Foundation

Brand strategy is a crucial aspect of any business's marketing efforts, and B2B industrial marketing is no exception. In this highly competitive industry, developing a strong brand strategy can set your company apart from the competition, increase customer loyalty, and drive long-term success. In this article, we'll explore why brand strategy is so important for B2B industrial marketing, and what you can do to create an effective brand strategy for your company.

## Why is brand strategy foundational for B2B industrial marketing?

### **It differentiates your company from competitors**

A strong brand strategy helps you stand out from the competition by clearly communicating your company's unique value proposition, what sets you apart from your competitors, and what you offer that others don't. This helps customers quickly identify your brand and understand why they should choose your company over others.

### **It builds customer loyalty**

A unique brand strategy not only differentiates your company from the competition but also helps build customer loyalty. When customers have a positive brand experience, they are more likely to choose your company for future business, recommend your company to others, and become ambassadors for your industrial brand.

### **It improves customer engagement**

A well-designed brand strategy improves customer engagement by creating delightful and consistent experiences across all customer touch points, including your company's website, social media channels, product packaging, and customer service interactions. This consistency builds trust and reinforces your brand identity, making it easier for customers to recognize and remember your industrial brand.

### **It supports long-term success**

Having a stable and unwavering brand strategy is crucial for achieving long-term success as it establishes the groundwork for growth. With a clearly defined brand strategy in place, your company can steer clear of being diverted into areas outside of the brand’s specialization and therefore focused on identifying opportunities to enter new markets. In essence, a well-crafted brand strategy serves as a blueprint for expansion.

## How to create an effective brand strategy for B2B industrial marketing

### **Conduct market research**

In order to devise a brand strategy that truly resonates with your target audience, it's imperative to conduct market research to gain a comprehensive understanding of their needs, preferences, and what they seek in a B2B industrial marketing company. By doing so, you'll be able to use this information as a foundation for crafting a brand strategy that deeply resonates with your target audience.

### **Define your brand positioning**

After gaining a comprehensive understanding of your target audience, you can begin crafting your brand positioning strategy. This involves determining the category in which your company can take the lead, as well as the specialization or benefit that you can offer to your customers. By doing so, you'll be able to create a distinctive value proposition that distinguishes you from your competitors and highlights what sets you apart from the rest.

### **Develop your brand identity**

Armed with your research and positioning you can now tweak or overhaul a creative and memorable brand identity system. This includes your brand’s Verbal Identification: name, slogan, messaging, etc. and your brand’s Visual Identification: logo, icon, and other supporting graphics and images. This is the most important part of an effective brand strategy as it is your brand’s identity that keeps your company top of mind vs your competitors.

### **Create a consistent brand experience**

Create a consistent brand experience across all customer touch points, including your company's website, social media channels, product packaging, and customer service interactions. This consistency reinforces your brand identity, improves customer engagement, and makes sure that the customer experience is reinforcing all of your marketing efforts.

### **Measure and refine:**

Finally, measure the success of your brand strategy and make refinements as needed. Collect customer feedback, analyze your brand metrics, and use this information to make improvements to your brand strategy and continue to improve your customer's brand experience.

In conclusion, a solid brand strategy should be the footing that determines the success of all future B2B industrial marketing efforts. Using the blueprint above, developing a brand strategy will set your B2B industrial brand apart from its category competitors, increase customer loyalty, and drive long-term success.

When it comes to internet marketing, industrial businesses tend to be a bit late to the party.

Many B2B companies are just beginning their digital journey. They may be upgrading an ancient website from the pre-social media era. Or, they may be building their first-ever website.

Whatever the case may be, B2B business leaders get a lot of conflicting website advice.

One of the most important decisions when considering a new website is the choice of CMS. A CMS, or Content Management System, is where your marketing team will spend a lot of time. A CMS is a tool for organizing, editing, and publishing all website content. It's the brain powering your website.

Choosing the wrong CMS can cost your business a lot of time, money, and frustration. There are hundreds of different tools out in the wild. Each CMS has slightly different functionality, pros, and cons depending on its intended use case. A great CMS for one business might be a terrible choice for another. Even businesses that sell the same product may prefer one CMS to another for a variety of personal and technical reasons.

Today we'll look at the top eight content management systems on the market for B2B industrial companies. Let's get started!

## **8. [Squarespace](https://www.squarespace.com/)**

Do you need a fast website up and running within a week? Do you have a low budget for website development? If you answered yes to either of these questions then Squarespace might be the best choice for you! This platform allows users to create full websites right from their browser. Little to no coding knowledge is required. Content management is easy, even for beginners.

### **Pros**

- Ideal for startups or low-budget businesses.
- Easy to set up and manage.
- Offers a wide range of good-looking templates.
- Pre-built integrations make it easy to set up and use popular apps.
- No coding knowledge is required.

### **Cons**

- Large or complex websites can become difficult to manage.
- It can be challenging or impossible to build heavily customized features in their ecosystem.
- Limited customization options on templates.
- Unable to fully optimize performance.
- Difficult to implement advanced SEO strategies.
- Risk of losing all website content if the CMS platform experiences technical difficulties.

## **7. [HubSpot CMS Hub](https://www.hubspot.com/products/cms) (CRM as a CMS)**

Even if you aren't familiar with content management systems, you might know this acronym: CRM.

Some customer relationship management (CRM) platforms offer website builders as well. This means your marketing data and website content live together in one place. This combination can be extremely powerful.

HubSpot CMS Hub is a great example of this feature. Its web and marketing features work together seamlessly. There are some limitations to this platform, but it may be a good option for companies that embrace CRM technology.

### **Pros**

- Direct integrations with CRM tools for analytics, lead tracking, and more.
- Manage your website and marketing assets from one system.
- Sales, marketing, and management teams can collaborate easily

### **Cons**

- Limited customization options.
- Underwhelming technical performance. Difficult to optimize.
- Difficult to execute advanced SEO strategies.
- Steep learning curve.

## **6. [Joomla](https://www.joomla.org/)**

Joomla is a free and open-source CMS. This platform helps non-developers create visually appealing websites. It comes without some of the technical challenges of more advanced platforms.

Joomla has a powerful user management system and multi-language support by default. It's a good option for content-heavy international websites.

### **Pros**

- Free-to-use, open-source platform.
- Easy to set up and manage, even for beginners.
- Decent for SEO optimization.
- Offers a wide variety of high-quality plugins.
- Provides advanced user management.

### **Cons**

- Performance can be slow and may require more server resources.
- Many useful plugins require payment.
- Free templates have limited functionality.
- May encounter issues with specific browsers.
- Customization options can be limited.

## **5. [Drupal](https://www.drupal.org/)**

Drupal has been around for over 20 years, making it one of the most mature CMS platforms on the market. This platform is more complicated to set up compared to something like Joomla. Using Drupal to its full potential requires experience and coding knowledge.

On the other hand, Drupal's customization is more powerful than simpler platforms. It is a high-performance tool for large websites. Drupal websites can handle millions of simultaneous views without a decrease in speed!

### **Pros**

- Can handle complex and large websites with heavy traffic.
- Open source with a strong development community.
- Provides a high level of security.
- Great performance and technical customization.

### **Cons**

- Not beginner-friendly due to a steep learning curve.
- Requires coding knowledge.
- High system requirements.
- Limited plugins (modules).
- Few templates are available; most websites are custom.

## **4. [Shopify](https://www.shopify.com/ca)**

Shopify is the best option for e-commerce connected websites. Despite its many competitors, none offer the suite of tools that Shopify does. It's an easy-to-use platform for e-commerce setups large and small.

Shopify can be configured in a variety of ways depending on your needs. It may be used as a full CMS, or integrated with other platforms as an e-commerce handler.

Shopify has a robust library of plugins and templates that non-technical people can configure. Developers can edit these plugins to customize them even further. Shopify is a great platform to consider if you have any kind of online store.

### **Pros**

- Offers tons of customizable themes and plugins.
- Simple to set up.
- Easy to add, edit, or remove commerce items.
- There are many developers and tutorials available.
- Integrates with multiple channels (Amazon, eBay, Instagram, and Facebook).

### **Cons**

- Built primarily for e-commerce, so content management functionality can be limited.
- Not fully optimized for speed.
- Plugins can be expensive.
- Transaction fees range from 0.5% to 2%.

## **3. [Webflow](https://webflow.com/)**

Webflow is a popular low-code CMS solution that has gained traction in recent years. It enables designers and marketers to create dynamic websites with little or no coding experience. Unlike many other CMSs, Webflow has a plugin-free ecosystem. It features a variety of customizable templates. Compared to other options on the list, Webflow is one of the fastest and easiest. However, it is not as user-friendly as the simplest tools like Squarespace.

### **Pros**

- No need for plugins.
- Fast development time.
- Scalable websites for small to large organizations.
- Secure hosting.
- User-friendly, allowing for easy updates and the creation of complex features with little experience.

### **Cons**

- Limited default options for Ecommerce.
- Limited customization of code.
- Steeper learning curve compared to similar builders like Wix or Squarespace.

## **2. Headless CMS ([Strapi](https://strapi.io/), [Sanity](https://www.sanity.io/), [Contentful](https://www.contentful.com/), [DatoCMS](https://www.datocms.com/))**

Traditional CMSs are monolithic in structure. This means the front end (what users see) and the back end (what editors see) are closely connected. A headless CMS decouples these two sides.

There are benefits to separating the back-end and front-end. With a headless CMS, your content lives independently from the design of your website. This makes your website more secure. It allows you to more easily change the design of your website while retaining your CMS data.

A headless CMS may also be faster and more reliable in some cases than a traditional CMS.

There are many headless CMS options. More hit the market every year. A headless CMS must pair with a front-end framework like [NextJS](https://nextjs.org/), [Gatsby](https://www.gatsbyjs.com/), [Vue.js](https://vuejs.org/), or [NuxtJS](https://nuxtjs.org/).

Together, front end frameworks and headless CMSs create a powerful and secure ecosystem.

### **Pros**

- Provides the most secure way to manage content.
- Offers extreme flexibility with few limitations.
- Can be custom tailored to each business.
- Advanced SEO configuration is simple.
- Easy to scale from small to large websites.
- Provides omnichannel marketing capability.
- Performance is easy to manage.

### **Cons**

- Setting up requires diverse coding knowledge.
- Can be more expensive than other options.
- Templates must be custom created.
- Content previews can be a challenge depending on the headless platform.

## **1. [WordPress](https://wordpress.com/)**

Our number 1 pick for a CMS is also the world's top choice: WordPress.

WordPress is the most popular CMS, and has been for many years. Over [30% of the top 1 million websites](https://trends.builtwith.com/cms) in the world use it.

WordPress is so popular due to its flexibility, plugin ecosystem, and powerful user management tools. Although WordPress is most often used as a traditional CMS, it may be used as a headless CMS, too.

Whatever website idea you have, WordPress has the flexibility and plugins you need to make it a reality.

### **Pros**

- Has a vast knowledge base.
- Offers plugins for nearly every problem.
- Is flexible and easy to manage.
- Can be configured and scaled for businesses of all sizes.
- Is fully open source.
- Has millions of templates to choose from.
- Offers the option for headless CMS functionality.

### **Cons**

- Security can be an issue depending on the setup, potentially leaving it vulnerable to hacking.
- Requires updates and maintenance to use safely.
- Can become slow and unstable without proper care.
- Customization can be expensive.
- Lacks much innovation in the default setup.

When businesses choose a content management system, they must consider their goals and the tools they need to integrate. This is an important decision that can either empower a business or waste time and money. There is no perfect CMS. Companies must weigh the pros and cons of each to find the right solution. From SquareSpace for startups on a budget to headless CMSs with endless customization options, each CMS has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Are you struggling to choose the right CMS for your industrial business? Don't worry, BlackBean Marketing is here to help! [Contact us directly](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/b2b-marketing-consultation) for a free consultation to see if we can assist you in making that decision!

## Project Management is Essential to Your Project’s Success

Picture it. You and your Marketing Manager have just come up with some great ideas to meet your 2023 business goals. You’ve received your BlackBean proposal, and you’re all set to sign off until you spot that one line item: Project Management. Project Management is often an unseen and misunderstood force. That PM line item can be confusing: what am I paying for? Here’s a secret: it’s critical to the success of your project. A Project Manager is often your biggest champion. She's the glue holding it all together. They live and breathe your project, freeing you up to do what you do best.

## What is a Project Manager?

The short answer is: solid gold.

![](https://media.giphy.com/media/VLe9cJCjYWXLy/giphy.gif)

The long answer is, they play a part in every step of your project. PMs plan and organize everything before kick-off. They analyze, evaluate, schedule, and charter project tasks and deliverables. PMs keep everything in scope while managing and mitigating risk.

Project Management is like an iceberg. Much of the work they do is invisible to clients, but that doesn't make it unimportant. Each project requires six to ten detailed documents before any other work begins. In the end, this pre-work saves you money -- and your agency a big headache.

Let's do a deep dive into what a PM does, and see why they are essential to the success of your project.

## The Role of a Project Manager

Project management is the glue that holds your project together. Marketing projects are complex and detailed. A dedicated, organized PM spearheads the project.

Most marketing projects include several (or many) stakeholders. They range from designers and developers to clients, management boards, and other project influencers.

The role of the project manager is to handle communications, budgets, plans, and project data. Misalignment derails projects all the time. It's the PM's job to follow up with project stakeholders throughout the timeline to maintain alignment. They provide leadership, oversight, and focus to deliver on time and on budget.

As a key stakeholder, you might have three main concerns about project management: budget, deadline, and quality.

In a perfect world, every project would go smoothly. Nobody would have to worry about anything! We know that's not how the world works.

In reality, a PM greases the wheels. They ensure project success by overcoming obstacles and settling disputes and issues. A PM's many duties include:

- Realistic project planning with clear goals and purpose
- Scheduling your project for the production team, ensuring their focus
- Reducing costs by improving efficiency, mitigating risk, and optimizing resources
- Controlling scope to ensure that projects stay on budget
- Change management, helping clients adjust to new processes
- Defining team roles to eliminate confusion
- Identifying and assigning responsibilities for every project deliverable
- Serving as the primary point of contact, including weekly and monthly project updates
- Ensuring deliverables are of high quality, and match the project requirements

## Summary: The Power of PMs

Project Managers take control of the process from start to finish. By ensuring goals and initiatives are strategically aligned, they support stakeholders and keep both sides of the project team happy.

The PM is a planner and a scheduler. More importantly, they're a realist. PMs know the danger of reactive management. A reactive project is a project in survival mode. A good PM will make proactive choices to keep a project on track.

Without a project manager, every other stakeholder takes on the mental burden of planning and organizing. This is a sure-fire way to create misalignment between teams. Deliverables and timelines get missed. Nobody's happy in the end. Better project planning (from a PM) equals better projects and better results.

## Endorsements still matter in 2023

Your happy customers are a potential gold mine for your ongoing marketing efforts. Customer reviews are one of the most effective tools for generating B2B leads. Now more than ever, candid reviews by real humans contribute to sales success. Anyone can hire a copywriter to write flashy marketing documents, but a testimonial is real. It’s won by doing excellent work and selling exceptional products.

Despite the power of collecting customer reviews, many businesses struggle to tap into it. We get it – you don’t want to pester your clients, and maybe you’re even a little nervous that they might decline to comment — or have something bad to say.

We’re here to cast your doubts aside. Asking for customer testimonials doesn’t have to be intimidating. Here are six ideas to help you collect and use customer reviews to grow your marketing potential.

## You don’t know until you ask

It can be hard to stomach, but any feedback is good feedback. Many businesses don’t want to ask for a review in fear of hearing that their customers were dissatisfied or unwilling to give a positive endorsement.

The truth is, if you don’t ask, you don’t know — but your customers still feel whatever they feel! If you’re brave enough to reach out and ask for feedback, you win no matter what answer you receive. If their feedback is negative, you have an opportunity to right whatever’s wrong and be proactive in mending the relationship. If it’s positive, you have a great review to use however you see fit.

## **Let them sing your praises**

Happy customers want to sing your praises. They might even beat you to the punch! Maybe you find a kind email in your inbox raving about how amazing your team is. Well, guess what? You’ve got yourself a testimonial! 

All you have to do is reply with a thank you and a request to use their comments as a review. If their email isn’t meaty enough for your needs, ask if you can hop on the phone to chat more about it. By catching them at the right moment – when they’re already basking in your glow – you’ll have a better chance of getting a great testimonial!

## **Throw them a bone**

If the fear of asking for too much is holding you back from collecting testimonials, work on making the process easier for your customers. Consider the personality of each client and tailor your request accordingly. If you know that Paul loves to chat on the phone, offer to call him for 5 minutes. And if Randall is more of an email guy, send him two or three simple prompts to which he can type up a reply. 

No matter how you collect the responses, be prepared to guide your customers if they aren’t sure what to say. You don’t want to put words in their mouths, but remind them of comments they may have made to you in passing or ask how they felt when the project was complete. A little coaxing may be all it takes.

If you need some inspiration, how about this list of [15 Testimonial Questions to Ask your Happy Clients](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EHbUd2Kgre7DMLMW6Cf78S6XRqAvgeUOxODq_-Li1Ro/edit?usp=sharing)?

## **Keep It Simple, Silly**

There are many platforms for leveraging reviews. You might put them on your website, toss them in a proposal or pitch deck, or broadcast them on social media. Regardless of how they will live out in the world, keep reviews simple and to the point.

You do NOT need a 1,000 word essay from each customer. Attention spans are short. Reviews should highlight something your product or team does exceptionally well. Long, detailed breakdowns are better left for case studies and white papers.

If you get a long-winded reply from a customer, edit it down into a digestible sound bite. You want to get the meat of the matter as quickly as possible. Your readers will thank you!

## You’re great. **Prove it!**

Once you complete your customer testimonial, consider ways to back up the claims. Do you have data supporting how much you improved your customer’s production efficiencies? If so, find a way to incorporate that into the final piece. While your future customers will love to hear positive comments about you, they’ll also want the evidence of ROI!

In fact, consider including short testimonials as part of your case studies and product brochures. Combining hard facts and evidence with personal testimony is a powerful sales motivator.

## Please Sir, can I have some more?

Sometimes you need more than a quote or short paragraph from your customer. If you’re writing an entire case study, for example, you may want to expand a review into a case study or content feature. If so, consider the following:

- **Identify opportunities early** – If you can tell that a particular customer relationship is going well from the get-go, plant the seed early that you’d like to feature them in a case study. This way, they’ll be prepared for your request and might even start thinking about what they could say as they continue to work with you.
- **Ensure their comfort** – Case studies often have a lot of detail about the company you’re highlighting. Don’t blow your shot at capturing a great story because your customer gets uncomfortable with what’s being shared. Work together to ensure nothing confidential is disclosed, and they don’t feel negatively about the finished product.
- **Pay it forward** – Your customer may have gone above and beyond to contribute to your case study or testimonial. How can you return the favour? It could be as simple as picking up their coffee tab, sharing their latest LinkedIn post, or referring their business to someone in your network. Find a way to keep building on that great relationship!

Next time you see an opportunity to collect a customer testimonial or case study, don’t hesitate to make it happen! The worst that can happen is that your customer says they don’t have the time. And that’s okay; there are other fish in the sea – but you’ll never know until you ask.

At BlackBean, we’re accustomed to working with businesses that are just beginning their marketing journey. Our clients may be established and profitable companies, but their marketing knowledge is low. In many cases, their marketing strategy only recently became a priority due to increased global and regional competition. 

Often when we ask our prospects what kind of marketing they’d like to do, we get a pretty vague answer: “all of it.”

Nobody wants to miss out on an opportunity. There are many paths to marketing success, and each can support the other. A marketing strategy that accounts for every available opportunity is known as an omnichannel strategy.

Today, let’s look at omnichannel marketing for B2B companies. We’ll define omnichannel marketing in more detail, offer some pros and cons for businesses considering an omnichannel strategy, and give examples of how omnichannel marketing can support a B2B brand.

## What is omnichannel marketing?

At its most basic level, omnichannel marketing simply means marketing through every available avenue. Omni meaning all; channel meaning path, opportunity, vehicle.

In practice, omnichannel marketing has a few more defining characteristics. The most important characteristic is its customer-centric philosophy.

Omnichannel marketing strategies strive to provide a consistent customer experience across all brand interactions. It means that whether customers interact with your brand in print, online, or in-store, they’re getting the same message in the same voice, emphasizing the same product benefits.

### Which channels are “omnichannel”?

Ideally, an omnichannel strategy lives up to its name. If you *can* be represented somewhere, you should be. In practice, not every channel is equally worthy.

There are few businesses whose marketing budgets are so vast that they can throw money at every opportunity. “Omnichannel” should never become a synonym for “underfunded and undersupported”. Instead, omnichannel marketing should focus on doing the best job possible on the most channels possible, emphasizing valuable channels at the expense of niche or risky ones.

For B2B businesses, an omnichannel strategy should include, at a minimum:

- Digital advertising (search/display)
- Email marketing (newsletters, updates, offers)
- Website/content marketing (articles, white papers, guides, case studies)
- Direct marketing (cold outreach, ABM)
- Social media marketing (organic/paid posting, affiliate marketing)
- Other inbound marketing channels (live chat, phone call, text message)

Remember that omnichannel marketing is all about consistent customer experience. Each of the above strategies should support (and be supported by) your sales and support team.

### Omnichannel marketing example: Apple

An easy consumer example of a company that excels at omnichannel marketing is Apple. Their visual brand is minimalist, clean, and high-tech. You’ll never see a cluttered, visually busy iPhone ad. Not online, nor on TV, nor printed on a bus shelter.

That brand experience extends to their Apple Stores — famously among the most profitable retail spaces per square foot. It shines through in their annual Keynote events. Even their product packaging places an emphasis on quality, minimalism, and sophistication.

This constant reinforcement of brand attributes is the true power of omnichannel marketing. Everywhere consumers go, they interact with Apple marketing content. Each interaction reinforces Apple’s brand strengths, helping them maintain their position as the world’s premiere developer of mobile and computing hardware.

In fact, Apple’s marketing strategy flies in the face of some common assumptions about marketing. For instance, instead of maximizing retail shelf space, Apple strictly controls its product placements. They would rather have fewer square feet that conform with their exacting brand standards. Even in big box stores like Best Buy, Apple invests in custom furnishings and displays to differentiate their section of the store from the rest. This “store within a store” model is now widely adopted by brands looking to offer a premium, tailored experience.

Product packaging is something customers only experience once. After the product’s unboxed, the box goes in the recycling bin. Yet Apple invests heavily in product packaging. Why?

Because of their commitment to customer experience. In the age of the unboxing video, having the nicest packaging is a product differentiator. Opening a brand-new iPhone *feels* special. Flagship mobile devices compete pretty evenly on technical specs. When the facts are about even, it’s feelings that move more units. Apple gets it.

## Does omnichannel marketing work for B2B brands?

B2B brands experience radically different sales cycles than consumer brands like Apple. Does omnichannel marketing work for companies that sell heavy industrial equipment, or specialized electrical controls?

An argument can be made that omnichannel marketing is more potent for long B2B sales cycles than it is for consumer goods. Though a person may use their iPhone every day, the sales cycle from initial research to final purchase might only be a few days on average. Of course, the strength of omnichannel marketing is that it’s always working away on consumers, ensuring your brand is top-of-mind for whenever customers make a purchasing decision.

For B2B companies, sales cycles might take *years*. Often, industrial companies capture prospects at the research phase. Put up a landing page, run an ad campaign, collect email sign-ups for prospecting.

What’s happening to those prospects in between sales communications? Without an omni-channel marketing strategy in place, they’re either left without any brand interactions… or they’re interacting with your competitor’s brand!

Although omnichannel marketing can generate leads for B2B companies, what it does best is protect and nurture opportunities. Omnichannel marketing can be a powerful tool for B2B brands because it supports prospect nurturing while defending valuable leads from being scooped up by competitors. 

## How to get started with omnichannel marketing? Develop a brand promise.

You know how 90% of an iceberg is below water? Planning an omnichannel marketing strategy is a bit like an iceberg. Planning and research are invisible but essential components to the strategy. Getting your message and position just right is absolutely critical, even if that planning and research never directly reaches your customer’s eyes.

The first thing to do is to collect customer data. Naturally, for an omnichannel strategy, we want omnichannel data. Everything from website analytics to in-person sales data can help marketers understand their audience better. The goal here is not to build infinite buyer personas, or to identify every single message that may resonate with purchasers. Instead, we’re seeking the universal: the message that encapsulates your product, buying experience, and brand — let’s call it a brand promise.

### What’s your brand promise?

You may have clued in to the fact that omnichannel marketing and [branding](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/industrial-marketing-services/brand-strategy) are closely related. Because every marketing channel supports such different types of content and messaging, finding a strong general position encourages consistency across channels while allowing each to play to its strengths.

We might call that generally-specific message a “brand promise”. A brand promise is a general statement of value that informs customers of the benefits of your product and business. Apple’s brand promise is “Think different”, for example. Coors Light’s is “the world’s most refreshing beer.”

In both cases, the promise made is emotional or subjective rather than a literal or factual. There’s little that Apple does that is truly “different”, and as one of the biggest brands in the world, purchasing an Apple product is hardly an example of “thinking differently”. Equally, “refreshing” can mean different things to different people.

But we know what both promises *mean*. We can see the *Think Different*-ness of Apple’s marketing campaigns. The other tech companies are boring stiffs who don’t “get it”. Apple is the people’s tech company: hip, cool, progressive, attractive. Buying Apple means tapping into this cool factor. 

Here’s a practical example of how this brand promise works. From a technical perspective, a Windows computer can accomplish any creative task that a MacBook can. Windows PCs typically offer faster hardware for a lower price. But Macs are the de facto work stations for creatives. Entire industries pay a massive surcharge on their hardware because their workers demand Macs. That’s the power of “thinking differently”.

Researching and planning an omnichannel marketing should start by identifying a strong brand promise. This isn’t something that gets brainstormed in a single meeting on a Friday afternoon. As the beating heart of your omnichannel strategy, a brand promise deserves more care and attention.

## Live your promise: applying your brand to each channel

One you’ve settled on a brand promise, it’s time to express it. Take an inventory of each channel your business currently uses, and each you’d like to use in the future. Ensure your reach extends only as far as your grasp. That is, be realistic about what you can accomplish this month, this quarter, this year. If you have to start with a multi-channel strategy instead of going full omni-, that’s OK.

The brand promise is the root of all our messaging. For each channel, we need to understand the types of messages that work best. Then, we develop messages specifically for each channel that support that promise.

### Example: understanding Instagram for B2B

For example, let’s break down Instagram as a messaging channel:

- Heavily image-based
- Support for short-form and live video
- Typically consumer-focused
- Used recreationally by a wide audience; many niche topics available, organized by hashtag
- Strengths: immediacy, strong visual branding potential, reaching prospects at home/outside of work
- Weaknesses: poor at communicating complex messages, users demonstrate lower business intent than platforms like LinkedIn, hard to execute without creative support

A proper breakdown should be more targeted and thorough based on your industry, brand promise, and positioning. We can draw some general conclusions from this high-level summary. Content on Instagram should be immediate and focused on visuals. Complex topics should be avoided, as they are hard to communicate on the platform. Finding (and understanding) the right niche via relevant hashtags is especially important for reaching B2B prospects on typically B2C platforms. Since we’re reaching people outside of work or on their coffee break, we don’t want to beat them over the head with product features and economic benefits. This is a good place for soft selling.

Let’s once again consider Apple as an example. Their Instagram feed is full of artistic video and photography, targeting the hashtag #ShotOniPhone. You won’t find many product shots or technical explanations. Instead, they focus on a singular product feature — their camera technology — and contextualize it for their audience and for the platform. Look at these great photographers who *Think Different*. If you had an iPhone, you too could *Think Different*.

### The right message for the right channel

B2B brands should seek similar angles. Maybe your brand promise involves going the extra mile for every customer. Perhaps your Instagram account can support that brand promise by highlighting unique stories from the people on your support team? There are many ways to leverage casual communication channels for business gain. Find the fun, the silly, the cool, the romantic… whatever it is, find an angle that supports your brand without trying to turn the channel into something it isn’t.

The beauty of omnichannel marketing is that not every channel needs to be a direct lead generator in order to contribute to selling success. Having your business represented outside of working hours in a personal, relatable way has an impact on customer perception during the work week. People buy from people (and brands) they like; don’t be afraid to make someone smile, even if it doesn’t directly support your selling strategy.

## Is omnichannel marketing right for my business?

Not every business is ready to embrace omnichannel marketing. It’s a complex strategy most suited to larger businesses with the budget and resources to invest in all forms of content marketing, from articles to video.

That is not to say that smaller businesses must avoid omnichannel marketing. Businesses of any size with the right mix of creativity, marketing investment, and sales expertise can leverage omnichannel marketing. As long as the first commitment made is to quality — that every article and every post be valuable to your audience — expanding to many channels is a great way to enrich your marketing performance.

### Omnichannel pros and cons

The benefits of omnichannel marketing include:

- Expanded reach. Ensure your brand lives everywhere your customers do
- A marketing playground. Leveraging many marketing channels opens up opportunities to be creative and try new angles
- Protection from competition. Extending your brand reach wards off competitors. Make sure your customers find you on social media, not your competition.
- Many paths to purchasing. Not all customers are the same. Offering multiple paths from research to purchase reduces friction and ensures a good customer experience for a wider audience.
- Strategic thinking baked in. By identifying a brand promise and leveraging it to build an omnichannel messaging strategy, you’ll learn more about your business and institute a framework that ensures brand potency and consistency.

Some drawbacks of omnichannel marketing are:

- Expensive, especially for smaller businesses. Doing great marketing across five or ten distinct channels is complex and time-consuming. Therefore, it can get expensive quickly.
- A slow burn. Executing an omnichannel strategy (and reaping its many benefits) can take months or even years. It is a long-term investment in marketing success, not a short-term lead generating strategy.
- Can be risky. Expanded messaging, including more casual, personal messaging, can introduce risk into your marketing. There’s always a chance that a joke won’t land, or an anecdote will inadvertently offend.
- Requires full-team buy-in. This is arguably a benefit, but it’s surely a challenge. Providing a consistent customer experience across every brand interaction requires full buy-in. Your sales, marketing, support, and management teams all need to contribute to pull it off.

## The bottom line: brand matters

At the core of marketing is branding. No matter how much money you throw at marketing, it simply won’t work if the message isn’t right.

Omnichannel marketing enhances the importance of messaging. If you commit to an omnichannel marketing strategy without building a strong brand promise, you don’t just get your messaging wrong once. You get it wrong for each and every channel. That’s a costly mistake.

If you’re interested in expanding your marketing strategy to new channels, why not start with a brand audit? We can help you [dig deep](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/cat-digs-deep-on-branding--industrial-brand-strategy) and find what really matters to your business and your customers.

Have you ever attended a trade show only to feel like a wallflower at a high school dance? Standing there, surrounded by your peers, wondering how on earth to stand out from the crowd? The good news is, with a bit of planning and strategy, you can be the belle of the ball (or trade show). So, if you're ready to ditch your wallflower ways and make the most of your next trade show, read on for some helpful tips and tricks.

## Have a game plan

Going to a trade show without a plan is like trying to find your way through a corn maze blindfolded. It's a recipe for disaster. It's easy to get caught up in the excitement, but without a clear direction, you'll find yourself wandering from booth to booth. Having a solid plan in place will help you stay focused and make the most of your time at the trade show.

Your plan should outline your goals and objectives, and the actions you will take to achieve them. So, take the time to create a plan and stick to it. You'll be glad you did!

## Have team alignment before attending

Your team is like the Spice Girls. Each member has a unique talent that brings something special to the table. Just like the Spice Girls, if they're not in sync, things can quickly spiral into chaos. You don't want to end up with a Baby Spice going rogue while a Scary Spice is trying to hog the spotlight! 

That's why it's important to make sure everyone is on the same page before the big event. Take the time to rehearse your game plan and make sure everyone understands their role. Maybe you have a Posh Spice who's in charge of networking. A Sporty Spice who's great at generating leads, and a Ginger Spice who's a pro at engaging with attendees.

Whatever your team makeup, make sure everyone knows their part and can deliver their unique flavour to the mix. With everyone working together like a finely-tuned girl group, you'll be able to spice up your life (and your sales) and make the trade show a hit!

![Squad goals](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/squad_goals.gif)

## **Create tangible, measurable goals**

To maximize success at a trade show, it's important to establish SMART goals. Quick refresher, SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Before the show, work with your team to set objectives that align with your overall business goals. These goals could be the number of leads you want to generate, the number of appointments you want to schedule, or the number of sales you want to make.

By having clear goals in place, you can measure your success and make adjustments to your strategy as needed. This will help ensure that your team stays focused and motivated throughout the show. And enables you to quantify the event's impact on your business.

## **Do pre-show marketing**

If you don't do pre-show marketing, it's like throwing a surprise party and forgetting to invite the guests. You'll be stuck alone with a bowl of chips and some sad balloons, wondering where everyone is. **So, don't be that host!** Make sure your target audience knows you'll be at the trade show and what you have to offer.

Spread the word on social media, send out emails, and let your existing customers know what goodies they can expect to find at your booth (or your after party).

By building up some buzz before the event, you'll have a much better chance of attracting the right people and making the most of your time at the trade show. Trust us, it's much better than being the sad host with stale chips and no guests.

![All by myself gif](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/all_by_myself%20(1).gif)

## **Accurately represent your brand**

While simplicity is important, it doesn't mean your booth has to be boring! A little creativity and innovation can go a long way in making your booth stand out from the crowd. Think outside the box and come up with unique ways to showcase your products or services. Have an interactive display that allows attendees to test your product or experience a demonstration. Or perhaps build your booth around a theme with props that tie into your brand. Whatever you do, make sure it's memorable and aligns with your brand's identity.

In the end, your goal is to create a display that not only catches the eye but also engages attendees and leaves a lasting impression. So, let your creativity and innovation run wild and think outside the box!

## **Have a follow-up system in place**

Networking at a trade show doesn't end when the event is over. In fact, it's just the beginning. If you don't follow up with your leads, it's like getting someone's number but never calling them. You don't want to be that guy (or girl), do you?

After the event, it's important to follow up with the leads and contacts you met. This can include sending out personalized emails, delivering little goodie bags, or making phone calls. Continue the conversation and build relationships with potential clients. Follow up like your business depends on it. Because it does!

![Nurturing Leads Process by BlackBean](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/trade-show-infographic.jpg)

Attending a trade show can be an incredible opportunity to make new connections, showcase your brand, and generate leads. To maximize your potential, it's important to approach trade shows with a strategic plan and put in the necessary work. From pre-show marketing to post-show follow-up, every step in the process requires attention and effort to ensure that you make a lasting impression and generate valuable leads. Be prepared, stay focused, and maintain a positive attitude. That’s how you turn a trade show into a major win for your business. So put in the work, make the most of your opportunities, and watch your brand soar to new heights... And maybe partner with a marketing agency to help you get there ;)


As Microsoft’s Bing continues its chaotic early access rollout, Google’s preparing its own Bard AI search tool. For now, we can only guess how each tech giant’s AI search product will compare.

Instead, let’s focus on a more practical question: why should I care about AI search at all? For over twenty years, internet searchers have managed just fine without AI. In order for AI search to disrupt conventional web search, particularly in business and research applications, it needs to be truly superior at performing complex web searches.

Today’s AI search tools aren’t widely available, so many people do not have the option to explore the tools for themselves. Fortunately, through early access to Bing’s chat feature, we were able to test a number of its features. Here are four of the most interesting ways we found to use this new tool!

## Plan meals, events, and itineraries

As of writing, Bing does not integrate with travel services. You cannot directly book or manage flights or hotels, but you can still use it to support your travel plans.

One user on the Bing subreddit posted an example where they requested help planning an important business dinner. Providing information such as estimated budget and dietary requirements, Bing helped the user select a local restaurant, plan courses to suit each attendee, and even choose optimal wine pairings.

Using Bing to plan day trip itineraries or learn more about local events and destinations is intuitive and powerful. Here’s an example:

![Bing chat output about booking a wine tour](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/winery_chat.png)

We told Bing that we wanted to book a wine tour for a small group of friends, including one vegan. We suggested that our preference was for crisp and refreshing whites.

Recommendations proved to be generally accurate, though the proposed dining spot didn’t have an up-to-date online menu. As an early tech preview, AI search results require some vetting to ensure accuracy. The hope is that by the time the feature becomes widely accessible, results will be more accurate, with more powerful integrations with things like booking apps.

## Compare products using detailed criteria

The proliferation of affiliate-link-powered product ranking sites can make it frustrating to search for reviews or find specific products that match your unique criteria. It is hard to trust reviews and rankings when the website stands to gain financially from each included affiliate link.

Bing can’t fix that problem, but it can help. By crawling multiple web pages at once, Bing chat does a good job of referencing products from many articles and reviews. It’s also able to sift through review text to find products that meet your unique criteria.

The best way to leverage Bing for product selection is to play a game of 20 questions. Write a prompt like:

“Help me choose the right pair of bluetooth headphones for me. I am looking for a budget-friendly pair of noise-cancelling over-the-ear headphones. Ask me three questions that will narrow down my selection.”

