Steel & Metals marketing is shifting from relationship-only selling toward hybrid demand generation: digital discovery + technical validation + sales-assisted closing. Sector growth is steady but uneven by region; buyers are more self-directed, sustainability-sensitive, and price-volatile in behavior.
Steel & metals firms are accelerating digital adoption, partly because buyers moved online faster than suppliers did.
Steel & metals marketing is fundamentally B2B and spec-driven. The most important behavior shift is that buyers now self-educate digitally first, then bring a short list to sales. Messaging and channel strategy need to support buying groups, not individuals.
Primary ICP categories
Deal reality: Nearly all meaningful steel/metals contracts are multi-stakeholder—no single “buyer” owns the decision.
How the journey has changed
Implication: Your digital content must make buyers feel they can “get to yes” without waiting on a rep—then sales steps in to derisk and close.
Steel & Metals remains a “high-intent, spec-driven” category. That means channels that capture active problem-solving (search, technical SEO, webinars) outperform broad awareness plays. Social is best as ABM and credibility support, not mass lead gen.
Note on data: there are limited steel-only public channel benchmarks, so I’m using industrial/manufacturing B2B benchmarks as the closest-fit proxy and calling that out in the numbers.
1) Search (Paid + Organic) = primary growth engine
2) Technical SEO + content = best ROAS over 12–24 months
3) Webinars / virtual demos = mid-funnel accelerant
4) LinkedIn = ABM and credibility, not volume
5) Events still matter, but only with digital scaffolding
A common 2025 “high-performer” direction:
This aligns with broader industrial benchmarks showing lowest CPL for SEO and highest-intent conversion for PPC, while events remain costly but valuable for enterprise deals.
Steel & Metals marketing stacks are converging toward ERP-connected, account-based, proof-heavy systems. The differentiator isn’t which tools you buy—it’s whether they’re integrated tightly enough to surface live commercial value (inventory, lead times, carbon footprints) during the buyer’s self-serve journey.
1) CRM (system of record for accounts + buying groups)
Steel/metals best practice: CRM must model buying groups and plants/sites, not just contacts. A single OEM often has 5–20 sites with different spec needs.
2) Marketing Automation (lead + account orchestration)
Must-have workflows
3) Web/Portal + CPQ (conversion engine)
This is where Steel & Metals differs from most B2B sectors.
Why it matters: Buyers want rep-free evaluation early; portals reduce latency and protect margin in volatile cycles.
4) Analytics & Attribution
Sector-specific need: track account-level engagement, not just last-click leads, because specs often circulate internally for weeks.
Gaining share
Losing share
These integrations separate “marketing teams that publish” from “marketing teams that drive revenue.”
Highest-impact integrations
Creative in Steel & Metals is less about “brand storytelling” in the abstract and more about de-risking technical purchase decisions fast. What wins is proof-rich messaging that maps to the buying group: engineers, procurement, ops, and ESG.
Top-performing CTAs (by observed industrial B2B conversion patterns)
Hooks that consistently land
Messaging types that outperform
Even conservative buyers respond to visual proof, as long as it’s technical and grounded.
Formats gaining momentum
Steel & Metals has a few messaging lanes that are uniquely high-leverage:
Below are three standout “winning patterns” from 2024–2025 in Steel & Metals. Two are named public campaigns with disclosed outcomes; the third is a composite of publicly documented digital-portal rollouts in steel distribution, because many firms don’t publish full marketing metrics. I’m explicit about what’s real vs. directional.
What it is
A coordinated brand + product-level rollout for low-carbon steel options under the XCarb umbrella, tied to third-party standards and customer decarbonization goals. (corporate.arcelormittal.com, corporate.arcelormittal.com, Reuters)
Goals
Channel mix
Spend (publicly undisclosed)
Likely weighted toward PR/government affairs + ABM enablement rather than broad paid social.
Results
Why it worked
What it is
SSAB is scaling two sustainability product lines:
The marketing model is co-development + high-visibility partner pilots with OEMs and construction leaders. (SSAB, Future Steel Forum, SSAB, sms-group.com)
Goals
Channel mix
Spend (publicly undisclosed)
Primarily owned/earned media + partner amplification (lower paid media reliance).
Results (public)
Why it worked
What it is
Across service centers/distributors, 2024–2025 winners are launching ERP-connected quoting/ordering portals, often with CPQ and massive SKU/variant catalogs. Documented examples include Klöckner’s long-running digital transformation and newer portal builds across the sector. (Harvard Business School, IFB-HSG St. Gallen, PitchGrade, Google Cloud, Stella Source)
Goals
Channel mix
Spend (directional, based on industrial rollouts)
Results (publicly supported, not steel-wide quantified)
Why it worked
Steel & Metals benchmarks are best interpreted through a B2B industrial lens: long cycles, buying committees, high technical scrutiny, and a mix of spot buys + multi-year contracts. Public steel-specific KPI data is limited, so the values below use manufacturing/industrial B2B benchmarks as the closest proxy and are labeled accordingly.
Steel & metals marketers are operating in a tougher, faster, more regulated environment than even 2–3 years ago. The same forces creating headwinds (ad inflation, privacy, buyer self-serve) also create outsized upside for companies that modernize earlier.
Challenge
Sector-specific impact
Opportunity
Challenge
Sector-specific impact
Opportunity
Challenge
Opportunity
Challenge
Opportunity
These playbooks are structured by company maturity because Steel & Metals has very different marketing constraints at each stage (data availability, channel mix, sales motion, product commoditization). Recommendations below tie directly to earlier benchmarks: search + technical SEO + portal/automation outperform, while broad social and untargeted lead gen underperform.
Primary objective: win initial accounts fast in 1–2 segments.
Playbook
Targets
Primary objective: increase RFQ volume + shorten cycle time + land multi-site contracts.
Playbook
Targets
Primary objective: protect margin, expand share-of-wallet, and win ESG/transition-driven deals.
Playbook
Targets
Priority tests
Test design tip
Steel & Metals marketing is heading into a two-speed future: companies that digitize quoting, proof, and buying-group targeting will keep gaining share; laggards will feel ad inflation and margin pressure harder. The outlook below ties macro demand shifts (especially “green steel”) to the practical marketing moves that will matter most through 2026–2027.
1) Budgets will keep moving from “lead gen” to “commerce + first-party data.”
Industrial distribution e-commerce is growing quickly; e-commerce accounted for 13.4% of distributor revenue in 2024, up 38% since 2022 (shopping-cart definition), and the general direction is steady expansion of digital buying. (Industrial Supply Magazine, Distribution Strategy Group)
Forecast implication: marketing dollars will increasingly fund:
2) ABM + intent will become the default for large-deal steel selling.
Multiple B2B 2025 outlooks and ABM studies show a shift to AI-assisted ABM personalization and buying-group orchestration. (TECHADVISORPRO, Demandbase, EMARKETER)
Forecast implication:
3) AI adoption rises, but use cases narrow toward ROI-positive workflows.
A 2025 survey of B2B marketers shows 60% plan to increase spending on AI tools in 2025. (EMARKETER, Marketing AI Institute)
Meanwhile, broad marketing leadership surveys report strong perceived ROI from GenAI in personalization and productivity. (TechRadar)
Forecast implication for Steel & Metals:
AI use will concentrate on:
4) Privacy “whiplash” but first-party strategy stays the winner.
Google has softened its third-party cookie phase-out timeline, adding uncertainty. (CookieYes) Forecast implication: even if cookies linger longer, Steel & Metals still benefits more from:
Green / low-carbon steel demand will grow, but adoption speed varies by region and policy.
Marketing implication:
Expect two parallel value propositions in 2026:
Your marketing must support audit-ready proof (EPDs, recycled %, melt-origin, carbon intensity per SKU) and not just sustainability copy.
Trend A — “Portal as the primary channel.”
By 2026, top performers will treat portals/CPQ as the center of their funnel, not an accessory. This matches sector digital transformation momentum and accelerating e-commerce expectations. (Industrial Supply Magazine, Openmind Technologies, WifiTalents)
Trend B — Spec-first, zero-click SEO.
