? So those are things that you want to look at and that's how you build what we call a SWOT analysis, which is to define the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your website. What's the state of your website and how do you make improvements and what actions do you need to put in place to improve those? So step number two is a website audit. And that's kind of building a plan and a strategy that is necessary in today's world and digital marketing. Next one is keyword research. And this kind of falls into your website audit, but it's separate because it's another area that ties back into all these five topics that we're talking about. Keyword research, you need to understand what are people searching for in your business? What are the key terms? This comes from Buyer Personas. What are the top keywords? What are the words that are used to get people to your website? Again, there's tools that will tell you that. Google Search Console is one of them. But you need to identify the top keywords for your business. You need to understand what's the monthly search volume for those. You need to understand how difficult they are to rank for. You need to understand the position, where you stand in terms of position tracking compared to your competitors. So a term, let's say for compact excavators or mini excavators, whatever the term is, how does that term in a generic manner rank compared to your top competitors in your area? There's tools that help you look at this and understand this. And then that would fold into your content strategy and your website strategy in terms of how do you become more competitive when it comes to search ranking and driving more visitors to your website who are looking for a product or service that you have to offer. The next field, again, we touched on it, was looking at competitive ranking, looking at competitive trends, understanding this through analytics. We use a tool which is called SEMRush. Some of you are probably familiar with it. That's a tool that we help clients constantly monitor how they're SEO performing and for the words that they're trying to rank for, how are they performing against their competitors? And then that type of information can be used to, again, do a SWOT analysis and develop an action plan for driving more traffic to your website. And again, the right traffic. Not just traffic, but people who are your ideal customers. Alright, moving on to number four is the content strategy. And out of the top five here, this one is probably a challenging or difficult one, but it's also probably the most important one. And I have this as number four because you really can't do or get started with an effective content strategy or blueprint or roadmap, whatever you want to call it, without doing steps one through three. And the most critical one is probably step one, is you need to understand who the buyer is. What are their triggers and goals? Because that information is going to drive what type of content, how do you build campaigns around your customer's kind of wants, needs, problems, pain points. You also want to fold into that content or the keyword targets. What are the keywords that you want to weave into your content? So again, it performs well in search engine results. A content strategy would also include what we refer to as premium content. This is the content that you might put on a landing page, whether it's a case study, a testimonial, access to a video or a webinar. How do you purpose your content in a premium manner where they need to exchange, the website visitor needs to provide some basic information, email address, name, company to get access to that so you can start to engage with them and monitor perhaps what they're doing on your website, what they're looking at. From there, that folds into what we refer to as a blog, which is the means to publish your content. A blog has maybe a negative connotation with some people. We're not talking about a blog where you write about, I don't know, your activities on the weekend. We're talking about kind of a resource center where you put helpful information that your customers would want to read on a regular basis. So you need to have an area within your website that where you publish this type of content and you also want to develop a calendar. The most effective content marketers are people who develop a plan and have a calendar that goes out, you know, a quarter or six months out and they know this is what we're working on in the coming three or six months at any given point. Content strategy state video is huge. For those of you who don't know, the biggest search engine right now is Google and the number two search engine is YouTube. YouTube is bigger in terms of search volume than the next three search engines combined. So video is huge. Short videos, relevant videos to your customers can be a really important part of your content strategy. Keep in mind, video works really well on phones. As people are on the move, they may watch video. I know I watch on a regular basis certain videos on a phone and the video performs really well. Google likes video and it's grown astronomically in the last couple of years. The next one is when you have a content strategy, you produce a new piece, let's say for the landscape contractor as an example, you want to promote that. You want to make sure that your sales team knows about it. You want to make sure that it's being forwarded to customers or prospective customers in the landscape contractor space. You want to make sure that maybe you promote it via social media channels that you're active with. And again, it depends on your situation. That may be a way you promote it via a Facebook page, maybe your LinkedIn page. It just depends on your business and how you're leveraging social media. And then lastly, content can also be integrated with your marketing automation platform and lead nursery. It can be woven into your campaign relevant to, let's say, your landscape contractor. You want to make sure that that landscape contractor who may be looking at a certain type of equipment, if they've engaged with a certain tip sheet, what other information might be helpful to them? Maybe understanding maintenance practice, maybe cost of ownership, maybe ROI. And then lastly, with your content