When it comes to creating newsletters, you probably only think about the ones that go out to your clients. From product sales to social marketing updates, newsletters are a great way to keep customers engaged and coming back to your company for more. But, did you know that internal newsletters are just as important? We have compiled a list of the top 8 reasons why your company needs an internal newsletter so you can keep your employees as engaged as your clients!
Top 8 Reasons Your Company Needs an Internal Newsletter
1. Transparency across all departments
Employees don’t usually keep up with their coworker’s roles unless they happen to be working in the same department or team, which can lead to a lack of company knowledge. Having an internal newsletter is a great way to highlight important projects each department is working on and may encourage employees to reach out to one another for questions and collaborations based on personal experience.
2. Company & Industry News
It’s important that everyone in your company is up-to-date on the latest company endeavors, as well as the latest news about your industry. An internal newsletter is a perfect place to provide links to new company products/marketing services, as well as updates on competitors or changes within the industry so all employees can be informed.
3. Introducing New Employees
Whether you have a small company or are as big as Google, it’s important that new employees and clients are recognized company-wide. When there is a new addition to the company, many employees get caught up with work and don’t take the time to get to know the person or their role, so welcoming them through the newsletter is a great way to keep everyone in the loop and encourage a conversation!
Account-Based Marketing tactics are improving fast, and with the help of technology, it is becoming a marketing plan that every B2B company should explore.
Did you know that 89% of respondents reported a higher ROI from ABM (Account-Based Marketing) than traditional marketing initiatives (ITSMA)? While ABM is a strategy best suited for long term growth and potential, new technology – specifically, AI (Artificial Intelligence) could be the critical difference in getting more leads and maximizing your ROI. Account-Based Marketing tactics are improving fast, and with the help of technology, it is becoming a marketing plan that every B2B company should explore.
Imagine being able to recognize a target account the moment they are doing their initial research. Today that is all made possible because of artificial intelligence, and AI is transforming the game in 2019 because of its ability to provide real-time feedback. AI can synthesize through millions of analytics in real-time, delivering a list of potential targets. Naturally, this will improve identification rates, which in turn could make for better results for your company. Furthermore, it is now easier for companies to understand the early signals in regards to what an account is not only writing about but what they are searching for. In other words, AI is producing real-time intent, which is getting those early signals about what an account is searching for on search engines. This becomes an important step in the Account-Based Marketing process because the ultimate goal is to get them the moment they start their initial research into what their problems are and the solutions that are offered.
Additionally, AI is also improving account engagement which is following click behavior to identify in real-time who (person, company) is on your website, while also recommending content that is relevant to their specific needs. Improving account engagement allows marketers to know who was on their company’s website and what they were looking at (issues they have). This provides sales and marketing to have faster conversion rates because they are already sending their hyper-personalized content to that specific person. Artificial Intelligence works so fast behind the scenes that it allows the sales and marketing teams to work together to best identify the company’s pain points and provide them with solutions to their problems. Ultimately, the old ways of marketing that manually crunchednumbers over a designated period are over; AI immediately processes the data and allows marketers to sit back and focus on the bigger picture. Leveraging the ever-changing technology can lead to quicker conversion rates for your company. If you would like to learn more about the importance of artificial intelligence and account-based marketing tactics, please contact us.
4 Frequently Asked Questions about ABM
What is ABM?
A recent study by Alterra Group has found that, “97% of marketers surveyed said ABM had higher ROI than other marketing activities.” Account-Based Marketing is a strategy using B2B sales and marketing principles to target company accounts. It is designed for long-term growth, rather than quick short deals. Based on the ability to send hyper-personalized content to targeted decision-makers, Account-Based Marketing tactics are a strategy that if it is managed right, can maximize your ROI over time.
Pardot or “to sell,” in Latvian, is, appropriately, the name of a marketing platform that ultimately serves to lead you closer to the sale. However, nurturing your prospects from initial touch to that sale is a delicate and often lengthy process. Pardot provides a number of tools that allow you to automate the marketing process from start to finish, but the open-ended nature of the platform can also lead to the confusion surrounding best practices. Below, we’ve put together a basic structure for you to follow while automating your processes in Pardot.
Tracking
Before your prospects are prospects, they could just be visitors on your website. A variety of tools in Pardot support you to track visitor activity on your website and begin associating data with these future prospects right from the start. You’ll then be able to view all of their Pardot tracked activities once they convert from visitors to prospects.
Converting
Forms on your web pages and landing pages act as the primary instrument for conversion from visitor to prospect status. Using Pardot forms or form handlers allows you to automatically update prospect records for use in sorting and customization as you start to develop your marketing campaigns.
Grading
The prospect grading process should really begin before you dive into the many features of Pardot. Automating a grading process for your prospects allows your team to capture information surrounding the suitability of each of the prospects in your system. You can significantly improve your conversion rates by marketing to prospects who will see the relevance of your products and services. The platform provides you with a default grading model that may serve as the foundation for your prospect grading strategy, but it also presents the opportunity to customize grading profiles for an approach that will more directly apply to your unique offerings.