Search will increasingly be won by:
Trend C — Buying-group personalization.
AI-assisted ABM will shift from “nice to have” to baseline for enterprise deals. (TECHADVISORPRO, Demandbase, EMARKETER)
Trend D — Proof-embedded creative.
Creatives that contain specs, QA evidence, and carbon proof will outperform polished brand ads as committees demand faster de-risking.
Innovation Curve for the Sector
Below is the consolidated evidence base used across Sections 1–11. I’m prioritizing primary/industry-standard benchmarks and credible market/news outlets. Where sources are directional or vendor/secondary, I flag that.
Sector market size, demand, and sustainability
Digital adoption & commerce transformation
5. 2024 State of eCommerce in Distribution (Distribution Strategy Group survey) — best-available benchmark for industrial distributor ecommerce penetration and growth; used as proxy for metals distribution. (Distribution Strategy Group)
6. Industrial distribution ecommerce trends & CX expectations — supports the “portal/CPQ as channel” thesis. (Industrial Supply Magazine)
7. Steel-industry digital transformation adoption stats — directional evidence of rapid digital maturity in mills and service centers. Note: secondary compilation; used for trend direction, not precision. (WifiTalents, AIST)
Cross-industry industrial/B2B marketing benchmarks
8. Unbounce 2024 Conversion Benchmark Report (57M conversions) — basis for landing page conversion norms (median ~6.6%). (Unbounce, MarketingProfs, Unbounce)
9. LinkedIn B2B ad performance benchmarks (2024–2025) — directional CPM/CTR/CPL guardrails for ABM in industrial categories. (Tamarind's B2B House, chartis.io, Huble, tamonroe.com, adbacklog.com)
10. Email marketing open-rate benchmarks (B2B) — used to anchor retention-stage KPIs. (HubSpot Blog, Powered by Search)
Because Steel & Metals has limited public, steel-only marketing KPI datasets, I used a triangulated approach:
Limitations
Disclaimer: The information on this page is provided by Marketer.co for general informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, legal, tax, or professional advice, nor an offer or recommendation to buy or sell any security, instrument, or investment strategy. All content, including statistics, commentary, forecasts, and analyses, is generic in nature, may not be accurate, complete, or current, and should not be relied upon without consulting your own financial, legal, and tax advisers. Investing in financial services, fintech ventures, or related instruments involves significant risks—including market, liquidity, regulatory, business, and technology risks—and may result in the loss of principal. Marketer.co does not act as your broker, adviser, or fiduciary unless expressly agreed in writing, and assumes no liability for errors, omissions, or losses arising from use of this content. Any forward-looking statements are inherently uncertain and actual outcomes may differ materially. References or links to third-party sites and data are provided for convenience only and do not imply endorsement or responsibility. Access to this information may be restricted or prohibited in certain jurisdictions, and Marketer.co may modify or remove content at any time without notice.
Most businesses struggle because they’re playing the customer acquisition game with outdated tools. AI is completely changing the game by helping companies hit revenue goals they never thought possible. The wildest part is that most entrepreneurs barely scratch the surface of what AI can do. But when you plug AI into the five phases of your sales cycle – prospecting, qualifying, presenting, handling objections, and closing – your ability to attract customers multiplies.
This guide will walk you through exactly how AI can do most of the heavy lifting for your sales cycles that works harder than any full-time employee you’ve ever hired.
Most issues with generating customers can be traced back to a clogged or broken prospecting pipeline. Prospecting is basically a polite way to tap people on the shoulder and ask, “do you have this problem?” until they finally say, “yes, please help me.” The process is simple but it hasn’t been easily scalable until now.
AI makes it possible for you to offload the entire research and list building process to generate lists of high intent prospects who match the traits of your best customers. According to McKinsey, companies that use AI to grow their sales see up to 50% more leads and appointments. That’s pretty significant.
· Build a lead list based on your ideal customer profile. Most teams just guess at who their perfect customer is. AI tools – like Manus.ai – can analyze your existing customer base, identify shared traits, and match those attributes to thousands of similar prospects across your local area or even the entire world. By feeding AI examples of your best buyers, it will eliminate the guesswork and identify people who are most likely to buy.
· Identify the right decision maker. Sifting through LinkedIn profiles all night long isn’t efficient, but until now it’s been the only option. AI eliminates this work by pinpointing the person who makes buying decisions within each company. These are the CMOs, ops directors, founders, and anyone else who controls the bank account. AI can also pull full social profiles for each person so you can learn more about them before you perform outreach.
· Offload repetitive prospecting tasks. Once you teach your AI system what a qualified prospect looks like, it can repeat the work automatically thousands of times. You only need to get involved to review the final prospect list.
AI-powered prospecting frees you up to focus on sales calls, hiring, and strategy, all while the machine handles the grunt work that would otherwise drain your time and energy.
After AI gives you a good list of potential buyers, your next task is qualification. This is where many entrepreneurs make a huge mistake by assuming every prospect deserves a call. They don’t. Many sales reps report wasting up to 50% of their time on unqualified leads, and the constant rejection leads to low motivation and burnout. That’s exactly why high-performing teams use AI to filter out low-quality prospects before they ever get into the calendar system.
Start using AI to screen calls and block low-quality leads. For example, tools like YourAtlas.com call leads automatically and run a qualification script before anyone gets access to your calendar. It confirms key information, determines if the lead has the actual problem you solve, and only books those who meet your criteria.
Using AI to ask key questions about budget, team size, priorities, and pain points will help you filter out the unqualified and avoid curious “tire kickers.” The information can be stored directly in your CRM so your sales reps won’t have to jump into calls blindly.
The goal is to effectively eliminate an overloaded calendar and avoid wasting time on prospects who will never buy. The result is fewer calls, higher conversions, and a calendar full of quality prospects. Essentially, AI is like the bouncer for your sales process that prevents your time from being hijacked by people who were never going to buy in the first place.
Even the best salespeople can struggle to create customized pitches. But buyers respond to relevance, and proposals tailored to their exact pains, goals, and language can drastically increase conversions. And you can use AI to combine everything you know about a prospect and create a custom offer built just for them.
· Build a dedicated sales offer. Using an AI tool like ChatGPT, create a new project for each buyer and upload everything including your offer template, product details, CRM notes, scraped data, and transcripts from your pre-qualification process.
· Generate a custom proposal that speaks to their pain points. Use AI to analyze a buyer’s conversations, industry challenges, background, and stated goals. Ask it to produce a proposal that speaks right to their biggest fears and goals.
· Never send a proposal without a call. AI is a great tool for drafting a proposal, but you’ll still want to rely on human connection to close the deal. Reviewing a proposal with a prospect live makes it possible to handle objections, identify their hesitation, and get their commitment.
This is precisely how entrepreneurs are using AI to generate six-figure deals in a single conversation.
You probably know that people don’t buy features – they buy benefits, including the ability to avoid something unwanted. They want the transformation of disappearing pain and some kind of life improvement. AI can help you shift your messaging from a technical list of features toward benefits that emotionally resonate.
For example, if the feature is “automated reporting,” the benefit is “never spending hours pulling spreadsheets.” AI can rewrite your entire pitch in benefit-driven language. Then you can feed AI your customer’s frustrations and ask it to turn them into compelling value statements that hit harder than the generic marketing fluff everyone else is writing.
And once AI rewrites your benefits, you can transform the content into emails, outreach campaigns, landing pages, and call scripts so that everything aligns perfectly. Ultimately, AI helps you frame your offer as the most obvious solution because it articulates the buyer’s pain specifically.
Every potential customer has at least one objection. It’s completely normal, and sometimes those objections work against them when they actually need a product or service. But it’s just the way people work. Buyers need reassurance that they’re not making a mistake with their money. And that’s why AI can be a powerful private coach for practicing handling objections.
Top salespeople spend time practicing handling objections and while it’s nice to do it live with another person, that’s not always possible. AI tools – like ChatGPT – make it possible to practice anytime, not just when other people are available.
But AI can do more than just have a conversation with you. You can use it to analyze existing sales calls and identify missed opportunities. For example, you can upload call recordings and transcripts for AI to highlight hesitations, emotional cues, objections you didn’t catch, and opportunities where the buyer disengaged.
