Influencer marketing continues to rise as consumers turn to peers for brand recommendations. As brands take note of what consumers want, they’re slowly shifting toward similar styles and marketing techniques. 

By using the marketing techniques of influencers, you can boost your engagement, build trust, and attract more loyal buyers.

Learn seven marketing tips from top influencer marketers for engaging and converting your buyers through content marketing.

Key Takeaways:

Influencer Marketing Trends

How much more popular are influencers than brands? 

According to one survey, 61% of consumers trust influencer recommendations over the 38% who trust brand content. Consumers also engage more with influencer marketing content.

So, what is their secret? Can brands generate the same response?

A 2021 research study examined why consumers follow influencers on Instagram and identified four primary reasons:

Brands can generate a similar response by tapping into these four pillars.

7 Marketing Tips from Influencer Marketing Trends

Use these seven content marketing strategies based on how influencers create content and why consumers follow it. These marketing tips can increase your content marketing engagement and conversions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1XHzcnH6J4

1. Be Authentic

Businesses generate trust by being authentic with their followers and subscribers. As you create social media posts, blog content, and website copy, be transparent and real with your followers to generate similar trust.

Authenticity begins by having set values, beliefs, and motives. Then, stay consistent with these values.

Influencers remain authentic by giving their followers a glimpse of their lives behind the camera, such as their morning routine, lunch break, or a short clip of them at work. These snapshots of ordinary life make them more believable and transparent, helping consumers connect with them better.

Brands can give similar transparency by sharing behind-the-scenes content, showing the people behind their work, and sharing their mission and values.

2. Promote Consumer-Focused Benefits

Customers follow influencers and brands in search of new items to purchase. This consumerism comes from customers’ belief that purchasing goods improves their personal gratification.

A brand can cater to this by promoting products based on their benefits to customers looking for products that will benefit them and increase their happiness. Keeping content marketing customer-centric tells customers what benefits come from the products rather than just listing features.

For example, a smartwatch company that understands current healthcare trends could promote its watch by highlighting its telehealth tracking benefits rather than just listing its features.

3. Provide Creative Inspiration

Most brands understand the importance of educating customers so they know the full benefits of their products and services. However, content marketing should also inspire.

For example, Target uses its social media to inspire customers by showing creative ways to use products and promoting causes through the brand.

Even B2B businesses should aim to inspire buyers. For instance, showing use cases or templates could spark your buyers’ creativity when using your software.

4. Motivate Others

While envy motivates consumers to follow influencers, does it also work with brands? Envy marketing produces mixed results. When used correctly, it can motivate buyers to respond. However, it can backfire if employed through unpopular celebrities or seemingly unfair circumstances.

Instead, focus on motivational marketing to ensure your envy marketing elicits a positive response. Influencers use motivational marketing not just to make followers envious of their looks, possessions, and life but share tips on how others are deserving and can achieve the same lifestyle as well.

Motivational marketing builds a bridge rather than dangling unattainable goals to increase purchasing behavior. B2B motivational marketing includes sharing realistic expectations for business growth and revenue, as well as steps for achieving these goals, rather than making extreme marketing claims.

5. Connect with Your Audience

Influencers engage personally with their audience, creating close connections. They respond to comments, give shoutouts to followers and loyal fans, and engage through live video. All these strategies also work in brand marketing.

26% of marketing leaders use live streaming

Image from Influencer Marketing Hub

B2B brands can offer similar engagement. However, instead of focusing on social media channels like Instagram and Facebook, they might encourage engagement through LinkedIn posts, live webinars, and shareable blog posts.

Collecting and analyzing audience data can help you know what your audience responds to most so you can create audience-centric content they’re most likely to respond to.

6. Create a Consistent Voice

The key to marketing success is a consistent brand voice. Your voice defines who you are, and that’s who your customers will connect with. Customers will have an easier time connecting with a brand that constantly sounds and looks the same because they can get to know the brand and the people behind it.

A consistent voice also helps influencers and brands become more recognizable. For example, MrBeast, a famous YouTuber with 154 million subscribers, consistently goes viral and attracts a large audience by sticking to a consistent format, voice, and structure that generate the most engagement.

Build your voice based on your audience and a formula you tested and know works. A B2B SaaS company will have a formal voice with a hint of personality. But if you’re a B2C ecommerce brand, use more humor and a casual voice to connect and build relationships.

7. Regularly Create Quality Content

Could you build a close relationship with someone you only saw four times a year? It would be challenging. The same is true for brands. The more often you share content on your website, social media, and third-party platforms, the more opportunities your audience has to get to know you and connect.

Regularly posting fresh, quality content also improves your visibility. It boosts your rankings in search engines, keeps you at the top of social media news feeds, and increases customer touchpoints, making them more likely to interact with your content.

Influencers recommend posting anywhere from several times a day to several times a week. While each influencer has a different schedule, consistency is key to building relationships.

Turn Your Brand into an Influencer

An influencer is more than an individual with a strong following. Brands can also become influencers by building an engaged community through consistent, quality content. You'll see greater brand loyalty and conversions by transforming your marketing into brand influencer marketing.

Until recently, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) was responsible for developing traditional strategies to promote their business and convert customers. 

However, with the advent of digital, social, and mobile technologies, a new demand for a positive customer experience, and the impact of a global pandemic, the CMO role has had to adapt. 

In today’s economy, CMOs must create customer-centric digital marketing strategies that reach a wide audience. 

Today’s discerning consumers are less impressed by low prices and are more concerned about user experience. 

In fact, 88% of shoppers won’t return to a site after a negative experience. As a result, CMOs must now collaborate with all departments to help develop deeper connections with customers and drive growth across the company. 

Read on for a close analysis of the evolution of the CMO role now that companies must focus on providing a positive customer experience with less face-to-face contact.

Key Takeaways

Marketing Has Changed

Digital marketing has become the most effective way to reach prospects and retain current customers. Today, about two-thirds of shoppers learn about products through social media. 

Every day, Google fields 5.6 billion searches from people looking for solutions to their problems. To boost online visibility, companies must appear at the top of search engine ranking placements. 

This means a CMO must now understand search engine optimization (SEO) and how to create compelling content that resonates with users and earns high SERPs. 

Marketing has changed drastically and, as seen in the following video, will continue to do so:

Source: Neil Patel on YouTube

Today’s CMO is responsible for more than simply developing marketing strategies to sell products. They must now build brand recognition, develop their company’s reputation, and create positive experiences that attract customers and keep them returning for future purchases. 

Since many sales teams aren’t meeting customers in person, the CMO role is more complex than ever before. They must adapt to the demands of the market to reach their company’s goals, set themselves apart from the competition, and help drive continued success.

5 Ways the CMO Role Must Evolve

In order to keep up with the demands of today’s consumers, capture market share, and stand out from the competition in a post-pandemic restructure, the CMO role must now evolve. Here are five ways this position must adjust to succeed.

