EST 1980
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Oct 25, 2022

3 Steps to Becoming a Smart Marketing Company

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by Karrie Lucero
It’s common knowledge that marketing is vital for business.
It keeps your name in the minds of your consumers and helps you reach out to new potential customers. Every company should be marketing, tailoring to their target consumers and creating the content necessary to get their message out, but did you know you can increase the effectiveness of your marketing by implementing “smart” marketing techniques?
Smart marketing, or as HubSpot has famously coined it, “Smarketing,” is utilizing marketing and sales team resources, increasing communication, and working towards common goals. In this article, learn the top 3 steps to becoming a smart marketing company. But first, let’s explore what smart marketing means.

Smart Marketing Unifies Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing are often thought of as teams that don’t necessarily need to be interconnected. If marketing does their job well, sales will see the success, right? Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Frequent and direct communication between your sales and marketing departments is critical for successful smart marketing. It is extremely important when it comes to creating, nurturing and converting leads into customers. Both teams should share data that will allow the other to improve the lead conversion process.
Collaboration and accountability are key. Share lead conversion percentages to make sure sales is pursuing an adequate amount of new leads each month, and make sure marketing is bringing in enough new monthly leads by sharing comparisons of monthly lead intake numbers.  has created a step-by-step guide on how to unify your sales and marketing departments to create a stronger team as a whole. As stated in the article, companies who are unifying their sales and marketing teams are seeing a higher return on their marketing investments.  

Smart Marketing Utilizes S.M.A.R.T. Goals

Part of uniting the sales and marketing teams involve setting common goals that both teams can collaborate on. Hubspot’s smarketing involves . When setting your company goals, make sure they are:
  • Specific: your goals should communicate what is expected, who will work to achieve it, and why it is important to the company
  • Measurable: your goals should have precise measurement criteria
  • Attainable: your goals should be within the reach of your company
  • Relevant: your goals should be relevant to your business and core initiatives
  • Timely: your goals should have a specific date by which you want to achieve them
allow your company to organize your objectives, measure progress and see the result of change over time. Hubspot recommends focusing on one of three for the “clearest vision of success”—visits, contacts and customers.

Three Steps to Become A Smart Marketing Company: SEO

Smart marketing is directly tied to inbound marketing. It’s difficult to have successful inbound marketing if consumers can’t find your business online. Increasing and maximizing your search engine optimization (SEO) will not only help you become more visible online, it will also help to reach your target consumers through the use of specific keywords.
Inbound Marketing-SEO
Keywords are the terms and phrases consumers search for in search engines. When placed strategically throughout your website and blog, as well as metadata and tags, search engines recognize these phrases and rank your website higher in search results. This means that using the right keywords allows potential consumers searching online to find your business easier.
However, not all keywords are made equal. Certain keywords have been dominated by large businesses or are used so frequently that it can be difficult to rank for those searches no matter how well placed they are throughout your website. Companies like HubSpot and provide keyword ranking tools that allow you to see where you currently rank for specific keywords and the difficulty of increasing your rank. 

Some SEO Ranking Factors

  • Internal and external links
  • Website content, such as pages or posts
  • Meta descriptions, alt text, headers, titles, etc…)
  • Site speed
  • Mobile friendliness
  • Website Architecture
  • Localization and Local SEO
Taking your current marketing efforts and developing them into smart marketing techniques takes time—the key is communication and collaboration. While convincing your sales and marketing teams to break the ice and dive into a full-communication relationship may not be the easiest step, working alongside will benefit both teams and the company as a whole.
By creating SMART goals, your company can see progress being made because your goals are well thought out and obtainable. Finally, optimizing your website with keywords and other SEO techniques will help your current consumers stay connected with you and lead new potential consumers to your website, where you can begin building a relationship with them.
Taking your current marketing efforts and developing them into smart marketing techniques takes time—the key is communication and collaboration. While convincing your sales and marketing teams to break the ice and dive into a full-communication relationship may not be the easiest step, working alongside will benefit both teams and the company as a whole.
By creating SMART goals, your company can see progress being made because your goals are well thought out and obtainable. Finally, optimizing your website with keywords and other SEO techniques will help your current consumers stay connected with you and lead new potential consumers to your website, where you can begin building a relationship with them.

Boost visibility, create engagement, increase leads and make more money with Inbound Marketing

Follow our free, easy-to-follow video series designed to show how to attract and convert more leads— and make more money with these tactics.

Three Steps to Become A Smart Marketing Company: Responsive Web Design

office tabletop with tablet, smartphone and laptop showing online shop responsive design website
Your website is a critical aspect of your marketing. You can have the best content in the world, but if people don’t know about it, they can’t benefit from it.
To make sure that everyone is able to find your website, make sure that it is optimized for mobile devices, but acts responsively regardless of device. If your site isn’t optimized for smartphones, tablets, and desktops, then a large percentage of potential customers will never see what you have to offer them.
For best results when optimizing your site:
  • Use responsive web design (RWD): Allow pages on your site to adapt based on their current widths in order to provide an optimal viewing experience for desktop and other device types
  • Test all parts of your website: Visit them directly with the device you wish to optimize for instead of just viewing them through a web browser window at full-size screens only – this way you'll know whether or not each page looks good enough before launching it publicly out into the world wide web where anyone could stumble upon it while searching Google or otherwise looking around online.
  • Make sure your website is easy to navigate: Find what your audience is looking for. If your site has multiple pages and sections, then make them easy to find by using clear labels on buttons and links.

Three Steps to Become A Smart Marketing Company: Knowing Your Audience

Target Audience Conversions
Define your target audience. Understand who they are, what they want and how you can reach them.
Ideally, you should be able to define your target audience in four ways: 
  • Geographics: Define which area or region of the country you will focus on as a market for your products/services
  • Demographics: Define age groups and even income levels that qualify an individual as a potential customer for your products/services
  • Psychographics: Based on values, align potential customers’ values with your product or service
  • Behavior: Based on past activity, understand what types of things people have already bought from other companies, 
Psychographics will help ensure that when it comes time for sales pitches or marketing campaigns, your target audience feels comfortable buying from your company because they share similar beliefs in certain aspects of life such as morals or religion. 
In order to effectively market a product, it is important to understand who is and what they want. If you don't know who your customer is, how can you sell them anything? It's just as important for brands to focus on customer experience as well as brand experience; make sure that customers are happy with what they are getting from your company and also that they feel like their needs are being met.
In terms of marketing, it is important to understand how people buy things and what influences their purchase decisions. Most people make buying decisions based on emotion and then justify them with logic. For example, someone may see a product they like, feel excited about it and then try to rationalize why they should buy it or not.

Conclusion

We hope you’ve enjoyed our three-step guide to becoming a smart marketing company. It can be daunting to think about all the work that goes into this kind of project, but if you take it one step at a time and keep your focus on your goals—the end result will be worth all the effort!

About Watermark:

As a in Denver, we strive to captivate your audience and elevate your brand through Smart Design and Creative Solutions. We believe marketing is a collaborative effort, achieved by practicing agility and working cohesively with your team, not for it. Using data-driven solutions, we implement the best practices necessary to help your business exceed KPIs. 
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