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.

Copywriting Tips that Inspire Your Customers to Take Action

Two Women Typing on Laptops

Inspiring customers to take action is the goal of any marketing campaign. Achieving that goal requires knowing the words that will resonate with your audience and motivate them to take the appropriate next step. This is why copywriting is such a powerful part of marketing.

There are dozens of things to take into account whenever you’re writing marketing copy. You’re thinking about your audience, the medium you’re communicating through, and what you’re trying to achieve. You’re also trying to determine what will capture their attention and keep them engaged. Most people don’t realize how challenging it is to accomplish such a feat.  

How do you inspire your audience to take the action you want in a way that doesn’t come across as a hard sell? In this post, we wanted to highlight a few tips from our writers in Orchard when it comes to creating marketing copy that inspires people to take action. 

Copywriting Tips That Inspire Your Customers to Take Action

1. Identify and solve a problem.

Great marketing copy creates tension that resonates with the audience and then provides a release. During the attention-grabbing phase, it’s essential to identify your audience’s needs or problems so that you can ultimately present a solution.

2. Use short, simple sentences.

You need to make it easy for people to read your content. This is especially true for writing copy that will be published on digital platforms. Reading from a screen is hard. When you write long, meandering sentences, your readers have to work harder to make sense of it. 

3. Don’t bury the lead.

This old adage from journalism also applies to marketing copy. While creating tension is important, you also don’t want to lose your audience’s attention. If you want to inspire action,  it’s best to get to the point. Your audience should know the next step they should take to resolve their issue within a few minutes of reading. 

4. Make sure to emphasize the benefits your customer will experience. 

A common reason marketing copy doesn’t inspire action is that the focus shifts from the audience back to the product or service. While it may be important to highlight the unique features of your product or service, your audience cares more about how it will benefit them. 

It’s important to start with benefits before you dive into whatever features you want to highlight in your copy. 

5. Read what you write out loud before posting.

The best marketing copy makes you feel like you’re having a conversation. It’s personable, relatable, and easy to follow. Reading your copy out loud before you post it is one of the easiest ways to improve your copywriting skills. 

6. Put yourself in your readers’ shoes. 

Many times, marketers can be so close to their product or service that they forget what it’s like for their audience to experience it. This is where it can be helpful to take a step back and try to read your content from your audience’s point of view.

As yourself…

  • Would I click this link?
  • Would I find this helpful?
  • Would I enjoy this content?

Any response other than a quick “yes” might indicate that you need to spend more time on your copy.

7. Provide an appropriate call-to-action.

Part of our role as marketers is to guide people through the buying process. In the same way, you don’t ask someone to marry you on the first date, it’s important to know the appropriate “next step” to offer your audience. 

Writing copy that inspires customers to take action is both an art and a skill. It requires that you understand your audience’s core challenges and needs. It also involves knowing how to guide them toward the right next step. 

If you’ve struggled to inspire potential customers to take action or you suspect that your website copy might be a reason you’re not attracting new business, our team can help. You can subscribe to our newsletter for marketing tips or reach out to learn more about the ways we can support your marketing needs.  

How and Why You Should Upgrade to Google Analytics 4

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Last year, Google announced the most significant change in the history of Google Analytics: Google Analytics 4 (GA4). In essence, Google has been working to improve its analytics platform to provide a more powerful marketing tool that helps businesses make better decisions. Since the announcement, we’ve been walking our clients through the changes of how and why they should upgrade to Google Analytics 4.  

We recently interviewed Digital Marketing Strategist, Amanda Bihun, to get her take on why businesses should upgrade their analytics to GA4 and how to successfully implement it. Here are a few takeaways from that conversation. 

Why You Should Upgrade to Google Analytics 4

Reason #1:  Google Analytics 4 will become the primary platform soon.

The main reason to move to GA4 is that Google is no longer updating and supporting Universal Analytics. Just a couple of weeks ago, Google announced that Universal Analytics will officially stop processing data on July 1, 2023. At that point, we will all be forced to move to GA4. However, because the two platforms do not talk to each other, waiting to make the switch will keep you from accessing any legacy or historical data. The earlier you adapt to GA4 while still using Universal Analytics, the longer you have to build up that historical data. 