1. Adapt to a Digital World

The CMO role must now have a strong understanding of digital marketing strategies and how to maximize the various opportunities in each channel. Know what information your customers want to receive and how they prefer to digest information. Digital programs include:

To make the most out of these platforms, CMOs must first conduct in-depth research to understand which tactics would be most valuable to your audience. Then you must know when to deliver quality content and campaigns for maximum impact. 

For a CMO who has focused primarily on traditional advertising, transitioning to a digital world is essential to meet today’s demands and stay current in your industry.

2. Understand the Post-Pandemic Consumer

Consumer behavior is typically somewhat predictable.  In the face of a global pandemic, however, everything changes. Overall spending dropped across all industries due to business and restaurant closures. Concerns about household income caused many to cut spending as they budgeted for the unknown. 

From a marketer’s perspective, more people were watching video content than ever before. Businesses had to find new and creative ways to reach consumers and try to earn their business.

As we rebuild from the pandemic, it falls to the CMO to understand the concerns, needs, and shopping behaviors of the post-pandemic consumer. 

Today’s CMO must act as the growth driver for the company and use innovation to provide market direction, shape business models, and generate new revenue streams. 

The post-pandemic CMO must gather insights from real-time data to help guide others to make daring decisions.

3. Address Concerns Surrounding Cybersecurity

Because the evolving CMO role is so involved in the technological aspects of business, they now must address concerns surrounding cybersecurity. The more personal information that’s gathered for research and sales purposes, the more opportunities there are for data breaches. 

Today’s CMO must follow best practices to ensure the safety of user information and protect the reputation of their business. 

The CMO plays a large role in addressing a company’s cybersecurity. They vet data-handling vendors and train their team to appropriately handle sensitive information. They work with IT departments to ensure protection systems are in place to safeguard against security attacks. 

CMOs communicate with customers about how their data is secured. Cybersecurity is a major issue for digital consumers. It’s up to the CMO to build confidence in customer loyalty and revenue generation. 

4. Differentiate Your Brand through Engagement

In today’s highly competitive marketplace, brand differentiation is essential to success. Any company can offer products and services at competitive prices, but only you can provide your unique customer experience. 

To set yourself apart from the competition through positive customer experience, the CMO role must engage with customers on a deeper level. Connecting online through social media, offering a chat feature on your website’s home page, and delivering custom content that is relevant to the needs of your audience are ways to build trust and develop a rapport with your following. 

CMOs must understand how to apply the insight they get from audience analytics to their marketing strategies. Understanding the preferences and desires of customers can help you reach them with valuable, dependable information they want to receive and share. 

The CMO role must facilitate communications that build a foundation for a lasting relationship that leads to more reach, and increased conversions, and sets you apart from your competitors.

5. Lead the Cultural Shift Within the Company

Marketing is no longer confined to one department, but it is interwoven throughout the company. Everyone is responsible for the education, service, and promotion needed to acquire new business and retain current customers. 

This idea requires a cultural shift within the organization, and it’s the CMO role that must act as the collaborator to lead this charge within the company.

From digital capabilities to a broader scope of marketing aims, today’s businesses must design a culture that drives overall success. It can’t simply focus on marketing but must also encompass all aspects of the business. 

As a collaborator, the CMO role must cultivate a sense of responsibility among all departments to play a part in the success of the company’s marketing efforts, and thus, the company’s overall success.

Master Your Evolving CMO Role

Relevance provides insights to help companies with custom SEO, coordinated digital PR, and content development strategies.

Contact Relevance today to gain the information you need to master your CMO role.

Low-quality leads are one of the big elephants in the room in marketing today. To demonstrate the effectiveness and show that the numbers are moving, a lot of marketers focus too heavily on metrics that reflect low-quality leads. But it’s the high-quality leads that matter.

With a pipeline filled with high-quality marketing leads, you can streamline your sales efforts and achieve a better marketing ROI. The problem is, it’s challenging to acquire warm leads. In fact, the majority of B2B brand marketers believe high-quality leads are extremely difficult to generate.

But that’s changing as marketing technology keeps evolving. With leading-edge AI-powered platforms, one of the biggest challenges in marketing has become easy to achieve. Let’s look at why continuing to focus on low-quality leads is a big mistake and how martech-savvy companies are utilizing AI.

Here's How B2B Brands are Using AI to Generate High-Quality Leads.

Key Takeaways:

Don’t Fall for Low-Quality Leads

Let’s face it – it’s easy to get wrapped up in metrics. Watching traffic, social media engagement, and website engagement increase is satisfying. Using these as key performance indicators can also help marketing leaders justify a growing budget.

While there’s nothing wrong with tracking engagement metrics in itself, there is a problem if you’re not putting enough emphasis on figuring out who you’re working so hard to build connections with.

According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2021 B2B Content Marketing Report, 90% of B2B marketers are tracking website traffic to gauge marketing content performance. Only about half are looking at marketing qualified lead metrics.

While generating low-quality leads is cheaper and easier upfront, this isn’t a smart strategy. High-quality leads have higher conversion rates and a shorter buying cycle.

Also, having too many low-quality leads impacts the conversion rate at each stage of the sales funnel. As a result, the final outcome is starkly different for a company that focuses on all leads rather than laser-focusing on high-quality leads.

Sirius Decisions research found that the number of closed deals for every 1,000 high-quality leads per year is 5 times greater than the number of deals closed from low-quality leads. And when you factor in the cumulative effects, low-quality leads can cost as much as 10 times more.

So what can marketers do to generate more high-quality leads?

Use clean data and AI and automate as much of your marketing as possible.

It All Starts with Good-Quality Data

Artificial intelligence can digest data and determine what leads are worth pursuing. The most advanced platforms can even design marketing campaigns that will figure out whether the people who interact with your emails, ads, and online content are likely to buy a product. If they are, the technology automatically sends the prospect’s contact information to sales.

But if you want your AI to provide accurate, spot-on analysis and predictions, you need to input good-quality data.

  1. Clean data is complete – you should have complete and accurate contact info for your leads, as well as the full buying history for your customers.
  2. It’s current – if you’re using both old data and recent updates, you have to qualify the data by engagement date and ensure your technology isn’t viewing old and new information equally.
  3. It’s manageable – With both first-party and third-party data, you may have problems such as duplicate data sets. Or, your system might discard correct data in favor of incorrect data.

Once you tighten up your database and data management methods, you can count on gold-standard output from your AI marketing software.

What Today’s B2B Brand Marketing Platforms Can Do with AI

With AI, you can derive deep value from your data. Of B2B marketing organizations today, 53% are using some form of marketing automation, and 37% plan to implement it in the near future.

The bottom line is, AI and machine learning allow you to hone in on what matters. Even with increasing complexity. It also helps your company reduce the noise you may be sending leads who aren’t interested right now, but who may be in the future.

For example, you can identify what customers want in real-time. You can also understand the nuances of every individual customer’s intent, and you can do this at scale. This would all be impossible without AI-powered platforms.