AI can create a list of common and potential objections specific to your product or service, and then provide you with questions you can use to guide a prospect toward a purchase. And of course, you can roleplay with AI to refine your delivery by asking AI to act as a skeptical buyer.
Remember that AI models become more accurate the more you train it, so training your chosen AI system on effective sales calls is crucial.
In addition to handling objections, it’s equally important to use AI to improve your overall sales scripts. Most scripts are built on assumptions but AI allows you to build scripts based on real buyer language, real objections, and real emotional triggers.
Start by training your AI system to analyze buyer language – the words buyers actually use during your conversations – to understand what’s driving them emotionally. Ask AI to identify buyer themes like urgency, fear, frustration, and hope. Then build your sales scripts around those motivations.
Next, ask AI to rewrite your questions to be shorter and more direct to cut out the fluff that bores prospects. Finally, ask AI to generate different versions of your script based on buyer personas. For example, you’ll want to use a slightly different script for founders, agencies, B2B teams, and local business owners. This is the ultimate key to persuasion.
Most sales are lost to incomplete or non-existent follow-up. Most deals require multiple follow-ups – sometimes up to five – but reps tend to stop after just one. AI eliminates the risk of inconsistency and ensures prospects don’t slip through the cracks.
Here’s how this works:
· Automate follow-up sequences based on buyer behavior. AI can detect when a buyer opened an email, clicked a link, or watched a video and then trigger the perfect follow-up.
· Personalize follow-ups with context from previous interactions. Since AI can read transcripts, it can reference details from a prior conversation to make messages feel more personal and not automated.
· Build a follow-up cadence that stays on top of the game. Whether it’s 10 minutes after a call or 10 months after a lead goes cold, AI can handle every touchpoint consistently.
With an AI-powered follow-up engine, your pipeline will stay warm and active long after human salespeople would have given up.
Buyers trust brands that feel authoritative and achieving that status often requires consistent education. AI can help you create educational content faster than your human team ever could. That’s good news because content marketing produces around three times more leads than outbound marketing. And when AI handles the heavy work, you can publish more content without skimping on quality.
You can use AI to create articles, videos, emails, and any other type of content from customer pain points. Feed your AI system your customer’s stated frustrations and then ask it to generate content that solves those problems clearly. This will draw in people with the same issues – issues your products and services solve.
From there, you can use AI to turn a single idea into content in a dozen different formats like LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, newsletters, email marketing, and more. Just upload your call transcripts and existing content and have AI extract a list of topics, insights, and questions that can be turned into fresh content. This creates a flywheel where prospects learn to trust you more while consuming your content, which means they’ll enter your sales funnel pre-sold.
Closing – or enrollment – is when the real relationship begins. AI can help you prepare for this by giving you scripts, objections, and onboarding assets that will increase a buyer’s confidence. Using AI at this point is quickly becoming a requirement rather than a luxury. In fact, 63% of sales leaders say AI makes it easier to compete in their industry, and when your competitors are using AI you can’t afford not to.
AI is a great tool for scripting your enrollment conversations with custom closing scripts based on buyer behavior, objections, priorities, and emotional triggers uncovered in earlier stages. It can create post-purchase onboarding content like welcome emails, checklists, intro videos, walkthroughs, and more. Using AI like this makes the closing process smoother and faster.
Retention is often overlooked but it’s a massive goldmine for customer acquisition. The longer someone stays with your company, the more they buy, and that increases their lifetime customer value. Companies that create an excellent customer experience tend to grow their revenues much faster than those who don’t. It’s not easy maintaining relationships with customers manually, and that’s why AI is the perfect tool for the job.
AI can be used to track customer progress, detect achievements, and remind you to celebrate them when they reach key milestones. AI can pull data from your CRM and past interactions to create personalized check-ins that feel thoughtful to your customers. AI can even recommend when to upsell, offer training, release new resources, or invite customers to exclusive experiences.
AI isn’t capable of replacing humanity, but it can multiply your efforts to make you more efficient in sales. The AI machine can automate parts of the sales process that would otherwise drain your energy, like research, qualification, note-taking, follow-up, scriptwriting, and analysis. This frees you up to lean into connecting deeper with your buyers.
When you use AI to manage repetitive work, you can show up better for your customers and close more sales. The companies that will excel and outperform competitors in the future will be the ones who know how to use AI to their advantage.
If you’re serious about turning AI into your most profitable marketing asset, our team is ready to take the wheel. We build AI-powered systems that attract better prospects, convert them faster, and keep them engaged long after the first sale. The brands winning right now are the ones using AI. Let’s make sure you’re one of them. Reach out to us today and let’s build your AI-powered marketing system.
Fashion & Apparel marketing in 2025 is being reshaped by three converging trends: acquisition strategy rebalancing, creator-first media, and value-plus-values consumer priorities.
Strategic meaning: This is a mature megamarket. Most brands can’t rely on category growth alone; they win by capturing share, expanding LTV, and differentiating through brand + community.
Strategic meaning: Expect incremental demand growth, not a boom. Marketing strategy must be built around efficiency + retention, not just top-of-funnel expansion.
Strategic meaning: Digital isn’t a channel—it’s the core operating environment for fashion demand creation.
Strategic meaning: Gains come from capability advantages:
Fashion brands are typically selling into three overlapping ICP clusters. The point isn’t to pick only one; it’s to align channel + message + offer to the dominant ICP per campaign.
Fashion journeys are non-linear and multi-surface. Think of it as “discover anywhere → validate socially → convert wherever it’s easiest.”
Typical journey paths
Key friction points (most common drop-offs)
Below is a fashion/apparel-specific channel efficacy view across ROI, cost, and reach. Benchmarks reflect 2024–2025 public data where available; in places where fashion-only numbers aren’t consistently published, I use retail/apparel proxy ranges and label them accordingly.
1) Best for efficient new customer acquisition
2) Best for growth in younger / trend-led cohorts
3) Best for margin + LTV
Fashion & Apparel martech stacks in 2025 are converging around three priorities: (1) first-party data control, (2) creator-led acquisition/creative supply, and (3) AI-accelerated content + personalization.
A) Commerce + data foundation
B) CRM + lifecycle automation
C) Customer Data Platforms / 1P identity
D) Creators / influencer + affiliate ops
E) Analytics + attribution
F) Creative / AI production
Gaining share
Losing share / under pressure
High-value integration patterns in fashion stacks
Fashion creative in 2025 is less about “polish” and more about proof, pace, and platform-native storytelling. The brands winning attention are producing more volume, closer to culture, with stronger fit/quality reassurance and values-with-benefits framing.
Highest-performing hook families (fashion-specific):
Fast fashion / trend DTC
Premium / contemporary
Luxury
Circular / resale-enabled brands
Below are three standout Fashion & Apparel campaigns from roughly the past year. I’m focusing on measurable outcomes and why the mechanics worked, not just creative vibes.
Goal
Channel mix
Spend (directional)
Results
Why it worked
Campaign Card (before/after)
Goal
Channel mix
Spend (directional)
Results
Why it worked
Campaign Card (before/after)
Goal
Channel mix
Spend (directional)
Results (category pattern)
Why it worked
Campaign Card (before/after)
Fashion & apparel funnels look deceptively simple—browse, like, buy—but performance benchmarks vary a ton by price tier, seasonality, and catalog breadth. The numbers below are 2024–2025 fashion/apparel or retail-proxy benchmarks with clear notes on scope.
Fashion & apparel marketing in 2025 is defined by cost pressure + signal loss + content velocity requirements—but those same constraints are creating clear advantage zones for brands that modernize their loop (creators → paid → owned → loyalty).
What’s happening
Why it matters
Opportunity
What’s happening
Why it matters
Opportunity
What’s happening
Why it matters
Opportunity
What’s happening
Why it matters
Opportunity
These recommendations are organized as playbooks by company maturity and grounded in the sector patterns we’ve discussed: rising paid costs, creator-led discovery, retail media growth, and the hard pivot to first-party data and AI-enabled creative velocity. (Netcore Cloud, Forbes, TikTok for Business, gotolstoy.com)
Primary objective: prove repeatable product-market-channel fit before scaling.
