INBOUND MARKETING BLOG

Inbound Marketing Priorities For The New Year

• By Donny Kemick

The Holiday Season is here, full of end of year wrap-ups and final planning for the new year. If you are going into 2015 with an ineffective, brochureware website, fear not! I'm going to give you your top 5 priorities for the new year as a small business getting started with Inbound Marketing. 1 - Define Your Buyer Personas You already know on a broad level who your buyers are. They may be manufacturers that buy your components, or health care institutions that buy your supplies. Do you know them on a more micro level though? If you do, all of your marketing efforts will be easier. In general terms, Buyer Personas are the profiles of a company's ideal buyers based on market research current client data. Each profile is then turned into a fictional person that fits the behavioral characteristics of one of your buyers. This is not as simple as identifying their job title and company size. We're talking about identifying their demographics, buying patterns/habits, goals and motivations. ...

Why Rich Snippets are Important to Your Website

• By Josh Curcio

I've gone through and read several articles about rich snippets and I'm fairly confident that 99.9% of business owners would be lost in reading those articles. My goal is to explain the importance of these rich snippets without getting too techie.

Improve Your SEO With Social Media

• By Donny Kemick

If you're looking to improve your SEO, you might be surprised to hear that social media can really help. SEO is at the top of the list for most small businesses looking to grow their sales with the help of their website. They "get it". People use search engines, mostly Google, to find what they need. Whether it's a generation gap or a learning curve untraveled, most do not put social media quite so high on the list. If they knew how social media can help their search engine optimization efforts, they may change their minds. Social Media Leads To More Naturally Built Links If you've heard anything about SEO, you know that quality links to your content help to boost your ranks in search results. The key word there is QUALITY. Just any old link won't help. It has to be relevant. For example, if a spammer you hire places comments on a blog about a topic that has nothing to do with your industry, you won't see any benefit from it. In fact, it will be a detriment to your SEO because Google ...

The 3 Easiest Types of Content Marketing for Small Businesses

• By Josh Curcio

Content Marketing Doesn't Have to Be Hard

Phoenix Metal Fabricating Website Launch

• By Josh Curcio

We are happy to have launched a newly designed and developed website for Phoenix Metal Fabricating in Jamestown, PA. Phoenix handles several aspects of metal fabrication starting with metal punching through powder coating and even some small assembly of final products. They run a very impressive operation!

Website Personalization Yields Higher Conversion Rates

• By Donny Kemick

What B2B Buyers Say About Content Marketing

• By Josh Curcio

Businesses in the B2B industry often struggle with online marketing because they expect that their current buyers will just come straight to them asking for a quote. This may happen in certain instances, but it's certainly not always the case. Even if a B2B buyer asks their previous provider for a quote, they are likely doing some online research on their own prior to that request. You don't have to take my word for it, but recent stats released by a DemandGen Report will support the information. Here's what B2B buyers had to say and what it means for your B2B marketing.

What Aren't You Tracking On Your Website?

• By Donny Kemick

If you aren't actively tracking metrics on your website, you aren't using the biggest advantage Inbound Marketing has to offer. Data is so abundant and freely available through tools like Google Analytics, MailChimp and HootSuite that you're not doing your job as a marketer if you aren't using it. Inbound Marketing isn't like traditional, interruption based marketing tactics such as radio, newspaper, TV and direct mail. You don't have to guess what's working and what isn't. The data is right there, in real time to see what Inbound tactics are getting you to your goals and which aren't. You don't have to wait for a new media buy to adjust. You don't have to reprint and remail to shift your course a bit. You can act on the data as nimbly and quickly as you'd like. If you're like most small businesses, you probably have Google Analytics setup to do basic tracking, but you haven't looked at it since you got the login information __ years ago. It's great that you have Google Analytics, but ...

Just Say No To Brochureware Websites In 2015

• By Donny Kemick

A new year is approaching fast. We've all gained 10 lbs while giving thanks at Thanksgiving and in a few weeks we'll add 10 lbs more at Christmas. While we spend time fattening up our waistlines, we need to be preparing to fatten up our bottom lines. Whether you're a B2B business, a nonprofit or anything in between, it's time to evaluate your website and just say NO to brochureware websites in 2015. If you're going to say no to brochureware sites, it might help to have a definition of them: A brochureware website is a business website that has very infrequently updated content. Often the site has been developed as a direct translation of existing printed promotional materials, hence the name. - Wikipedia I would like to add a bit to this definition because many small businesses don't even have printed promotional materials to carry over to a website: A brochureware website is also one that has stale, infrequently to never updated content with no focus on lead generation or business ...

5 Interruption Marketing Tactics to Forget in 2015

• By Josh Curcio

Because the behaviors of consumers has changed so drastically in recent years, it becomes more difficult to find a place for interruption marketing. I'm not going to say that you should abandon all interruption marketing efforts because they can have a place for some businesses, but even those businesses should consider a shift in their marketing budgets to more inbound marketing strategies. There are however some interruption marketing tactics that should be forgotten as they are a waste of effort, money, and they flat out annoy the consumers you're trying to attract.