This is where we have to strike a balance between distinguishing language and tone, and the practicality of being a website user. According to TechJury, “52% of buyers are more inclined to purchase from vendors after reading their content.” This places even more emphasis on getting your web copy right – although it isn’t the same as blogs or social media posts, effective web copy can be the difference between a closed deal and a regular trend of bounce-rates.

Get Your Tone Right:

You need to tell a story – every customer comes to your business wanting to solve a problem they’re facing. This should be at the heart of your website copy – how do you make them feel understood and prioritised?

A lot of this begins with inclusive language and doing your research into your target audience. Consider what it is you’re selling. In the B2B sphere, a lot of customers are coming to your website looking for technical and digital solutions for challenges that prevent them from getting maximum sales.

Let’s say you’re selling software – it’s likely that your clients need to know exactly what product is going to suit their needs and their budget. Provide them with an expandable graph of features. If you can’t describe each feature in a sentence (and perhaps provide the option to learn more if their interest piques), then customers will easily click away in favour of a solution that appears more upfront. Consider this: “67% of B2B buyers find product specifications and functionality useful.”

Don’t Treat Your Website as a Walking Advertisement:

Look, in plain terms, we don’t want to give off that ‘Do you struggle with clogged sales funnels and low ROI?’, as-seen-on-tv tonal choices. Depending on the product/solution, your potential may see this is as insincere and even as click-bait for product advertising. The above website copy example only answers one of the required ingredients of effective website copy: identifying a customer’s pain point. It doesn’t meet the standard for capturing a genuine and personable tone. According to Forbes, B2B customers are beginning to rely “more on the internet than salespeople” which means that your website is the initial sales tool for all customers to respond to.

Make Your Call-to-Actions (CTAs) Worthwhile

The Golden Rule: Place Your Customer and Their Needs Central

No matter what, your language needs to speak directly to your customer and their pain points. According to CEO World, “When making B2B purchase decisions, Millennials (aged 26–41) want a personalized shopping experience similar to what B2C provides.” This extends to how people feel when they read your website copy – it should place them front and centre. You can use automated conversational marketing and data management tools like Drift or Databox for easy audience data analysis. The rule of putting your customer first in your copy is so simple to apply, even on a sentence scale.

Compare:
‘We are passionate about growing your ROI and helping you make better budget decisions’ 

with

‘Grow your ROI and invest your software budget where it counts with our automated Purchase Order management product.’ 

Notice how the latter uses the pronoun ‘you’ to put the customer’s needs before your advertising pitch? 

In 2023, “Website development is the number one area of marketing spend, leading with 51%.” You can write your own copy, but if you don’t have the time to do it, the option of outsourcing a professional is going to help elevate your website into an authentic representation of what you can do for your customers.

By the end of the article, I hope you’ve got a clearer perspective on the marketing technique that suits your individual needs, and perhaps learnt something new to bring to your marketing team.

Let’s get Organic!

Organic Marketing believes in creating natural connections between themselves and their clients. They operate across various different social media and website channels, using unpaid content forms to promote their brand. Feed updates across Organic Marketing’s social media platforms don’t include boosted posts. Rather, they tailor their content to SEO trends and relevant hashtags to reach their target audience. LinkedIn cites that SEO, when partnered with Organic Marketing as a primary method of meeting consumer pain points, can generate ‘1000% more traffic than organic social media’ marketing functioning alone.

Organic Marketing does not focus on a short term return on investment – it looks toward the bigger picture. Often organic marketing seeks to create long-term loyalty between customers and brands. It can encourage a community wherein customers can share their experience with like-minded individuals and bring them across to your business by recommendation. Organic Marketing has the power to spread naturally because posts shared by your business may then be re-shared by your followers, thus connecting with a whole new community of people.

Organic Marketing uses various formats to connect with potential leads – this can include email campaigns, blogs, social media posts, videos and informative/educational/entertaining content. Essentially, Organic Marketing is not shoving a sales campaign in a customer’s face. Organic Marketing is centred around providing a solution to a customer’s problem in a way that feels empathetic, natural and timely. Organic Marketing allows you to engage with your customers in a supportive way throughout the duration of the sales journey that makes them feel understood, so they’ll form a bond with your brand and want to revisit.

Organic Marketing does come with its own set of challenges. Namely, getting your posts to the top of the algorithm consistently. Whilst SEO remedies this obstacle significantly, it can be difficult to have your posts remain in a visible space when they aren’t benefiting from paid boosting. 