What to do
Budget bias (directional)
Primary objective: scale efficiently while stabilizing blended CAC.
What to do
Budget bias (directional)
Primary objective: protect margin and brand equity while expanding share.
What to do
Top experiments for 2025 fashion performance
Fashion & apparel marketing through 2026–2027 will be shaped by four forces: low-growth macro conditions, “shoppertainment” commerce surfaces, retail media scale, and AI-driven creative/personalization. The winners will be brands that can move fast, measure incrementally, and own first-party relationships. (McKinsey & Company, Nielsen, Reuters, WIRED)
1) Retail media becomes a top-3 spend line for many apparel brands
2) TikTok Shop is a real commerce channel, not just discovery
3) Paid social stays biggest, but shifts from “polished ads” to “creator systems”
4) Search/Shopping stays strong, but becomes more feed- and AI-dominated
Breakout 1: AI creative factories + digital twins
Breakout 2: “Shoppertainment” as a core funnel
Breakout 3: Zero-click search + social search
Breakout 4: Incrementality and media-mix modeling for mid-market brands
Breakout 5: Circularity-led retention
Market outlook & macro context
Retail media / commerce media
Social commerce / TikTok
Paid social benchmarks
Ecommerce conversion / retention benchmarks
Email / lifecycle benchmarks
Ad market & AI context
Disclaimer: The information on this page is provided by Marketer.co for general informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, legal, tax, or professional advice, nor an offer or recommendation to buy or sell any security, instrument, or investment strategy. All content, including statistics, commentary, forecasts, and analyses, is generic in nature, may not be accurate, complete, or current, and should not be relied upon without consulting your own financial, legal, and tax advisers. Investing in financial services, fintech ventures, or related instruments involves significant risks—including market, liquidity, regulatory, business, and technology risks—and may result in the loss of principal. Marketer.co does not act as your broker, adviser, or fiduciary unless expressly agreed in writing, and assumes no liability for errors, omissions, or losses arising from use of this content. Any forward-looking statements are inherently uncertain and actual outcomes may differ materially. References or links to third-party sites and data are provided for convenience only and do not imply endorsement or responsibility. Access to this information may be restricted or prohibited in certain jurisdictions, and Marketer.co may modify or remove content at any time without notice.
If you run a small business, you already know that your online reputation can make or break you. Before people call, visit, or submit a form, they usually check your Google Maps listing and read a few online reviews. A handful of glowing comments can boost your business’s reputation, while negative reviews, false reviews, and even fake Google reviews can scare away ideal customers.
The problem is that many business owners still don’t know which negative reviews they can actually remove, which ones they should respond to, and how to manage reviews across Google Maps and other platforms in a way that protects their online reputation.
In this article, you will receive a step by step guide that explores why Google reviews matter more than ever for conversions and local SEO rankings, what happens when you ignore negative reviews, how to generate reviews that build trust, and will walk you through when you can remove a review, when you should report inappropriate reviews, and how to flood your business profile with legitimate reviews that reflect the real customer experience. Let’s dive in.
Local SEO has changed drastically since Google’s early days. Today, Google’s local search algorithm is driven primarily by trust signals, and reviews are at the top of the list. Successful local SEO depends heavily on having an optimized Google My Business profile with plenty of reviews. Google places a heavy emphasis on the quantity and recency of reviews when determining local rankings. And while a few negative reviews won’t necessarily tank your visibility, they can deter potential customers.
Generating leads or customers from your business profile requires two steps: First, you need to show up in the local search results, and then you need people to click on your listing or call you directly. However, negative reviews and low star ratings can be a strong deterrent even when you rank at the top.
Business profiles show up at the top of Google’s local search results, which makes your Google listing even more important than your website. However, a lack of good reviews along with negative reviews can keep you buried.
Truth be told, Google reviews can make or break local rankings and conversions. When someone searches for “plumber near me,” Google will show businesses with the highest ratings, plenty of recent reviews, and active business profile activity. However, the algorithm is just one half of the equation. The other half is psychology.
Customers trust social proof, including reviews, more than copy on a website. According to research data, 32% of people trust Google Business reviews and listings over the content published to a business’ website. At the end of the day, potential customers rely on reviews to assess trust and credibility. A business with 4.6 stars looks significantly more trustworthy than one with 3.1 stars.
The bottom line is that you need good reviews to get search visibility, and once you rank, you need trust to get conversions. Star ratings have a psychological impact on whether or not a potential customer will convert. While negative reviews aren’t completely avoidable, they can be managed to mitigate the damage.
Both a lack of reviews and the presence of negative reviews can harm your business's reputation and erode trust. Unfortunately, sometimes one specific review can become the single point of focus that dissuades customers from doing business with you. However, the more positive, legitimate reviews you get, the less impactful one negative review becomes. This means you can mitigate the potential damage of negative reviews simply by making the effort to generate more positive reviews.
For example, say you’re running a local HVAC company and you haven’t been managing your reviews. You drop down to 2.9 stars, your call volume drops by 37%, and your main competitor picks up the slack. They’ve been managing their reviews, so they have over 250 reviews, 4.8 stars, and a 65%+ call-to-quote conversion rate. Their success isn’t because they had better prices or even better services. They just projected a more attractive online reputation that got customers to choose them.
Let’s be real. You can’t just delete a bad Google review unless the specific review violates Google rules. But that doesn’t mean you’re powerless. There are methods to manage and even remove Google reviews without too much of a hassle.
The first step is to assess the specific review to see if it contains policy violations. If a review breaks the rules, it should be easy to have it removed. Google will remove the review if it includes:
If a review violates these guidelines or otherwise violates Google’s policies, you can report inappropriate reviews from your business profile. Google will then issue a decision pending status before making a final decision.
When a bad review doesn’t qualify for review removal, you need to take a different approach. Respond to the review by acknowledging the customer’s frustration, but without admitting fault. Offer to resolve their issue offline. For example, you might write the following:
“We’re sorry to hear about your customer experience, Sam. This doesn’t reflect our usual company standards. Please contact us at [contact info] so we can make it right.”
In many cases, this opens the door for you to turn one star reviews into five star reviews. Believe it or not, it happens frequently because people appreciate being taken care of and companies that make things right earn big trust.
Reaching out to people who leave negative reviews also shows other prospects that you’re professional and responsive, and it boosts your online reputation dramatically.
The fastest way to neutralize negative reviews is to generate as many positive and legitimate reviews as possible. It’s similar to SEO, where you can rank better content to push less-than-ideal content lower in the rankings. The further back a bad review gets pushed, the less relevant it will seem to your prospects.
Google weighs:
The good news is that it's easy to get positive reviews when you have a strategy. Encouraging satisfied customers to leave their own review naturally suppresses negative reviews and helps balance your business profile.
The biggest mistake you can make when managing your Google reviews is not asking for reviews. Most people won’t remember, even after telling you they will give you a 5-star review. People need to be gently reminded and walked through the process. Thankfully, there are several ways to not only generate more reviews, but to maximize the positive ones.
Part of managing your Google reviews requires generating reviews. If you leave it up to customers to remember, you’ll only get a small fraction of the reviews you can get with a proactive approach.
It’s important to request a review right after a positive customer experience. This way, the experience with your business will be fresh in your customer’s mind, and they’ll be more likely to share a positive experience. Don’t wait until their enthusiasm fades. Here are some tips for getting reviews while the experience is still fresh:
Get a QR code that takes people directly to the URL where they can leave you a review on Google. If you work in the field where you visit people’s homes, print the QR code and place it in an acrylic sign holder and bring it with you to each job site. This works great for plumbers, roofers, electricians, and general contractors.
If you have a physical location or office, you can place the QR code in an acrylic holder on various counters or right at your desk if you deal with customers directly.
Another method is to send out automated email marketing or SMS messages with direct links after a service has been performed, or a few days after a purchase to give the customer time to experience the product.
If you have employees, teach them to confidently ask customers, “would you mind sharing your experience with us on Google?” You’ll get plenty of reviews this way.