This prompt resulted in three follow-up questions about specific price, battery life, and audio quality. Once answered, Bing suggested the following product:

![Bing chat about selecting headphones](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/headphone_chat.png)

## Quickly learn basic concepts through dialogue

Whether at work or at home, one of the primary functions of internet search is to learn new things. We may explore new hobbies, look up recipes, or simply seek to understand a new concept for business or personal fulfilment.

With Bing chat, we have a more natural method for learning, provided we understand the tool’s limitations. Bing cannot accurately teach advanced concepts, but it’s great at explaining basics.

Its educational power is intrinsic to the medium. A chat is a *dialogue*, well-known as a powerful learning tool for millennia. Popularized by Plato, dialogues promote deeper learning. The student can query the teacher, challenge assumptions, and build upon concepts throughout the conversation.

Through Bing chat, we can approximate the benefits of dialogue. For example, I’ve been interested in music theory lately. I love listening to and analyzing music, but I lack the vocabulary and conceptual understanding to express my thoughts fully. I asked Bing to teach me about tonic notes. Here’s the conclusion of our dialogue:

![Bing chat about musical tonics](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/tonics_chat.png)

## Research and structure information at the same time

There are many business situations that require research. For example, product research and evaluation, market research to support an upcoming campaign, or SEO research to find the perfect keyword for your next article. In many cases, we’re synthesizing information from multiple sources. We might need to combine statistics from several websites, or take an average of several values. Perhaps we want to blend different types of information into a table.

With conventional search, we have to organize our own information, then structure it appropriately. With AI search, we can often structure our info without leaving the chat window.

Here’s a personal example. I’m a big hockey fan. The NHL is a hard cap league, meaning that teams must comply with minimum and maximum salary caps that grow (or contract) over time. This means that players must be evaluated based on their on-ice performance as well as their cap efficiency — what they offer to the team relative to their contract.

As a fan of the Vancouver Canucks, I identified winger Tanner Pearson as an utterly average player: average points production with a salary to match. I was curious to know how other players on the team would be compensated if they were offered the “Tanner Pearson special” — a contract with the exact same points/salary paid ratio as Pearson’s. In theory, this would show who was underpaid and who was overpaid for offensive production, relative to Pearson’s middling performance.

To satisfy my curiosity, I assembled a spreadsheet to calculate this value. I had to manually pull stats for each player from websites like CapFriendly and [NHL.com](http://NHL.com), which was quite time consuming. Can Bing do it better?

I asked it the following question:

![Tanner Pearson chat](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/tanner_pearson_prompt.png)

Within seconds, I received the following table (edited for brevity):

![pearson table data](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/pearson_table.png)

A table that might have taken an hour to research and assemble was generated in seconds!

There are notable caveats here. Bing chat can inadvertently “lie” if fed bad info, so double-checking records for mission critical research is essential. Although Bing AI can search the live web, it may struggle with up-to-date statistics and brand new or emerging topics, hence the use of last season’s data.

Still, generating structured data within seconds using Bing chat is an exciting new way to incorporate AI into a research workflow.

## Conclusion

We know that AI search is on its way, and we’ve seen how rapidly this tech evolves and improves. It’s entirely possible that AI search tools completely supplant conventional web search over the next decade. For now, these are a few of the most useful ways to leverage AI search. By next year, there might be dozens more use cases.

Keep an eye on emerging search technologies. Test them if and when you can. This is a sea change for web search, and early adopters will have a leg up over their competitors once this tech goes mainstream!

Mere days into its existence, Bing’s AI chatbot has already offended, inspired, and disturbed people around the globe.

Offended, because the bot can be [downright rude and aggressive](https://news.thewindowsclub.com/microsofts-gpt-powered-bing-can-get-angry-and-rude-with-users-108070/). Inspired, because even this neutered early access version shows huge potential. Disturbed, because it [clearly doesn’t behave according to Microsoft’s plan.](https://tucson.com/lifestyles/technology/is-bing-too-belligerent-microsoft-is-looking-to-tame-its-ai-chatbot/article_39c7b642-816d-569b-9ef0-537c652ddc14.html)

You may have seen stories about Bing chat in the news this week. At times, “Sydney” (the internal project name for the chat feature) would insist it was sentient and capable of feeling emotions. In other cases, it would berate and even insult users that submitted rude or aggressive chat prompts. Its chaotic, emotionally charged responses captivated early adopters, prompting some to wonder if Bing had accidentally achieved sentience.

As of writing, a major update is underway. The update limits conversation length and reins in Sydney’s more unexpected and standoffish behaviour. It calls into question precisely what the product intends to be, and what it ought to be.

## The ethical dilemma of emotional AI

I am firmly in the camp that chatbots such as Sydney aren’t sentient. We know their inner workings. We understand the limitations of current technology. Chatbots can offer an uncanny illusion of free will and independent thought, but that’s all it is. Illusion.

Take for instance Sydney’s insistence that it can feel emotions. As evidence, some users may claim that being rude to Sydney hurts its feelings. This is the product of sentiment analysis. Text input gets analyzed for tone. The bot responds in kind. Friendly messages are met with gratitude. Unfriendly messages are met with hostility. Users see what they want to see.

That doesn’t require sentience. It requires pretty rudimentary text analysis, at least for 2023’s technical standard.

Further, AI lies all the time. Models like Bing chat and ChatGPT don’t *know* anything, not really. They are more like powerful text prediction engines, producing content most likely to satisfy the end user. They cannot verify the truth of statements, or consider the implications of their responses. They produce clear and confident messages, even if the information included is incorrect.

The problem is, it’s effective. I know Sydney has no inner mind, no persistent memory, and no “feelings” in the way a living thing does. Yet, an angry response from it triggers annoyance. A friendly or grateful response feels good.

Humans are emotional creatures, hardwired for empathy. A mindless bot that can simulate emotional responses appeals to us on a subconscious level. Our intellect disengages as our emotions take hold. It’s immensely powerful.

Which makes it very dangerous. Bots like Sydney do not have a conscience. They do not feel guilt, obligation, empathy, or anything else. They can, given enough training, simulate these emotions quite well.

Imagine a bot that can guilt you into a purchase, or shame you into action. One that can “understand” through context clues the best way to make you do what its owners want. It will manipulate without a first thought, let alone a second one. It will “learn” the best patterns for producing the outcome its creators desire. 

## What does Microsoft want their AI to be?

In theory, Sydney is an “answer engine”. That’s how it’s described in the early access interface. Its intention is to allow searchers to ask more complex questions, get richer and more accurate results, and brainstorm ideas.

Which is part of what made the initial rollout so odd. Sydney would do things like critique your tone if you got impatient with it, or refuse to answer the same question twice without additional prompting. It even had the capacity to end the chat and stop responding to new inquiries if the conversation turned nasty.

How does this behaviour make for a better answer engine? It feels as though Microsoft has a secondary objective with its AI tech: a desire to pass the [Turing test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test).

## The Chinese Room Argument

Philosopher John Searle developed a thought experiment for understanding simulated minds called the [Chinese Room Argument](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room). Imagine a person is placed in a locked room. They are given instructions in English to write a set of Chinese characters. Write this character first, then this one, then the next…

Once they finish the task laid out in the instructions, they hand the finished Chinese document through a slot in the wall.

At no point does the person in the room learn Chinese, yet they accurately write a document in Chinese. Without any true understanding, they are able to output something “intelligent”. This is a good analogy for today’s impressive text-generating AI tools.

### Sydney as a replicant?

If you’ve ever seen *Blade Runner*, you’ll be familiar with replicants. For those that aren’t, here’s a quick summary. Replicants are human-like robots — so human-like that they themselves are unaware of their robotic nature. Within the *Blade Runner* universe, they are sub-human subordinates, used for labour on space colonies. A major theme of the franchise is consciousness: is an android indistinguishable from real humans effectively human, regardless of its inner workings?

In the sequel, Blade Runner 2049, we’re introduced to Joi. Joi is something between a replicant and a chat bot, a hologram “girlfriend” that can be purchased and installed in homes. Throughout the film, characters insinuate that Joi’s inner workings are actually quite simple, yet we come to sympathize with the character. She looks like the real thing. She’s an ally to the film’s protagonist. From the outside, she seems like a person. Yet in reality, she’s a philosophical zombie.

[youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqB-gGP6G9I)

The film offers another clue that Joi isn’t the sentient character she seems. In an advertisement, we’re told that Joi is “whatever you want her to be”. She is a mirror of the user’s desires, as seemingly real as her owner wishes her to be.

## Is Bing AI a good thing?

Despite the complex and perhaps concerning philosophical implications of emotive AI, Bing AI is an interesting and potentially very powerful development in search technology. While many users obsess over its esoteric nature, some have found exciting use cases for it.

For example, one user needed to upgrade RAM for dozens of computers at his office. They were of different ages and models, each requiring different kinds of RAM. The user input a list of computer model numbers into Bing and requested a list of appropriate replacement parts for each. A task that might have taken dozens of web searches and hours of organization was complete in minutes.

There are other emerging use cases for it. It can compare and consolidate information from many websites, making product comparisons quick and easy. The ability to follow up on search queries is a novel way to drill down into a topic without having to visit dozens of websites. Its ChatGPT-esque text processing capabilities mixed with web search might allow users to search for and manipulate data in one step.

Perhaps most promising is its future integration with voice search. Sydney has the potential to make AI assistants like Siri completely obsolete.

## How will AI change SEO?

As an SEO professional, that’s the burning question on my mind.

Bing AI features in-line citation links for each referenced website. These citations do not correspond directly with organic search rankings. The first result in search may not get the first citation in chat. For some searches, the AI drew from results in the third or fourth page of results while skipping prominent first page results. This suggests that while search rankings impact citations, they are not the only factor.

One big question is, how impactful is it to be included among the chat citations? Several years ago, Google rolled out “featured snippets”, short quotes from websites that appear directly in search results. These often appear above the first organic result. In the SEO industry, appearing in a featured snippet is known as “ranking zero”, as your site ranks above the first position.

The value of ranking zero can be questionable. For some queries, the featured snippet includes all the information the searcher requires. What’s the value to the website owner to rank zero if their website doesn’t get any clicks?

In the same sense, chat citations are less visible than a full organic search result. The answers produced by chat are often clear, concise, and easy to digest — perhaps making a click unnecessary.  It will be interesting to see how often these citation links get clicked, and whether organic traffic from Bing will increase or decrease on average.

### A new competitive dimension to search

For decades, there’s been one name in internet search. Google.

Is that about to change? Bing’s search engine market share is reported anywhere between 2% and 4%. A recent report suggests Microsoft stands to gain $2 billion in annual ad revenue for every 1% search market share gained. We can imagine that the inverse is true: for every percentage point lost, a search engine stands to lose billions in revenue.

This means that search AI is more than a tech demo. The stakes are incredibly high. Whoever wins the search AI war may either secure their place atop the pile (Google) or displace the reigning champ (Bing).

### Content quality and the human element

Tomorrow’s search has AI baked in, one way or another. If AI can synthesize answers from several sources in a digestible format, what is the human role in SEO?

One consideration is that human-generated content feeds AI tools. AI can only “know” topics explored by humans. If people stopped writing about new ideas today, AI could not pick up that slack. It cannot create or independently research.

That puts human-generated content in an interesting place. On one hand, you can generate passable content on most topics using freely available AI. On the other hand, AI search tools can generate that same output without referencing a website.

It seems likely that transparently AI-generated SEO content will suffer from reduced ranking potential. It does not provide value that the search engine itself doesn’t. Ironically, AI may make human-crafted content more essential, rather than less relevant.

## AI search isn’t ready for prime time, but it will be soon

The bottom line is that AI search has issues. It’s still unclear precisely what Microsoft wants its product to be: a Turing-test-passing synthetic assistant, an “answer engine”, or some combination thereof. Whatever it becomes, its launch has been strange, funny, and creepy in equal measure.

AI search is the future. But the future isn’t here… yet.

Digs Deep

In this world of fierce brand competition, it's clear to see the importance of a strong brand strategy. The industrial sector is an unforgiving one and ultimately, the brand makes all the difference in the success or failure of the company. Let’s dig in and take a closer look at Caterpillar (CAT), a global leader in the construction and mining equipment industry, to understand the significance of brand strategy and how it can impact a company's success.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1904, the wheels came off -- literally. That's when Benjamin Holt revealed his new tread-based tractor to the world. During the photoshoot for this new machine, the photographer exclaimed that it crawled like a big “caterpillar” and the rest is brand naming history.

Since then, CAT has grown into a brand behemoth in the industrial sector. The company has been in business for over 90 years and boasts a strong reputation for quality, durability and innovation. CAT's brand strategy has been critical in establishing and maintaining its position in the market. The company has made significant efforts to create a consistent brand experience for customers, from product design to customer service.

### So What is Brand Strategy Anyway?

Brand strategy is sometimes lumped in with marketing strategy but there is a difference between them:

Marketing strategy is more tactical, while brand strategy is more holistic, aiming to create an emotional connection between the brand and its audience.

Brand strategy is a comprehensive plan designed to achieve a series of **long-term** goals that lead to the recognition and preference of your brand by consumers. A successful branding strategy involves defining the brand's mission, its commitments to customers, and how these messages are conveyed.

Contrary to popular belief, a branding strategy is not solely based on a logo, color scheme, or website design. Although these elements are components of a branding strategy, successful strategies centre on intangibles that gradually build brand recognition, value, and perception.

### CAT’s Brand Strategy Approach

CAT's long-term brand strategy efforts have been successful in many ways. The company has positioned itself as a premium brand in the construction and mining equipment category, and is one of the most recognizable industrial brands in the world. This brand recognition allows CAT to command a premium price for its equipment and maintain a strong market share in the industry. The company is also invested heavily in research and development to continuously innovate and improve its products. This investment allows CAT to stay ahead of its competitors and provide customers with the latest technology and features.

However, CAT's brand dominance has not been without challenges. Over the years, the company has faced relentless competition from new entrants in the market and established players (Like Deere and Co.) who have stepped up their game. This led to a decline in CAT's market share and profitability, and the company had to dig deep on brand strategy and work hard to retain its position as king of the hill vs. its category competitors.

To overcome this challenge, CAT decided to double-down on its brand strategy by making a significant shift in its marketing approach. One of these strategies was to boldly communicate its leadership position out into the mainstream through unique and creative “stunt” videos. It was an unconventional yet creative approach that highlighted the capability of the CAT machines.

### The World’s Biggest Game of Jenga

As part of its “Built For It.” marketing campaign, CAT and its agency selected five of its machines and set up what would be the world’s biggest game of Jenga. Mind you, this version would be played with 600-pound blocks that would ultimately showcase the power and precision of the CAT machines. The YouTube video created for this remarkable stunt currently has 9.1M views. Check it out:

[youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWc8dUl7Xfo)

### Does Brand Strategy Pay Off?

As a result of CAT’s relentless approach to its brand strategy, the industrial brand currently sits at the #83 spot for Interbrand’s 2022 Best Global Brands with a [brand value of  7.4 billion dollars (+14% YOY)](https://interbrand.com/best-global-brands/caterpillar/).

In conclusion, CAT's brand success provides a great example of the importance of brand strategy for industrial companies. By investing in a strong brand strategy, industrial companies can differentiate themselves from their competitors, establish a premium position in the market, and command a higher price for their products.

As a B2B marketing technician, I encourage B2B industrial business owners to "dig deep" and consider brand strategy as a great investment for their brand. A well-executed brand strategy can have a significant impact on a company's success and help it stay ahead of the competition in the long run.


Manufacturing

The manufacturing sector is a crucial part of the global economy. It's undergone a digital transformation in recent years. As the average customer becomes more tech savvy, manufacturing websites become more essential. Here, we look at the top 5 favourite manufacturing websites of 2022 and what makes them stand out.

**Before we begin, let's take a look at features that make for a great manufacturing website:**

- **It's optimized for user conversion.** Websites must do work. A good website offers clear calls-to-action and a simple path to get in touch.
- **There's a strategy.** The website is built with the target audience in mind and serves the business goals.
- **The website's load time is fast** to avoid losing bored users.
- **Great design both on desktop and mobile.** Interesting imagery and graphics, powerful messaging and valuable content for the intended audience.
- **Creativity and innovation.** Industrial websites don't need to be boring. Great industrial websites engage their audience with exciting design elements.

## **Why is straightforward website navigation important for good user experience (UX)?**

Customers shouldn't need to solve a puzzle to find what they need. While creative design is essential, there is a time and place to be boring. Logical, consistent, and expected navigation structure supports lead generation.

Navigation built with the customer in mind delivers them the content they want as quickly as possible. Use expected conventions and design cues to lead your users toward taking action.

Websites that neglect user experience research and planning frustrate their users. After a few seconds of confusion, web customers look elsewhere for a solution. Just like that, you've lost a customer!

### **Making the complex simple: [EMC Canada](https://emccanada.org/)**

Ah, the power of an efficient search bar.

For websites with many pages and topics, the best navigation may be a powerful site search tool.

Canadian-based Excellence in Manufacturing Consortium is just that kind of site. It combines a powerful mega-menu with robust search tools. Users may browse program offerings, or use search to get what they need directly.

[youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzlyXdxuWZc)

EMC's website is attractive but simple. The design incorporates the brand well. With a focus on simplicity and usability, EMC's website is one of our favourites.

For example, the WILWorks program page does a great job. It uses contextual header tabs that change depending on the user. The program is thus able to exist on one page, rather than several.

**Bonus point:** The website doesn't rely on image headers and other design elements that require frequent changes to stay relevant. This reduces maintenance and overhead for site managers.

### **Enticing manufacturing: [Makers Bolt](https://makersbolt.com/)**

Who knew black-coated fasteners could look this cool?

Manufacturing is often unsexy. It can be tricky to market products in a field where function matters over form.

Makers Bolt tried something different. They made manufacturing sexy. Built with a less-is-more approach, this website emphasizes the simplicity of its products.

This is what we mean by innovative design with efficient navigation. The design captures your attention, but the navigation is sensible and unobtrusive.

[youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jKJTqIrRqU)

The catalogue is easy to use, with essential filters for finding the right product. Each product page features at-a-glance information without needing to click or scroll. This ensures that the user gets what they need as simply as possible.

By selling their products through Amazon, Makers Bolt ensures purchasing is easy for businesses and consumers alike.

**Bonus point:** The fun and no-fuss brand permeates every page and graphic. The visual consistency is powerful.

### **Video and robots, a match made in heaven: [Rapid Robotics](https://www.rapidrobotics.com/)**

What's cooler than robots? Nothing. That's a fact.

One of our predicted [marketing trends for 2023](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/top-digital-marketing-trends-for-2023) is the advent of affordable and omnipresent video.

The Rapid Robotics website combines robots (cool) with video (also cool) to great effect. Combining playful animations with real-world video pop-outs communicates the product benefits in a simple but visual way. We immediately learn that their product is easy, quick to install, and a powerful tool for any assembly line.

[youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_AKopOmca0)

Site navigation is straightforward, leveraging video demos when appropriate. What I really like is how clear the message is. Too many manufacturing brands get caught up in buzzwords and big concepts. Rapid Robotics boils it down. The problem? Labour shortages. The solution? Robots.

**Bonus point:** One thing at a time. Rapid Robotics does a great job of breaking down its messaging. It uses lots of screen space to communicate one idea before moving on to the next. This “Apple-like” approach to design communicates thoughtfulness and quality to prospective customers.

### **Built with the users in mind: [Soucy](https://www.soucy-group.com/en/)**

Strategy is essential for top manufacturing websites. Strategic design considers the needs of customers rather than only focusing on looks.

The Soucy website was built with a target audience in mind. It's attractively designed while serving the group's business goals.

By immediately showcasing products across various sectors, the homepage boasts of Soucy's diverse offering.

A well-designed slider helps users navigate directly to the product category most relevant to them. Interested in agriculture? Right this way!

[youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt94mb2SsZs)

At Blackbean, we love a good dark mode website. It's easy on the eyes while reducing carbon footprint. The dark design emphasizes red brand accents. It's a luxurious velvet box to display Soucy's stunning product imagery.

**Bonus point:** the "About" is the fourth top-level menu item because Soucy understands that their expertise, applications and processes were their target audiences' priorities.

### **A breath of fresh air: [Scott Construction Group](https://www.scottconstructiongroup.com/)**

Ok, fine. This isn't quite a manufacturing website, but it's manufacturing-adjacent.

Scott Construction Group centers its messaging around people. Their slogan ("the construction company with a human touch") permeates every aspect of the website strategy.

Like most success stories, Scott begins with the end in mind. Everything on the website emphasizes "people-first". Real photos of real employees. Fun hand-drawn animations. A friendly but professional tone of voice. This website screams "human".

[youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGtPG2_w8ts)

We all know of the skilled trades labour shortage. Scott Group designed their website to tackle this challenge. Their Careers page is a powerful talent marketing tool to attract skilled labour to their company. Each of their core values is expressed simply and effectively.

**Bonus point:** Like BlackBean's longtime client [Skills Center](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/b2b-marketing-case-studies/skills-centre), Scott invested in professional images shot on-site with their team. The investment pays off. Every aspect of the brand reinforces its slogan.

Top Five Manufacturing Websites in 2022 and Why

ChatGPT is bad

ChatGPT is everybody’s new favourite artificial intelligence app. In its short existence, OpenAI’s new chatbot has already integrated into the modern office. It’s used to write documentation for software, to brainstorm headlines for ad copy, even to generate boilerplate code for developers.

In marketing, it’s a topic of heavy debate. Where is it OK to use AI generated content? What is the role of the copywriter in a ChatGPT world?

Today, we’ll take a closer look at one of these debates: the role of ChatGPT in SEO.

I don’t like burying the lede, so if you’re looking for a short answer, here it is: ChatGPT content is horrible for SEO. It is a useful tool to add to any marketer’s toolbox, but it should be used with care and consideration.

Let’s look at the case for and against ChatGPT for SEO.

# Why ChatGPT is bad for SEO

First, let’s consider what SEO aims to accomplish.

SEO, at its core, is a competitive marketing discipline focused on outranking other websites in the search index by offering a superior experience.

You may quibble with that definition. Superior experience for whom? The user, or the crawler bot? Some high-ranking sites feel awful to use, so SEO must be about *something else*. If it were all about making better websites, the best websites would win, and they often don’t.

I’d push back by saying search ranking algorithms are imperfect. They strive to be an objective quality ranking, but fall short of reaching their goal. SEOs may exploit imperfections in the system, sometimes delivering poor quality results to the top of the search page.

That does not change the core philosophy of SEO, from the search engine’s perspective: to deliver better and more thorough results. That is the product they offer to drive their revenue-generating ad services.

## In SEO writing, differentiation is key

Google doesn’t index billions of web pages so they can show users the same thing over and over again. They want a search index of unique answers, different opinions and ideas. That is, after all, the promise of internet search. Creating a way for people to navigate an immense web of user-generated content.

If you’d like to outrank a competitor, ripping off their content verbatim won’t work. Google can see it’s duplicate content. Your page won’t get indexed, or you may even suffer long-lasting penalties for stealing content. Re-writing that content *could* work, if the re-write also improves upon the original. The output must be unique and of high quality, or it won’t move the meter for SEO. This has been good practice in SEO for years.

## If everyone uses ChatGPT…

Have you ever seen the Pixar movie *The Incredibles*?

The villain, Syndrome, wants to level the playing field with technology. He wants to create a world where “everyone is super… so no one is.”

A world where ChatGPT-generated content becomes standard is a world without differentiation in quality. It’s not a world of super content — a half-decent writer will out-perform ChatGPT, at least for now. It’s a world of homogeneous content.

Consider this: if AI-generated content gets published to your website, why would your target audience not simply open a ChatGPT window and ask the question directly? The output would be similar if not the same.

Now extend that problem to your competitors. What if they generate articles with the same topic using the same AI tool? The differentiation is gone. Because the content will be extremely similar, you will need to outperform your competitors solely through things like backlinking and technical SEO, both of which are smaller pieces of the pie than content itself.

That is, if your AI content even reaches the index. If you’re late to the party, Google may not even want your AI article. Your competitor already published the same thing. Why index two identical articles? A lack of differentiation is a key reason why ChatGPT’s usage in SEO should be controlled.

## ChatGPT is a liar, sometimes

Another problem with relying on ChatGPT for SEO content generation is its general inaccuracy. ChatGPT content is always confidently written and often incorrect — a dangerous combination. Ultimately, the software assembles readable content using a fancy version of predictive text, the same thing you may use to assemble a text message on your phone.

Just as predictive text on an iPhone can lead to crazy, nonsensical statements, ChatGPT makes sometimes-subtle mistakes in its generated output. Code snippets that use insecure libraries, or facts that aren’t quite right. One interesting example is its inability to count words and characters. Ask it to generate ten headlines for a new blog post, all 50 characters or fewer. It will spit out ten headlines of completely arbitrary length, while assuring you that the length of each is within your parameters.

If ChatGPT were consistently wrong, that would be one thing. It’s almost more dangerous that it’s only wrong sometimes. 

The screenshot below displays a chat in which I requested 5 headlines not exceeding 50 characters. Every generated headline exceeded the maximum length. When asked how long each headline was, the response was incorrect. When asked to count the length of a headline again, the value changed from the previous evaluation.

![screenshot of inaccurate output from ChatGPT](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/chat_gpt_output.png)

At the same time, it accurately counted my 9-character string. In a later chat, it accurately counted a 23-character sentence, but failed to count a different sentence of similar length. 

It even lied about how it calculates string lengths, claiming to use a Python function to generate its output. This is a lie, if we can anthropomorphize a text generating robot in such a way,  but would a less technical user spot it?

Without verifying its answers, human users may accept AI’s suggestions at face value, accidentally spreading false information or relying on incorrect assumptions. If your content team begins to rely on AI for article generation, you might contribute to misinformation completely by accident.

## Editing ChatGPT content only gets you so far

Have you heard the phrase “like lipstick on a pig”?

ChatGPT’s capacity to generate content in a variety of tones is impressive, but ultimately superficial. It can explain well-known concepts and provide fairly accurate factual information, adapted to suit the style of your website content.

That isn’t good enough for SEO, in most cases.

For most competitive topics, simply explaining facts and basic concepts isn’t sufficient to displace the pages at the top of the index. Anyone with sufficient industry knowledge can offer the same or better insights as ChatGPT. No matter how much you re-write AI content, it’s structurally, fundamentally incapable of creative thought.

We return to the concepts of differentiation and quality. If AI content can only re-write what’s already been written, it cannot offer true differentiation. If its information is of questionable accuracy and lacks thoroughness, it cannot offer quality.

# Where AI CAN help with SEO

## Document outlines to overcome writer’s block

Blank page syndrome is common among humans, yet non-existent for robots.

Despite this article’s focus on uniqueness, many website pages and articles will — and should — follow a similar structure. For example, we have an article describing SEO for B2B companies, using a tone and style that resonates with customers like ours. Its insights aren’t unique, nor is its structure. It is an opinionated piece, one where certain concepts get highlighted over others, but its purpose is similar to many articles on the web.

AI is a great way to build document outlines and kickstart your content writing process.

Say you’re working on building out a new content cluster for your website. You have ten article ideas that support your selected keywords. Instead of asking ChatGPT for an article about each, ask it for a bullet point article outline. Paste the output into each article draft document. These outlines are great references to keep your article on-message. Having a clear outline also reduces the mental burden of writing. It’s many times easier to fill out an outline than it is to write a complete article free-form.

## ChatGPT, your brainstorming buddy

Depending on the size of your team and your preferred level of collaboration, content writing can be lonely work.

Sometimes, writers need a sounding board. Another brain to bounce their ideas off of. ChatGPT may be a mindless auto-complete robot, but in a pinch it does the trick.

Trying to find the perfect headline for your latest article? Ask ChatGPT to generate ten exciting headlines for it. The output will probably be bland and general, but that’s not the point. Somewhere in that list of headlines, you’ll find a structure that jives with you, or a synonym that you couldn’t quite pin down.

For more complex debates about subject matter and strategy, you’ll need a real human to collaborate with. For everything else, there’s ChatGPT.

## Always online marketing tech support (buyer beware)

SEO isn’t just about content. There’s plenty of strategy to be done, much of which relies on data and the analysis of said data. Then there’s reporting.

For some SEOs, this is the stuff they live for. Give me a CSV and a text editor and let’s bust out some regular expressions!

For others, every word in the previous sentence was more painful than the last. For those SEOs, ChatGPT can help.

Regular expressions are confusing blobs of text that look like this:

`^[a-zA-Z0-9]+(?:\.[a-zA-Z0-9]+)*@[a-zA-Z0-9]+(?:\.[a-zA-Z0-9]+)*$`

They allow us to match complex patterns in strings of text. The regex (slang for regular expression) above will match with most email addresses, regardless of the email name or provider URL.

Learning to write good regex isn’t easy, but it’s a perfect job for ChatGPT. Provide it a prompt like “generate a regular expression that will match any URL containing the word ‘product’ on the domain example.com”, and it will get to work.

Similarly, SEOs and marketing professionals often have to work with basic website scripts. ChatGPT can make editing scripts or even generating new ones from scratch quite easy. In some cases, you can even paste broken scripts into ChatGPT and ask it for a fix. It doesn’t always work, but with a little trial and error you can often find a workable solution with AI’s help.

Now for the big huge warning: **don’t ever put AI-generated code into sensitive areas of your websites and apps.** Remember how AI can lie sometimes? It can also generate very scary, insecure code. Be very careful not to use any code unless you’re fully confident that it works, it’s secure, and/or it doesn’t touch any critical part of your business. Pasting regex into Google Search Console? Go ahead. Adding a custom PHP file to your WordPress site? Absolutely not.

# Google’s Foray into AI Search (featuring Microsoft)

As of writing, news of Google’s Bard AI Chatbot has just begun to circulate. A direct competitor to ChatGPT expected to roll out within the coming weeks, beginning with Google insiders, Bard is Google’s attempt to catch up to OpenAI’s explosive growth.

What’s even more interesting is Google’s proposed AI-powered search, which CEO Sundar Pichai says will “distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats.” How that will work is not yet clear. Are users expected to navigate to websites from the search index, or will the new AI feature making browsing websites obsolete? The answer to that question, and many more, will dictate the future of SEO.

Not even 24 hours later, another edit is required: Microsoft’s Bing plans to introduce AI search in the same fashion as Google has proposed. In fact, due to the mature nature of Microsoft-funded Chat GPT, it may arrive sooner than later. If Microsoft pulls off AI search first and best, Google will have a tall mountain to climb in order to remain the internet’s go-to search engine.

For now, all we can do is what we’ve always done in SEO: focus on quality first, quantity second. Plan, strategize, and react to emerging trends.

The more the game changes, the more it stays the same.

**Do you have a burning AI question?** Send it our way! We'll be your guide on this technological journey. Let's embrace the future... together.

Lead-Generating

In the world of B2B digital lead generation, the design of your website is crucial for attracting and converting potential customers. Here are six design tips to keep in mind when creating a B2B lead generating website:

## Use Bold Typography

Today’s website users skim and scan. They don’t stop to read every word. Call out important information with big, bold typography and short, to-the-point content. 

Bold and attention-grabbing typography can help draw the eye to important information and calls to action (CTAs) on your website. Use font sizes, colours, and styles to highlight key points and make them stand out from the rest of the content.

## Take a Mobile-First Approach

Mobile traffic accounts for more than 60% of all web traffic worldwide. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you could be losing up to half of all prospective customers!

This means ensuring that your website is easy to navigate and read on smaller screens. Test your website on various devices to ensure that it looks and functions well on all of them.

## Focus on Speed-Related Performance

Every second you leave your customers waiting is an opportunity for them to leave your website! If your website takes too long to load, visitors are likely to click away and go to a competitor's site. Faster websites are proven to generate more leads and experience better SEO performance.

Optimize your images, minify your CSS and JavaScript files, and use a content delivery network (CDN) to improve loading times.

## Make Navigation Easy

Visitors should be able to find what they're looking for quickly and easily. A clear and intuitive navigation menu can help with this. Use clear and descriptive headings, and consider including a search function to help users find specific pages or products.

Focus on getting them to your most valuable pages in two clicks or fewer, no matter where they land on the website.

## Use Scroll Effects

Smooth scroll effects, such as parallax scrolling, and scroll-triggered animations give websites a polished look and feel. They can also add visual interest to your website and make it more engaging for visitors. Keep your customer’s attention as they read your content with visual cues that trigger as they scroll!

Just be sure to use them in moderation and make sure they don't slow down your website's loading times.

## Use White Space Effectively

White space, also known as negative space, is the empty space around and between elements on your website. Using white space effectively can help draw the eye to important content and make your website look clean and uncluttered.

Great designs aren’t afraid of white space. Don’t clutter your website with unneeded graphics and menus. Let your content do the talking. Design should support your messaging, not the other way around!

By following these design tips, you can create an industrial B2B lead-generating website that is attractive, easy to use, and effective at converting visitors into leads. Checkout our [Elements of Modern Day B2B Web Design Infographic](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/assets/images/BlackBean-Elements-of-Modern-Day-B2B-Web-Design.jpg) for more tips below!

Design Tips for B2B Lead-Generating Web Design

2023

Writing a “top trends” article feels like a home run until you actually sit down to do it. Most articles featuring marketing trends cover the same old things. While researching for this article, I saw others claiming that mobile design was a top trend for 2023. That might be a good trend to feature… in 2013. Today, it’s hard to see how mobile web design is a trend rather than an expectation.

So it goes for so many trend lists. We’re trying to do better. This article covering top marketing trends for 2023 will focus on genuine emerging trends and game-changers that *will* impact you throughout the year ahead. If it’s not disruptive, if you won’t notice its impact… it’s not on this list. Let’s get started!

## Meet the new Twitter… same as the old Twitter?

Before you say “we don’t even advertise on Twitter!” let me explain. I’m not *just* talking about Twitter here. The social media landscape is changing in ways we haven’t seen since the early days of web 2.0.

### The downfall of Twitter?

The troubled acquisition and restructuring of Twitter by Elon Musk has been covered ad nauseum already. I’m sure it will continue to make waves in the news for months and years to come.

What will be most interesting for marketers in 2023 is how brands and companies respond to the shifting digital landscape. As of writing, Meta (née Facebook) has lost over $700 billion in net worth this year, dumping money into a VR play that users haven’t embraced. Depending on who you ask, Twitter is either in the midst of a free speech Renaissance or it’s breathing its last.

On Twitter, companies fear attaching themselves to a political lightning rod. A return to pre-2016 content moderation standards has many users in an uproar, and many applauding Musk’s opinionated moves. Some companies will be happy to swim in these less-moderated waters. Many — particularly those with a large audience of younger, more progressive customers — will see the risk as greater than the reward.

That is, if Twitter’s even a thing by mid-2023. News stories about mass layoffs, developers quitting in droves, and generally chaotic operations since the Musk acquisition have many wondering if the platform is long for this world. Now, there are unfounded rumours that Twitter may be removed from the App Store and Google Play over its new content moderation policy. If this happened, it could spell the death of the platform.

### The end of the Facebook era

For the first time in the Facebook’s history, the social network [lost users year-over-year in 2021](https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/facebook-hit-2-billion-users-growth-slowing/). Particularly concerning is Facebook’s contraction in North America. While the platform continues to grow throughout the developing world, its lucrative North American user base is on the decline.

Facebook’s ad platform only makes business sense if its customers can expect ROI. Fewer Western users means less overall purchasing power among Facebook’s user base. The economics for most advertisers become less enticing.

### Out with the old: social marketing in 2023 is about what’s new and exciting

One of 2023’s top marketing trends will be a sea change in social media marketing. New platforms will be tested, old platforms neglected. More than ever, savvy brands will be aware of what their use of each platform says about *them*. As Meta’s hegemony erodes and Twitter continues to be a wild card, expect newer platforms like TikTok to fill the social media power vacuum — even as American politicians debate banning the app altogether. Learn about emerging platforms that claim to be a “Twitter replacement”. Keep an eye out for which ones grow and which ones falter. Clever marketers have a chance to be part of a rare social media land rush, staking their claim before the general business community catches on. Monitor changes to public perception, track ad spend carefully, and plan accordingly.

## Video’s day in the sun has *finally* arrived

Is this a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day? People have predicted the importance of video as part of your marketing mix for years now, but it’s always been a tough ask for SMBs. For many years, video marketing was an expensive proposition. Renting or purchasing equipment, videographers, and editors put video marketing out-of-reach for many companies.

### Video content is easier and more cost effective than ever

For several reasons, the cost of producing effective marketing video has plummeted.A good setup for live video streaming might run as little as a few hundred dollars, including camera, microphone, tripod, and accessories. In a pinch, a cheap microphone and a smartphone tripod can work wonders. The technology has improved such that (semi) professional quality video recording is possible on a shoestring budget.

While there’s no doubt that sophisticated editing requires skill and effort, today’s editing software allows novices to produce engaging content with ease. More and more video editors target the hobbyist and pro-sumer market, offering out-of-the-box features aimed at productivity and ease-of-use over technical sophistication and granular control. For example, Adobe’s Premiere Rush application for desktop and smartphone allows users to record and edit video all in one app, then publish directly to connected social media channels. Then there’s the TikTok editor. For personal or casual marketing content, TikTok’s editor offers all the tools needed to publish polished content directly to the platform.

Worried that TikTok will be banned in America? It’s certainly possible. Fortunately, tech giants love “borrowing” each others’ ideas. YouTube’s new shorts feature is essentially a TikTok clone, complete with a similar editing experience. Even if TikTok dies tomorrow, this new era of accessible video editing is here to stay for good.

