Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

You need a game plan--a process to produce and consistently deliver information your readers will quickly devour. Below are the steps needed to help get you started on your own game plan and win with your marketing.

Follow these 5 steps to become a content marketing MVP:

1. Perform a Content Marketing Audit

Pull all your existing marketing collateral together, such as current web pages, printed material, slide decks, blog posts, advertising, brochures and any old material hidden away in filing cabinets or folders that might be put to good use.

Analyze what you have, how effective it’s been, and then consider what objectives you hope to accomplish. Ask yourself, “What is my goal?" With this knowledge, you can determine the gap between where you are and where you want to be and create the content you need to reach your buyer.

2. Create your Content Marketing Strategy

This will provide strategic direction on how your marketing content and content marketing processes will help you achieve your business goals. Your content strategy should be directly related to your business objectives and your customers’ needs.

You need to document your strategy. To properly plan content, you should clearly list the goals your business has and then prioritize them. Then, create objectives that help you reach these goals. Review your content and ask how well the content matches or serves these goals and objectives. Then you will have no problem creating meaningful content that achieves your goals because it stays on message.  

3. Develop Well-defined Targets

To make content marketing work, you need to understand who you are selling to. Your blogs, email marketing, white papers, videos, e-books, podcasts and advertising all need to speak to your buyer. The best way to keep visitors engaged with your site and company is to set business goals and then create content that helps you meet them. With your goals in place, you can create content that serves those goals.

Determine your target audience and build buyer personas or profiles for each sector you intend to target. You can then build an editorial calendar to plan the content you are going to deliver to each audience.

4. Compose and Distribute Great Content

The content you create will depend on the objectives outlined in your content marketing strategy. Remember to create the kind of content your target audience will actually care about.

Simply creating good content isn’t enough, you need to distribute that content to reach people. Your distribution plan will be guided by where your target audience consumes content. Make sure your content is easy to share to encourage more engagement and sharing.

5. Monitor, Measure and Make Improvements

Most important, you need to measure your progress on an ongoing basis. These metrics will provide you with valuable information on what’s working and what can be improved upon.

The metrics will also provide insights into developing new opportunities for engagement and content delivery and will guide your strategy and content marketing system moving forward.

By creating great content, developing a strategy, defining your target reader, composing and distributing your content, and measuring your success, you will become a true content marketing MVP.

If you need some extra help creating a content marketing plan for your business, use our Content Marketing Kit. Or you can always give us a call.

Are you a content marketing MVP? Please share the tricks and techniques you have discovered that are delivering the best results for your business.

Do you know your clients? Really know your clients? Do you understand what puts them over the moon and what keeps them up at night? Are you listening? Or are you so busy talking about you, that you know nothing about them?

Here’s the truth. No one cares about you. People are only interested in themselves. The only way to get someone to pay attention to you is if you are talking about what interests them!

Knowing your audience is essential for inbound marketing success. Every individual prospect will be different, but there are things they have in common, and you can use these commonalities to create marketing personas that will make your prospects think you are talking directly to them, about them.

Marketing personas should represent your best clients. They give guidance for molding your future products or services. They help with the decision making process of your marketing strategies. They direct your sales and marketing teams in knowing what to say.

Here's a simple three-step guide to help you create a marketing persona:

1. Identify your ideal client(s). You need to gather the basic facts about them like: What's the size of their company? What industry are they in? Are they a new startup or an established business? Where are they located? Questions like these will help you define who they are.
2. Know what they like. Identify the things that they actually buy and use or how they spend their money. Based on these facts, you will know what and if they are willing to pay for your products or services.
3. Find out their drivers. What desired result are they seeking? What problems do they need to have solved? Knowing the answers to these questions will help you understand the wants and needs of your ideal clients so you can speak their language.

These are just a few basic things to remember when creating your marketing personas. Spend some time getting to know your ideal clients better, and you will discover your best prospects will hang on your every word.

If you need some help creating the perfect marketing persona for your business, download our Precise Prospect Profile Worksheet. Or you can always give us a call.

