5 Ways B2B Companies Can Get Out of Their Comfort Zone

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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.

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Green Apple’s Approach to Building a Marketing Strategy

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Green Apple Strategy was founded as a full-service marketing agency built on the idea of serving clients differently. Rather than leading with marketing services, such as building a website or managing PR, we set out to be an agency that approached our work with a “business owner” mindset. Rather than thinking about marketing in its own silo, we wanted to come alongside our clients to strategically consider how marketing could impact their entire business—and alternatively, how other areas of their business impacted marketing. We wanted to be an agency that worked to build marketing strategies with the entire business in mind—not just the immediate marketing needs or sales goals. 

This is one reason why “strategy” is intentionally included in our name. Whether it’s onboarding a new client or renewing our annual contract with an existing partner, the strategic planning process is an integral part of our approach and one of the primary ways we add value to our clients. We build our marketing plans with a focus on strategic planning and then develop our tactical approach from it. This has given us the opportunity to learn some important best practices when it comes to building a marketing strategy. 

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Our Approach to Building a Marketing Strategy

Here are a few best practices we’ve incorporated into our approach after crafting hundreds of marketing strategies over the past decade:

1. Make sure the right people are in the room as you build the strategy.

One of the dangers of building a marketing campaign in a silo is that the strategy isn’t aligned with the direction that sales is headed, or it ends up creating headaches for other areas of the business.

Developing your marketing strategy with input from important stakeholders is one of the keys to creating a plan that supports every area of the business. At Green Apple, we are passionate about getting the right people involved. It’s not helpful to work solely with the VP of Marketing when the CEO needs to sign off on the strategy. At the same time, we want to include people who might be impacted by the strategy and tactics. 

Defining the right people depends on the unique characteristics of each company. Depending on who is making the decision and who will be impacted, we’ve worked alongside CEOs, COOs, CFOs, marketing leadership, and service-line managers to ensure our marketing strategies benefit the direction of the entire company. 

2. Coordinate with key stakeholders to help them understand where marketing is going and collaborate around areas of impact. 

Getting the right people in the room is one thing. Intentionally listening to their needs, thoughts, and questions is another. While we don’t expect a CFO or COO to understand everything about marketing or know specific best practices, we also recognize their perspective on how our strategy impacts their role is important. 

Oftentimes, we’ll host a listening session as we share our initial thoughts and strategy with key stakeholders. We want their feedback because they all have different perspectives on the business. This coordination and collaboration allow marketing to hear updates that might be happening in other areas of the company. These insights can be important for finding your next marketing angle or designing a strategy that will truly move the business forward over the next year. 

For example, if Operations is planning on rolling out a new product or service line—that’s a key tactic to consider. If a potential merger or acquisition is happening in the next year, that will drastically impact your marketing plan. Gathering as much information and perspective for where the entire organization is headed in the next year ensures marketing can fulfill its role and address the specific needs of the company—whether that’s brand management, sales-enablement, or enhancing the customer experience.  

3. Set realistic expectations and goals based on what’s realistically possible.

Unless you are Amazon or another major Fortune 500 company, the resources and budget you can devote to marketing are limited. That’s important to remember as you build your marketing plan. It’s easy to get so caught up in the excitement of all the possible tactics and strategies that you forget what’s actually possible with the resources you have available. 

That’s why it’s important to set appropriate expectations as you finalize your marketing strategy. You need to recognize everything that is going to be required to execute the strategy, including your budget, resources, and timeline.

Having this sort of honest and transparent conversation with clients has been one of the keys to our work at Green Apple. Over the years, we’ve worked with clients who only want us to develop a strategy they can execute internally. Other clients ask us to develop a strategy and then hire us to execute it. Because of our strategic emphasis and full-service capabilities, we’re able to provide value to both types of clients. We don’t rely on pushing a specific tactic or service. In every strategy session, we work with our clients to help them define the difference between what they should do or want to do and what they realistically can do.

4. Make sure stakeholders have a clear understanding of how marketing reaches your target audience.

One of our favorite parts in every strategy session is the moment when people realize how all of the marketing ideas and tactics work together to move their company forward. Whether it’s gaining clarity around their target audience or recognizing how all of the various marketing platforms create an omnichannel presence to reach today’s consumers, we love the “light bulb” moment when all the key stakeholders recognize the synergy a good marketing strategy can create. 

