Conversations with Phil Gerbyshak – The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

Conversations with Phil Gerbyshak – The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

John Jantsch discusses his latest book, The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur, on Conversations with Phil Gerbyshak.

The book is designed as a daily guide for entrepreneurs who are seeking guidance and meaning while on their entrepreneurial journey. Filled with 366 meditations and quotes from transcendentalist authors of the 19th Century, Jantsch closes each entry with a challenge question for readers to ponder that day.

To learn more about the book, Jantsch’s background, and more, check out the episode.

Listen: John Jantsch on Conversations with Phil Gerbyshak

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Lessons From Our Top 10 Influencer Marketing Posts of 2019

2019 saw the continued rise in influencer marketing's power and scope in both B2C and B2B industries. This continued the explosion of interest in the practice over the past two years, and with more practitioners than ever going all-in, influencer marketing has been a primary focus of what we have explored on our blog throughout the year. We're lucky to have some of the strongest B2B influencer marketing professionals contributing to the TopRank Marketing blog, including our CEO Lee Odden, Ashley Zeckman, Joshua Nite, Caitlin Burgess, Anne Leuman, Nick Nelson, Tiffani Allen, Debbie Friez, the author of this post, and Alexis Hall, among others. As an industry approaching $20 billion annually, influencer marketing is now far from a shiny new object to savvy marketers. The insight and expertise our team has acquired helping some of the top brands in the world including 3M, Adobe, SAP, LinkedIn, and Oracle plan, implement and measure influencer marketing programs has often made it here to our blog. To help our blog community grow their influencer marketing knowledge, we're delighted to offer this list of our most popular influencer marketing posts of 2019. Of course, collaborating with influencers is something we do daily for clients and ourselves, and influencer engagement has become even more central to our B2B content marketing solutions, alongside social media marketing, SEO, and online advertising. The influencer marketing posts that proved to be our most popular of 2019 based on web analytics and social media data are listed below. We hope that they will help you ask the right questions and provide truly best-answer solutions to some of the most important challenges we'll all be facing in 2020. We give a giant thank you to Lee Odden, Ashley Zeckman, Josh Nite, Anne Leuman, and Caitlin Burgess for their work in advocating influencer marketing best practices. In addition to the list below, we've published several popular influencer lists this year, and while we won't place them on this list, we wanted to share them here as they're a great way to find and follow some of the leading digital marketing influencers.

• The Top 50 Social Media Marketing Influencers in 2019
• 50 Content Marketing Influencers and Experts to Follow 2019 #CMWorld
• 50 Top B2B Marketing Influencers, Experts and Speakers in 2019

Our Most Popular Influencer Marketing Posts in 2019:

1. 7 Top B2B Influencer Marketing Trends for 2020 — Lee Odden

Our CEO Lee wrote the most popular influencer marketing post of 2019 on our blog, exploring some of the most important and relevant trends to recognize for 2020. Highlighting trends including influence artificial intelligence (AI), democratized influence, brandividual media, more engaging content, integration with martech, the consumerization of B2B influence and more, Lee took a powerful look at many of the influencer marketing trends that are likely to rise in 2020. Check out all of Lee’s 2,600+ posts here, and follow him on Twitter. [bctt tweet="“Not staying on top of how the world of influencer marketing is evolving is simply leaving your customers open to the influence of your competition..” @LeeOdden" username="toprank"]

2. Inspiring Examples of B2B Influencer Marketing in Action — Lee Odden

Lee also wrote our second most popular influencer marketing post of the year, offering up 10 inspiring examples of B2B influencer marketing in action, showing how B2B influencer marketing can help increase credibility by promoting to buyers using people they trust. Lee looked at how more B2B brands are realizing that while different than B2C, working with influencers in a business to business context represents a significant opportunity to create more credible content. [bctt tweet="“Trends come and go, but the value of trusted sources of information to customers looking for solutions couldn’t be any more timeless..” @LeeOdden" username="toprank"]

3. 5 Key Trends in B2B Influencer Marketing Plus Critical Do’s and Don’ts — Lee Odden

Offering an exploration of critical do's and don'ts for B2B marketers, Lee also penned our third most popular influencer marketing article of the year, digging in to the world of micro and macro influencers, centralized influencer operations, always-on influencer engagement, a focus shift to both quality and quantity metrics, and the rise of influencer marketing software investment. Combined with five key trends to be aware of, this is an insightful look at the power of B2B influencer marketing when done right.

