Liron Ramot

Even the most well-crafted content can sometimes fail to deliver the results you want. As our world gets more digital, it’s not uncommon for businesses to pour money and time into creating high-quality content, blogs, videos, social media posts, and eye-catching designs, only to find that their efforts don’t connect with their target audience or drive results. In most cases, this isn't a reflection of the campaign's quality, but a sign that it simply doesn't align with the company's "big picture" and goals. Consider this: A company puts together an insightful blog post packed with valuable information and engaging visuals or an expert educational webinar. The problem is, if that campaign isn’t aligned with the brand’s broader marketing goals and strategy or tailored to the specific needs and behaviors of its audience, it’s likely to miss the mark. Without a strategic framework guiding planning, production, and distribution, even the best campaign can get lost in the noise of the internet, failing to generate traffic, engagement, or conversions. Your campaign could have all the right elements in place - compelling storytelling, high production values, and a strong call to action, but without the strategic groundwork, it is likely to struggle to achieve meaningful results.

Why Often Misses the Mark?

Creating digital content that truly connects with your audience is no small feat. The landscape is crowded, the competition is intense, and audiences are more critical than ever. While many businesses pour resources into content creation, they find that their efforts do not translate into engagement or conversions. Most of the time, it's just a lack of alignment between content and the organization's overall business goals. Without a clear, strategic framework, content can become scattered, inconsistent, and ultimately ineffective. This is exactly why companies should consider stepping back to take a broader view. Rather than rushing ahead with the next campaign or content piece, a strategic pause to reassess and realign can be incredibly valuable. This is the essence of the discovery and study processes, a strategic approach that will build a solid foundation for your digital marketing campaign.  

Understanding the Study Process

The primary aim of the Study process is to provide a focused analysis of your current digital marketing efforts. It’s about taking a step back and evaluating what’s working and what isn’t, allowing for strategic adjustments that enhance performance. This process is ideal for annual strategy reviews, specific campaign assessments, or when there’s a need to refresh the approach to your digital marketing.

What It Achieves?

The Study process delivers actionable insights that help fine-tune your digital strategy. By concentrating on specific areas, such as target audience engagement, campaign effectiveness, or digital content performance, the Study process allows businesses to make data-driven decisions that improve ROI. It helps you understand where your content may be falling short and offers concrete steps to address these issues.

How It’s Done?

• Initial Consultation: In-depth session to clarify your business’s current digital marketing objectives and identify the key areas that require attention.
• Targeted Research: Assessing the performance of specific campaigns, audience engagement metrics, and the effectiveness of your content in driving desired outcomes.
• Strategy Refinement: Adjust and optimize existing strategies based on findings.
• Implementation and Monitoring: Monitoring and tweaking the revised strategy as needed.

Example: A company uses the Study process for an annual strategy review, identifying gaps in campaign performance and refining their approach to improve results.

Exploring the Discovery Process

The Discovery process offers a broader, more comprehensive approach to digital strategy development. It’s designed for businesses that are launching new brands, undergoing a rebrand, or expanding into new markets. The Discovery process is about building a solid strategy that aligns with long-term business goals and keeps consistency across all digital channels. The Discovery process offers a deep dive into your brand’s identity, your market, and your audience. It provides a holistic understanding of your brand’s digital landscape. It uncovers opportunities for differentiation, identifies potential challenges, and sets a strategic direction that makes sure all digital efforts are aligned with your overarching business goals. One of the unique offerings of the Discovery process is the development of a visual language for your digital activities. This component ensures that your brand communicates consistently and effectively across all platforms, enhancing brand recognition and coherence, which is not typically included in the Study process. The goal is to develop a strategy that meets immediate needs as well as positions your brand for long-term success. This process is particularly beneficial for companies preparing for major changes, such as a new brand launch or market expansion.

How It’s Done?

• Kick-off Meeting: Clarify goals and challenges.
• Comprehensive Research and Analysis: A thorough examination of the market, competitors, and internal capabilities. Key activities include identifying Buyer Personas, conducting a Competitive Digital Analysis, and performing a detailed SEO review.
• Digital Strategy Development: Based on the research insights, a full-scale digital strategy is formulated. This includes defining content pillars, creating a media plan, and developing creative visual guidelines that ensure brand consistency across all platforms.
• Presentation and Implementation: Once approved, the strategy is implemented, with ongoing support to ensure its success.

Example: A company undergoing rebranding uses Discovery to align its digital presence with its new identity, resulting in a cohesive and impactful digital strategy.

Why Discovery Is the Better Choice?