For example, one of the ways we support clients is by gathering customer feedback and testimonials. This becomes helpful for improving areas of the business, but it also provides an opportunity to create “customer spotlights” the company can promote through blogs and social media. These customer spotlights also become valuable sales tools that the business development team can use in proposals or pitch meetings. By creating a throughline, we’re able to leverage one simple idea to improve multiple areas of the business. 

5. Embrace the opportunity to learn and make adjustments as you go. 

Recognizing potential changes and creating space to learn and adjust are key to developing an agile marketing strategy that can evolve throughout the year. A marketing strategy should help you set a direction, but it should also give you the ability to evolve and adapt. Our marketing strategies include a process of continual learning so that we can optimize what we’re doing throughout the year. We also plan for the unexpected so that we can pivot if there’s a new service line or business need that arises. We’re not afraid to deliver a marketing strategy and then come back a few months later after analyzing the results to say, “We’ve identified a better way to do this.” 

Every marketing strategy should be developed with a long-term mindset that includes a process for looking at the data. We’re committed to changing directions if there is a more effective way to help the company succeed. 

Work with Us to Build Your Next Marketing Strategy

At Green Apple, our competitive advantage lies in our approach to strategic planning. If you’re interested in learning more about our process or discussing the specific ways we can help you, feel free to reach out to our team.

10 Spot-On Marketing Quotes

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Finding new sources of inspiration and creativity can be one of the most helpful ways for marketers and business owners to stay proficient at their craft. You never know what might spark an idea or help identify the angle for your next marketing campaign.

At Green Apple, we like to keep ourselves inspired when it comes to new and better ways of marketing. Our team is constantly searching for creative practices and marketing ideas to incorporate into our work. It’s not uncommon for our team to share highlights from the latest marketing books we’ve read or quote thought leaders we’ve heard on podcasts during a whiteboard session.

10 Spot-On Marketing Quotes 

Here are ten marketing quotes we’ve shared that do a good job of capturing the essence of marketing, where it’s headed, and how companies can maximize their effectiveness when it comes to reaching customers and inspiring people to take action:

1. “Marketing strategy will impact every piece of your business, and it should be tied to every piece of your business.” – Brandon Andersen

I love this quote because it speaks to the new reality that marketing integrates with every part of your business and vice-versa. This is a key mindset in the way we approach marketing strategy at Green Apple. 

2. “The new reality is that sales and marketing are continuously and increasingly integrated. Marketing needs to know more about sales, sales leaders need to know more about marketing, and we all need to know more about our customers.” – Jill Rowley

Sales and marketing alignment is absolutely essential. This quote perfectly addresses the new reality of how the two teams should work together. 

3. “As marketing converges with customer service and sales, marketing today is more about helping and less about hyping.” – Joel Book

Marketing tactics aren’t the only thing that’s evolved. As marketing continues to work closely with customer service and sales, it’s important to adopt a helping mindset.

4. “Every email is an opportunity to test a different benefit or angle.” – Heather Morgan

Because of the nature of email, it’s an wise tactic to continually test your emails and collect analytical data to see what messages (and approaches) resonate most with your audience. 

5.​​ “Great marketers don’t use consumers to solve their company’s problem; they use marketing to solve other people’s problems.” – Seth Godin

The best marketing campaigns are built around what potential customers are thinking and how to help them solve their problems. That’s the way you earn trust and attention. 

6. “Marketing is about becoming part of people’s stories.” – Bernadette Jiwa

One key to successful marketing is to position your brand in a way that makes your audience’s life better. Recognizing what customers want (and how marketing can help) is a key strategy to incorporate into your marketing approach. 

7. “Good marketing makes the company look smart. Great marketing makes the customer feel smart.” – Joe Chernov

Great marketing campaigns make the customer feel like the hero. Whether it’s through the blog content you write or the monthly email newsletter you send, it’s important to focus your marketing content on your customers, not just highlighting your brand. 