Using AI to generate high-quality leads is not a new concept, but the level of sophistication is.

Oracle Fusion Marketing uses AI to score leads at the account level, predict when buyers are warm, and then sends the contact information to sales. It personalizes content to ensure leads are getting a consistent experience across channels.

Adobe’s Marketo has a feature – Predictive Audiences – that suggests marketing segments to use in campaigns for event marketing. It also suggests solutions when registration numbers aren’t on target.

Salesforce’s B2B automation tool is Pardot Einstein. This AI-powered tool automatically prioritizes leads for you, shows you where to focus efforts, and scores leads based on your company’s conversion patterns.

Marketing that Focuses on High-Quality Leads Is a Win for All

The whole idea behind high-quality leads is to invest resources in people who are on the path to purchase. Not on cold prospects who aren’t actually interested in your product or service.

Pouring energy into low-quality leads is a waste of time for your marketing and sales teams. But more importantly, it could also harm your brand image and diminish the likeliness of a future sale. You could be turning away potential customers by blasting them with too much marketing content they don’t need right now. That’s not a great way to build trust in your brand.

With AI, you know when to reach out. And you know when to stay quiet. With better technology, we finally have the opportunity to pull off messaging elegance – not overkill. Let’s take advantage of it.

First Image by Mikhail Nilov from Pexels; Second Image by Content Marketing Institute; Third Image by Soma Metrics; Thanks!

It's common for marketers to make a whole lot of fuss about timely deploying well-crafted email marketing campaigns. The hubbub is justified! Without the right promotional email that carries well-placed CTAs, it becomes exceedingly difficult to get prospects to a desired website landing page.

Marketers are well-aware of this, so they put forth gargantuan efforts in personalizing a top-notch marketing email but still experience low conversion rates. This typically happens when the CTAs present in marketing emails redirect leads to poorly designed landing pages.

An unflattering landing page linked to an exceptional promotional email can severely hamper your brand's reputation and shake your lead's trust in your product or service. Moreover, given that landing pages alone are responsible for a 9.7% conversion rate, it's prudent they be well-crafted.

Are you wondering if there is a talisman, perhaps, a bag of tricks that can help you create elusive email marketing landing pages? There's nothing magical about it. Just follow the seven tips listed below.

1. Don't write ambiguous headlines.

Remember: Your leads are coming to your landing page after having read the email you sent them. So they already have a firm idea of what to expect from a subsequent landing page. Therefore, you must offer them continuity, something achieved only with the right headline.

Here are a few practical hacks to keep your landing page headlines engaging: 

In a nutshell, since the headline is the very first thing your prospect will look at, make sure it's powerful. For example, if you're a food delivery app such as Uber Eats, your landing page must state what you do right on top. Here is their straight-faced headline approach, ironic with a hint of wit: "Want food? Get food."

2. Don't deviate from the main topic.

Write powerful body content for your landing page that further elaborates on the information your marketing email provided to the reader. For instance, if the lead has come to your landing page by clicking on an email that contained a CTA to buy a SaaS CRM software, don't greet them with a description of what it does.

The page should, foremost, contain a headline saying something like "Make your CRM software purchase in less than 30 seconds." The body content should mention the software name and image with a single CTA saying "Buy now."

Keep the body content of your landing page relevant and concise. Provide only critical information. Remember, this is not your product's home page and must not be treated as one as that would annoy your prospects and thwart conversion.

3. Use a single call-to-action (CTA).

Just as you would use a CTA in your marketing email, make sure your landing page also carries a powerful one. But only one, at least in the top section of your landing page.

If you use more than one or two CTAs, you risk confusing the next step you want your prospect to take.

Instead, include a single powerful CTA that quickly catches your reader's eye. Be it to directly help them buy your product or service, educate them, or invite them to start a free trial. Whatever the next action you want them to take becomes your singular CTA.

Once you're done writing the top half of your landing page, you can utilize the rest of the space to describe your product features further, put out a chatbot for customer service, and so on.

4. Make your page aesthetically appealing.

If you think appearances are unimportant, think again. A visually cluttered landing page with a jarring color scheme and upper case letters reduces a brand's credibility. It almost makes the landing page seem like a spam scheme. Why would any prospect buy from a page that looks "shady" to begin with?

Avoid such a scenario by adhering to the following tips that top UI designers use to make a web landing page aesthetically appealing:

Here is an email template that doubles up as a landing page created by automated email marketing software SendX. Look at how it strikes the right color balance, has a single CTA in the first half, and uses stellar imagery to describe the product, in this case, a Canon camera.

5. Avoid using navigational links.

A great many brands make the mistake of filling their landing pages with non-CTA links such as social media buttons, navigation bars, or links to other products they offer. These practices are suggestive in nature and often distract a prospect from converting.

Your landing page should ideally only contain the information you advertised in your marketing email. However, your website will contain a top menu bar, which visitors can use to explore your home or other pages. But that's all you should provide. Better yet, leave the landing page with nothing but a home button on the top left or right corner.

6. Provide social proof by including testimonials.

This tip is especially useful if your landing page launches a new product or feature. Providing social proof in the form of customer testimonials or reviews can help fence-sitting leads to take action. It just may be the final straw for converting them.

The logic here is simple. Anyone can send a marketing email talking up their product, but this doesn't guarantee that your potential customer will believe you. This is why your landing page is an ideal place to showcase positive customer feedback given by previous buyers.

7. A/B test the landing page.

While you may be happy with the landing page you designed, your potential buyers might not click through it. Perhaps they found it confusing. Create at least two versions of a landing page based on what your leads might like and A/B test them with a small prospect sample.

Doing this will yield quick results as to which one fares well. You can also use a web analytics tool to study how much time prospects spend on a particular landing page sample and on which section. Keep in mind that testing your landing pages before rolling one out can boost conversions by a whopping 300%.

Parting Thoughts

If you're struggling to craft the perfect landing page, one that truly complements your email marketing campaign, these seven tips can serve as a blueprint. Use them to develop a landing page that's a natural extension of your marketing email and provides actionable information to your prospect.

Running an email newsletter campaign for the B2B market is a lot like running a newsletter in any other industry segment. You're going to need to set up situations where subscribers will actually open up your messages.

One of the biggest issues you'll face with any newsletter campaign is growing stale. There's a massive number of people who simply let emails waste away in their inboxes.

According to one study, consumers can spend upwards of five hours a day gawking at their inboxes. Check out the four real-world use cases below. See if you can't get readers to devote a little of their inbox time to you.

1. Managing an International Campaign

Imagine that you're the head of a successful nationwide B2B sales organization. Your firm is now ready to move onto the international stage. One of the most cost-effective ways to market to buyers in other nations is to reach out to them via email marketing.