strategy, you definitely want to make sure that you can measure and make assessments. What type of content's working? What gets clicked on? What gets watched the most? What gets read? What gets shared? Because that's going to help you navigate going forward. We want to do more of this type of content because it seems to get much more engagement than content B. And without analytics, you're totally guessing. Again, going back to the 401k situation, you're not going to invest in something that the 401k will not give you performance results. So you want to make sure when you implement any of these strategies that one of the first things you understand is how do we measure it in order to make adjustments? When do we spend more? When do we cut back? And that's based on data that helps you understand the performance. Alright. Number five. And that ties into the last topic, and that's a reporting process. The thing that I find with some companies is, again, depending on the size of your dealership, this reporting process may vary, but the key to it is sales and marketing, which I kind of refer to as the revenue team for a company. They're responsible for growing the business. They've got to be working together. They've got to be aligned, and they've got to be engaged on what works. In many cases, if you have a marketing department, it's got to work closely with sales. And sales has got to, they have a lot of insight that makes marketing campaigns more effective. But the bottom line here is sales are the true measure of success with everything we're talking about today. Is it driving more sales? The next point is traffic needs are meaningless without orders. And I'm not just talking about equipment. This may be parts. It may be service. It may be rentals. It may be technology. But are the activities that you're investing in, are the strategies and tactics you're investing in, are they producing new orders and new business for your company? And you've got to understand that. And this is a constant discussion where sales and marketing must be aligned. They must work together. And they must constantly review how this stuff is working. Again, this falls back to tracking tools. And we've talked about Google Analytics. We've talked about Google Search Console. We've talked about marketing automation. All of those platforms have reporting tools. And those tools need to be reviewed. You need to understand your ROI. And in many cases, we find that companies who will manually do this with a spreadsheet, it's a total disaster because the spreadsheets never get updated. You've got to have tools that automatically produce these reports so that when you sit down and talk with the team about what's working and what's not, you've got access to the data and you know that it's accurate. So the tracking tools are key to a reporting process that you meet once every two weeks, once a month as a team to look at what's working, what's not and looking at new ideas that you might want to implement and leverage based on the data that you're getting from the existing programs. And then the last one is the revenue team must engage the field of company with sales opportunities to meet revenue objectives. And it's not just marketing. It's not just sales. It's both of those working together. And again, it depends on your company. Some companies I know are smaller. You don't have a marketing team. But this step is absolutely critical that you guys are engaged as a team, as a cohesive team to make sure you're getting input from sales and sales is getting input from you on how to work together to be more successful for your company. So those are the five takeaways for today. And I wanted to close with kind of a final thought. This is from Colin Powell. Hopefully a lot of you know Colin Powell. He was a four-star general or is a four-star general in the Army. He was also a former national security advisor for the country. And there are no secrets to success. And this totally applies to what we're talking about here today. It's a result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure. We talked about the small experiments, testing small, low-risk pilots. All of this works when you're experimenting and trying new things on a small scale. If it works, pour more money into it. If it doesn't work, adjust it or back off. But it takes work, it takes planning, and it takes a strategy to be effective. In terms of kind of Q&A, I don't know if anyone has any questions, but on the last slide here is my contact information. Feel free to reach out to me. If you'd like to send me an email, if you'd like to visit our website or give me a phone call, I'd love to be helpful if I can, answer any questions. And I'd like to thank everyone for taking the time today to join the webinar. And again, as I said, if you have any questions, please feel free to follow up and let me know how I might be able to help or answer questions. Have a great day.
Video Summary
In this webinar, Brian Shanahan discusses the importance of modernizing marketing strategies and provides five steps to kick start 2018. He emphasizes the need to adapt to changing buyer habits, as more people are accessing information and making purchasing decisions online. Shanahan suggests a mix of inbound and outbound marketing strategies, with a focus on creating engaging content. He also highlights the value of conducting a website audit to ensure it is mobile-friendly, contains useful information, and can be easily found on search engines like Google. Shanahan stresses the importance of keyword research and competitive ranking analysis to improve search engine optimization. He also recommends developing a content strategy that targets specific buyer personas and includes premium resources like case studies or testimonials. Additionally, he suggests leveraging marketing automation and reporting tools to track and assess the success of marketing efforts. In conclusion, Shanahan emphasizes the importance of hard work, preparation, and learning from failure in implementing effective marketing strategies.
Keywords
modernizing marketing strategies
kick start 2018
inbound and outbound marketing
engaging content
search engine optimization
content strategy
buyer personas
marketing automation
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