Successful Email Marketing (CV301)

You can easily manage email marketing yourself, but if your business relies heavily on email marketing and your time is at a premium, you may want to seriously consider using an email service provider. ESPs are extremely convenient for many businesses because they take the industry’s best practices and automate them for you. They save you time by dealing with headaches businesses typically don’t have time to deal with such as managing new subscribers, handling email bounce-backs, removing unsubscribers, and tracking delivery results. If you’d prefer to manage your own email marketing campaign, then read on.

Image by: digitpedia

Connect with your prospects

The first step is to establish quality connections with prospects who would be most interested in your product or service. Place a signup form or guest book on your landing page for people to join your email list. If visitors find your Web content useful in helping them solve their problems, they will most certainly leave their contact information in hopes of learning more. These are the types of quality connections you want when building a reliable email list. When you give people the choice to send their contact information, you’re enacting permission-based marketing – the type of marketing that offers the best quality leads. On your signup form, clearly describe the nature of your email content and how frequently you plan to send it. In addition to name and email address, be sure to include a category where prospects can discuss their interest in your business. Knowing your prospects’ interests is extremely valuable. It enables you to direct specific email to those with a clear interest in your topic.     

Create valuable email content

There’s only one reason why prospects would leave their contact information for you – they find your content so valuable, they want to learn more! When crafting email content, keep asking yourself, “Is my content informative?” If your emails are considered valuable enough, leads will forward them on to their colleagues or print them off for reference. Valuable content should be educational – it should give guidance and direction on how to solve common problems within your industry. It’s equally important that your content promotes your product or service and relates to your audience. Keep in mind that a key objective of email marketing is to build deeper relationships with your customers. 

Determine your email format

Email format depends on your objective. Newsletters are used to communicate educational content and typically contain lots of text, few images, and soft calls to action. They are often written in a concise summary format with bulleted points, and are distributed weekly or monthly. Promotional content usually contains more images and less text. The distribution frequency is contingent upon your business and the stage of the sales cycle. Promotional content includes strong calls to action that entice prospects to click your ad images. Announcements are triggered around specific events such as press releases, holiday greetings, or thank you cards. Email distribution times should be tracked in a master schedule. Determine when your audience is most likely to read your email (day of week, time of day) and develop your email frequency around it. 

Prevent your email from getting ignored

Lots of marketing email ends up in spam folders or trash cans. To counteract this, there are a few tricks you can use to maximize the chances of your email being read by its recipients. In the “From” line of your message, use a name that your recipients are most likely to recognize. In most cases, your brand name would be an ideal choice. Keep your “Subject” line short and concise (30-40 characters including spaces). The subject line should be a phrase that clearly promotes the immediate benefits of your email. Use words that are attention grabbers. For instance, if you’re emailing a newsletter, avoid generic subject titles like “monthly newsletter.” Use titles that draw instant attention like, “Turn Leads into Cash-Paying Customers.” Avoid using titles that may be misconstrued as spam.

Track your results

It’s a good idea to track your click-through rates (CTR) – the level of interaction received from links in your email. By imbedding HTML tracking code within your links, you can easily monitor which ones receive the most clicks. This is a great way to identify which links your audience finds most interesting. If you’re able to identify who likes certain topics of interest, you can target individual leads with information they would find most useful. CTR is also beneficial in weeding out which ads are underperforming and require optimization. Low CTRs can result from an unclear opt-in process, marketing to the wrong target audience, poorly written subject lines, confusing email design and layout, and lack of urgency created in calls to action. 

Inbound Lead Nurturing (CV201)

Would you like to generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 30% lower cost? Did I hear a resounding yes? Inbound lead nurturing makes this possible. Lead nurturing is all about building and maintaining relationships with qualified prospects regardless of where they’re at in the buying process. To retain early stage leads, it’s extremely important that you have a well-defined nurturing process laid out.

Who needs nurturing?

First, define your ideal customer profile. Isolate what type of buyer would be most interested in your product or service. To find your best prospects, make sure your target market is clearly defined. Consider how long the nurturing process will take before your prospects become sales-ready. Most prospects who visit your website are interested in checking out the products or services you offer before making a purchase decision. Your objective as a marketer is to transform them from leads into customers by keeping them engaged in relevant and personalized communication. 