It costs no more to email someone on the other side of the planet than it does to email your next-door neighbor. This makes email an especially attractive option. Chances are that you have at least some international buyers already signed up for your B2B email newsletter if you're in this kind of position. Should that be the case, you'll want to invest in a piece of email newsletter software. That way, you can divvy up contacts based on their region.

Business owners in one area might have specific needs. Going through the extra step of segmentation can give you the freedom to reach out to them directly. In some cases, you might want to consider hiring an author who is fluent in another language. That way, you can be absolutely certain you're getting content that's tailored to the market you're trying to reach.

Whatever you do, don't even think about running your email messages through automated translation software. While this might seem like a good way to save time and money, the text that comes out of these is often mangled. It could potentially even be offensive. You're much better off sticking to your native language. Alternatively, work with bilingual professionals who understand the local tongue of the places where you're doing business in. Keep in mind that your readers might be in a different time zone. You might want to schedule your email blasts based on their location, not yours.

2. Reaching Out to New B2B Buyers

Before a business starts to really grow, it typically doesn't make any major purchases. Owners will usually only buy increasingly large stocks of goods once they're in a stable financial position. No matter what the current economic climate might look like, there are countless businesses all over the world that reach this point every week. When they do, the managers who run them might not have any idea about how to manage their money.

You can use your email newsletter campaign to reach out to these and other business owners. They may be at a total loss when it comes to buying from B2B organizations. When reaching out, make sure you segment your email list properly. Potential new buyers and those you've never worked with before should be sectioned off into a category of their own. That way, they can receive tailored messages to their unique position.

Don't be afraid to dispense tips or helpful advice. You might even want to share a few pointers as to the best way to find organizations that offer the kind of services yours does. That might seem like this could lead them to shop around. However, many business managers and newly minted purchasing directors may start to trust you as a result and come back to your brand. The more your letters start to sound like they're geared exclusively to marketing, the more chance you won't actually reach anyone.

People who read online B2B email newsletters on a regular basis are very often trying to glean information. They may need an opportunity to buy something useful for their business. They're likely to ignore messages that are too one-sided. Give your customers the freedom to configure their own preferences as well. This should help to improve the image of your newsletter with those who might otherwise not invest the time in reading one.

3. Connecting Readers with Your Company's Values

Social and environmental responsibility have become major issues for many buyers these days. While they're normally seen as something you might associate with consumer buying habits, they have a place in the B2B marketplace as well.

This is especially true if you ship goods to companies that have built marketing campaigns around the idea that they sell only natural, organic, or low-carbon products. It's also something that you want to consider if you're trying to promote a brand that's built around the concept of fair trade or some other value designed to do more than simply build a business. Use your email newsletter to better explain the source of the goods you're selling. Inform readers whether or not your clients could use them to further this kind of campaign.

Approximately 52 percent of U.S. consumers consider personal values when making purchasing decisions. Even purchasing departments are taking note. That makes this a great opportunity to position yourself as a legitimately responsible firm. Some companies are dedicated to volunteerism. You might have seen a few consumer products that feature labels showcasing how much work their staff does pro bono. If issues such as these are important to your company, say so in your email newsletter.

Don't purchase outside email contact lists. Doing so can undermine the idea that you run an ethical firm dedicated to your customers.

4. Offering Deals to Your Regulars

According to some marketing experts, people who receive an email newsletter may spend as little as 26 seconds looking at it. That means you need to offer something fast, right from the beginning, to catch their attention.

Offering deals to select individuals has traditionally been a good way to encourage them to open B2B email newsletter mailings. It's become even more popular as a result of data retention policies. Newsletters are easy to track as well as use, which makes them a great choice for this kind of marketing.

Some forms of data collection are understandably controversial. However, you probably have a pretty good idea of who your best shoppers are. Consider giving them some rewards for sticking with your brand for so long. On the other hand, you might also send out personalized messages to those who haven't bought from you in a while. Encourage them to come back somehow.

Marketing specialists have suggested that potential buyers respond best to new messages. You might be able to grab some market share this way as well. On the other hand, perhaps you're building a firm that's dedicated to privacy. If that's the case, then you'll want to do the exact opposite. Explain to your newsletter readers just how much you care about their right to decide exactly what gets done with their information.

Picking an Angle That Works for Your Company

Depending on the specific type of company you represent, any of the four angles listed above might be right for you.

Spend some time brainstorming. Come up with a list of potential ways you could use a B2B email newsletter to promote your brand. Throw out any that seem too ridiculous. You'll probably have a decent collection at the end you can actually turn into viable messages.

In any case, make sure that the offers you send are genuinely good deals. Offer something that would get you excited if you were in your client's shoes. The human aspect is always the most important, no matter what kind of marketing your B2B firm does.

Back to school season is here, but this time of year isn't just for the kids anymore. Adult education is going through the roof. These days, the number of adults — including those with college degrees — who are going back to school is constantly increasing.

People are interested in expanding their skills. They want to boost their chances at finding a higher-paying job or landing a promotion. Many hope to acquire new abilities based on marketplace demand. Still, despite the interest in adult education programs, it can be hard for providers to find an audience.

If you're in the adult education market, how can you tap into the immense demand for skill-building programs? More importantly, perhaps, how will you stand out from your competitors?

Armed with a savvy approach to content marketing, you can spread the word — and the buzz — about your programs. The right approach will help you increase enrollment and simultaneously help your students embrace new, exciting futures.

1. Be a myth buster.

There are plenty of different reasons that adults consider going back to school or entering a training program. The flip side to that is that there are at least as many reasons why they express some hesitancy about the process.

One way to break through that anxiety is to address some of the major myths and misconceptions about adult learners and education programs. For example, it's common for older adults to worry that they'll be the oldest person in the classroom. They also worry that taking on new skills later in life will be too difficult.

In reality, students return to school or enter training programs at all ages and from a variety of backgrounds. It's important to stress that everyone can be successful. When students feel like returning to school won't cause embarrassment or frustration, they're more likely to enroll. After that, they're more likely to express the kind of excitement and determination that will help them meet their goals.

2. Find your audience.

Another critical element to successfully marketing your adult education programs is knowing your audience and where to find them. However, this is easier for some programs than others.

For example, if you offer a CPA exam prep program, you'll want to market it through related channels. These might be through the schools where prerequisite courses are taught or in partnerships with exam registration sites. You can highlight the statistical benefits of taking such courses, present testimonials from other students, and outline your offerings. The same is true for any other kind of test prep course.

Of course, other adult education programs can be much harder to promote because your audience is more disparate. If you offer training in a trade, where should you market that? To get the word out about your program, you may want to connect with job listing sites, local career centers, and even more traditional educational venues.

Don't adopt too narrow a view of who might be interested in your adult education program. With more degree holders pursuing certification in a trade, now's the time to acknowledge that your target audience may be changing.

3. Promote progressions.

Many adult education programs can be described as "one and done." However, the reality is that — no matter someone's career path — there is always room for growth and progression. Growth often entails taking more courses for advancement and continuing education purposes.