Why is this historical data important? Without it, you cannot show growth or decline. Numbers don’t have as much meaning without proper context. Capturing as much historical data as possible through GA4 will provide greater insights into the way the data changes over time. 

Reason #2: Google Analytics 4 provides advanced event tracking of goals and conversions.

GA4 is much more accurate and reliable in tracking goals because they are done through Google Tag Manager. This allows users to isolate an event specifically so we can determine how successful it was. For example, if you want to know how a specific email newsletter campaign worked to drive business development leads, that will be easier to do using Google Analytics 4. In Universal Analytics, goals were more loosely defined and often counted traffic to a page that wasn’t actually a lead or conversion. 

Reason #3: Google Analytics 4 provides more detailed engagement metrics.

GA4 got rid of bounce rates and other tactics we would use to try and measure engagement. Instead, it provides a standardized way to measure engagement rates and user engagement. This is important because overall success cannot only be measured by the number of people that visit the site. We need a more comprehensive view that connects the dots between how long they stay, how many pages they visit, what type of content they are consuming, what links they’re clicking on, and which forms they’re filling out. GA4’s updated metrics provide a new line of sight into how functional and user-friendly a website is and also how many people are interacting with it.

How to Upgrade to Google Analytics 4 

Before you officially make the switch to GA4, it’s important to understand your current analytics functionality and website capabilities. For example, are you setting up a new site or one that already exists? What type of site is it? That will help you set up and configure your new GA4 properly. Once you’ve determined those questions, here are a few helpful resources: 

  1. How to set up Google Analytics 4 on a new website or app

Already familiar with Google Analytics but want to set up Google Analytics 4 on a new website or app? Then this is the article for you!

  1. How to set up Google Analytics 4 on a CMS-hosted website

If you have a CMS-hosted website (like WordPress, Squarespace, or Shopify) and want to set up GA4, then this article will guide you through the process. 

  1. How to add Google Analytics 4 to a site that already has Analytics

Does your website already have Universal Analytics, and you’re ready to begin transitioning to GA4? This article outlines how to set up Google Analytics 4 alongside Universal Analytics

Taking analytics seriously is essential for developing a data-driven approach to marketing and business. If you have any questions about Google Analytics 4 or how to use it to create a more effective website, feel free to reach out to our team at any time. 

5 Ways to Attract Your Ideal Client to Your Website

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You have a great website. So, why are people not finding it? If they are coming across your website, why aren’t they staying? Are these visitors even your target audience? These questions may have crossed your mind as you’ve been navigating through your digital marketing strategy. It’s common for businesses to feel like they’re doing everything they can, with little to no result. That’s where we come in. To help you attract your ideal client to your website, we’re sharing five elements of your strategy that can make all the difference. 

1. Know Who They Are (In Detail)

Before you go looking for your ideal client, you must determine who they are. You may feel like you already know, but even if you do, it’s important to delve further into the details. An essential tool for this process is the client profile. By asking yourself deeper questions about who your clients are, you can paint a picture of your client that will guide your marketing decisions moving forward, such as where to advertise your website, for example. Need help coming up with questions? Take a look at our recent article, 20 Questions to Ask Yourself that Will Improve Your Customer Profiles.

2. Speak to Their Current Challenges

Understanding your clients’ pain points—their current challenges—you can speak directly to them, making them feel seen and heard. What keeps them up at night? What is that one thing they need to hear? If you can identify those elements, you can grab your audience’s attention by showing them that you can offer the solution they’ve been searching for. Utilize this messaging throughout your website, social media captions, blog articles, and more to attract the client who needs exactly what you’re selling.

3. Show them the Type of Results You Can Deliver

People are attracted to results, and rightfully so. They want to know that they’re spending their hard-earned money on a service that will deliver the promised results. Show your clients what you’re capable of. Create case studies and curate a portfolio so that your prospects can see what you’ve done for others. This way, they’ll be able to imagine what you could do for them. 

4. Provide an Excellent User Experience

When a prospect visits your website, you want to make sure that their experience is top-notch. This is sometimes their first impression of your business, and therefore should be a tool used to begin solidifying your relationship with this visitor. If they have a tough time navigating the site or aren’t drawn in by it, that might be all they need to know to begin looking at your competitors. 