Paid Marketing

Paid marketing can sometimes suffer a negative rep. With the amount of advertising we consume across social media and searching online, our palates for advertising have become far more gourmet if you will. Insincerity and pushiness in sales campaigns read as a deterrent for potential leads. 

Supplementing this, post-pandemic, the convenience of online shopping has been earmarked by a significant uptick in paid social media advertising. As such, responding to the desirability of convenience can benefit your business by providing solutions that are instantaneous and accessible from the comfort of your buyer’s home. Often, people tend to picture paid marketing as one of those blown-up, waving creatures parked out the front of car washes that scream about the cheap deal available. We’re going to debunk that myth and show you how paid marketing can be honed to influence your advertising reach effectively.

Paid marketing can come in similar forms to that of Organic Marketing. Meaning you could use social media posts, blogs and website content, collaboration posts, videos, events and commercials as a means of advertising your business. Paid marketing is able to be analysed through various different means, such as social media analytics tools and conversion rates as a result of click-throughs, lead generation and post impressions. A successful example of paid marketing comes through the latest upgrades to Instagram – utilising website and search history analytics, customer interests are often transmitted by algorithm across your socials and searching platforms. As a result, potential leads may encounter paid advertising tailored to products or pain points of note for them that pop up into their Instagram feed without necessarily coming across as an advertisement straight away. This could be, for example, collaboration posts that featured paid product placement.

Paid Search and Organic Marketing Key Terms and Definitions

Lead: A generated lead means that a customer has interacted with a touchpoint – whether an email, a message via social media, an advertisement or a form – and has opened up communication with your business. 

Evergreen content: Pertaining more to organic marketing strategies, evergreen content is defined as material that responds directly to your audience’s needs, and is always relevant to them. 

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): Used particularly for organic marketing, search engine optimisation prioritises your business at the top of search engine results pages to reach your target audience. It uses keywords, key phrases in searches, geographic location, customer searching behavioural patterns and purchase history to boost your content as the most relevant. 

SERP: Search Engine Results Page   

PPC: Pay-Per-Click advertising, meaning advertisements that are boosted by financial backing.

Conversions: Conversions apply to both paid and organic marketing. At a simple level, a conversion is defined as a customer-fulfilling interaction with your business. This could be making a payment, completing a review, filling out a form or responding to an email.  

Daily Budget: An amount of money – with a budget cap – that you are planning to spend on a marketing campaign per day. This may vary depending on the days you need to factor in boosting posts or posts that you selectively invest more in because they have a higher chance of reaching your target audience. 

Campaigns: Campaigns are a series of ads that seek to generate – in the case of paid marketing – financial investment in your product or service from potential customers. Campaigns can come in different forms, such as sales campaigns ( these target monetary return for the business as a primary goal), email campaigns (these are delivered to the inbox of potential clients or returning customers to offer deals or promotions and encourage brand loyalty), or social media campaigns (utilising social media platforms as a means of promoting offers, connecting with your clients and establishing a community). 

Bounce Rate: The numerical amount of users who are clicking away from your website and not interacting with any of the pages 

Click-Through-Rate: This could be linked to the percentage of visitors who click on to your website using the links provided in your social media posts or accounts. It could also be a percentage of users who visit your website based upon an online advertisement built upon their search, geographical location and other customer profile factors.  Conversion Rate: The calculated percentage of the website or social media visitors who are performing an interaction with your business. 

Cost-per-Click: This is the investment you make into search engines or websites for the right to advertise your business across their product. 

Dynamic Advertisement Targeting: Similar to SEO, this feature allows you to promote your product or service to the right audience based on data surrounding their searches and individual needs. 

Keyword: Keywords can be used in partnership with SEO for organic marketing campaigns to reach your target audience based upon keywords, phrases or questions that commonly pop up in their searches. 

Meta tags: Meta tags are used for SEO purposes in organic marketing strategies. They help to boost your website/content reach, and target your relevant audience. Meta tags are developed as HTML code that are then added into the <head> section of your content pages. Thus, meta tags are only visible in the behind-the-scenes elements of your SEO process, but they’re an essential ingredient to an effective SEO strategy. 

Meta description tags: When you search for something using a search engine, it usually displays the title of the webpage and then a brief couple of sentences – also known as a slug – that can be either generated from the page automatically or developed specifically by the content creator. If you write the meta description yourself, you can include keywords and phrases that match the content up with common queries, searches and questions asked by search engine users.