4. The Next Level of Influence: 30 Essential Influencer Marketing Statistics — Joshua Nite

In the fourth most popular influencer marketing post of 2019, our Senior Content Marketing Manager Josh shared 30 statistics to help take your influencer marketing to the next level — what we call Influence 2.0. Josh's post is a great way to upgrade your influencer marketing and get ready for what comes next.  Check out all of Josh's posts here, and follow him on Twitter. [bctt tweet="While financial compensation can be part of your #influencermarketing strategy, it shouldn’t be the whole strategy. Money can’t buy genuine enthusiasm and emotional investment. @NiteWrites" username="toprank"]

5. Why Always-On Is Always Better for Driving B2B Influencer Marketing Success — Caitlin Burgess

When it comes to B2B influencer marketing, always-on is always better, and in our fifth most popular influencer marketing post of the year, our Senior Content Marketing Manager Caitlin shares why strong relationships and always-on commitment to influencer marketing combine to help you refine, evolve, and scale your marketing efforts. Featuring seasoned influencer marketing leaders at B2B brands, Caitlin's post reveals how at its core, influencer marketing is all about brands engaging and developing relationships with individuals — individuals who have relevant topical expertise, reach, and resonance that aligns with the goals of the brand. Check out all of Caitlin’s posts here, and follow her on Twitter. [bctt tweet="Companies should approach influencers as partners, not just as people that they can use for their marketing efforts and launches. - @AmishaGandhi #B2BInfluencerMarketing" username="toprank"]

6. 5 Essential Questions to Guide Your B2B Influencer Marketing Strategy — Ashley Zeckman

Our Senior Director of Digital Strategy Ashley Zeckman answered five common questions about influencer marketing in our sixth most popular post of the year, with answers and insight including: • What is B2B influencer marketing? • How effective is it? • How can I get leadership to buy in? • Short-term gain or long-term reward? • Who are the right influencers for your brand? Ashley explored how each influencer type holds a different value for your audience and your brand, and how finding your right influencer mix means the right tactics, the right topics and the right experts. Check out all of Ashley’s posts here, and follow her on Twitter. [bctt tweet="Influencer marketing activates internal and industry experts with engaged networks to co-create content of mutual value and achieve measurable business goals. - @leeodden" username="toprank"]

7. How Can B2B Brands Benefit from Collaborating with Influencers? Let’s Get the Scoop from the Experts — Caitlin Burgess

How can B2B brands benefit from collaborating with influencers? In this post Caitlin holds another spot on our top ten list for the year, sharing actionable insight from experts including Whitney Magnuson, Rani Mani, Lucy Zarlengo Moran, Martin Jones, Konstanze Alex, and others. [bctt tweet="Working with B2B influencers allows our brand to have a constant pulse check with purchase decision-makers. @konstanze @dell" username="toprank"]

8. Examples of B2B Influencer Marketing to Inspire You in 2019 — Lee Odden

Another top influencer marketing post of the years comes from Lee, sharing B2B influencer marketing inspiration with powerful examples of success from our clients at 3M, Dell, Oracle Dyn, Prophix, and SAP to help you visualize ways to make your influencer marketing efforts more impactful and meaningful. Lee's article makes it clear that an influencer content program can be a powerful force in your B2B marketing mix.

9. Sowing the Seeds of Success: 3 Elements of Strong B2B Influencer Relationships — Caitlin Burgess

What characteristics do the best influencer/brand relationships share? In another top post of the year, Caitlin shows how to sow the seeds of success using elements that form stronger B2B influencer relationships, including: • The Fit Factor • A Foundation of Trust • Commitment to Co-Creation • Greater Long-Term Interaction [bctt tweet="In order to be successful, the work has to be mutually beneficial to both parties. @lucymoran on #B2BInfluencerMarketing" username="toprank"]

10. Hitting Your Target: Why Account-Based Marketing and Influencers Are the Perfect Match — Nick Nelson

In the tenth most popular influencer marketing article of the year, our Senior Content Strategist Nick digs into the essentials of account based marketing (ABM) and its intersection with influencer marketing. Nick shows how ABM can bring a clearer focus to your B2B influencer marketing strategy and how it helps hit your influencer marketing targets and gain ideal customers. Check out all of Nick's posts here, and follow him on Twitter.

