These days people shopping or making an informed decision about something go through various phases before coming to a conclusion, these phases are called the buyer's journey. Sometimes this "journey" takes a half hour, sometimes it takes months or even years. It just depends on the product, service, problem or the commitment to find a solution.
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Every business owner wants to effectively reach their potential buyers. Obviously, that's where marketing comes in. The problem is, the wrong marketing, namely interruption marketing, is just added noise for people to filter out. We are bombarded with commercial messages every day. Some estimates say we are exposed to nearly 30,000 commercial messages each day! The vast majority of which we completely ignore! Every isle at the super market, informational website we visit, and game we play on our smartphone pushes an ad of some sort in our face. We are even exposed to subliminal ads in TV shows and Movies! Interrupting Is Rude These ads all have 1 primary trait in common that kills their effectiveness versus Inbound Marketing. They all try to force themselves in front of a broad audience by interrupting you for attention. The problem is, as a society, our brains have adapted and are better than ever at filtering the overwhelming majority of these messages out. It's just noise. It's the ...
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Now that we're a week into the new year, hopefully you've had some time to get back into the groove at work. That doesn't mean it's time to start slacking off again though. ;) What it does mean is that you should have a bit of extra time to review your web analytics from last year!
Read moreMany 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.
Read moreThere're 12 months until next Christmas. What successes will you be celebrating this time next year? That's entirely up to you! We're here to help make sure you get on track and stay there, but you have to be committed to setting yourself up for success and staying on course as you put out fires here and there in your normal routine.
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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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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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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 ...
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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.
