How to Strategically Think About Your Annual Marketing Budget

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Creating and getting approval for your annual marketing budget is one of the most important (and often difficult) tasks for an in-house marketing team. It takes a lot of time to analyze results from the previous year, gather anticipated costs for new ideas, and finalize a budget that works within the limits of your business. The challenge becomes even greater in seasons of economic uncertainty, and the threat of a recession can create budget cuts at any point.

Over the past decade, we’ve had the opportunity to walk with dozens of clients through the budgeting process. We’ve helped start-ups looking for creative ways to maximize their resources. We’ve helped million-dollar companies navigate uncertainty during the pandemic and make marketing budget decisions during a recession. If you think of an issue or question, we’ve likely faced it. 

How to Strategically Think About Your Annual Marketing Budget

For this article, we’ve asked Senior Client Relations Specialist Marcie Prescott to share the wisdom and insight she’s learned from decades of experience developing marketing budgets. Here are the four best practices that Marcie shared to help you think more strategically about your annual marketing budget. Her tips can help ensure you stay on track toward your goals: 

1. Make sure your budget is connected to your objectives, goals, and key metrics. 

Your marketing budget should be closely integrated with your annual marketing plan. Every line item in your budget should be connected to a tactic. It’s also important to identify the success metrics you’re going to use to determine if your investment was worth it. 

If you can’t look at your budget and answer, “What are we wanting to achieve with this investment?” then take a step back and clarify your annual marketing goals and objectives.  

2. Recognize the common pitfalls that sink your marketing budget.

A big part of managing your budget is knowing what obstacles and roadblocks to avoid. Here are a few common pitfalls that can sink your marketing budget:

  • Failing to identify your target market and audience. It doesn’t matter how big your marketing budget is if you don’t connect with potential customers. 
  • Putting too much effort into big budget marketing efforts. If you’re gambling with your marketing budget, you’re doing it wrong. Instead, it’s important to diversify your marketing spend so that you’re not putting too many eggs in one basket. 
  • Underestimating the amount of work involved in a marketing campaign. It’s easy to develop an annual marketing strategy and budget without recognizing all of the time, energy, and resources that it will take to implement. Before you finalize your budget, it’s important to ask, “Can we really do this?” Getting input from your team is also important.
3. View your marketing budget as a fluid asset. 

If there’s one lesson we’ve learned, it’s that your budget should be a fluid document that is reviewed and updated regularly. Neither your annual marketing strategy nor your budget should be written in stone. You can pivot your marketing without abandoning your entire strategy and make necessary changes to your budget. 

Fluid marketing budgets allow companies to redirect marketing to tactics that perform well and channels that suddenly offer new opportunities. This is even more important during a recession, when potential cuts may be required. 

4. Embrace a mindset of continuous improvement toward your strategy and budget.

Marketers should constantly be learning, testing new ideas, and finding ways to maximize the ROI of their budget. Rather than using last year’s budget or “institutional wisdom” to drive your decisions, embrace a mindset of continuous improvement to develop a marketing budget based on where your business is headed. Just because something worked well five years ago doesn’t mean that it’s the best way to connect with today’s customers.

You don’t have to wait until the end of the year to be more strategic with your marketing budget. Whether the year is winding to a close or just getting underway, it’s always a good time to think about your budget and consider how you can be more strategic with the resources you’ve allocated.

Our Top 10 Marketing Insights & Topics from 2022

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2022 provided its fair share of challenges for marketers. Many businesses were still navigating the ripple effects created by the pandemic — whether it was learning how to promote new services or balancing business development needs with operational capacity. Economic obstacles and the fear of an impending recession caused some companies to tighten their marketing spend or focus on fundamental strategies. Companies learned how to embrace the “new normal” of virtual team meetings and hybrid work models.  

Despite these challenges, our team at Green Apple, and the clients we serve, have discovered valuable insights to propel our work forward. As Albert Einstein once summarized, we’ve found that “in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”

As we reflect on everything we’ve learned from 2022, we wanted to recap the insights and articles that our audience found most helpful throughout the year. As you’ll see, they cover a variety of topics in almost every aspect of marketing. We believe this goes to show the integral role that marketing plays in every area of the business. Without further ado, here are our most popular blog posts from 2022.

1. What Not To Do During a Zoom Meeting

We’ve all seen or experienced our fair share of Zoom faux pas over the past few years. But an embarrassing interaction isn’t the only thing that can derail a Zoom meeting.

As a virtual agency, our team has learned A LOT about maximizing Zoom for productive team meetings. This article outlines some common mistakes to avoid. 