Thanks TopRank Marketing Writers & Readers

There you have it — a strong group of 10 of our top influencer marketing posts for 2019. We published dozens of posts this year specifically about influencer marketing, and we plan to bring you even more in 2020, so stay tuned. Please let us know which influencer marketing topics and ideas you'd like to see us focus on for 2020 — we'd love to hear your suggestions. If you'd like to get a handle on influencer marketing trends, be sure to also check out Ashley Zeckman's post. Many thanks to each of you who read our blog regularly, and to all of you who comment on and share our posts on the TopRank Marketing social media channels at Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

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From Ours to Yours, Happy Holidays, Marketers!

The snow is falling, fires are crackling, and the scents of pine and cinnamon fill the air. That’s right: It’s the most wonderful time of the year, marketers. It’s a time of celebration and reflection. 2019 was a magical year for the TopRank Marketing team. We had the honor of working with an incredible book of clients and industry influencers. We welcomed new team members. We experimented, innovated, and optimized the work we do. And 2020 looks just as bright. To celebrate the year, the holiday season, and each other, the TopRank Marketing team enjoyed a few days of good old holiday fun. Get a glimpse of the fun below.

Movie Monday

What better way to get in the holiday spirit—and entice you to brave a snowy rush hour commute—than the promise of a classic holiday flick? After plating up Potbelly’s sammies, chips, and cookies, the team gathered in the conference room to watch Bill Murray as Frank Cross in "Scrooged". via GIPHY

Desk Decorating Extravaganza

For years, Debbie Friez’s historic collection of Santa Bears has been an office staple throughout the holiday season. But this year, we asked the team to give her snuggly, cuddly display a run for its money. From simple stocking displays to extravagant wrapping jobs, holiday cheer was in the office air, with Jack Fitzpatrick taking home the prize for Best Dressed Desk.

Spreading Holiday Cheer as Volunteers

Giving is a central tenet of the holiday season. With that in mind, the team headed to Second Harvest Heartland, a local food bank and community partner in our home state of Minnesota. While there, the team was tasked with sorting, bagging, and lugging thousands of pounds of locally grown potatoes. According to Second Harvest Heartland, one in 11 in our region are at risk of being hungry. Our work that day was the equivalent of providing nearly 6,100 meals.

Ugly Sweater Day

No holiday spirit week would be complete without Ugly Sweater Day. From an ode to Buddy the Elf from our CEO Lee Odden to Tiffani Allen sporting her “Cat Fancy” top for the second consecutive year, the team was stylin’ that day.

Holiday Potluck

What holiday celebration would be complete without a day of delicious indulgence? The team outdid themselves for this year’s Holiday Potluck. Here’s just a taste of the delicacies that filled our bellies:

• Fried Chicken
• Macaroni and Cheese
• Sausage Cheese Balls
• Tamales
• Barbecue Meatballs
• Bread “Surprise”
• Spinach Dip
• Charcuterie Platter

Hot Cocoa Social

To cap off this year’s festivities the team came together to craft their own unique hot cocoa concoctions. The cocoa varieties spanned from traditional to salted caramel and dark chocolate, and toppings included “unicorn poop”, peppermint spoons, and cookie stir sticks.

Wishing You and Yours the Happiest of Holidays

We’re incredibly grateful for each other, our wonderful clients, thought leaders, and friends we’ve worked and grown with this year. So, from our marketing family to yours, Happy Holidays! [embed]https://youtu.be/0IUG67amZZ8[/embed]

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Important KPIs for Each Phase of the Customer Journey

Important KPIs for Each Phase of the Customer Journey written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The customer journey is often a long and winding road. And that means it can be difficult to track your business’s effectiveness at each phase of the journey. The easiest way to gain greater clarity around your customer journey, and to identify strong points and weak spots, is to pinpoint and evaluate key performance indicators (KPIs) for each phase of the journey.

Once you find the metrics that can help you understand your business’s effectiveness in guiding the journey at each stage, you can begin to make changes to your existing approach. You can find ways to lean into the tactics that are working and eliminate the less effective elements of your strategy.