5. Use SEO Best Practices

If your prospects can’t find your website, all of your effort could go to waste. It’s vital that you implement SEO best practices, such as adding keywords, metadata, and backlinks to your website so that you rank higher in search results. SEO can be a complex element of your digital presence, so it’s often essential to have a marketing team on your side, but there are a few tactics that you can implement yourself. Check out this article for a bit of guidance: 4 Steps Your Small or Midsize Business Can Take to Improve SEO.

Attract Your Ideal Client with Green Apple Strategy

We can help you reach your target audience through a comprehensive set of marketing tactics. Want us to join your team? Contact us 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 each and every one of them.

How to Identify & Fix the Broken Parts of Your Marketing Funnel

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If the goal of marketing is to guide people from discovering your brand for the first time to becoming a qualified potential customer, then understanding every part of that journey is essential. Most people refer to that process as the marketing funnel. In most of the conversations I have, it’s easy for business leaders and marketing professionals to know if their marketing funnel is broken. The more difficult task is identifying which part is broken and how to fix it. Your sales team might think you have a lead generation problem, but what is actually preventing them from hitting business development goals is that the leads they’re following aren’t ready to buy. This would be more of a lead nurturing issue. In this post, we highlight a few areas of the marketing funnel, share specific ways you can identify the problem area, and, more importantly, tell you how to fix it.

How to Identify & Fix the Broken Parts of Your Marketing Funnel

Brand Awareness
How can you tell if your “top of the funnel” marketing efforts aren’t working? The signs of a brand awareness problem are easy to see—if you’re looking. Most awareness problems fall into this category: Your brand can’t capture its target audience. Analyzing metrics such as website traffic or foot traffic (if you’re a local shop or retail store) can be a great way to determine if enough people know who you are. Fixing this issue could include more digitally-oriented marketing tactics such as social media, SEO, or SEM.
Lead Generation
Maybe you’re getting a decent amount of traffic to your website, but you have a hard time identifying who is visiting and if they could be a potential customer. Many factors make generating leads difficult. Are you offering a lead generation that people care about? Are you asking for the right information? Are you making it easy for people to find your lead generation resources and take action? Never underestimate the power of addressing your lead generation challenge; leads are the lifeblood of your marketing funnel.
Lead Qualification
The biggest challenge I hear from business leaders isn’t about lead quantity; it’s lead quality. To convert marketing leads to customers, you need to make sure you’re talking with the right people. Alongside your sales team, you should make sure you understand who you’re trying to reach. If you’re struggling to generate quality leads, it’s important to define buyer personas. This strategy helps you establish a compelling value proposition that educates people about how you can help them right now.
Lead Nurturing
What do we do with the leads that might be qualified but aren’t ready to buy? Many business development professionals toss these leads to the side—neglecting them until the person raises their hand again and expresses interest. If you’re struggling to convert qualified marketing leads (those with the power to make a purchase decision), then you might rethink how you’re nurturing them throughout the buying process. Many potential customers are exploring your brand, but they might not be ready to buy. This doesn’t mean you should ignore them.
Lead Hand-Off to Sales
The hand-off between marketing and sales is one of the easiest tasks to ruin in the demand generation process. As in a relay race, the lead hand-off should be an actual hand-off, not a toss. If you feel like your sales team isn’t following up with quality leads, it’s crucial to have a documented process that is agreed upon by both sales and marketing. Just as a doctor diagnoses which system in your body is causing illness, it’s vital to determine which areas of your marketing funnel are causing your lead issue. Without identifying the specific area that needs attention, you can’t create a truly healthy funnel.

How Marketing Can Directly Impact Revenue with Sales Enablement

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Directly tying your marketing efforts to revenue generation is a challenge for almost every business leader and marketing manager. In today’s world, there are so many factors that influence a potential customer’s decision, so utilizing proper marketing tactics is essential. It’s the only way to know if the time, energy, and resources you invest are making an impact on the bottom line. 