8. “The new wave of marketing is scientific marketing. It’s not about the big idea—it’s about making course corrections every day.” – Sharad Sharma

One of the best things about marketing in today’s digital age is the ability we have to constantly measure and tweak our efforts. Being able to optimize our campaigns has been one of the most beneficial practices we’ve implemented over the past ten years. 

9. “The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.” – Tom Fishburne

People don’t like to be sold to. The gift of effective marketing is that you’re building trust with customers and giving them the inspiration to take an action that will help improve their lives.

10. “There are a lot of opportunities that you can discover by listening closely to what your customers are saying.” – Joei Chan

Customer surveys and testimonial requests are some of the most effective marketing tactics we’ve deployed for our clients over the years. It’s amazing how the feedback provides valuable information about sales, customer success, product development, and operational processes.

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.  

Last-Minute Holiday Marketing Advice to Stand Out This Season

The holidays can be one of the busiest—and most stressful—times of the year for marketers. Target audiences and potential customers are busier than normal and bombarded with messages and advertisements during the holiday season. All of the hustle and bustle also comes at the end of the year when you’re making one final push to meet your annual marketing goals. 

Developing an intentional holiday marketing plan can be one of the most effective ways to keep you and your team on track during November and December. And if you’re just now recognizing the need, that’s ok. Putting a little thought and effort into your holiday marketing strategy can go a long way. 

After working alongside many of our clients to design holiday marketing campaigns, we wanted to take a few moments to provide some last-minute advice to maximize your marketing efforts during the holiday season. 

1. Be sure to express gratitude to your current clients and customers. 

The holiday season is a great time to show your clients how valuable they are to your business. This is a simple and effective way to surprise and delight customers and keep them loyal to your brand. You could ship the same holiday gift to all your customers or take the time to send a custom gift to your top clients based on something you know about them.

If you’re running short on time, there are plenty of virtual client appreciation gifts that you can send last minute. 

2. Be creative and fun when incorporating holiday-themed messaging into your content. 

The competition for attention is at an all-time high during the holidays. One way to stand out is to take advantage of the spirit of the season by sharing light-hearted content. There are literally hundreds of ways to execute this. You could create a “12 Days of…” brand campaign on social media or send a funny online greeting card for your monthly newsletter that highlights your company’s human side.

3. Don’t let warm leads go cold during the holiday break.

While it may be difficult to schedule meetings during the end of the year, the holidays can also be a great time for closing new deals. With Q1 and new budgets around the corner, decision-makers are finalizing their vendors and goals for next year.  

Developing an intentional strategy to keep leads from going cold during the holidays could make a tremendous difference when it comes to hitting your annual goals or starting the new year with a lot of momentum. 

4. Find simple ways to give back to others.

More and more companies are adopting corporate social responsibility as a way to stand out and give back to society. Studies show that 84% of customers in the US will most likely buy from brands supporting the social causes they care about. If your company gives back in some sort of way during the holidays, don’t be afraid to share that through your marketing channels. 

Whether you’re looking for ways to connect with customers at the end of the year or need a fresh approach for the new year, our team at Green Apple Strategy can help. Contact us today to schedule a consultation to discuss your needs and learn more about our approach.

The 7 Strategies Your Email Newsletter Should Use

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When it comes to the basic “blocking and tackling” of effective email strategy in 2022, email newsletters are on the starting line. After all, 81% of B2B businesses name newsletters as their top content marketing strategy. However, the popularity of newsletters often makes it one of the most difficult tactics to deploy. It’s important for every business to consider how their newsletter is going to stand out in the crowded inboxes of their audience.

3 Benefits of Email Newsletters for Marketing

Before we dive into the email strategy for developing an effective newsletter, here are just a few important factors to consider:

1. Newsletters provide a way to educate current and prospective customers.

An effective email newsletter is informative and relevant. It should appeal directly to the subscriber’s interests and cover the topics from the industry. Because of this, newsletters provide your audience with a better understanding and knowledge of your brand in a way that is helpful. 

2. Newsletters help you keep leads warm.

Not everyone who visits your website or submits their email address is ready to buy. Newsletters can be a great way to keep potential customers engaged and informed until they’re ready to make the decision to buy. 