Because the journey changes so much over time, there are different KPIs to consider at each phase. Let me walk you through the most important KPIs to focus on for each stage of the customer journey.

Know, Like, and Trust

At the top of your marketing hourglass are the know, like, and trust phases of the customer journey. This is where customers first discover your business and then come to understand what you do.

The first thing you’ll want to know at this part of the journey is how many people are actually discovering your business online. To measure this, you can turn to metrics on organic and paid search campaigns.

A tool like Google Search Console allows you to understand how your keywords are performing. You can see search traffic and reach. You can track which queries are actually bringing visitors to your website. When you understand these SEO metrics, you can revisit your keyword research and make tweaks to boost your SEO.

Tracking paid search results is also critical in this stage. Understanding metrics on your ad campaigns like the quality score (which measures the relevance of your keywords) and clickthrough rate give you a deeper understanding of how many people are seeing your ads, and whether or not your copy is compelling enough to get viewers to click your link.

Once you move into the like phase, you begin to evaluate metrics that cover engagement on your website and social media. It’s important to track the number of visitors you have to your website. Are they all first-timers, or do you have return visitors? How many times do people generally visit your site before they move onto the conversion phase of the marketing hourglass? All of this information can help you understand potential bottlenecks in the know, like, and trust portion of the hourglass.

Social media engagement metrics also give you insight into the like and trust phases. How many people are following your accounts? Are you steadily growing your audience? And beyond just the number of followers, are those who follow your account interacting with your content? Are people liking, commenting, and responding to your follow-ups? More engaged followers on social indicates that the content you’re sharing is helpful and meaningful to your audience. You’re doing the work of truly earning their trust.

Try and Buy

Once you’ve won prospects over initially, they move closer towards the ultimate conversion goal: making a purchase. But before they hand over their credit card information, they want the opportunity to try what your business offers. They need that final assurance that everything will go smoothly if they decide to buy.

When it comes to the try phase, you want to measure metrics that clearly showcase the gap between people who were in those early marketing hourglass phases and those who’ve made it to this next level. Tracking site visits versus conversions by source is a great way to visualize this gap.

Is there a certain channel that drives more traffic to your site than others? Maybe you see most of your traffic coming from your Instagram profile. The content you’re creating there is meaningful enough to vault those followers up to the try and buy phase. From there, you also want to measure conversions by channel.

Let’s say that only a tiny sliver of those Instagram followers actually convert once they visit your site. But a larger number of folks coming through your newsletter—a less-popular channel overall—take the next step with your business. That gives you some insight into the effectiveness of the messaging on your newsletter versus your Instagram. While the Instagram content attracts more positive attention, it somehow doesn’t sync up with what visitors find on your website (hence the high number of visits but low conversion). Your newsletter, on the other hand, isn’t as compelling, but provides a clearer picture of the work you do.

Measuring Call to Action button and landing page performance can also provide valuable information at this stage. Are people actually clicking on your CTAs, be they on your website, in your social ads, or in your newsletter? And once they’ve clicked the CTA and landed on your website, are they filling out the form they find there to take the next step to try or buy—whether that’s requesting a demo to give you a try or making a first purchase?

Repeat and Refer

The final phase in the hourglass takes you beyond the initial purchase and into the realm of your long-term relationship with customers. Do your customers like you enough to return to you for additional purchases? And beyond even that, would they refer you to a friend?

There are a handful of KPIs that can help provide clarity around those questions. Retention rate is one of them: How many of your customers are sticking around come renewal time? If you run a gym, do you see people renewing their memberships month after month? Or is there a big drop-off at some point in the cycle?

If you see a pattern in your retention rate, why is that? For the gym that sees a big drop-off in March, as those New Year’s Resolution folks begin to drift away from working out, can you provide an incentive then to get them to stay on? It doesn’t even need to be monetary; maybe it’s a class with a popular instructor called “Maintain Your Resolutions Through the Spring.” And those who signed up for gym membership in December or January are given first dibs on spots.

Reviews can also help you identify issues in your customer journey. Do you keep seeing positive feedback on your customer service team? That means you’ve created an empowered team who’s willing and able to go the extra mile for your customers (a great way to boost retention). But at the same time, do you see a common complaint that leads customers to turn to your customer service team in the first place? If so, take steps to remedy that issue that multiple customers have identified in reviews.