2. 7 Key Elements of Eye-Catching Content

Marketing has always been about capturing attention. How can you do that in our world that seems busier and noisier than ever? This article highlights some helpful design tips to consider whether you’re creating a social media post, print ad, or sales collateral.

3. Why Corporate Social Responsibility Should Be on Your Radar for 2022

Social responsibility platforms have become a priority for businesses in almost every industry. How can you leverage it to connect with customers and prospects in a more meaningful way? This article outlines a few key ideas to consider. 

4. 5 [Virtual] Client Appreciation Gifts for 2022

The pandemic created the need to find ways to show appreciation virtually. But as the way business has evolved, virtual appreciation gifts are also great for clients you might have in other parts of the country. This article highlights five of our favorite ideas. 

5. Frustrated by the Fact That Marketing is Constantly Evolving?

We understand that it’s easy to get frustrated by the constantly-evolving nature of marketing. This article offers some encouraging reminders for business leaders or marketing managers who are frustrated by the fact that nothing seems to be working like it once did. 

6. Is Print Advertising Still Viable?

Print advertising isn’t dead. In fact, we’ve found that print advertising has some advantages over digital features depending on our client’s target audience and goals. This article shares a few benefits of print advertising and strategic ideas for integrating it into your marketing efforts.  

7. Enneagram and Marketing: The Creative Beauty of Type Fours

The enneagram has become one of our team’s favorite tools and topics to discuss in recent years. This article describes how an Enneagram 4 — also known as “The Individualist” – provides the much-needed creative ideas and spark for your marketing. 

8. 20 Questions to Ask Yourself That Will Improve Your Customer Profiles

It’s essential that you know your customers if you want your marketing to resonate. As a result, every business should develop customer profiles or buyer personas for their key target audience. This article unpacks 20 different questions that will make that experience more effective. 

9. 4 Factors for Creating a Customer-Centric Culture

The experience you provide customers directly impacts your bottom line. How do you go about creating a culture within your business or organization that values the customer experience? While the specific tactics or strategies may evolve, this article shares four key factors that you need to create a customer-centric culture.

10. Enneagram and Marketing: How Type Threes Move Mountains

Enneagram 3’s (also known as The Achiever) offer essential traits and skills that can be helpful for managing your marketing efforts. This article unpacks the traits of The Achiever from one of the Enneagram 3’s on our team, our Founder and Chief Strategist, Samantha Pyle. 

Get the Latest Marketing Insights & Trends

At Green Apple, we’re constantly looking for new sources of marketing inspiration for our clients. We typically share what we’re learning each month through The Core, our monthly newsletter. Sign up to get the latest marketing insights and inspirations delivered directly to your inbox. 

5 Best Practices for Marketing Project Management

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Let’s be honest – managing all of your marketing efforts is tough. There are dozens of steps to move a single project from an idea to a completed deliverable and requires collaboration between multiple parties. While there can be a lot that can go wrong, the good news is that there’s a way to bring order to all the madness that marketing campaigns bring with them – marketing project management!

Project management is more than a way to make sure your team is staking on time and budget, it actually increases the ROI of your marketing efforts. Marketers who plan projects are four times more likely to be successful.

At Green Apple, we’ve learned quite a bit about the foundational principles and best practices for effective marketing project management. While some of the lessons we learned the hard way, others were discovered through the creative problem-solving of our team. Today, we’ve built a team of gifted client relations specialists whose primary focus is to execute an effective project management process. 

For this article, we’ve asked one of our assistant client relations specialists, Kayla Reyes, to share a few insights she uses when it comes to “keeping all the plates spinning” for our clients.

5 Best Practices for Marketing Project Management

There are dozens of elements that go into managing your marketing projects effectively. From creating your overall structure and procedures to defining the communication processes, there’s a lot to consider. But how do you go about implementing these foundational principles for marketing project management? Here are a few best practices we’ve learned over the years:

1. Hire the right people.

Many of the tasks and responsibilities of a project manager require a certain mindset and skillset. Some people are big vision, whiteboard dreamers. They typically make better strategists that project managers. 

At Green Apple, we use a couple of tools to assess a team member’s project management acumen. For example, we have several enneagram ones who embody the characteristics of being honest, detail-oriented professionals. We also use the Culture Index to evaluate the interpersonal skills that are required for project management. 

2. Find tools to help.

Once you have the right people in your project management role, it’s important to equip them with tools that can help them be successful. In today’s digital-first world, this often means finding the right project management software for your team. As a hybrid marketing agency, we’ve found a lot of success in using tools like Basecamp and Asana for project management and collaboration with clients. 