3. Newsletters can enhance your brand reputation and highlight your expertise.

Newsletters also provide a way to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry and build expertise. By sharing relevant industry news and providing perspective on important topics for your audience in your newsletter, you become a trusted voice for them. 

 

7 Effective Strategies for Email Newsletters

So how do you create an engaging newsletter that creates momentum for your marketing efforts? Here are seven strategies to consider:

1. Choose an Email Software that Works for Your Brand

There are many email service providers out there on the market and choosing the right one is not easy. While we’ve used several survey platforms to send newsletters for our clients, our team likes the features and functionality that Campaign Monitor provides. The key is to find software that can meet your requirements and can guarantee both high deliverability and quality of your emails.

2. Set the Right Expectations by Letting People Know What to Expect from Your Newsletter

Because of how many emails are sent daily, people are more and more reluctant to share their email addresses. Whenever you’re asking people to sign up for your newsletter, it’s helpful to answer the question “What’s in it for me?”

Helping people recognize the value of subscribing to your newsletter and setting expectations for how you will communicate with them goes a long way in maximizing the ROI of your campaigns. 

3. Use a Clean and Consistent Template

You want to make sure your newsletters are skimmable and easy to read. Whether you use an out-of-the-box template or get one created especially for your brand, using a consistent design will help your brand achieve a layer of cohesiveness and flow.  

4. Make Sure Your Subject Line is Compelling

You only get one chance to make a great first impression with your subject line. According to research, 64% of readers make the decision to open an email based on the subject line alone. Here are a few different subject lines you can use to elevate your email newsletters.  

5. Consider Adding an Emoji to Your Subject Line

At Green Apple, we’ve found emojis help our clients’ newsletters stand out in a crowded inbox. One study analyzed over 9K email campaigns on mobile and found that subject lines that included emojis increased email open rates by 1,071% on Android and by 662% on iOS.

6. Make Your Newsletter Helpful & Informational More than Sales-Driven

Newsletters are better for cultivating customer loyalty and brand equity than they are for hard selling. When it comes to the content you create, it’s important to embrace the mindset of “always be helping.” One way to integrate this into your newsletters is the 90/10 rule: 90% informational content, 10% sales material. With the right balance, less is more and the educational material will lead to more sales than product copy.

7. Continually Analyze & Test to Find What Works

As with any marketing tactic, in email strategy, it’s important to constantly test and analyze your newsletter to see what works. You want to track the metrics that indicate whether or not your newsletter is working and test new ideas along the way. This includes testing out different strategies for send date, layout & design, calls-to-action, etc. 

Email newsletters might be something we’re all familiar with, but it can challenging to create a successful one for your own brand. We hope these insights and strategies help you develop a newsletter that delights subscribers and creates momentum for your marketing efforts.

How To Write Subject Lines That Increase Your Email Open Rate

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Do you remember the last email you opened from a brand or company compared to one you automatically deleted? More than likely, it was the subject line that was the difference. In today’s digital age, effective subject lines are essential for writing the perfect marketing email. 

Why Effective Subject Lines Are Important for Email Marketing

Here are a few reasons why your email subject lines matter more than ever: 

1. Your audience is flooded with emails every day.  The average person sends and receives 121 business emails every day. The emails you send have significant competition when it comes to earning the attention of your audience.

2. Your subject line is the primary driver of email openings. According to research, 64% of readers make the decision to open an email based on the subject line alone.

3. Bad subject lines could impact your deliverability rates.  69% of email recipients report emails as spam after reading the subject line. If your subject line could potentially be considered spam, your deliverability for all other emails moving forward could suffer. Spam traps can cause your domain or IP address to be denied, affecting your email deliverability rates and sender reputation.

4. Emails are still the most effective way to stay top-of-mind. While it has become increasingly difficult to stand out in your audiences’ email inbox, email is still the primary way you can stay top-of-mind for potential customers. In fact, 99% of email users check their inbox every day, with some checking 20 times a day. Of those people, 58% of consumers check their email first thing in the morning. Your email could be the first thing they see when they wake up.

