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'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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We preach and preach that you should be blogging regularly. We share stats about how much better companies with an ongoing blogging effort do at generating leads. We practically beg you to write regular blog posts! While blogging is excellent for your Search Engine Optimization efforts, it can also be a huge driver of other tactics you employ online. Here're some ways to reuse your blog posts. 1 - Blog Posts Make Great, Share-able Social Media Content If you've held the position that your company doesn't have anything to share in social media, you're wrong. One great "side affect" of blogging regularly is that it will feed your social media efforts. In fact, a single blog post can yield several social posts. How's that you ask? Simple, after writing a blog post, you can take several facts from the post and turn them into short social media updates with links to your blog post. Using HootSuite or Buffer you can then schedule the social posts to be sent on different days in the future. ...
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Small Business Inbound Marketing Lead Nurturing
Read moreThere's a common mindset with many manufacturers that their website can only be an informational, brochure-style site because they sell to other businesses, with a long sales process. They think that because they can't sell direct online, their options for making their website a business-generating tool are limited. They tend to receive contact form submissions from current customers or potential customers that a sales person has already spoken to, but no new leads develop because of their site. Does this sound like your manufacturing business?
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Even if you have the best looking website in the world, it's useless without website traffic. While many new clients that we work with can definitely use a face-lift and strategy for their website, their biggest issue is often that they have no real traffic. If the top of the Inbound Marketing funnel is empty, the middle and bottom of the funnel are sure to follow suit. That's obviously a problem and all too often the case when we meet with a new client. Your biggest Inbound Marketing downfall may just be attracting website visitors. Start By Answering Some Questions Before starting your efforts to fill the top of your funnel, you need to be clear on some things... Who are your buyers? Define your buyer personas. Don't shortcut this process. Your buyer personas need to be the source of all of your marketing. These are your ideal buyers we're talking about. You need to know more about them than their job title at a company that could buy your stuff. What is your current volume of ...
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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.
