Category: Strategic Marketing

If the events of 2020 taught marketers one thing, it’s that we have to be prepared for anything. Companies ready to pivot at a moment’s notice bounced back from the pandemic faster than others.

Now that we’ve (finally) said “so long” to 2020, we’re excited to re-energize and share our top tips for getting ahead in the 2021 marketplace.

Here is what we expect to see trending in the marketing industry over the next 12 months.

Staff Augmentation

2020 came in like a wrecking ball, with the majority of companies feeling a financial strain. Many operations furloughed or reduced staff, decreased resources, and, in some cases, closed their doors for good.

So, it should come as no surprise that companies will be slower to hire new employees in 2021.

This creates an opportunity for agencies to offer help without adding to a client’s overhead costs. We anticipate a significant shift in staff augmentation, allowing agencies to fill marketing leadership and administrative roles for their clients.

• Companies will likely hire contractors or part-time employees before adding FTEs to their organization
• A few agencies (like Giant Voices) will offer staffing help, providing talented and trained marketing experts to fill marketing director, marketing assistant or CMO roles

During previous economic downturns, marketing agencies have been the thought-leaders and strategic partners helping clients get back on their feet. Agencies have played an integral role in providing communication, direction and support when organizations need it most.

At Giant Voices, we offer clients the support they need to sustain their operations and the strategy they need to thrive.

Full-Service Agency Support

The need for full-service agency support has shifted like a pendulum—especially in the past 10 years. Around 2010, companies preferred hiring multiple “niche” agencies to cover singular focus areas. One agency would provide social media support, another influence management, the next SEO support, etc. 

However, many soon discovered how difficult it had become to manage 7-10 relationships with segmented teams, not to mention the inability to create cohesive and comprehensive campaigns that resonated with customers and prospects.

Moving into 2019, most companies wanted to limit their agency partnerships, preferring a full-service firm model that provided a much-needed integrated strategy. We see the pendulum continuing to favor the full-service agency model in the new year.

• Companies want to create cohesive messaging across their many communication channels
• Connections matter more now than ever, and clients want to work with agencies that understand them. They want to build a relationship with a single firm that can dig in and strengthen an organization’s brand while helping them achieve revenue goals
• Firms like Giant Voices will expand their specializations to provide clients with full-service agency support

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Moving into a new year while trying to curb the effects of an ongoing global pandemic means companies need more than marketing help—they need sales help as well.

In 2021, we see more and more clients asking for help with sales and marketing alignment strategies. Our team advises clients through sales funnel development, visually showing them how their advertising and lead generation tactics will take their prospects from impressions to sales conversions.

• Sales are critical – companies and clients aren’t just looking for a marketing firm, they’re looking for a firm to help them sell
• Messaging matters – companies are reaffirming their competitive advantages by synchronizing their messaging in sales and marketing
• Increasing ROI has never been more important – companies are tapping into full-service marketing agencies for conversion strategies
• Numbers tell a story – companies are reassessing their KPIs to measure success and ensure sales and marketing alignment

Customers are part of the entire journey, not just the sale, which is why sales and marketing alignment will take on a new meaning in 2021.

Our firm knows consumer behavior, and we understand the importance of  pivoting quickly when the landscape changes. We specialize in creating customized strategic plans that work best for each client’s unique situation.

Ongoing Growth of Personalized Connections

It’s been in almost every headline in 2020—we miss connecting with other people. While building relationships remains the key to successful client/customer and client/firm relationships, this sentiment holds true in 2021.

Companies will seek new, creative and innovative ways to reach their customers, and they will rely on their full-service agency to guide them to where they need to be.

We anticipate these tactics will perform strongly:

• Video advertising: As thousands of Zoom calls in 2020 have taught us, nothing beats a face-to-face conversation. Whether it’s on social or in programmatic display, video ads will continue to be the preferred choice as each allows advertisers to communicate on a more personal level than a standard display ad.
  
• Personalization using programmatic AI: The digital advertising landscape has transformed in the last two years, making it easier and more affordable for advertisers to send personalized ad content to targeted audiences. Providing the right content, in the right place, at the right time, is the best way to drive conversions.

2020 was a year of autonomy for target audiences across all industries—during that time, consumers’ needs changed drastically as they wanted to work, learn and gain feedback on their own time, in their own way.