5 Types of Subject Lines You Can Use

Now that we’ve outlined the importance of crafting the right subject line for your email, let’s talk about some various tactics you can try. Here are a few different types of subject lines we’ve used with our clients over the years:  1. Listed Subject Lines  There’s a reason lists have grown so common in content marketing: they work. Lists provide content in a short, simple, and skimmable format. As human brains are naturally drawn to digits, lists are an easy way to pique a reader’s attention. 2. Scarcity Subject Lines Humans have a deep fear of missing out—on anything. Email subject lines that mention scarcity tend to perform well because they create a sense of urgency for your audience to open the email. 3. Personal or Local Subject Lines People are looking for content that is most relevant to them. This is why crafting email subject lines with unique and specific information can create a sense of personalization. 4. Clever & Witty Subject Lines A witty subject line can stand out among the scores of boring ones around it. If you know your audience well, a clever joke can get your email opened and shared. 5. Emoji Subject Lines Recent studies show that emails with an emoji in the subject line show a 56% increase in open rates. Using emojis can help your subject line stand out, as long as you don’t overdo it.

5 Keys to Craft the Perfect Subject Line for Your Marketing Emails

We’ve identified a few different directions you could take with your subject lines. But how do you know what will work best for your audience? Here are a few best practices to craft subject lines that will stand out and elevate your email marketing campaigns: 

1. Take Time to A/B Test Your Subject Lines Effective marketing is all about experimentation. This includes the subject lines you use in emails. Constantly experimenting and analyzing your subject line strategy through A/B testing is a great way to optimize your email campaigns. Compare open rates, and try to understand why some subject lines are more effective than others.

2. Use Segmentation and Personalization As we highlighted above, personalized subject lines can be a great way to stand out. This is where segmenting your audience based on location, preferences, or interest can be a great way to add personalization to your subject lines. According to Campaign Monitor, using the recipient’s first name in the subject line increased the chance of the email being opened by nearly 15%.

3. Make It Short and Sweet (and Mobile-Optimized) Most people’s attention spans are very short—so generally it’s a good idea to keep your subject lines brief and to the point. The most effective subject lines are typically no more than five or six words. It’s also important to remember that people are most likely checking email on their phones. Brevity is especially important since most screens only display 30-40 characters in a subject line.

4. Start with Action-Oriented Language Actionable subject lines can often inspire people to click on your email by instilling urgency and excitement. For example, in an email inviting people to an open house at your new office, the email subject line might read, “Enjoy free drinks at our new office!” rather than a more generic (and less actionable) “You’re Invited to our Open House.”

5. Tell Your Audience What’s Inside the Email If you want people to take action, it’s important they know what to expect if they open your email. Make it clear what’s waiting inside the email. This is something your audience wants to know, and it can be the difference between an email that is opened and one that isn’t.

Email Marketing Strategies That Stick

At Green Apple, we’re constantly working alongside our clients to stay updated on the latest email marketing trends as they evolve and change. By using some of our tips, we hope you can come up with creative and engaging subject lines of your own. Reach out today if you need a reimagined and effective email marketing strategy.

How Green Apple Works to Build Your Perfect Marketing Team

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When Green Apple was founded in 2012, we started with the commitment to always find the best way possible to serve our clients and support our staff. Rather than striving to become an agency with large office space, we wanted to stay nimble and find workspaces that were collaborative but not constraining. Instead of hiring dozens of full-time employees and trying to find ways to keep their plates full with projects our clients potentially didn’t need, we wanted to create a model that embraced the growing freelance economy to work with specialists who were building their businesses. 

That’s where the concept of the Green Apple Orchard began to take root. The Orchard allows us to build the perfect marketing team for our clients by working with some of the industry’s top creative talent. 

How the Green Apple Orchard Produces Even Greater Results for Our Clients 

  1. We employ a team of freelance specialists to offer the best talent.

    The Orchard is comprised of writers, print designers, web designers, web developers, photographers, and videographers who serve on our accounts as Green Apple team members. Many of the Orchard members have decades of experience in their areas of expertise. Some would be too expensive to hire on their own, but we have access to their services because they enjoy working alongside Green Apple’s clients in addition to their other commitments.

  2. We match you with team members with the experience or expertise you need.

    The Green Apple Orchard becomes even more valuable as we begin to work with new clients. Each client that comes in at Green Apple undergoes a thorough onboarding period. During this process, we select Orchard members who will fit best with those accounts for the services they need (writing, photos, web design, web management, graphic design, etc.). We’re able to work with specialists from various backgrounds who often have direct experience related to our client’s industry.

