Erica Hakonson - Principal & Founder - Maven Collective Marketing

Author: Erica Hakonson - CEO & Founder

Erica Hakonson, CEO & Founder of Maven Collective Marketing, is a distinguished figure in the world of B2B digital marketing. At the helm of the Marketing Partner for Microsoft Partners, she has led her agency to impressive heights, winning more than 160 awards including the B2B Agency of the Year by PR Daily, the Best Firm to Work with from Good Firms, and Top Digital Strategy & SEO Firm from TechBeheMoth.

Her commitment to women in tech and business has been equally impactful, earning her the Female Entrepreneur of the Year, Silver Award, as well as being published in the Globe & Mail as part of my Globe Career’s Leadership Lab. With a dedicated career in tech, spanning more than 18 years, Erica's leadership and innovative approach have made Maven Collective Marketing a beacon of success in digital marketing.

Outside of the office, Hakonson is an amateur banjo player and outdoor enthusiast spending time in the outdoor capital of Canada with her awesome tiny humans, her heroic husband, and her energetic bird dog.

Get The Recognition You Deserve With Business Awards

Estimated Read Time: 5 minutes

Intended Audience: B2B Business Owners, Microsoft Partners, SaaS Business Owners, Tech Company Owners

Award ceremonies are more than just a red carpet, a trophy, and a speech, especially in the B2B and technology industry. B2B Awards and competitions for companies are a powerful way to get recognition in your field of expertise.

This recognition is often underestimated by businesses as they are skeptical of the resource investment that goes into preparing a nomination submission. Let us change that for you and show you why it is worth the effort. Since, both the B2B and technology industry is highly competitive; opportunities like business awards become even more essential to help stand out in the market.

Let’s briefly glance over the types of awards and then dive straight into the advantages of entering business awards.

Ranging from local, national to international, awards of all kinds are available, they can be industry-based or narrowed down to a particular criterion. So, no matter the size of your business or the impact of your service, there is something for everyone. If you are a B2B company, you should definitely be exploring awards relevant to your business to achieve that edge over your competitors.

What is the Significance of B2B Awards?

There are many benefits to submitting your B2B company for an award:

Earn Credibility

Think of awards as a stamp of approval for your business. What is it that your audience is recognizing when you enter or win an award? Your expertise, knowledge, expertise and know-how! Just by entering for an award, you are able to showcase that your product or service is worth knowing and talking about. It is a great way to get larger audiences to learn more about what you do and gain credibility for your work in your industry.

Level The Playing Field

No matter the scale of your business, there is an award out there for you. In fact, many awards allow businesses of varying sizes to compete against each other. In this case, a small startup could be pitched against a larger enterprise. What matters here is your unique solution, process/approach and business model.

Motivate Employees

All that hard work that organizations channel towards their services deserves attention. Awards are a great way to boost the morale of your team and keep them motivated to deliver quality results time and again. These wins are very important for teams and you should not hold back in celebrating together.

Attract Customers

Business Awards can bring in new customers and open new avenues for your business. A lot of award organizers provide media coverage to winners, which can help your company get more attention, so enter the arena and increase your market share.

Boost Your Marketing Strategy

Of course, we know that companies enter with the aim to win, but you can repurpose your award submissions for other marketing opportunities too. Once you have won the award you can utilize its PR toolkit of award badges, certifications, and other components to update your own marketing material.

Engagement and Brand Awareness – Having an award logo on your website, company-client documentation, and social media channels helps with brand awareness regarding your achievements and drives engagement for your product.
Link Building – Winning an award can get you featured on reputable websites with high traffic, in turn, impacting your website’s organic search performance.
Content Marketing – You shouldn’t think that all your efforts towards writing that perfect submission come to an end with the award. You can make use of your submission and create various kinds of content around it like a case study, multiple B2B blogs, short video clips, or even conduct a live webinar session that talks about how you attained your project goals.

When is the Best Time to Enter a B2B Award?