And finally, there’s the Net Promoter Score, or NPS. If you’ve ever taken a survey for a business, you’ve likely encountered the NPS question: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”

People who respond with a nine or 10 are known as promoters—loyal fans of your business. Folks in the seven to eight range are in a bit of a no-man’s land; they’re considered passive. While they’re happy enough with you, they could just as easily go with a competitor, if the right offer came along. Anyone ranking you a six or below are considered detractors. They’re unhappy with you and could do damage to your business with negative word-of-mouth.

Understanding how many of your customers are enthusiastic supporters versus how many could take you or leave you (or worse, bad-mouth you to a friend), helps you gain clarity around the final steps of the customer journey. With detractors, you did everything early on in the hourglass well enough to get them to buy from you. But something went awry in the last few steps, and now they’re unhappy enough to tell others about their negative experience. That’s valuable information! From there, you can assess things like your onboarding process for new clients and take a closer look at your customer service approach to identify weak spots.

When it comes to getting a better understanding of your customer journey, it’s not enough to rely on your gut. The journey is complex. The best way to understand it is with cold, hard data. By tracking specific KPIs for each phase of the customer journey, you can identify the strengths and weaknesses in your strategy, and make tweaks accordingly to better facilitate a smooth journey for your customers.

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Learn From Our Top 10 Content Marketing Posts of 2019

Content — it encompasses nearly everything we read, view, or listen to online, and as our CEO Lee Odden said years ago, it's also the primary reason search began in the first place. We're especially proud of the content marketing successes our team at TopRank Marketing have achieved in 2019, for a wide-range of B2B clients. As 2020 draws close we wanted to share our top content marketing articles of the year — each filled with best practices, research, examples, and the latest trends. The excellent content marketers who make our award-winning blog one of the most popular in the industry include Anne Leuman, Joshua Nite, Nick Nelson, and Lee Odden. Collectively this compendium of our top 10 content marketing posts of the year serves as a valuable resource, loaded with practical examples and relevant topics for digital marketing professionals from CMOs to copywriters. We hope you find these articles helpful well into 2020 and far beyond. We're going to exclude our single most popular content marketing post — 50 Content Marketing Influencers and Experts to Follow 2019 #CMWorld — from the list, because it’s not quite an article, however you'll still find it a helpful resource, recognizing 50 of the best professionals in content marketing including Ann Handley, Jay Baer, Pam Didner, Christopher Penn, and so many more marketing leaders. Now, let's move on to the top 10! These most popular content marketing posts of the year are ordered by a combination of search visibility and social engagement:

Our Most Popular Content Marketing Posts of 2019:

1. Take 2019 By Storm: Get Inspired By These 11 Content Marketing Quotes — Anne Leuman

With 11 inspiring content marketing quotes, it's no wonder that Anne has garnered our most popular content marketing post of 2019, containing uplifting and memorable insight from Ann Handley, Tamsen Webster, Andrew Davis, Heather Pemberton Levy, Robert Rose, and others. Anne has gathered together a goldmine of inspirational quotes for B2B content marketers. Check out all of Anne's posts here, and follow her on Twitter. [bctt tweet="It’s important to slow down our #marketing to get the basics right. @annhandley" username="toprank"]

2. B2B Marketing Examples: 7 Bold Examples of Interactive B2B Content — Joshua Nite

Senior Content Marketing Manager Josh showed how seven B2B brands have use bold interactive content in our second-most-popular content marketing post of the year. Featuring IBM, NASDAQ, HubSpot, DivvyHQ, VenturePact, Prophix, and SnapApp, Josh shared great examples to light your creative fires and open your B2B minds to the possibilities of interactive. Check out all of Josh's posts here, and follow him on Twitter.