Digital marketing has evolved and stretched its fingers across nearly every digital platform imaginable. From the paid ads you see on Instagram, to the web pages that have fostered their SEO strategy enough to land on the first page of Google, your opportunities for reaching prospects are broader than ever. Despite the surplus of opportunity in the digital landscape, email marketing remains the most effective method of marketing to your customers. Before launching your next email marketing campaign, take a look at the top email template designs for 2019. Pardot HTML email templates have a broad range of capabilities, and between these 7 examples, you’ll be able to pick and choose ideas to adopt in your own emails based on your marketing goals.
1. Call to Action: InVision
Starting off our list of email designs is a template curated by an agency well-known for its design prowess. While we must give credit to the clean overall design of the email, we would like to highlight the use of a single call-to-action after the email’s body of content. Using only one CTA has proven to improve conversion rates since it erases any doubt about which path is intended to be taken upon review of your email.
2. Mobile-responsiveness: Yesler
You’ll notice that many of the templates we are recognizing here utilize a single-column layout, and this is no coincidence. Your customers continue to rely more and more on their mobile devices for both their personal lives and work, especially when it comes to having email access both in and out of the office. A single-column layout can easily be optimized for mobile viewing, and Yesler provides an excellent example of how a content-heavy email can still be designed with mobile in mind.
The extent of your offerings cannot be summarized in a single case study, so you’ll need to select a targeted focus for each one. While one case study could serve to highlight how your services had a direct impact on rebuilding your client’s strategy from the ground up, another may emphasize an instance when your team introduced a client to an additional process that contributed to their further success on an already effective system. However, all of your case studies should be curated to convert and engage,helping you to fill up your lead funnels and retain accounts.
Obtain permission from your candidate
You don’t want your clients to browse your website only to find an unfamiliar case study with their name attached to it. Obtaining consent from you candidate is necessary in order to build a case study that is verified by both parties and will open up the opportunity for direct quotes to add further validation to your case study.
Improving your Case Studies
Target the Right Industry
When your prospects can relate to your case study candidate, they are far more likely to see how your products or services could, in turn, benefit them as well. This familiarity can be easily fostered by conducting your case study on a client within a particular target industry.
We’ve attended the webinars, we’ve read through the release notes, and we’ve actually used the features. With our customers in mind, we trained our team on these new features to improve our Salesforce consulting services. In addition to the full release notes found at the bottom, here are some of our favorites.
Sales Cloud
Accelerate Sales with Cadences and Work Queues
Description: Cadences are custom sales processes that guide reps through handling prospects of all types. Create consistently scheduled cadences of outreach activities that alerts and helps reps nurture their prospects. Work queues prioritize the next steps reps should take with their prospects. The app provides them with approved email templates and call scripts to help close the deal.
Benefits: Shows which prospects are ready for each outreach in your sales cycle. Handle prospects in half the time than it took before. Ensure company-wide uniformity of sales best practices.
Pinning Feature
Description: With 5,000 votes on the Appexchange, this Salesforce update allows users to pin certain filters on modules. Have a custom filter on tasks for past due tasks only? When you navigate to the Tasks object, it may default to recently viewed tasks, but now you can pin custom filters to default to.
Benefits: Saves time navigating across multiple objects. Increases customization of the platform.
Custom Training Programs
Description: This Salesforce feature gives companies the power to set up custom programs with certain training links, per user. Links can include Salesforce articles as well as external links.
Benefits: Uniformity on training new and existing users with the ability for tracking. Maximizes the use of the Salesforce platform, users don’t need a separate system for training.
Corrao Group uses Salesforce for everything from client profiles, internal & external project management, and everything in between; we’ve deployed the Salesforce platform company wide. We implement Salesforce integration best practices in order to make sure we get the most out of our Salesforce organization. Our project management team utilizes Salesforce as a tool to track projects, assess our budgets, and bill employee time for maximum optimization of the platform.
Before Salesforce
Before using Salesforce, Corrao Group used to run on a lot of spreadsheets and constant overseeing. We had to set up our internal projects differently than external projects to bill time, and it was difficult to determine how much time was needed to complete each task in a project. When we adopted Salesforce in 2008, we became both a customer and a partner in the same day. Our mission with Salesforce was to maximize not only our investment with the platform, but our clients’ as well.
Once we switched to Salesforce for our project management, we had to evolve with our clients and learn how to utilize Salesforce integration best practices for our business consultations. Larger projects required more technical knowledge, and as power users of the platform, we took it into our own hands to figure out a way to make Salesforce work for us.
With Salesforce
Salesforce has provided visibility into our entire business process and has allowed our Project Management team to work more efficiently. We have tailored Salesforce to work with our own management tools from sales to kickoff, and now have both internal and external projects set up the same way. A popular feature we created was the automation of project communications to both the Salesforce Account Executive and the customer themselves. Without having to track down their Project Manager, automatic updates are sent out with timestamps regarding how the consulting project is tracking.
