Would your integration firm benefit from implementing these marketing tips and strategies?
Some integrators within the NSCA community are extremely focused on marketing, others—not so much. Regardless of which category your company best aligns with, these are marketing tips that all integrators can try in order to accelerate reach and increase awareness.
1. Create a Content Calendar
Generating a healthy mix of marketing content keeps your brand looking fresh and energized. The best way to maximize exposure on social media is by creating a content calendar: a roadmap that outlines what you’ll post and promote during a 30-, 60-, or 90-day period.
Sticking to the calendar ensures a good messaging cadence, and your audience will frequently see the content you promote. It helps to mix up the type of media you use as well. While it’s easy to incorporate pictures, graphics, and videos, utilizing clickable metadata links and PDFs when available increases the value you extend to your customers.
2. Leverage Multimedia Tools
A tool that every marketing team should consider adding to its arsenal is Canva. Whether you’re using the free version or upgrade to a business license, Canva empowers teams to design presentations, promotional graphics, social media landing pages, and so much more. Canva even released animation capabilities so you can create GIFs for web and social in seconds.
Rather than outsourcing design to external parties or always relying on a dedicated in-house resource, this marketing tip gives you an easy, intuitive resource that anyone on your team can use to start designing today. This makes turnaround time on marketing assets faster, less expensive, and completely within your control.
3. Let Your Customers Do the Talking
Don’t overlook the impact that a case study, project profile, or success story can have. Name-dropping helps potential customers get to know the types of organizations you work with—and the type of work you do. It also lets potential customers know that there are workable solutions out there to address challenges similar to theirs, whether it’s dealing with the struggle of finding technology to support hybrid learning or integrating a nurse call system with wireless devices to improve workflow.
Ask your sales professionals to share their best customer anecdotes and get your customers to share their side of the story, too. You’ll get lots of mileage out of that case study content: feature it in newsletters, share it on social media, distribute it to potential customers, turn it into a blog, share it with an industry publication, etc.
4. Optimize Your Consultative Role
Marketing and communications initiatives play a vital role in educating customers and should consistently showcase your company as a resource. You can act as a guide for customers by offering up valuable information about new technologies, trends, industry research, best practices, and general thought leadership.
To optimize this outreach:
- Share information with customers through a mix of digital and traditional mediums
- Give presentations and guide educational sessions for customers who want to learn more about the current landscape or challenges
- Shift your message from products to education and solutions
- Provide educational resources, including handouts, videos, and links to industry information
- Identify and manage return on objective as well as return on investment
5. Use Social Media to Amplify Your Brand
(Almost) everybody does social media—and some do it better than others. The fact remains, however, that you can effectively leverage social media platforms—Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.—to put your company on the map. Not everyone consumes information in the same ways, so you need to put your messages in the channels your customers use.
Work with your team to develop a weekly schedule by looking at user data provided by social media platforms. Pinpoint your peak days and times that your users tend to look at your content and start scheduling based on that.
Once a schedule is developed, create captivating content. What’s so interesting about that new technology? Who is that new technician on your team? What cool project did you wrap up last week? By following this marketing tip, you’ll see an increase in engagement, and your followers will turn into a community. With the next generation already using social media for their source of news and technology, our industry needs to make sure we’re all doing our part to put our best foot forward on social media.