3. 5 Content Promotion Tactics To Make You (Almost) Famous — Lane R. Ellis

With five content promotion tactics to make you (almost) famous, including influencer co-creation, trend awareness, smart re-purposing, engaging interactive elements, and more, my article was our third most popular content marketing post of 2019.  Check out all of my posts here, and follow me on Twitter. [bctt tweet="“Not only is influencer marketing one of the fastest growing areas in marketing, it's also one of the disciplines where B2B brands are seeing trend-setting marketing performance.” @LeeOdden" username="toprank"]

4. 5 Examples of Remarkable Content Marketing in Action — Lane R. Ellis

Offering five examples of how remarkable content marketing wins minds, hearts, and wallets with inspiring, relevant, and best-answer insight, this post by me showcased success stories from Sigstr, Oracle, Adobe Creative Cloud, PathFactory, NBC News Brand Studio and more, and was our fourth most popular content marketing article of 2019. Learn how remarkable content marketing is able to inspire us to reach out and try for newfound levels of success, through powerful storytelling and the kind of compelling and relevant information that provides best-answer results.

5. Wow Your Crowd: How Content Marketers Can Create Powerful Audience Connections — Nick Nelson

How can content planning set the stage for unforgettable B2B marketing experiences? In the fifth most popular content marketing article of the year, our Senior Content Strategist Nick digs into the essentials of audience-first planning, including building a concrete strategic framework, staying nimble and adaptive, and emphasizing emotional pull. He also shares insight from #CMWorld speakers Amanda Todorovich, Courtney Cox Wakefield, Margaret Magnarelli and other top B2B content marketers. Check out all of Nick's posts here, and follow him on Twitter.

6. Embracing Interactive Content: 19 Statistics Every B2B Marketer Needs to Know — Anne Leuman

With 19 statistics every B2B marketer needs to know, Anne's talents again featured on our year's list of top posts, using compelling statistics that drive engaging content experiences that will connect on an intellectual and emotional level with your audience. Anne shares statistics from Buzzsumo, Content Marketing Institute, Ion Interactive Inc., SnapApp, Demand Metric, Cisco and others, combining to create deeper engagements with your target audience, improving message retention, and more.

7. Infographic: 5 Must Have Ingredients for a Great Content Marketing Strategy — Lee Odden

TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden has gathered together a goldmine of must-have ingredients for a great content marketing strategy in an infographic post that was our seventh most popular of 2019. Collaborating with the folks at Oracle Marketing Cloud, Lee showed how content marketing success really comes down to the five basic ingredients of goals, operations, insights, architecture, and measurement, and explained how to combine them to produce content that gets results. Lee has also been the driving force behind the TopRank Marketing blog for over 15 years, and it’s posts such as this which have had professional marketers coming back for more year after year. Check out all of Lee’s 2,600+ posts here, and follow him on Twitter.

8. 15 Reports Charting the Future of Content Marketing — Lane R. Ellis

What does 2020 and beyond hold for content marketing? In the eighth most popular content marketing post of 2019, I dug in to this question through the lens of over 15 insightful reports loaded with B2B data to help savvy marketers define and chart an optimal content marketing future. I showed how the information in the reports combine to help you gain a clearer understanding of B2B content marketing while still keeping more than an eye open towards the future.

9. Less Is More: Time to Cut Content Bloat & Create Content Connections — Nick Nelson

Offering up tips on trimming down your writing to make it more punchy and concise, Nick has another of our top content marketing post's of the year, curating advice from top wordsmiths in the marketing game, emphasizing how to overcome many of the most prevalent pitfalls today’s content creators face. [bctt tweet="700 more words will not help you reach your goals any more than 7 more words. Create content that helps people. Do it efficiently. @randfish" username="toprank"]

10. 12 Must-Have Marketing Skills for B2B Content Marketers — Joshua Nite

Rounding out our list of the top content marketing posts of the year Josh earned a second entry on the list with a close look at 12 important B2B proficiencies including SEO, SMM, influencer marketing, measurement, empathy, creativity, communication, organization, motivation, confidence, humility, collaboration & more. Are you using all 12 of Josh's must-have B2B content marketing skills?

Thanks TopRank Marketing Writers & Readers

There you have it — the selection of 10 of our top content marketing posts for 2019. Special thanks go out to all of the excellent writers who have contributed truly stellar posts on content marketing topics throughout the year. Please let us know which content marketing topics you'd like to see us to focus on in 2020 — whether it's interactive, video, artificial intelligence, real-world case studies, or analytics, we'd love to hear your suggestions. Many thanks to each of you who read our blog regularly, and to all of you who comment on and share our posts on the TopRank Marketing social media channels at Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

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Small Business Marketing Insights for 2020

Small Business Marketing Insights for 2020 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch on 2020 Small Business Marketing Insights

I wanted to close out the year with a solo show looking ahead to the next one; let’s talk small business marketing insights for 2020.