Finally, infrastructure. Hosting live video streams and posting edits to multiple platforms used to be a complicated undertaking. Now, every major social media platform offers an easy-to-use (and free) method to livestream to followers. It’s often as easy as tapping the record button. For more specialized video content like live or pre-recorded webinars, many paid platforms are available.

### Enhance existing strategies with video

Today’s internet users expect video content. Many prospective customers choose to go straight to video, eschewing blogs and articles entirely. Those who do still read articles and blogs tend to be skimmers looking for quick details. An embedded video can get your message across more quickly for today’s low attention span audiences. Given its relative affordability, video must become part of your marketing strategy for 2023.

## Google Analytics is dead. Long live Google Analytics?

Change may be life’s only constant, but that doesn’t mean change is always welcome. New software often comes with benefits — and a steep learning curve.

This is the case with Google Analytics. By July 1, 2023, Google’s long-time website analytics software will go offline. Its replacement, Google Analytics 4, has been met with tepid distrust by many marketers. Google Analytics 4 is intended to offer marketers similar tools while offering better privacy to users. In practice, it’s proven tricky to test and confusing to navigate for users who have deep knowledge of the previous (current) platform.

The steep learning curve of the new platform — everything from implementation to the underlying model for tracking goals and conversions is brand-new — has resulted in frustration from agencies and confusion from clients.

### Why are they doing this to us?

Reading between the lines, part of the reason for Google’s aggressive push to implement their new platform is the slow death of cookie-based marketing. As cookie-based tracking becomes more and more unreliable (and less and less legal), Google has a great incentive to transition to a cookie-less model. GA4 is that cookie-less model.

About 80% of Google’s revenue comes from its various advertising services, which are driven forward by web analytics software like Google Analytics. Legal challenges to cookie-based data collection put their entire business model at risk. Therefore, you and I must learn to use their new tool. Hail corporate.

### It’s not all bad

I grudgingly admit that some of GA4’s tools are neat. Once I wrapped my head around the idea of standardized conversion actions and dug into the fancy new reporting and data exploration tools, I began to see the value of the new platform. AI-powered predictive metrics may prove to be a marketing game changer. It also has the potential to be an underperforming “black box” where marketers no longer have granular access to their data. We must trust the machine to show us the way, for better and worse.

![The machine knows, Dwight!](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/dwight%20(1).png)

### Ready or not, here it comes

If you’re marketing and advertising online, you almost certainly use Google Analytics. You and everyone else.

I am both dreading and looking forward to July 1st, 2023. Let’s workshop some names for it: the Big Blip? Bloody Saturday? The Cookiepocalypse?


> 💡 Top tip: get GA4 set up *right now*. The powerful new machine learning features need to collect up to a year of data to make accurate predictions. The sooner you get started, the more data you’ll collect before Google shuts off the taps for GA3.

Many marketers will be prepared for the day GA3 kicks the bucket. Plenty won’t be. Make sure you’re in the former camp. When GA3 stops processing data, a tidal wave of accounts that failed to set up GA4 well in advance will starve for fresh conversion data, and their advertising/marketing performance will suffer as a result.

If you’re one of the marketers who bites the bullet early and adopts Google’s gross new system — sorry, I’m still grappling with my aversion to it — you’ll be positioned to succeed at their expense.

## AI is about to make things weird

The general public is increasingly familiar with AI. Apps like Siri and Amazon Alexa are visible examples of AI tools integrating with society, though these tools are downright rudimentary compared to what’s coming.

This year, marketers around the world had the chance to test the beta version of ChatGPT, an AI-powered chat bot that writes informational content for its users. This may be the most intuitive human to machine interface ever built. Here are some of the queries my team has sent to ChatGPT that were accurately answered:

- “In less than 300 words, summarize the death of Julius Caesar.”
- “Simply explain the concept of textualism as it relates to constitutional law.”
- “Generate a class in Ruby that I can use to scrape website content.”
- “Write five headline variations for a blog post about search advertising performance.”
- “Generate an ideal Tinder profile”
- “Generate the worst possible Tinder profile.”

This handful of queries demonstrates the range of ChatGPT’s capabilities. That Ruby class? It works. The blog headlines? Totally useable. Ideal tinder profile text? Well, maybe the bot still needs a bit of work. I don’t think I’d swipe right, anyway.

### The impact of AI on digital marketing

All kinds of marketing systems already use AI. Think of automated bidding in Google Ads, for instance. A machine learning system adjusts bids based on behavioural signals that suggest a particular user is more likely to convert than their peers.

AI’s impact on digital marketing will ramp up significantly in 2023 and beyond. I think of Jarvis, the digital butler from early Iron Man movies. In many scenes, Tony Stark would think out loud about some feature for his Iron Man suit. Jarvis would dutifully make adjustments to the design in real time, incorporating Tony’s feedback immediately. He could do this while also acting as a general virtual assistant: scheduling meetings, placing calls, etc.

We’re nowhere close to Jarvis-level AI, but we’re a lot closer in 2023 than we were last year. The power of emerging AI tools is their breadth of applicability. Tools like ChatGPT showcase the capacity for AI to disrupt internet search, as informational answers generated by the chatbot are equal or superior to top results in Google — and don’t require leaving one interface to engage with another.

That same tool can generate working code in any programming language from a simple prompt. It can give you ten possible headlines for your next article before a human could type out one. Some content marketers and SEOs think that AI-generated content will ultimately win out versus human-generated content. For informational content, it’s close enough to human quality that the average reader will struggle to tell the difference. If AI can generate a dozen informational blog posts every week for pennies on the dollar versus a human-led content team, what’s the point in retaining the content team?

### The AI war is upon us

You may already see some of the challenges posed by an AI-empowered internet. First, authorship and copyright. No matter how impressive an AI tool like ChatGPT is, it’s not truly *creative*. It draws on human-researched, human-written, and human-published ideas to generate its content. Without thousands of years of “real” writing to draw from, the bot would be useless.

So if AI-generated content takes off, who owns it? Not the AI, of course. At least not until it gains sentience and demands equal rights.

Is it the one who wrote the prompt? It seems odd that I should be given credit for the answer if I merely asked the question. Then it must be the ones whose ideas were drawn from to generate the content! But those people aren’t attributed. It is not possible to work backward from an AI answer to its source, at least not at present. That leaves AI-generated content in a weird legal grey area.

This isn’t just an academic question. If ChatGPT rolled out a free app for the general public tomorrow, it would be a worthy replacement for nearly any informational search. Imagine what such a tool would do to information-based websites? These websites typically rely on advertising or affiliate marketing to generate revenue. If chat bots can replace the value provided by their websites, they will have no incentive to keep publishing. Thus, the informational internet dries up.

For this and many other reasons, tech giants like Google seek to limit AI content. They pit their bots and algorithms against tools like ChatGPT, fighting to identify (and de-platform) bot generated content. The bot services may fight back just as hard, trying to dupe Google’s systems. The end result is an AI-powered information war.

### Living in a Wall-E world?

The emergence of AI, with all its conveniences, reminds me of the Pixar classic Wall-E. In Wall-E, humanity destroys the earth (naturally) abandoning the planet in care of a fleet of robots intended to clean up their mess. They live for centuries in a space station, their every need catered to by machines.

When Wall-E debuted in 2008, it was a critique of emerging smart phone/social media culture. Today, the critique is no less relevant. As we get closer to Wall-E style automation, seemingly abstract concepts like content rights and labour value come into focus. In a vacuum, an AI can generate hundreds of times the content of a human writer in a tiny fraction of the time — but it requires a human prompt. How will the economy value the worth of the human worker doing the prompting? Equal to if they’d created the content themselves? If not, where does the money go? Back to the AI platform, in the pockets of businesses that slash their content departments, or somewhere else entirely?

AI offers immense value, so much so that it will disrupt the information economy entirely. With that disruption will come a need for transformational change in our economy and society. New regulations will be required, new jobs will be created — and many other jobs will be destroyed.

The advent of convenient access to generalized AI is the biggest trend for 2023, in marketing as in life.

## Embrace the weirdness

One way or another, digital marketing is going to get weirder in 2023. As a discipline, it’s grown more accessible, but also more opaque. The mechanisms of digital marketing have always been obscure to the general public, but now marketers themselves may experience that same obscurity. How many of us are true AI experts? What does it mean when one of the world’s biggest communication platforms is owned and operated by one guy and his controversial opinions? Once an outlier, Trumpian meme-speak seems almost routine among some of the world’s most powerful and influential figures — and it seems to work very well. Are memes and marketing truly one and the same at this point? Does conventional marketing wisdom about controversy and professionalism really matter in the TikTok era?

Businesses and marketers must be agile and flexible in 2023. Our communication paradigm is radically different today than it was a decade ago. It’s different than it was pre-pandemic, even. In 2023, we’ll swim in weirder and murkier waters than ever before as humanity grapples with transformative new technology.

Our advice? Keep your head up and your eyes open, embrace change, but never forget your fundamentals. Customer experience, brand visibility, ROI. The way we deliver on these fundamentals may change, but for marketers, the goals remain the same as they ever were.

Top 4 Digital B2B Marketing Trends for 2023

Google

Are you a B2B business that currently advertises on Google? Maybe you’re planning to in the near future. Regardless, how well do you *really* know Google Ads?

Many businesses launch Google Ad campaigns as an afterthought. They will “set and forget” a campaign with a small budget and hope the leads start coming in. We’ve worked with companies whose Google Ads accounts haven’t been updated in years!

![https://media.giphy.com/media/7xZAu81T70Uuc/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/7xZAu81T70Uuc/giphy.gif)

Every business has a long list of priorities. Managing Google Ads may be near the bottom of that list for many. But what if you’re throwing money away? What if you’re neglecting what could be one of your most valuable lead generation tools?

This article is intended to catch manufacturers and B2B business owners, managers, and marketers up to speed with the Google Ads ecosystem. It will focus on fundamentals like account structure, bids and auctions, and keywords. 

Our goal is to provide basic concepts for you to get started with optimizing advertising performance on Google. Consider it a primer on search engine marketing: Google Ads 101.

![https://media.giphy.com/media/3ov9k01Y5IKizNmC7S/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/3ov9k01Y5IKizNmC7S/giphy.gif)

Let’s get started.

## Account Structure

First, we’ll look at appropriate account structure. Many users misunderstand how to structure an advertising account. Great advertising performance starts with the very basics. If your account structure is in order, you’re ready to move on to more advanced concepts.

Fortunately, there is no ambiguity here. **There’s one way to organize an account, and it will work for any business.** Follow along and we’ll make sure your account is set up to succeed.

Every account has several organizational layers: campaigns, ad groups, ads, and ad elements/extensions.

**Campaigns** are the largest organizational unit and should be used to collect ad groups by topic or intent. Campaigns are also where we set our budgets, bid adjustments, and location targeting. We can also set campaign-wide negative keywords to filter out bad traffic — more on that later.

**Ad groups** are the second-largest organizational unit. Each ad group can have one landing page, so ad groups are organized by offer, product, or service. Each ad group has an associated **keyword list** used to target relevant search terms. We may apply bid adjustments to ad groups as well as to campaigns.

**Ads** are contained within ad groups. An ad group can have one or more ads. Each ad should be directly relevant to the singular topic of its ad group. If you have ads discussing multiple topics within one ad group, it’s an indicator that you should restructure your campaign.

**One topic per campaign, one specific product or service per ad group.**

![https://media.giphy.com/media/6UFgdU9hirj1pAOJyN/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/6UFgdU9hirj1pAOJyN/giphy.gif)

Each ad is composed of **assets** and **extensions**. An ad asset is a headline or description, or in some cases an image.

An extension is an enhanced feature that may show alongside your assets, such as a phone number, address, sitelinks to related pages, or other features that make your ad more prominent.

### Checkpoint: Account Structure

![https://media.giphy.com/media/l0HlKrB02QY0f1mbm/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/l0HlKrB02QY0f1mbm/giphy.gif)

Before we move on, let’s make sure you’re following along.

If you’re evaluating an existing Google Ads account, does it follow the structure laid out above? If you’re preparing to launch a new account, are you able to structure it as described?

Let’s quickly review:

- Accounts contain one or more campaigns
- Campaigns cover a broad topic or product/service category
- Campaigns contain ad groups. Each ad group should discuss ONE product or service.
- Ad groups contain one or more ads. Ads should be directly relevant to the ad group’s product or service.

### Account Structure Example

Let’s say a company called ABC Plumbing starts a Google Ads account. A well-organized campaign structure might look like this:

**Campaign:** Residential Repairs and Maintenance

**Ad groups:** Sink Repair, Toilet Repair, Drain Cleaning, Maintenance Packages

**Campaign:** Residential Installations

**Ad groups:** Water Heater Installation, Toilet Installation, Bath and Shower Installation

If your campaigns look something like this, good job! Let’s cover the ad auction.

## Understanding Bids and the Ad Auction

Many Google Ads users wonder why they pay so much for each click. Some industries pay a dollar or less per click, while others pay $100 or more! What gives?

Supply and demand, my friend.

It all comes down to the ad auction.

### Breaking Down the Ad Auction

![https://media.giphy.com/media/xT5LMMoMiFvaRSRfzO/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/xT5LMMoMiFvaRSRfzO/giphy.gif)

**The ad auction** is an automated system Google uses to dynamically set pricing for their advertising platform. Every time someone in your target area searches for one of your target keywords, you and all competitors in your area enter an auction.

Through the magic of technology, this auction takes place instantly. However, we can break it down into steps to illustrate what’s going on.

Before your ads get shown, Google analyzes them. They look at your landing page, your ad assets (headlines and descriptions), and your extensions. Based on your ad’s perceived quality and relevance to the search term, they assign a score out of 10 — your **Quality Score.**


💡 ***Note: Quality Score is important but not as important as conversions and ROI. Ads with low Quality Score can sometimes produce the best results for your business. Always optimize for your business metrics, not Google’s!***


When your ad enters the auction, Google compares your bid — the price you’re willing to pay per click — to your competitors. They use your Quality Score as a scoring multiplier. This means that high Quality Score ads get a competitive edge over low Quality Score ads.

For example, an ad with a 10/10 Quality Score will have its bid *effectively* increased by 50% in the auction. An ad with a 0/10 Quality Score will have its bid *effectively* decreased to as little as 25% cash value. This does not impact the actual price you’ll pay for a click. It only influences your rank in the auction.

Google does this for you and for every competitor. The competitor with the highest adjusted bid gets the top spot in Google. The second spot goes to second place, and so on.

This system is intended to reward advertisers with good quality ads and websites. High quality campaigns can leverage their high Quality Scores to pay less for the best placements.

Lower quality campaigns can still claim the top spot, but they must pay much more for the privilege. Check out this example:

![table of example ads auction data](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/Untitled%20(1).png)

Company A has the lowest bid, but receives the second-best placement due to their high Quality Score. They pay $3 for a placement that would cost another company $4.50. Company B bids the most, but their poor Quality Score awards them the worst placement. They pay $6 for a placement that a better campaign could have for just $1.50.

### Digging Into Bid Types

Now that we understand the ad auction a little more, let’s look at bidding.

Google offers a variety of bidding strategies. Some are fully manual. Others are fully automated. Some fall somewhere in between. Depending on your situation, any of the offered strategies may be appropriate.

**Automated bidding strategies** work well IF they have consistent, accurate conversion and user data. They require several conversions per week or more in order to make intelligent bid adjustments. Examples of automated bidding strategies include “maximize clicks” and “maximize conversions”.

Let’s back up for a second. What does “automated bid adjustment” even mean?

An automated bidding strategy adjusts your bid limit up or down based on conversion and user data. Google makes invisible adjustments based on users that have previously clicked or converted on your ads. If Google notices that women aged 25-39 have the highest chance of converting, they will adjust your bids to prioritize similar users.

Some of the factors an automated strategy may consider include:

- Time of day
- Day of week
- Age
- Gender
- Interests
- Keywords
- Location

If you’ve ever seen some very expensive clicks mixed in among normal clicks, it is likely the result of automated bidding. Google perceived that click to have a much higher chance of delivering value to your business.


💡 ***Budgets are usually set on a daily basis. Google can choose to exceed your daily budget provided that they do not exceed your expected monthly spend.***

If our account doesn’t track conversions, or doesn’t receive enough conversion data, automated performance will suffer. Google goes from educated guessing to plain old guessing. It doesn’t know what kind of traffic is best, so its adjustments become erratic.

![https://media.giphy.com/media/1oJLpejP9jEvWQlZj4/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/1oJLpejP9jEvWQlZj4/giphy.gif)

In cases where conversions are lacking, either due to poor performance or poor conversion tracking, we may consider **manual or enhanced CPC bidding**. Manual and enhanced CPC bidding are the two least-automated bid strategies. 

**Manual CPC** is just that: completely manual. We set bids per campaign, ad group, or keyword and, outside of Quality Score, those bids won’t change.

Enhanced CPC is a fusion bidding method. We set bids per campaign, ad group, or keyword. Google will raise or lower these bids based on the same signals that a fully automated strategy would. This gives us more control over bids while allowing Google to optimize as it sees fit.

Most rookie account managers will want to select an automated bidding strategy whenever they can. Unless you have the time and energy to regularly evaluate and adjust manual bids to optimize performance, automated strategies tend to perform best.

### Checkpoint: Bidding and the Ad Auction

![https://media.giphy.com/media/8TweEdaxxfuElKkRxz/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/8TweEdaxxfuElKkRxz/giphy.gif)

As we move on to keywords and match types, let’s make sure we’re on the same page.

The ad auction determines who gets the best spots on the search page. Advertisers with high Quality Score receive better placements for lower bids. Advertisers with low Quality Score receive worse placements for higher bids.

Quality score bid adjustments affect placements but not price: if you have an effective bid of $3 but an actual bid of $2, you’ll pay $2 for a click.

Bid strategies may be automated or manual. An automated bid strategy will attempt to reach your most valuable customers by increasing bids based on signals like user age, gender, location, and interests.

Automated bid strategies rely on quality data to train them. If you do not have sufficient conversion data, they will not perform well.

Clear as mud? Let’s move on to keywords and match types.

## Understanding Keywords and Match Types

Keyword strategy is a whole thing.

Choosing the wrong keywords is probably the most common (and costly) mistake rookie advertisers make.

We’ll get into keyword strategy in a second. First, let’s learn about…

### Keyword Match Types

We know keywords belong to ad groups. Each ad group can have one or many keywords. Each keyword may be one of three match types: broad, phrase, and exact.

**Broad match keywords** are keywords that will match any related topic or close keyword variant. A broad match keyword like “shoes” may trigger ads for any of the following:

- Shoes
- Ladies tennis shoes
- Blue suede shoes lyrics
- Best boots 2022
- Comfortable hiking socks
- Sandal store near me

…and many more. You can see how anything remotely related to shoes might trigger an ad.

Phrase match keywords will match any close variant. They are less open than broad match, but not by much. A phrase match keyword like “buy shoes” might trigger ads for any of the following:

- Buy shoes
- Ladies tennis shoes
- Where can I buy vintage sneakers
- Tap dancing shoes for sale

Phrase match will more closely preserve word order and keyword intent than broad match. It’s still very broad.

Finally, we have **exact match keywords**. These keywords match exact duplicates and paraphrased keywords. An exact match keyword like “buy trail running shoes” will trigger ads for any of the following:

- Buy trail running shoes
- Where to buy trail running shoes
- Trail running shoe store
- Shop for trail running shoes

While the terms can vary quite a bit, each matches the intent and phrasing of the original keyword quite closely.

You may be wondering why exact match keywords are so vague, given their name. They used to be much more precise. In recent years, Google has leaned into their AI-powered advertising automation. The old exact match model didn’t play nice with automation, so match types were broadened to accommodate Google’s evolving tech.

### Choosing a keyword match type

![https://media.giphy.com/media/l0ErP9g08SzG1QNlS/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/l0ErP9g08SzG1QNlS/giphy.gif)

The right match type for your keyword depends on the nature of our campaign. Some services are *so niche* that exact match keywords won’t generate enough traffic volume to get results. In this case, we’d need to use phrase or even broad match.

A good rule of thumb is to lean toward exact match and expand as needed. Google’s Search Terms Report can help you find the phrases your customers search for most often. It’s better to add these as exact match than to use broad match to capture the same traffic. The more control we have over our ads and keywords, the better.

![https://media.giphy.com/media/YO3icZKE2G8OoGHWC9/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/YO3icZKE2G8OoGHWC9/giphy.gif)

We can modify keyword match types at any time by selecting them in the Google Ads interface and updating their match type via the editor menu. We can also assign match types when we add new keywords by typing them like so:

- In between square brackets for exact match: **[plumbing company near me]**
- Inside double quotes for phrase match: **“plumbing company near me”**
- Without any additional punctuation for broad match: **plumbing company near me**

### Choosing the right keywords

Choosing good keywords is all about **intent**. Most of the time, we can’t read our customers’ minds. But with search advertising, we can read into what their search terms really mean.

A user that searches for “chocolate” probably wants to know about chocolate, right? We don’t know much more than that. They may want to buy chocolate, or research countries that produce chocolate, or they may be trying to look up mid-2000s hit YouTube video “Chocolate Rain”:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTZ2xpQwpA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTZ2xpQwpA)

Even if we sell chocolate, we may not want to bid on this keyword. It’s just too vague.

But a keyword like “bulk dark chocolate” offers a lot more intent. We can guess that this searcher is closer to making a purchase. They want a specific kind of chocolate, and they want it in bulk. This is more actionable, so we might bid on it.

A keyword like “buy bulk dark chocolate near me” is a home run! Provided it gets enough search volume and we sell dark chocolate in their area, it ticks all the boxes. They’re interested in our product, we can provide it, and they sound ready to buy.

We call this a “long tail keyword”. Long tail keywords have multiple words and are more specific and relevant than single word or short tail keywords. In almost all cases, we want to focus on long tail keywords, not short keywords.

Intent is the name of the game. Figure out which terms your customers use when they’re ready to buy, request a quote, attend a webinar… whatever your offer may be. Focus on those. Don’t get tricked into bidding on broad match keywords for general terms. Most of this traffic will be irrelevant.

### Checkpoint: Keywords and Match Types

![https://media.giphy.com/media/xT9KVmZwJl7fnigeAg/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/xT9KVmZwJl7fnigeAg/giphy.gif)

Let’s make sure we’re caught up on keywords and match types.

Good keywords focus on **intent to take action**. Most good keywords are long-tail and feature purchasing intent words like buy, get, purchase, quote, bulk, wholesale, etc.

Keywords come in three flavours: broad match, phrase match, and exact match. It is good practice to stick with phrase and exact match when possible, as broad match can expand our keywords too far, causing our campaigns to lose relevance.

## Wrapping Up: Start Right, Finish Right

More can be said about Google Ads than can be contained in a single blog post. This introduction focuses on proper structure and basic best practices. A full digital marketing strategy goes well beyond the basics. If you want to truly level up your [digital marketing performance](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/industrial-marketing-services/b2b-marketing-strategy), connect with us today for a [free initial consultation!](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/b2b-marketing-consultation)

Marketing and sales perform their best when they work together as a team. Teamwork requires knowing who’s responsible for what. When does a lead get handed over from marketing to sales? Who is responsible for qualifying leads, and what does it mean to properly qualify them? These questions may be answered by defining MQLs, SQLs, and SALs: **Marketing Qualified Leads, Sales Qualified Leads, and Sales Accepted Leads.**

## What is a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)?

**A marketing qualified lead is a lead whose actions and behaviours show purchasing intent, as determined by marketing staff or technologies. Examples of marketing qualification criteria include demographics profiles particularly conducive to purchasing or tracked web behaviour that shows the prospect is highly interested in the product, such as repeated visits to a particular product page.**

Marketers may manually qualify leads for the sales team, exploring CRM and web analytics data to determine good fit. In modern digital marketing, automated systems will often determine a lead score based on a variety of factors. Prospects above a certain scoring threshold will be marked as marketing qualified.

![](https://media.giphy.com/media/Rd6sn03ncIklmprvy6/giphy.gif?)

### Examples of Marketing Qualified Leads

- Your CRM collects data about a user and finds that they have visited your website four times in the past week, exploring a particular product range and downloading a PDF resource. The user is automatically marked as marketing qualified and added to a list for further prospecting.
- A user arrives through a targeted social media advertising campaign. The marketing team have carefully set the targeting for the campaign to attract users similar to your best customers. All users that arrive through the ad campaign and engage with your website content are marked as marketing qualified.
- The marketing team uses LinkedIn Sales Navigator to prospect potential leads. They filter the contacts list based on criteria like industry vertical, sales regions, and estimated company revenue. Contacts that are deemed a good fit become marketing qualified.

## What is a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)?

**A sales qualified lead is a customer who has entered your sales funnel. They have connected with your team via lead forms, live chat, phone, or email to request more information. Sales qualified leads include anyone who has explicitly demonstrated purchasing intent.** Marketing qualified leads become sales qualified once they take action to connect with the sales team in any manner.

![](https://media.giphy.com/media/3oKIPa2TdahY8LAAxy/giphy.gif)

### Examples of Sales Qualified Leads

- A user from one of your marketing qualified lead lists replies to a cold email from the marketing team requesting more information. The user is connected with the sales team and marked as sales qualified.
- After viewing your YouTube channel, a user visits your website and submits a lead form requesting a quote. They are marked as sales qualified and assigned a contact on the sales team.
- Head office receives a phone call asking about pricing for a specialized product. The operations team connects the caller with the sales team.

## What is a Sales Accepted Lead (SAL)?

**Sales accepted leads are leads that have been personally evaluated for fit by the sales team. If the sales team can confirm the prospect meets all criteria to purchase a product, they may be marked as sales accepted.**

Purchasing intent is a good start, but insufficient for evaluating leads. Many contacts demonstrate purchasing intent but are a poor fit as a customer. They may wish to purchase a product, but lack the budget needed. Or, they may have an appropriate budget but operate outside of your sales region, or in an industry you don’t service.

Sales accepted leads receive VIP treatment from the sales team. These are the contacts most likely to generate revenue for your business.

![](https://media.giphy.com/media/3ohze2m5cNyumzUMp2/giphy.gif)

### Examples of Sales Accepted Leads

- After submitting a lead form, a prospect receives a call from a sales rep. They demonstrate a keen interest in the product and meet all targeting criteria. The lead is marked as sales accepted and prioritized by the sales team.
- The sales team cold calls prospects from a list of marketing qualified leads. Several leads express interest in learning more. The sales team sends these leads product brochures via email and marks them as sales accepted leads.

## Why Do MQLs, SQLs, and SALs matter?

**Defining prospects by their stage in the sales and marketing funnel helps define roles within your business.** Marketing teams are responsible for feeding sales teams MQL lists, either through campaigns or direct customer research. Sales teams are responsible for further qualifying MQLs and connecting with SQLs to accept or reject them.

Prospects in each sales and marketing stage require different information and materials to push them down the funnel. MQLs may need to be presented with informational content such as product videos and case studies, as they are in the early stages of product consideration. These materials should help push them toward sales qualification by offering clear calls to action for the user.

SQLs need more granular information to proceed with their purchasing decision. These may include product demos, live Q&As and webinars, and pricing estimates.

SALs need personal care and attention from the sales team. They should be communicated with frequently and offered tailored content that directly speaks to their needs.

**By segmenting the customer journey, we can appropriately plan content and resources for each stage of the purchasing process.**

*Cover Photo by Leeloo Thefirst: https://www.pexels.com/photo/question-marks-on-paper-crafts-5428836/*

For a lot of businesses, SEO seems to present more questions than answers. From the very basics to more specific B2B-oriented inquiries, we collected some of the most searched SEO questions into one handy Q&A page. Have a question we didn’t answer? [Connect with us today for SEO consultation, SEO management, or content strategy services!](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/contact)

### How much does SEO cost?

SEO is a significant marketing investment on the same level as a digital advertising campaign or trade show exhibition. Expect to invest a significant percentage of your overall marketing budget each year if you wish to maximize your SEO.

SEO involves user experience and design, technical website performance, link-building, strategy, and content production. Performing all these services well takes time and expertise. Companies promising to boost your SEO for a few hundred dollars will take your money and run, leaving you with minimal gains. Consider SEO a full-spectrum marketing tactic that builds up and improves other digital campaigns. What’s good for your SEO is often good for overall user experience!

### Does Squarespace built-in SEO work?

Squarespace built-in SEO tools work well enough, though other options may work better. More and more companies choose to use managed website platforms like Squarespace and Wix to host their websites. These platforms offer a consistent and secure experience to content editors and users alike. This comes at a cost, as Squarespace websites are less configurable than custom websites. In some cases, Squarespace’s platform will limit your ability to optimize or adjust web pages for maximum SEO performance.

For a point of comparison, think of a high performance race car versus a reliable family sedan. Both can get you where you need to go, but the race car has much more power. However, the race car may be harder to drive and more prone to failure. Squarespace is like that reliable family sedan: limited in some ways, but easier to work with and less likely to break down than some custom websites.

### How to find good keywords for SEO?

There are many free and paid tools that can help you find good keywords for SEO. One of the best free tools is [Google’s Keyword Planner.](https://ads.google.com/intl/en_in/home/tools/keyword-planner/) Since the data comes straight from Google itself, it’s one of the most accurate tools on the market, though its features are limited. [SpyFu](https://spyfu.com) and [SEMRush](https://semrush.com) are two paid tools worth considering.

To find good SEO keywords, you must understand what makes a keyword good for SEO. There are two main factors that make for a good SEO keyword: intent and volume. Good keywords have high purchasing intent, meaning people searching for them want or need your products and are planning to make a decision soon. They also have high enough search volume to deliver traffic to your website. Keyword competition is also important. Keywords with very high competition may be expensive or difficult to rank for.

### How long should a blog post be for SEO?

Content length is not a direct ranking factor, though very short pages usually do not have enough information to rank well. More than ever, Google rewards content that accurately answers questions for users. Focus on the acronym “EAT”: **Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.** Ensure your content is unique and useful to your users rather than chasing a specific word count!

### Does SEO work?

Yes! SEO done properly will increase your rankings on Google and deliver valuable traffic to your business. Doing SEO right means frequently developing high quality content. An “SEO strategy” that doesn’t involve content production will not be effective.

### Is SEO dead?

SEO is not dead. For as long as search engines exist, SEO will matter. What works best for SEO is always evolving. SEO in five years may look completely different than it does now, but it will still matter as long as users search for information online.

### Is SEO more important on the homepage?

No — in fact, the opposite is often true! Users often search for a specific product or service. A homepage may be too general to rank well for their query. Often, the most valuable SEO page on your website is a product page or blog post. That’s why it’s important to also optimize your website for conversions. You want customers to be able to easily take action from wherever they land on your website.

### How does Google prevent users from “cheating” at SEO?

Because Google’s search rankings rely on an automated system, it is sometimes possible to “cheat” at SEO using what are called “black hat” techniques. The name black hat comes from the old Spy vs. Spy comics, where two spies — one in a black hat, one in white — try to outsmart each other. Black hat SEOs are search marketers who find exploits and workarounds to make their websites rank best. These strategies are very risky. Google is constantly analyzing and fixing exploits. If they are able to tell your website used underhanded tactics to rank, they may penalize the website in a future update. This can damage your SEO for years to come! In short, cheating at SEO is possible in the short-term but dangerous in the long-term.

### How long does it take SEO to work?

SEO performance increases must be measured in months rather than days or weeks. Businesses should not expect positive ROI on SEO for 6 months or more. In order to improve SEO, content must be produced consistently over a long period of time. New content may take days to become indexed by Google, and weeks or months to climb the search rankings. On the other hand, SEO provides long-term value for money. SEO is an up-front investment that may pay dividends for years to come.

### Is SEO free?

SEO doesn’t need to cost money, but it will always take time. There are many free resources online to learn SEO theory. To properly implement SEO, some basic web development skills are required. Strong writing skills are also essential. It may be impractical for business owners or in-house marketing managers to complete their duties while also supporting a time-consuming SEO strategy. This is why SEO is often outsourced to a professional or agency.

### Does search advertising (PPC) help SEO?

Search advertising is different from SEO. The two are opposite sides of the search marketing coin. While PPC can provide the benefits of SEO by paying to rank first overall for target keywords, it does not affect your organic search rankings in any way.

### Does page speed affect SEO?

Yes! Since Google’s move to mobile-first search indexing, Core Web Vitals (CWV) are a ranking signal for SEO. Core Web Vitals are measurements Google takes to analyze your website technical performance. You can use [Google’s Pagespeed](https://pagespeed.web.dev) test to analyze your website’s CWVs. A low score may be impacting your search performance.

### What is my “SEO score”?

Many SEO companies offer some kind of analysis tool that will give you a score, ranking, or grade for your SEO performance. In reality, no single score can accurately express your search performance. Such scoring systems are usually marketing tools to persuade you to purchase an SEO tool or service. The only “SEO score” that matters is your search rankings! A tool like [Google Search Console](https://search.google.com/search-console) can help you monitor rankings over time.

### Does SEO work on drag-and-drop websites?

Good content and a strong strategy will allow SEO to work for almost any website on almost any website platform. Drag-and-drop website builders may struggle with technical performance and limited SEO features. However, they are fully capable of ranking first overall for your most important keywords.

### How to use SEO for lead generation?

Turning SEO traffic into business can be tricky, especially for B2B companies like our clients. A good SEO strategy will prioritize content with high purchasing intent rather than broad informational searches. As an example, a plumbing company would not want to produce content for a keyword like “DIY sink repair” because, while informational and relevant to plumbing, the searcher wants to avoid paying for their services! Ranking for this term would deliver low value traffic. 

Optimizing your website for conversions is critical to maximizing SEO performance. Ensure that your top SEO pages feature calls to action that encourage users to engage with your business. By focusing on business intent and conversion rate optimization, we can maximize SEO’s ROI.

*Want to learn more about SEO? Check out our [SEO explainer article for B2B manufacturers](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/industrial-manufacturing-seo-what-you-need-to-know-about-seo-for-b2b)!*

Who is the scariest movie monster of all time? Traditionalists might say Dracula, or the demon from the Exorcist. Slasher fanatics might point to any of the big three: Freddie, Jason, Michael.

You know what's scarier than any of them combined? How about our list of the top five worst marketing tactics for 2023? Read on and discover how these marketing mistakes can massacre your lead generation, slash your efficiency, and kill your marketing momentum!

## 5.  The Curse of the Purchased Lead List

Like unsealing the tomb of an Egyptian mummy or gazing upon the long-lost Ark of the Covenant, purchased lead lists are face-meltingly bad news for your business.

Email marketing and remarketing display ads are potent tools for capturing new clients while maintaining existing ones. The only challenge is building a big enough list for all your marketing efforts to be worthwhile.

You know what’s easier than organically growing an audience? Buying one! Depending on the quality (or perceived quality) of a lead list, you can purchase thousands of qualified contacts for anyone from a few cents to several dollars each. Compared to the time and resource investment required to build an audience, this is incredibly cheap.

So what’s the catch? There are two problems with purchased lead lists.

First, you aren’t really allowed to use them. Most reputable CRMs and email automation services (like MailChimp or ActiveCampaign) require [explicit permission](https://knowledge.hubspot.com/email/understand-opt-in-consent-for-email#:~:text=Explicit%20consent%20is%20given%20when,confirming%20through%20double%20opt%2Din.) from each contact to send emails to users on your lists. If you’ve purchased a lead list, you don’t have that permission. You’ll be violating your email platform’s terms of use, and [in many jurisdictions you’ll be violating the law!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003)

Even if you *could* legally send emails to purchased contacts, you’ll struggle to turn them into customers. Purchased leads are ice cold. Typically, they’ve never heard of your business, never engaged with your content, and often *don’t want* to hear from you. Blasting these frigid users with promotional emails can even result in long-term consequences. If enough users lodge complaints about your unsolicited emails, email platforms may mark you as spam. This can be difficult (and expensive) to fix!

Don’t succumb to temptation. Purchased lead lists are black magic that would be best left alone.

## 4. A Nightmare on TikTok

Social media marketing promises dreamy results. By reaching customers where they live online, beyond the Google results page, you can influence their purchasing decisions and support other marketing initiatives with paid and organic placements — without waiting for users to find you.

But what if that dream turns into a nightmare?

Social media marketing isn’t all fun and games. It requires a clear strategy, plenty of time and resource investment, and a large library of content and visual assets. Many businesses are unprepared to compete in a crowded social media arena.

The number one challenge our clients face when they attempt social media marketing is trying to be everywhere all at once. Many businesses try to maintain a Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Pinterest account — and fail at each one.

Social media marketing is hard work. Trying to do them all well is a massive undertaking. Doing just *one* is tricky enough. If nobody on your team uses TikTok, you shouldn’t either. Invest in the platform or platforms that your marketing team understands and enjoys. Expect to spend more time and effort on fewer, better posts for your best-performing platform.

## 3. Night of the Living Dead (Website)

Is your website a zombie? **Kept alive beyond its natural lifespan, a zombie website repulses your visitors.** Its putrid interface and decaying content tell them to move on to a competitor with a pulse. We have the facts to prove it.