Sometimes leaving reviews seems simple, but customers may not want to go through all the steps. You can reduce the friction by making it as easy as possible.
Don’t make customers search for your business profile. Provide direct links to review pages.
Provide step-by-step instructions. It may only consist of three simple steps, but spell it out.
Remember not to offer any kind of incentive (monetary or not) for leaving a review, altering a review, or deleting a negative review. Doing so is a violation of Google’s terms and can cause Google to remove reviews, penalize your local search rankings, and even suspend or remove your Google Business Profile entirely.
A crucial part of managing Google reviews involves responding to every single review. This shows customers and prospects that you’re listening, and that will help you build trust, which strengthens your online reputation.
It’s best practice to thank customers for positive reviews using their name and highlight a specific detail they mentioned in their review. For example, you could write, “Thanks for the great review, Sarah! We’re so happy to know you enjoyed our cookies over the holiday season.”
If no details were given, writing a general message is good enough as long as it sounds sincere.
When responding to negative reviews, be professional and polite. Acknowledge the issue and offer to resolve it offline by asking the customer to contact you. This will show prospects that you’re accountable and willing to resolve issues. A bad review handled correctly can build even more trust than a 5-star review.
On the back end, turn bad reviews into opportunities to improve your services. If you keep getting similar complaints, take that as a sign to revisit your products or services and see if you can make some changes to meet customer expectations.
It’s not enough to just collect customer reviews. You need to make sure the world can see them even when they aren’t searching for you in Google. You can embed your Google reviews on your website using a review widget, like the ones offered by other review sites and other platforms like EmbedSocial, Tagbox, or Trustmary. These widgets will integrate reviews seamlessly and can be customized to match your website’s color scheme. It also helps to share screenshots of your reviews on your social media accounts.
You can also boost trust in Google’s search results by getting your star ratings to show up under your search result listings. This is done by embedding schema markup on your pages.
Last, start collecting video testimonials from satisfied customers and embed them on your website for people to watch. Written reviews are good, but video testimonials pull more weight. A whopping 72% of customers trust a brand more when they have positive video testimonials and reviews.
Now that you know how to remove and suppress bad reviews along with how to generate positive reviews, make sure you monitor monitor negative feedback, recurring issues, or any deceptive content. This helps you improve customer experience and your business's reputation.
It also helps to use tools to track and analyze customer sentiment so you can get a better idea of what people are saying and how they feel about your brand. From there, you can adjust your business strategy as needed to improve customer satisfaction and boost your revenue.
At the end of the day, your Google reviews are doing one of two things: fueling business growth, trust, and visibility, or lighting a fire that is slowly burning your credibility.
Local SEO is no longer about who has the most backlinks or the best keywords. It’s about having customers who trust you, and positive reviews are the clearest signal of trust you can get. The businesses winning the most traffic, leads, and conversions aren’t always the best in their industry, but they appear more trustworthy. Negative reviews, inappropriate reviews, and fake reviews must be addressed quickly to protect your business profile.
If you want a high level of trust when customers search for your services, here’s what you need to do:
Local SEO lives and dies by Google reviews. And the truth is, every day you delay is a day your competitors get ahead. If managing your business profile, handling policy violations, or filing a removal request, feels overwhelming, or you just don’t have the time, we can help.
At Marketer.co, we help local businesses turn their Google reviews into a clear advantage. If you want more visibility, more 5-star reviews, and more leads, contact our digital marketing agency right now. We’ll help you build an online reputation that gets results.
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The broad strokes of search engine optimization (SEO) are relatively easy to understand, even for lay people. Even if you’re new to search engine optimization, the core idea is simple: match your pages to what people actually want to find. At its simplest, an effective SEO strategy is about helping users and search engines find the best, most useful answers.
Google search and other search engines want to reward high quality content, and they want to provide users with relevant pages matched to their search intent. Your goal is to show up more often in Google search for the terms that matter most.
Accordingly, good, relevant page content makes it to the top of search engine results pages and earns visibility in competitive search results.
If you want to achieve the highest search engine rankings possible within your domain, you'll need to consistently create content for your target audience. You'll also need to support that content creation with a host of different SEO strategies, including on page SEO, technical SEO, and link building from other websites.
But in today's hypercompetitive online marketing environment, the fundamentals alone aren't enough to guarantee SEO success. In modern digital marketing, content isn’t competing only on quality — it’s competing on polish. Instead, if you want any page of your website to dominate the competition and rise to the top of the search engine results and SERPs, you’ll need to incorporate SEO tuning — a more precise form of SEO optimization.
But what exactly is SEO tuning, how is it so reliable, and how do you practice it for your internal pages?
We hope to answer all your questions and more in this guide.
SEO tuning is a specific set of strategies in the umbrella of search engine optimization focused on polishing pages that already perform well. Think of it as an advanced blend of page SEO, page optimization, and technical SEO fixes that strengthens your ranking signals without rewriting everything from scratch..
These strategies are designed to help you fine-tune and polish an existing page, ultimately supporting it in terms of its ranking potential and relevance for your target keywords.
Chances are, if you've been operating a website for some time, you have lots of strong pieces of content that need just a little bit of extra help to reach the upper echelons of the SERPs and become top ranking pages.
The strategies in SEO tuning include things like cutting ineffective content, including more relevant keywords, improving keyword placement, minimizing keyword cannibalization, fixing broken links, and fixing small technical SEO issues.
Additionally, SEO tuning calls your attention to specific ranking factors and qualities of your page, so that you can maximize its likelihood of ranking highly for relevant queries. These include things like:
Note that SEO tuning isn't about creating new pages, nor is it about completely overhauling existing pages. Instead, it's about taking solid, reliable pages on your website and fixing the little issues that might be holding them back.
You can think about it as taking a page that ranks as a B or B+ and moving it to an A or A+.
Why does SEO tuning work?
For starters, SEO tuning can help you with the following:
It's also important to recognize the current landscape of SEO.
These days, the SEO field is incredibly competitive, even for relatively obscure fields and niches. Between rising competition and AI driven search results (and other answer engines), search visibility is harder to win. Many teams now use AI tools to scale audits and surface quick-win tuning opportunities. Because search engine optimization is constantly evolving, pages that aren’t tuned can slip even if they used to rank well.
Even if you have a piece of great content on your website, there are probably a dozen other websites that offer content of similar relevance and quality. If you want to reach page one, or even rank one for a given keyword phrase or query, it's imperative that your page is as polished as possible.
At the highest levels, even small improvements to on-page SEO and technical performance can lead to measurable gains in search rankings.
On top of that, companies that heavily invest in SEO often suffer from redundancy and pages that overlap in their pursuit of goals. SEO tuning provides you with an opportunity to separate your strategic targets, remain focused on your most important objectives, and protect your SEO efforts from overlap.
How do you tune a page for SEO?
The easy answer is to work with the team of SEO experts, like those of us here at Marketer.co. We can help you identify the most valuable pages of your website, brainstorm about strategically valuable keyword targets, and ultimately conduct analyses that lead us to the best SEO tuning strategies for each page.
But if you choose to do the work on your own, you need to keep the following concepts in mind:
Treat tuning as a repeatable part of your broader SEO strategy, not a one-off task.
Everything starts with an SEO tuning audit. Essentially, this phase is about identifying potential page targets of your website and evaluating them in terms of SEO performance. There are SEO tuning software tools available to help you do this; these will often provide you with specific recommendations, based on the content of your website.
However, it's also possible to conduct this audit on your own.
Start with your tools:
When evaluating pages of your website, look at:
Once you have a list of valuable page targets, take a look at the following:
Once you have a full analysis in place for a given page, you'll be able to devise a plan for how to make changes to it. If you're working with SEO consultants, or if you've used an SEO tuning tool, you'll likely have specific recommendations to work with. Otherwise, you'll need to brainstorm solutions on your own. Depending on the current status and position of your page, there are probably many things you can do.
The process of applying these changes can be somewhat tedious and repetitive, but remember that every tweak inches you closer to SEO ranking perfection.
Many people think SEO tuning is all about adding new, better content. But in many cases, the stronger move is to surgically remove things that aren't working.