One of the simplest and most effective ways for marketing to directly impact revenue is to focus on sales enablement. Essentially, sales enablement is equipping your business development team with assets that make them more efficient and effective. This includes content that helps prospects to answer the questions they ask, solve their problems, and build the case internally with their team.

But, what’s the best thing about sales enablement? All of it can be tracked, measured, and attributed to the bottom line. 

How to Create Sales-Enablement Tools That Directly Impact Revenue

How can marketing equip your sales team with resources that make them smarter and more efficient and effective? Here are a few important considerations when creating your sales-enablement assets: 

  1. Sales Enablement That Answers Potential Customers’ Biggest Questions. The most effective sales-enablement tools proactively answer the questions of prospective customers. This includes assets such as answers to frequently asked questions, at-a-glance competitor comparisons, and statistics that add credibility.
  2. Sales Enablement That Comes in Different Formats. Every customer is different in how they prefer to consume content. The good news is that you don’t have to create all of these resources from scratch. Re-organizing the content you create into various formats is one of the simplest ways to maximize your content marketing efforts. Equipping your sales team with content in various formats such as ebooks, case studies, blog posts, videos, webinars, and infographics is key.
  3. Sales Enablement That Is Easy to Find and Simple to Use. Sales enablement tools are effective if your business development team actually uses them. That’s why it’s critically important to create sales enablement tools that your team can use. Make sure everything you create is easily accessible, consumable, and shareable.
  4. Sales Enablement That Makes Your Business Development Team More Efficient. Marketing automation and technology have opened the door for new levels of sales enablement. Not only can you create resources for sales to use, but you can also send it on their behalf. Finding simple ways to leverage marketing automation to support your sales team will save them a tremendous amount of time and enable them to focus on having meaningful conversations with potential customers. 

The great thing about sales enablement is that all of it can be tracked. You can see what potential customers are consuming. You can know what content is influencing their decisions. You can share that information with your sales team to help them be even more effective. While marketing might not be able to take complete credit for “closing the deal,” empowering your business development team with sales-enablement tools that can be tracked and measured is a meaningful way to directly tie your marketing efforts to the bottom line. 

How Marketing Can Become a “Secret, Strategic Weapon” for Sales

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One of the best definitions of marketing I’ve heard was that marketing exists to be a secret, strategic asset for business development. Whether it’s building brand awareness or developing strategies to accelerate the sales cycle, everything you do in marketing exists to grow your business. The good news (for marketers and sales professionals) is that such a broad definition creates new ways of thinking when it comes to the role marketing plays. Rather than compartmentalizing marketing into its traditional definition of primarily advertising and brand awareness, we can discover new ways in which marketing can play a more “behind-the-scenes” role in business development. How Marketing Can Become a “Secret, Strategic Weapon” for Sales Here are a few of my favorite ways in which marketing can become a secret, strategic weapon for business development:
  1. Write story-driven case studies for your sales team. Someone once said the best stories happen to brands who know how to tell them. And, marketers are natural storytellers. That’s why story-driven case studies are so valuable. Crafting case studies that help prospects see themselves in the work you’ve done with clients is one of the best ways to equip your sales team to be successful.    
  2. Create a repository of easily accessible, relevant statistics. Statistics and numbers can play a significant role in the buying decision. As marketers, we have the opportunity to sit at the unique intersection of having insights on industry-related statistics and data points that are specific to our business. By compiling all the relevant statistics into one easily-accessible location, marketing can help sales teams save a tremendous amount of time.
  3. Research and report what your competitors are doing. Salespeople want to know what competitors are doing and how your organization compares. As a marketer, you can make them more confident and informed by conducting competitive intel. This includes anything from one-pagers that outline competitors’ weaknesses and strengths to links of unfavorable reviews about competitors.
None of these projects require a lot of heavy lifting, but each has the potential to make or break a sale for your business. If you want your marketing to have a direct impact on your business development goals, consider how you can start investing a portion of your week fleshing out one of these three ideas for your sales team.

