Smart Marketing Blog

How to Define and Market to Your Customer's Pain Points...Accurately

Content that attracts and resonates with the right audience must focus on what your customer needs most. Whether you’re creating a headline for your homepage, a topic for your new white paper, or overhauling your corporate brand position and message, if you can’t connect with your customers’ pains and help them see how you or your products can solve them, they’ll move along quickly.  

5 Tips for a Tagline that Sticks

Brainstorm notes on hotel bar napkins. Conversations that take you so far down tangents you’ve forgotten what your company does. You need something that’s memorable but not too off-the-wall, specific but not excluding, and exciting but accurate …

Brand Positioning and Messaging: More Than A Mission Statement

It’s often easy to skim over your corporate brand. Maybe your company has been in business for decades and you assume you have a brand already, or your business is fairly new and three years ago you set out with a mission statement, so you should be set. Right? Let’s try an exercise to see if you are actually set. Who was the first president? George Washington, of course. But who was the fourth president? What about the eighth? The easy way to stick in someone’s mind is to be the first. The hard way is to be second (or fourth, or eighth). In his book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Jack Trout clearly states, “If you didn't get inside the mind of your prospect first, then you have a positioning problem." Has your positioning and resulting messaging set you up for a first-place seed in the minds of your potential customers? Here are five objectives your brand positioning and messaging should meet if it is done correctly, positioning you for that first-place spot (keep reading through the end to also see what you can expect during a complete messaging project):

Infographic: Top 5 Findings from the 2019 SMFE Research Report

Planning without researching is just guessing. Strategizing your marketing spend this year without taking a look at what marketing research says is like playing darts with your marketing budget. Smart marketers research their industry, competitors, and customers so they best understand how to reach and sell to them.  

The ROI of Content Marketing

Content is at the heart of any inbound marketing program. It’s how new people find your company from searches, it educates prospects and compels them to complete lead forms, and ultimately it builds trust between your business and potential customers.

Buyer Personas: 8 Questions to Profile Your Customer

During the marketing strategy phase, it’s important to know the different personalities that make up your target audience, what they care about, and what they need so you can communicate with them in the most relevant way possible.

Trends: Web Form Fields That Convert

High quality content is key to lead generation. While we know scientists and engineers seek accurate, research-based content, we know they are skeptical of trusting online content and filling out lead forms to get to it. So what fields - and how many - should we prioritize?

How to Write Content For Your Sales Funnel

Inbound marketing is all about creating and promoting content that attracts, converts, closes and delights your buyer personas. To successfully do this, you need content for each stage of the inbound marketing funnel. Additionally, you need content for each specific buyer persona who enters your marketing funnel so you can successfully turn web visitors into customers. 

How to Write a White Paper that Grabs Readers

For technical audiences, white papers have traditionally been seen as unbiased, lengthy academic articles that look like a chapter straight out of a textbook. However, nowadays many companies commonly use this media format in content marketing to attract and inform customers.

Checklist for Creating B2B Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are vital to you as a marketer whether you are planning your marketing strategy, brainstorming new web content or redesigning your website. Smart marketers break down potential customers into audience segments called buyer personas to help them customize marketing efforts to their ideal clients.