3. Build consistent processes and systems around your tools. 

Investing in project management software is only helpful if your team knows how to use it. It requires intentional planning to discover how the match the features that are available in a project management tool with the internal processes and structure of your team. Training is another important factor to ensure everyone has what they need to fulfill their task and nothing slips through the cracks during a project. 

4. Take a detail-oriented approach to execution.

Organizing and streamlining ideas and projects is essential to keep on track with deadlines. This is even more true in a fast-paced agency environment when you’re serving multiple clients at once. 

While moving a project through the stages of development is one key, making sure it’s done well and nothing is overlooked is another. The people who are really great at what they do focus on executing – not just the big things but also on all the little details. A good project manager recognizes that even the tiniest details matter. They make sure everyone has what they need for their specific task and address any mistakes that are made along the way.  

5. Periodically ask what’s working and what’s not.

Consistently asking, “is this working?” is just as important with your project management process as it is with other areas of marketing. At Green Apple, we make sure our project management approach integrates with our client’s internal processes. We’ve found it helpful to host quarterly meetings with our project managers and Orchard members to identify ways to improve our project management processes internally. 

“As a project manager, I love getting into the weeds to help our clients launch a strategy or create a campaign that makes a tangible difference in the world,” Kayla described. “It’s always meaningful to look back and celebrate the hundreds of steps that are taken — and all the people who are involved – to execute all of the marketing efforts for our clients.”

You can learn more about Green Apple’s unique approach or connect with our team to discover how we can become your marketing partner. 

 

B2B Social Media Trends for 2023

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B2B marketing is often a complex and complicated practice. This can especially be true when it comes to social media. As the social media landscape has evolved over the years, B2B marketers have to determine which social media approaches  to implement and which to leave out. As we look towards 2023, B2B marketers will still need wisdom when it comes to deciding how to use social media to connect with customers.

Before we get into the trends, it’s important to remember a key principle: Consider social media marketing trends carefully and identify the best platforms to engage customers and foster customer relationships. Does your company need TikTok? Maybe. You should only be on a platform if it helps you connect with your customers. 

Here are a few social media trends for 2023 to be mindful of: 

Trend #1: User-generated content continues to produce engagement. 

Sharing content from customers or followers has become an increasingly popular tactic because of social media’s increasing role in cross-channel B2B marketing. This content is known as user-generated content (UGC). Currently, 85% of consumers find UGC more influential than branded content. This includes testimonials, case studies, reviews, or other assets produced by your customers. 

So how do you go about obtaining and sharing user-generated content? Here are a few ideas for reaching out for testimonials or content ideas from customers. 

Trend #2: Find creative and unique ways to partner with influencers.

One of the biggest B2C trends that made its way into B2B successfully has been influencer marketing. But identifying the right influencers to partner with is essential. The good news, especially for B2B marketers, is that you don’t need to find an influencer with millions of followers. Instead, consider the voices in your industry that customers trust. Don’t discount the importance of micro-influencers.

Trend #3: Continue to create shorter, more visual content. 

The average human has an attention span of just 8.25 seconds, according to recent studies – 4.25 seconds less than it was in 2000. This is evident if you take one look at your social media feeds. 

At Green Apple, we’ve been exploring ways to create shorter, more visual content for our clients. The social infographics we’ve created have generated significant increases in reach and engagement. 

Trend #4: Be strategic with your social advertising budget.

As attention on social platforms becomes increasingly competitive, paid advertising will play a more significant role in B2B social media marketing in 2023. According to recent studies, 84% of B2B marketers use paid social for their content marketing efforts.

Most businesses still have a limited social media advertising budget, so it’s important to invest your money wisely. The good news is that you can be incredibly targeted with your ad spend on popular B2B platforms. As you advertise on platforms like LinkedIn, be sure to use targeted ads based on data like location, industry, company, and job title.

Trend #5: Focus on metrics that matter. 

Measuring social media efforts has always been important, but determining the true impact of social media is key. Measuring the right metrics is key. In addition to tracking metrics such as follower growth, engagement, and reach—consider the more qualitative insights such as relationships that have been developed or customers that have been served through social media. 

New B2B social media marketing trends surface every year. Some trends have been there for a long time but have evolved. As a B2B marketer, you need to be prepared and ready to adapt to new changes in your industry. Hopefully, this post helps you get up to speed!

7 Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in the New Year

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The new year often provides a fresh start for people and companies. This is especially true for marketing. Many companies start the year with a fresh marketing plan (or at least a few adjustments from their current efforts). Most of the time, there’s a level of energy and excitement as you start the year with 365 days to achieve your marketing goals.