Robot meta tags: These are for the search engine itself. They essentially help search engines program where your content will appear on a page of results – the technical terms are ‘indexed’ or ‘followed.’ Think of indexing as ordering or organising and following as a link that works and leads you to the relevant webpage.

Best Practices – The Rovert Digital Guide to a Hybrid Marketing Strategy

Be Relevant, be timely

Boost your posts wisely, my friend

That boost button is magical. However, when you’re working with a marketing budget, you need to ensure that you invest intelligently. There’s no point in boosting posts that have no further incentive for your audience/don’t have the potential to gain traction. If you’re encouraging a product introduction to your audience, why not make use of the social media variables such as Reels, Stories, Highlights and Links to string out the promotion and keep your audience engaged. Timing of boosted posts matters too, if you boost a post whilst the majority of your target audience is asleep, then you defeat the purpose of investing in paid marketing.

Schedule, Schedule…Schedule! 

In fact, we’re doing it right now! That’s because we’ve used research across our social platforms to determine what kinds of content are most relevant for our followers. Additionally, staying ahead of the game allows our team to focus on other tasks whilst our social media platforms are pre-prepared. The only other focus then becomes monitoring and noting what our audience makes of the content so that we can pivot accordingly for the months to follow.

Employ a computer to crunch the numbers for you

As good as you may be at designing, writing, producing and recording the content you’re planning to use – the reality is that computers are just unequivocally the experts at providing numerical analysis, based upon large volumes of data. You can use subscription applications such as Databox to help measure post impressions and social media reach – additionally, you can link Databox to your website so that it counts conversions from posts to website clicks.

FAQs 

Is there a word limit for writing effective meta tags?

Keep to approximately 60 characters and try not to use keywords over and over again; this comes off as ungenuine for website users, and it also makes your content look like it has been written by a robot. 

What about meta description tags?

Stick to around 140 and 160 characters. 

Okay, but the whole coding thing sounds pretty complicated. How do I get meta tags and use them if I have no experience with coding?

If you’re unsure of how to code yourself, you can seek help outwardly from an experienced digital marketing agency! However, if you’d like to get into the content-publishing cycle yourself, you can enlist the help of plugins – similar to Chrome extensions – that help do the work for you. Hubspot cites examples such as All In One SEO and Rank Math as helpful SEO tools that can act as an editor and reviewer for any meta tags you write.

How much should you be investing into Google Ads as a medium-small sized business?

This depends on a number of factors related to your marketing strategy. Particularly, how much money your business is going to invest into an entire Google Ads campaign – you may decide to spend $600 a month and divide this amongst different pieces of content. Additionally, remember with PPC that the system works in a bidding process. Keywords are awarded a quality score based upon investment from a business, and then Google ranks them accordingly. Thus, if you find yourself with a higher quality score for a particular keyword, you can plan your budget based upon this. Cost-per-click also helps determine the expense of a monthly Google Ads budget – if you’re working with pricey keywords, the less is more approach may be infinitely more important than simply throwing money at heaps of vaguely related words. 

Depending on your marketing budget as a business, you may be able to shift and adapt your strategy depending on what works through experimentation. Using a combination of paid and organic marketing gives you the flexibility to share your individual voice as a company, but maintain the benefits of fast conversions and financial return. A hybrid approach favours your brand by feeling authentic whilst achieving consistent income and setting your business up for the future. Automating your approach to marketing with the help of digital applications can solidify your approach by allowing your marketing efforts to be productive rather than time-consuming. 

The In-House Graphic Designer Of Your Dreams – Canva

No doubt you’ve considered hiring a graphic designer externally, or have debated investing in the Adobe Suite of products. Likely, you’ve put off visual content upgrades because of the cost, and as a result, lack of priority. However, dressing your content to impress for the occasion is important. Introducing…Canva. Canva has millions of free (and some priced) templates which can be used to create copyright-free, unique content for your business. There are endless features suitable for website design, easily transferable to website builders such as WordPress or Squarespace or Weebly. You can also create show-stopping social media content (video and photo), with features such as music, captioning, effects and artist-designed stickers.

Make Your Meetings & Collaboration More Productive and Meaningful – Evernote

A Cutting-Edge Alternative to Salesforce’s Service Cloud – Drift

Looking for a cost-friendly but incredibly innovative way to connect with your customers? Drift is a commerce and sales generating business that looks to transform your customer relationships. Drift provides conversational marketing across a wide array of customer-business connectivity situations such as video, chat or email. Drift uses conversational AI, to create predictability and prompts for your staff when navigating customer interactions. Drift allows you to humanise problem-solving and generate holistic leads, without making your customers feel like they’re talking to a robot, or that they’re just a purchase order.