Customers have had time to assess companies’ channels as well as the content they produce, so utilizing technology while emphasizing the importance of authentic storytelling will be critical to success as marketers embrace a new year.

Drive Growth in 2021 With These Marketing Trends

Four marketing trends will drive growth in 2021:

1. Staff Augmentation
2. Full-Service Agency Support
3. Sales and Marketing Alignment
4. Ongoing Growth of Personalized Connections

At Giant Voices, we practice what we preach. We are here to help you reach your ambitions as we embrace a new year.

Are you ready for 2021? We can help. Connect with us today for a discovery meeting.

COVID-19 has left a gaping impact on business, not just in how we conduct sales and marketing, but the processes behind our sales and marketing efforts.

For the past several months, the old tactics—building relationships through coffee shop conversations or selling a client on data sheets in boardroom discussions—simply aren’t cutting it and likely aren’t going to be received the same way moving forward.

So, why are so many companies continuing to position their sales and marketing teams like it’s 2019?

While our firm will be the first to admit that we miss the energy and growth that comes from in-person conversations with our clients and coworkers, we know and accept that today’s B2B landscape has shifted. We get it. It’s important to adapt in order to move forward—but that doesn’t always make it easy.

As a strategically-focused, ambition-based marketing firm, we work with clients to help identify their financial, operational and communication goals. Then we use that ambition as the foundation for all of our communication efforts.

We help maintain alignment across the board on messaging—from collateral to emailers to social media posts to sales rep communications. We work to ensure everything is cohesive when it reaches a prospect.

Knowing this background information, our simple advice might not surprise you when it comes to elevating your brand in today’s climate: synchronize your messaging in sales and marketing.

That means sitting down with both teams to reaffirm that communications are absolutely, 100%, without a doubt, aligned in terms of the messaging you’re sharing with your target audience.

After all, you can’t execute communication that will help you increase ROI, generate leads or put yourself in a position to market new products unless you can build from a strong foundation.

But how do you align your sales and marketing teams? These four steps will get you started.

4 Ways to Ensure Sales + Marketing Alignment

Establish a Team

If you’ve ever watched synchronized swimming, you’d know it’s obvious when someone is off. If a limb flies left when it’s supposed to go right, it doesn’t take much for a choreographed number to be thrown off course.

It’s the same with your marketing and sales communication and the quality of the experience you’re providing your prospects. If your marketing team produces content promising one thing and sales sings a different tune, you may miss out on the potential to develop profitable leads—which, to be frank, you can’t afford to lose.

We highly recommend that sales and marketing teams meet at least once a month to review what’s working, what’s not, what new products need nurtured messaging, what new communications need testing, to name a few.

These meetings will keep everyone on the same page and reaffirm that the teams work collectively to achieve the same outcome.

Put a Plan Together

An integrated marketing/sales strategy built on aligned messaging creates trust, credibility and consistent experiences.

So, where to begin to make sure your team is in sync? We suggest starting with sales enablement, the iterative process of providing your business’s sales team with the resources they need to close more deals.

It’s about producing cross-functional teams that can execute sales success through unified communications. Resources to elevate your sales and marketing alignment include:

• Performance data sheets
• Structured communication plans
• Product information sheets
• Marketing insights from digital and traditional media
• Verbal coaching and sales communication

This is the simple starter kit to ensure your team is on the right track when communicating a consistent narrative and unified mission to your target audience.

Utilize a CRM

Our recommendation for maintaining organization when aligning sales and marketing messaging? Invest in an effective CRM—and use it.

A customer relationship management system (CRM) is a centralized location where you can track and manage the journey of your subscribers, prospects, leads and marketing qualified leads (MQLs) based on all of your communications.

Using a CRM will help improve communication with your target audience while also allowing your marketing and sales team to centralize their messaging based on the findings of interactions with each unique prospect.

Not only does this create unified messaging across the board, but it also allows your sales team to focus their time and energy on leads with the most potential.

It also offers tried and true insights for your marketing team to develop content that will produce effective results.

What’s more, an effective CRM will allow you to categorize your contacts as they work through the buying stages. That means your messaging—as unified as it is in overall intent—can be effectively tweaked to meet audiences where they are at on their journey.

The truth is, with buyer behavior today, your prospects are more likely to convert to customers if they’re part of the entire journey, not just the sale.