While there have been some big trends in the world of marketing—things like AI—getting a lot of buzz, I’m not here to talk about those. Trends like that are often not relevant to small business owners. Instead, I want to cover what I think are the insights for 2020 to give you some things to think about, that can actually add to what may be your long list of planning elements.

Insight 1: Audio Content Will Prevail

I think audio content is going to be something that people need to really embrace for 2020. If you’re not podcasting already, now is the time to start. It’s a great way to produce content. It’s also a great way to open up lines of communication with people you want to speak with, whether those are authors and influencers or folks in your target market or even your very own customers.

So podcasting is a great way to build relationships. But beyond that, the format appeals to the needs and sensibilities of a modern audience. People have less time and attention to sit in front of a monitor and read content. I certainly know I’m that way! Same with video. I have a lot of trouble sitting in front of a monitor and devoting time to a video when I could be doing other things.

Audio content, on the other hand, is totally portable. I can download a podcast, stick my phone in my pocket and go for a walk. I can turn it on in the car and listen during my commute. I can walk the dog, I can go for a run. The portability of the format makes it incredibly easy for even the busiest of people to consume the content at some point during their day.

So, if you are not producing audio content, I’m going to encourage you to do so. And there are a number of ways to get started. If you have videos you’ve already produced, you can strip out the audio from those videos and run it in another format. You can use audio to talk about your business, then get the audio transcribed and use that on webpages as written content.

And you can create a non-traditional podcast. It doesn’t have to be all guest interviews. You can occasionally do a rant (like this one I’ve done on marketing insights!) to get results.

Getting started with audio now isn’t just about getting immediate results—it’s also about the long game. I see smart speakers eventually playing a bigger role in the way people consume more of their daily content. So “Alexa: play my flash briefing,” might deliver a daily recap of audio content. While I think this is a ways off, it’s never to early to get prepared for a shift like that!

Insight 2: Take Your Marketing In House

As a marketing consultant and person who trains marketing consultants, I think more small businesses should bring things in house. And there’s two areas in particular that should be outsourced less: marketing tactics and technology.

In the case of both of those areas of focus, it’s not an either-or proposition. You hire a marketing person to handle routine things that include both sides of that coin, from writing content to doing social posts to getting reviews to making Instagram posts. Those are all things that I think you should have an internal resource to do, but the secret ingredient is to marry that with a strategic marketing partner.

A lot of times, small businesses will hire a marketing person who knows how to manage social media, but isn’t given any broader direction when it comes to marketing strategy. (And that’s because there often isn’t a bigger strategy.)

That’s where a marketing consultant or advisor comes in. They can help you with the strategic component, the plan, the operations of the plan, the analysis of results, and make sure that you remain on track in working towards your big goals. Meanwhile, the internal person who knows the intricacies of the business can be directed to execute on this plan and craft messages that align with your strategy. That way, you get the best of both worlds.

In fact, I think this is going to be so critical in 2020 that we’re creating a certified marketing manager program, where we’ll train small business marketing staff on how to hire internal people and have that person directed by an outside resource, like a Duct Tape Marketing Consultant.

Insight 3: Humanize and Automate

Remember how back in the day, every deal was done with a handshake with a trusted partner you could look in the eye? Then technology came along, and suddenly you could do business without ever actually speaking with another human being. Now, it seems the pendulum is starting to swing back the other way, and we’re finding a happy medium.

So this insight sort of seems counterintuitive, but I’m saying you need to both humanize and automate. It comes down to finding the right balance. Both customers and business owners want things to be convenient and efficient—which is where automation comes in—but they also want that human touch.

There’s a tremendous amount of research being done around what makes someone love a company. And in many cases it’s things like convenience, knowledge, communication, efficiency, friendliness—all human traits. But a lot of the reasons a company is convenient and efficient are now aided by technology.

So I think that we need to get to the point where we are automating everything that can and should be automated and we are humanizing or re-humanizing everything else. My insight for 2020 in terms of a recommendation in this case, is get back on the phone. Let your phone ring, answer your phone, call people, that is one of the easiest ways I think to re-humanize our businesses. I’ve certainly been guilty of the opposite, and I look forward to picking up the phone more this year.