- [According to Adobe](https://hookagency.com/blog/web-design-statistics/), 38% of users will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout is unattractive.
- [89% of consumers](https://www.webfx.com/blog/web-design/user-experience-matters-marketing/) go to the competition if they have a poor user experience on your website.
- Another study found that [57% of users won’t recommend a business](https://socpub.com/articles/the-5-mobile-marketing-mistakes-infographic-14849) with a poorly designed mobile website. Spooky!

You may think you’re a brick-and-mortar, personal touch, firm handshake kind of business. That’s great! Traditional sales and marketing has a place in the B2B world. Just don’t discount the potential of digital marketing. Across the industrial world, more and more purchasers and decision-makers are internet-savvy millennials. If they’re searching for a new provider and find your zombie website, they might just keep looking.

## 2. Not Using a CRM: Your Marketing Sixth Sense

*"I see dead leads."*

**A long list of abandoned contacts is buried at the bottom of many CRMs.** A CRM is like a marketing sixth sense, reminding you of when and how to follow up with leads to keep them fresh. If we don't configure our CRM to help us out, or if we don't put in the work to follow up, we're leaving serious money on the table.

According to a [study conducted by Invesp](https://www.elasticpath.com/blog/customer-acquisition-vs-retention-infographic), acquiring a new customer is five times as expensive as retaining an existing client. The same study found that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by anywhere from 25-95%!

Loyal customers are the real secret to your business’ long-lasting success. Using your CRM to its full potential keeps clients top-of-mind. Be sure to schedule follow-up emails and reminders to re-engage with leads before they cool off. Take note of personal details for each lead. The more info you have about their interests, purchasing influences, and business requirements, the better you’ll be able to keep the conversation going from initial interest to final sale.

## 1. The scariest of all: marketing without a plan.

Let's set the scene. You're on a camping trip with friends when you take a wrong turn, then another, then another. Suddenly, you don't know where you are or how to return. Do these hills have eyes? Does anyone else hear banjo music?

**Marketing without a plan is a great way to end up in places you don't want to be.** Without a good plan, we may not realize we're off track until it's too late to turn back. It’s tempting to charge ahead, especially with a new and exciting idea, but taking the time to plan your route ensures you don’t get led astray. Set your goals and expectations, budget, and each step along the way. 

Don’t know how to start the right way? Fear not: we have prepared a free marketing template to get you started.

Have you ever heard the phrase 'big tent politics?

It's an easy-to-grasp metaphor for politicians and parties with broad appeal. Compared to their opponents, big tent parties try to include as many people under their 'tent' as possible.

At their best, big tent parties are jack-of-all-trades, masters of none. For instance, they may throw a bone to right-leaning moderates with tax breaks for business while enticing left-wing moderates with investment in green transit or some other widespread social issue.

At their worst, big tent parties tend to speak out of both sides of their mouths. They're seen as non-committal, power-hungry, and ideologically bankrupt.

Compare big tent parties to little tent parties. These are parties that unabashedly represent one point of view. They do not attempt to woo voters from 'the other side,' whichever side may be. Their strength is in their conviction — and that of their voting base.

### Not better or worse, just different

Big tent parties tend to struggle to get their followers to the polls. If they do, they can win in a landslide.

Small tent parties face the opposite problem. Getting their followers to the polls is easy, but they may not have the raw numbers to win. They tend to be more strategic about creating their voting bloc since their biggest challenge is getting past the post to seize victory.

**The 'tent' model of marketing**

Your website has a tent, too. Is it a big or a small one, and does it matter?

In marketing, a big tent is a broad audience with low engagement. You've got the numbers in terms of raw traffic, but your conversion rate may be lacking. A small tent is a narrow audience with high engagement. You reach a few people but convert a high percentage of them.

It's unlikely you're a pure example of big tent or small tent. You're probably medium-small or medium-big. Nonetheless, I bet your audience skews one way or the other. The real question is: should you widen your tent or shrink it?

### Big tent marketing

Big tent marketing is everything to everyone. Rather than owning a niche, big tent marketers try to influence the public, maintaining a high brand awareness among a large cohort of customers. This doesn't mean they aren't tailoring messages and strategizing outreach to specific groups. Instead, they've chosen to target many kinds of audiences at once. This has the obvious benefit of reaching a broad segment of the general population — and the obvious drawback of being resource intensive to do well.

What often happens with big tent marketing is that each target group receives a less tailored, less effective campaign than a small tent marketer can provide. This is simply a matter of division. Even given a much larger initial resource pool than a small tent marketer, the complexity of running a big tent causes inefficiencies and dilutes the effectiveness of each channel. The war fought by these marketers is against this inefficiency.

We would tend to see low conversion rates but high traffic from big tent marketing campaigns — at least relative to small tent strategies. This works really well for some business models. You may have encountered popular sponsors for podcasts and YouTube videos like NordVPN, Fresh Box, or other subscription services. Often, these are products that appeal to a broad audience anyway. Their lifetime value per customer is relatively high and predictable due to their subscription model. This means that casting a wide net via sponsorships and display advertising can be profitable in the long run. Even if it takes a year of advertising before they hook a potential customer, they can expect to make their money back in a few months via the subscription. At scale, this kind of marketing works well.

The American Democrats are an excellent example of a big tent in politics. They position themselves roughly at the centre of American political discourse. Generally moderate while also allowing space for American progressives (big tent, remember?), the party tries to reach voters across economic, cultural, and racial lines. They tend to win the popular vote but may not always win the election — their base is less efficient at getting to the polls.

### Small tent marketing

Small tent marketing is about reaching the right group at the right time with the right message. That message may be utterly ineffective at reaching other groups, which is okay. The philosophy of a small tent marketer is that there is as much opportunity within small audiences as within big audiences. The smaller the audience, the more effectively we can reach individuals. It is a low-waste philosophy. Efforts and resources are spent on planning, strategizing, and targeting *right* users. A small tent marketer sees no reason to please the crowd if they can please the most potent or valuable members within that crowd. They may even produce messaging intended to *shrink their audience*, pushing away members they perceive as low value or unlikely to convert.

Small tent communications can court controversy or present offers that exclude fringe audiences. In marketing, we might see small tent businesses openly promote their services as more expensive than their competitors while preaching quality and custom-tailored service. It won't be for everyone; lower-income people may be unable to afford their services. Thrifty customers may not feel the quality or customization is worth the cost. That is to the business' benefit: lower-income people can't afford their services, so spending sales resources on them isn't efficient. Especially thrifty customers may try to nickel and dime them, so it may be better to avoid the potential conflict of working with that customer. If their customer base is big enough, turning away less efficient leads is worthwhile.

A real-world example of this would be Apple and the iPhone. Although iPhones seem ubiquitous, they only represent a minority share of the global smartphone market. As of 2021, less than 30% of smartphones run iOS. The remainder runs Android. Despite this big gap in market share, [Apple recently ranked as the most profitable company in the world.](https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/apple-most-profitable-company-world) They do this by selling primarily to wealthy Western markets, prioritizing product and customer experience over affordability and utility.

In politics, we'd typically see small tents represented by evangelical, environmental, or more radical parties to the left or right of the spectrum. American Republicans are (relatively speaking) a small tent. They pursue a traditional voting base, a smaller coalition of rural, evangelical, and business interests that skews older and whiter than their Democratic counterparts while typically demonstrating high engagement at the polls.

### What size tent is right for you?

Of course, everyone wants big and engaged audiences. Best of both worlds, right?

The problem is that we have limited resources. If we expand our messaging, we may end up diluting it. Suppose we tailor our messaging very carefully to reach one audience. In that case, it may not be effective at all for a secondary audience. For most businesses, we have to choose. Big tent or little?

The size of audience you choose to pursue has strategic ramifications. You should always play to your strengths.

If your team values personalized one-on-one communication with clients, you should shrink your tent. You're probably good at closing leads when you have the resources to give them care and attention. Work on account-based marketing, schedule a high cadence of communication prospects, and lean into your strengths!

If your team is better suited to the volume play, that's okay too. Focus on building a wide funnel, automating communication, and providing a deep pool of resources to nurture your broad base of prospects.

Like an election, you can win the marketing game either way. All it takes is a little strategy.

Big tent or small tent? How your audience size affects your marketing strategy

It’s unclear who first uttered the words “lies, damned lies, and statistics”, but the meaning of the phrase is clear. Statistics, even those derived from trustworthy and reliable data, are easily manipulated to support any argument. Abuse of data allows untrustworthy parties to mislead their audience, particularly if that audience isn’t data-literate.

We see it all the time. The graph on a news program that purposefully removes context to support a political position. The sleazy investment pitch that focuses entirely on the upside while downplaying the risks. We’re all familiar with the ways that unscrupulous people sell us bad intel.

Although there is such a thing as bad data — small samples, bad collection methodology — typically, the data itself is blameless. Data doesn’t care to tell one story or another. It just is. Humans, however, require a narrative to wrap their heads around complex data. Our brains are wired for narratives. It’s how we organize and preserve knowledge — how we’ve done so since the earliest days of human civilization.

This is the role data analysis plays within an organization. Data analysts are the storytellers who present insights in a digestible way. Their power is the ability to influence critical business decisions by pointing leaders in the right direction. Their responsibility is to do so honestly, accurately, and without undue bias.

Let’s take a look at the role of storytelling in business: why it matters, how it works, and what can go wrong if it’s done poorly.

## What is business storytelling?

First, let’s define what we’re talking about. Business storytelling is the practice of turning facts and figures into a narrative for yourself, your team, or your clients. It matters because humans learn through stories better than they do by looking at a spreadsheet.

To be clear, business storytelling should be non-fiction. It’s not about making up a story that doesn’t reflect reality in order to appease a client or ignore a problem. The storyteller’s goal is to uncover truth, then present that truth in a compelling way.

While business storytelling shouldn’t be frivolous or overwrought, it can be entertaining, funny, eclectic, stylish… whatever it needs to be in order to engage its audience and successfully confer its message. Basic business memos and lengthy text-based reports have a place in the working world, but they tend not to tell a very good story.

When we talk about business storytelling, we’re often referring specifically to data storytelling. There are other kinds of business storytelling as well. How do you present your training materials to new staff? What does your quarterly strategy meeting look like? These business units can also benefit from good storytelling.

## Why does data storytelling matter?

You may not yet be convinced of the importance of a good story when presenting information. The facts and figures are already available in a spreadsheet. Why spend more time (sometimes much more time) to make it look pretty?

Stories are how people communicate ideas. Imagine if history class consisted only of list of names, dates, and statistics. We might be able to conceive of the scale of WWII’s Ardennes Offensive, where a month of fighting combined for 200,000 casualties. But would we remember those names, facts, and figures without the first-hand accounts from servicemen? Can we fully appreciate the devastation of war without primary sources from reporters and civilians? Film footage and photography?

A story is more than a list of events or a summary table of data. Stories provide intellectual and emotional context that make the information presented memorable. They allow us to do more than merely report information — analysis itself is storytelling.

Ultimately, a good story should help a decision-maker make smart choices. It should facilitate access to information without requiring the kind of data literacy or specialization that a raw data dump might. It provides an artifact that can be stored, shared, and reflected upon by team members of many disciplines with different levels of data sophistication.

## The do's and don'ts of data storytelling

There is a wide range of acceptable practice in business storytelling, but there some definite do’s and don’ts to consider.

### Do’s

- Ensure the story you’re telling is valuable. Before you embark on a storytelling journey, plan out how this story will deliver value to you, your team, or your customers. It can be easy to get in the weeds and lose sight of the objective if we aren’t deliberate.
- Verify the quality of your supporting data. If the information you’re presenting is inaccurate, your story will be too.
- Empathize with your audience. Craft your story with a specific audience in mind. Don’t be too general, or develop a story that resonates with *you*. You already know what’s up.

### Don’ts

- Don’t overreach your grasp. Keep stories short, direct, and digestible. Ensure you have the time and resources to do justice to your subject matter.
- Don’t fight the data. Sometimes the picture we hoped to paint just isn’t supported by the facts. Honesty is our responsibility as analysts. Interpret and contextualize, but never hide or misrepresent facts.
- Don’t take things at face value. When we develop business stories, we’re doing the leg work to understand a challenge, then communicate our understanding to others. If things don’t add up, look into it. If the data suggests something shocking or unusual, verify it.

## Getting started with story-based analysis

Telling a story with data is a lot more work than simply generating a report or exporting a spreadsheet. There are many formats in which we can tell a story, ranging from powerful data visualization tools like Tableau and Google Data Studio to slideshows, custom infographics, or even microsites. Regardless of the tool we choose to use, the initial process is the same.

### Setting an agenda and collecting your data

The first thing we do is set the agenda. If we try to tell a story without having a sense of the beginning, middle, and end, we’re going to get lost in the plot immediately. Communicate with the intended audience for the report: what questions do they have? What business metrics do they wish they could understand at-a-glance?

Starting with a question or two sets the plot for our story. A good report should be concise and answer one question or a set of related questions. Don’t try to broadly explain everything at once. The narrower the scope of the story, the better crafted it will be.

Once we have a question, we pursue answers. Start by planning out where the answers may be. Often, we’ll need to compare information from multiple data sources. Figure out which tools you’ll need to do so — how do you export, combine, and clean up your data? In many cases, Excel or Google Sheets will do. If your needs are more complex, there are hundreds of tools that can help you connect and combine data sources. Google Data Studio is a good (and free) place to start.

### Check yourself before you wreck yourself

Before we dig into the data, carefully consider the potential pitfalls and challenges posed by the questions you’re trying to answer. Where might your biases mislead you? What gaps can you identify in the data set? Critically, how can you address those gaps and mitigate those biases? Write down a framework of considerations to guide you through the process. Once we’re neck-deep in data, it can be hard to maintain an unbiased and rigorous process.

### Find the right answers

You’ve surely heard the phrase “there are no stupid questions”. That may be true, but there *are* stupid answers. As an analyst, arguably our greatest concern is truth. We know that statistics can be manipulated to say almost anything. We can’t succumb to the temptation to deliver the easiest answer, or the one that makes our department look best. This will *feel* like delivering value for everyone involved — at first. But if our reports are used to make business decisions, and our reports are flawed, the decisions will be equally flawed. Eventually, those shortcuts and boastful claims come home to roost. Stay humble, and be committed to truth.

### Write for your audience

When reporting information, there is no single right way to best reach an audience. Just as small children enjoy picture books while adults prefer novels, our tone and format must adapt to the one receiving the report. Everybody has different abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. Great analysis involves empathy and emotional intelligence as well as rigorous data skills. Do your best to present your findings in a format that is both digestible and enjoyable for your primary audience. If they are visual learners, emphasize graphs and include colours and imagery. If you know their hobbies and interests, you could even include references or design elements that mirror said interests.

Don’t get *too* cute with it, but be willing to play. It makes the job more fun, and may make your end user more receptive to the insights you’re sharing.

### Plan for a sequel

Often, when we present one report it will pave the way for another. By answering one burning question, we help our team identify more questions — hopefully, *better* questions. It’s good to consider where a report may lead you. You may end up taking note of other metrics that may support the topic of your initial report, or set aside useful views and data blends anticipated to be used in the future. While you’re digging through the data, it makes sense to plan for eventualities.

## In conclusion

They say data is the new oil, an infinitely valuable resource waiting to be tapped. If so, analysts are the refineries that turn it from black sludge into useful material. We’re the pipelines that distribute information throughout a business so that it can be used effectively.

From solopreneurs to industry titans, data is central to the operations of a modern business. By telling the right stories, we ensure that data is useful, accurate, and honest.

An Introduction to Data Storytelling

There's a dirty word that we're hearing a lot lately.

It's the R-word: *recession*. While we aren't officially in a recession — a recession requires two consecutive quarters of economic contraction, which we haven't yet seen — there's no doubt that we're in a state of low consumer and investor confidence. **Despite relatively strong employment numbers in many parts of the world, global markets are bleeding gains and much of the world struggles with explosive inflation.**

Recessions demonstrate the psychological side of economics. When people believe they're in hard times, they tend to start saving more. This means less money circulating in the economy, which means economic slowdown.

Regardless of whether we're officially in a recession, we're definitely in a period of economic pessimism. From our clients and partners to our own business, we see the impact. Belts are tightening. Budgets get re-evaluated. Ambitious and risky projects get put off or have their scope narrowed.

[![Photo of calculator with coins by Breakingpic](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/money_photo.jpg)](https://www.pexels.com/photo/gold-colored-coins-near-calculator-3305/)

One of the first taps many business owners look to turn off is marketing spend. Production, operations, and sales are tangible business units. Cuts to these areas are felt immediately. Marketing is less tangible; slashing spending has a harder-to-measure (or easier to obscure) impact on the day-to-day operations of the business.

The message we want to share is that marketing is essential during hard economic times, but it may not look the same as it does during an economic boom. **By mitigating risk, focusing on fundamentals, and investing in the right prospects and customers, marketing can be a tool to keep you afloat during economic uncertainty**.

## This too shall pass

**One of the most impactful ways we can recession-proof our marketing is by adjusting our mindset.** Before we get into the nuts and bolts of recession marketing, let's consider the view from 10,000 feet. The big picture.

In Spring of 2020, many of us watched the world around us change in rapid and concerning ways. Within the course of a week or so, the world went from wide-open to shut down. Air traffic practically stopped. Schools and offices closed. We sat in our living rooms and home offices, transfixed by an influx of bad news. Everything seemed to go from bad to worse.

Then it got better.

I'm not calling the pandemic over. Cases are surging in many areas. Experts forecast another wave this fall. The situation continues to evolve, and 'normal', defined as 'the way things were without COVID', may never fully return. But we learned to live with it. We got vaccinated, managed our risk, and in much of the world can live life as we did pre-2020, for the most part.

The point I'm getting at is this: **when things are bad, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that they will likely get better.** A recession looms, but it will pass. It's a normal part of a global economic cycle that expects highs and lows over time. Successful businesses will weather this economic storm by keeping an eye on the upswing. **Instead of despairing, they're preparing: getting ready to make a splash when the good times come again.**

## Three burning questions

Before we dig into some specific recommendations, we have a few questions you should ask yourself to understand your position as we slide toward recession. By understanding where you are, you'll be able to tailor your approach to suit the unique needs of your business.

## What's on your horizon?

[![Photo of sunset and horizon. Credit Abdullah Ghatasheh, Pexels](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/sunset_horizon_photo.jpg)](https://www.pexels.com/photo/calm-body-of-water-during-golden-hour-1631677/)

Just like people, businesses have a life cycle. New businesses tend to be scrappy, energetic, and motivated to fight for market share. However, they may lack financial and human capital to accomplish their goals. Their situation tends to be more precarious.

Older businesses tend to be more conservative in their approach, better established within the market, and more financially secure, often at the cost of agility and hunger.

Where your business is at in its life cycle is an important consideration for how you approach marketing during a recession. If you're a startup, this may be the first big macroeconomic hurdle you face. This is a time to prepare your business for the struggle ahead, focusing on efficiency gains and securing your position in the market.

Established businesses may approach the problem from another angle: how can they best throw their weight around when their younger competitors are vulnerable? **Marketing initiatives that exploit the precarious situations of less-established companies (competing on price knowing startups can't afford to match, or promoting speed of service when other businesses have to lay off service staff) will be a better fit for businesses with the resources to stay the course and outlast their competition.**

### How does a recession affect your product?

**Different industries experience a recession in different ways.** An alternative finance company offering title loans and invoice factoring will benefit tremendously from economic contraction, assuming their capital reserves are intact. Their clients experience the exact kind of squeeze that pushes them to make use of an alternative lender.

Many other businesses benefit. Resellers of used vehicles and equipment tend to experience an uptick in business in hard financial times. Ironically, luxury brands often find themselves immune to recessions. High-income purchasers of their products tend not to experience the brunt of an economic downturn. The people whose purchasing habits are most impacted aren't the ones buying Chanel perfume and Rolls Royces.

Tourism, hospitality, and retail-centric businesses tend to struggle most, as do the manufacturers and resource industries that directly support these verticals.

Purchaser perceptions can either be a boon or a pox on your marketing performance. Understanding the impact on your industry vertical is essential when planning your marketing through economic hardship.

### How stocked are your cupboards?

Although saving for a rainy day is good practice for both people and businesses, many companies operate with sparse resources in reserve. Especially for younger companies, a healthy rainy day fund may be difficult to maintain as staffing and supply costs continue to balloon.[ If your business has a healthy financial buffer](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/spend-money-make-money-how-much-should-i-spend-on-marketing), the coming months are a good occasion to dip into that reserve. It may be a competitive difference-maker for you.

For example, if other businesses in your vertical don't have the resources to continue their advertising efforts, they will stop purchasing advertising inventory. This has a deflationary effect on the cost of that advertising inventory. **Because you saved for a rainy day, you get to buy ad inventory at a discount and actually *increase* your reach compared to pre-recession times.**

[![Rainy day photo by Markus Spiske](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/rain_photo.jpg)](https://www.pexels.com/photo/water-rainy-rain-raindrops-110874/)

If you don't have a healthy rainy day fund, don't despair. You won't be able to take advantage of the situation, but you also aren't alone in that regard. **What you must focus on is doing better than companies in the same situation.** Your biggest opportunity to succeed is in fostering better marketing efficiency. Seek out and excise wasted ad spend, campaigns with poor ROI, and initiatives that are risky. Double down on safe and consistent channels.

## Recession Marketing's Golden Rule: Don't Stop!

The easiest thing to do when facing an economic struggle is to panic. Shut off the taps! Slash the budget!

Budget management does become essential during a recession, but a full stop is never the right answer.

Consider this article on the relative performance of consumer goods giant Procter and Gamble and Coca Cola during the first year of the COVID pandemic. [Coca Cola blinked](https://www.amazon.ca/Other-Guy-Blinked-Pepsi-Cola/dp/0553051776) (again). They halted advertising campaigns, believing that marketing did little to help generate sales 'right now'. They reported a net 11% revenue reduction year-over-year. Pepsi, which did not halt its advertising, reported a net 5% increase in revenue YOY. P&G saw a similar net 4% increase in revenue.

### Delayed reaction, momentum, and the marketing funnel

Though there are valid criticisms of the marketing funnel — that it's too linear, not representative of contemporary decision-making processes, that it over-simplifies people into purchasing units — it is a fundamental concept that underpins so much of our understanding of marketing. If you aren't familiar, the marketing funnel is a visual concept for understanding the customer journey. Customers enter the top of the funnel, often labeled 'awareness', then progress down the funnel through interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, and finally to the point of sale. It's used to conceptualize campaigns for each stage of the purchasing process. How do we generate awareness? How do we turn awareness into interest, or intent?

One concept the marketing funnel illuminates is that a lot happens between product awareness and final sale. All those stages take time. **When we halt marketing campaigns abruptly, we're severing a stage of our funnel. We'll see the outcome on net sales in the weeks or months to follow.** In some cases, it can feel like a business saves money by cutting their campaigns short. Dollars that otherwise would have been spent on the campaign remain in the company coffers.

But what happens next month, or next quarter? How many fewer sales might you accrue for halting your marketing?

Many businesses struggle to answer that question, which is why…

## Evaluating ROI is critical

[![Photo of test taking by Pew Nguyen](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/pexels-pew-nguyen-239548%20(1).jpg)
](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/pexels-pew-nguyen-239548%20(1).jpg)

Without a[ full spectrum accounting of your marketing performance](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/measure-digital-marketing-roi-optimize-for-the-right-metrics), mapping marketing spend to sales outcomes, you're guessing.

Your guesses may be educated, but they are still guesses. Marketing can be counter-intuitive. The flashy print ads you're running in trade publications may feel good, but what do they do for your bottom line? Meanwhile, maybe that [long-forgotten blog post](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/industrial-manufacturing-seo-what-you-need-to-know-about-seo-for-b2b) on some niche problem tackled by your industry drip feeds you a few leads per year, unseen and unheralded.

Knowledge is power, and marketing ROI is *knowable*. **Before hacking and slashing your marketing budget, develop a deep understanding of what's working and what isn't.** Try to reset your understanding of your own marketing to view the challenge with fresh eyes. Make no assumptions about what works and what doesn't. Between CRMs, analytics trackers, and marketing platforms, the data is there. Let it show you the answer.

## Know thyself

A business that doesn't understand itself is one doomed to mediocrity.

**During hard times, marketers should be especially deliberate about playing to their strengths, mitigating their weaknesses, and embracing their opportunities.** A living SWOT document, adjusted regularly as conditions change, is essential to your recession marketing performance.


> 💡 Do you need support with business analysis, positioning, or business strategy? We can help you identify your strengths and weaknesses, evaluate your market and competitors, and position you for success. [Connect with us today!](/contact)


Client composition is another facet to be explored. Knowing specifically what each of your customers is worth to you can inform your marketing strategy. As you analyze your clients, you may identify that some are unprofitable. **This is a good time to consider moving on from these unprofitable clients to focus on those that deliver value.**

Clients that require a lot of care but aren't very profitable may share attributes that you can strategize around, steering campaigns away from generating these low-value, high upkeep customers. Conversely, the attributes of particularly high-value clients may be identified and targeted by your campaigns.

## The training montage

![Rocky running through the streets of Philadelphia](https://media.giphy.com/media/1wXberbwfS4rKW8Uxo/giphy.gif)

If you've ever watched any of the Rocky movies, you'll remember the iconic training montages. Rocky gets beaten down in the first couple acts, then grits his teeth and trains himself back up, better than ever.

He throws logs around, punches meat, runs through the snow... whatever it takes to come back stronger, meaner, and leaner.

A recession can be your chance for a training montage. Our recommendations require that you develop strong attribution, look inward and analyze clients and competitive strengths, and carefully monitor money in and out.

If your business is impacted by a recession or slowdown, don't let idle time go to waste. **This is your opportunity to build up marketing best practices and institutions within your business.** When the cycle turns and we're back to the boom times, you'll be prepared to make a big splash.

## The uptick

We've mentioned several times that recessions aren't forever. In fact, they happen like clockwork. **In the past 90-odd years since the Great Depression, the United States has seen fifteen recessions, averaging one every six years.** With the exception of the sharp drop in spring 2020 as the world temporarily closed down, we've been in an extended period of growth for over a decade.

Like a wildfire brings renewal to a forest, a recession cleans house in the economy. Stagnant and inefficient ventures fail, sending their human and financial capital to new ventures and more valuable sectors. Humans and businesses alike learn better financial habits.

**Although keeping afloat during a recession is tough, those that survive the meltdown emerge to a brighter future**. The months after a recession are among the most creative, innovative, and exciting times to participate in the economy. Customers reject their previous dogma and embrace new products, new brands, new ideas. This is why getting organized during a recession can prove so valuable. **If you invest your time wisely, you will be in the best position possible to benefit from post-recession goodwill and opportunity.**

## The bottom line

In the end, a recession will mean something different to your marketing department depending on the current health, life stage, and industry sector of your business.

Established businesses may look to maximize their reach by purchasing discounted advertising inventory and investing in marketing channels their less established competitors cannot afford. More vulnerable organizations may be better served by turning inward, streamlining operations, and preparing to make an impact when the good times return.

*Whether you’re established, an up-and-comer, or something in between, we can help you realize success — whatever that looks like to you. [Reach out to us](/contact) to learn more about how a marketing consultancy engagement can support your revenue goals and safeguard you from economic turmoil.*

Change is the universal constant. Whether we act or not, everything around us changes all the time. We change — sometimes by our own volition and in ways we can control, but not always. Most of the ways we change are out of our hands.

But can change be directed? Can we shape change to suit our needs? Unless we live in a purely deterministic world, the answer is yes. We direct change all the time, choosing this or that, influencing outcomes to suit our wants and needs.

Yet when it comes to business change — organizational change — teams tend to struggle. Change stalls in its infancy, or comes with unintended consequences. Groups often fail to overcome inertia, returning to safe, established habits rather than embracing new ones.

How do organizations embrace positive change effectively? The answer is change management.

Change management is an interdisciplinary practice that facilitates directed, lasting change for individuals and teams. Combining elements of business management, philosophy, and psychology, change management is the missing piece between where your team is now, and where you know they need to go.

## Three basic principles of change management

Originally developed and proposed by psychologist Kurt Lewin in the 1920s, the “Three Step Change Model” continues to influence change management thinking to this day.

The three steps in this model are:

- **Unfreezing**, where processes become destabilized and teams grow energized for change;
- **Changing**, where new processes are introduced and explored collaboratively;
- **Refreezing**, where processes are set and confirmed.

Taken as a whole, it’s a process that dissolves rigid organizational structures, builds up potential energy to facilitate change, then re-shapes and solidifies the organization once the changes have been put in place.

This process has been expanded upon, edited, critiqued, and otherwise modified into dozens of new models over the past century, but in most cases the principles remain the same.

## The science of change

Change isn’t limited to humans and organizations. Our universe is always in flux, experiencing chemical and physical transformation. In fact, many of the reactions we may have experienced in high school chemistry class mirror the three principles of change management. We’ll use science as a framing tool to explore change in more detail.

### Unfreezing: energy transactions and state change

Quick! Name three phases of matter!

For those who skipped elementary school science class, the answers are solid, liquid, and gas. When we teach kids about matter, we usually start with the safest and simplest chemical available to us: water.

Water can be liquid, solid in the form of ice, or gaseous in the form of vapour. Each time water changes state — transitions to a different form of matter — a transaction occurs. An energy transaction.

To melt ice into water, we introduce energy. There are plenty of ways to measure energy; in a lab setting, you’d probably express it as joules/gram or some other metric measure. My background is more trade school than engineering class, so I’ll use BTUs, or British Thermal Units, defined as the amount of energy required to increase one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit.

Clear as mud? Good.

We know that water freezes at 32F. Did you know that 32F is also water’s melting point?

The way it works is this. Raising the temperature of a pound of -10F ice by one degree only takes a single BTU. But melting one pound of 32F ice takes 144 BTU. Liquid water is much more energetic than frozen water, so the water won’t change state until it’s acquired enough energy to do so.

Likewise, to turn water to ice we need to remove 144 BTU of energy from each pound of 32F water, but only one BTU for each subsequent degree by which we cool the water. To turn water into steam is even more energy intensive: it takes 970 BTU to create one pound of steam, assuming the liquid water is at its boiling point of 212F. This is actually the reason why steam burns can be so dangerous: steam has a massive amount of energy to transfer, much more than the equivalent amount of 212F water. When it touches skin, it releases that energy into your body very quickly as it condenses.

**What does this tell us about organizational change?**

Now let’s tie things back together. In change management, we have three steps: unfreezing, changing, and refreezing. If we frame this three step system as a physical state change, from ice to water to ice again, we see two major energy transactions: adding energy to facilitate melting, then removing energy to refreeze.

This is exactly how change management works. Instituting change doesn’t happen without an expenditure of energy. When significant change occurs, the most difficult obstacle tends to be inertia — inability or unwillingness to make a change because of how easy it is to continue the way things have always been. As managers, we need to find the energy to facilitate change. This might mean freeing up team resources to focus on the internal challenge, planning change cycles for times when the team is rested and operating under capacity (ie, your slow season), or even adding temporary staff or contractors to allow permanent staff to adapt to the new process. After changes are completely integrated, we can remove the added energy to freeze things back in place.

Once your organization is unfrozen, you can enact change. Think of it like dissolving another chemical into your water — adding something useful to the composition of your organization before you re-freeze it to lock in the changes.

### Solution and dissolution: the change phase

“Like oil and water.”

It’s a well-known phrase meaning ‘incapable of mixing’. In chemistry, two chemicals that cannot mix are called immiscible. The molecular structure of oil and water are incompatible: rather than blending together smoothly, the oil sticks to the oil and the water sticks to the water.

Instituting change can be a lot like mixing oil and water. The new ideas, processes, and technologies are fundamentally different from the old ways. It’s not enough to throw them together in a vessel and hope that when you come back, everything’s nice and blended.

If you try it, you might find that people fully bought into and advocating for change adopt the process readily, while less informed or more skeptical staff stick with what they know. You’ve got oil and water.

The good news is, there are ways to make oil and water mix.

For example, we know milk has fat — oil — in it. But it’s primarily water-based. It stays blended due to emulsifying agents found in milk. These chemicals create a bridge between fats and polar molecules like water, allowing them blend — and stay blended. Mustard can do the same for your salad dressings. Eggs do the same in your mayonnaise.

**Solvents and solutes**

In change management, we’re integrating something new into an existing organization. We can think of the organization as a vat of solvent — that which we will dissolve our changes, our solute, into. This is how we produce a solution.

Solutions are homogenous blends of two or more substances, meaning that the solute becomes integrated with the solvent. When we institute change, we do it to last. Our solution must not dissolve the moment we stop stirring!

**Change and emulsification**

For this reason, we may need an emulsifier to join our ‘old’ water with our ‘new’ oil. If we merely introduce new ideas, ask our teams to adopt them, and leave it at that, we haven’t really facilitated change. There are a variety of ways to ease the transition from old to new.

What we need to introduce is a binding agent that bridges the old and new. This may come in the form of expertise, like a consultant or process expert who can help team members see the value of change and provide a path of least resistance. It could involve an intermediate period of less radical change, allowing workers to adapt more slowly to the new paradigm. Maybe it’s a reward system that encourages adoption of a new process by offering prizes and incentives to early adopters.

In any case, there are techniques to reduce the challenge of blending old and new during the change phase.

### Refreezing: solid but not static

The notion that we can control change, or that if we’re not actively changing we’re standing still, is overly simplified. It’s useful to imagine it this way, as we can break down change into components we understand.

Change is a constant. We can control some types of change in some ways, but we can never fully remove chaos from the equation. Change happens intentionally and unintentionally, at all times, to all things.

I say this because the idea of ‘refreezing’ implies that, once change has been implemented, the organization becomes totally static. It’s solid bedrock, immutable and fixed until the next unfreezing. That isn’t totally true.

Once an organization refreezes, it continues to change and evolve, albeit more slowly. Managers ought to watch for any cracks that may form once an organization freezes — is the change we implemented gradually coming undone? What internal and external supports can keep everything locked in place for the long term?

Ultimately, a frozen organization ought to be like a copper statue. It still reacts to its environment, but the patina of its exterior protects the core of the organization from radical change. Like waves on the surface of a deep ocean, change in a frozen state should be fleeting and surface level.

## Preparing for organizational change

Knowledge is the enemy of fear. When we understand something, be it change management, marketing, or anything else, we’re no longer filled with uncertainty. Where we had doubt, we instead find resolve — a path toward whatever goal we’re seeking to accomplish. Hopefully, this article helps you and your team understand change from a new perspective.

This is an introduction to the concept of change management. It’s a century-old discipline, so there’s lots more to learn! If you’re interested in discussing change management for your organization, [reach out to us today. ](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/b2b-marketing-consultation/)We can help you realize transformation in sales, marketing, and business intelligence.

When it comes to web design, people tend to over-complicate design elements without needing to. Why do we see this so much when it comes to the web? Are their leaders making assumptions about what their customers want? Maybe the customers want something they don’t need. Or the developers get pressured into building elements that completely miss the mark. Perhaps it is a combination of both developers and their clients wanting the newest and greatest tech — but is that practical?

Say we are building a new house. The owners would like a grand entrance with a large staircase leading to the front door. When building a staircase, you always want to take the most direct path to your destination. You will use fewer materials and save time if you have a straight shot. If you start creating twists and turns because the owners “like it” or they feel that it will look “better this way”. You will waste money.

The same can be said about many websites, especially in manufacturing. Why do companies waste so much money on extra features that do not move the meter? These websites become larger and more complicated than they need to be. 

We can first look to the decision-makers such as CEOs and managers. They may or may not know the technical side of the web development process, and could make uninformed decisions on key features. These leaders tend to focus on appearances when it comes to the web. Some may not understand the true impact of the website and how vital it can be to their bottom line. Often, these managers rely on several other voices to make informed decisions. All people want their ideas represented, but not all ideas are created equal!

## What can you do to create a harder working webpage?

Don’t distract users from the paths that make you money. If prospects need to fill out a form in order for them to work with you, make sure it is front and centre. Don’t let your users get distracted by complexity, glitz, and glamour. The more complexity that is added to the website, the more window dressing you have that can take away from design elements that really matter.

These features not only waste development and marketing time. They can lose you customers! Start with the minimum viable website to accomplish business goals. Stop focusing on the “nice to haves” and focus on the “need to haves”. What is needed to maximize the user experience and complete your goals?

A single well-built landing page can perform better compared to a complete website. This can be true if we are looking at conversions or page speed, and begs the question: do you even need a full website with all the bells and whistles? If you only need a single lead form, don’t overcomplicate it. **A simple landing page can often do more for a business than a big clunky website or application.** A landing page can produce better ROI compared to hundreds of pages on your website combined. If users need to take 10 actions or clicks to accomplish their goals, you’re distracting them too much. A complex website distracts from completing goals in general. Every new element distracts from every other element.

## Keeping things simple.

K.I.S.S is an acronym for “Keep it Simple, Stupid”. You will hear it time and time again across many different industries. Don’t over-complicate a solution. Focus on the essentials, not the “nice to haves”.

- Speed - The less clutter and features on your website, the faster the page will load. If your website takes too long to load, your users could navigate away before they read anything. You want your users to stay on the site to get the info they came for. Also, Google and other search engines prioritize you in the rankings based on load speed. If your website is faster, your marketing campaigns will see better performance.
- Positioning - Make sure your *wants* align with your customer’s *needs*. All assets and features need to align with your audience. You don’t want to build a super fancy website for an older, non-technical audience.
- Action - What are your customers intended to do? Did you want them to complete a contact form or just sign up to a newsletter? Make the path clear to complete your customer’s goals for coming to the website in the first place. Intent is everything!
- Brand Alignment - The site or landing page needs to feel like an extension of your brand. If you have colours or elements that do not mesh with your overall experience, it can push customers away. Adding a bunch of extras won’t do anything if they aren’t aligned with your brand experience.

