Here’s 5 Things You Need For Your 2020 B2B & B2C Marketing Plan

The most successful teams in the premier league take the time to review their strategy, realign their goals and try new tactics. Why should your business be any different?

Original post on the Catalyst Marketing Blog.

The teams in the premier league are having their winter break.

While the players are resting to prepare to kick off the rest of the season, the managers and backroom staff will be reviewing recent games, team sheets, individual performances, and how their tactics fared.

To achieve their targets, win the games and reach the highest positions in the league they outline a strategy and then continue to adapt their tactics as the season plays out.

The same should apply to your business. If you start marketing without a strategy, you’ll most likely get relegated. If you stick to your original plan and refuse to adapt to the changing conditions, you’re likely to fall short of your goals.

With that in mind, we’ve identified 5 key things your 2020 marketing plan should include to help you adapt and overcome future challenges.

1 — Personalisation

Personalisation has been a buzzword for a while now, but it’s more important than ever that you start incorporating this within your marketing.

The Harvard Business Review states that personalisation can lift revenues by 5–15% and increase the efficiency of marketing spend by up to 10–40%.

It’s not just using contact tokens to change the first name in an email you’re sending. Go further with the personalisation, use data to dictate what content to send to your prospects. If you have two key offerings you should segment your data to ensure they’re getting content based on their previous behaviour i.e. what webpages they’ve visited on your site, what content they have downloaded etc.

2 — Chatbots

A.I. was a big topic last year, everyone talking about how artificial intelligence will improve business. A lot of people think of the Terminator when A.I. gets mentioned, but it doesn’t have to be anywhere near that advanced to be of benefit.

Chatbots are a form of A.I. as they respond to keywords from prospects with predetermined responses. You’ll most likely have used one whilst being on the internet. They’re the little pop-up chat windows you find on websites. They’re also used on Facebook messengers.

Chatbots are a great way to ensure your business is always available to answer frequently asked questions from interested prospects as well as saving you time. Consumers have come to expect more instant gratification, whether that be same-day delivery or instant responses, it is becoming a normal expectation.

3 — Remarketing

Ever looked at some trainers on a website and then noticed them pop-up in ads across the entire internet? That’s remarketing.

Remarketing works by placing a cookie on a visitors device so that when they visit other sites your adverts will appear to them.

Visitors who are retargeted are 43% more likely to convert according to Criteo. It’s common for prospects to do their research and browse several sites before coming to a decision. By retargeting them, it helps put your brand front of mind. There’s a 70% chance they’ll choose your product/service over a competitor when they see your retargeting ad. It’s a key method of driving people back to your website as well as tying in nicely with our first point on personalisation. Retargeting ads are another way for you to show your consumer you’re going the extra mile to understand exactly what they want.

You may be thinking this only applies to the B2C industry. It doesn’t. B2B businesses should also leverage retargeting ads to help keep your brand front-and-centre of your prospects' minds. By showing them ads that are related to the content and pages they’ve viewed on your website they’re likely to engage with your brand. What’s more, once they visit the website again, you can further personalise the landing pages to what they have seen and engaged with.

And what’s great about it all, you only pay for the ad if the user clicks it! Win-win.

4 — SEO

You’ve probably heard the acronym SEO being thrown around by marketers quite often. It stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is simply the art of optimising your website so that it ranks higher on Google searches.

SEO is quite complex and technical the deeper you dive into it, however, the top-level view of it is to ensure the keywords your target audience are searching are found within your website copy, and that you have guest blogs on other sites. The better Google can read your webpage, and the more ‘backlinks’ going to said webpage from other high-performing sites, the better.

However, it’s not as simple as that. Although Guest blogging is essential for SEO, it’s worth being aware of the constant changes Google implements to its algorithm. From March 2020 Google is once again introducing a new change, this time penalising incorrect links which in turn, could potentially reduce the value of guest posts in consideration for search rankings.

So, if your current SEO tactic is solely based on guest blogs, mixing it up will be important to maintain your rankings.

5 — Email marketing

A few years ago everyone was saying email marketing was dead. The cancel culture was out in full force preaching how GDPR will finish the channel off.

They were right, to an extent. SPAM type email and huge blanket sends are most definitely dead. However, Targeted Email marketing is where you’ll get a great ROI. The 2019 DMA Email Marketing Benchmark Report found that email generates over £42 for every £1 spent on email.

Now, this figure isn’t a guarantee for your business, but it’s a channel that should be leveraged. If you’re writing content for your website, you should be sharing it on social and email.

Make sure you’re sending emails regularly to keep your audience engaged. Segment the data and leverage personalisation to share the right content with your audience and you’ll begin to see far greater results than if you were to send a one-size-fits-all email.

Conclusion

These 5 points are our initial thoughts from the first quarter on what to focus on for 2020.

However, the truth is, just like the teams in the premier league, we have to adapt as the season progresses. Learn from our performances, and not fear change if we’re to reach our goals.

Your Ultimate Guide To Generating Leads

If you’re interested in more ways to generate leads, then check out our guide on ‘ How To Generate Leads That Close: The Ultimate Guide’.

Mailing List Sign Up

Thanks for reading Here’s 5 Things You Need For Your 2020 B2B & B2C Marketing Plan.

Want more content like this sent straight to your inbox? Subscribe to our mailing list on the original post.

Originally published at https://www.wearecatalyst.co.uk.