  3. We can grow our team quickly as your needs expand.

    Your marketing strategies and tactics should evolve as your company evolves and trends change. This is where hiring an internal marketing team can become tricky. For example, if you want to drastically shift your approach from an inbound content marketing approach to a more targeted account-based marketing strategy, your internal team might not have the experience or skills to deliver. Because of the Orchard,  we’re able to adapt our teams and services with clients as the relationship grows or your needs expand.

4. We maximize our hybrid model to meet your needs from around the world.

For the past decade, we’ve worked with specialists and talent from around the southeast. At the beginning of the COVID 19 pandemic, Green Apple officially embraced a hybrid office model that allowed our entire team to work virtually but still have access to a central meeting space for meetings, brainstorming, team building, open-space working, and team collaboration. 

As a hybrid agency, we’ve become incredibly skilled at working with Orchard members from across the country. This allows us to tap into resources from literally around the world to meet our clients’ needs. 

Grow Your Business Through the Orchard

Are you looking for a strategic, full-service marketing firm that has the experience and adaptability to meet your needs? Contact Green Apple Strategy today to schedule a consultation. Our team is happy to sit down with you to discuss your goals and how we can help you achieve them.

Case Study: How We Increased LinkedIn Followers 5X in 6 Months

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LinkedIn is an essential platform for many B2B companies, and there are several reasons why:

  • 4 out of 5 people on LinkedIn “drive business decisions.” (Source)
  • 33% of B2B decision makers use LinkedIn to research purchases. (Source) 
  • 80% of B2B social media leads come from LinkedIn. (Source) 

There is no denying that LinkedIn is one of the most effective social media lead generators for B2B marketers. Since LinkedIn allows users to generate content and create engagement, it makes sense for those involved in the B2B industry to remain active on LinkedIn. 

Recently, our team at Green Apple collaborated on a strategy to enhance our LinkedIn presence that increased our followers by more than 500 in less than six months. 

The Challenge: Testing Ideas to Transform Our Strategies

We often help clients use LinkedIn as a marketing tool and find effective ways to optimize B2B LinkedIn pages for business. We also believe to serve our clients effectively, we should always be looking for ways to test ideas and strategies ourselves. Understanding the ways brands use LinkedIn gives us insight into how we can integrate new approaches into the social marketing strategy we create for clients.

In May 2021, we sat down to develop a year-long plan that would help us learn new tactics and achieve specific growth, interactions, and engagement goals. We started with a little more than 100 followers on our LinkedIn page. 

Our Approach: Collaboration & Content to Accelerate Connection & Growth

To test ideas and strategies, we worked through the same strategic marketing process we use with our clients: 

  • We identified a goal and created a feasible strategy — We started by setting a goal to have 1,000 followers by May 2022. This seemed like an audacious but achievable goal. We also wanted to develop a strategy that would be reasonable for our team to execute. We know our team is primarily focused on client goals, so we collaborated on a feasible strategy that was highly achievable. 
  • We used our team strengths to devise a plan — The strategy we created was built to maximize our team’s unique strengths and gifts. One of the things that makes Green Apple unique is that our team is diverse in experience and expertise. We wanted to highlight this by encouraging team members to be present on LinkedIn. We also wanted to give our insights into the marketing industry, share what our team members are learning, and highlight the milestones our team reaches. 
  • We created a team-oriented approach — We knew that collective buy-in would be essential for achieving our goal. From the very beginning, we rallied the team behind the goal and provided ways to engage with our content, share their own content, and grow our network. We also wanted to share content highlighting the “everyday” aspects of our team — including behind-the-scenes photos and personnel updates from the Green Apple Orchard. 
  • We evaluated and re-evaluated our content each month — It’s important to constantly measure your efforts and tweak your strategy based on what you’re learning. Each month, our team would spend time reviewing the content we posted. The insights we discovered based on the performance of the various topics or types of posts allowed us to adjust our strategy along the way.