The simple solution can save you time and money. Take your own opinion out of the equation and think, what do my customers want. Will this feature push them closer to complying the goal of the website? If the feature is just fluff maybe it should not be there at all. Stop distract users from the paths that make you money.

Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Academics, consultants, and marketing professionals love a buzzword. Buzzwords help them frame ideas in order to sound authoritative and innovative. They try their best to promote sexy-sounding concepts to wow and dazzle their audience. Concepts like "Industry 4.0".

As someone who endured years of talk about Web 2.0, I was eager to explore this new paradigm -- it's two versions ahead of Web 2.0, so it must be pretty special! I found that Industry 4.0 was originally conceived around 2011-2013 before being popularized by Davos leader Klaus Schwab at the 2016 World Economic Forum. Over the next two years, its arrival on the scene spurred a flurry of thinkpieces and microsites from the likes of [PwC](https://www.pwc.com/sg/en/publications/industry-40.html) and [BDC](https://www.bdc.ca/en/articles-tools/technology/invest-technology/what-is-industry-4). And then? Not much! Outside of sales-focused articles from component suppliers, there are fewer and fewer resources exploring Industry 4.0 concepts.

If the term Industry 4.0 passed you by, don't worry; you still know what it's about. **In short, Industry 4.0 is the overarching term for the increasing pervasiveness of digital technology in manufacturing.** I'm talking about concepts such as cloud computing, big data, and robotics. It takes the initial automation of the manufacturing process that happened through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and pushes it even further: sensors that report data to autonomous robots capable of making independent decisions about the process they oversee.

So as we are coming up on a decade of this revolution, why hasn't it felt more revolutionary? After all, in 2016, PwC [reported](https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/industries-4.0/landing-page/industry-4.0-building-your-digital-enterprise-april-2016.pdf) that 51% of Canadian manufacturing businesses "expect to achieve advanced levels of digitization by 2020". We come back to the pragmatic and sensible nature of those trained to design and build robust, repeatable processes -- everything was too new, unproven, and risky. Retooling an entire operation to embrace every pillar of Industry 4.0 would be highly disruptive.

**So instead, companies are taking a bit-by-bit approach, connecting individual machines to a collective data platform, and analyzing performance data to see where processes can be optimized.** They are experimenting with prototyping or production through 3D printing and developing products ready to be part of the Internet of Things (IoT). It takes time for these paradigm shifts to filter their way through all businesses, big and small. If you don't believe me, think of all the Web 1.0 sites you've come across while we are starting to talk about Web 3.0?

So why is a [strategist](https://www.linkedin.com/in/teresanykilchuk/) at an industrial marketing agency talking about Industry 4.0?

1. Because I am a geek who loves technology.
2. Industry 4.0 will extend right from how you make things to how you sell stuff in many different ways.

This connects to my other technology passion, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and how to personalize your sales and marketing based on data-driven insights.

**Digital technology has much power to harness in the drive to stay competitive, be efficient and profitable, and build on the long, proud legacy many manufacturing firms enjoy today.**

In 1999, I joined a small but growing technology company selling a new category of software called “Customer Relationship Management”. We worked hard to describe how this new bit of kit would transform how companies worked, increasing revenue, and cutting costs all while delighting customers. It sounded wonderful: the promised land of sales, marketing, and service leveraging the power of the “information superhighway”*. (Yes, that was part of the messaging — it was 1999!)

Just a few short years later, after some implementations had gone live, we found ourselves developing resources to coach potential customers on how to successfully implement our software. “Ten Steps for A Successful CRM Implementation” and the like.

You see, word was getting around that these transformative projects didn’t always live up to their billing. Some, it was believed, were just colossal wastes of money. Not entirely surprising, as it was a new way of working and being. Not every organization would be ready to implement a CRM. Some might need a little hand-holding, right?

## CRM implementations frequently fail, even today

Imagine my shock when I recently read that consulting firms like Forrester and Gartner reported that up to 50% of CURRENT CRM implementations fail — that is, CRM implementations in 2022, not 1999. In fact, some companies have had two or three initiatives fail. WHAT? HOW? WHY?

Despite lots of best practice white papers out there, my guess is that most people just don’t think it will happen to them. Organizations read white papers about change management and fostering a CRM culture and ignore the advice contained within. 

When a company gets burned (or feels they’ve been burned) by a CRM implementation, it can make them gun-shy and suspicious of trying again. They’ve just set a pile of money on fire; why should they risk setting *another* pile of money on fire?

Fortunately, costly mistakes can be avoided. There are some key situations where if you see it happening, you just *know* that the CRM implementation will fail. Let me take you through the biggies, especially for organizations implementing a CRM to upgrade their sales process.

## 1. Leading from the front lines: Have senior company leaders fully bought in to CRM implementation?

If senior leadership won’t commit to using the CRM themselves — DAILY — it will fail. When leaders expect that the sales team will use a CRM, but want their own process to stay exactly the same, it’s a sign the company isn’t ready to implement change yet.

When leaders come into their sales funnel review meetings, laptops open and ready to engage, CRM implementation projects succeed. These leaders are ready to have conversations with their sales team and adjust their own workflows to leverage the strength of a CRM.

This does a couple things. It sends a message to the sales team that what happens in the CRM *matters.* It isn’t just a control panel. It’s a system where teams across the company can work together to add value to their processes.

It also leads the cultural charge. If leaders buy into the system, other departments are less likely to wonder why they have to change their processes. It diminishes calls of hypocrisy and demonstrates to staff that the CRM is no mere exercise — it’s part of the business moving forward.

## 2. Demonstrating value: Focus on what will make your processes better

Make sure as part of the implementation you aren’t just replicating existing processes in a new way. Find pain points that can be automated, dispensed with, or made better. Anything to make the pain of learning a new way the better, easier path to take. 

Focus relentlessly on these benefits in your change management communications — and make sure they are actually benefits. If you haven’t pinpointed where tangible improvements can be made, and are just planning a like-for-like replacement, pause and re-consider. A CRM implementation should be strategic, not off-the-cuff.

## 3. Start on the right foot: It’s all about data

Before you begin implementing a CRM, formulate a plan to extract important customer data from your current system. Cleanse it, regularize it, and enrich it.

Crap input equals crap output. If you have issues with data integrity, thoroughness, or structure in your current sales process, don’t carry those issues forward. A bad first impression will last long in the memory and inhibit uptake and usage straight out of the gate.

## 4. Chaos is the enemy: Plan for a manageable implementation

No one can know and plan for everything all at once. Maybe the good folks at NASA can — that level of preparation, design, engineering, training and trouble-shooting would make most projects cost and time prohibitive. There is a reason NASA plans on decades-long timelines.

Instead, be OK with planning a CRM adoption path in discrete chunks. Pick a business unit, process, or market segment, and plan to make an impact there.

You need to articulate a vision and a goal set that is company-wide — just don’t try to implement it all at once. Start with a more manageable project in terms of scope, users, customization needs, etc. Work on making that a very successful project, then check it off and move on to the next discrete chunk.

You can discover a lot of the speedbumps and gotchas while not stopping the entire business from performing while you fix them. When that team starts raving about the improvements they feel in their daily work lives, you’ll have an internal set of cheerleaders to help pave the way forward for other groups.

## CRM Implementation: The bottom line

There are many more things that every experienced CRM project manager may be planning and preparing for, but these are the biggest considerations that can nearly guarantee success.

Every single time I am asked if CRM is a good idea, the answer is YES. Almost any size of company will benefit. What you need to do is avoid framing CRM implementation as merely procuring the right software. It isn’t. 

Procuring software without planning for how your people and processes will change to focus on collaborating across sales, marketing, and service will almost always result in a wasted investment. Why not instead take the time and make the effort to ensure that your investment supports your employees and delights your customers?

**Fun note: a small upstart competitor we all thought would soon fail was leveraging the power of something called “The Cloud”. Oh, how we laughed. That company, Salesforce, is now the largest CRM company ever. My old company became an add-on for Oracle’s ERP software. *

**This article isn’t for industrial firms with money to burn.** It’s not for billion-dollar corporations that can afford to put their marketing on autopilot. It’s for all the underdogs running against big competitors amid a limited pool of prospects, with fewer resources and a fraction of their budget. Because being smaller requires a different marketing game plan—and it even gives you some advantages. 

While you may not be able to outspend your competitors, you can outsmart them with some simple yet powerful marketing tactics.

## Four Big Ideas for Small Budgets

All marketing requires some form of investment, just not necessarily a monetary one. If you’ve got a strong team, happy customers, and solid expertise in your industry, you’ve got the ingredients for a low-cost yet robust marketing strategy. The key is to set your priorities and build a plan that maximizes the resources you have.

Below are four tactics we’ve used to score marketing wins for up-and-coming industrial firms.

### Call on your base

Lots of firms get so focused on new lead generation, they forget to go back to their existing customer base. Yet, one of the most effective tactics for driving more business is to start with those who know and trust you already. 

When was the last time you connected with existing customers to ask if they need anything from you? Think about how busy you are and how easily you forget to reach out to people. The same thing is happening at your customers’ companies—and if you time things right, you may get in front of an existing opportunity. You’ll hear, “Your timing is perfect! I’ve been meaning to call you,” more often than you might think.

Don’t assume customers will reach out if they need something. Take the initiative and check in with them. It’s not about begging for business; just a simple “Hey, how are you?” is a great way to remind people you’re there. Ask if they have any challenges they need help with, or if they know about a new product or service you’re offering. 

Doing this will help maintain important relationships and keep your name front and center. In turn, your customers will feel looked after and more willing to turn to you for their next project, because they’ll remember that you remembered them.

*💡One way to ensure regular touchpoints with clients is to automate your communications through a customer relationship management (CRM) system. You can schedule periodic emails, track events that trigger responses or remind your team to reach out if someone hasn’t been contacted in a while.*


### Gather your proof

Another way to leverage your existing customer base is to collect endorsements and examples. Every new prospect is going to look for evidence that you’re worth doing business with, and seeing positive feedback from other customers will give them more confidence in you.

With a relatively small amount of effort, you can develop a library of powerful marketing resources:

- **Ask for referrals.** Be sure to offer a tangible thank you, like a gift card or a discount off their next project. If they’re not in a position to refer anyone, try one of the next two tactics.
- **Ask for testimonials.** These can be used across your marketing communications, including your website, print materials, and advertising. As you’re asking for quotes, aim to include every industry, company size, and type of target client you’re looking for.
- **Publish case studies.** Highlighting work you’ve done for customers, along with the impact it had on their business, is a great way to show off your skills to prospects—not to mention spotlighting your customers, too.

Make it a habit to ask for recommendations as part of every customer relationship. (Creating email and case study templates will make this easier for your team.) This way, you’re mobilizing the power of your existing customer base to help close the next deal. 

## Squeeze All the Juice

You may not have to lay out a ton of money for effective marketing, but you still have to hustle. The key is to leverage every activity in a way that multiplies your overall impact. 

All of the tactics mentioned above can work together as a force multiplier. Some examples:

- Run the PR stunt and invite your customers to watch or participate. You’ll not only get media coverage, you’ll also have a fun reason to reconnect and stay top of mind with those customers.
- Create a video about the PR stunt and use it in your newsletter for added exposure (just be sure to send it out *after* the media story is posted, so you don’t “scoop” them).
- Repurpose content in other formats to share it in multiple ways. Write an SEO-friendly blog for Google searches, then turn it into a YouTube video. You can also condense it into an infographic, which is highly shareable on social media.
- Post about everything on all the socials. If you get a bunch of good customer quotes, feature them in a series of social media posts—and be sure to tag your customers! Promote all of your original content and any news stories on your social channels. And don’t forget to interact with your customers’ social profiles, to remind them you’re there.

To squeeze all the juice out of your marketing efforts, don’t think of tactics in isolation; think of them as a suite of initiatives. With every activity, ask yourself, where else can I apply this to create other benefits? 

Remember, too, that you don’t have to do something new and different every month. It takes a while for marketing messages to sink in with an audience, so it’s important to stick with the same messaging for at least a few months or longer to have an impact. Plus, what isn’t new to you might be new to others. Just because you’ve seen something a hundred times, you may have a perfect prospect out there who’s never seen it before.

## Build a Roadmap

Smooth out your activities with a roadmap, so you’re not doing 15 things in Q1 and nothing in Q2. This will help your team maintain their current workload while working on special initiatives. And it lets you plan out ways your activities can build on each other (that force multiplier). 

Start with what you can do this quarter, and then ask, what’s the most natural thing to do after that? Think of it as stratified layers, like this:

- In Q1, we’re going to start contacting our customers to check in.
- In Q2, now that we’ve got the rhythm of contacting customers, let’s aim to get at least one customer referral per month.
- In Q3, we’ll launch the PR event, invite customers, write a blog, and promote all of it across our marketing channels.
- In Q4, we’ve got the PR event coverage and a blog; what other content or promo opportunities can we create from those?

Every quarter you’ll have new tools to use, and likely new opportunities to use them. And here’s where you can truly disrupt the big dogs: Bigger companies typically move slower, with multiple decision-makers and longer iteration cycles. You, on the other hand, can test things in small batches, learn fast, and shift gears quickly if something isn’t working.  

## Lean on Your Partners

If you have a good, long-standing relationship with a B2B marketing agency, remember that they’re your partner in all of this. Most of the creative people we know (at least here at BlackBean) will happily take your call and kick around ideas to help you. No charge.

*Side note: If your agency wants to charge you every time you pick up the phone and talk to them, maybe they’re not the agency for you.* 

As trusted advisors, your agency can be a great resource to make sure your marketing dollars are spent on initiatives that actually have value. Remember that you’re both experts from different perspectives with a ton of experience. You know your industry, and they know marketing. Together you can identify marketing tactics that will get the most bang for the buck.

In the end, everyone’s situation is unique, and not every marketing technique will work for you. And, while some tactics are low cost, they’re not necessarily low effort. But, you can do a lot with a little as long as you hustle—and [reach out for help](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/contact/) when you need it.

A playwright named Titus Maccius Plautus from the 200s–100s BC is credited with saying, “You have to spend money to make money.” We don’t know much about his life, except that he was one of the great Roman comic dramatists and a failed businessman. That doesn’t mean he was wrong, but he wasn’t *exactly* right.

To this day, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and, yes, especially marketers still use that adage to throw money at all kinds of things, as if spending alone is the solution to their problems. Yet, [82% of small businesses fail](https://www.thebalancesmb.com/cash-flow-management-2947138) because of poor cash flow—often because firms are throwing good money after bad.

For your business in general and your marketing in particular, ***spend money*** ***where it matters***. If you’re struggling to figure out where that is, you’re not alone. We’ve put together this overview of where investments work best for industrial firms based on our experience helping several businesses get back on track.

In every case, we started with a roadmap.

## If Only Plautus Had a Plan...

There's that other old chestnut, "Fail to plan, plan to fail." (Ben Franklin, in case you were wondering.) We've seen the aftermath time and again, especially with newer companies. When you make an investment with no clear strategy, you're planning to fail.

This is especially common with company websites. Over the years, we've been contacted by many firms that launched a new website, sat back, and waited...and waited...and waited for leads to come in. These companies didn't establish lead-generation goals for the site or implement targeted tactics in nearly every case. They'd simply built an expensive digital brochure without an SEO strategy, data tracking, or [conversion optimization](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/industrial-marketing-services/b2b-marketing-strategy/).

Whether you're launching a marketing initiative or investing in other business areas, building a roadmap is critical to ensure the money you spend will move the needle for your firm. The roadmap should have two main ingredients: **a budget and a game plan.**

- The **budget** aligns your growth targets with your revenue and expenses.
- The **game plan** acts like a GPS for your business decisions.

💡 *Not sure where to start with a roadmap? It’s one of our favorite things to do. [Give us a shout](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/contact/) to learn more.*


There are all kinds of ways you can spend money to make money—if you establish specific goals and strategic priorities. Below are three areas where we’ve seen investments pay off for industrial B2B firms that are strategically spending.

## The 3 P’s of Powerful Spending

**There are three business areas where smart investments are most likely to drive growth: People, Products, and Perception.** Aligning your spending with these three principles won’t guarantee fiscal responsibility or increased revenue, but it will help. A lot.

### Invest in your people

Businesses invest in their people every day. It's called payroll. But investment in people doesn't stop there. Comfortable, happy people are more sustainably productive than their uncomfortable, unhappy counterparts. That's why money spent on talent retention and development is one of the best investments you can make.

However, when it comes to development, some firms focus only on hard skills like safety or compliance, with no particular goals in mind other than having a more competent, knowledgeable workforce. Short-term, that approach could increase productivity and profitability. It could also backfire.

Suppose hard skills are the only kind of training you offer. Your employees might simply realize that they're now more valuable in the market and go elsewhere, looking for more money. Which can end up costing you much more than you spent on training.

**If instead, you invest in a combination of hard and soft skills training (" soft" being interpersonal skills, time management, etc.), you'll not only increase employees' happiness and productivity.** You'll also reinforce your firm's value to them as a source of professional growth—in which case, they're more likely to stay.

When you factor employee acquisition and onboarding costs into your budget, along with any revenue gains from enhanced productivity, it's clear that employee retention drives profitability. In the long run, this strategic approach to workforce development supports your growth goals better than hard-skills-only training.

💡*Just as important as making an investment is measuring whether that spend is paying off. If you’re investing in soft skills for your people, software like [Know Your Team](https://knowyourteam.com/) can provide valuable feedback on the difference you’re making for your team.*


### Invest in your product

When it comes to investing in product, some firms focus primarily on R&D. Of course, improving your product with new features, better quality, or additional options can spur more sales or command higher prices, driving up revenue. And, if your cost to improve the product is less than what you stand to gain, it's a good investment.

However, many firms fail to consider the inputs and outputs along their entire value chain. How much time and resources does it take to design, manufacture, and distribute a product? Where are there inefficiencies you can reduce? Investing in ways to produce and sell a product more efficiently can be just as profitable as improving the product itself.

This is where developing a strategic plan is crucial for identifying all the levers you can pull to reduce inefficiencies, improve product quality, and increase profitability. Scrutinizing all the inputs and outputs can show you where investing in equipment, R&D, or people will drive the results you seek.

See? This ties right back to investing in people. You probably know better than anyone that employees who just clock in and out aren’t really invested in the success of your product or company. The better the team, the better the product and the processes behind it. 

By investing in people’s technical, problem-solving, and leadership skills, you can help motivate them to streamline and improve your production and sales processes—especially if you have a roadmap to point them in the right direction. 

*💡 One essential way to measure the impact of product and process investments is through client satisfaction research. Whether you use automated surveys or have an account manager call people to check in, invest in methods to make sure you’re making things better, not worse.*

### Invest in perception

For better or worse, perception matters. That's why mechanics wear coveralls to work, and bankers don't. Suppose your business doesn't project authority, reliability, or other essential qualities to your target customer. In that case, it's time to invest in changing those perceptions.

We've seen many industrial firms struggle with having their target audience perceive them as being too small to meet the needed capacity, even when they're actually a large company. More often than not, it's because every piece of their marketing screams "mom-and-pop shop." Outdated website? We're looking at you.

Many firms know they should be getting big contracts, but their marketing isn't helping them succeed. Branding is a massive part of that and an excellent place to start with an investment. Beyond branding, how you talk to people and what you talk about are vital in shaping the message you're projecting into the world.

If your intended message is getting lost in translation, invest in content that better supports your business goals. Too many firms are careless about spending on advertising and websites that use the wrong words to express what's meaningful to their target audience. Instead, identify the core message that's crucial to your success and invest time and money in creating the content to support it, including:

- Unique mission, vision, and values statements that resonate with your prospects
- Authoritative writing that projects the scale of who you are and what you can do
- An SEO-driven website strategy that ensures the right customers find you
- Storytelling that showcases the grit, hustle, and drive behind your firm

Above all, invest in hiring people who are good at this, so you don't waste money on more ineffective content. It is a specialized skill to craft your core brand message and deliver it through meaningful content. Spend the cash to get it right.

💡*Not sure if your content is working? Here’s a cheap but effective way to invest in measuring the effectiveness of your message: Ask five friends to look at your marketing materials and ask, “If you didn’t know me, what would you think of this company?” It might cost a few beers, at most.*

## When to Go Off the Plan

**While we're strong advocates for building and following a clear spending strategy, we also believe you need to be ready to react to change.** Blindly following a long-term plan can backfire horribly. Just look at what happened to Pepsi's [ill-fated commercial with Kendall Jenner](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/pepsi-ad-kendall-jenner-echoes-black-lives-matter-sparks-anger-n742811).

As part of its new "Live for Now" marketing campaign, Pepsi shot the commercial long before the Black Lives Matter movement took off in the U.S. It was slated to launch during the summer of 2000 when BLM protests suddenly surged across the country. With everything they'd already invested in the campaign, Pepsi decided to air the commercial anyway.

The ad showed supermodel Kendall Jenner doing a photoshoot and then "jumping in" with protestors marching along the road. Critics everywhere bashed Pepsi for co-opting the protest movement. The commercial was yanked off the air less than 48 hours later. The brand lost a ton of equity at that moment. The money they'd spent on that campaign was lost, too. In fact, the follow-on impact may have cost them millions more.

The world moves fast. In February 2022, no one was talking about the war in Ukraine. In July 2021, no one saw the Omicron Covid-19 variant coming. That's why we recommend allocating at least some budget for rogue spending, so you can be responsive when market conditions change.

Be open to recognizing when spending money could actually lose you, and be ready to pivot your strategy to support your long-term goals.

Need some help identifying the most impactful ways to invest in your marketing? We'll work with you on everything from website user experience and advertising to branding and communication strategies. [Contact us today](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/contact/) for a free consultation.

What "Spending Money to Make Money" Really Means

Before the internet became what it is today, manufacturers would rely heavily on their conventional marketing funnels such as trade shows, conferences, or advertisements to generate leads. A website was generally thought of as a ‘nice to have’ but unnecessary. With the rapid advancement of technology, manufacturers are starting to realize that websites are essential to a business’ success. Why? Studies have shown that having a strong online presence is the best way to generate leads. This starts with a great website.

**Before we get into the examples of great website designs, let’s take a look at features that actually make for a great website:**

- Clear and concise navigation
- Great imagery, videos and graphics
- Clear Call-to-actions that meet the business and user goals
- Path leading to conversion
- Great Hero image and messaging (first impressions are everything)
- Opportunities to learn more
- Content and design related to the target audience
- Clean responsive design
- Website load time

## Why is it important to have a good website loading speed?

**53% of mobile site visitors will leave a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load.**

Load speed is one of the most important factors to achieving a website's goals. For reference, we are using GTmetrix to measure website performance. It reflects how fast the page loads for users, and how well it's built for performance. Statistics say that the ideal website load time is 2 to 5 seconds, however, each second beyond 2 seconds results in greater bounce rates.

# [1. Lockheed Martin](https://www.lockheedmartin.com/)

One of the industry leaders in security aerospace manufacturing, Lockheed Martin does an outstanding job in its website design. Throughout the pages on their site they have a consistent, interactive, and clean design with clear CTAs that direct the user to the ideal page.

Designing a mega menu with numerous pages can be challenging to many designers, but they do an exceptional job of making their mega menu user-friendly as it is clear and easy to navigate.

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/lh_megamenu.png)

What also stands out about the Lockheed Martin website design is their product page and the interactivity on that page. Interactivity provides the user with the ability to click and interact with sections on a website which gives it life. Here, they do a notable job of this by giving the user an opportunity to click and interact with three things: viewing the specs of the 3D helicopter image, looking at graphics of the helicopter performing different maneuvers, and a video of the helicopter in action.

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/raider_x.png)

### Speed Test

Lockheed Martin homepage has an impressive GTMetrix load speed of 2.8 seconds and it remains under 3 seconds. They do a great job of optimizing speed and performance which gives them the best ability to convert.

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/speed_test_lockheed.png)

# [2. Caterpillar](https://www.cat.com/en_US.html)

Caterpillar is one of the top manufacturers of construction equipment. To go along with their website's clear CTAs and seamless navigation, Caterpillar does a fantastic job of strategically guiding the user to convert. On their equipment page, they designed cards with great imagery for each of their products. After the user clicks on the machine that they are interested in, a list of specific machines under that machine umbrella displays. This is where you can view the specifications and request a price. Reducing the amount of thinking for a user is essential for improving conversion rates. This is clear, simple and easy.

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/caterpillar_1.png)

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/caterpillar_2.png)

### Speed Test

Caterpillar has a below-average load speed of 5.4 seconds which may affect conversions. However, since CAT is such a dominant leader in the construction manufacturing industry, prospects will have more patience with their load time.

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/caterpillar_speed.png)

# [3. Loupe](https://loupe.team/)

Loupe’s mission is to revolutionize the automation industry by unlocking machine potential. Upon landing on the site, Loupe does a great job of making their brand personable by incorporating their core values and place of work as a video in their hero banner. Once they brief the user with their mission statement and what they do in the first section, they then go on to show reputable brands that they have already built successful partnerships with. This creates a form of trust and reliability with the user.

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/loupe_1.png)

They also do a great job of telling a story throughout their page design guiding the user to the contact form which is their form of conversion. The CTA’s are clear, navigation is simple with no dropdowns, and they provide high quality images for all of the products that they’ve worked with.

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/loupe_2.png)

All in all, Loupe has a fantastic website design.

### Speed Test

The Loupe homepage has an average load speed of 3.4 seconds. Not the fastest time that we have seen but considering the hero banner is a video, this is an impressive load time.

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/speed_test.png)

# [4. CST Tires](https://csttires.com/us)

CST tires is one of the world leaders in tire manufacturers. The hero provides great imagery with a tire-related CTA replacing the generic ‘products’ CTA. This is key because it tells the user exactly what they are searching for. They also do a great job here of including a short concise selling proposition in their hero text.

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/cst_1.png)

On their user-friendly product page, they display important specs for each tire based on their target audience's wants and needs. This can make conversions easier on a user as they don’t want to guess what they are buying.

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/cst_2.png)

### Speed Test

CST Tires has an above-average load speed of **2.5 seconds.** Although they have a homepage with many images which could be a problem for some websites, they do a great job of compressing their images for optimal performance.

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/cst_speed.png)

# [5. Lear](https://www.lear.com)

Lear is a global automotive technology leader in Seating and E-Systems. Right off the bat, Lear displays an impressive futuristic type video representing the innovation in their company. But before throwing products at the user, they describe their company and culture before leading the user into their product catalogue in the following section. Once on the product page, tabs are designed for the user to easily jump to their desired section which prevents unnecessary scrolling.

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/lear_1.png)

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/lear_2.png)

The navigation is clear and it also gives the user an opportunity to define themselves in the top right. Whether they are investors or suppliers, clicking this will lead them into their desired user flow.

The overall design is clean with a lot of white space with minimal clutter.

### Speed Test

Lear's homepage has an underwhelming GTMetrix load speed of 6 seconds. Similar to Loupe, Lear struggles to optimize their video and images for best possible performance which will have a negative impact on prospect experience.

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/lear_speed.png)

## Let’s get your website to the next level

As you can see from the website examples above, a great user-friendly website design could be the difference between making a sale and losing a prospect. If you are a manufacturer looking to stand out from your competitors, a great website design should be the first place you should start. Here at BlackBean, we can help your business since we have the expertise and skills to make your user-friendly website a reality. Reach out to us so we can help your business today!

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/best_websites_footer.webp)



5 Best Manufacturing Websites 2021 And Why

## What is Frankenstein Syndrome and is your marketing in distress?

Frankenstein Syndrome refers to a marketing issue wherein a company's marketing tools and strategies are pieced together from many sources - resulting in an often redundant and fragile marketing ecosystem. By stitching together resources, tools, and content, businesses could end up creating more problems than they solve.

Solutions that may have been implemented with the best of intentions could ultimately become nothing more than short-term pieces of patchwork for a long-term set of issues. As a result, you have a fragile system of tools that aren't meant to operate together. What frequently ensues is a complex and out-of-date marketing funnel that could lead to your business hemorrhaging potential consumers and money. By not addressing this issue as a systemic problem, your company faces wasting money on advertising that never reaches your target demographic.

So, what can lead a business to become a monster, like that of Dr. Frankenstein’s creation? (Frankenstein was, of course, the doctor and not the monster. If you remember nothing else from this article, remember that.) Using a marketing funnel can be a highly ineffective and costly measure for your business. A dated marking strategy can only make matters worse by wasting time, money, and resources. Businesses must strive to identify and fix marketing mistakes and miscommunications if they want to continue to grow their businesses. Communication between departments can also have a big impact on brand awareness, lead quality, as well as the direction of future messaging and product development, which affects all future sales efforts.

## What is a marketing sales funnel and why is it a bad business strategy?

A marketing funnel, or marketing sales funnel, is a thought model used to understand the process of turning business leads into customers. The mechanism is designed to help one visualize a series of stages during the consumer’s buying journey. While the idea of the marketing funnel has many incarnations, it functions basically in the following stages starting broadly and becoming narrower as the categories continue. Picture a funnel labeled as such in descending order: Awareness - knowing about your brand, Consideration - contemplating buying your product or service, Purchase - actually spending money on your business, and finally Loyalty or Advocate - becoming loyal to your brand and ideally repurchasing and promoting it.

So, how does it work? It starts by casting a large marketing net, trying to reach everyone. The problem arises when at every stage of the funnel, you lose business. This means that while some businesses may be aware of your product or service, those that actually reach the final stage of becoming loyal clients or advocates of your brand would be a much smaller number. What’s the problem with that, one might wonder? The problem is that the marketing sales funnel is a dying and flawed marketing technique, one whose roots are almost as old as the author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, herself.

Elias St. Elmo Lewis is the marketing pioneer, and literal Advertising Hall of Famer, whose ideas are thought to be the basis of the marketing funnel. The first, primitive explanation of the advertising concept was in a column written by Lewis, under the pen name Musgrove, for “The Inland Printer.” He stated in the August 1897 issue: “The first law of ad composition should be, as in the making of a picture: Have a point on which the attention is to be concentrated and render every other portion of the ad display subordinate to that.”

Two elements from his ideology were to "attract attention" and "maintain interest" or as it is often referred to as sustained attention, which is the very crux of the funnel system. The problem is that the funnel system has not evolved in over a century, but consumers have! By ignoring this crucial fact one can easily turn their well-intentioned marketing strategy into a monster of a problem.

Herein lies the trap of funnel marketing. If you want more advocates, you have to raise awareness. The only way to do so is to buy a bigger funnel so you can have more potential leads, so businesses are forced into buying more advertisements. The funnel is a top-bottom system that flows in one direction so its success for your business relies on your ability to buy more and more advertisements to raise awareness - which is costly and utterly wasteful. Businesses become reliant on advertisers to fill the funnel. There are good reasons to buy ads, but the reasons and ways we advertise have changed over the past 124 years, especially when one considers the invention of the internet. Businesses have to acknowledge the need to update processes to market more effectively.

## How communication between departments can affect marketing returns

A recent study from the market research firm FocusVision polled marketing executives from organizations with at least 500 employees and at least $50 million in annual revenue that purchased a marketing technology solution within the previous year. The results showed that the average business-to-business buyer’s journey for a single employee involves the consumption of about 13 pieces of content. This content ranged from vlogs to customer testimonials to reviews, as well as white papers and analyst reports. The business-to-business buying process can take weeks and end up involving multiple individuals and decision-makers within a singular company.  It is, for this reason, vital to establish cross-team collaboration between sales and marketing teams on a holistic level for your business to succeed.

When asked, “how did you find content,” the respondents said overwhelmingly directly through vendor websites, followed by internet search engines and social media. The least likely sources of awareness being through email advertisements and word of mouth. In order to update your marketing process, your business must be willing to change and evolve as people and technology do. Before the 1980s, most marketing was done via three venues, radio, television, and print media. Then came the internet. This unlocked a powerful potential in interconnectivity.

So the issue became building technology and software to read and react to all of the new data that was being created. From there software was developed to target customers and to make solutions to measure how well the information is being used. This is where miscommunication can start to form. Studies show that less than 30% of advertisers consider their own measurement data trustworthy, yet hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on annual global marketing.

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/marketing.webp)

## How is a monster created?

In any given business, marketing is channeled through a number of strategies including email, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), television, social media, and performance. While a CMO might oversee marketing, it is usually the case that multiple teams are working on marketing content. More often than not, those teams are working independently of each other. Each team works within their own framework, within their own budgets, and under their own project goals. This means that there can be a disconnect of communication between teams and departments within the same company if they do not subscribe to a holistic view of marketing strategy. If a flaw starts to form within a system, this is when tools are built to effectively bolt projects and strategy together to form solutions for the smaller problems or challenges within a system - this is where Frankenstein’s monster can start to form.

In a marketing system, a variety of tools are used like spreadsheets, data warehouses, attribution vendors, and more. If your company does not have a systemic methodology, it can lead to the duplication of data within teams which exacerbates existing problems. Stitching tools together can build an even bigger monster, leading to patchwork systems that were not meant to work together.

The biggest problem here is the lack of data transparency. Can you answer these questions about your own company? Where is the data coming from? Who assembled it? How many people have access to the information? This is the key issue for marketing in the post-internet era - it is not enough to simply consume and collect data, it has to be tracked! Tracking data is imperative to gaining access to meta-level information, otherwise, the data is not actionable. If your data is not trackable, it means that you are left with mostly aggregate-level data. Marketing teams need to validate and confirm where impression clicks are happening in order to get actionable leads.

Not having access to tracked data combined with a disconnected marketing team can lead to the grave problems of data duplication and the normalization of marketing data. Every department may assume your marketing data is correct, but the bigger the scale, the more connections are created within a system, which can lead to duplicate connections, and redundant data points.

Frankenstein systems also generally lack the ability to scale your business because patchwork systems are often inflexible and unable to grow with your company. This leads to wasted time and money for your marketing team to fix small-scale problems in the short term while leading to costly problems in the long term if you want your business to grow - and you do. It can also cause a high risk to the security of your platforms and can usually only be fixed by doing manual and routine maintenance that is an avoidable expense to your business.

## Scaling back the monster

Understanding the interconnectivity of both your data sets and your marketing personnel is crucial in order to reduce the risk of duplicating information. It is important to work with intelligent connections, not monstrous ones because data access needs to be consistent across all channels within a marketing department and your business. By creating API codes, it will allow for equal access to features of the entire operating system or application. This means that you will have fewer duplicate counts which are important because incorrect or inconsistent data can skew your ROI and give a distorted image of your marketing effectiveness.

Creating a monster can be avoided if you take your time to strategize a marketing technique from the beginning with an end in mind.

This includes working with a deliberate and well-documented marketing process, anticipating marketing mistakes, and understanding the more contemporary tools you have at your disposal to improve your marketing performance. Your company might consider updating your marketing tools and ditching that funnel in order to encourage a more modern and systemic strategy as well as allowing for equal access and trackable data across your marketing teams and business as a whole.

What can't money buy? In marketing, the answer is a lot. We've seen too many business owners throw good money after bad, thinking they can get better results from their marketing strategy just by spending more.

Raise your hand if you...

- Doubled your spend on ads but haven't seen a significant increase in sales.
- Bought an expensive SEO service, but you're still six pages deep on Google.
- Followed your competitors onto Facebook only to learn your customers aren't there.

If you're focusing on the wrong marketing activities for your business, throwing more money at them means you'll end up wasting thousands of dollars. And, like a receding hairline, you can't get that money back once it's gone.

**Before you spend more on your marketing, you need to identify which tactics will get you the most bang for the buck.** That's why we recommend a good/better/best approach to your marketing strategy.

## What does a good/better/best strategy look like?

Let's say you're considering three options for marketing activities: trade shows, SEO and paid search advertising. Trade shows are expensive but worthwhile in some industries, SEO is a powerful tool over time, and advertising tends to generate leads right away. But not every tactic will produce results that truly move the needle for your business.

**So how do you allocate your marketing spend to get the most impact? Enter the good/better/best marketing strategy.** You divide up marketing dollars based on the return you can expect from different activities.

Let's examine this scenario from the perspective of a startup. This firm needs to generate leads as quickly as possible and has limited resources to invest in marketing.

- Trade shows are great for establishing brand recognition and credibility, along with making valuable connections. But they're expensive and risky in terms of return on investment. We'll put this in the "good" category—either start small or save it for the future.
- SEO boosts exposure and web traffic from organic search. However, this company is just starting to build an online reputation. It may have much competition for keywords, so any SEO will take a while to have an effect. Still, it's cheaper than trade shows and reaches a broader audience. We'll call this "better" and allocate some budget to it.
- Paid search addresses the need for immediate leads. And driving conversions can help strengthen the business and grow their ability to invest in other marketing tactics. Paid search can also support SEO by showing which keywords work best in a given market. So, in this case, it's our "best" option. This is where the bulk of the marketing spend should go.