As marketing continues to evolve, it’s important to understand and implement the basic principles for earning attention and inspiring action. Failing to embrace the core principles of marketing might lead to mistakes that cause you to invest time, energy, and resources into marketing tactics that don’t move the needle. 

7 Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in the New Year

After more than two decades in the industry, here are a few common marketing mistakes that businesses are prone to make in the new year:

1. Focusing on “tactics” rather than your strategy.

One of the most common mistakes business owners make is to focus too much on tactics and not enough on strategy. As a marketing agency, people often reach out to us and ask for help building a new website or a stronger social media presence. While these are admirable goals, they must be based on a strategic plan to truly return the best ROI for your business. 

If you’ve struggled to generate results and wonder why your marketing isn’t working, it likely has to do with prioritizing tactics over strategy. 

2. Getting comfortable with the status quo.

“The job isn’t to catch up to the status quo; the job is to invent the status quo.” – Seth Godin

Doing things the way they’ve always been done is tempting because it’s safer. But in a world that’s changing faster than ever, sticking with the status quo only creates an opportunity to get left behind. 

It’s important for B2B companies and marketers to get out of their comfort zone. Embracing a mindset of growth and change is one of the best ways to ensure your marketing efforts continue to produce results year after year. 

3. Failing to recognize how marketing is interconnected with other areas of your business.

At Green Apple, we often say that “everything is marketing.” This is a mindset we bring to every meeting and every marketing strategy we create for clients. Failing to recognize how marketing impacts sales or operational decisions could quickly create breakdowns in other areas of your business. Additionally, developing a marketing strategy without considering other key initiatives in your company might lead to a lot of “spinning your wheels.” 

4. Being too rigid with your marketing plan and failing to adapt.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in recent years, it’s that businesses must be willing and prepared to adapt. In some cases, you can pivot your marketing tactics without abandoning your entire strategy. Sometimes, if there’s a major shake-up in your business or industry, you might need to overhaul your entire plan. 

5. Defining what your customers want without asking them. 

Marketing is all about helping customers understand how your business can help solve their challenges. It’s relational. And every good relationship is built on communication. If you want your marketing to resonate with customers, listen to them. Taking time to understand their challenges and create messaging built around their current reality is key to creating a more customer-centric culture. 

6. Talking about your products and services in a way that confuses an audience. 

Using complex phrases or industry jargon is one of the quickest ways to lose potential businesses. Customers will disengage if they can’t understand or relate to your message. 

If you work in a detailed industry, it’s important to find effective ways to explain the complex products or services that you offer. Making it simple for people to understand how they can become a client or customers is one of the easiest ways to gain potential business. 

7. Identifying the wrong KPIs or forgetting to measure results. 

Successful marketing initiatives often require the use of lessons learned from previous experiences. This means identifying the marketing metrics that matter most to the overall success of your business and developing the habit of measuring them on a regular basis. 

Green Apple Can Help Your Business Avoid Costly Marketing Mistakes

Everyone, from professional marketers to small business owners, makes marketing mistakes. But even if you make some mistakes, you should be ready to learn from them. If you’re looking for a way to take your marketing to the next level or simply need help managing everything that is required for reaching your goals, our team can help. Contact us to learn more about our unique approach and schedule a discovery call with our team. 

 

Setting Your 2023 Marketing Goals: A Guide

Setting the right goal is the backbone of an effective inbound marketing strategy. It can provide a foundation for how you develop your marketing approach. It can also help you identify milestones to track as you make progress toward important business objectives. 

While business leaders and marketing managers recognize the importance of setting marketing goals, defining them is often easier said than done. Where do you start? Which goals will truly help you move the needle? How much should you stretch while still identifying SMART marketing goals that are attainable? These aren’t easy questions to answer.  

7 Steps to Identify The Right Marketing Goals for 2023

After hundreds of conversations over the years, we’ve discovered a few best practices that can help you set marketing goals that align with your overall business objectives. Whether you’re just starting the process of defining your goals or finalizing your marketing plan, here are a few helpful steps to ensure you set the right marketing goals for the year: 

Step #1: Evaluate and Analyze This Year’s Goals 

Taking time to reflect on your experience over the past year is the best place to start. What were your goals at the beginning of the year? Were they helpful in moving you toward your ultimate business goals? Were you too ambitious in some areas? Were there certain obstacles that kept you from achieving your goals? Which goals would you keep and which would you jettison?

These are all incredibly helpful questions to help you develop smarter marketing goals for the following year. At Green Apple, we often encourage our clients to include other stakeholders in the process of evaluating goals. Whether it’s capturing anecdotal feedback or conducting a thorough SWOT analysis, it’s important to approach the conversation with honesty and candor.  