The Results: Discovering the “Link” Between Intentional Effort & Exponential Growth

Six months into the strategy, we’re well on our way to achieving our annual growth goal. We’ve also experienced exponential growth in our engagement. We’ve increased our reactions by 4,872%, comments by 7,800%, and shares by 2,566%. Along with these quantitative results, we’ve also created deeper, more meaningful connections with people on LinkedIn we hadn’t experienced before. 

If you want to learn more about our approach or discover how you can leverage LinkedIn for growth, reach out to us to help establish a strategic social media plan. Also — if we haven’t connected on LinkedIn yet, we’d love to share our content with you. You can find our LinkedIn page here.

A B2B Guide to Marketing Automation

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As a brand, connecting with your target audience is crucial. In order to connect with your target audience effectively, you need to know what content resonates with your target demographic, their sales cycle, and what they value most about your product or service. This type of in-depth research can be difficult to reproduce at scale, but marketing automation can be a powerful tool. Marketing Automation can help you identify your potential customers’ needs, establish several touchpoints on their sales journeys, and bring more sales to completion.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation refers to a set of tools and processes that are used to communicate with existing leads, bringing them closer to the point of buying. Any time a customer adds an item to a cart, leaves the page, and later receives an email with “Forgot Something?” in the subject line, that’s marketing automation at work. Setting up a series of processes, emails, reminders, or follow-ups can help you increase communication with your customers without taking the additional time or requiring you to hire new talent. Instead, marketing automation uses well-designed processes to help you discover potential customers, replicate high-performing practices, and encourage repeat purchasing behaviors. 

Marketing Automation Saves You Time and Overhead

Marketing automation has numerous benefits, but the most important is the time you save by streamlining your sales cycle. Rather than spending hours identifying and contacting qualified leads individually, it gives you the capacity to reach out to leads at the ideal point in their purchasing journey. There’s no need to manually import customers into your database. Instead, an automated marketing tool can identify and label leads for you by tracking a user’s interaction with your brand. 

Marketing Automation Can Strengthen Your CRM

Marketing automation also increases the power of your customer relationship management (CRM) tool, such as Salesforce. In tandem with a CRM, marketing automation can help you build a customized onboarding process and follow-up communication for clients in order to strengthen your customer relationships.

Especially in B2B industries, having a personalized connection can make or break a sale. Because automation analyzes your audience’s actions, it actively nurtures your leads by personalizing their experience and automatically segmenting their journeys. Marketing automation can monitor behaviors such as clicks, site visits, or purchase histories and provide your leads with information and opportunities that are customized to their needs. You’ll see improved conversion rates, and you’ll be able to assess and improve your sales pipeline with actionable data. 

How You Can Implement Marketing Automation

While marketing automation can be immensely effective, you need a strong foundation to see powerful results. This includes a reliable contact list, an up-to-date website, active email marketing tactics, and social media management. If you need a starting place, try refreshing your current marketing by conducting client interviews or researching SEO best practices.

Once you’ve established reliable groundwork, you need to indicate your specific goals. Your goals may include an increase in subscribers, clicks, sales, or page likes. After you’ve determined your goal, decide what platform you want to use.

There are several MA systems available, but consider your preferred budget, ease of use, type of marketing automation, and customer service when deciding which one is best for you. Finally, you should determine if you want to implement alone or hire a professional marketing company to begin your process. 

Iterate and Improve Your Marketing Automation

Nothing works as well in a silo as it does when combined with other tools. To continue achieving marketing automation goals, you should pair MA with inbound marketing and CRM tools to increase its reach.

You’ll also want to include other team members in setting up and improving your processes. Sharing reports with senior executives and data with your sales team will allow you to collect and implement their insights into the sales funnel. With the feedback and assistance from various departments, plus the results from your marketing automation tool, you can optimize your content, messaging, and strategies to retain your current customers and attract more.

Need Help Getting Started with Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is a powerful tool that can be complex to implement. Green Apple Strategy is a full-service marketing agency that helps clients communicate effectively to their desired audience. Are you interested in learning more about how we can help you start your marketing automation journey? Contact us today for a consultation! 

How to Get More Out of Your Content Marketing

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Content marketing might be evolving, but it’s not going away anytime soon. According to the latest research, 82% of marketers report actively using content marketing in 2021, up 70% from 2020. Yet, the constant demand for content can be exhausting for businesses. Finding creative ways to get the most out of your content marketing is often one of the biggest challenges companies face in today’s marketing world. 

