Many small businesses still don't know what Inbound Marketing is, and that's OK. We're here to help you understand and capitalize on what it can do for your business. This short video will give you 5 tasks to get started with Inbound Marketing. Here's a link to more detail on the 5 tasks as well as additional resources to help with each one.
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If you are planning a website redesign in 2015 there are 4 areas you MUST include to ensure you get the outcome you're really after, more business. I shiny new look and feel will certainly help to build trust with your visitors when they arrive, but if you have no visitors to see it, what's the point? It's an absolute must to have as much focus on your efforts (think SEO, content marketing, social media, sponsored advertising) to get high quality traffic to your site as your efforts to make your site look better. 1 - A Blog In case you haven't heard... you have to be producing content if you want to get high quality traffic to your site. I'm not talking about people searching for your brand name, or people using local search to find a local supplier. I'm talking about new, high quality visitors that need what you provide and search for terms around your offering versus your brand name. That's how you grow your business. The absolute easiest way to generate content on a consistent ...
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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. ...
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Content Marketing Doesn't Have to Be Hard
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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.
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We had a great meeting this week with a prospective client where we were focused primarily on SEO. As an Inbound Marketing agency, we obviously took a step back from the SEO discussion to evaluate more of the overall goal of the site and what desired actions are when a visitor arrives. As we talked through the scenarios and got into email marketing directly to some of their leads, a great question was asked that I think is worth exploring in a bit more detail. The question was around frequency and follow up and was basically: Won't this visitor feel like we're spamming them? The general answer here is... it depends. First, Is Your List Segmented? I wrote a post a couple weeks back on the importance of segmenting your email marketing list so I won't go deep on it here. As a quick refresher, it's one thing to have a list of 100,000 email addresses with their names. It something completely different to know the interests and further segmenting details of those 100K people. That last word ...
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We've been doing our best in trying to motivate you blog and blog frequently. Not creating junk content just to have more content, but content that your readers or potential readers will find useful. For any industry, any service type, any business, and so on, there are endless things to blog about that useful. Yes, I'll repeat that. There are endless things for you to blog about and they don't have to be fluff. If you need a push to help get those creative juices flowing, try Quora to help think of blog post topics that will be useful to someone.
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If you are growing your email marketing list (and you are, right?), you have to make sure you're monitoring and adjusting your efforts to maximize open and click-through rates. If not, you're wasting sends. You're falling on deaf ears. You can't nurture a lead that doesn't read what you send them for one of many reasons. If you want to improve email open rates keep reading... 1 - Who is the "Sender" of your emails? Question. When you receive an email from someone you know or another human being, are you likely to at least open it? I'm going to bet you said yes, with varying degrees of importance. Someone you know or recognize may yield a quicker open than a stranger. How about when you receive an email from a brand? Are you likely to open that? What level of urgency? I'm not talking about order update emails or responses to a request for information. I'm talking about emails from brands that you are expecting to receive. All of that being said, what name comes through when you send ...
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If you are executing digital marketing, congratulations! You are most likely already one step ahead of your competition, and making strides to meaningfully connect with prospects online. But, how do you know if you’re seeing continual success year over year, and improving your metrics?
Without the tools in place to analyze and benchmark your efforts, it is impossible to scale your online marketing and ensure continuous success.
