We’re halfway through the year, making July a fitting time to revisit your goals for 2019. Here are a few tips to ensure you don’t get lost in the weeds executing your strategy, and instead, are able to home in on your big picture marketing goals. What could you eliminate? Answering this question will force you to prioritize your to do list. Are there reports you’re drafting weekly that would serve the same purpose if you delivered them monthly? Be honest with yourself, and your…
Yes, understanding your business (think: value proposition, mission statement) is important. But I’d argue that truly understanding your customers is even more crucial. If you don’t know your target customers, how can you successfully market and sell your products and services? Creating buyer personas, a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, is one of the best ways to generate leads and ultimately close sales. There are dozens of questions you could ask yourself, your team and your customers to help develop buyer personas. To keep…
Forbes recently announced the companies with the best Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reputations, and Lego earned the No. 1 spot on the roster. How did they get there? According to the study compiled by the Reputation Institute, Lego behaves ethically, conducts business fairly, operates transparently, protects the environment and supports worthy causes. What is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)? There are seemingly infinite definitions for CSR. Here are a couple: CSR promotes a vision of business accountability to a wide range of stakeholders, besides shareholders and…
There’s a significant difference between clicks to your website and true inbound lead generation. While it may be tempting to report those larger web traffic numbers as “leads,” the reality is that you can’t be certain that those folks are actually prospective customers. Website traffic is important Don’t get me wrong, traffic to your site is important. After all, it’s the first step in generating customers though online marketing efforts. But if your end goal is lead generation, it’s essential to consider clicks and leads…
Lead scoring assigns points to a person based on their likelihood to buy your product or service. Our last blog post on lead scoring – Lead scoring 101: Lead scoring & why it’s important– also explains how lead scoring can be used to align marketing and sales, save valuable resources and increase sales close rates. Now, let’s get into the science of lead scoring: the data that indicates a lead is likely – or unlikely – to buy and how to get started developing a…
Driving sales. It’s the No. 1 goal of any inbound marketing plan. But it takes more than big budgets, lots of time, great writers or even sheer luck to deliver quality prospects to your sales team. In fact, 80 percent of marketers report their lead-generation efforts are only slightly or somewhat effective (BrightTALK, 2015). To deliver quality prospects, you must define what a “quality, qualified lead” is. And that begins with understanding and developing a lead scoring system. What is a lead? Let’s start with…
The holidays are quickly approaching, bringing a fresh start in the New Year. But before you check out of the office, why not take this opportunity to take stock of your marketing efforts in 2016. These three exercises will help you come back in January with a fresh perspective and poised for success in 2017. Look way back. Take a look at what you set out to do last January. What were your goals and did you achieve them? If you set SMART goals (Specific,…
The buyer’s journey – the research process potential buyers go through before making a purchase – is critical to understanding how to develop effective inbound marketing campaigns. Inbound content should be written to potential buyers at each phase of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration and decision. The consideration stage Consideration stage content provides in-depth, solution-oriented information. This is the phase where a prospect has clearly defined their problem or opportunity and is committed to researching and understanding all available approaches to solving it. That’s where…
A strong inbound marketing campaign produces content that attracts site visitors and email contacts, converts them into leads and, ultimately customers (read: generates ROI). Writing content for each stage of the buyer’s journey (awareness, consideration, decision) is easy in theory, but not always in practice. The Awareness Stage Also referred to as “top of the funnel,” the awareness stage begins when your audience (potential buyers) realize they have a problem. They’re online looking for solutions. This is your opportunity to position your brand as an…
So you’ve developed the industry’s best white paper, ran an impressive social advertising campaign and received thousands of new email contacts. Now what? An expansive contact list is great, but only if you know how to use it. Break it down. Segmenting your email list allows you to focus on certain groups based on specific traits or characteristics. Let’s say your target audience is IT managers. The IT manager at a small local company is going to have different challenges and priorities than an IT…
When was the last time you had a problem and took to Google to find the answer? Given that every minute Google recieves more than 4,000,000 search queries, I bet it was fairly recent. Well, that’s what your potential customers are doing too. They’ve got a problem and they need a solution. So, give the people what they want. That’s the idea behind inbound marketing: providing informative, helpful content – blog posts, ebooks, checklists – that draws customers to your website. The first step in creating that content is…
Facebook Admins may have noticed a new button on their timeline page, the “Create Call-to-Action.” The Create CTA button started appearing on some of our client Pages last week, but at the time of this post, not everyone has the feature, so be on the lookout. Here’s what we know so far. What is it? The CTA button allows admins to insert a CTA directly onto their timeline page (previously it was only available for status updates)at no cost. Choose from the following actions: Book…