Insight 4: Focus on Customer Experience

Customer experience and retention is the golden opportunity for every single business.

PwC did extensive research into why customers stay loyal. They found that very few reasons had anything to do with the actual product or service. For the most part, it was all about customer experience—things like convenience, knowledgeable communication, efficiency, and a friendly staff.

So, how can we look at this in our marketing? You’ve probably heard me talk about the marketing hourglass, where we get people to know trust, try, and buy. But then we think marketing ends at the repeat and refer stages.

In reality, though, all seven stages must come together under the marketing umbrella. Everything from building knowledgeable, efficient communication to reporting results and providing friendly interactions for customers all go hand-in-hand.

I think we as marketers ought to spend at least half our time on creating a better customer experience and then you can spend the other half on generating more leads and converting more leads.

Insight 5: Paid Search Matters More Than Ever

Paid search—Google ads, Facebook advertising, LinkedIn, all the banner ads—have been around forever. So it’s not their existence that’s a new insight. In fact, certain types of businesses, like e-commerce brands, have used paid search to dramatically grow their businesses. But we’ve now entered and era where the small local business of any stripe must embrace paid search. Increasingly, Google is where people turn to find any and every piece of information about a business. Even if they’re already a customer!

An interesting anecdote for you: I did a search the other day for a plumber in Kansas City. And the first real result, meaning an actual business that wasn’t either an ad or an aggregator like Angie’s List or Home Advisor, showed up on page two. So, pay to play is definitely here. Making paid search a real, significant part of your overall marketing plan is no longer optional.

My first bit of advice on that front is to make sure you’re involved in the paid search process and are doing it in a smart way. Do your research about what paid search actually entails. You don’t have to do it for yourself, but you need a baseline knowledge to know you’re not getting scammed.

I see so many small business owners that work with pay per click firms that basically set up templated campaigns and forget them and don’t communicate and just say, “Oh, you got 27 clicks this week”. Well what does that mean? It means I spent X amount of money, that’s all you can tell me. It’s not about how many clicks you got, it’s about how many customers you won.

My next piece of wisdom is the use paid search to capture people with the highest purchase intent. There’s a lot of categories of business where paid searchers converted two to one over people that just went out and had a long tail search and found your blog post.

I’m not saying abandon everything else. In fact, never abandoned your website, SEO, or content. But you want to supplement it with paid search to get that high intent stuff. Maybe there’s categories where you’re having trouble getting your content to rank. Maybe there are certain really competitive search terms like an emergency service for something that you know if somebody finds your ad they’re going to buy it, because they’re trying to fix something.

I believe that the local service ads are going to only get bigger as a category. Eventually, you’re going to find accountants, lawyers, and more in those service ads because Google is making more money on those ads than anywhere else. And, consequently, the ads are going to take up more real estate on the results pages.

One final note on paid search: if you set your campaigns up correctly and are checking in on reports regularly, you come to understand that you’re not really bidding on keywords. You’re bidding on search terms: what someone puts into a search term to make your name pop up.

Once you begin thinking of things in those terms and use analytics to track your results, then you can build a complete roadmap for your marketing plan. When you understand the tactics that are working, and how people are moving throughout their customer journey from start to finish, then you can tailor your content further to encourage others to take that same path to conversion.

Those are my five insights for 2020. I hope you get out there and make moves to implement some of the tactics around these insights, because I really do believe they can make a huge difference in your marketing.

To help you in your marketing efforts, I wanted to announce that—while I don’t have a release date yet—you should keep your eyes peeled for a significantly revised edition of Duct Tape Marketing, the original book. Also, we’re creating a certified marketing manager program, which should be launching at the end of Q1 2020. The program will allow business owners to provide personal development and training to their team. You’ll have your own private coach or consultant, and they won’t just go through the plan, but will also apply the plan to your business.

So keep an eye out for all that and more in 2020. Take care and have a great rest of your 2019. See you in the New Year!

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This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by SEMrush.

SEMrush is our go-to SEO tool for everything from tracking position and ranking to doing audits to getting new ideas for generating organic traffic. They have all the important tools you need for paid traffic, social media, PR, and SEO. Check it out at SEMrush.com/partner/ducttapemarketing.

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