In traditional settings, we might talk about this approach as driving re-enrollment or matriculation. However, in marketing language, this means that you need to use your content to drive customer retention. What can you offer that will keep them coming back?

Among the most important aspects you'll want to highlight when working to encourage repeat enrollments is how students can benefit from further coursework. Be careful to showcase the interesting options available to more advanced students as well as changing workforce requirements. This means doing some research. What are the industry standards for promotion or continuing education?

It's easy to keep students coming back when it's absolutely required by their employers. However, you want them to be excited by your services and offerings without a need for prodding. Coming to you out of stagnation or compulsion doesn't provide a great source of motivation. That means making your services stand out in quality, cost, and overall experience.

4. Embrace the power of partnerships.

Among the many ways that adult education programs today expand their reach and communicate their services to their target audience is by building connections with other organizations. For example, some adult education programs are collaborating with major corporations to offer their employees opportunities to pursue college degrees or certification programs.

Though most programs don't have the scale to make such large connections — could you handle the volume if hundreds or thousands of students signed up for your programs all at once? — partnering with local businesses that want to help staff develop advanced skills might be a viable option.

You provide the background information and the courses. Businesses bring in the students, many times with the prospect of obtaining a raise or advancement. We are living in a moment of "upskilling" and "reskilling," equipping people who have jobs with new or more advanced skills for a changing marketplace. Partnerships such as these are ideal drivers of engagement.

5. You might have a shifting market, but the process is the same.

Marketing adult education programs may involve presenting content that's different than marketing other services. However, the processes are fundamentally the same. Whether you're sharing your message via blogs or newsletters or in infographics on social media, content marketing typically embraces the same core approaches and platforms.

Your goal, then, is to optimize the educational content you offer rather than just flooding the field. And most importantly, at the end of the day, it's all about knowing who your audience is. You need to learn how to connect with them. You want to be sure that they can see the benefits of what you're offering.

Some people have a deep and abiding love of learning, no matter what the topic. However, others require a tougher sell to engage, even when your offering is to their advantage. Arm yourself with the facts about what learning a new skill, taking a test prep course, or earning a degree can offer. With that knowledge, you can connect with even the most reluctant students, encouraging them to expand their minds and pursue what motivates them.

Many companies are still designing their ad campaigns to target desktop audiences with an effective mobile marketing call-to-action as an afterthought, at best.

And yet, consumer use of mobile devices surpassed desktops and laptops toward the end of 2016. Google certainly took notice, and most professional marketers did as well. This phenomenon brought about the rapid and continuing development of mobile apps. It also brought about a new type of marketing content specifically suited to mobile device users.

Consumers are now shopping on small screens.

Your customers are also busy and on the go with these portable devices. What they don't want are walls of small text, exactly the sort of content that marketers use in website and blog post content. They want information, entertainment, and inspiration in digestible doses. This situation calls for visual content that viewers can absorb quickly and easily with as little text as possible.

In the world of marketing, some of that text will be presented in the form of a call-to-action (CTA) that drives conversions. So what does a successful CTA look like, and how are they targeted to reach the right audiences?

Effective Mobile CTA Strategies

Each CTA should have one conversion goal only. And the operative word here is “action.” Whether you want a viewer to visit your website or a specific landing page, download your app, or purchase something, you want the user to do something by clicking the CTA button. A strong CTA with a single purpose helps guide the user on their buying journey.

1. Research is still required.

You probably already have a buyer persona. But how long has it been since it's been updated? Data science can now provide plenty of detailed information, as can social listening tools. The more you listen to what your target audience is saying, the better you understand their “pain points.” Pain points can be used in your content but also in your CTA. For example, “Find Your Perfect Shoe” is a CTA that provides a solution to a pain point. Executed well, it drives the customer to a landing page on your website where that solution can be found.

2. Put the right message in your CTA.

Always use an action verb in the imperative form. These include terms like subscribe, buy now, sign up, check out your options, etc. The user knows exactly what he or she needs to do to get to a solution.

3. Always focus on the user.

The user needs to feel that you have his interests at heart. If you can use the pronoun “you” or “your” in your calls to action, the message is more personalized. Instead of “check out our options,” say “check out your options.”

4. Leverage FOMO in your mobile marketing call-to-action.

You can create a sense of urgency just as you do with any other CTA, but remember they must be short. “Check out your options and get today’s 25% discount” or “Get your 25% in the next 12 hours.” Scarcity and urgency do sell. It’s a psychological strategy called “fear of missing out" (FOMO), and consumers don’t want to miss a bargain.

5. Show your benefits if you can.

Your customers have a problem to solve. Whether they want a new pair of shoes or a new microwave, your product or service must offer a solution. The call to action can include the benefit or value you provide. “Find your perfect microwave right here” would be such a CTA. You are offering a solution and telling them that there are several options from which to choose.

6. Use images.

Human brains process visuals much faster, and using them on mobile devices is a critical piece of marketing. Any time visuals can be used instead of text, the more likely it is that visitors on mobile devices will stay with you. You can even use a visual with a CTA embedded within or under a photo of a product.

7. Use video.

An explainer video can do a great deal to capture your audience’s attention. And it’s a perfect venue for consumers on mobile devices. You can provide all of your value propositions if you have the right visuals/actors and the right script. In today's digital landscape, a video marketing strategy can be very powerful. Your script will be critical in this event.

If you do not have the creative juices that might be required for an engaging and compelling script, consider hiring a creative writing team for help. There are many organizations that employ an entire department of creatives who produce scripts all the time. One of the great things about using a video is that you can embed a call to action, complete with a button, at the end of your video. Catch them while they are engaged.

8. Simplify your mobile marketing call-to-action as much as possible.

While your CTA may be clear, simple, and compelling, be certain that the link you take your user to provides exactly the content that is promised. And that content must be clear, simple, and compelling too. Do not confuse or even anger users by presenting content, products, and services that are not specifically related to your CTA.

Even presenting more CTAs to other pages is not a good idea. Audiences expect to get exactly what is promised and nothing more. Mobile users want to access the information quickly; confusing them with other “stuff” will not be welcome and is likely to cause them to bounce. Worse, a customer might be angry enough to block future messages and/or delete your app entirely.

9. Always test your CTA.

It’s hard to know which types of mobile marketing content might resonate and which will totally “flop." This is why savvy marketers conduct A/B testing. That testing should include smaller content, such as headlines, email subject lines, photos, and even font sizes. The benefits of A/B testing are well-known, but just to quickly recap:

Leverage These 9 Tips to Craft a More Compelling CTA

Consumers on their mobile devices are demanding. They want speed, efficiency, and results. They want information delivered in ways that require the least amount of effort. Scrolling through a website is not their idea of a good time. Crafting an effective mobile marketing call-to-action acknowledges these user preferences and serves up information accordingly. If potential customers search for a product or service and your business pops up, you'd better be prepared to quickly show value and benefit. Quickly direct them to what they want via a compelling CTA.