You won’t be able to improve if you don’t take the time to identify your current reality. This leads to the next step. 

Step #2: Define Your Current Position and Barriers to Growth

Defining the proper marketing goals requires an accurate understanding of your current reality. It’s important to consider your current growth level. You shouldn’t expect to grow by double digits (without a significant shift in budget or strategy) if you’ve averaged 2-3% growth. This also means making an honest assessment of your limitations. Every marketing tactic requires time, energy, and resources. One of the worst mistakes you can make is to set audacious marketing goals without the ability to make the necessary investment to achieve them. 

Step #3: Incorporate Your Business Goals and Initiatives into Your Marketing Goals 

One of the best ways for your marketing efforts to impact your business is to ensure your goal supports the overall direction of your company. This is an often overlooked but essential step in setting your marketing goals. As we partner with clients to develop their marketing strategy, we take time to identify any business objectives marketing should support. Often, this requires collaboration between the C-suite, marketing team, business development team, and even customer service and operations. 

The point is to understand what your company is trying to achieve so that you know where to invest your marketing budget.

Step #4: Identify Your Priorities

If you could only focus on three or four marketing goals for the year, what would they be? If you could only focus on one, what would it be? Asking these two questions can help you define your priorities. Biting off more than you can chew is a common mistake when it comes to setting the right marketing goals. 

Ranking your priorities can ensure you focus on what’s most important. It can also provide clarity if you’re forced to make budget cuts or other business decisions that might impact your overall marketing campaign. 

Step #5: Set Clear, Written Objectives and Key Results 

Based on the insights you gain from the first four steps, you’re ready to define your marketing goals. Writing your goals down is also important. According to research from CoSchedule, marketers who write down their goals are 376% more likely to report success than those who don’t. 

It’s important to have a timeline for each goal or objective. For example, 

  • Goal: Grow our social media following
  • Objective: Increase social media audience by 30% by April 1, 2023
Step #6: Detail Your Milestones and Metrics for Success

The best way to drive your results and keep your team motivated is to break down your annual goals into quarterly and monthly milestones. This can also be helpful if you work in an industry where certain times of year are busier than others. 

For example, if you have a Q2 sales goal that’s higher than normal, you might want to set a Q1 lead generation goal that can support it. 

Step #7: Determine How to Translate Metrics into Actionable Insights 

If you want to achieve your end goal, it’s important to be able to translate your marketing results into actionable insights. This shift in the way you approach marketing metrics can make a huge difference.  

If you’re struggling to identify the right marketing goals for your business, you’re not alone. We’ve worked with businesses in a variety of industries, and each has its own unique set of challenges when it comes to setting the right goals. 

Let Us Help You Achieve Your Goals

If you need help setting the right goals or designing a marketing strategy to help you achieve your business goals, our team is here to help. 

Mood Boards: The Secret to Successful Branding & Creative Marketing

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Branding and creativity are two core elements of successful marketing. While most people think the creative direction is the fun part of marketing, the reality is that making a final decision on creative elements for clients is hard work. You have to consider brand perception and how to differentiate your client from competitors. Getting everyone aligned around a final decision can also be challenging. 

Over the years, we’ve learned a few tips and tricks to navigate the complicated creative process. Mood boards have become one of our favorite tools. Mood boards can be a valuable tool whether you’re looking to refresh your entire marketing plan or find the next angle for your marketing campaign. 

What is a mood board and why are they effective?

In short, a mood board is a visual representation of ideas gathered from a variety of sources to help you find the best idea for your creative marketing project. 

While most companies utilize mood boards for big branding projects, they can also be helpful when redesigning your website, developing your social media calendar, or for something as simple as designing a company t-shirt. 

Here are a few reasons why we love using mood boards with our clients:

1. Find and cultivate inspiration.

The best creative ideas come from collaboration. Because everyone has a unique perspective, certain images, words, or colors might resonate differently with your audience. Mood boards provide a way to capture a variety of ideas that can help you build a creative campaign that reaches different audiences

2. Get everyone on the same page.

Collaboration is an essential part of marketing. Ideas need to be heard and considered by every member. A mood board supports the collaboration process by providing a framework for people to operate within. It provides clarity within the collaboration process that ensures everyone is working in the same direction. 

3. Ensure you’re developing a cohesive approach.

It’s important for your marketing to tell a cohesive story. Mood boards help by allowing you to see how various elements work together to develop a narrative. 

