4 Ways to Improve Your Marketing Communications Strategy and Sell in 2020

You might have the best product in the world.

But there’s a good chance nobody will know about it … unless you spend time, money, and effort marketing your product.

How to Improve Your Marketing Communications Strategy

To help you out, I’ve compiled four ways you can sell your product in 2020 by improving your marketing communications strategy through targeted messaging, PR, mediums, and channels. Here is a quick preview of the tactics we’ll discuss:

1. Save time and money by guest posting on relevant publications,
2. Create high-quality content,
3. Boosting your SEO efforts,
4. Sending quality emails to your existing customers and new prospects.

These are marketing, communications, and PR techniques everyone can learn and apply right away. Practice makes perfect so feel free to get started with these and dedicate at very least 30 minutes every work day to one or a few of these activities.

Ready? Let’s roll…

1. Guest Post On Right Publications With Quality Content

Guest blogging (i.e. writing an article to another publication) has built a bad reputation in the last few years. Many businesses have exploited this strategy to build backlinks (links back to their site).

The key here is not to think about getting a big fat juicy backlink for your own site into the content of the guest post you’re submitting but to focus on quality of the content.

If your content is high quality your readers will dig around and find your website in your author bio on the other publication and will be more likely to buy.

Guest blogging can help you:

1. Establish a strong reputation in your industry
2. Increase traffic by linking to your website in your author bio
3. Boost brand awareness

Steps to Follow

Here are the steps to follow:

• Find the right publication: Look for publications where your customers hang out. For example: if you run a sales text software app you might look for sales blogs, or if you run a nut butter company you might look for a health and wellness blog.

• Create the right content: Your content should engage your readers and align with your publication’s guidelines and topics. Look through the last 10 articles published on a publication to get the idea of the type of content you might like to contribute. For best results try to find an editorial calendar for the publication asking for specific topics.

• Promote Your Content

It’s always a good idea to help promote the content you write for other publications. The publication will of course promote the article themselves but it’s also good for you to look for ways to promote it as well.  One way you can do so is finding broken links to similar pieces of content and asking them to fix the links to point to yours.

For example, let’s say you submitted and published an article on Startup Nation about sales management. You can use a tool such as Ahrefs, you type in a URL of a popular sales management blog (since that’s the name of your article) and can see all the broken links on that blog and topic:

Or you can type in a keyword on JustReachOut to find all the broken links on different blogs and the email addresses to contact them:

You can send this email pitch to ask them to replace the broken link with your comprehensive post:

2. Utilize SMS Texting For Converting Your Leads Into Customers

Creating content is a fantastic first step to increase your traffic to the site. Once you have some traffic you need to convert the leads who contact you as prospective customers.

While most businesses use email and phone to follow up, communicate and book demos to sell their prospects there is a much better way to do so.

SMS text messages have an insane 85% response rate from prospective customers while email and phone are around 35% at best according to Chris Brisson of SalesMsg. Brisson’s company processes millions of text messages per day and they’re official HubSpot partner for business text messaging.

Brisson compiled some of the best sample text messages templates their customers send to their customers on his blog recently.

Using SMS, you can create a direct funnel from lead capture to sales demo and follow ups to the actual sales.

The key here is managing your sales team properly, and getting the entire team on board to close calls, create scripts, and engage with potential customers.

3. Create Custom Landing Pages

If you already have a brand, reputation, and loyal customers, you should consider driving your customers towards a custom landing page.

Unlike a homepage website, landing pages only have content specific to your PR campaign (whether that be raising awareness of a new product, driving sales for the new product, capturing emails, etc.).

Landing pages help increase sales conversions by minimizing distractions and having focused and targeted messaging.

For Example:

• Housecall Pro is a software for service professionals. While they target cleaning, lawn care, plumbers, pest control, HVAC companies, and many more, they create fantastic landing pages for each industry. Here, they’ve designed a landing page to target plumbers.

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• If you look at this landing page, you can see that they’ve tailored the content to plumbers. They’ve included testimonials from other plumbers, featured their plumbing community, and even include blog posts relevant to any plumber. By explicitly targeting plumbers and not just any service professional, it feels more personal and relevant, which helps boost conversions and sales.

4. Send Better Emails To Your Customers

In 2018, the number of emails sent and received globally was 281.1 billion.

But by 2022, the number of emails is expected to increase to 333.2 billion.

So if you want your emails read, you’ll need to optimize them.

That’s why, when it comes to marketing a new product, we recommend you send better emails to your existing customers.

Why?

Customers who have purchased with you two times prior are nine times more likely to convert than a first-time shopper. And email marketing still works! According to DMA, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $32.