While both the Study and Discovery processes offer valuable insights and strategic direction, the Discovery process stands out as the more comprehensive and long-term solution. Here’s why Discovery might be the better choice for most businesses: Long-Term Strategic Value Discover aims to build a digital strategy that will serve your business for years to come, not just address immediate needs. By conducting thorough research and analysis, the Discovery process helps you create a strong, adaptable strategy that can evolve with your business. This long-term focus is particularly valuable in today’s fast-paced digital environment, where trends and technologies are constantly changing. Comprehensive Insights Unlike the Study process, which offers a more focused review, the Discovery process provides a holistic view of your digital strategy. This includes everything from a detailed SEO review to the development of creative visual language guidelines. These insights are crucial for making sure that all aspects of your digital presence. From content to design, everything is aligned with your brand's goals. Flexibility and Customization One of the key benefits of the Discovery process is its flexibility. The process can be adjusted to your specific needs - whether you’re launching a new product line, rebranding, entering a new market, or looking to create a unified visual identity for your campaigns. This customization helps make sure that your digital program is relevant, consistent, and effective.     With the digital marketing arena being so fast-paced, it’s easy to get caught up in the rush to produce content and launch campaigns. Taking the time to reassess your digital strategy allows you to see what’s really working and where you might need to adjust course. It’s not simply about tweaking a campaign here or there, but rather making sure that every piece of content you create is connected to your broader goals and truly resonates with your audience. Whether you’re considering the focused approach of the Study process or the more comprehensive Discovery process, this strategic pause is crucial so your content doesn’t just reach your audience—it makes an impact.    

Digital marketing is crucial for B2B companies to effectively reach their target audience, generate leads, make data-driven decisions, and stay competitive in the market. However, while most B2B businesses see the need for digital marketing, they don’t necessarily have the team, tools, or budget to handle it in-house.

Digital Marketing as a Service (DMaaS) is a model that works

As an on-demand model, DMaaS allows your company to access a wide range of digital marketing expertise, tools, and resources without hiring and maintaining an in-house marketing team. While digital marketing toolboxes, tactics, and strategies differ according to client needs, they frequently comprise smart content, webinars, outreach and Account-Based Marketing (ABM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), sponsored campaigns, and marketing automation to reach target audiences and drive traffic or conversions.

4 great reasons why DMaaS makes sense for your B2B business

1. Access top-tier talent without the overhead costs associated with traditional hires Budget constraints and HR challenges may be standing in the way of hiring an in-house digital marketing manager. DMaaS offers a cost-effective solution, allowing your company to alleviate the burden of recruitment, training, and retention, freeing up your resources to focus on your core business operations.
2. Effectively navigate the complex digital landscape Tap into the expertise of seasoned professionals who possess a comprehensive understanding of digital marketing strategies, tactics, and execution skills that can help you achieve your marketing objectives.
3. Adapt to changing market conditions Your business has to constantly adapt to market needs and business growth. DMaaS has built-in flexibility, allowing your business to scale up or down, based on your changing needs and budget.
4. Set goals, measure results & change the game plan as needed In the dynamic world of digital, the goalposts are constantly changing. By setting key performance indicators (KPIs) and using accessible analytics tools such as those available in HubSpot, you can easily track the success of your marketing campaigns, optimize strategies as needed, and demonstrate the value of using DMaaS services.

Follow the yellow brick road

As a global B2B marketing expert, OZ has spent years building a strong reputation. Digital trends may come and go, but dedication, commitment to success, experience, and professionalism never go out of fashion. At OZ, we believe that long-lasting partnerships are based on deep listening, understanding, and transforming your goals into measurable results. That’s why many of our clients stay with us when they move companies, and why many clients come to us by word of mouth.

Your dedicated digital account manager will be your work BFF

With OZ, your account will be managed by a dedicated digital account manager backed by a multidisciplinary team with expertise in every aspect of digital marketing, and more. Your OZ manager is always backed up by a team comprising a graphic designer, strategist, and content writer. Your OZ manager becomes an integral part of your marketing team, offering full commitment and dedication to your company's goals. It's not just one person, but an entire team of digital experts working behind the scenes to drive your digital marketing success. Every member of the OZ team brings with them a high standard of professionalism and expertise gained from working with numerous B2B companies across various industries.

Boost your bottom line

DMaaS enables you to reach and engage with your target audiences effectively, measure the success of your campaigns with precision, and adapt your strategies in real time based on insights and feedback. It’s there to act as a driving force in your marketing strategy, enabling you to access the resources and expertise required to enhance your brand visibility, attract and retain customers, and drive sustainable growth.  

If you’re a fan of hummus, you’ll know that it goes great with pita. While you can eat them separately, they are quite simply, better together. The one really complements the other. The same can be said of HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing methodology and Account-Based Marketing (ABM). To make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s start by defining these methodologies:

Inbound Marketing

Attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. It’s about building meaningful relationships with consumers, prospects, and customers.