4. Make it easier to gain buy-in from stakeholders.

Making a final decision can be one of the most challenging aspects of a branding or creative project. Your design team could work for hours only to get an idea nixed by the CEO or final decision-maker. A mood board mitigates that risk by gaining buy-in early on in the process. It also provides a more visually appealing way to present your ideas. Mood boards can help you explain your ideas or direction in ways that words can’t. 

How to Create a Mood Board

There’s no one right way to create a mood board. But here are a few helpful steps to maximize your effectiveness: 

1. Find a tool that works for your team.

It’s important to find an approach that works best for your team. You can create a physical mood board in your office. There are also a variety of online tools that make it easy to create digital mood boards. These are helpful if you’re working remotely or hiring a freelance designer for your project.  

2. Define your goal and audience.

Taking a moment to identify who you’re trying to reach and what you’re trying to achieve can provide clarity for your team. Doing this on the front end can help save a lot of time and ensure everyone is working in the same direction. 

3. Identify elements to include in your mood board.

What you include in your mood board will depend on the nature of your project. Most mood boards include images that convey the look and feel you’re hoping to recreate with the final product of that project. But you can also add colors, font families, or certain keywords or phrases that capture what you’re trying to communicate. 

4. Invite others to share inspiration.

Once you’ve set some parameters, it’s time to invite others into the collaboration process. Encourage participants to include anything they find that feels like a visual representation of your brand. While this might come more naturally for some than others, don’t discount the feedback and perspective from people you might not consider to be the most creative individuals on your team. Invite everyone to look for marketing inspiration that is all around them. 

5. Identify trends. 

After everyone has had a chance to add ideas, it’s time to start narrowing your focus. Are there certain visuals or elements that seem to stand out more than others? What elements might work well together and appeal to your audience? Take this time to cut any ideas that might seem out of place. 

6. Balance a final decision with continued inspiration.

Once you feel like you’ve narrowed down your mood board to its final stage, ask yourself: Does this provide enough clarity and direction to begin executing our project? If so, you’re ready to get started. 

As an aside, some companies curate mood boards to capture ideas on a regular basis. These can be helpful to use as guideposts for driving brand and design decisions in the future. 

Feel stuck in your branding efforts or creative marketing project? Our team can help. Connect with Green Apple to learn more about our unique process. We’d love to discuss your needs and develop a strategy based on where you want to go.

7 Marketing Tools Your Team Can’t Live Without

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Executing a marketing strategy is a lot like climbing a mountain. Both are focused on an audacious goal that requires effort and dedication to achieve. You need an intentional plan for how you’re going to climb the mountain. There will also be unexpected obstacles and unexpected turns along the way. Sometimes you have a clear path to reaching the summit. Other times, you may need a guide to help you navigate new terrain. 

And just like mountain climbing, you need a variety of marketing tools that can help you along the way. These tools may help you assess your current situation, work more effectively, and take the right steps toward reaching your goal. Each tool might serve a different purpose, but they’re all essential for your survival. 

7 Marketing Tools Your Team Can’t Live Without

Here are seven types of tools you need to execute successful marketing campaigns: 

1. Collaboration Tools

Executing a marketing plan requires significant collaboration. When you’re managing all the elements for your content marketing campaigns or seeking input on an important design project, there are numerous stakeholders and steps that need to be addressed. 

At Green Apple, our hybrid office model has trained us to become experts in marketing collaboration. Here are just a few of the collaboration tools that make it easy to collaborate with clients, team members, and freelancers in the Green Apple Orchard from across the country:

  • Google Workspace — Google’s collaborative tools such as Docs, Slides, and Sheets make it easy to create, approve, and deliver assets in a timely fashion. Rather than tracking multiple documents or attachments through email, Google makes it easy for team members and clients to collaborate in the same documents in real time. 
  • Basecamp —  Project management is essential for streamlining work and optimizing efficiency. Basecamp rolls all of the core necessities of project management into a browser-based tool that makes it easy to track campaigns from start to finish. We’ve used Basecamp for years, and it has become an integral tool for our team.  
  • Zoom — Video conferencing became an essential business tool during the pandemic. We’ve found it incredibly helpful for improving our team’s virtual meetings, meeting with clients in other cities, and connecting with The Orchard, our remote contract team members.
2. Design Tools 

The image you portray is important. The good news is that it’s easier than ever to find affordable design tools that make your brand stand out and look professional. Tools like Canva can be incredibly helpful for designing eye-catching graphics and images for social media. However, knowing when to use Canva and when to outsource to a professional can be essential to maximize the impact of graphic design for your brand. 

3. Digital and Social Media Management Tools 

With all the various social media platforms, it’s almost impossible to manage all of your content production needs without a social media management tool. Social media management tools help you plan, schedule, and monitor your social media posts. These tools also give you the chance to review and analyze your audience engagement on multiple channels. 