But if you’re new to business and don’t have any customers, you can consider creating a landing page that captures emails.

A landing page can help you begin relationships with your prospects, while emails can help you build this connection.

So How Do You Send Better Emails?

Send Welcome or Activation Emails Immediately

Immediate welcome emails have a higher open rate of 50%, which makes them 86% more effective than standard newsletters.

While many companies send welcome emails right away, we like Invision’s  ‘Thanks for subscribing email.’ Not only was it sent immediately, but it also offered additional value by giving subscribers a free UI kit as well.

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When sending activation emails, start off with an email greeting that welcomes people, like this one from RightInbox:

“As promised, here’s …” — this email greeting is natural and will help build rapport with your audience.

Send Thank You Emails

Everyone loves polite thank yous! You should send these out after someone subscribes, purchases a product, refers a friend, etc. They boost engagement and will help build your company’s relationship with your customers.

Here’s an example of Grammarly saying thanks to its users.

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Using humor and personalization like Grammarly, you can improve your brand image and connection with your loyal customers.

Send Educational Emails to Engage Customers and Users

Newsletters is the life and pulse of your brand and business. Educational newsletters should not bore people with verbal diarrhea of “how to 10X your traffic” but instead share useful and digestible tid bits of information which can help customers scale their businesses.

Each section of your education email should include the following:

• Header image
• Headline
• Body copy
• Call to action

For regularly scheduled newsletters, maintaining the same structure is important for consistency, allowing recipients on both mobile and desktop to browse the email and decide what content is most interesting to them. Then, they can quickly go back to the sections they know they want to read.

This email below from HubSpot includes a variety of resources including educational guides, community discussions, tools, and product news. The Grow Better Letter is distributed to a wide audience of the CRM with a section for every reader.

A Look at Hubspot’s Approach

Here is how Jordan Pritkin Head of Email Marketing at Hubspot CRM describes this email:

“The Grow Better Letter is a bi-weekly email newsletter sent to HubSpot CRM users. It’s a way for us to help our users, who are largely salespeople and marketers, learn and grow with our content. We can also communicate upcoming events and product updates, and provide a direct connection to speak with our team.”

Subject Line: Marketing Email and Ads, now free in the HubSpot CRM

Goal: Readership and Engagement

Performance: Open Rate: 40% | Click Through Rate: 20%

Insights and Takeaways

According to Jordan Pritikin, Email and Growth Marketing at HubSpot, this newsletter has helped the team learn that:

• It’s best to design newsletter emails for consistency. Try to provide recipients with a brief overview of the content and a clear call-to-action to quickly access the information they want.

• The term ‘free’ increased click-through rates, as high as 30%, when used in both email and web page calls-to-action. For this particular newsletter, HubSpot decided to use these learnings and apply the term ‘free’ to our subject line. This newsletter’s subject line and content made it outperform other email sends. Leading to the highest performing newsletter email of the year, encouraging 40% of recipients to open it.

• If you can offer your prospects information that is useful and actionable over time, they will continue to open your emails. When your brand is top-of-mind, your audience will think of you when they’re ready to learn more about your company. It’s a win-win!

Write Better Press Releases

Press releases are key for keeping both your customers and potential new customers informed.

But, most press releases are still stuck in the 1800s.

Instead of boring press releases that nobody reads, your press releases should follow a specific, consistent format.

This helps to increase your odds of getting journalists to publish it and circulate it beyond your email list.

Here’s a great press release format you can follow:

1. Headline: Grab attention here and focus on the subject at hand. Is it a product launch? New business funding? Get specific.
2. Location: Where this is happening?
3. Lead: First paragraph in your release to summarize the most important info.
4. Body: Provide more details expanding on the lead.
5. Boilerplate: Describe your company in just 1-2 sentences.
6. Press Contacts: Provide name and contact details for the proper employee at your business.

Conclusion

Selling new products in 2019 can be challenging.

That’s why you should build your reputation by guest posting on relevant publications, write quality content to boost backlinks, create custom landing pages, and send better emails to your customers and prospects.

Don’t rush in and try and sell your product immediately.

Pushing a sale rarely works in today’s business environment.

If you follow these four techniques above, it’ll help you gain online exposure, build an audience, and develop a strong relationship over time with your prospects and customers.

Find your target market. Engage with them. And earn your customers’ trust.

Follow this, and you’ll be making plenty of sales in no time!

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, "4 Ways to Improve Your Marketing Communications Strategy and Sell in 2020" was first published on Small Business Trends

Originally posted on 4 Ways to Improve Your Marketing Communications Strategy and Sell in 2020 via Small Business and Franchises