Account-Based Marketing

A B2B strategy in which marketing and sales work together to create personalized buying experiences for a select set of high value companies.

Inbound lays the foundation for a strong ABM strategy

According to HubSpot, inbound marketing helps you attract contacts associated with your target accounts. ABM accelerates the flywheel (the cyclical marketing funnel comprising attract, engage, and delight) so you can win and delight your target accounts by providing a standout customer experience. By using inbound, you’re able to carry out highly-targeted allocation of the most relevant resources to your high-value accounts. As a B2B marketer, by using this combined approach you can attract a broader group of prospects than you would if you were only using one method.

Double up and deliver value

Your carefully crafted content has a two-for-one value. You can create and use content that serves both your ABM and inbound strategy. As an example, once you’ve created a personalized case study for a target account, you can also share on your website.

Leverage account-based marketing tools

HubSpot’s ABM tool makes it easy to implement ABM and inbound strategies in a complementary way. Its CRM platform connects all of your sales and marketing data and allows enables customer-centric automation and personalization. It makes it easy to use data to segment and target your accounts and marketing automation to nurture your buyers or buying committee and hand over your leads to sales. 1. Set up ABM strategy quickly and smoothly

• Use workflow templates to define your ideal customer profiles and identify good-fit target accounts
• Set up default properties to tag accounts and buying roles
• Leverage AI-powered recommendations of target accounts

2. Allow sales & marketing to easily collaborate

• Use shared tools that unite your teams around the same data in the same place
• Use the Target Accounts feature to obtain a bird’s eye view of progress across all target accounts
• Use Slack to support high-value target accounts, post KPIs, and share notes

3. Attract high-value accounts & build deeper relationships through personalized engagement

• Personalize content and tailor how you engage with stakeholders within an account
• Use account-level targeting in LinkedIn Ads integration to target companies by account status or tier
• Deepen your relationships over time & build connections with stakeholders within each account

4. Track and measure key milestones on an account’s journey

• Use the account overview feature to understand what’s happening at an account level
• Employ out-of-the-box ABM reporting dashboards to get a higher-level view
• Obtain a higher level view using company scoring to identify the highest value accounts and prioritize reachout

As an added bonus, HubSpot’s apps and strategic partners including Slack, LinkedIn, Sigstr, Madison Logic, RollWorks, and Irioblio help you easily customize your ABM strategy. ABM helps you communicate with high-value accounts as if they’re individual markets. HubSpot’s experience shows that if you do this, along with personalizing the buyer’s journey and tailoring all communications, content, and campaigns to those specific accounts, you'll see greater ROI as well as a boost in customer loyalty. This is borne out by an ABMLA study, which shows that compared to other forms of marketing, 76% of B2B marketers who used ABM in 2020 reported increased ROI. Using HubSpot inbound marketing and ABM tools to power your ABM strategy helps you identify your high-value targets, communicate effectively through the right channels, and deliver the results you need.

You’ve peppered your website content with all the keywords you want to rank for. Yet your site still isn’t appearing in Google search rankings, not to mention Bing. It may be time to rethink your SEO strategy. A quick reminder: SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It primarily drives two things: rankings and visibility — and it helps you position your brand throughout the entire buyer’s journey. When you plug your keyword into a search engine, it brings up a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). What happens next has a lot to do with how well your site is optimized for SEO. To ask an existential question: If your company doesn’t rank on the first ten search results, does it even exist in the mind of your potential buyer?

How is your website ranked?

Google’s algorithm changes daily, but as a general rule of thumb, it ranks your website on three main factors: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.

• On-page SEO — covers three key areas:
  • High-quality content (the heart of on-page SEO)
  • HTML (source code including page titles, headers, meta descriptions, image alt-text, and more),
  • and site architecture elements (such as page URLs, internal linking, and more).
• Off-page SEO — social sharing, external linking, and more.
• Technical SEO — structured data, site, speed and mobile readiness.

There are many quick actions you can carry out to improve your search engine rankings such tweaking title tags, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links, to name but a few. However, to significantly improve your results, you need to carry out an SEO audit. Based on your findings, you’ll need to build a comprehensive SEO strategy that includes on-page strategies (which use intent-based keywords) and off-page strategies (which earn inbound links from other websites). If all that sounds a little daunting, here’s the good news. You don’t have to do the heavy lifting. HubSpot’s put together a free kit on how to run an SEO audit including an SEO template, audit checklist, and 9-step guide.

Don’t procrastinate, automate!

Why waste time, money and manual work when HubSpot SEO Marketing Software does it all for you? It can help you plan your SEO strategy, optimize your content, and measure ROI in three key steps:

1. Get SEO recommendations to optimize your site- Obtain recommendations ranked in order of priority which show which optimizations will have the biggest impact
2. Create an optimized content strategy to build search authority- Obtain topic suggestions based on relevance, competition, and popularity and create high quality content around your core topics
3. Integrate your SEO software with HubSpot’s content management tools- Obtain search keyword data, choose canonical URLs, get estimates on which topics will yield organic traffic gains, and track key topics on your dashboard

Get topical!