At Green Apple, Sprout Social is our social media management tool of choice. It makes it easy to manage various social media accounts for all of our clients. It also provides comprehensive reporting that provides a detailed look into content performance through competitive analytics and strategic insights.

4. Online Advertising Tools 

Online advertising has exploded in recent years. In fact, digital advertisements will account for more than 66% of the total global advertising spend by 2023. It allows you to create targeted messages to reach and expand your audience, improve your brand awareness, and generate more qualified leads.

At Green Apple, our digital marketing team collaborates with online advertising specialists to design and implement online advertising campaigns for B2B and B2C clients. Some of our favorite tools include Google Keyword Planner and Adstage. 

5. Lead Capture & Nurturing Tools 

If you rely on inbound marketing to generate sales leads, you need a marketing tool that captures potential customers and guides them through the marketing funnel. The good news is that most tools integrate with your website to create a seamless user experience.

Over the years, we’ve used lead-capturing tools such as Unbound and Leadpages to capture leads. We’ve also worked alongside several clients to leverage marketing CRMs such as Hubspot to track and manage marketing leads.

6. Website SEO Tools

Whether it’s keyword research, content optimization, or checking your current page rankings, every marketer needs a go-to tool for planning content and optimizing it for SEO. 

Green Apple recommends SEMrush, the top-rated keyword tool we use for our clients. We’ve found that it’s the best tool to implement SEO tips that actually work. Their platform offers comprehensive reports to monitor competitors’ backlinks and offers backlink audits for sites that have already linked to your website with an anchor text. 

7. Customer Experience & Testimonial Tools

In today’s digital world, consumers hold the power when it comes to your brand reputation. A negative customer review or poor client experience can have a devastating impact on your brand. At the same time, testimonials and feedback can be some of the most beneficial assets for brand management.

At Green Apple, we’ve worked with a variety of customer experience and testimonial tools to capture feedback for our clients. Delighted is a customer satisfaction platform that allows you quickly and easily capture feedback through customer surveys. LoyaltyLoop is another tool we use to better understand and improve upon the customer experience. 

Finding the right set of marketing tools can be overwhelming. It’s important not to lose sight of the forest through the trees. Focus on your end goal and then find the tools that will help you get there. Our team at Green Apple can help you determine which tools are a fit for you. We’d love to take a look at your marketing goals and help you design and execute a strategy to meet them.

How to Know When to Redesign Your Website

A-desk-with-a-monitor-and-a-laptop

Determining when to redesign your website is a common yet challenging business decision. On one hand, your website is often your most important marketing tool. An effective website can make a dramatic impact on your bottom line. On the other hand, redesigning your website requires significant time, effort, and resources. 

At Green Apple, we’ve had the opportunity to help dozens of clients redesign their websites over the years — a few of which have gone through multiple iterations. We want to help our clients make informed decisions on whether they should invest in a website redesign. We also want to help them avoid the mistakes businesses make when launching a new website. Sometimes they decide it’s time to redesign the entire site. In other cases, we help them identify small tweaks and improvements they can make.

How to Know When to Redesign Your Website

Beyond obvious factors such as security concerns or outdated functionality, here are a few questions we ask to help our clients navigate the decision to redesign their website:

1. What do the metrics say?

Google analytics and marketing metrics can play a helpful role in helping you determine the current state of your website. 

For example, If your website has a high bounce rate, you should conduct further investigation to see if the issue is based on slow page load speed, bad or unclear content, or a poor user experience.

Your conversion rate can help you determine if your website is doing its job of converting visitors into potential customers.  Websites that have a hard time generating leads and conversions are typically missing key elements that help with the conversion process.

2. How is the mobile experience?

In today’s digital-first age, mobile marketing is an essential tactic for every business. The majority of web traffic nowadays is conducted on mobile devices. Your website should be “mobile responsive” and also easy to navigate on a phone. If you have received numerous complaints about the mobile optimization of your site, it might be a good idea to get ahead of the issue by redesigning your website.

3. Does your website reflect the way you currently talk about your business?

Most businesses adapt the way they do business in order to keep up with the changing demands of their customers. For some, the way they talk about their business changes as they discover new messaging that resonates with their audience. It’s important that your website matches the way your leadership and sales team talks about your products or services. This is key to creating a cohesive user experience. 

4. How easy is it for people to quickly understand what you do and take the first step?

The ultimate goal of every website is to support business development. That’s why it’s essential to make sure your website is easy to navigate and understand. Having a disconnect at any level of a user’s journey can lead to confusion and frustration.