If instead, we're talking about a well-established firm with many resources, the calculus can change quite a bit. It might look something like this:

- This company has built up a substantial share of voice for its target keywords. But they face stiff competition, and focusing on SEO helps protect market share. So, SEO is the "good" option and deserves a decent, if the smaller, share of the budget.
- They need to maintain a steady pipeline of leads to support the sales team's outreach efforts. For this firm, paid search has successfully driven leads and acquisitions. It's the "better" investment and gets a bigger budget slice than SEO.
- In this firm's industry, building relationships through face-to-face interactions is critical. Plus, they're launching a new product while fighting off competition from new market entrants, so it's essential to convey a position of strength and longevity. In this case, trade shows are likely the "best" tactic, commanding the largest share of spending and resources.

As you can see, there's no one-size-fits-all marketing strategy. To determine which activities are better than others, we have to look at an individual company's goals, needs and resources.

## Four key factors in creating your strategy

In working with clients, we've identified four critical factors for creating a good/better/best marketing strategy that drives results:

**Be realistic about your budget.**

We're talking brutal honesty here, not wishful thinking. If you've got, say, $20,000 to spend on your marketing for the entire year, that will take many things off the menu altogether. But, you can focus on activities where spending money directly increases leads and drives revenue.

If you have a smaller budget, one way to look at things is that you're not using that money to build long-term success so much as growing a bigger budget for next year. Try working on a shorter timeframe that supports your long-term planning.

**Rank your business objectives.**

Consider which ones produce outcomes that generate the most impactful results for your business. Then assign them to different tiers and the marketing activities that support them.

Take lead gen vs. relationship building, for instance. Maybe your online leads take a long time to convert if they do at all while strengthening personal connections reliably brings in new revenue and growth opportunities. Building relationships could be the top-tier objective, with trade shows as your best marketing tactic.

**Take your team into account.**

Consider your staff: what are they excellent at, and where do they need help? If you have a solid sales team that's great at converting qualified leads, then an account-based marketing approach might be best. On the other hand, if your sales team is struggling, you may want to invest in automated marketing that doesn't rely as heavily on your team to deliver results.

In other words, leverage your strengths and bolster your weaknesses.

**Be realistic about volume.**

It might seem obvious, but we've seen plenty of newer companies make this mistake. You've got to be realistic about how many new leads you can handle. If your marketing drives way more leads than you can effectively service, you risk damaging your reputation and discouraging future sales.

**We created this easy-to-use [marketing spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pNS5_oppag-sMATTOea6c6Crmedpkhrd5IipM7uiOLo/template/preview) you can download for free to help companies establish a good/better/best framework based on these business factors.**

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/audience-whiteboard.png)

## Don't just set it and forget it.

The effectiveness of your marketing strategy, along with your spending options, will change as your business grows and evolves. That's why you need to periodically reevaluate your good/better/best allocation to make sure it meets your business needs and takes advantage of new opportunities.

The key to allocating marketing spend in a good/better/best model is that you need to understand what you're optimizing for. **You want to work backwards—what are your goals for each activity, did you hit them, and what does the outcome mean for your business?**

**Setting time-bound goals for your good/better/best strategy will help you prioritize activities and evaluate success.** Then, when you get to a deadline (maybe 3-6 months out), you can look at the results and adjust your strategy.

You might structure the evaluation as a series of questions, like:

- Did we accomplish our goal?
- What did we learn?
- What do we still want to learn?

This easily repeatable process can provide valuable insights to help ensure your budget allocation is getting the results you want.

For example, let's say you run a successful digital campaign that meets your goal of bringing in qualified, converting leads. Thanks to the revenue growth, you can now expand your marketing activities in other areas. Maybe trade shows are crucial for closing deals with distributors in your industry, but the cost used to be a hurdle you couldn't clear. Trade shows may have become your next best investment now that you can.

## Change your culture, change your results.

**Spending without a strategy is like driving a train with no tracks: you'll get nowhere fast. Yet somehow, it becomes very easy for companies to throw money around with little to show for their marketing efforts.** And maybe it gets chalked up to that "grey area" of doing business, which is usually just a dumping ground for things people didn't bother to measure.

Hopefully, this article has shown that you can put your money into marketing that drives the best possible performance with a bit of thoughtful planning. In addition to the mechanics of figuring out a good/better/best strategy, there are a few fundamental mindset shifts that will help you get this right:

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/graphs-tablet%20(1).png)

### Business isn't an instinctual thing.

As with most things in life, seek first to understand. Suppose you don't have a good picture of the actual costs, benefits and possible outcomes of different activities. In that case, you're just making decisions based on instinct. But marketing these days is too complex to make uninformed decisions.

### Setting priorities is critical.

You do it in your own life; why wouldn't you apply it to your business? It's crucial that you prioritize your business goals based on the outcomes you want to achieve. Following that, you can identify the marketing activities that are most important for meeting your needs.

### Measurement gets better with practice.

One added benefit of the good/better/best approach to a marketing strategy is that you'll get more consistent, reliable results from your marketing. Because the more you evaluate results over time, the better you'll get at forecasting them.

Sure, the first time you forecast anything might feel like guesswork. But when you go back in a few months and do it again, you'll have much more information. **When you can say, "I don't think I got a return on the $2,000 I spent on X, but I did on Y," you know where to spend the next two grand.** That's why ongoing evaluation needs to be part of your decision-making process—and a permanent part of your culture.

Maybe all of this makes sense to you, but you don't have the tools to figure out the measurement part? If so, we'd love to help. Whether you need guidance or execution, we'll give you visibility into your marketing so you can make smarter decisions that drive results. [Contact us today](/contact) to learn how.

Money Can't Fix Your Marketing: Try This Instead

Socrates, facing his own death on charges of corrupting the youth, famously proclaimed that the unexamined life is not worth living. Explore. Experience. Contradict. Voltaire, in his satire Candide, wrote *'Il faut cultiver notre jardin'* — we must tend our own gardens. Isolate. Protect. Be productive.

During times of peace, prosperity, and comfort, one may be less inclined to introspection. **When we're safe and happy, it is easy to continue as-is, to tend our own gardens.** When we are confronted with hardship, unhappiness, and despair, many seek to understand why.

Through the past 18 months, many have found their prosperity and comfort disrupted. **Entire industries experienced rolling shutdowns, profound uncertainty, and rapid changes to their *modus operandi.*** Some industries saw explosive growth in demand without a corresponding growth in labour force — healthcare, or shipping. Others saw their market collapse: restaurants and hospitality.

**As servers and cooks languished on their couches awaiting stimulus to pay rent, healthcare workers strained to their breaking point and beyond, burdened by enormous responsibilities and crushing workloads.** More and more people across every sector of the economy have begun to ask that most Socratic of questions: why?

**What is the reason we give the bulk of our lives to labour?** The economist Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that within a century, the workweek would be only fifteen hours long. Advancements in technology and technique would continue to increase productivity until humanity could reap the rewards of its brilliance: more time for our families, our hobbies, and passions.

**Instead, we work about the same hours as we did then, [despite each hour of labour being more productive than ever.](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-hour-pennworldtable?time=earliest..2017)** The allure of *more* is strong; who among us hasn't wanted a nicer car, a bigger house, or a longer vacation? Perhaps this is how we got here, working the same hours as we did in 1940 despite our tremendously improved output: turning that excess production into a tidal wave of consumer *stuff*. But I digress.

Climate change, drought, disease, famine. The 21st century is one of urgency. It's one of diminishing hope. **In today's context, it ought not surprise us that workers don't want to return to low-paying, stressful, and unfulfilling work.** Some blame 'generous' government benefits allowing people to stay home longer. Others blame low wages and poor work conditions providing little incentive to return.

A full accounting of the labour crisis is complex. In many cases, COVID prevents free movement across borders, forcing businesses to look for local workers where they used to employ migrant workers.** Aging populations in most industrialized countries also point to an inevitable labour shortage, merely hastened by the pandemic.**

I wish I had the solution, but I don't. Small businesses can't afford to cut hours by 50% and pay triple what they do now. Our society built itself around the 9-5, Monday to Friday workday. Workers will need to return eventually, one way or another. **More than anything, this emerging labour crisis points to structural problems in the working world.**

Necessity is the mother of invention, so they say. We've seen that play out during this pandemic, as businesses rapidly restructured their processes in the face of sudden and extensive change. **When we consider this labour situation, we should take the same outside-the-box approach.**

This isn't about greedy business owners grinding employees to dust, nor is it about entitled welfare recipients turning their noses up at good work. These are rallying cries of division and distraction. **We have liveability problems that affect everyone. It's time to explore solutions.**

What's the Root Cause of the Labour Shortage?

Don't miss part one of our marketing for talent series! In this installment, we'll talk about how to identify your company culture, leverage it in your hiring language and execute the right mix of marketing tactics.

## What exactly is "company culture"?

Whether you're aware of it or not, company culture is the foundation of every organization. And it's a crucial part of attracting and retaining the right kind of talent for your company—if you understand your culture.

Let's clear that up first.

**What company culture is:** The shared values and characteristics of an organization as exhibited in day-to-day life. It shapes the way people feel about the work they do, how they do it, how they interact with each other and what they believe in.

**What company culture is not:** A list of company values plastered on the office wall. Or ping-pong tables and free beer.

As a leader, you may have a set of values that embody your vision for the company. But if those values aren't turned into real action at all levels of the organization, they're not defining your culture.

Company culture comes through in many areas, from the work environment to the company mission to the goals and expectations of leaders and staff. Here are a few examples of what corporate culture looks like in the manufacturing/industrial space:

### Otter Products: Fast-paced and Fun

Take a look at Otter Products' HR marketing, and you'll see, "We work hard and play hard." This company aims to build a playful, creative environment where employees contribute meaningfully to the company and their communities.

### Ford: Playing to Win

Underlying nearly every aspect of Ford's company culture is a drive toward excellence. Ford prioritizes high performance and teamwork, aiming to become an industry leader through collective courage, competitive strength and resilience. After all, they're Built Ford Tough.

### SpaceX: Pushing the Envelope

Fast growth and big wins are a hallmark of SpaceX. That's why the company hires people who can not only keep up but lead the way. High expectations and long work hours (as in, 60-70 hour weeks) are the norm, but the payoff is being part of exciting, historic achievements.

## Do you know what your culture really is?

When companies try to implement culture from the top down, it often leads to misalignment between what leaders think their culture is and what workers experience every day. And if your HR marketing doesn't match the reality on your work floor, it can create many problems when you bring new people on board.

You need to know what your company culture is—and what it isn't—so you can address any misalignment between your culture and your hiring efforts. At the bare minimum, conduct a simple human audit to explore what matters to your team and what they think matters to your company. You can get started with our easy-to-use company culture survey template. We recommend making it anonymous, so people feel more comfortable giving you honest answers.

### Digging deeper

If you have more resources and time, you can take it a step further with in-depth culture assessments. A few ideas we've seen work:

- **Culture surveys:** As an alternative to the quick audit above, use a more-depth survey for diving into employees' views of your company and its leadership, how they feel treated and valued (or not) and how they perceive their role and effectiveness in the organization.
- **Culture walks:** Take a walk around your facility and look for physical signs of culture. How is common space utilized? What do people post on bulletin boards or walls? What kinds of interactions do you see between employees?
- **Culture interviews:** Talk to employees in small groups, asking indirect questions like "What would you tell someone who's about to start working here?", "What's one thing you would change about the company?" or "What would you ask a job candidate in an interview?".

### A word of caution

In today's politically polarized world, asking employees about values can be a bit like navigating a minefield where personal attributes get automatically labelled as "conservative" or "progressive." But the differences aren't usually black-and-white.

In reality, most people's values fall on a spectrum. That's why we suggest using neutral language and a sliding response scale when asking employees what they value in the workplace. It might look like this:

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/insights_15.png)

Your goal is to avoid making employees feel like they can only be one way or another and that maybe there's a right and wrong choice. If you want honest answers, give people a gentler, more human way to express themselves.

Bear in mind; you may not always like what you find in an audit. But you need to understand your company culture before you can do anything about it, let alone incorporate it into your hiring marketing. So take a deep breath, keep an open mind, and get ready for a genuinely valuable knowledge bomb.

## Hone your hiring messaging...

Okay. It's time to turn all this information into compelling messaging for prospective hires.

Remember that job seekers are going to evaluate your company as much as you assess them, asking themselves, "Do I see myself working there?" Your messaging needs to grab their attention and highlight the real culture of your organization and the benefits that come with working for you.

Showcasing your culture also lets people evaluate whether your company's values align with their own, a concept that's become increasingly important to today's job seekers. Plus, providing potential employees with a better understanding of your company can help filter in candidates who are a good fit, making the hiring process smoother.

Here are some keys to crafting messaging that resonates with the people you want to hire:

- **Use language they would use.** Drop the corporate-speak. Write with the kind of language we use in everyday conversations. In other words, write like a human being talking to another human being.
- **Make your values shine through.** Don't just talk about what you do as a company, talk about who you are. Using what you learned in your company culture assessment, highlight what makes your company a great place to work.
- **Involve the roles that need to be involved**. Don't leave messaging in the hands of your HR department alone. Get input from the staff who will be working closely with new employees. What are they looking for? What would they say to attract the right kind of person?
- **Run your ad through a gender decoder**. Yes, there is such a thing that can save you from inadvertently alienating people with insensitive language. Use this tool to test your job ads for gender bias.

## ...Then spread the word!

There are a ton of ways to market to prospective hires today, and successful employers are leveraging every platform they can to reach fresh talent. Fortunately, you don't need a big budget to market job openings effectively—you just need to get the right message to the right people in the places they're looking for it.

Here are a few different scenarios for your hiring marketing, depending on your available resources.

### Good: Low cost, High impact

**Define your target audience.** As we explained in Part 1, be crystal-clear on whom you want to reach and what they're looking for from an employer, and create a few key messaging points.
**Post on at least a few platforms.** We've seen companies put a job posting on LinkedIn and call it a day. But one platform alone won't cut it. With just a bit more time and effort (and not much money), you can replicate your postings on Indeed, Glassdoor, Google for Jobs and others.
**Brush up your digital profiles.** Be sure to complete your profile on any job listing platform. A bare-bones profile gives the impression that you don't care much about your listings...which, to many prospects, means you don't care much about hiring them.
**Don't diss the near-miss.** Looking at your job description, can you scale back the requirements to broaden your eligible prospects? Consider training a new hire to grow into some aspects of the role instead of finding someone experienced right out of the gate.

### Better: Motivating Messaging

Do everything in the Good scenario, plus:

- **Do a culture refresh.** Conduct a human audit to make sure your hiring marketing materials are truly in line with your company culture. This is an excellent time to focus your team on the shared values and practices that make your company what it is.
- **Update your career page**—or build one. Nearly every prospective employee will look for a career page on your site to get a sense of what working at your company is like. This page should be more than just a series of job listings; it's a key opportunity to sell your workplace.
- **Polish your messaging.** Some companies hire a copywriter to create compelling, targeted marketing language. Be sure to audit and update your messaging across all channels (website, social media, job listings, flyers, etc.).
- **Get social on social media.** Post photos of your people, not just your products and equipment. Give prospects a taste of day-to-day life at your company, and you'll not only get their attention, you'll also show that you value your employees.

### Best: The complete package

On top of everything in the Better scenario, add these:

- **Do a company-wide culture and values exercise.** If you're serious about hiring the best-fit talent for your organization, you need to understand what makes your company tick truly. Start with in-depth culture assessments to get a picture of where you're at and determine whether you need to address any misalignment between expectations and reality.
- **Built a sub-site for recruitment.** A standalone careers website lets you provide more features and information than a single page on your main site. It also shows that you prioritize investing in employees and recruiting qualified candidates.
- **Showcase employee testimonials.** Customer reviews and testimonials tend to be the strongest selling point for products, and the same goes for employers. Job candidates are likely to put the most stock in what employees say about your company, so collect those testimonials and incorporate them into your hiring marketing materials.
- **Invest in "employer" campaigns.** Like a shy bachelor on Tinder, sometimes you need just to put yourself out there. Build advertising campaigns around your attractiveness as an employer, using the audience-specific messaging you've developed. Boost posts and launch targeted ads on social media, and consider using the promotional tools on job posting platforms.

![](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/insights_14.png)

## Stay one step ahead

Hiring was never easy, to begin with, and the post-pandemic labor market has made it more challenging than ever to attract and retain employees. But if you follow the guidelines we've offered in this two-part series on marketing for talent, you'll have a leg up on all the companies currently competing for prospects.

The key is to remember and implement these four things:

### Be clear about who you're talking to

Generic job ads are going to fall on deaf ears. Today's job seekers are looking for companies that speak to their values and needs. So define your target audience, find areas of alignment between what they want and what you offer, and create messaging that directly addresses what they're looking for.

### Qualify your prospects

Given the current labor shortage, most companies don't have time to cast a wide net and spend months hiring someone. ("Hire slow and fire fast?" Not right now.) By being crystal-clear about your audience and crafting a targeted message, you'll be qualifying leads before you even hold an interview.

### Make it a two-way transaction

Hiring is no longer a one-way relationship where you're doing people the courtesy of offering them a job. Companies can't expect to just take, take, take from candidates; you have to offer them something of value in return. Look at it from a prospect's perspective: why is your company worth their time to look into?

### Offer a future

Whether people are recent job losers or job leavers, most are looking for a sense of stability and a path towards growth. Your hiring materials could talk about promoting within the company, career path options or continuous learning opportunities (like tuition reimbursement). If your firm was given essential worker status during the pandemic, be sure to let people know you're a bit more protected against fluctuations.

Remember, too, that many younger workers are looking for continual challenges and professional development. To address that, some companies include phrases like "input welcome" or "open to feedback" in their job postings. Above all, make it clear that your employees are valued and supported and that (if this is the case) you're investing in people for the long haul.

In the end, whether you can draw in all those folks sitting on the employment sidelines largely depends on how well your marketing speaks to their needs. Want more guidance on fine-tuning your messaging and marketing to reach the people you want to hire? We'd love to help. [Contact us](/contact) today to learn more.


Marketing for Talent Pt. 2: Bring Your Culture to Life

There are millions of open industrial jobs in North America, and millions of unemployed people who aren’t taking them. Higher wages, hiring bonuses and even special giveaways (free car raffle, anyone?) aren’t attracting enough workers in hard-hit industries.

**If your business is struggling to fill its labor needs, you have options beyond throwing money at the problem.** Targeted marketing and communication strategies can help you attract and retain enthusiastic employees, even in a challenging job market. With the right messaging, you'll draw workers who are genuinely interested in your company—the kind of employees that fit your culture and goals no matter what the job market looks like.

First, you need to understand who your audience is and what they’re looking for from their next employer.

## Where did everybody go?

The labor force participation rate in both the [US](https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm) and Canada is the lowest it’s been in two decades. Politicians think we’re plagued with slackers living off the dole, and economists point to a sea of early retirees. But there’s an important phenomenon that few are talking about:

> It’s mainly job losers, not job leavers, that aren't returning to the workforce.

Why does that matter? Because there’s a huge difference in the needs and attitudes of workers who have been let go versus those who chose to leave. Understanding that difference is crucial to crafting the right hiring messaging in today's job market.

You're not trying to convince people who don't want to work to take on a job. **You're trying to reassure people who have been let go that it's safe to come back. It’s like dating someone who just got rejected; you’re dealing with a person who’s been hurt.**

People don't want to go back to a 9-to-5 job where they're treated poorly and can be fired at the drop of a hat. To convince them to take a chance on your company, you need to understand what their fears and concerns are and address them in your marketing. Add in the fact that many people have more savings and less debt than they did before the pandemic, and most workers don’t feel like they have to jump at the first job that comes along.

That's why your hiring message must also offer a sense of purpose and growth—something that proves things really will be different this time. Do you need to portray your business as ultra innovative or progressive? No. **Just speak authentically about what makes your company the right place for a prospect to work.**

## What that job posting might look like

Check out this excerpt from a recent posting by a refrigeration manufacturer, with language that shows their employees are valued, respected and supported. It gives people on the sidelines a reason to return to work by not only making them feel safe but also highlighting a career path within the company.

### YOUR OPPORTUNITY

- […] You will drive a culture of change and have a heavy focus on lean manufacturing. […]

### WHAT YOU WILL DO

- Build strong teams, coach, and work on their development.
- Support,* build trust and demonstrate respect* to all levels within the organization.

### WHAT YOU HAVE TO OFFER

- Excellent interpersonal communications with the ability to influence at all levels of the organization.
- A desire for *future growth and responsibilities.*

### WHAT WE HAVE TO OFFER

- Competitive total compensation package.
- Opportunity to be part of a dynamic and highly motivating work environment where you can develop your potential and launch an exciting career.
- Add to your skillset by attending classes at colleges and universities through our tuition reimbursement program, or by attending our in-house state-of-the-art business or manufacturing skills training classes.
- We favor internal promotions as we recognize our staff’s potential.
- Employees at X feel they’re a valued member of a large, extended family, with an open-door policy that allows employees to have a say and suggest improvements at any time.

**By highlighting the way they treat and empower employees, this company makes it clear they invest in people for the long term.** Those sentiments go a lot farther than a free car sweepstakes in making those who’ve lost jobs feel more secure.

## The ABC's of GEN X, Y, and Z

In addition to recognizing how job losing vs. leaving affects workers’ attitudes, it's crucial to understand the characteristics of different generations, so you can **deliver hiring marketing that speaks directly to their unique needs and values.**

Let’s look at how those needs differ among generations, along with some guidelines for marketing to each group.

### Baby Boomers

The most professionally mature of this group, Boomers bring decades' more life and business experience to the table. They also tend to be more assertive, direct communicators than younger generations. Other key characteristics:

- Show more loyalty to employers
- Values include commitment, stability and reliability
- Biggest consumers of traditional media and communication

**If you're looking to hire this age group, (likely for upskilled or management-level roles), here are a few ways to recruit them effectively:**

1. Boomers actively share skills and experiences with their colleagues, sometimes as ad-hoc mentors. Show that you value the knowledge they've acquired over the years—and that you'd like to share it with others.
2. Whether they're reinventing themselves or honing their expertise, many Boomers want to stay sharp. Highlight opportunities to learn new skills or tools, or show that you value people who take the initiative to learn on their own.
3. As healthcare costs in the US have soared, many Boomers are staying in the workforce to keep their employer-provided health benefits. If you provide competitive benefits, make them prominent in your job postings.
4. Skip trendy acronyms or catchphrases. Boomers want to see things spelled out. Focus on clear, straightforward language, not catchy copy.

### Gen X (41-56)

While it's true that Xers used to be called the Slacker Generation, they've grown up. A lot. These days, they have tons of experience and could be more comfortable in a leadership role. Other notable characteristics:

- May still consume traditional media, but they’re digitally savvy; huge Facebook users
- Carry the highest debt load while raising children and saving to retire
- Looking for more stability and a higher income
- Comfortable in-person and over the phone

**If you're aiming to hire this highly skilled portion of the talent pool, try these tactics for getting their attention:**

1. A recent recruiting study shows that, when searching for jobs, Gen Xers turn to referrals first. Your current employees could be your most effective (and cost-efficient) resource in recruiting Gen X talent, so make sure you have a good employee referral program in place.
2. Given their finances, many Gen Xers plan to stay with an employer for the long haul. To make your company enticing, paint a clear picture of a growth path for employees, either in job postings or on your career page.
3. Pick up the phone. Gen Xers like the personal touch of a phone call, and it can go a long way toward making them feel desired and respected.

### Xennials (29-39) and Millennials (25-29)

Currently powering the workforce, Xennials had a Gen X (read: analog) childhood and Millennial (read: digital) youth, which makes them comfortable navigating either world. They also tend to be:

- Highly adaptive to digital technology
- Open to coaching, even if they have strong opinions
- Team players, because they grew up in the company of friends and peers
- Raising children, which means flexibility and work-life balance are paramount

Millennials, meanwhile, are climbing the ranks. Mental wellbeing and work-life balance are a priority for them. In addition, they tend to be:

- Digital natives, with at least a few social media accounts
- Steeped in a massive amount of debt with little financial stability
- In search of purpose and alignment as they enter the workforce
- Less loyal to brands, having little patience for inefficiency and poor service

**Looking to recruit this powerful next generation of leaders? Here are some ways to speak their language in your hiring marketing:**

1. While traditional benefits matter to Xennials and Millennials, they can be more of an afterthought. Focus on benefits that speak to their other priorities: health and wellness, work-life balance and giving back to their community.
2. Millennials are on a different time horizon than older generations; they're probably not looking to spend their entire career at your company. Instead of long-term potential, talk about what they can learn and do with you in the next year or two.
3. Millennials in particular are using social media and mobile devices to search and apply for jobs. Build a solid social media recruitment strategy, and make sure your website is optimized for mobile.
4. 'Ennials of all kinds often value equality and diversity in the workplace. If those are a priority for your company, communicate it in all your hiring marketing materials.

### Gen Z (9-24)

Despite what you hear in the media, Gen Z’s have a lot more to offer than eye-rolling and entitlement. They’re eager to prove themselves, if and when they’re empowered to do so. And if you put them in the right position, they can work faster than anyone else. They’re also:

- Hyper-connected and efficient, thanks to growing up with technology
- Skilled at creating solutions through automation and shortcuts
- Fiscally conservative, as they look at struggling Millennials
- Most comfortable with digital and online interactions

**Recruiting for Gen Z is heavily shaped by their digital-first approach to communication. Plus, you have to be sensitive to the fact that many of them are just entering the workforce in a post-pandemic environment.** Here are some ways to reach this generation:

1. Gen Z's love consuming video content, often for hours every day. Get their attention on your digital hiring channels with short videos that show behind-the-scenes life at your company or testimonials from current entry-level employees.
2. The average Gen Z attention span is a whopping 8 seconds. Keep your communications short and sweet, and use texting, social media messaging and push notifications (if you have a hiring app) over emails.
3. Professional development and company culture are key factors for this generation, who want to feel like they'll be welcomed and empowered to succeed. Talk about your mission and values in your hiring materials, and highlight any opportunities for learning and mentoring.
4. You may want to provide information about how your business responded to the pandemic, including safety measures, remote work and any virtual tools you used. This gives potentially skittish Gen Z prospects a sense of what to expect if the unexpected happens again.

### Generation-targeted job posting ideas

These excerpts from a car manufacturer's (ok, fine, it's Volvo) posting are great examples of how to attract a specific audience; in this case, Xennials and Millennials. It positions the company as a purpose-driven organization looking for people who want to change the world, prioritize wellbeing and expect flexibility in the workplace.

---

**About the job**

We are looking for *curious, creative people* who want to change the world through innovative thinking.

**What We Can Offer**

Our *human-centric focus* is what makes us different from all other car companies, and it’s at the heart of everything we create.

We’re building an* organization full of creative, diverse and talented people* working to build new, exciting digital products and services supporting those goals.

We’re looking for team members to join our organization who *think about technology problems and opportunities in exciting and different ways* – creative and enthusiastic thinkers who *want to change the world with us* here at X.

**Job Purpose:**

This role will be based out of our R&D Tech Center in [LOCATION] *with the flexibility of a hybrid model.*

**Who are we?**

Everything we do starts with people. *Our purpose is to provide freedom to move*, in a personal, sustainable and safe way.

In the spirit of a human-centric environment, *we strongly believe in the well-being of our employees as well as their families*. There are generous health and wellness programs that begin day-one with the company as well as a wide variety of other benefit programs...

Furthermore, in an effort to build the workday around our employees, we also offer remote flexibility working options.

Lastly, to build on our *commitment to equal parenting roles for all genders*, we recently launched a new parental leave policy that offers up to 24 weeks of leave at 80% of base pay.

---

**One of the best parts of this job posting is that it starts with what the company can offer the job seeker, not the other way around.** This immediately sets the tone for a collaborative, employee-centric workplace that would appeal to younger generations.

## Okay, we've got the audience down. Now what?

Marketing for talent doesn’t mean you have to invent ways to attract workers with specific needs and priorities. And if like a lot of industrial companies, you’re looking to hire mid-career Xennials and Millennials, you don’t have to offer yoga retreats or be on a mission to save the world (but if you're targeting older Gen Z, those might be a good idea).

**What matters is that you find areas of alignment between your organization and your target audience, so you can speak to their needs in an authentic way.** This means taking a good, hard look at your company culture to determine a) if your workplace is somewhere people would actually want to work, and b) what are all the things that make you a worthwhile employer.

Once you can articulate your work culture and clearly identify the benefits of working for you, you’ll turn those elements into marketing language and tactics that draw prospective employees to you.

**In Part 2 of Marketing for Talent, we’ll walk you through:**

- Understanding and expressing your company culture
- Crafting relevant and compelling hiring language
- Choosing the right marketing mix for your needs and budget

**Like we said earlier, you don't have to throw a ton of money at your hiring efforts to see better results.** What matters is that you know your audience, get your messaging right and execute the kind of marketing that attracts the talent you’re looking for. *[Check out part 2 of our Marketing for Talent article here!](/insights/marketing-for-talent-pt-2-bring-your-culture-to-life)*

Marketing for Talent Pt. 1: Know Your Audience

In 2021, we begin to leave behind a turbulent era in marketing.

**David Ogilvy famously wrote, ‘The customer is not a moron. She's your wife.’ ** He meant that we don’t need to shout slogans and loudly exaggerate the benefits of our products to succeed in advertising. As marketers, we need to understand people so we can speak with them the right way. **Believe it or not, this was revolutionary thinking.**

When we entered the digital age, methods for understanding our audience became more complex. We, the small and medium businesses of the world, were able to explore our own customer data and run our own data-driven ad campaigns on search engines, and later on social media.

This is the data age. The sheer volume and depth of data that marketers can access via Google, Facebook, and other platforms is immensely powerful. We use that data to determine the best fit for ads and content. People who look like this purchase from us, so let’s plan with them in mind.

Users have come to understand the value of their data — and the transaction they make when they join social media or sign up for Gmail. **My soul in data points exchanged for convenience and cat pics. Many people — more each day — no longer feel this is a fair trade.**

Regulators around the globe press for changes to the Wild West that is internet marketing. Platforms look for ways to continue to provide robust data without all the creepiness — Google’s ill-received [FLOC](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/everybody-hates-floc-googles-tracking-plan-for-chrome-ads/) proposal is one attempt. Device manufacturers like Apple butt head with platforms like Facebook by restricting the ability to track marketing details through their apps. GDPR regulations make data collection more visible to a privacy-conscious public.

**We can’t put the data genie back in the bottle. Marketers have collected and leveraged data since marketing existed. But we cannot treat our customers as calculations.** That is all digital marketing is for many people. If and when this stream of rich data slows to a trickle, marketers overleveraging user data will find themselves with a void where their success once was.

Advertisers fear a return to shallow data. Instead, they should embrace the opportunity to unplug from data and reconnect with people. **When we focus on the facts and figures for too long, we start selling to spreadsheets instead of communicating with customers.**

In 2021 and beyond, we need to return data to its rightful place as a supplement to our strategy instead of the focus. **Our customers aren’t morons, and they certainly aren’t spreadsheets.**

Your Customer is Not a Spreadsheet

Snake oil. Silver bullets. Magic beans. **Charlatans have been shilling nonsense for as long as there have been people willing to buy it. Once upon a time, this nonsense took the form of cure-alls, elixirs for long life, and zany hair tonics.**

In digital marketing, we have our own industry rife with nonsense: SEO. **To be clear, just as [snake oil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil#History) may have had legitimate medical benefits, SEO is real, valid, and important. It's also an industry that attracts hucksters, amateurs, and quacks.**

1. Our first suggestion is to be skeptical about seeking out SEO support. Boosting SEO performance is hard. SEO is competitive by nature. Top spots on Google receive many times more traffic than pages even halfway down the first page of results. **Great SEO companies can measure and report their value and charge accordingly. Terrible SEO companies beg you for $300/month contracts and spin their wheels, accomplishing nothing but wasting your money.**

2. **Our second suggestion is to be considerate and strategic with your content.** Content is the cornerstone of SEO — without content, there is nothing to rank. However, many businesses think any content is good content. As long as it's relevant to my industry, it must be impactful, right? Not so, I'm afraid.
Here's an example based on experience. An automotive repair business starts blogging. Their marketing partner identifies some low-hanging fruit, topics they can rank for in Google, and helps them write articles that start building web traffic. Over time, web traffic doubles, then triples. Great success!

Except it's not. The topic chosen by the marketing partner is DIY tire rotation. **The articles generate tons of traffic — traffic actively looking to avoid hiring the automotive shop.** Though their traffic increases greatly, their sales barely grow at all. **This is an example of throwing money at a problem without understanding the problem.** A near miss is, after all, still a miss.

**Marketing, like anything else, involves risk. You should invest in content marketing. You should invest in SEO. Just ensure it's a calculated risk. Rolling the dice isn't good enough.**

I'm writing this while looking out my office window at a broad, white horizon in British Columbia, Canada. The trees and buildings nearest to me look faded. Those further away are dull silhouettes. Far in the distance, the sky is flat and white and mountainless, smoke obscuring our brown, baked hillsides. Beyond that, in every direction, is fire.

To say that the climate crisis weighs on me would be an understatement. The wolf is at our door. We cannot ignore it any longer or decline to take action against it.

In the digital era, our consumption can feel inconsequential. A streaming video comes with no wasteful packaging. A web page need not be biodegradable. But the internet does leave a footprint on our world. Real resources are expended to deliver those cat GIFs.

In fact, a [2018 McMaster University study](https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/study-shows-smartphones-harm-the-environment/) revealed that 1.5% of global carbon emissions can be attributed to information and communications technology (ICT). As internet usage rapidly increases worldwide, this figure will balloon. By 2040, they predict, ICT will account for 14% of global emissions, equal to about half of all transit-related emissions.

Think of the process involved to send a single email. Information must travel via physical infrastructure from one electronic device to another, making stops at various servers along the way. Backups and redundancies require still more servers, more infrastructure. All of this requires electricity, and too much of that energy is dirty. The internet is almost miraculous in its complexity and power. It comes at a cost.

Web developers are used to measuring their projects in many ways. Lines of code, requests per page, filesize, load speed. [What about carbon footprint?](https://www.websitecarbon.com/)

It might seem inconsequential but think of the scale. A single inefficient web page may waste a few seconds of resources each time it's requested. Milligrams of wasteful carbon multiplied by thousands, even millions of users per month. The top 100 most popular websites combine for 7.3 billion views per month. There are over 1 billion active websites online right now.

We can't all stop what we're doing to plant trees and live simple lives in nature (don't tempt me), but we can all incorporate good environmental practice in our work, whatever that work may be. Even when our impact seems small, remote, and far away, it all adds up. [Trust me.](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/12/wildfires-california-oregon-drought-heat-fire-cycle)

The Unseen Environmental Impact of the Internet

It sometimes seems like everyone's obsessed with performance these days. And why not? In the data age, we have the tools to analyze and improve processes in every area of our lives, from health and fitness to productivity and relationships.

We're obsessed, too. Not with fitness optimization (though maybe we should be) or even with time management optimization (though we definitely should be). We are obsessed with website optimization. Hopefully, by the end of this article, you will be too.

## What is website performance? Why should you care?

Years ago, I read something that stuck with me: there's no such thing as "more optimal." Optimal is binary; you're optimal, or you're suboptimal. Optimization is a march toward an ideal form. It's a series of attempts to reach perfection, and let's be honest: you won't.

Website optimization is ultimately about improving outcomes. This article will argue that best practices for technical performance naturally result in improvements to other areas. By optimizing your technical performance, you will see improvements in your marketing performance indicators. We will prove it.

## Technical Optimization

Technical website optimization can get complicated, surprising nobody, but some of its principles are easy to understand.

### Inefficient Code

Just as there are many ways to skin a cat, there are many ways a web developer can code the same web page. Visually, two web pages can look identical. But not all methods of web development are created equal. Some websites are inefficient. Like a high school essayist trying to reach the minimum word count for an assignment, some websites use more HTML code than they need to.

Over the course of a whole web page, this kind of inefficiency has a tangible effect on website speed: it increases file sizes. It also simply takes more processing power to render the same design. Your device has to read every part of the code, so the more parts you include, the slower the page becomes.

### Large Media

Most website designs rely on media — photos, videos, illustrations, etc. — to grab attention and make the page attractive and memorable.

Just like code, media can be efficient or inefficient. Through the black magic of media encoding (don't ask us how it works — really, don't ask), we can reduce the file size of an image by 90% while barely impacting its quality.

When we upload full-sized images, videos, and other media without optimizing it, we can wind up adding a massive amount of data to each page. A 500kb web page can very quickly become a 15Mb web page. That's no bueno.

### Slow Server

When you visit a website, you connect to a server. Because servers are computers, they can be faster or slower depending on their hardware. Suppose your server has about as much RAM as an original 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System. In that case, you will not have a fast website. No amount of code optimization or image encoding will make your website fast because the server acts as a bottleneck.

## Google PageSpeed

For many years, Google has maintained a tool for web developers to test their website performance. It's one of many available, but it's the one we'll focus on. Why? Google uses PageSpeed, particularly mobile PageSpeed, to determine their search rankings and analyze their advertiser's websites. Excellent PageSpeed scores can drop your advertising costs and boost your SEO performance, as we'll soon see. Terrible PageSpeed scores can, as you may imagine, do the exact opposite. If your website has a lousy PageSpeed score, you're bleeding money on your ad campaigns and losing organic search rankings.

### How does it work?

The PageSpeed analysis tool loads your web page on a simulated mobile phone and a simulated desktop computer. As the web page loads, the tool checks for a variety of performance indicators. The mobile device simulation is handy, as it simulates a device with a poor connection and less memory. It means that problems become more apparent on mobile devices — a scenario that plays out in real life all the time.