Take these 9 tips for crafting those CTAs, and you are likely to get more click-throughs. More click-throughs mean more of the conversions you are trying to achieve.

Digital e-commerce marketing veterans often get the feeling they’ve seen everything. A new tactic or creative campaign goes viral practically every week as videos and posts are shared en masse by audiences hungry for je ne sais quoi.

But other than the obvious “try to map out the pulse of your audience and intentionally create an e-commerce marketing campaign likely to go viral,” what can a content marketer do to achieve success? Let’s take a look at some creative tactics that can work well in the e-commerce space that rely on more than “the wow factor.”

Creative E-Commerce Content Marketing Tactics

Personalize, Personalize, Personalize

One of the biggest e-commerce marketing trends in 2021 and beyond is personalization. Consumers have come to expect personalized products, personalized services, personalized marketing messages.

Much of this personalization will rely on either artificial intelligence or product development. But there is a way to personalize your content without the use of an artificial brain.

The best example that comes to mind is the creative use of a quiz. Not the Buzzfeed kind, though. For example, you can pop a quick questionnaire on your main blog page where you’ll briefly interview visitors about their interests. After that, your website only shows them the articles you now know they will be interested in. 

You can also segment your visitors based on the country they are visiting from, whether they have been to your website before, or the referral source they used to find you.

Naturally, you can also tie personalized content to products. Function of Beauty, for example, is one brand that has perfected the marketing of personalized haircare and skincare products.

Function of Beauty offers the simple quiz shown above to personalize website experience to individual needs and requirements.

Be an E-Commerce Marketing Problem Solver

Another e-commerce marketing trend that's here to stay is providing value. Long gone are the days when visitors were happy to be converted through lame and irrelevant blog posts.

Yes, the internet is still full of sub-par content, but there's a good chance that upcoming search engine algorithm updates will weed it out.

But back to the point about providing value. One of the ways to provide value via your e-commerce marketing efforts is to solve problems. Search engines are most often asked questions that pertain to a specific issue the searcher wants to solve. How to remove a wine stain from a white carpet, how to do keyword research, how to choose a VPN, etc.

Every industry has problems to solve. All you have to do is pinpoint the ones your specific audience is struggling with and provide a reliable, in-depth solution.

For instance, check out this post about mattress sizes and dimensions. Anyone who is looking to purchase a mattress will love it. They won’t have to measure mattresses in a store or look for dimensions while shopping online. They’ll know the name of the mattress they need and be able to do a much more specific search for it.

Freely Share Your Knowledge

Another way to provide actionable value in your posts is to share the knowledge you have. After all, you know a lot more about your products and their capabilities than a customer ever could.

This is where a lot of brands miss out on a great e-commerce marketing opportunity. Typically, companies are afraid to share “proprietary knowledge” or even the expertise they have accumulated over the years. Contrary to their beliefs, however, teaching others what you already know won’t amount to shooting yourself in the foot. Instead, it will establish you as an expert and a trustworthy source of information. The overflow effect will be that your products are perceived as trustworthy as well.

Take a look at this comparison post about paddleboards. Anyone who is looking to buy their first board will love the information and appreciate the opportunity to compare different brands and different models.

Note the customer-focused benefit of adding these kinds of summary tables to posts. They save visitors a lot of time and cut right to the chase, putting all of the value right upfront. This is a positive user experience at its best. You’re not asking a visitor to linger longer on the page (boosting your SEO scores), but rather being mindful of their needs.

Go Deeper

Most brands will produce blog content as this is still the most straightforward e-commerce marketing format. It’s easiest to rank and hiring a freelance content writer has never been simpler. There is plenty of evidence to support the success of the practice and countless case studies and use cases detail what some of the best practices are.

To work, though, your blogs need to be just a little bit more than the recapping and repackaging of the top ten articles on the same topic. You need to add some personality to them, and you also need to show your expertise and experience.

Unique stories and examples always work best. They also give you a better chance at offering a piece of advice others have not mentioned already. Sure, everything on the web has already been rehashed a thousand times. But your own experiences are still your own, as is your brand’s voice. For example, here's a mannequin buying guide that offers a little bit extra in the advice department. This makes it just a fraction more valuable than other posts ranking for the same topic.

Use More than One Format

Speaking of blog posts, you might want to consider offering your audience plenty of other content formats as well. We’ve all heard that video is more popular than written content, but that doesn’t mean you should stop writing blog posts. Podcasts are a trend that’s likely to stick around and the Covid-19 pandemic only highlighted the value of the webinar.

Working with all of these different formats requires more work and increased spending. Consider diverting some of your blogging budgets and center some of your blog posts around these other formats. Recap a podcast, offer additional input based on the conclusions reached during a webinar, and so on.

A brand that does all of this well is GRIN, which offers podcasts, case studies, and interviews. GRIN also recently launched a webinar and has a very active blog.

Use E-Commerce Marketing to Offer Something Else

To wrap this up, let’s end on a positive and vibrant note. A content marketing tactic you can employ to add a layer of personality and humanity to your brand is perfectly encapsulated by Bando's resources.

Bando features playlists, coloring pages, and worksheets. They’re only loosely connected with their products. And yet, they stay very much in line with the brand’s ethos and values.

Noted SEO expert Tim Soulo would tell you that this kind of e-commerce marketing is not worth much as you can’t link back to your products directly. However, sometimes you need to pull a rabbit out of your hat. Give your audience something they can just take away and enjoy, trusting that they will also be more than happy to browse your store when they come back for the next installment.

Use Marketing to Bring Real Value to Your Audience

These tactics will hopefully help you identify the key trends in e-commerce marketing for the next year or so. Ultimately, it’s all about value and personalization. After all, if what you are selling is valuable, marketing will be a much easier process.

Growth hacking is famously used by business-to-consumer (B2C) companies and startups as a way to increase lead generation—and eventual sales numbers—using flexible strategies and techniques.

Many companies have successfully used growth hacking to become top names in their respective fields and can readily produce impressive growth numbers to prove it. This is primarily because these companies have a greater number of sales prospects when compared to business-to-business (B2B) companies. This makes sense simply because there are far more consumers than there are businesses.

But just because B2C companies enjoy a huge advantage in terms of the number of prospects, does not mean B2B companies cannot also take advantage of growth hacking. In fact, B2B companies can use many of the same techniques and strategies applied by B2C companies and modify them to suit their needs. Before we get started though, let’s get on the same page about growth hacking and how that affects growth marketing. 

What Is Growth Hacking?

“Growth hacking” is an umbrella term used to describe innovative techniques and strategies focused on the growth of your business. It’s a process of experimenting and identifying techniques that work well in growing your marketing success and business rapidly.

Growth hacking is most commonly used by new businesses or startups to kickstart rapid growth in a short amount of time. These companies typically have less available capital and need to get the biggest bang out of a limited budget. B2B growth hacking allows startups to gain customers as quickly as possible.