How do you provide a great experience? Make sure your website is easy to navigate, your content is easy and enjoyable to read, and you have clear calls to action.

5. Are you being outranked by competitors on important key search phrases?

Designing an SEO-friendly website is a foundational element for your marketing efforts. SEO is crucial because it makes your website more visible to searchers, and that means more traffic and more opportunities to convert prospects into customers. 

One way to determine if you’re maximizing your SEO efforts is to conduct keyword research to see how you compare with other competitors in your industry. If your website is struggling to rank for important keywords, it’s likely that your website is not built in accordance with new search engine algorithms and needs to be redesigned.

Failing to keep your website updated can waste marketing resources, lose out on sales, or hurt your brand reputation. 

If you’re just looking for a website redesign, Green Apple might not be the best fit. But if you want to ensure your website is aligned with your overall marketing strategy and actively helping you grow your business, we’d love to talk. Through a comprehensive audit of your website, we can discover opportunities to improve your website so that it reaches your audience. Contact our team today.

5 Ways B2B Companies Can Get Out of Their Comfort Zone

Two Women Discussing Business Items on a Whiteboard

Consistency in marketing is essential. However, businesses can get so comfortable with their marketing processes and campaigns that they end up stuck in a rut. Before you know it, the strategies and tactics that are used to help you meet your goals don’t work anymore. How can B2B companies avoid the marketing rut? Finding ways to periodically get out of your comfort zone can be one of the most helpful ways to generate new ideas and regain momentum toward achieving your goals. 

At Green Apple, we approach our marketing strategies by doing everything we can to help our clients grow. Sometimes that means finding ways to help them think differently and get them outside their comfort zones. 

5 Ways B2B Companies Can Get Outside of Their Comfort Zones

Here are five helpful ideas that have helped our B2B clients expand their thinking and find new ways to enhance their marketing strategies:

1. Reexamine your audience and unique value proposition.

Your customers and target audience are human beings that are constantly growing, learning, and changing. That’s why it’s important to regularly evaluate your target audience as well as the unique value proposition you’re using to reach them. This can be especially helpful if you’re trying to market a complex product or service. 

At Green Apple, we recommend our clients take time to re-evaluate their audience at least every 3-5 years. We’ve found that taking time to consider who you’re trying to reach and what questions they’re asking is one of the most beneficial ways that B2B companies can refresh their marketing efforts. 

2. Consider testing 1 or 2 innovative marketing tactics each year to reach customers.

Marketing is constantly evolving. While you don’t need to implement every new trend, it’s important to consider which new tactics or platforms might help you move the needle. 

Each year, we try to include one or two innovative marketing ideas in our clients’ strategies. It’s been amazing to see how much of a difference this can make, especially for our B2B clients. In most cases, our clients don’t need to overhaul their strategies. They’re looking for a couple of new ideas that can be easily implemented. We may not execute these ideas, but they often help clients get outside their comfort zone and generate helpful conversations. 

3. Find an outside voice that can help you challenge assumptions and identify potential ideas you haven’t considered.

Have you ever felt like you can’t see something objectively because you’re too close to the situation? It’s easy to get stuck in a rut when you spend so much time, energy, and effort on marketing your company. At Green Apple, one way we try to add value to our clients’ strategies is by providing a third-party perspective on unique challenges and situations. 

This can be one of the most helpful ways to discover creative potential and opportunities within your business that you may have never considered.

4. Consider stealing a few ideas from your favorite B2C company.

You might be surprised by how effective it can be to follow the lead of B2C marketers when it comes to creating marketing campaigns that stand out. Over the years, we’ve found there are several marketing tactics that B2B companies can steal from B2C brands. 

The next time you notice a B2C company capturing your attention, take time to evaluate what made it stand out. How could you incorporate the same ideas into your efforts to reach potential B2B customers? 

5. Repurpose existing content into other formats. 

In most cases, B2B marketers rely on written content and in-depth resources to reach potential customers. As a result, B2B content marketers spend around 82% of their work hours on content creation each week. 

Repurposing existing content can be a way to get the most out of your content marketing rut by working smarter, not harder. At Green Apple, we’ve helped clients with everything from repurposing thought leadership into podcasts and reformatting blog posts into social infographics. 

As marketing continues to evolve, B2B brands need to stay nimble. Finding ways to get out of your comfort zone can be one of the best ways to ensure your marketing efforts continue to produce results year after year.  If you’re looking for a way to find new ideas for your B2B marketing strategy, our team can help. Reach out to us to schedule a strategy session​​ or let us know if there’s a specific question we can help answer.