The customization of Salesforce is endless. We are able to add important details into each project such as files, quip documents, or even chatter threads. We have also implemented advanced dashboards such as Skuid in order to prioritize tasks and streamline management by utilizing Salesforce integration best practices. It is now easier to help project managers reassess how to work efficiently with the wide visibility into their projects, as well the ability to optimize Salesforce to see each individual’s skill-sets.
Project Notes & Additions in Salesforce
Moving over to Salesforce for project management did not come easily without the education about how Salesforce would work in our favor. Our whole company has to work together to learn how to manage our projects and prioritize the most important ones. From internal to external projects, we have been able to utilize Salesforce throughout all of our business processes, and with every new feature added is another way for us to maximize our investment with the platform.
Future of PM
The future of using Salesforce for our project management is ever-evolving. We have experienced the infinite customization of Salesforce, and the perks of better visibility so that we can spend less time overseeing, and more time helping our customers. We have ongoing conversations about ways we can continue to optimize our processes, as well as reassessing how we budget out our time.
With integration tools, we are not only able to streamline our own processes, but we can help our customers do the same. Our mission is to maximize our customers’ Salesforce investment, but in the process of doing so, we have continued to maximize ours. The advantages of Salesforce are endless, and we will continue to evolve our project management as Salesforce evolves with us.
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87% of B2B marketers agree that Account-Based Marketing (ABM) delivers a higher ROI than other marketing activities (ITSMA). If you’ve never executed ABM, your patience is usually tested when starting out. We’re used to semi-quick, yet small results with traditional marketing methods. A generic email blast goes out to a purchased list, and form submissions flood in. Boom, leads. Your Sales teams then engage with these leads and become upset to learn they’re not qualified. You realize that while you have hundreds of new leads, they’re not the right leads for your business. ABM saves your company time and allows Sales to focus on extremely qualified leads. In fact, Sales will only focus on leads that are your ideal customer, based on research of your existing customers. The result? Higher ROI, customers for life, and established personal connections.
The first step in ABM is for “Smarketing”, Sales and Marketing, to come together and choose the target accounts you will go after. If you’re just starting out, we recommend selecting a few accounts, show the ROI, and expand from there. A three-tiered approach is recommended so Smarketing knows how much time to devote to an account. Tier ones are your highest valued accounts that meet your Ideal Client Profile (ICP). An ICP is a representation of your best-fit clients based on data and research. These should receive most of Smarketing’s attention, meeting face to face and establishing the greatest connection. Tier twos meeting most of your ICP, but aren’t as valuable as tier ones. Tier threes are your general leads that come in through lead magnets and your website. Adopting an ABM strategy doesn’t mean giving up on traditional marketing entirely, as that strategy will populate your tier threes. Tier threes can also move up the ranks too and become a tier one if they meet the ICP.
New users can be so overwhelmed with Salesforce Einstein Analytic’s features that it could take up to one year to use the application. Unfortunately, a year is too long to see an ROI for on such a tool. The solutions to this are Templates, out of the box sets of dashboards and reports for new users. Templates provide an expedited start to users starting out with Einstein Analytics. Up and running within twenty minutes, they contain best practice KPI’s and are available to customize.
Templates give users the power to package and distribute their apps to others in your company, partners, and even customers. Apps give you ready-made dashboards automatically populated with Salesforce data to show KPIs. If you’d like to show Marketing’s influence on the Sales pipeline, “there’s an app for that.” Templates will allow you to package multiple apps and share them with the team and others to view real-time information from your system.
Key Elements of Templates:
– Quick Start: A configurable wizard helps you adjust analytical assets in your system.
– Intelligent KPIs: Templates will adjust and recommend best practice KPIs based on your company type.
– Advanced Data: Have data spread across the entire system? Templates automatically combine data from Opportunities, Accounts, Products and more in one view.
Salesforce Analytics Templates to Watch For in Spring ’19:
– Lead trending
– Financial service cloud products
– Trailhead and learning map
Is your content creation team struggling with staying on top of marketing content? If so, you need a comprehensive digital content calendar. Every company, from start-ups to Fortune 500s, can benefit from the structure of a content calendar, so if you’re not using one, you can start to fall behind. Making sure you have planned content posts in advance is one of the best ways to make sure you are providing the consumer with current and relevant information.
Here are our top 5 tips for creating your digital marketing content calendar!
1. Decide what you want to post
When your content creation team begins to build the calendar, they need to decide what kind of content your company would like to post. If you want to post pictures, social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter would be your best options. If you would like to share information about your company’s services, blogs and emails may be best. Do your research on the times that are best to post for each outlet, as you don’t want your posts to get lost in the abyss of social algorithms.
Another question you need to think about is who your ideal audience is going to be. Your content creation team will want to target the content to your audience, so you need to make sure it’s relevant and interesting to get them coming back for more.