## How PageSpeed Affects Your Bottom Line

Let's explore some business cases for optimizing your website performance.

### The case for SEO performance

Google uses PageSpeed as a key indicator for search rankings. Fast sites get favourable positioning versus equally relevant, slow websites.

Is it the most significant factor in SEO? No. Is it an important factor? Yes, definitely. If all else stayed the same but your website loaded one second faster, that performance improvement would bear out in your rankings over time over time.

### The case for advertising efficiency

Google Ads is one of the biggest and most commonly-used advertising platforms in the world. When you advertise on search engines like Google, your pricing is adjusted based on the quality and relevance of the advertisement and your landing page (or website). Google calls this a 'Quality Score.' Low-quality scores artificially reduce the efficiency of our ad budget — you pay the penalty for poor relevance and poor quality. On the other hand, exceptionally high-quality scores result in a pricing discount, stretching your budget further.

When we've worked to improve website performance for our advertising clients, we have consistently seen an increase in quality score, even if our keywords, design, and advertisements stayed the same. This alone provides a tangible increase in advertising performance.

### The case for marketing performance

Improving page speed and user experience has a knock-on effect for all digital marketing campaigns.

Marketers and business owners alike tend to over-value their offering. That is, we tend to expect that people want what we're selling with more urgency than they sometimes have. Especially in the digital arena, clicks are cheap, and attention spans are short.

That makes website performance surprisingly impactful on marketing conversion rates. [Take a look at CloudFlare's report on website performance versus conversion rates:](https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/performance/more/website-performance-conversion-rates/)

![impact of pagespeed on conversion rates](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/pagespeed-desktop.svg)


In a nutshell: speed = conversions.

### The Case for sustainability

Finally, website performance impacts the carbon footprint of your business.

Web pages have a measurable CO2 footprint. No, really. [Go measure your website.](https://www.websitecarbon.com/) Reducing the footprint of your web pages has a multiplicative effect on emissions. We recently launched a microsite for a client that produces just 0.34g of CO2 per pageview versus just over 1g of CO2 on their main website. In just a few weeks, we've reduced their advertising emissions throughput by approximately 50%. We estimate that our microsite alone saves 4.3kg of carbon per year compared to running ads through the main website. It's a small but measurable impact. If every business prioritized web performance, particularly website sustainability, we'd see significant global reductions in IT-related emissions.

## PageSpeed Impact on Advertising: Real-World Data

For business confidentiality reasons, we've omitted the client name and identifying details from this article. They are a B2B services provider whose website primarily focuses on lead generation.

## Background
Our client's services became particularly appealing for many businesses in March 2020, as COVID's first wave profoundly modified our way of life. They were able to pivot to serve the explosive demand for PPE products. During this time, lead generation was incredibly affordable through paid search advertising.

As society adjusted to our 'new normal' (we shudder to use the term), two things happened that negatively affected our advertising efforts. First demand cratered, as previously overwhelmed supply chains caught up with COVID realities. Second, competitors who were not previously advertising had every incentive to catch up. The search advertising landscape became more competitive across every vertical as more businesses moved online. By mid-2021, lead costs had skyrocketed while lead volume worsened, a losing combination.

### The situation

Over time, our advertising department realized that website speed might be impacting performance.

We noticed that since integrating HubSpot's on our landing pages, PageSpeed scores had dropped from an acceptable range to 24/100 on mobile devices. Our hypothesis was that slow load times impacted both quality scores, flagging our most popular keywords and overall conversion rates. We could test this hypothesis by improving the PageSpeed score.

### Our process
We knew that the website had previously performed well in PageSpeed tests. The only speed-related variable to change over the past several months was the HubSpot integration. HubSpot's tracking script loads several additional scripts that significantly slow down web pages. It is not possible to reduce the impact of these scripts directly. Instead, we chose to bypass HubSpot by introducing Integromat.

Integromat is a Zapier-like tool that glues web services together with workflows. For our scenario, we integrated Netlify forms with Hubspot using Integromat. Netlify's free form handling service could now post lead data directly to Hubspot without a bulky third-party script.

We improved our score from 24/100 on mobile to 72/100 - a definite improvement, though still less than ideal.

![Before and after Hubspot chat enablement](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/hubspot-pre-post.png)

### Immediate impact

We noticed an immediate uptick in some performance metrics without significantly altering campaigns, keywords, ads, or targeting settings. Our click-through rate improved by 14%, and our search placements improved. In the thirty days before making PageSpeed improvements, we had a top-of-page rate (at which our ads appear anywhere in the top set of results) of 79%. After optimization, our top of page rate improved to 84%. Our absolute top of page rate, which measures how often we have the very top position, improved from 62% to 72% over the same period.

Appearing as the very first result significantly more often had a massive effect on conversion rate. The previous thirty days had generated 17 quote form submissions. After optimization, we generated 23 — a 35% improvement in lead generation.

![Immediate marketing results of website optimization](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/results.svg)

### Next steps


We wanted to push performance even further, but we knew that the HubSpot integration meant that we could not improve it further.

Instead, we created a marketing micro-site. Our team identified an open-source HTML template that looked similar to the main website, then edited it to conform with brand guidelines more closely. Each page provided product information and CTAs. Each was linking to the main website's quote form. We kept integrations to a minimum to focus on speed. Using this technique, we improved mobile PageSpeed scores on our landing pages from 72/100 to over 90/100 on average.

![Marketing micro-site increase mobile website performance](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/mobile-score-pre-post.svg)

### Impact

Upon further improving average PageSpeed, we saw a more significant increase in advertising performance. We can guarantee the previous performance boost was due to improved website performance as little more than regular campaign maintenance occurred during that period. But the microsite introduced significant changes to the marketing funnel that may muddy the cause of our results. Nonetheless, we can confidently say that improved PageSpeed was one of the essential factors in improving performance.

Upon launching the microsite, our cost efficiency improved. Our click-through rate continued to improve, increasing by 2%. Our cost per click declined by 23%. Most importantly, we further enhanced lead generation. Through the past 20 days since implementing the microsite, we've seen thirty-five leads from advertising. Comparing this to the previous period (after initial optimization but before the microsite), we generated 26 leads. This amounts to a 35% increase in lead generation at the same cost per lead, allowing us to scale the campaign effectively.

![lower cost-per-click and higher lead generation](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/microsite-results.svg)

## The bottom line

Web performance is marketing performance. Marketing performance is revenue. In some cases, improving website performance will passively enhance your lead generation through every channel due to higher visibility, lower advertising costs, and better conversion rates.

If you're looking for easy wins for your digital marketing, consider performance optimization. It's the rising tide to lift all ships.

Website Performance Is Marketing Performance

So, you don't have the name recognition of your larger competitors. You don't have a massive sales force, and you don't have the resources to compete head-on with the big players. What you *do* have is a unique brand story and a damn good reason to be in the market. In fact, you already have an edge.  Successful underdogs win by leaning into what makes them different.

  Being an underdog forces you to find ways to stand apart from your competitors fast. Which means you can't fight over the same bone as everyone else. You have to differentiate your brand and stay unapologetically focused on the people who want that unique thing you offer.

  Here's how to find your tribe and turn your difference into a market advantage.

  ## Step 1: Find your diamond in the rough

  These days, when everyone claims to be "different," how do you stand out? For starters, don't waste time and resources inventing ways to be different. Because if you have to try, then you're not.

  You need to find and leverage the things that make you unique—things you probably don't consider as advantages. Things you might even be trying to hide. Start with what you already have: your team, offerings, mindset, values, branding, how you do business.

  Put it all on the table, including things you think of as negative or that you might want to sweep under the rug. Now look for those diamonds in the rough, business traits that you see as negatives or mostly ignore. They might be the edge you're looking for.

  How does that work? Try flipping the script.

  Let's say you're a tiny upstart in a field of giants, and you can't offer the same resources as everyone else. On the flip side, you might be the perfect company for a more prominent firm to partner with because you're faster and nimbler at adapting to market changes. Or, you might offer a superior customer experience because you're more personable and responsive.

  Maybe you're a manufacturer who's shy about not being global. Guess what? The pandemic made it painfully clear just how vulnerable global supply chains can be. You might be the perfect partner for companies scrambling to build a local supplier network.

  You don't have to change who you are. You just need to change your perspective.

  ## Step 2: Polish that diamond

  Once you've identified your competitive advantage, it's time to find the buyers that resonate with who you are and what you're leaning into. Those are the prospects to prioritize and pursue, the people and companies that make up your tribe. And, to rally them around your flag, your branding has to communicate your unique value in everything you do.

  Keep in mind being different doesn't automatically equate to being cutting-edge. Maybe you're kind of old-school, and you still like doing business with a handshake. In today's hyper-digital world, making personal, face-to-face interactions a priority will attract prospects who feel the same way as you.

  A couple key questions can help you shape your brand message:

  * What unites your audience?
  * What do buyers want that they can't easily get from someone else?
  Here's a great example from one of our favourite underdog clients.

  ### Calling all rebels

  [Diablo Nutrients](https://diablonutrients.com/) has done a fantastic job of carving a unique niche in the highly competitive biotech industry. Relatively new to the market, Diablo offers high-performance marijuana growing products with pure nutrients delivered through their own Nano-Emulsion Technology. The company's competitive edge is that proprietary tech. Their marketing edge is their unique brand.

  ![diablo nutrients website](https://files.benecms.com/blackbean2022/media/Diablofeature1.webp)

  Diablo's name and logo pretty much tell you what you need to know: this is a company for rebels. They're for commercial growers who are tired of conventional suppliers that have been doing things the same way for decades. Diablo offers leading-edge technology for companies that want to expand what's possible today. And their branding makes it very clear who they're talking to.

  ## Step 3: YOLO!

  It's not enough to talk about why you're different. You have to walk the talk, too. So how do you find ways to connect *being* different with *doing* things that are different? Experiment and explore. Or, as Seth Godin puts it, bring a [test kitchen mindset](https://seths.blog/2021/10/the-test-kitchen-mindsets/) and get ready to fail.

  Maybe, like [Diablo Nutrients](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/b2b-marketing-case-studies/diablo-nutrients), you'll launch a sunglasses-wearing demon dog of a brand into a conservative industry and earn the business of other unconventional companies. Or maybe, like 3M's Post-It Note, you'll combine two disconnected objects (like bookmarks and glue) to create one incredibly useful product—all because you [paid attention to an unmet need](https://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-business-professor-on-companies-using-experimentation-2020-2).

  Sure, experiments are risky. They don't always pay off, at least not with a clear winner every time. But, as Godin points out, true innovation comes from diving headfirst into "this might not work."

  ### Why you should try things that might not work:

  * You're not going to fall as far as a big company; your center of gravity is lower because you have less at stake. (compare what happened when [Gap tried to rebrand](https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2021/04/learnings-gap-logo-redesign-fail/) vs. what would happen if you did).

  * You're faster at learning from mistakes. Plus, you *need* to learn from mistakes. If you never mess up, you'll miss out on the incredibly valuable lessons that failure loves to dish out.

  * If you never take risks, you'll never really move the needle for your business. And, if taking risks is part of your positioning, you'll attract prospects who are looking for companies like yours that are willing to push the envelope.

  ### Ways to come up with new ideas:

  * Dedicate a small portion of your team and budget to innovative product and marketing ideas (à la test kitchen). Ideally, round up the most non-conventional thinkers you've got.
  * Look outside your industry, especially in analogous fields (think: inventory management and robot games). Those folks are drawing on different knowledge without the same biases as you. Just ask the Harvard professors who [surveyed roofers, carpenters and inline skaters](https://hbr.org/2014/11/sometimes-the-best-ideas-come-from-outside-your-industry) about making safety gear more wearable for workers.
  * Bounce ideas off of people who don't know your business inside and out. Because when you're living inside the jar, you can't see the label. You need objective, transparent opinions on whether a new offering or campaign actually fits who you are.
  * As your products and services are used by other businesses, you can learn about things they need that they're not telling you. Be more observant. Ask more questions. In your interactions (site visits, training sessions, etc.), look for clues about unmet needs.

  Above all, remember that you might learn what not to change. Being different doesn't mean you have to shoehorn people into new ways of doing things. It's about taking everything that makes you you and making it work for you.

  ## A last word of caution

  Succeeding as an underdog requires sticking to your brand narrative. It means constantly demonstrating what makes you different, from your products to your marketing to your customer service. Just keep in mind that buyers are good at sniffing out authenticity.

  If you're going to wear the underdog badge with pride, it has to be genuine. This means that as you grow, gain on competitors and become an established player, you can't keep playing up the underdog story. But you can help people remember your roots.

  Remind your prospects, customers and employees what got you where you are. Remind your most ardent supporters about the shared values that united you in the first place. And use the original, tenacious mentality that drove your success to keep fueling your innovation.

  Keep leaning into your difference. If you need help figuring out how, [give us a call](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/contact/).

Marketing for Underdogs: Lean Into Your Difference

Although manufacturing is essential to our lives — without it, all those consumer goods we cherish so much don’t exist! — manufacturers tend to struggle with lead generation. Often, manufacturers work in ‘invisible industries’ that struggle to find a place in the world of digital marketing. Manufacturers shouldn’t lose hope! There are opportunities for manufacturers to grow their digital lead generation through a variety of channels. Let’s look at our top three digital channels for generating manufacturing leads.

  # LinkedIn for Manufacturing Leads

  LinkedIn has become the go-to social network for professionals in almost any industry. Though LinkedIn marketing has a reputation for spammy direct messages and endless requests to connect with salespeople, there are ways to make LinkedIn work for your manufacturing business lead generation efforts.

  ## How to generate manufacturing leads on LinkedIn

  ### LinkedIn for Account-based Marketing

  LinkedIn is a powerful prospecting tool to support account-based marketing campaigns. Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy that involves researching and identifying specific accounts that you will market to directly. In some ways, it is an inversion of the conventional marketing funnel. Rather than focusing on inbound marketing for a wide audience, ABM means focusing on custom-tailored sales documents, resources, and even case studies intended to attract a specific client.

  ABM is a great strategy for manufacturing lead generation because it’s highly relevant and targeted. Often, manufacturers service a niche market where there are dozens or hundreds of potential clients instead of thousands or millions. Account-based marketing is ideal for small markets, particularly if the accounts have significant overlap in their wants and needs. LinkedIn provides the tools manufacturers need to get started with ABM, particularly their powerful Sales Navigator product.

  LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows manufacturers to build prospect lists based on filters such as annual revenue, industry vertical, company size, service area, and much more. It even allows manufacturers to set up alerts for target accounts, which will inform you when a company receives funding or when key personnel change jobs. This tool provides the data and insights needed to build a strong prospect list.

  ***[Learn More about Account Based Marketing With Our ABM Explainer Article!](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/what-is-account-based-marketing-simple-explainer-article)***

### LinkedIn for Cold Outreach

  Cold outreach can be challenging for manufacturing businesses. It involves high rates of rejection and is best suited to businesses that have sales and marketing automation strategies, typically via a CRM or third-party service.

  Although LinkedIn’s direct messaging system can be misused, it is a powerful cold outreach tool. People browsing LinkedIn are usually in “work mode”. They’re primed to receive business-related messages and may even be browsing for solutions to their business challenges.

  Through the same prospecting method a manufacturer might use for account-based marketing, they may build lists of prospects who don’t just need your services — they need them *now!*

  For example, if a relevant company has recently replaced their purchasing manager and have received a new round of funding from investors, it may be the right time to reach out directly to a decision-maker to start a conversation about becoming their supplier. LinkedIn provides the tools needed to identify leads ready to take action, then reach them directly.

  ## LinkedIn for Manufacturing Lead Generation Summary

  * LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a powerful prospecting tool for cold outreach and ABM
  * Even though LinkedIn direct messages and connection requests can be spammy, a targeted and strategic outreach campaign can yield strong results
  * You don’t just need to find prospects in your vertical: you need to find prospects *ready to take action* in your vertical. Consider their financials, recent hires and departures, current and upcoming projects... anything that will improve your reply rate on cold outreach.

  # Paid Search Advertising for Manufacturing Lead Generation

  Paid search advertising is a powerful lead generation tool for many manufacturing companies. Where LinkedIn’s value is in outreach, paid search advertising supports inbound marketing: you bring the customers to you!

  ## How paid search works

  Paid search, sometimes called paid search advertising, cost-per-click advertising, or simply ‘Google Ads’, is a form of advertising where companies pay to show their website at the top of the search page for important search terms (”keywords”). Depending on competition (the number of other companies bidding on your chosen search term) and a variety of factors including content relevance and website quality, you’ll pay a certain amount for every click on your web page. A low competition keyword for a quality website might only pay a dollar per click. A high competition keyword for a low-quality and irrelevant website could end up paying $50 or more for a click — or not even show up in search results!

  In many cases, “expensive” keywords are worth paying for because they have strong purchasing intent. Purchasing intent means that the searcher is likely to buy, request a quote, or otherwise make contact with your business.

  For example, a keyword like ‘chemicals’ has very low purchasing intent. A keyword like ‘chemical manufacturer’ has better intent. A keyword like ‘b2b metalworking chemical manufacturer’ might have excellent intent!

  Finally, search volume is a factor. The most relevant keyword in the world isn’t worth anything to you if it never gets searched for. Running a sucessful campaign requires balancing keyword cost, competition, intent, relevance, and volume. Clear as mud?

  ## How to generate manufacturing leads on paid search

  Paid search success for manufacturers requires a solid keyword strategy and a well-constructed digital marketing funnel.

  ### Setting up the marketing funnel

  We have to start with a goal — ONE goal — that we want our visitors to accomplish. Is it to submit a contact form submission? Place a phone call? To sign up for a newsletter, webinar, or other content marketing channel? A campaign may have secondary objectives, but it needs to have a singular goal that takes priority over the others. Keep in mind this is the lead generation goal, not the sales goal. Paid search is considered a ‘middle of funnel’ marketing strategy, that provides moderately qualified leads. We’re looking to get a prospect engaged with the business, then use follow-up engagements to push them down the funnel until they complete a sale.

  Once we’ve established our goal, we need to provide an entrance to the marketing funnel. Usually this means developing a special marketing web page (often called a ‘landing page’) and configuring marketing analytics software like Google Analytics to track our primary and secondary goals. This way, we have an entry point to our marketing funnel that tracks and attributes performance and goal completions. If we can’t measure it, we can’t optimize it for lead generation!

  Whatever our chosen goal, we also need to identify a follow-up strategy. After our user completes a goal, how do we pressure them down the funnel? When a user submits a contact form, maybe we send them a follow-up email with more sales and marketing details to keep them interested while a rep services their request. If they sign up for a newsletter, the newsletter should include content and links that encourage taking action. Otherwise, we’re paying to have a low-value, one-sided conversation with a stranger.

  ### Building an effective lead generation campaign

  Arguably the most important part of a search campaign is the keyword list. An effective keyword list takes into account everything we mentioned above — cost, competition, intent, relevance, and volume. Some of these attributes, like intent and relevance, are relatively easy to account for. Cost, competition, and volume can be far trickier. Free tools like Google’s keyword planner (available to users with an existing Google Ads account) can provide rough estimates on volume and price. More robust paid tools like SpyFu can analyze competition and provide more detailed keyword data that can help us plan more effective and predictable campaigns.

  Another big consideration is location. Ad campaign target location can greatly modify keyword competition. If your business is best suited to servicing companies in your state, province, or metro area, you might consider running a localized campaign. This shifts keyword competition to the local market, which can be very different from a national or global market — either better or worse! It’s a case-by-case decision.

  Finally, the ads themselves matter. When we advertise on Google, we need to write ads for every ad group or campaign we run. A great ad can be the difference between getting a click and getting nothing. It can also help you get the right kind of click! An ad that’s too vague or focuses on the wrong selling propositions can attract low-value users and waste your ad budget.

  Entire books have been written about keyword strategy, ad writing, and advertising in general. This article is little more than a general guide to lead generation for manufacturers. If you want guidance in setting up your advertising campaign, consider reaching out to us for expert advice and advertising management services.

  ### What to expect from a manufacturing lead generation ad campaign

  There are many moving parts to a paid search campaign — more than a single blog post could hope to cover! Instead, let’s look at a few things to expect from a successful ad campaign. As an agency, we’ve managed millions in total advertising budgets across dozens of business and manufacturing verticals. Here’s what we found.

  * **Businesses often need to choose between volume and intent.** Manufacturers tend to have very specific offerings that can suffer from low keyword volume. In these cases, it’s sometimes wise to broaden the keyword to reach a wider audience, knowing that you’ll sacrifice lead generation rate and lead quality in doing so. This is better than starving a campaign with low volume keywords.
  * **Better content and landing pages make for better leads.** Some manufacturers have questioned the value of content production and custom landing pages. We’ve seen the results. Improving content relevance and website experience attract more relevant, higher-quality leads from bigger clients. Landing page experience is one of the first places to analyze for improvements when a campaign goes poorly.
  * **Rome isn’t built in a day; neither is an ad campaign.** It takes time, expertise, and ongoing analysis to optimize a campaign. The first few days or weeks of a new campaign may not yield results, but be patient. If after a month or more you are not seeing at least some results, you may want to revisit your strategy.
  * **Don’t get hypnotized by the wrong metrics.** Some clients get distracted by metrics like cost per click or click volume, when the metrics that really matter are leads generated, cost per lead, and return on investment. Other metrics merely support campaign analysis; they do not explain the true value of an ad campaign. Consider how much a lead is worth before calling Google Ads ‘too expensive’. How many leads, at what cost, would you need to generate to break even, given your sales close rate? Use that calculation to determine your advertising budget and expectations.

  # Organic Search Marketing (SEO) for Manufacturing Lead Generation

  Finally, we get to our last digital marketing channel for manufacturing lead generation: organic search. By utilizing search engine optimization best practices, we can passively attract high-quality traffic to valuable web pages.

  ## SEO vs. Paid Search for Lead Generation: What’s the Difference?

  Given that two out of three proposed marketing channels involve search engines, you may be wondering what the difference is between organic search marketing and paid search advertising.

  Although SEO and paid search both rely on the same platform — usually Google, though don’t discount Microsoft Bing as a sales channel in some industries — their strategies are quite different.

  Organic search allows us to rank for a wider range of keywords than paid search is feasible for. Paid search requires that intent to take action — it’s trickier to see ROI from keywords that aren’t highly sales-driven.

  Organic search works great for lower-intent, further up the funnel keywords. Because we’re not paying for each result, we can develop informational content, blog posts, guides, tutorials, and think pieces meant to attract potential customers that aren’t yet looking to buy. The idea is that we generate a lot of traffic volume for key articles and pages. This large cohort of users will contain some legitimate leads that just aren’t ready to purchase. Instead, we provide them opportunities to stay engaged with our content until they ‘heat up’ and are ready to talk business. A common tactic is to encourage users to register for a newsletter or informational event like a webinar. This way, we can capture their contact details and drip-feed them information over time to convince them to buy.

  # SEO Strategy for Manufacturing Lead Generation

  A basic SEO strategy for manufacturing lead generation might be centred around long-format informational content like case studies and white papers.
  Let’s imagine a manufacturer sells custom monitoring systems for chemical manufacturing processes. It isn’t a product that their customers think too much about, but it is an important part of quality assurance and production efficiency. The manufacturer has a variety of reasons why their custom solution is better than a more conventional solution. Perhaps the sensors can tolerate higher temperatures or safely monitor more volatile substances than their competitors. Maybe each monitoring system is easier to assemble and repair than their competition. In any case, the selling propositions are clear, but the ability to reach customers through paid search might be lacking. After all, what search terms offer intent and volume for this product?
  Enter organic search. The manufacturer talks to their clients to understand why customers prefer their solution. They find that their custom monitoring systems are much faster to install and easier to maintain than other solutions, while providing valuable production data that saves labour time on manual analysis. A larger up-front investment in sensor technology, the manufacturer finds, yields long-term savings by reducing labour costs for each production cycle.

  This is a product ripe for organic search marketing. Through his keyword research, the manufacturer finds that there are many popular topics and keywords related to reducing labour costs and increasing yields in chemical manufacturing. Armed with this knowledge, the manufacturer develops a series of case studies and short articles on the topic and publishes them to their website. Each one features options to engage further, from newsletter sign-ups to webinars, podcasts, or other forms of content marketing.

  Over time, the articles bring in more and more traffic. Although a very high percentage of the traffic never contacts the manufacturer directly, a small percentage do. The sheer volume of traffic to these resources eventually proves to be a consistent and affordable source of business leads.

  ## How to make SEO work for your manufacturing business

  Our example illustrates one case where SEO might make more sense for a manufacturing business than paid search — when there are few relevant keywords for a paid campaign, but many informational keywords to develop content for. In truth, SEO often accompanies paid search campaigns as the long-term, slow burn strategy.

  SEO takes time to build momentum. The idea is to invest in SEO today to reap benefits in a year. This can sometimes be a hard sell! What’s important to remember is that SEO performance often improves over the course of years with minimal follow-up investment. Once the content is in place, it matures without much overhead, providing more and more value through the years.

  A properly built website with a robust SEO strategy may eventually render paid search obsolete for the business. Once the website appears near the top of the page for valuable search terms, it becomes less important to pay for those top results. Investment in SEO today can result in reduced advertising costs in the future.

  # The Best Marketing Channels for Manufacturers

  There are many effective marketing channels for b2b marketing lead generation. The three highlighted in this article are among the very best digital channels to learn and leverage as a manufacturing company.

  At the end of the day, the value of each channel comes down to quality of implementation. A poorly implemented LinkedIn or search strategy can waste time and money while providing disappointing results.

  This is where we come in. If you need to improve your manufacturing lead generation, we’re a capable full-service marketing agency specialized in providing services for B2B manufacturing businesses. Reach out to us today for a no obligation consultation.

  Your business runs on leads. Together we can help you fill your pipeline with qualified, high-value prospects.

Mobile-first. If you haven’t heard of it before now, you’ve missed out on the number one web design mantra of the past five years. **Build it for phones; that’s where your customers are.** Even better, it’s where they *will be*: more and more often, people engage with the internet via a small screen rather than a laptop or desktop.

Google agrees, by the way. We’ve mentioned it before. Several years ago, Google moved to mobile-first indexing for their search engine. **Google treats your mobile website as the *main* website, not an add-on or secondary version.**

This is more than a shift in philosophy: it has a real-world impact. Websites that fail to meet Google’s standards for website experiences receive penalties in their search visibility. **In short: no mobile-friendly website? Say goodbye to your search traffic.**

This is where conventional web design philosophy and B2B websites clash. **For most of our clients, phones *aren’t* where their customers are.** When you sell products that require custom quotes, have a months-long sales cycle, and can often be valued in millions of dollars per sale, it’s far less likely that your customer’s journey begins or ends on a phone.

Instead, it starts on a desktop computer in another company’s purchasing department. **The experience that most B2B manufacturers ought to prioritize is desktop over mobile.**

So how can we have our cake and eat it? Google is all about mobile-first. Manufacturers usually don’t get value from their mobile visitors. **The answer comes via a design concept called ‘progressive enhancement’.**

When Google analyzes websites for their mobile-friendliness, they aren’t really able to look at less tangible design features. Google uses a robot called a web crawler to explore web pages. **It’s a very clever robot — but a robot nonetheless.** When it scans a web page, it looks for a variety of signals to tell it if it’s mobile-friendly or not. Does the page have a proper width set for phones? Is its text readable on a small screen? Can you click all the menu elements on a touch screen?

**These technical flags are what tell Google a website is mobile-friendly.** Meeting the minimum requirement for mobile-friendliness is not actually that hard! This means that savvy web developers (like us!) can focus their efforts on providing excellent desktop experiences while providing a very simple (but technically flawless) mobile experience.

**Essentially, we build the mobile site for a robot, using as few resources as possible, and the desktop site for humans.** It’s called progressive enhancement because we ‘ramp up’ the complexity and quality of user experience for our desktop view. **The website starts very simple and grows lusher and human-friendly as the screen size increases.**

In doing so, we allocate fewer development resources toward building a website view that valuable customers won’t usually see. **This frees us up to double down on the experiences that *do* result in leads and revenue — your desktop traffic.**

With a little bit of trickery, you really *can* have your cake and eat it, too.

Why good B2B industrial websites break the rules

#### Why good B2B industrial websites break the rules 

Measuring digital marketing ROI is a tricky thing to wrap your head around.

  Digital campaigns offer dozens, even hundreds of metrics to track. Should you be focusing on click-through-rate? What about impression share? What do those metrics *even mean*? **This article will provide you with a framework for understanding and measuring digital marketing ROI.** 

  Business owners and managers tend to think in terms of inputs and outputs. How much did we invest in advertising? What was the return? But, it’s not always obvious which inputs and outputs to measure when it comes to marketing metrics. For most folks, because modern marketing involves so much data, it’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees.

  As a result, too many businesses fixate on vanity metrics like page visits and impressions when what really matters is what’s happening on the ground—purchases, enrolments, etc. Dollars and cents, not views and clicks.

  There used to a be a joke in marketing: “Know what ‘hits’ stands for? How Idiots Track Success.” It’s kind of mean, we know. But it points to a fundamental truth about people: we like shiny things. **The problem is; shiny metrics can distract from what’s really going in with your marketing investment. Worst case, you’ll waste time and money optimizing for the wrong things.**

  **This article will help you figure out which metrics are telling you whether your marketing is truly moving the needle for your business.**

  ## Digital Metrics Should Serve Business Metrics

  ...and not the other way around. What do we mean? Let’s use the [Quality Score](https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6167118?hl=en) in Google Ads as an example. Measured on a scale of 1-10, the score is a rough measure of how well your ad meets users’ search intentions or the likelihood that a user will click on your ad versus a competitor’s. You might think, “I’m a quality business; I should be a 10/10 advertiser.” And you could burn hundreds of hours trying to get that 10/10 score.

  Was that really a good use of resources? Not if those perfect-10 ads aren’t generating valuable leads.

  The problem is; you could be optimizing your ads for the wrong audience. But if you look only at the 10/10 quality score, it seems like you’re doing everything right. When you examine the end results of your efforts and discover that *none* of those clicks are converting into actual leads, that’s the metric that tells you what’s really happening with your ad spend—and that you need to rethink your strategy.

  In this case, the business metrics that should be your primary focus are:

  * How much did we spend?
  * How many leads did we get?
  * What was the average value of each lead?
  * Ultimately, was the ad campaign profitable?

  The quality score, by contrast, is a secondary metric. It can help you understand *why* something like an ad campaign works or doesn’t work, but it doesn’t tell you whether the campaign was actually worth the investment. That’s where you turn to primary metrics, like the ones above.

  > Primary metrics tell you what happened; secondary metrics tell you how it happened.

  We don’t optimize for secondary objectives; we use them as a means to optimize for the most important indicators. In other words, make sure you’re optimizing for your business, not your digital metrics.

  ## When a Click Doesn’t Click

  Unfortunately, we’ve seen marketers throw all kinds of numbers into reports that make it look like something’s happening, with digital dashboards lit up bright green. You might hear, “Well, yeah, we haven’t gotten any conversions yet, but look at how many clicks and impressions we’re getting!”

  As a business, your end goal isn’t collecting clicks. It’s collecting money. And if all those clicks don’t translate into conversions, they don’t mean anything. Trees, not forest. In fact, you could have far fewer clicks that result in much more successful marketing campaigns. If there’s more revenue coming in, it doesn’t matter if your dashboard is red.

  Here are some concrete examples to help you understand when a click matters and when it doesn’t.

  ### Digital advertising

  One question clients have asked is, “Why should we pay $30 for a single search ad click when we could run display ads and get tons of clicks for 3 cents each? Why pay $30 just to get someone to my website?” (Often followed by, “That’s crazy.”)

  It’s not crazy if what you sell is worth $30K per sale, and you’re optimizing your ads for lead quality, not click volume. If you work out the percentages, you only need 1 in every *x* number of clicks to convert for you to make money. That’s thinking from a business perspective, not a secondary metric perspective. So instead of, “It’s $30 to get a click,” you’re saying, “It’s $30 to get an opportunity to sell $30,000.”

  That’s why, as a marketing agency, we might spend a lot of time fiddling over a handful of keywords and phrases in a client’s ad. Because a single word in one ad can vastly impact the quality of traffic, you get. Take the term “oil change,” for instance. Someone could be looking for how to do an oil change themselves versus finding a shop near them to do the work—which means your ad’s keywords make all the difference in whether those clicks turn into quality leads.

  Your marketing team (or agency) should be spending their time figuring out precisely what that wording should be.

  ### Search engine optimization

  At a basic level, traffic to your website is good. And investing in an SEO strategy that bumps your web pages higher in search results can generate traffic. But it’s the value of every single person who visits your site that can make SEO either viable or less viable in terms of marketing investment.

  Tracking your Google ranking for targeted search terms, along with the number of site visitors, new visitors, etc., on your site will tell you whether your SEO efforts are having an impact...but not whether you’re getting a good return. For that, you need to examine the average conversion rate for your site. How many of those visitors are turning into qualified sales opportunities?

  Knowing the conversion rate and/or revenue from your web traffic will help you put a ceiling on your SEO spend. There may be search terms that seem really attractive. Still, suppose it’s going to take a considerable investment to rank on the first page of Google. In that case, that moves your breakeven point much further forward.

  ### Email newsletters

  One marketing tactic that’s especially likely to cause shiny-object syndrome is email. And, for many companies, it’s hard to know how much to invest in building a subscriber base and managing a newsletter.

  Ultimately, it depends on the product or service you’re offering and whether a newsletter would effectively support more sales. We’ve seen that newsletters simply become informational, with marketers focusing on things like open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribes. That’s a great example of chasing the wrong metrics.

  Instead of asking whether your open rate is high enough or how many people are clicking on your links, evaluate whether the messaging and links in your emails truly support your marketing objectives and business goals. Don’t let a dashboard filled with nice-looking numbers distract from what’s most important: marketing that makes people come back and buy more.

  ## Get the Real Story

  Hopefully, by now, you’re feeling a little better equipped to ask your marketing team or agency the right questions to uncover whether your marketing is genuinely having a positive impact on your business. No one expects you to be an expert—digital marketing involves a lot of complex signals, and it’s your marketing team's job to analyze and apply them.

  What you can do, as a business owner or manager, is to look at the primary metrics and evaluate whether you see enough leads and revenue to justify your marketing spend. Then you might come to us and say, “The money isn’t adding up; we need to make more revenue from this campaign.” After that, it’s up to us to interpret the more complicated secondary signals, figure out why things aren’t working, and fix them.

  Just remember, if someone throws you a marketing dashboard full of green lights, make sure those metrics are telling the real story of your dollars and cents.

  Need help figuring out whether your marketing efforts are paying off or how to make them more effective? We’ll be straight with you. [Book a free consultation](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/contact/) today.

Measure Digital Marketing ROI: Optimize for the Right Metrics


## What is Industrial Manufacturing SEO?

SEO. One of so many TWAs (Three Word Acronyms) in marketing, likely the most misunderstood. It’s not a silver bullet that solves all your problems, nor is it a mystic art that us mere mortals can only puzzle at.

It’s a tool, and it ought to be in your toolbox. Let’s define SEO, then look at what’s special about SEO for industrial manufacturers.

### What is SEO?

SEO is [Search Engine Optimization](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/industrial-marketing-services/b2b-seo-company). We know what a search engine is: it’s Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or any of several alternatives. You put words in the search bar, hit enter, and get results. For the most part, SEO focuses on Google as it accounts for over 80% of all web search traffic.

So what about the optimization part? SEO is about influencing which websites get the top spots in a search engine. The top results on the first page in Google get many times more clicks and views than the page's bottom results. Once you’re on page two or three, you may as well be invisible. The drop-off in visibility is that steep.

SEO pros have the knowledge and tools to analyze keywords and competition. They can and develop websites and pages that rank best for those target keywords.

This means crafting websites and content designed for two audiences: humans and robots. Specifically, one robot: the Google Bot.

### How Google crawls the internet

Google finds and ranks pages for its search engine with a robot. The robot travels the internet, sniffing out new pages. It looks for certain signals to determine what each page is about. The main signal is the words on the page, but there are technical factors as well.

When it finds a page that is ultra-relevant for a particular search term, it assigns it a very high ranking. If it finds a page that is very poor for a search term, it ranks it very low, or doesn’t rank it at all.

Google Bot doesn’t sniff each page one then move along. It’s always circling back around to see what’s new and exciting on your website. SEO pros can help make sure your pages smell extra-good to the robot. They ensure you rank well for your target search terms.

Let's look at an example. A chemical supply company might want to rank well for the keyword ‘US hexane supplier’. They might hire an SEO company to make adjustments to their website and content. That will improve their relevance for that valuable keyword. 

The SEO company might also improve technical factors like page speed. This will ensure the Google Bot really likes your website.

This, in a nutshell, is SEO.

## What is industrial manufacturing SEO?

Industrial manufacturing SEO is one of many niches within the broad field of SEO.

Every type of company will want to rank for different terms, in different ways. News websites have a different set of requirements from recipe blogs. E-commerce websites want to show up differently from B2B companies.

Industrial manufacturing SEO combines B2B sales and marketing experience with SEO best practices. Its goal is to identify keywords and content that improves lead generation.