So, a key part of converting a prospect into a lead is ensuring that marketing materials and language are adjusted accordingly—whether a prospect has visited your landing page for the first time or they are ready to close on purchasing your product.

We firmly believe that having and actually using a CRM will help you organize contact data while allowing you to see how people are finding you in today’s changing market.

Put the Data to Work

Lastly, after you have found the CRM that best fits your interests, use the information it provides to ensure your KPIs (key performance indicators) match up with your ultimate plan to reach people. We recommend monitoring some or all of the following KPIs to measure success.

• CPL (cost per lead)
• CPC (cost per click)
• Average total contract value
• Monthly sales growth
• Revenue per client
• Profit margin
• Client retention rate

Just to name a few. Digging into the data will provide concrete facts on where people enter the conversion funnel and answer the question: what does my buyer’s journey look like?

Modify and Pivot to Foster Success

There are four steps you can take to produce a well-oiled sales and marketing machine:

1. Establish a team
2. Put a plan together
3. Ensure you have a CRM
4. Put some measurements in place

As always, leave yourself room to modify and pivot—if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that our environments are constantly changing, and the needs of our buyers will inevitably change too.

Interested in learning more about sales and marketing alignment? Contact us today for a discovery meeting.

We don’t need to tell you that COVID-19 caused immediate and likely irreversible shifts in the business landscape. When we come through this—and we WILL come through this—business won’t look quite the same.

While we don’t know what the future holds, we do know that strategic marketing is more important now than it has ever been in the past.

We also know that many business leaders have had to make significant staffing changes in response to COVID-19’s ever-evolving impact on consumer behavior in different industries.

Now is not the time for radio silence. Your customers and prospects need to hear that your company has been able to pivot, that your work endures and that you and your team are here for the long haul.

Giant Voices offers many levels of support to help in all of your strategic communication efforts, and can act as a fractional CMO, marketing director or marketing admin.

Whether you’re looking for administrative assistance on a specific project or more robust oversight for your marketing strategy, the Giants are ready to dive in.

Fractional CMO

It is possible to add an executive to your team without conducting a prolonged search for the perfect candidate—who often comes with a high price tag.

As your Chief Marketing Officer, we’ll handle just about everything from setting sales goals, overseeing company branding, creating key messages, developing collateral, managing digital marketing assets, event coordination and more.

The best part? Our CMOs come backed by the entire Giant Voices team, so you’ll get 20+ strategic marketers to support your company’s growth.

A long-time Giant Client was faced with a sudden and unavoidable crisis, and they needed to formulate and deploy a strategic communications action plan quickly.

Leadership looked to Giant Voices’ public relations expertise for both immediate tactics and a forward-thinking strategy that helped the company build momentum to launch new offers. In the midst of this work, Giant Voices helped the client navigate the changing business landscape in response to COVID-19.

Fractional Marketing Director

From internal and external communications to marketing and advertising strategy, a Giant Voices account executive serving as your marketing director can help move your business forward powerfully. We can step in to fill a temporary vacancy, address a specific situation or crisis, or provide long-term marketing oversight and strategy for your team.

Overseeing the marketing of a parent organization of three independently operating programs is more than a full time job, especially when a CMO doesn’t have access to an in-house marketing team. Giant Voices dove in as a fractional marketing director to keep projects and initiatives running smoothly.

An expert Giant Voices account executive coordinates with contractors, works directly with each program team, engages the Giant creative teams for content creation and graphic design, and ensures each project meets both our and our client’s high standards.

Sales/Marketing Administrative Support

Successful marketing strategies require drilling into the details. Managing lists, coordinating mailings or email sends, staying on top of customer inquiries or managing social media accounts across several platforms is time consuming but incredibly important work.

When our clients need extra hands to get the work done, the Giants roll up our sleeves to keep you in touch with your customers.

When Giant Voices onboarded a new client with a large but unkept database of contacts, we tapped our account assistant’s expertise to validate and clean the large volume of data.

She embraced the high-touch project with a positive attitude and a strong drive for perfection, so our client could focus on strategic marketing initiatives. Today, this client enjoys a clean and accurate list of valuable, engaged contacts.

How Can We Help?

As our clients make strategic decisions to position their business for continued success during and after the global pandemic, Giant Voices is here to help.

Our job is to augment your team wherever you need support the most so we can strengthen your business now and into the future. Get in touch with us to discuss your strategic marketing needs and explore your options.