Create a dialogue

When you’ve identified your prospects, it’s time to qualify them. When they land on your landing page, use your inquiry form to acquire basic yet valuable information about them. Refrain from using a form that asks too many questions – being bombarded with too many questions too early on in the buying process is a big turnoff for prospects. Set up an automated inquiry email response so prospects receive an immediate acknowledgment in their inbox. Subsequent email should be crafted in a way that conveys relevant and personalized dialogue. Its content should not only demonstrate your expertise, but should contain information prospects need in order to move forward in their buying process. Gauge closely where your leads are in the buying process and develop your email track around it. 

Cultivate relationships

Unlike email blasting, lead nurturing offers precise targeting. When leads fill out your inquiry form, they’re revealing specifics about their interest in your offerings. This is valuable data you can use to cater to their individualized needs in subsequent nurturing emails. Once leads express interest, develop your relationship further. Send them additional content that illustrates how your expertise can help solve their problems. If you cultivate leads during the early stages and intensify their interest with compelling content, they’re far more likely to become buying customers. 

Calls to Action & Landing Page Best Practices (CV101)

Did you know you can double or even triple your conversion rates by making just a few simple adjustments to your landing pages? Landing page optimization is one of the easiest ways to boost your website’s performance. To motivate a customer to buy, sometimes all it takes is making a small change to a button or tweaking a headline.

Image by: egmTacahopeful

Try it for Free!

The first thing to know about landing pages is that they need to convey a call to action – your page needs to create a sense of urgency. Use persuasive language that stirs consumer emotions and compels them to take action! Be specific about the action you want them to take. When visitors click on a button that says, “Get your free eBook here,” ensure that the button redirects them to a page where they can actually get their free eBook. Some marketers create deception by creating buttons that redirect visitors to a page completely unrelated to the button they clicked on. Bad idea! This only frustrates people and prompts them to go elsewhere. Instill trust in customers by being genuine about your calls to action. Follow through and give customers what you say you’re going to give them.

Make it clickable and colorful!

When creating calls to action, use clickable, eye catching images to direct people to your landing pages. It’s good practice to make an entire ad image clickable – it reduces confusion about where to click. If your images are interesting enough, people won’t be able to resist clicking on them! It’s also good form to use consistent visual style between the clickable ad image and your landing page. Color is important! You want your colors to compliment each other nicely. Make sure there’s stark contrast between words and the background they’re placed upon. Colors should make sense – if your call to action button says something like, “Save money now,” it would make good sense to use a green color so people will subconsciously associate it with money. Also, if you have multiple buttons on a single page, make each one a different color – this will allow visitors to easily differentiate between them.

Is your customer having happy landings?

Arrange your landing page layout so it's simple and well organized. Your most important information should be placed at the top of the page. Visitors should not have to use the scrollbar to find your most valuable content. Strategically place your buttons in locations that are easy to find. People hate wasting valuable time searching for stuff! So, a word of wisdom – make things as easy as possible for your customers to find. Don’t force them to go hunting for it or they just might use their “Back” button! From time to time, check the functionality of your buttons to make sure they’re pointing to the right locations. Again, consider the frustration factor – people have little tolerance for broken links. Preserve your professional reputation by maintaining connectivity to all links. Also, monitor the effectiveness of your calls to action. If one call to action is not generating traffic, switch it out for another one. Experiment until you get the results you’re looking for.

Which flight path is your landing page taking?

When designing a landing page, place yourself in the shoes of your customer, “Why am I on this page and where is it supposed to take me?” Make sure that you’re fulfilling the primary purposes of the page – creating enough urgency that it prompts visitors to take action, and pointing them to where you want them to go. Just in case visitors missed your primary call to action at the top of your page, place a secondary call to action at the bottom. Make your page navigation clear and easy for people to understand and you’ll get them where you want them to go. Check out Jacob Gube’s blog for some good examples of call to action buttons.