The rapid experimentation that comes with B2B growth hacking allows companies to test and follow strategies that can provide a much-needed breakthrough in markets. Creatively repurposing existing strategies to suit your own company is what smart growth hackers try to do.

That being said, here is a guide to growth hacking made simple for B2B companies.

Growth Hacking Made Simple: A Definitive Guide

Below you’ll find some of the best hacks you can use to generate B2B leads for growing your business. In order to make B2B growth hacking simple, you will first need to understand the sources of B2B prospects and leads for your business.

The Best Sources of B2B Prospects and Leads 

Customer Referrals

Customer referrals and repeat business are perhaps your best sources of B2B prospecting and lead generation. Your existing loyal customers who have been with you for a long time can generate valuable and qualified leads.

With referrals, you can grow your business while saving time and resources on sales due diligence. B2B companies should prioritize existing relationships because referrals are more likely to lead to prospects, who are more likely to convert. Seizing every opportunity to care for customers as partners makes them more likely to sing your praises to other potential customers.

Internet and Social Media

The rapid, exponential growth and popularity of the internet and social media platforms make it an excellent resource for B2B lead generation and prospecting. Larger search engines and social platforms will all be key for growing B2B businesses all over the world.

These platforms have a continuously growing number of users, including B2B companies, and have tweaked their services to become more business-friendly over the years. They can effectively market products and services, get reviews and recommendations, and promote your brand to new audiences.

There is a multitude of available digital marketing strategies — including content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies — that will help your business generate more leads and prospects.

Cold Calling

Even as the internet and social media are rapidly taking over the passive or inbound marketing world, cold calling services are still an effective, tried-and-true method of B2B growth hacking. Cold calling provides an opportunity to directly approach qualified prospects that have a much higher chance of sales conversion.

Your business should not have to struggle to generate well-qualified prospects and leads in order to grow. Well-researched, professional cold calls can be highly profitable in warming up or even converting prospects for your B2B company.

Professionals working for a B2B lead generation company are paid to help businesses generate well-qualified leads and warm sales appointments. This allows your sales team to focus on closing more sales and growing your B2B company.

Email Marketing

As old and outdated as email marketing may sound, it’s still a great way to grow and nurture your leads. Well-crafted emails can greatly help with customer service and support, prospect questions, and content marketing.

Effective email marketing campaigns can be very efficient, segmented, personalized, and specific in targeting and generating leads. As an inbound direct marketing method, email can nurture prospects and grow your B2B company's awareness, value, and revenue with excellent ROI.

Physical Events

Promoting and showcasing your products and services at relevant physical events such as trade shows can be very effective for generating leads. Events can create brand awareness with new prospects and simultaneously allow you to create warm leads and retain existing customers.

Physical events give your business an opportunity to measure lead activity by creating excitement for your in-person presence through digital marketing campaigns — making it a perfect way to collaborate your online and offline efforts.

The Best Hacks to Help Grow Your B2B Business

Create Quality Shareable Content

We often hear that “content is king.” This is an absolutely critical truth to keep in mind when it comes to growth hacking. Today’s prospects respect good quality content above all else.

For B2B businesses, this means an opportunity to rise above the competition as an authority in their field. Quality content offered as webinars, slideshares, articles, and eBooks are some of the top generators of B2B leads because they are educational and provide immense value. As such, your goal with content should be to provide relevant educational value and not focus on self-promotion. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself, “What problem can I help somebody solve?” The more educational and valuable your content, the more authority you gain with prospects.

Additionally, your content needs to be searchable and shareable to allow for easy dissemination to improve its ranking on search engines. Your content should provide an opportunity to share in the form of embedded social media share buttons. You can make your content attractive by including relevant, high-quality images and great design, especially if your content includes an infographic.

Titles also play a major role in creating shareable content. Your titles should be attractive and compelling. Avoid using click-bait at all costs; it undermines quality, trust, and your authority.

Join and Use LinkedIn

As any marketing or sales professional will tell you, LinkedIn is currently the growth hacking social platform for B2B lead generation and prospecting. You cannot expect to grow your B2B business effectively unless you are a part of their growing social network.

Your business should create a LinkedIn profile and begin creating a thriving network of relevant B2B companies and individuals. Rather than connect to everything that crosses your path, it’s best to strategically select relevant groups. By regularly contributing to their active conversations about your industry, you establish influence and authority.

Consistently commenting with value and solutions will make you a respected authority in LinkedIn groups. LinkedIn networking offers great value in terms of generating leads and warm appointments with prospects. Use multiple LinkedIn strategies for B2B sales prospecting to grow your business.

Personalize and Customize

Personalizing content and customizing solutions is important for growth hacking in any B2B business. You can easily discover information and the pain points of your prospects through correspondence, emails, calls, purchase history, and even from platforms like LinkedIn.

Using this information to target pain points, you can customize your solutions to present relevant value propositions. Personalize emails and relevant content by using real names and mentioning their company and industry as much as possible, even in automated responses.

Personalization adds a human touch and tends to get better responses from prospects than generic, automatically generated emails and promotions.

Let Them Try Before They Buy

Free trials and freemiums effectively eliminate one of the biggest obstacles of growth hacking in B2B businesses. Often, B2B products and services have a higher barrier to entry. If, on the other hand, you let your prospects try your products and services, they are more likely to engage and convert.

Free trials should include enough time for prospects to understand the value you bring but not long enough for them to benefit from the full service. Similarly, freemiums should offer enough engagement to keep prospects interested in the benefits of premiums while having a good experience.

Additionally, you want to keep your support and service at their best for the trial period and freemium users. This will help you be more attractive to prospects who will in turn be more likely to convert.

Incentivized Referrals

This is a highly effective growth hacking technique for any and all B2B companies. Incenting customers and prospects to refer your business to other prospects will help significantly grow your leads. You can offer rewards, discounts, or anything of value to help incentivize and entice referrals from your customers.

Outsource Your Cold Calling

Cold calling has been, and still is, the most highly effective tool for B2B lead generation and prospecting. However, most B2B cold calling companies don't know how to properly make cold calls, qualify leads, or set warm sales appointments. As mentioned earlier, they often do not possess the skills, duplicatable process, or bandwidth to make cold calling work consistently.

Additionally, sales professionals typically hate making cold calls simply because they do not have the time or bandwidth or do not know how to use them successfully. Nevertheless, this should not stop you from taking full advantage of cold calling.

This is why outsourcing your cold calling efforts to professionals is an excellent idea. You can let professionals handle your B2B cold calls to generate well-qualified leads and warm sales appointments while allowing your sales team to focus on closing more sales

Retarget Prospects a.k.a. Cross-Selling and Up-Selling

Retargeting is another effective growth hacking technique for B2B companies when it’s done correctly. Whether you use email marketing campaigns or social media campaigns to retarget your prospects, always provide a strong reason.