As the SEO project leader, you need to decide on each page’s target audience, goal, topic, and target keywords and phrases. HubSpot’s SEO tools make it easy to research and organize topics and subtopic keywords based on your company’s areas of expertise, which serve as the foundation for all the content you create for your website. Creating relevant and up-to-date content helps your website get indexed more accurately by search engines such as Google, which analyze keyword phrases in your content, title, meta description, hyperlinks, and more.  

Key tips to getting started with SEO

• Crawl your website, conduct an SEO audit, and define your site architecture.
• Establish a value proposition for every page and review and edit your content accordingly
• Target your audience for that specific page (if it differs according to market segment, application, or product category)
• Update your URLs, page titles, and meta descriptions.
• Making sure that your keyword/s are included in your URL and are used throughout the page
• Incorporate and optimize relevant visual content
• Add internal and external links

Why use HubSpot for SEO?

If haven’t yet made our case for why HubSpot takes the pain out of SEO and adds the gain, here are a few more good reasons to check it out: You don’t need to be an SEO expert, because its built-in SEO tools are built with marketers in mind. There’s no need to know coding either. HubSpot handles the technicalities, so you can focus on content. Here too, HubSpot has a variety of content planning tools built into the platform. It makes it really easy to connect your marketing assets so you can track the buyer’s journey — from awareness to qualified lead to happy customer.  

If you’re already using HubSpot to fuel your inbound marketing strategy and drive sales, it’s time you took AI out for a spin

Constantly writing content to fuel your inbound marketing funnel can be time-consuming and costly. While ChatGPT isn’t going to replace your talented content team anytime soon (if at all), it can prove very useful in helping your team conduct research, generate content ideas, and write basic drafts for your team to finetune — so that you can generate more content, faster. It also helps your sales teams focus on closing deals instead of being bogged down by manual tasks. As a HubSpot user, it’s all your fingertips.

Say goodbye to writer’s block

Having trouble generating the volume of content you need? Call on HubSpot’s friendly Content Assistant to create or refine web copy, blogs, articles, emails, and more. Using AI, you can generate ideas, outlines, or paragraphs for your required topics. You can also generate sales emails, titles and meta descriptions for pages and posts, and social posts. Simply answer the prompt, “What’s this social post about?” review the result, and tweak until you’re satisfied the post meets your standards. Not writing in English? Set the target language for the required content. Once a language is set, any generated text will automatically be output in that language.

Four ways to tweak existing content

Using the “highlight” command, you can rewrite, expand, summarize, or change the tone of the text you’ve highlighted. It’s quick and efficient. Rewrite - Generates different wording for the highlighted text Expand - Elaborates on the content of the highlighted text Summarize - Condenses the highlighted text Change tone - Rewrites the highlighted text in the selected tone: friendly, professional, witty, heartfelt, or educational Beyond using the highlight command, you can also generate headings, paragraphs, and subsections based on your existing content. Clearly describe the content you require and select the required output. Remember to be very specific, use simple language, and provide examples to clarify the context and tone of your request. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Experiment with different prompts until you get the output you need.

Best practices for AI-generated content

• Always proofread and edit all your content before you publish it.
• Maintain your brand's voice and style – your tone of voice must be consistent through all marketing materials.
• It’s not all or nothing — remember to balance your AI-generated content with human-generated content.
• Check, check, and check again. While HubSpot has put security measures in place, content assistant may occasionally generate inaccurate, skewed, inappropriate, or misleading information. Make sure you verify the accuracy of the output's content, particularly any statistics or facts.

Now watch your high-quality content start spinning the flywheel and generating leads for your sales team.

Streamline your daily sales workflow with ChatSpot.ai

Another great AI tool in the HubSpot toolbox is ChatSpot.ai, which helps your sales team save time and maximizes productivity by carrying numerous daily tasks. It can assist with lead management, adding contacts and companies to HubSpot’s CRM, including specific notes, assigning tasks, and sending reminders as well as personalized follow-up emails – all through simple chat-based commands. It quickly identifies prospects based on specific criteria (such as industry, location, and size) and provides a list of high-potential leads. It’s easy to create real-time custom reports on key metrics, including website visits, lead conversions, and revenue in an easily digestible format. It also aids with forecasting, listing the deals closing within a specific timeframe, the deal stage, as well as anticipated revenues.   In short: It simplifies and streamlines your team’s daily workflow, cuts down on time-consuming manual tasks, and helps your sales team do more in less time. All those ready to start using AI, say “Aye!”