If you think you have missed out, don’t worry, award season isn’t limited to a single month of the year. Since there are so many different types of business and technology awards, they are all open for nominations at different times of the year.

Consider your B2B award nominations it an ongoing effort, honing the nomination pitch after pitch. This is not as time-consuming as it sounds, you could subscribe to business press or just do a simple sweep at the beginning of each quarter to keep yourself abreast on forthcoming business awards.

Once you know the deadlines and requirements for the award you are aiming for, it is important to make sure you have enough time and resources to prepare for the submission. We understand that with so many ongoing projects and customers to serve, it can be hard to make the time for this as well. That’s where the Mavens come in.

Captivating Business Awards Submissions with Maven Collective

The Maven Collective team is fully equipped to draft a compelling submission for you. Not only are we an award-winning marketing team ourselves, but we have also helped many clients successfully enter several B2B and technology awards and win!

Each year the Mavens work with clients to create captivating submissions for prestigious awards like the Microsoft Inspire/Impact Awards, Nielsen Norman Group Intranet Design Awards, FastCompany Innovation by Design Awards, Ragan and PR Daily Awards, StepTwo Intranet & Digital Workplace Awards, BC Tech Technology Impact Awards, Les Prix Canie Awards, and the Web Excellence Awards to name a few.

With the Neilson Norman Group Intranet Design Awards submission deadline fast approaching, we are actively curating some riveting applications for our clients.

From our experience, we have learned how demanding award nomination proposals can be, but we also understand what it takes to create a notable, award-winning entry. Starting right from strategizing your approach to weaving storytelling and testimonials into your submission. We extract the right information from you teams and your clients that allows you to shine in a way your organization hasn’t before. Let us be your storyteller and build your captivating award nomination you and your team will be proud of.

If you would like us to guide you through any B2B, technology, or product innovation award submissions, check out our carefully crafted services or send us your queries at mavens@mavencollectivemarketing.com today!

Powerful User Behavior Analytics Tool: Microsoft Clarity

Estimated Read Time: 5 minutes

Intended Audience: B2B Business Owners, Business Strategists, Microsoft Partner Organizations

The current business scenario has forced a lot of enterprises to move away from the brick-and-mortar approach and embrace online means. Businesses need a firm marketing strategy and a healthy website to ensure the success of their products and services. Taking cognizance of these challenges, Microsoft has been addressing the woes of remote work with its many tools. Likewise, Microsoft recently launched Clarity to make website management a breeze for developers and non-developers alike.

What is Microsoft Clarity?

An analytics tool that empowers website managers to make educated decisions on website modifications. It is a FREE platform that keeps decision-makers notified of their website’s performance and engagement. The platform acts as a set of tools that point at areas of improvement and changes that need to be made to improve website performance.

Microsoft Clarity observes website visitors and tracks user behavior across your website. You can access all this information through a dashboard that allows website managers to view behavioral patterns of various audience segments.

The tool comes with some remarkable capabilities that can help you improve your website performance with powerful insights.

HOW TO LEVERAGE MICROSOFT CLARITY FOR YOUR WEBSITE

Use Session Playbacks to Track User Behavior

You can view session activity for each website visitor and track their engagement throughout the website. From mouse movements to scrolling to clicks, everything is recorded. So no more guesswork and anticipating how your users are behaving on the website, you can now see for yourself.

There are extraordinary filtering capabilities that come with session playbacks. Microsoft has implemented machine learning to discover novel patterns in session recordings like “rage clicks”, “dead clicks”, and “excessive scrolling”. These patterns can be used as classifications to filter out what you want to see. This is extremely useful for determining the user interface performance.

How to Best Utilize Session Playbacks

Session Playbacks are of use to website operators, webmasters, and User Experience (UX) consultants to identify and repair design shortcomings. You get to see which part of your website runs smoothly and which bits are causing issues for your visitors. Moreover, developers can utilize it during the development and testing phase of the website too. Therefore, this feature enables you to redesign your website based on visitor interactions.