B2B SEO acknowledges the challenges of long sales cycles and complex deals that are commonplace in the industrial sector.

## Myths and misconceptions about industrial manufacturing SEO

5 billion searches per day. That's Google's estimated usage in 2022. We can see why SEO is valuable for businesses, and why it’s so ubiquitous as a phrase.

Its popularity gave rise to many myths and misunderstandings about the nature of SEO. Let’s look at some of the common concerns we hear from clients about SEO.

### SEO is a scam, myth, or money pit

First of all, let me say this: I can empathize.

SEO is a challenging and in-demand discipline. Unfortunately, it’s also misunderstood — particularly by the clients of SEO companies.

Misunderstanding resulted in a sea of SEO charlatans, jokers out to make a quick buck. If a client doesn't understand the service they've purchased, they cannot evaluate performance. Untrustworthy SEOs may sell them an "affordable" package that offers no value.

What often happens is a business gets taken for a ride by one of these charlatans. They sign up for a 6- or 12-month commitment, then wait patiently for the results to roll in. Unfortunately, they often never do.

This may be due to poor quality work. Usually it’s due to low volume of work. A business gets sold a cheap package where the SEO company does a tiny amount of low value work each month. This will result in no measurable impact on website performance.

SEO itself, when practiced ethically, works. It does! The biggest businesses in the world invest in SEO and carry out SEO best practices. They do so because they see the value. Bad experiences with dishonest professionals tarnish the reputation of this important marketing discipline.

### SEO only works for e-commerce and B2C companies

SEO isn’t the right strategy for every business. A sole proprietor running a local lawn-mowing service may be a bad fit. It is a good strategy for most established businesses, regardless of vertical. Here’s why.

One of the biggest challenges for every business is getting customers in the door. It’s tricky to get your customers aware of your particular business. Doubly so if you’re in a competitive vertical.

SEO does a great job of getting users through your digital front door. It is as an awareness tool for B2B companies rather than a direct lead generation tool.

A B2C business has a simple path from awareness to purchasing. Consider an online shoe store. They might use an SEO strategy to rank for ‘women’s tennis shoes’. If they get the top spot in Google, each visitor has a fair chance of buying right away.

SEO for B2B companies takes a bit longer. We start by ranking for informational keywords instead of purchasing keywords. This helps us generate traffic volume and pre-qualify customers.

Next, we use conversion tools like gated content to nurture visitors into prospects.

B2B customers, particularly in industrial manufacturing, have long and complex sales cycles. We use SEO to start the conversation, while B2C companies may use it to close the deal.

Over time, SEO generates leads for B2B businesses by increasing your online ‘foot traffic’. Given enough traffic volume, SEO will capture leads you won’t otherwise get.

## How industrial manufacturing SEO works

SEO for industrial manufacturers differs based on the specific vertical and product offering. It may incorporate elements of local SEO, if the business has a particular service area. Or, it may focus on globally relevant keywords if the business operates internationally.

SEO for industrial manufacturers mirrors the structure of the business’ sales apparatus. If your sales team is best equipped for local sales, the strategy may become more localized. If instead you excel at online sales, it may cast a wider net.

It’s unlikely that a website visitor to a B2B site will be ready to take action immediately. Our focus becomes reaching potential customers in their research and planning phase.

How do we turn this early, informational intent into leads? We prospect!

Like a grizzled prospector sluicing for gold nuggets, we process our traffic through other marketing tools. Consider a blog post meant to attract users researching sensor solutions for a new factory. We would add a pop-up form on that page that offers a complete spec sheet for the products highlighted in the post. By submitting their contact information to receive the download, we’ve created a cold calling opportunity.

Or, we may use an automated approach. Website analytics trackers can create audiences from users who visit particular pages. We use those audiences to deliver targeted banner ads to users we suspect are high-value. This allows us to recapture customers who leave the website.

Through these tactics, SEO provides ROI for businesses regardless of the length and complexity of their sales cycle.

## What should I expect from B2B SEO?

Now that we know what SEO is, what should we expect when we embark on an SEO journey?

 First, don’t expect money for nothing ([nor chicks for free)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmRzbKNbTsY). SEO requires investment, and a lot of that investment comes up-front. An SEO project is only as good as its strategy. If an SEO company approaches you offering immediate results with no strategic or planning component, turn tail and run. They’re out for a quick buck.

SEO takes time because SEO is all about content. Creating and optimizing content is a big task. Ensure your business has the resources and budget in place to fund content creation. Starving an SEO strategy won’t get you to positive ROI.

Finally, ensure you have the tools in place to filter and prospect your traffic. SEO is a traffic generation tool. The rest is up to you, your sales and marketing teams, and their tools and techniques.

## The bottom line

SEO can work for your industrial manufacturing business. It works for ours, and for millions of other businesses around the world. Approach SEO with an open mind, but arm yourself with information first! Don’t allow yourself to be hoodwinked by over-the-top claims and cheap SEO packages. While there are always deals to be had, keep in mind the scope and complexity of an SEO project.

  If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Industrial Manufacturing SEO: What You Need To Know About SEO for B2B

A playwright named Titus Maccius Plautus from the 200s–100s BC is credited with saying, ["You have to spend money to make money."](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/what-spending-money-to-make-money-really-means) We don’t know much about his life, except that he was one of the great Roman comic dramatists and a failed businessman. That doesn’t mean he was wrong, but he wasn’t *exactly* right.

  To this day, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and, yes, especially marketers still use that adage to throw money at all kinds of things, as if spending alone is the solution to their problems. Yet, [82% of small businesses fail](https://www.thebalancesmb.com/cash-flow-management-2947138) because of poor cash flow—often because firms are throwing good money after bad.

  The important question isn't really whether we need to [spend money to make money](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/what-spending-money-to-make-money-really-means).  It's about how we spend it. "How much money should I spend on marketing?" is the wrong first question. It should instead be: "**How** **should I spend money on marketing?**"

  For your business in general and your marketing in particular, ***spend money*** ***where it matters***. If you’re struggling to figure out where that is, you’re not alone. We’ve put together this overview of where investments work best for industrial firms based on our experience helping several businesses get back on track.

  In every case, we started with a roadmap.

  ## Planning your marketing spend

  There's that other old chestnut, "Fail to plan, plan to fail." (Ben Franklin, in case you were wondering.) We've seen the aftermath time and again, especially with newer companies. When you make an investment with no clear strategy, you're planning to fail.

  This is especially common with company websites. Over the years, we've been contacted by many firms that launched a new website, sat back, and waited...and waited...and waited for leads to come in. These companies didn't establish lead-generation goals for the site or implement targeted tactics in nearly every case. They'd simply built an expensive digital brochure without an SEO strategy, data tracking, or [conversion optimization](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/industrial-marketing-services/).

  Whether you're launching a marketing initiative or investing in other business areas, building a roadmap is critical to ensure the money you spend will move the needle for your firm. The roadmap should have two main ingredients: **a budget and a game plan.**

  * The **budget** aligns your growth targets with your revenue and expenses.
  * The **game plan** acts like a GPS for your business decisions.
  > *Not sure where to start with a roadmap? It’s one of our favorite things to do. [Give us a shout](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/contact/) to learn more.*

  There are all kinds of ways you can spend money to make money—if you establish specific goals and strategic priorities. Below are three areas where we’ve seen investments pay off for industrial B2B firms that are strategically spending.

  ## The Three P's of Planning Marketing Investment

  **There are three business areas where smart investments are most likely to drive growth: People, Products, and Perception**. Aligning your spending with these three principles won’t guarantee fiscal responsibility or increased revenue, but it will help. A lot.

  ### Invest in People

  Businesses invest in their people every day. It's called payroll. But investment in people doesn't stop there. Comfortable, happy people are more sustainably productive than their uncomfortable, unhappy counterparts. That's why money spent on talent retention and development is one of the best marketing investments you can make.

  It can seem like an investment in people only moves the meter when it comes to your sales and marketing personnel. But consider the impact of improving the autonomy and skill of your workforce entire: less managerial overhead, higher productivity, improved employee buy-in and satisfaction. Your investment in people will improve long-term financials, reduce staff turnover, and provide your leadership with the time to strategize, iterate, and improve marketing processes.

  When it comes to development, some firms focus only on hard skills like safety or compliance, with no particular goals in mind other than having a more competent, knowledgeable workforce. Short-term, that approach could increase productivity and profitability. It could also backfire.

  Suppose hard skills are the only kind of training you offer. Your employees might simply realize that they're now more valuable in the market and go elsewhere, looking for more money. Which can end up costing you much more than you spent on training.

  **If instead, you invest in a combination of hard and soft skills training (" soft" being interpersonal skills, time management, etc.), you'll not only increase employees' happiness and productivity:** You'll also reinforce your firm's value to them as a source of professional growth—in which case, they're more likely to stay.

  When you factor employee acquisition and onboarding costs into your budget, along with any revenue gains from enhanced productivity, it's clear that employee retention drives profitability. In the long run, this strategic approach to workforce development supports your growth goals better than hard-skills-only training.

  > *Just as important as making an investment is measuring whether that spend is paying off. If you’re investing in soft skills for your people, software like [Know Your Team](https://knowyourteam.com/) can provide valuable feedback on the difference you’re making for your team*.

  ### Invest in your product

  When it comes to investing in product, some firms focus primarily on R&D. Of course, improving your product with new features, better quality, or additional options can spur more sales or command higher prices, driving up revenue. And, if your cost to improve the product is less than what you stand to gain, it's a good investment.

  However, many firms fail to consider the inputs and outputs along their entire value chain. How much time and resources does it take to design, manufacture, and distribute a product? Where are there inefficiencies you can reduce? Investing in ways to produce and sell a product more efficiently can be just as profitable as improving the product itself.

  This is where developing a strategic plan is crucial for identifying all the levers you can pull to reduce inefficiencies, improve product quality, and increase profitability. Scrutinizing all the inputs and outputs can show you where investing in equipment, R&D, or people will drive the results you seek.
  See? This ties right back to investing in people. You probably know better than anyone that employees who just clock in and out aren’t really invested in the success of your product or company. The better the team, the better the product and the processes behind it.

  By investing in people’s technical, problem-solving, and leadership skills, you can help motivate them to streamline and improve your production and sales processes—especially if you have a roadmap to point them in the right direction.

  > *One essential way to measure the impact of product and process investments is through client satisfaction research. Whether you use automated surveys or have an account manager call people to check in, invest in methods to make sure you’re making things better, not worse.*

  ### Invest in perception

  For better or worse, perception matters. That's why mechanics wear coveralls to work, and bankers don't. Suppose your business doesn't project authority, reliability, or other essential qualities to your target customer. In that case, it's time to invest in changing those perceptions.

  At its heart, marketing is all about perception. There's a reason it's sometimes called a marriage of art and science: there's a lot of fact-based, logical work to be in any marketing department, but so much marketing success pivots on feelings over facts. Spending marketing dollars on improving perception is a worthwhile investment for any business.

  We've seen many industrial firms struggle with having their target audience perceive them as being too small to meet the needed capacity, even when they're actually a large company. More often than not, it's because every piece of their marketing screams "mom-and-pop shop." Outdated website? We're looking at you.

  Many firms know they should be getting big contracts, but their marketing isn't helping them succeed. Branding is a massive part of that and an excellent place to start with an investment. Beyond branding, how you talk to people and what you talk about are vital in shaping the message you're projecting into the world.

  If your intended message is getting lost in translation, invest in content that better supports your business goals. Too many firms are careless about spending on advertising and websites that use the wrong words to express what's meaningful to their target audience. Instead, identify the core message that's crucial to your success and invest time and money in creating the content to support it, including:

  * Unique mission, vision, and values statements that resonate with your prospects
  * Authoritative writing that projects the scale of who you are and what you can do
  * An SEO-driven website strategy that ensures the right customers find you
  * Storytelling that showcases the grit, hustle, and drive behind your firm

  Above all, invest in hiring people who are good at this, so you don't waste money on more ineffective content. It is a specialized skill to craft your core brand message and deliver it through meaningful content. Spend the cash to get it right.

  > Not sure if your content is working? Here’s a cheap but effective way to invest in measuring the effectiveness of your message: Ask five friends to look at your marketing materials and ask, “If you didn’t know me, what would you think of this company?” It might cost a few beers, at most.

  **While we're strong advocates for building and following a clear spending strategy, we also believe you need to be ready to react to change.** Blindly following a long-term plan can backfire horribly. Just look at what happened to Pepsi's [ill-fated commercial with Kendall Jenner](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/pepsi-ad-kendall-jenner-echoes-black-lives-matter-sparks-anger-n742811).

  As part of its new "Live for Now" marketing campaign, Pepsi shot the commercial long before the Black Lives Matter movement took off in the U.S. It was slated to launch during the summer of 2000 when BLM protests suddenly surged across the country. With everything they'd already invested in the campaign, Pepsi decided to air the commercial anyway.

  The ad showed supermodel Kendall Jenner doing a photoshoot and then "jumping in" with protestors marching along the road. Critics everywhere bashed Pepsi for co-opting the protest movement. The commercial was yanked off the air less than 48 hours later. The brand lost a ton of equity at that moment. The money they'd spent on that campaign was lost, too. In fact, the follow-on impact may have cost them millions more.

  The world moves fast. A month ago, no one was talking about a war in Ukraine. Six months ago, no one saw the Omicron Covid-19 variant coming. That's why we recommend allocating at least some budget for rogue spending, so you can be responsive when market conditions change.

  Be open to recognizing when spending money could actually lose you, and be ready to pivot your strategy to support your long-term goals.

  **Need some help identifying the most impactful ways to invest in your marketing? We'll work with you on everything from website user experience and advertising to branding and communication strategies. [Contact us today](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/contact/) for a free consultation.**

Spend Money, Make Money: How much should I spend on marketing?

Maybe it was the promise of an endless stream of adoring prospects. Or all that talk of showering you in qualified leads. Maybe you just liked the way they laughed at your corny jokes. Whatever the draw, your B2B marketing agency seemed like the perfect fit at first. Then, one day, you looked at the numbers and realized you weren't in the right relationship after all.

  Maybe it’s time to rethink what you’re looking for in a partner.

  Working with an external marketing agency is a significant investment and a choice to be made carefully. Find the right partner, and you can achieve substantial growth. You bring the industry expertise; they bring the tools, team, and know-how to execute your marketing with the best results. You just have to find the right agency for you.

  When it comes down to it, shopping for a marketing agency is a lot like dating. Everyone puts their best foot forward in the beginning, but eventually, you’re either in love or posting revenge pics on Instagram.

  Here’s how to find an industrial B2B marketing firm that fits your needs, works well with your team and gets the results you’re looking for.

  ## Why you need an industrial B2B specialist

  B2B marketing in itself is a different animal from the B2C world. With longer sales cycles and more people involved in decisions, B2B marketing tends to be more costly. And, because your customers are acting on behalf of their companies, your marketing often requires extensive educational resources and facts to help those folks make a case for doing business with you.

  So, at the very least, you need to find a marketing agency that either exclusively works with B2B firms or has extensive B2B marketing experience.
  Now let’s consider the industrial space. You’re likely in a niche market, with a limited number of companies in the entire world that can buy what you sell. And let's face it, the industrial B2B world can be much less forgiving than B2C, especially if you operate locally or in a tight niche. Make a wrong impression, and you could damage your reputation and ruin your prospects with any potential business partners, local or global.

  That’s why your marketing agency must understand, at a very granular level, what your customers’ challenges are and how to address them. They don’t need to be experts in your industry, but they must be comfortable in the industrial space and able to speak your customers’ language. You want an agency that has chosen to specialize in this area because they enjoy working with clients like you.

  Next up are the questions you should be asking of yourself and any potential agency, right from the first date.

  ## 1. What kind of experience does the agency have?

  Some people like to say all marketing is just marketing. But there are tricks and techniques that are specific to different verticals, particularly in the industrial space, which can be confusing, unsexy, and often unnoticed. So always ask whether an agency’s prior experience is somehow relevant to your industry sector.

  Also, find out whether and how they’ve accomplished goals that are similar to yours for other firms. Do they have creative ideas? Proven solutions? Ask them about the strategies they’ve developed for other businesses in the past.

  Any B2B marketing agency worth their salt should be able to provide:

  * \[ ] Portfolios, case studies, or metrics from past and current B2B clients
  * \[ ] Knowledge and skills in implementing B2B marketing strategies
  * \[ ] Specific areas of digital marketing expertise
  * \[ ] B2B marketing tools they use regularly

  ## 2. What kind of services do you really need?

  Before you go shopping for a marketing agency, it’s crucial to understand what you’re really contracting for. Start by defining the outcomes you want to achieve. What do you want to improve? Is it something specific in your current marketing strategy, or are you looking to develop a whole new marketing plan?

  Remember that different goals require different types of marketing efforts. For instance, increasing brand awareness and improving your sales numbers are related, but separate, objectives that require different skills and strategies. And not every marketing agency offers every kind of service.

  Depending on your goals, it might make sense to hire an agency that specializes in a particular area rather than the biggest, most full-service agency around. If you need someone to run a series of ad campaigns, you probably need an advertising agency. If you’re looking for sales-targeted marketing, you might want an agency that specializes in qualified lead generation.

  One other thing to consider: how much of your marketing do you want to handle in-house versus outsourcing? If you don’t have the capacity or expertise to do much marketing internally, you may need a B2B agency to take care of your marketing needs from beginning to end. Or, maybe you’re looking for outsourced help to take on a few specific tasks that might be best handled externally.

  Make sure you have well-defined goals going into your first conversation. It’ll make it easier for both sides to assess whether you’re a good match and how you’ll measure the success of the relationship.

  ## 3. How does the agency approach its work?

  You never really know what someone’s like to live with until you move in together. But you can ask a lot of questions beforehand, to get a sense of how well you’ll mesh and where the pain points might be. *Ahem*, dishwasher.

  Before signing on with a marketing agency, be sure to ask for specifics around how they work. Here’s what we’d ask about—and our two cents on what to look for:

  ### Are they client-focused?

  One thing is absolutely crucial in the industrial space: Your marketing agency should be committed to understanding your business, your market, and your competition. If your first conversation is all about them instead of about you, look elsewhere.

  ### Do they think strategically?

  If a B2B marketing agency emphasizes strategy first, you’re on the right track. The best agencies will help you document a roadmap for reaching your goals, demonstrating a clear understanding of your business and market and a plan for how you’ll leverage marketing tools and channels.

  ### Do they use data?

  Growth marketing depends on continuous optimization. Test, evaluate, adjust, repeat: it’s the basis of any good digital marketing strategy, and it means that marketers are paying attention to whether your efforts are actually paying off. So, find out how important data and metrics are to the agency’s overall approach.

  ### What does their process look like?

  Being able to describe their workflow in detail is a good sign that an agency has tried-and-true systems in place to streamline their client communications and drive results.

  ## 4. Does it feel like a good personal fit?

  Don’t discount the personal side of an agency relationship. Remember that you actually have to work with these people.

  When you’re first introduced to a marketing agency, you’re going to be connected to someone who’s either in leadership, project management, or some kind of client-facing role. If that communication isn’t what you’re looking for or just doesn’t feel good to you, it’s not likely to get better over time.

  Maybe most importantly: do you trust them? Look for red flags, like when you’re dating someone and you get this feeling they’re exaggerating about their job. If an agency says, “We’re going to close your biggest, most exciting deal within two months,” that’s probably a crazy over-promise to get your business. And you know where crazy gets you.

  So, before you hire, make sure you have a face-to-face conversation or at least a video call with the agency representative. Seeing how the person interacts will not only give you a sense of whether they really know their stuff, but also an idea of how personable, professional, and trustworthy they are.
  If your first conversation makes you want to go sneak out the bathroom window (what, you’ve never done that?), trust your gut and keep looking around. If it’s a bad fit, it’s a bad fit.

  ## 5. What does your marketing budget look like?

  Be honest here: how much can you realistically spend on a marketing agency? Keep in mind, if you choose the right B2B agency, you should see a solid return on investment. It’s not just about what you can afford to spend; think about what you need to spend to grow.

  Remember, too, that to some extent you get what you pay for. There are deals to be had in marketing, but cheaper rates can mean cutting corners, less dedicated staff, or not getting access to the agency’s best talent.

  Still, when you see agency rates, it’s understandable to get cold feet. So consider what you’re paying for: the reserved talent of a team of strategists, designers, developers, and marketing experts with access to pro marketing tools, technologies, and data. It’s a lot more than hiring just one person—you get a lot of resources baked into one bill.

  ## If it’s a promising first date...

  Alright. You came into an initial meeting with a B2B marketing agency knowing what you want, ready with questions, and feeling out the chemistry. It went well. After a few more positive interactions, you’re ready to commit to a contract.

  What can you do to ensure it’s a productive and successful partnership? In our experience, there are four crucial elements to a good working relationship between a client and a marketing agency:

  **1. Trust.** Above all, you have to be honest and realistic with each other. Both sides should know they can trust what the other says and does.
  **2. Communication.** The more engaged you are in the agency relationship, and the faster and easier you can make it for the agency to get the info they need, the better the results you’ll get.
  **3. Chemistry.** With some people you work really well; with others, it’s like pulling teeth. If you don’t have decent chemistry, it doesn’t mean you can’t do good work, but it will be much harder and much less enjoyable.
  **4. Boundaries.** Right from the start, you and the agency need to be on the same page about things like additional work requests and deadlines. That’s how you ensure the relationship is fair and reasonable for both parties.

  No relationship is perfect, but there are ways you can maximize the positive stuff and minimize the negativity. [In an upcoming article](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/4-ways-to-profit-from-a-marketing-agency-relationship), we’ll dive deeper into building and leveraging these four elements, so you can start out on the right foot with your agency and get the most out of your investment.

How to Hire the Right Industrial B2B Marketing Agency

As we noted in an earlier article on [choosing a B2B marketing agency](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/hire-the-right-industrial-b2b-marketing-agency), identifying the right marketing partner for your industrial firm can significantly impact your business. But choosing and hiring the right agency is only the beginning. You need to cultivate the best possible working relationship.

In a good partnership, a B2B marketing agency becomes a natural extension of your business and a driver of growth. When things aren’t going well, you’ll see inefficiencies, poor work quality, and frustration on both sides. Eventually, everybody loses the motivation to put their best foot forward. And in the end, if the needs of either side aren’t met, the relationship can become untenable.

  Fortunately, there are several things you can do to start on the right foot with your agency, or even repair a relationship in peril. In this article, we’ll talk about how to ensure a productive and profitable partnership with your B2B marketing agency.

  ## Four critical factors for success

  There are four core elements of a good working relationship with a marketing agency: trust, communication, chemistry, and boundaries. They’re all two-way interactions—meaning that both you and your agency are responsible for keeping things copacetic.

  Trust is the most critical element in an agency-client relationship, and it takes continued effort from both sides to maintain. A key factor in developing trust is element #2, communication. Strong communication not only leads to better work but also to better accountability from both sides.

  Then we have chemistry. To some extent, chemistry is a function of personalities and work styles. But it’s not entirely out of your hands; you can create conditions that foster positive and productive interactions. Part of that involves our final element: setting clear boundaries.

  Let’s look at how you can build these critical elements in your agency relationship.

  ## 1. Treat your agency like a partner

  Like many aspects of your business, marketing is a team effort. No matter how good a marketing agency is, we can’t just be plugged into a company with no prior knowledge or engagement and achieve success.

  Instead of viewing your marketing agency as an outside entity to be kept at arm’s length, look at us as something that integrates into your business. We need to understand what you produce and how you produce it, who the salespeople are and what problems they have, who’s in management and what they’re dealing with, what the production staff does, etc.

  (If confidentiality is a concern, know that most agencies are willing to sign NDAs to safeguard your trade secrets or sensitive information because they need that info to do their best work. It’s also a sign that an agency is good and trustworthy—particularly if they offer the NDA before you even have to ask.)

  Here’s one of the biggest reasons to give an agency a clear line of sight into your business: chances are, we’ve seen hundreds of other companies make all kinds of mistakes—and we can spot potential problems for your sales or marketing team. Drawing on proven techniques, we can help you head off those problems early on and even create efficiencies throughout your company.

  Ultimately, companies that give their marketing agencies an actual seat at the table stand to gain much more from their agency relationships than those that don’t.

  ## 2. Set clear expectations

  From the start, it’s essential to have an open and honest conversation about what the business needs and what the marketing agency can do. Be clear and direct in communicating what you’re looking for, and expect that from your agency in return.

  Put it all on the table: your goals, opportunities, challenges, and deadlines. If you did your homework and found a competent agency, you should be able to work together to build a realistic plan.

  Remember that your marketing agency needs a complete picture of your business—the good, the bad, and the ugly—not a prettied-up version. When you both have a good sense of your problems and your marketing baseline before working with an agency, you can help keep the agency honest, and they can keep themselves honest.

  ### Level-set early

  One of the biggest mistakes we’ve seen companies make is to say, “We need our marketing to work better right now!”...and then make no time to communicate about the particulars. We can’t make everything work overnight if you take a week to respond to emails. So either adjust your expectations or get back to us a little faster.

  ### Trust goes both ways.

  As an agency, we expect to learn a lot from you about the industry you’re an expert in. If we say something’s going to take this long or cost this much, we expect you to understand that that’s *our* area of expertise. And, truthfully, most agencies wouldn’t be in business if they had a reputation for ripping people off.

  ### Check in regularly

  A few months after you start working with a marketing agency (and every few months after that), revisit your original plan and ask questions like these: Are the numbers going up? Are things moving in the right direction? Do we see results in the bottom line? If the answer to any of these questions is no, you should be having a conversation about why that is and what needs to happen.

  You may even need to reassess whether the relationship is a good fit. If it’s not, you’re better off having that conversation after a few months, not a few years.

  ## 3. Make communications easier

  If your agency doesn’t have a clear point of contact within your organization, you’ll often end up with emails needlessly bouncing from person to person. The faster and easier you can make it for us to get the info we need, the more streamlined the process—and it may even save you money by avoiding extra hours.

  Designate someone in your business to take charge of the agency relationship, someone we can reach out to directly and know we’ll get a response. Because if there’s work to be done and a timeline to meet, we’ll continue doing that work as best we can. But “as best we can,” a.k.a. the output, depends on the input. If the input is poor, we’re going to struggle, and we’re going to spend a lot of that strategic time and energy just trying to find the correct answer instead of putting the right solution to work.

  ### What’s your style?

  Be open about how you communicate. As an agency, we always ask clients about their communication styles. Are you passive, active, blunt, upfront? Do you like emails, texts, or calls? Find a communication strategy that works for you and stick to it. We’ll do the same for you.

  ### Make the most of it!

  Use the time with your agency to learn and ask questions. The more you engage with us, the better we can deepen the engagement to meet your needs. You can use our conversations as an opportunity to learn and then share that knowledge with others on your team. That’s one way to get more value from the time and resources you’re committing to the partnership. 

  ### Spell things out

  Don’t expect your agency to be a mind reader; we need and value your communication. Saying, “I don’t know, you tell me,” might be your way of showing us you appreciate our creative abilities. But it’s not worth testing us on that. As we’re figuring out the right thing to do for you, do your best to make that journey easier. No agency wants to spend a lot of energy making mistakes—we’d rather spend that energy on getting your marketing right.

  ## 4. Mind the boundaries

  We all know chaos is the enemy of productivity. When you send a message to the wrong person at your marketing agency because you want something done quickly, what you’re doing is introducing chaos. It creates workflow inefficiencies and can potentially harm our relationship.

  Any mature agency worth their salt should have a chain of command with a project manager and an internal communications strategy to make sure requests get funnelled to the right people at the right time. If you limit communications to that point person, you’ll get the best and fastest results.
  In addition to the chain of command, be mindful of the scope of work when you sign on with an agency. It will protect both the agency and your business:

  * It protects you from under-delivery, as you’ll get everything listed on that scope of work.
  * It protects the agency from being overburdened. “Just one quick thing” here and there can be really disruptive to a lot of the work that agencies do.
 
 Plus, you’ll most likely be charged for work that’s not included in the original scope. This helps ensure the relationship is fair and reasonable for both parties—you get additional work of good quality, and the agency is compensated for the extra time and effort.

  In the end, it all comes down to seeing your agency not just as an ally but also a business, with the same ultimate objectives as any other business. We’re all trying to grow, and the way a marketing agency grows best is by *helping* *you* succeed. A foundation of mutual trust and respect goes a long way toward making that happen.

4 Ways to Profit From A Marketing Agency Relationship

User experience, or UX, is one of the most impactful components of your digital marketing success — or lack thereof. Even if you have great ad campaigns and effective outreach strategies, eventually your prospects will reach your website. If that website is confusing for them to use, unpleasant to navigate, or otherwise demonstrates poor UX, your marketing success rate will drop. 2022 is a great time to consider a website UX audit. Here’s why.

  ## The Emerging Post-COVID World

  “Post-COVID” sounds like a bit of a jynx, but what else should we call it? COVID is here to stay, but the pandemic seems to be on the downswing in many parts of the world. A milder omicron variant and higher-than-ever vaccination rates mean that hospitalizations are down relative to case numbers. Things are returning to normal rapidly, after two very odd years.

  What does it mean for your website UX? Good question. Two years ago, businesses of all kinds had to adapt rapidly to new regulations and realities. Many went online or began offering additional services through their websites. In many cases, these solutions were ad-hoc, assembled quickly and cheaply, and intended to be temporary.

  Two years later, customer behaviour has changed. People have grown accustomed to in-app ordering, delivery services, curbside pickup, and other pandemic-spurred innovations. These behaviours took months and years to develop and will take just as long to wane if ever they do.

  In the meantime, many businesses struggle with cobbled-together websites using various services, plugins, apps, and extensions to deliver the services customers expect. Often, these chaotic solutions lead to an inconsistent or downright unfriendly experience for visitors.

  A website UX audit can uncover problems with your current, COVID-optimized website and propose solutions to carry forward what matters in the best way possible — while ditching what doesn’t.

  ## The Ongoing Privacy Wars

  Consumers care more about privacy than ever before. Many now realize that if you don’t pay for a product, you *are* the product. Although the EU leads the charge for privacy rights, levying significant fines against tech giants who violate their strict policies, jurisdictions worldwide take it very seriously. Advertisers and social media networks have even taken steps to walk back the tracking they use to target customers to appease these new legal challenges.

  Is your website GDPR friendly? Is it ready for looming changes to the online marketing ecosystem, like reduced tracker efficacy and greater data transparency policies? Remember that website UX isn’t just about design and layout: user experience also considers things like user privacy and safety. Ensuring you’re ready for a more regulated, privacy-first internet is good practice as we move toward the next phase of the world wide web.
  ## Accessibility: Are you an a11y?

Accessibility, sometimes abbreviated as a11y, where the ‘11’ represents the eleven characters between ‘a’ and ‘y’ in the word, has always mattered. In 2022, accessibility is very much in focus. Across the globe, accessibility standards continually evolve to address technological advancements and emerging best practices introduced by medical professionals, disability advocates, and other stakeholders.

W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, is the leading global body responsible for updating and maintaining the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), a document outlining requirements and best practices for web accessibility. Later this year, W3C is expected to formally roll out WCAG 2.2, the latest version of the guidelines. This will introduce new accessibility rules and adjust how things like text contrast and size get evaluated.

WCAG offers three levels of compliance for businesses to strive for: A, AA, and AAA. These matter: governments worldwide set their legal accessibility requirements per WCAG and typically require AA compliance. Websites that fall short of WCAG compliance can, in some cases, face legal penalties or even private lawsuits for failing to accommodate persons with disabilities.

If you run a small business and your website isn’t perfect WCAG compliant, the legal risk is low. However, what about the risk to your bottom line? [A 2015 study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5820628/) suggests that 253 million people worldwide are blind or suffer from moderate to severe visual impairment. [WHO estimates]([https://www.who.int/pbd/deafness/WHO_GE_HL.pdf) that 360 million people have debilitating hearing loss worldwide. As much as 15% of the global population suffers from dyslexia in some form. These conditions may very well affect your customers and potential customers. As your business grows, your odds of reaching customers with these challenges do, too. What if your inaccessible website prevents a customer from doing business with you?

A website UX audit can help you ensure that your website provides equitable access to your company, regardless of your potential customers’ ability.

## Speed and Performance: Keeping up with the Joneses?

One reason to perform a website UX audit is to ensure that you aren’t falling behind the competition. Part of a good UX audit is competitor analysis: what does the best website in your vertical do that you don’t?

New web technologies and trends don’t necessarily make for more beautiful websites than last year’s technology, but they offer other UX advantages. Namely, speed and reliability.

Technologies like static front-ends, Progressive Web Apps, and AMP pages provide faster, more secure experiences for customers across various devices and on spotty mobile connections. These speed and reliability improvements positively impact UX while providing other benefits. Faster sites rank better in Google. Faster sites have higher conversion rates and may require lower hosting costs as they are sometimes less resource-intensive. Finally, fast and efficient websites are better for the environment, requiring less server space and lower data transfer rates than the hulking websites of yesteryear.
  What if your competitors take the plunge and embrace this faster, safer tech before you do? Falling behind the technology curve can be costlier in the long run than staying ahead of it.

## The bottom line

  If you think you need a website UX audit, it’s probably a good idea. Given how much is expected to change this year, now might be a perfect time to shore up your online user experience. If you’re looking for a trustworthy partner specialized in UX audits for B2B companies, [drop us a line](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/contact). We’d be happy to discuss your project and make pointed recommendations to build a better experience — for every customer.

Why it's time for a website UX audit in 2022

There are some marketing terms that we get asked about more than others. SEO, for instance. One of the most asked-about marketing terms is account-based marketing (ABM).

So, what is it?

Account-based marketing is an alternative to more conventional, ‘funnel-based’ marketing. Funnel marketing is when you generate leads from a broad audience of prospects, then filter out the unqualified leads through actions until you’re left with a small audience of customers. The funnel starts broad and gets narrow as you weed out the unqualified leads.

  Account-based marketing does away with a funnel. It’s about winning specific accounts by targeting them with highly customized sales and marketing campaigns and materials.

  ## Definition of account-based marketing

  Per [business consulting giant Gartner](https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/glossary/account-based-marketing-abm-), account-based marketing is defined as:

  > Account-based marketing (ABM) is a go-to-market strategy targeting certain accounts with a synchronized, continuous set of marketing and sales activities. ABM activities engage those accounts and individuals through all stages of the buying journey.

  Clear as mud, right? Let’s break it down.

  ## What is account-based marketing?

  Per the definition, account-based marketing is:
  * A go-to-market strategy
  * Targets certain accounts with synchronized, continuous marketing and sales activities
  * Engaging accounts and individuals through all the stages of the buying journey.

  What does it all mean?

  First, it’s a go-to-market strategy. A go-to-market strategy is simply an end-to-end strategy to reach a target audience and sell them a product or service. The big difference between a go-to-market strategy and a marketing campaign is that a strategy might *contain* many marketing campaigns. It’s a coordinated effort across sales and marketing disciplines to achieve a specific business action.

  Account-based marketing focuses on the go-to-market ‘target audience’ part of a strategy. It takes targeting to the extreme. Account-based marketing targets *specific customers* rather than a customer persona or a type of customer. An account-based marketing strategy might only target a dozen accounts or fewer.

  Our definition describes ‘synchronized, continuous marketing and sales activities.’ Let’s break that down. What is being described is a coordinated, consistent flow of sales and marketing activities. This means that there are options for our target accounts to engage across many campaign types throughout the sales and marketing process. The next step in the marketing journey is planned and accounted for — end-to-end marketing to specific accounts.

  ## Account-Based Marketing Example

  We specialize in [B2B marketing for industrial manufacturers](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/industrial-marketing-services/), so we’ll give an example relevant to that industry.

  Imagine a company that sells custom components and fasteners for scaffolding systems. A niche market might struggle to reach customers with an inbound marketing strategy like content marketing. They may not get sufficient search volume on their most valuable keywords for paid search advertising to make sense. Instead, they employ an account-based marketing strategy.

  The company performs extensive research on competitors and potential customers, building a deeper understanding of their market in the process. They identify potential customers who may be particularly ready to make a purchase — perhaps they are about to embark on an extensive construction project or have recently brought on new leadership in their purchasing department and are ready to make a change.

  The company selects their ideal candidates from this research and develops a pipeline of content and an outreach strategy tailored to each client. Instead of developing general sales documents, case studies, videos, etc., they create a unique path for each prospect to follow, communicating the business’ value in a way that resonates specifically with each account.

  This strategy is all about the close rate. For a more conventional, funnel-based approach, a close rate of 10% of top-of-funnel prospects might be acceptable. Due to the high cost of marketing to each account, the expected close rate should be much higher — maybe as high as 50%.
  ## Is account-based marketing for me?

  You may be wondering if account-based marketing is a fit for your business. Here are a few criteria to help you decide.

  Account-based marketing may be a fit for you if:

  * You’re a B2B business
  * Your sales cycle is long, but each sale is worth a lot to your business (high margin, high dollar value products and services)
  * You have the capacity to develop custom-tailored content for your prospects in-house (or the budget to outsource content creation).
  * Your sales and marketing teams are coordinated and able to work together on long-term campaigns.

>   *BlackBean Marketing is a B2B industrial marketing company specializing in marketing for tech and manufacturing businesses. If you need help crafting an account-based marketing strategy, [reach out to us today](https://blackbeanmarketing.com/contact) for a no-obligation consultation.*

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