4 Marketing Skills Every Business Development Professional Needs

Remember when the only thing that news reporters had to think about was writing a story that would work for the morning paper? Today, reporters need a working knowledge of best practices for creating digital content, leveraging social media, and building their platforms to connect directly with their audience. In the same way, the traditional “sales” role is evolving. For most industries, gone are the days where salespeople simply show up, get a list of prospects, and execute the same sales pitch over and over again. Today’s business development professionals must be more savvy, especially when it comes to understanding marketing. 4 Marketing Skills Every Business Development Professional Needs So what are the marketing skills that are becoming more and more important for business development professionals? Here are four I’m noticing: 1. Writing No matter what you’re selling, you need writing skills to succeed as a salesperson. Email is just one example of how this plays out for many of today’s business development professionals. Clear, concise writing is an invaluable skill to communicate effectively and be understood. 2. Social Media Social media marketing is an important skill to help you find clients or increase your influence in the industry. It’s not something that’s solely a responsibility of marketing anymore. Learning how to use social media to listen to potential customers, build relationships, and add value to your industry has become a critically important skill. 3. Storytelling Marketers have always been great at storytelling. For salespeople, learning how to tell stories can be an incredibly valuable skill. In the book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath note that 63% of attendees remember stories after a sales presentation. Only 5% remember statistics. 4. Using Analytics Marketing analytics such web behavior data, website engagement, purchase history, etc. is incredibly valuable information for salespeople. Knowing how to draw actionable insights from analytics data to become more attractive to potential employers has become an essential aspect of selling for business development professionals. Taking the time to develop these skills will not only improve your ability to close more deals, it will also make you a more valuable salesperson. What are some other marketing-related skills that have become increasingly important for business development professionals?

4 Inbound Lead Nurturing Tips Every Biz Dev Pro Should Know

Tree growing and turning into an arrow shaped tree flying off
Inbound marketing has become the most effective way for businesses to generate leads in today’s digital age. However, there’s one essential element required to maximize the ROI of your inbound marketing efforts — lead nurturing. Creating an effective campaign means thinking beyond generating a lead and considering what happens after someone submits their information to download your inbound marketing resource. This is where lead nurturing comes in. Lead nurturing will help you qualify and develop the leads your campaign generates, moving them from early-stage leads to interested prospects who are a good fit for your product or service. 4 Inbound Lead Nurturing Tips Every Biz Dev Pro Should Know But what’s the key to effective lead nurturing? Here are four tips you should know:
  1. (Pre)segmenting the leads you’ll generate.
Before you start writing emails and setting up your nurturing flows, first think about who the leads are you are likely to generate and how you should follow up with them. It’s possible that one nurturing track and one set of messages will work for
 all of the leads your campaign generates, but it’s more likely that you can segment those leads and nurture them in more targeted ways. For example, if your business caters primarily to two specific industries, you may want to nurture each industry’s leads in different ways and with different content.
  1. Defining your goals and creating email content.
With your segments in mind, you are now ready to start writing the email content for your nurturing flows. When deciding what kind of content you’ll use, it’s helpful to ask yourself what your ultimate goal is for each segment you plan to nurture. If your high level goal is to turn early leads into sales ready leads, what does that mean in practical terms? Do you have different goals for different segments? Once you’ve determined the goal for each nurturing flow, start mapping out your emails and your content.
  1. Nurturing through your website.
You’ve got your emails written and your automation flows in place. That’s great! But nurturing your leads shouldn’t stop at the inbox. Your leads are likely coming and going from many different parts of your website all the time. Maybe they directly type in your web address to get to your homepage or click a link on social media and end up back on your blog. Depending on the tools you use, you may be able to deliver targeted messages to these leads too.
  1. Determine when leads are ready for your sales team.
The machinery of your campaign is almost fully set up! To take things the final mile, give some thought to when and how you’ll pass leads to your sales team. How this process takes place varies widely from company to company. If you get a few leads, you may walk over to your sales folks and have a face to face discussion about each lead that comes in. If you get a large volume, it’s helpful to have an ongoing process in place. Free Resource: Inbound Marketing, Lead Nurturing, & More! If you want to learn more about everything that goes into an effective inbound marketing or lead nurturing campaign, don’t miss our free resource How to Grow Your Business with Inbound Marketing. In it, you’ll find everything you need to know, including a checklist, for how to create, promote, and measure an effective inbound marketing piece.