Oof. It’s that time of year again where most Americans are groggily returning to work post-Thanksgiving in a tryptophan daze that’s unlikely to lift as the dread of leftovers loom high in fridges at home.
But leftovers don’t have to be horrible—all you need are fresh ingredients to turn what you have into an amazing new meal. This Thanksgiving analogy applies perfectly to marketing teams and strategies.
Whether it’s time, money, or content that you have leftover, putting a fresh spin on your marketing leftovers will keep your content fresh and demand gen cooking up new leads.
Buyer personas that personify and humanize your ideal customers are critical to any marketing and sales efforts. To put it in a holiday analogy, buyer personas help you package your products, solutions, or services in a way that will delight your customers on an individual level. All this being said, persona creation is resource and time-intensive. But that doesn’t mean personas are out of reach for you. If you’ve got a little time on your hands, consider creating what we call “persona-lites” and leverage it to strengthen your new year.
Start off by researching persona basics and utilizing free guides or templates. Use your research to craft a list of 7-10 questions that can be adjusted for various industries. When it’s time to interview sales teams, SMEs, and if possible, customers, you’ll have a strategic start for creating your persona-lites.
Most of us have underutilized or under-leveraged content in our library. These assets can be multiplied to support upcoming 2020 strategies. Think deconstruction for long-form content and multiplication for short-form content. Whatever you do, remember to keep your persona-lites in mind!
Longer content pieces like whitepapers, ebooks, and even webinars can be deconstructed into digital assets to support marketing campaigns such as blogs, emails, and social media posts. As for shorter content like social posts and threads, those can be used as inspiration pieces or quotes for future blogs. Revamp past social media campaigns by adding design elements like animations, gifs, boomerangs, or short videos.
PPC (pay-per-click) ads are a broad umbrella term for any digital advertisement that charges per user click. The most common avenue for PPC advertisements is social media and search engines, such as Google Ads.
All these modalities allow marketing teams to decide who they want their ads served to (remember your persona-lites?) and is a relatively cheap and low-barrier avenue to begin increasing brand awareness and inbound leads. Media outlets offer varying degrees of targeting that carry different values from one company to another.
B2B organizations might find value in LinkedIn’s rich account targeting features, whereas B2C organizations might find greater value in Facebook’s demographic targeting features.
Nothing eats away from a marketing team’s time like manual processes. If you’re managing leads and accounts and collecting data, you’re taking time away from other valuable and critical activities. Think about what’s holding you and your team back from accelerating and scaling your efforts. If you’re wrangling a list of leads to nurture, consider getting an automation tool such as outreach.io for smaller budgets, and Pardot or Marketo for larger budgets.
From buyer personas to marketing tech, leftovers in your marketing efforts don’t have to be boring or stale. Regardless of whether you have extra time or money, with a little bit of creativity, your teams can create a whole new strategy to delight your customers and fill your sales and marketing funnels.
Contact us if you have any questions or would like to learn more about how you can maximize your marketing leftovers, and be sure to follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.