The idea of retargeting only works when you pause long enough to ask, “How is this benefiting them?” and “Why should they do what you ask?” This will allow you to understand what will motivate your prospects to come on board and retarget effectively.

Another thing to note when retargeting your customers and prospects is the history of your interactions. Keeping track of their responses will go a long way when shortlisting and targeting the right prospects with your retargeting campaigns.

Conclusion

Growth hacking is the development of a set of tools used by B2B companies to grow their business. If you are not already applying these growth hacking techniques and strategies, I recommend starting immediately. Use the techniques and strategies outlined here and watch your sales increase.

However, growth hacking is also all about experimenting, applying different strategies, and doubling down on the techniques that generate the most growth. Not every growth hack will work for your B2B company. Run tests to determine which hacks are best for your situation.

Additionally, feel free to customize and modify each growth hack to suit your business. We have seen B2B companies simply copy effective B2C growth hacks without adjusting them to suit their specific business. More often than not, this is a recipe for failure.

Don’t be a victim of copy-and-fail methods. Instead, take the time to learn how each growth hack can be modified and improved to benefit your B2B company. With a little time and patience, you are bound to see results.

If you want to pick up your geography lessons again, here we go: the Americas is made up of two regions -- North America and South America. Although we see so much global digital and content marketing targeting North America, we sometimes forget the other great market, Latin America. Latin America is slowly rising to become the next great American market, solidly increasing in both population and GDP over the last decade. This is a market not to be ignored.

So how do you utilize global marketing strategies for Latin America? What strategies work and which ones massively fail? We’ll take a look at the strategies needed for this increasingly growing market, such as content marketing, branding, and product launches that make it big in Latin America. 

Then, we’ll see what not to do: just translating your content from English to a Latin American language. The standards for the language industry are high, so marketing to this audience may prove difficult, but not impossible. We’ll show you what the standard is for the language industry in this article, as well as how it’s used for marketing to this audience. 

The Hows and Whys of Global Marketing in Latin America

In a 2020 study, Harvard Business Review found surprising facts about Latin America. For example, $1 out of $10 is attributed to the Latin American market. It is the fourth-largest mobile market in the world. A powerful combination of video content and social media will be used by consumers in this region.

Blogs and content have also been used to power up the Latin American market. According to Alejandro Valencia of Getty Images, “Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia are really big markets for print and magazines; whereas, content marketing is strong in Latin America. Brazil is the biggest market in Latin America. Then Mexico. Argentina is the third one regarding the size of the market and the size of the types of prints Latin Americans read today. I think Colombia is emerging, but I think it’s mainly about Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina doing the big job and structure.” 

Content is still king in Latin America. Companies that have succeeded are using combinations of video, blogging, and social media to market their products and services to different countries in Latin America. You can vary how you reach out to the Latin American audience, which means using e-books, videos, infographics, blog posts, memes, gifs, interactive quizzes, contents, games--you name it, it works, as long as it’s done well. We’ll show examples of how other companies are doing it right later on.

Ideally, a global marketing strategy that targets international consumers like the Latin American market is one that takes into account the marketing channels popular in the different countries. This includes video content, SEO-optimized written content, social media, PR, and others. 

Global Marketing Strategy Done Right

The number one thing that’s working for Latin America is video content. Most Hispanic users, 289.2 million, in fact, watched digital video content in 2019, according to another study. There are predictions it may climb to 317.9 million by 2023. 

Airbnb has certainly been looking at Mexico and Latin America, which is now its fastest-growing market, according to Bloomberg. They host more listings in Mexico than there are hotel rooms, outranking their competitions by far. 

Surely, their video content contributed to their marketing strategy. In January 2015, Airbnb launched a social media campaign with the hashtag #OneLessStranger. With this hospitable, social campaign, Airbnb asked the global community to perform random acts of hospitality to strangers, and then upload it via video with this hashtag. About 3 million people engaged with this campaign, making their mark in the international community.

But they’re also trying out a different global marketing strategy that’s unique to them: allowing the local government to collect and remit a 3% occupancy tax. Having argued with New York and San Francisco city governments in the past regarding these regulations, Mexico is the first country they’re trying this out in.

In another example, Red Bull is the leading energy brand in the Latin American energy drink market, with Coca-Cola as number two. This is due to a subsequent global marketing strategy that prioritizes content innovation. The Austrian company built a Red Bull plant in the Amazonas, in South America. Special Red Bull events also take place all over Latin America. 

Global Marketing Gone Really Wrong

Yet, global marketing strategies in Latin America do not always work well. At best, they derive from errors in consumer research. At worst, they’re culturally or socially inappropriate, leading to zero revenue.

Marketing Messages

When Parker Pen UK expanded globally to Mexico, one of their marketing messages said, “It won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you.” They incorrectly translated this message. They thought that the Spanish “embarazar” meant “embarrass.” Rather, it was another verb meaning “to impregnate.” So, they translated “it won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you” to “it won’t leak in your pocket and impregnate you.” 

A rather embarrassing lesson in marketing messages, Parker Pen UK learned the hard way to not directly translate English to Spanish. This led to poor sales and poor reception, as you can imagine.

Product Launch and Branding

American Motors launched their midsize automobile “Matador” in Puerto Rico to zero sales. Why? Because “Matador” translates to “Killer” in Spanish-speaking Puerto Rico. Taking into account the very famous hazardous roads in Puerto Rico, the name reiterated danger in a harmful way. The very product name was wrong to begin with, and without even going into the marketing messages, the very product launch was a failure.

Ford Motor Company, in an almost identical case with the product name, did something similar. Ford tried to launch its car “the Pinto” in Brazil. In Brazilian Portuguese slang, “pinto” translates to “small male genitals.” With this socially inappropriate branding due to cultural norms, Ford had to rename and rebrand to the “Corcel” which translates to “horse.” Needless to say, the embarrassing product launch led to zero sales as well. (story continues below)

The Language Industry Standard In Global Marketing

Companies can avoid these errors by hiring translators. The language industry’s standards for global marketing are quality and accuracy. As you have seen above, many of these problems could have been solved by translation alone. 

“With any translation company, performance and perfection go hand-in-hand,” says Tomedes CEO Ofer Tirosh. “Translation services should always strive to perfect the language needs of every region. At Tomedes, we use the Four P’s: perfection, passion, performance, and professionalism, to ensure that transliteration blunders do not happen”  

Transcreation solves the problem of transliteration. Also, expertise in language solves the misleading brand or product name. However, the golden standard of accuracy and quality translation would have been the perfect solution for these brands. 

A good global marketing strategy starts with data. Research your target market and their language before you decide on branding and marketing messages. Spanish and Portuguese slang will be different in usage. Mexican Spanish and Puerto Rican Spanish will have different connotations and cultural baggage. 

Next, think long and hard about your branding strategy, and how that might work for your target market. After that, localize your messages to fit with your diverse offerings for that region. It seems simple, but even the smallest mistakes, especially in an unfamiliar language, could cost you.

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