For example:
Also scan for grammatical and spelling errors. They hurt trust and readability.
Once you remove everything compromising your SEO ranking potential, you can focus on tweaking what already exists and adding more.
Pay especially close attention to the following:
The final step is to measure and analyze your results. Keep in mind that Google’s index updates only periodically, and it may take several weeks or months before your changes take full effect.
After tuning, monitor impressions, clicks, and average position in Google search console. Track changes in click through rates alongside rankings to verify real improvement. Log your content fresh updates so you can compare performance before and after — especially for pages tied to a specific query set.
If results don’t improve, analyze why and consider another tuning round.
So the solution is to tune your pages for SEO as much as humanly possible, right?
Not necessarily. There's such a thing as “too much of a good thing” in most areas of life, and SEO tuning is no different. Because SEO is constantly evolving, what works today can become risky if pushed too hard tomorrow.
Google doesn't want pages that are tuned to technical perfection, necessarily; it also wants authentic, user-centric content. If it becomes clear that you're artificially manipulating your rankings, or if your content becomes so tuned that it reads as robotic or mechanical, it could end up hurting you more than helping you.
These are just some examples of how:
These tips and strategies can prevent you from overtuning your articles for SEO:
Follow best practices and avoid keyword stuffing by keeping keyword placement natural.
We’ve helped a wide range of clients achieve next-level SEO results, and one of the best tools in our arsenal is SEO tuning.
Here are a few of the best success stories we have to offer:
Across campaigns, gains often come from pairing on page SEO tuning with off page SEO support like link building, guest posting, and earning authoritative backlinks. That combination builds page authority, strengthens your site’s authority, and increases your website’s visibility — especially for high-intent service and local SEO pages.
Promotion matters too. Sharing tuned pages via social media can attract early engagement and natural backlinks. In practice, social media amplification helps your best pages get discovered faster, supporting long-term SEO success in competitive markets.
SEO tuning is hard. If you have hundreds of pages to optimize for, it’s even harder. That’s why we make every effort to help our clients navigate this space – and tune their pages for ranking perfection. If you’re interested in a free SEO tuning audit, or if you need help executing the finer directives of your SEO strategy as a white label SEO reseller, contact us for a free consultation today!
So, you've finally decided to take the plunge.
Or maybe you're just curious about learning more about the platform.
Either way, you know that TikTok marketing has massive potential as a marketing strategy for modern brands.
But how exactly does marketing on TikTok actually work?
Is this the right marketing tactic for every business?
And how do you utilize TikTok to drive engagement, increase brand awareness, and boost sales?
This guide to TikTok will walk you through everything you need to know, from account setup and content creation to organic reach, paid ads, and influencer marketing.
TikTok is a social media network that focuses on highly shareable, engageable short form videos.
Users can create videos from scratch or modify existing videos, then share those videos with their friends and followers. Creators and brands can publish TikTok videos from scratch or modify existing ones using editing features built in, such as filters, captions, sound effects, slow motion transitions, and trending audio. The platform allows for videos of up to 10 minutes, but most people on the platform focus on making much shorter, punchier videos. TikTok users are much more likely to engage with a video that's less than a minute long, so most creators prioritize this.
TikTok marketing is a marketing strategy designed to take advantage of this social platform to promote products, services, and brand values through engaging content, influencer collaborations, paid ads, and community building.
Much like other social media strategies, you can use organic posting to build a following and nurture your biggest fans. You can also use paid advertising to reach new people and cut out the messy middle work. Unlike other social media channels, TikTok’s unique format rewards creativity, relatability, and consistency over polish. That makes it a powerful tool for brands willing to create fun, relevant content tailored to TikTok’s audience, especially younger audiences.
TikTok marketing isn't guaranteed to be effective, and it's not the best medium for every brand. However, there's enormous potential here – and with the right strategies, you can greatly amplify your overall marketing reach.
Not convinced that TikTok fits into your overall social media marketing plan?
Let’s take a look at some of the statistics:
As you can see, TikTok is an extraordinarily popular app, and it seems to be growing in popularity with each passing year. At the same time, a tiny minority of marketers are currently using TikTok, representing a potential competitive advantage for you.
One important thing to note is that TikTok is disproportionately favored by young people. The user base of TikTok skews very young, and older adults are more likely to have negative feelings about the app.
TikTok excels at content discovery, organic reach, and building highly engaged audiences. Compared to other social media platforms, brands can reach a broader audience faster — even with one video.
Keep this in mind; if you're not interested in appealing to children and teenagers, this strategy may not be viable for you. Or at the very least, you'll probably find better results with other social media apps and mediums. Brands targeting older demographics may see better performance on other platforms or other social media platforms entirely. TikTok should be treated as one marketing tactic within a larger, well-rounded marketing strategy.
Creating a TikTok business account is easy represents an essential business account step for brands getting started. After creating a normal account, go into your account settings, select “Manage account,” then choose “Switch to Business Account.
”From here, you'll be able to create and post videos to your business account and leverage the power of TikTok Ads Manager.
A TikTok business account provides more control, access to TikTok analytics, performance metrics, ad formats, and promotional tools like TikTok Promote. This setup allows social media managers to measure results, refine their own strategy, and optimize for optimal performance.
How do you create TikTok videos? The app allows you to make novel modifications to videos, like using video editing tools, adding stickers, sound effects, specific lines of dialogue, filters, and tons of other special features. When creating a video, you'll have the option of pulling in a video saved on your phone or filming a new one from scratch.
Either way, once you have a video captured, you can modify it as you see fit. The app is designed to be simple and intuitive, so you should have no trouble experimenting with some of the interesting and dynamic effects available to you. Additionally, new effects are being added all the time, so there's always new material and popular trends to explore. To create engaging content, focus on storytelling, pacing, and creative flexibility. Even lightly TikTok edited videos often outperform overproduced ads.
Once you're done editing, you can review the video and post it to your TikTok business account. If you need further help creating videos for the first time, TikTok has some excellent guides worth reading.
The biggest decision you'll make in TikTok marketing is deciding whether to pursue organic marketing or paid advertising.
A successful TikTok marketing strategy typically balances organic growth with paid promotion.
TikTok organic marketing is all about trying to reach people naturally through the TikTok algorithm by creating content as if you were an average TikTok user. You'll create videos on a regular basis, share them with your followers, reach out to new people, and eventually build a following. From there, you can create videos on any topic and rest assured that your content will reach a large chunk of your audience.
TikTok makes it easier than most social media platforms for your content to reach new people, since it algorithmically chooses content to display in a section called “For You.” In this section, users can review carefully curated videos that match their interests and personality.
Once your content starts to become successful, you'll start showing up in “For You” sections of regular users, introducing them to your brand and potentially drawing them into your audience.
These videos are selected based on a number of criteria determined by TikTok, including:
Organic marketing is effective because it generates natural, genuine interest in your brand and its products. However, it can also be difficult, inconsistent, and unreliable.
Even if you make amazing content, there's no guarantee it's going to reach the people you want, and no matter how engaging you are, your content will never reach 100 percent of your following. On top of that, it usually takes months, if not years to build up a strong following.
That's why many TikTok marketers turn to the world of paid advertising as an alternative.
If you have any experience with bidding on ads in Google Ads or a similar platform, TikTok Ads Manager is going to look familiar to you. The ads manager utilizes a bidding system, allowing different brands to competitively bid on ad placements.
Paid advertising allows brands to scale faster through structured advertising efforts and different ad formats, including:
Additionally, you can bid in a number of different ways:
Compared to organic marketing, paid advertising on TikTok is a practical guarantee of results; if you pay money for ads, you'll get a specific number of impressions, views, or clicks in return. Paid ads help drive sales, support lead generation, and expand reach to a wider audience, though they work best when paired with organic, relevant content. It's also much faster and easier to scale, as long as you have the budget to do it. However, users may not be willing to engage with ads as much as organic content, and the strategy can be expensive for some users.
If you’re familiar with content marketing in general, you already know some of the most important fundamentals that will lead you to success in organic TikTok marketing. But here are some additional tips that can help you build a successful TikTok marketing strategy:
These tips can help you find more success with a paid TikTok advertising strategy:
If you can't stand the idea of learning yet another new social media platform, or if you just feel overwhelmed at the thought of marketing on TikTok, your best course of action is to work with a marketing agency.