Recently, our senior content strategist, Skylar Wooden, had an opportunity to educate our team on the latest trends in content marketing. She highlighted specific ways our clients can continue to get more out of their content marketing efforts. We wanted to take a few minutes to share her key insights and takeaways in this post.  

How Today’s Audiences Are Consuming Content 

Businesses need to know the variety of formats that are driving most of today’s content marketing. A decade ago, most marketers focused primarily on written content, whether online or in print. Today’s businesses must consider the way content marketing has evolved. Here are the three primary ways today’s audiences are consuming content based on statistics  from a 2021 Hubspot report: 

  1. Written Content — This includes content like blogs, e-books, and articles. 61% of marketers are paying more attention to writing these. Of the written content formats, the top 3 content types are social media content (95%), blog posts (89%), and email newsletters (81%).
  1. Audio Content — Many businesses have turned to podcasts as a way to reach their audience in recent years and for good reason! In under three years, podcast listening in the United States has increased by more than 60%. The podcast market is expected to reach more than 2 billion by 2023, meaning that marketers are preparing to devote significant time and money to the channel.
  1. Video Content — Video is now the primary form of media used within any content strategy. According to the report, a video was the most commonly used form of content marketing in 2021, overtaking blogs and infographics. So, how do you get more out of your content marketing efforts in 2021 based on these statistics? Here are a few important insights we encourage clients to consider: 
  • Consider Your Audience’s Preferences — Meet your audiences where they are, not where you want them to be. This is the most important principle to keep in mind when developing content. An estimated 68% of Baby Boomers prefer traditional content formats such as news articles, research reports, blogs, e-books, and email content from commercial brands. If you want your content marketing to make the biggest impact, you need to meet your audience in the channels they use (social, email, etc.) with the types of content they prefer (written, audio, video). 
  • Remember that Video Covers All Three Content Types — One unique aspect of the video is that it allows you to diversify your content into all three formats. You can start by posting the video, pulling the audio for a podcast or recording, and formatting the transcript to create a blog post or infographic. As video becomes increasingly important, this is an easy way to reach your audience by repurposing and reformatting.  
  • Know that the Future of B2B Marketing is Audio — While the video might be the most popular format of content today, businesses should pay attention to the increased interest in audio content. According to statistics shared at the 2021 Inbound Conference, 57% of the American population listened to podcasts last year and weekly listenership doubled from 2020 to 2021. Additionally, more than half of consumers say they consider buying from brands they hear on podcasts.  

How to Diversify and Maximize the Content You Create 

With these trends in mind, it’s important to consider all three formats of content in 2022. We also recognize that creating a new piece of content from scratch can be time-consuming. So, how do you diversify and maximize your content? 

  • Supplement Blogs with Audio & Visual Content — Is there a way to include a video or audio podcast into the blog posts you create to maximize content? Find ways to integrate audio and visual content into the online content you’re creating.
  • Maximize the Reach of Podcasts through Show Notes & Additional Resources — If you’re creating podcasts, leveraging the show notes is a great way to maximize your content and drive your audience deeper into your content marketing funnel. Providing a way for your audience to download additional resources can also supplement your podcast efforts and increase engagement with your brand. 
  • Repurpose Resources into Shorter Audio or Social Content— You can easily repurpose, repackage or expand every piece of content that you produce to get the most out of your investment. For example, if you’ve created a piece of long-form content such as a video or e-book, consider how you can repurpose key ideas and concepts for other channels such as social media or email.

As content marketing continues to evolve,  brands need to stay nimble. Remember, the most important way you can get the most out of your content marketing efforts is to ensure you’re meeting your audience where they are. Taking these tips into consideration will help you stay ahead of the trends when it comes to creating content that impacts your bottom line. 

Need Help With Content Creation? 

Our strategic, full-service marketing firm can help you plan and deploy an innovative content marketing approach to court customers and build brand loyalty. Contact Green Apple Strategy today to schedule a consultation. Our team is happy to sit down with you to discuss your marketing goals and how we can help you achieve each and every one of them.