Marketers just read that headline and cringed. They’re giving us the evil eye through their screens, thinking: “What do you mean, MORE? We’re already doing EVERYTHING!”

It’s true! Marketing covers a lot of ground and our work is essential to business growth. So, how can we sit here and proclaim that marketing should start delivering more?

Because we know they can.

Demand More From Your Marketing Team

More Strategy

Marketing isn’t supposed to be reactive. It should be forward-thinking, smart and strategic. Every effort should drive your business in the direction you want it to go–and when marketing is aligned with your business strategy, there’s no telling what you can achieve.

Now is the time to include your marketing team in strategic planning, so they can create all-encompassing solutions that help you reach your goals. 

More Advocacy

Marketing supports all business functions—and should be your cheerleaders, your yes-people, your sounding board and your advocates. That also means marketing shouldn’t be an afterthought.

If you want marketing to back you and your ideas, start including the team in strategic-level meetings. You’ll be impressed by the ideas and support that come as a result.

More Reliability

You should never have to wait on marketing. They should be the very embodiment of hustle because their work supports sales, customer service, financials, technology and more.

You must be able to rely on marketing to deliver, because when they don’t, everything suffers. The best way to ensure your marketing team keeps a pep in their step? Set realistic expectations, and then give them the resources they need to succeed.

More Ideas

Marketers get into marketing because they have big ideas on how to drive sales and customer engagement. Marketers are little idea factories just waiting for someone to say “go!”

Give your team the space they need to experiment, and they’ll blow you away with creative solutions that get results. Every time.

More Solutions

Are you adding a new product or service? Expanding into a new market? Trying to attract a new customer demographic? Growing your internal team?

Look to marketing for strategies and solutions to help meet your goals. Marketing will come up with creative ways to solve a problem, and they never shy away from a challenge.

Add a Fractional CMO to Your Marketing Team

This is a lot to ask of a marketing team, we know—especially if your marketing team is a powerhouse of one. The Giant Voices account management team often holds the role of Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for our clients.

We can handle just about everything from setting sales goals, overseeing company branding, creating key messages, developing collateral, managing digital marketing assets, event coordination and more. This is why adding a fractional CMO or marketing leader to your team can seriously transform your success.

We work with you and your marketing team to deliver strategy, value and results that drive your business forward. The best part? Our CMOs come fully-supported by the entire Giant Voices team. 

Interested in learning more? Contact us.

As a savvy business professional, surely you’ve asked yourself this question: “Can’t I just hire one person to do all my marketing?”

You know, a magical unicorn of a human who can develop smart strategy, write insightful press releases, update your social media, design layouts, forecast sales—the list goes on.

The short answer, of course, is yes. But, like a magical unicorn, they’re awfully hard to find. If not downright impossible.

Here’s the reality: You can hire an entire team of experts—a herd of workhorses—for about the same investment as that elusive unicorn you might be hoping to capture.

For starters, consider the true cost of an employee. The average salary of a marketing manager typically ranges from $60,000 to $100,000.

Now, throw in health benefits, vacation and other perks, and you can easily tack on 20 percent to that total.

Simply put: All the rainbows and glitter that come along with a unicorn can get expensive. Fast.

It’s also important to look at the current low rate of unemployment. Today’s economy favors the employee, not the employer. With an unemployment rate of just 2.4% in many markets, employees are less loyal than ever before.

In fact, in many cases, employees are staying at their job for less than one year. You should also consider the time and investment it takes to train a new employee—only to have them leave a few months later.

The lesson here: Unicorns have the power of flight and they’re not afraid to use it.

Finally, as you well know, marketing disciplines are expanding as fast as the marketing channels themselves. In the last 15 years, the industry has exploded. There are more marketing channels than ever before with many new channels emerging online daily.

So, unless your unicorn comes with an equally magical unicorn cloning machine, you’re going to need more horses in your stable to handle the myriad of marketing disciplines in our ever-expanding world.

We get it. Like you, we’ve been there.

We know what it’s like when you’re feeling overwhelmed. You look to the skies in hopes of summoning that magical unicorn from behind those perfectly puffy white clouds. We believe the answer is right here on the ground—a stable of workhorses, patiently waiting to run long and hard out into that field—to help you get the job done.

Contact Giant Voices when you’re ready to bring on a trusted, experienced and dependable team of workhorses to uplevel your marketing.