Create Content that Google Loves Too – Storychief

Data Management That Doesn’t Deplete Your Budget – Proof Analytics and Databox

If you’ve heard of Salesforce’s Einstein Analytics, and have been looking for a cheaper – but equally as effective – alternative, these two applications might be the just solution you need. Proof Analytics is a Salesforce partner tool – meaning it runs the same insights you’d get on Salesforce; including budget projections, digital compliance, scaling and campaign/project management, all at a way more cost-effective price point. Similarly, Databox can help you with analysis for your social media posts – including interactivity, click-rate, lead generation, demographic insights and real-time customer updates. Databox operates at a much friendlier price-point than most of its competitors, and is simple to navigate.

MarTech database compiles thousands of marketing technology applications and demonstrates how to create your ideal marketing tech stack. You can research competitor companies within your industry and compare what products are part of their tech stack, and then discover cost-effective solutions for your business needs. We recommend making use of the filtering tabs in order to find the most relevant applications for your needs. You don’t always need to make external hires or spend a fortune on popular software solutions because there are companies and products out there that are exactly what you need, for the price that suits you.

So the main takeaway is this – you can make those changes and innovations to your business without spending an absolute fortune. Based on B2B business experiences so far this year, we know that sometimes the key to staying alive when times get tough is just being ready to accept change. It isn’t easy, but as a startup owner, you’re built for challenges and you’re way stronger than you think. If you find yourself in need of a boost, you can always chat to us at Rovert Digital and we can talk through the next steps for growing your business, and overcoming those obstacles together.  

It’s everywhere. In fact, you’ve probably just stopped scrolling through your TikTok feed to read this blog. It has rapidly grown in popularity and become a major player in the social media landscape over the last few years. And additionally, it’s become a logical place to advertise.

While it may seem like a platform primarily geared towards consumer-facing brands, TikTok can be an effective advertising tool for B2B companies to reach new audiences. According to Business Insider, “Nearly 40% of Gen Z prefers using TikTok and Instagram for search over Google, according to Google’s internal data.”

Know your audience

TikTok has a diverse user base, but the majority “(60%) of consumers [are] between the ages of 16 and 24.” (Brandastic 2021 in Shu-Chuan Chu, Tao Deng & Juan Mundel (2022): The impact of personalization on viral behaviour intentions on TikTok: The role of perceived creativity, authenticity, and need for uniqueness, Journal of Marketing Communications.) Understand the demographics of your target audience and see if they align with TikTok’s user base. As well as advertising actual products, you’ll find that a lot of TikTok’s most popular marketing content tends to fall under the educational or problem-solving bracket. Short-form videos from the B2B sphere can appeal to younger content-consumers. For example, Mondaydotcom has innovated their B2B content and advertising to suit the interests of their target audience – they’ve done this through implementing “trending sounds” (social insider).

Get creative with your content

TikTok is all about creativity and entertainment. Instead of pushing a sales pitch, focus on creating engaging and informative content that will educate your target audience about your product or service. As above, introducing the faces behind your company and providing some “tutorial”-like content can help make B2B accessible. Or, look at it from the perspective of someone wanting to enter the B2B workforce; you could unpack skillsets like ‘Tips for Writing Kick-Ass Press Releases’ or ‘How to Master WordPress.’ For example, Adobevideo uses TikTok to create tutorials featuring their suite of products, and have since seen upwards of “300K followers and 1M likes.” You could even consider making a series of TikToks, which brings us onto the power of hashtags…

Utilise hashtags

Hashtags are a powerful tool on TikTok, and they can help you reach a wider audience. They group your TikToks with related content, thereby programming the algorithm to frequently boost your posts to appear on the ‘For You Page’ and the FYP of others with similar interests. You might be able to ‘respond to’ or ‘duet’ with other TikTok artists to broaden your reach. Research relevant hashtags that are related to your industry by following other industry professionals and include them in your post captions. For example, Up is a digital bank which uses the hashtags “#FinTok, #PersonalFinance and #MoneyTok” to boost their posts alongside the Spark Ads function. 