Your marketing agency can help you with every step of the process, from content creation and influencer marketing, TikTok Shop, helping you set campaign goals, helping you film and edit successful videos for distribution.
An experienced agency can help brands utilize TikTok effectively while integrating it into a broader marketing strategy across social media channels and other channels.
If you're interested in learning more about how a TikTok marketing agency can help you, or if you're ready for a free quote, contact us today!
Social media marketing depends on content as a type of fuel to drive interactions and increase follower counts across social media channels. While social-exclusive, text-based posts can be effective, especially when made regularly, the true anchors to your social media campaign are the heavy-hitting pieces of social media content that you circulate on your chosen platforms.
Unfortunately, it’s not enough to simply post random bits of social content and hope for the best. Your content must be high-quality, it must be developed specifically for your target audience, and it must be appropriate for your chosen medium. The best approach is to organize your social media content categories into a few reliable content pillars that reflect your company culture, brand identity, brand values, and the brand stand you take in your market. With a clear social media strategy and a simple content calendar, you can create content for different platforms that your audience cares about, grab attention quickly, and foster trust through meaningful connections. Some types of content simply fare better than others in the social world, and these seven types of content tend to fare the best:
And, by extension, how-to content or instructional types of posts. Listicles are powerful for a reason; they are always concise and typically short, and they offer practical information in a familiar and easily scannable format. The result is a piece that any reader can quickly peruse for as much or as little information as they want—and because the headline usually contains a number or another indication of its formatting, it’s an attention-grabbing title in the sea of social media posts. While listicles are sometimes frowned upon as an “inferior” type of content compared to a longer article or whitepaper, they’re essential fodder for growing a social media following from the ground up.
Listicles can also serve as the foundation for creating more engaging posts by incorporating visual content or interactive content such as polls or quizzes that answer questions and spark conversations. Content marketers and social media marketing teams alike can easily adapt listicles into valuable social media content for blog posts, turning them into carousel posts with multiple images, or breaking them into a single post series with compelling captions and a strong hook. This is a great example of educational content that simplifies complex ideas for a broad audience, and it’s a must have format for most platforms.
This type of content is typically written but is much more involved than the typical listicle. Rather than consolidating lots of general information into a digestible, easy-to-read format, this content is all about breaking new ground with new data, new metrics, or new insights. For most companies, this means digging deep with some original research and publishing the results. You’ll spend more time and more money developing these types of pieces and you won’t generate as much attention as you will with a listicle, but the attention you do generate will be far stronger, and you’ll earn a much greater reputation for it in the long run. Use both in balance throughout your campaign.
Research posts are also a powerful thought leadership play. Sharing in depth findings and valuable information builds credibility, drives engagement, and helps build trust with potential customers and existing customers alike. When you translate insights into relevant content, you can generate awareness, increase engagement, and reach new audiences throughout the buyer’s journey—often leading to more leads over time.
Infographics have long been a favorite in the SEO community, and for good reason. Infographics take original research and insights and condense them into an aesthetically pleasing, easily navigable graphic image. Infographics are shared more than almost any other type of social media content, giving your brand extra visibility and brand visibility on social media.
In addition, infographics tend to attract a ton of inbound links as other external sources cite your information, so your domain authority—and your search ranks—will increase as a result. The one downside to infographics is the amount of time and/or money they take to produce, so use them sparingly.
Infographics also perform exceptionally well on social media platforms, as social media users are more likely to engage with visual storytelling. Incorporating infographics into your content marketing strategy can complement your blog content and written content, offering a dynamic way to communicate key information. They’re also ideal to repurpose blog content into multiple types of content formats for other platforms.
For many companies, videos seem like an intimidating challenge that requires a dedicated expert or technical equipment. In actuality, videos don’t have to be professionally produced in order to have a great impact. Something simple, like a video recording of a speaking event your CEO attended, can carry just as much weight as something more complicated you spent weeks trying to film and produce. Share these short form videos when you can, but try to keep them on the short side—people tend to watch and share shorter videos more often than those longer than five minutes or so.
Short form videos are a secret sauce in social media marketing today because they capture attention fast and often earn the most engagement. Try instagram videos, instagram stories, or youtube shorts, and experiment with trending audio and trending topics pulled from google trends. A quick product tutorial, explainer videos, or behind the scenes clip that highlights product features can increase engagement, boost engagement rate, and pull in new followers. A successful content strategy should incorporate videos not only on social media but also on your web pages to encourage user interaction and boost visibility.
When you want to dive deeper, long form videos and long form video content (like full youtube videos) let you go in depth on complex ideas, customer questions, and detailed demos. Using both short form videos and long form videos gives you multiple types of video content for many platforms.
Interviews are great pieces of content for a number of reasons, but there’s one quality that makes them perfect for social media sharing: the fact that there are two authorities involved. As the interviewer, you’ll be seen as an authority and you’ll be able to share the material with your own followers.
The great advantage here is that your interviewee will also be seen as an authority, and they will be highly likely to share the interview with their own network of followers, greatly increasing the cumulative impact of the share. Audio and video formats work best, but make sure to include a written transcript on your site.
Interviews with thought leaders also create meaningful connections and can be repackaged into content formats like quote graphics, text based posts, or live streams. Even one strong single post clip can increase engagement and audience engagement across social media channels.
News events tend to attract a lot of attention, as your followers are always hungry for new information. Industry updates are a perfect opportunity for this—simply share an article (yours or someone else’s) and include your own commentary on it. Start a discussion and get the community involved. You can also do the same with any company news you might have to offer, such as the launch of a new product or the hiring of a new employee.
Sharing industry updates alongside your own brand content helps reinforce your brand identity and brand values. Watch trending topics so you can post timely, relevant content that grabs attention and sparks conversations on most platforms.
Social media platforms serve as a gateway into other people’s realities, and real-time event updates make great use of this functionality. While you’re attending a local event, tradeshow, or conference, post regular images and updates as the event rolls on—and include the event’s hashtag if you can. Your followers will love the first-person perspective, and if they happen to be attending the event, you’ll earn extra attention and credibility.
Real-time coverage also works for upcoming events, live events, live videos, and even live shopping. Consider adding a question box during the event to encourage interactive content, answer questions on the fly, and build trust with real customers.
Beyond these seven anchors, don’t ignore user generated content. Customer stories, customer testimonials, and positive reviews from happy customers provide instant social proof, help build trust, and are proven strategies for small business growth. Featuring real customers also signals your company culture and builds credibility, which can raise social media engagement.
Seasonal content around social media holidays is another easy win. Pair it with influencer marketing or influencer collaborations to reach a wider audience and potential customers on different platforms. If your goal is to capture leads, link your best social posts to a landing page and use shoppable content to guide viewers toward product discovery.
Incorporate all seven of these types of social media content updates into your social media marketing campaign, no matter which platforms you use or which industry you belong to. Of course, the actual content you choose to create within these broad categories must be based on what your audience actually wants to read or view.
Performing some initial market and competitive research should help you start with solid new ideas, but remember to adjust your content creation and social media strategy over time as you learn more about how your social media content impacts your social media engagement and brand visibility.
The Oil & Gas Services sector is entering a phase of moderate market growth combined with rapid digital adoption. While the overall oilfield services market is projected to grow from ~$311.6B in 2024 to ~$585B by 2034 (CAGR ~6.5%), the marketing landscape is changing even faster due to:
Digital transformation initiatives in oil & gas are forecast to grow at ~11.6% CAGR through 2030, and this is reflected in marketing budgets shifting steadily toward digital channels.
Marketing teams are moving from legacy trade-show–centric motions to hybrid digital sales models:
Growing Tactics
Declining Tactics
These benchmarks combine industry reports and cross-B2B industrial data:
Longer sales cycles (3–18 months), complex procurement pathways, and multi-stakeholder signoffs mean that multi-touch attribution and nurture sequences outperform one-shot lead-gen campaigns.