Get a Performance Overview with Clarity’s Dashboard

Analyzing website usage is a common practice for understanding your web traffic. Microsoft Clarity dashboard provides data such as session counts, total users, page view details, bounce rate, scroll depth, etc. You can even view javascript errors and monitor the popular pages across the website.

These insights help understand user scrolling patterns like they may be doing so in search of particular information or if they are clicking on areas they expect to be hyperlinked.

What does the Microsoft Clarity Dashboard offer?

The dashboard is a quick way to glance over the performance of your website. Decision-makers can make the most of it by getting a comprehensive summary. It is an efficient tool to track and report developments across the website and ensure that any efforts being made on your part are giving the desired results. Based on this, you can make informed changes to your website and boost its engagement with the target audience.

Learn How Users Interact with Your Content

Tracking user interaction is one of the best ways to identify areas of improvement for your website. Microsoft brings the heatmap feature to Clarity that follows visitor movement, empowering you to see where users scrolled and clicked, and monitor the entire navigation lifecycle. This capability is extremely useful for visual people as they can see what content is important to users and make note of whether or not users are getting desired information.

Click-maps and scroll-maps are easy to use and showcase frequently interacted areas on a webpage. While playbacks show the journey of a single user, heatmaps give you insight into aggregated interaction.

Structure Your Website with Heatmap Insights

The Microsoft Clarity Heatmaps allow you to see if the areas of interaction depict the information you want to be accessed most by users, if that’s not the case, then you need to rethink and modify the layout of the page so that visitors are aligned with the portions you want them to. For example, if not enough people are scrolling to the bottom of the page, then maybe you could shorten the length of the page or move more valuable information to the top. Heatmaps also help analyze call-to-action placement on your website and observe if the kind of language and layout you use is conducive to conversions. Therefore, data-driven inputs can be provided to make any necessary design changes to the website that facilitates better user experience and drives conversion.

Does Microsoft Clarity Replace Other Website Analytics Tools?

Microsoft Clarity is not just about the three core capabilities, there is so much more to this tool through its filtering and custom tag capabilities. You can filter down data and analyze specific criteria. For example, taking a look at heatmaps for pages that have excessive scrolling or high rage clicks, to identify pain points that can be improved upon. Since Google Analytics discontinued Heatmaps in 2017, Clarity is here to fill the gap along with some other overlapping metrics. But, Google Analytics has a vast expanse of metrics on acquisition and conversion, that cannot be replaced by Clarity.

Microsoft Clarity features overlap with several other tools as well that come at a monthly fee. Although software like Crazy Egg, HotJar, and Lucky Orange, offer similar insights at a cost, they provide additional features too. Crazy Egg covers referral source tracking, keyword tracking, and several A/B testing capabilities. HotJar on the other hand has extensive customer experience and feedback features that Clarity lacks. So far, Luck Orange is somewhat closest to Microsoft Clarity’s areas of expertise.

However, Microsoft Clarity has its advantages, even though the above-named tools offer free trials, you can get a lot of those powerful insights on Microsoft Clarity for free! Moreover, it has the ability to combine different filters allowing you to narrow down on user behavior and in turn suggest modifications to simplify user experience across the website. You can even custom code tags and fire them across pages to get specific metrics.

*BONUS* Microsoft Clarity can be used by anyone, irrespective of the size of their website and traffic since there are no caps on traffic. Microsoft Clarity can support the largest of websites and can process large amounts of data without getting in the way of your website’s performance.

Which Analytics Software is Best for You?

Analytics is vital for monitoring a website’s performance, to make sure that you are taking all actionable steps to drive traffic and conversion, make use of a combination of software. In this manner, you not only cover all your bases but also make data-driven decisions. For example, a combination of Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity gives both valuable audience metrics and user experience insights, allowing you to make informed decisions about online marketing efforts and design. At Maven Collective Marketing, we promise measurable results and would love to help you in your marketing initiatives. If you would like to know more about using analytics tools to boost the marketing strategy for your business, get in touch with us!