Take advantage of TikTok’s ad formats

TikTok offers a wide variety of ad formats, such as brand takeovers, in-feed videos, and branded hashtag challenges/trends. Experiment with different ad formats to see which one works best for your business. The good thing about TikTok is that trial and error is your best friend; you can save drafts and come back to them later, so you can always change things up. If you’re using “in-feed” advertisements, there are plenty of ad-formats to choose from, including: “branded effects (sharable stickers and filters), and branded hashtag challenges” (TikTok, in Shu-Chuan Chu, Tao Deng & Juan Mundel) For example, B2B company Social Dot uses Spark Ads in partnership with TikTok to promote digital business and their product. According to TikTok, Social Dot has seen a “44% increase in followers…1.7M Video Views.” 

Measuring your ROI

TikTok’s analytics tool can help you track the performance of your ads and understand how they are impacting your business. Make sure to track your ROI and adjust your strategy accordingly. You can view engagement insights such as the amount of views, likes, shares and saves within the analytics tab of each TikTok, and then deduce what kinds of content are most engaging for your target audience. For example, TaxDown, located in Spain and assisting income tax in tax returns, used Spark Ads’ “interest segmentation for audience targeting…they saw that +35ys were converting at higher rates than Gen Z which helped them increase and scale out accordingly.audience n to track their conversion rates.” 

Keep TikTok’s advertising policies in mind

TikTok has strict policies for advertising, so make sure to familiarise yourself with them before running any ads. This will help you to avoid any potential violations. You can view TikTok’s advertising terms and conditions here.

By understanding the unique features and capabilities of TikTok and utilising them effectively, B2B companies can use the platform to reach a younger, tech-savvy audience.

There’s a steady shift toward hiring a wide range of generational experience in both B2B and B2C content-marketing because diverse perspectives drive meaningful business results. Mastering TikTok could unlock quality lead generation opportunities as well as lots of potential hires! 

There’s that funny old saying: when the going gets tough, the tough get going. And that’s exactly what we’re going to chat about today: self-motivation. For startup owners, or anyone in the business sphere for that matter, a lot of the time you might be working on your own. Late nights, early mornings in front of your laptop trying to code that software or fix your website for the thousandth time. These can add up into stress, the kind of stress you’re too stressed to acknowledge. So, how do you motivate yourself to work smarter, not harder? Let’s unpack that now.

Set SMART goals

Having a clear idea of what you want to achieve will help you stay focused and motivated. Make sure your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Write them down and stick ‘em where they’re visible when you’re working.

Break down your daily to-do’s

Take it from someone who used to multitask across a hundred different unfinished projects – prioritise. It will take away that overwhelming feeling and turn it into fuel for getting stuff done. I would highly recommend looking into a scheduling tool like Asana or even just using a checklist on your daily planner. It’s super satisfying to customise & mark-off tasks.

Create a plan of action

Having an outline before you start is crucial for staying motivated. If you’re going through a tough patch with your mental health, it will be great to turn to your plan. Questions you could write answers for might include: what do I do to calm myself down if I’m feeling overwhelmed at work? What conditions help me work best? What time of day am I most productive?

Flip the negative bias

Our brains are wired to take the negative approach, the safe and survivalist route. That’s great when you’re running away from a very hungry lion, but not so great when you’re trying to make work less stressful. Anxiety or stress on a base level are actually an almost identical composition to excitement. So, try to challenge your mindset when it tells you that you’re anxious. You can, over time, trick your brain into relishing the anxious feeling.

Reward yourself

Celebrate your progress and achievements. Reward yourself for reaching milestones and for staying on track.

Stay accountable

Share your goals with a friend, family member, or mentor and ask them to hold you accountable. You’ll have someone to share your successes with, and when motivation is low, it can completely change your mood to simply call someone who gets you.

Stay flexible

Be open to change and be willing to adjust your plan if necessary. Inevitably, you’ll encounter hurdles somewhere along the road, so it’s beneficial to reevaluate your relationship with setbacks from the outset. They’re totally necessary – you wouldn’t savour the end product without the hustle and challenge to get there.

Take care of yourself

Maybe I sound like the broken record of every twenty-something mindfulness guru, but it really is integral to get the basics down-pat. Make sure you’re getting enough sleep, eating well, and moving around. When you take care of yourself, you’re better able to take a more consistent approach to your goals

Exercise Daily

Incorporating exercise into your daily routine can help establish a sense of discipline and structure, which can carry over into other areas of your life and further enhance your motivation. When you feel physically capable and confident, you are more likely to approach tasks with a positive attitude and greater motivation. Your body releases endorphins when you break a sweat; these hormones promote happiness and reduce stress.