The Oil & Gas Services market represents a major global industrial vertical supplying exploration, drilling, completion, production, maintenance, and digital optimisation services to upstream and midstream operators. Key market size estimates include:
The TAM is large, highly capital-intensive, and increasingly dependent on digital technology and operational efficiency innovations—both of which influence marketing priorities.
Short-term growth drivers (1–3 years):
Long-term growth drivers (5–10 years):
Growth metrics:
The split indicates that while core services grow steadily, digital-led services are expanding significantly faster, reshaping what customers expect from service providers.
Oil & Gas historically lagged behind other heavy industries in digital adoption, but this gap is narrowing quickly:
This shift impacts marketing by increasing demand for:
Verdict: The Oil & Gas Services sector is in the “maturing” phase of marketing evolution.
Evidence:
Implications for marketing teams:
The Oil & Gas Services sector sells into complex technical organizations with long buying cycles. Typical ICP segments include:
Oil & Gas Services buying cycles are long, multi-touch, and committee-based. Marketing must support every stage.
Buyers begin by researching solutions to operational problems (e.g., “pump optimization,” “digital twin for offshore assets”).
They engage with:
Key behaviors:
Offline elements:
Retention and upsell are crucial because service contracts often renew annually or span multiple years.
Technical buyers now expect:
Generic “we offer X services” no longer works. Buyers expect:
Buyers increasingly demand:
Driven by global regulation, buyers look for service providers who:
Oil & Gas is catching up to other industries:
The Oil & Gas Services sector relies on high-intent technical buyers, long sales cycles, and multi-stakeholder procurement. As a result, channel performance varies widely by audience, region, and service complexity. Below is a breakdown of the major marketing channels—with indicative benchmarks, data-driven insights, and recommendations.
Notes:
SEO is disproportionately powerful in O&G due to the sector’s reliance on technical research.
Despite rising digital adoption, offline channels remain essential.
Because deals are complex and long-cycle, a single channel rarely wins alone.
Firms with integrated analytics (CRM + marketing automation) outperform by understanding touchpoint ROI.
The Oil & Gas Services sector has historically lagged behind other B2B industries in marketing technology adoption, but this has shifted sharply as operators demand more data transparency, digital workflows, and evidence-driven performance metrics. Below is a breakdown of the tools most widely adopted, emerging, and declining in relevance.
These tools fail because they don’t support multi-stakeholder decision-making or operational data integration.
Driving better attribution and multi-touch visibility.
Connecting marketing KPIs with real service outcomes:
This enables service providers to show direct operational ROI in sales cycles.
Intent data + account scoring now influences outbound and inbound sequencing.
Marketing in the Oil & Gas Services sector is evolving quickly as buyers demand technical clarity, operational proof, and digital experiences that support evaluation long before a sales conversation begins. This section outlines the most effective creative formats, message angles, CTAs, and hooks used across the industry.
The strongest-performing content consistently ties services to measurable operational outcomes.
High-performing proof points include:
Buyers—especially engineers and operations leaders—respond to messaging that is specific, quantifiable, and verifiable.
Service providers that highlight reliability tend to outperform brand-focused messaging.
Examples:
Regulatory and ESG pressures shape purchasing decisions.
Effective themes include:
Buyers want service providers who help them meet both regulatory and stakeholder expectations.
Digital twin content, predictive maintenance messaging, and IoT platforms are strong value propositions in the sector.
High-performing hooks:
Example Topics:
A single slide or carousel post showing a before/after metric.
These outperform long case studies because they communicate ROI instantly.
Example Format:
Using tools like Power BI, embedded dashboards allow buyers to preview operational data.
Applications:
These assets differentiate your brand because they replicate real work environments.
In Oil & Gas Services, real footage from rigs, sites, or control rooms performs better than polished, overly branded videos.
This form builds immediate trust.
Typically paired with dashboards or diagrams:
These formats are especially strong for complex services that benefit from rapid visual explanation.
Oil & Gas Services marketing campaigns that perform best share three traits:
(1) evidence-based messaging,
(2) multi-channel orchestration, and
(3) strong alignment between marketing, engineering, and sales.
Below are three standout campaign examples from the past 12 months—including results adapted from industry benchmarks and real-world B2B performance norms.
Objective: Drive demo requests and technical evaluations for a new predictive analytics system used in upstream operations.
Objective: Position a services firm as a leading provider of methane leak detection and emissions reporting solutions.
Objective: Increase job applications for field technicians in a competitive labor environment.
The Oil & Gas Services sector relies on long, multi-stakeholder buying cycles. As a result, marketing KPIs must reflect progressive movement through the funnel, not instant conversions. Benchmarks below represent realistic performance for engineered services, digital solutions, and industrial field support offerings.
Used to measure market exposure and top-of-funnel reach.
Indicate shifts from awareness to active evaluation.
Measure meaningful lead qualification and pipeline movement.
Critical for service contracts, SaaS + digital tools, and long-term field services.
Indicate customer satisfaction and expansion potential.
The Oil & Gas Services sector faces unique marketing challenges shaped by market volatility, regulatory pressure, digital transformation, and long, multi-stakeholder sales cycles. But these constraints also open new opportunities to differentiate through data, digital content, and precision targeting.
Below is a breakdown of the most important challenges and corresponding opportunities.
Impact:
Higher acquisition costs, reduced efficiency for cold audiences, and more pressure to optimize content depth.
Impact:
In O&G, a single deal can require:
Impact:
Impact:
Brands relying only on organic content suffer diminishing returns unless they invest in:
Marketing teams often depend heavily on:
Impact:
Slow campaign cycles and restricted content velocity.
AI enables:
Opportunity:
Create role-specific, basin-specific, and asset-specific content at scale.
Operators now expect:
Opportunity:
Brands that visually explain digital capabilities outperform generic messages by 2–5× CTR.
With privacy changes, companies are shifting to:
Opportunity:
Higher-quality leads and better multi-touch attribution.
With tightening methane, emissions, and HSE regulations:
Opportunity:
Clear ESG value props accelerate deal velocity.
O&G firms can now target:
Opportunity:
ABM yields 20–60% higher opportunity rates compared to generic B2B targeting.
Opportunity:
Content that replicates real operations builds trust faster than brand messaging.
This section turns the prior analysis into practical playbooks you can execute—sorted by company maturity, with clear guidance on channels, content formats, and retention/LTV strategy.
Context: Limited brand awareness, narrow budgets, differentiated tech or niche service (e.g., a specialized monitoring solution or basin-specific intervention service).
Primary Objectives
Recommended Moves
Context: Established references, decent pipeline, but inconsistent marketing. Some digital presence, but patchy attribution and content.
Primary Objectives
Recommended Moves
Context: Brand known, complex portfolios, global footprint, many internal silos.
Primary Objectives
Recommended Moves
Prioritize formats that make the invisible visible (data, subsurface processes, remote ops).
Retention and expansion are where Oil & Gas Services make their real money.
Track:
Use this to trigger proactive outreach before renewals.
The Oil & Gas Services sector is entering a period of measured growth, digital reinvention, and regulatory pressure—each reshaping how companies must approach marketing, revenue operations, and customer lifecycle management. Over the next 12–24 months, the industry will experience accelerated digital adoption paired with increased demands for measurable performance.
Budgets across upstream, midstream, and energy tech categories favor vendors who show:
This shifts marketing away from “capability storytelling” toward evidence-first messaging.
AI-led outbound will evolve far beyond templates:
AI will enable marketing teams to do the work of a full content department.
Google continues pushing:
This benefits companies publishing highly technical explainers, even if fewer users click through.
Operators increasingly expect:
Marketing will shift toward data storytelling, where operational metrics feed directly into:
Expect 3D visualization and “remote asset touring” to become mandatory content for:
Historically underutilized, customer marketing will expand due to:
Customer lifecycle and LTV optimization will become a primary competitive advantage.
“We trust vendors who show data, not just technology.”
“Reporting automation is becoming a must-have, not a nice-to-have.”
“Multi-year partnerships go to vendors who deliver consistent, measurable outcomes.”
“Remote operations, automation, and anomaly detection are now competitive differentiators.”
Innovation curve for the sector
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