Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

Because your business website is the representation of your company, it should convey the image your company wants to portray to your prospects, the principles you uphold and the quality of service your consumers expect.

Appearance and first impressions are brief but lasting reminders. Surely you wouldn’t want to give the wrong perception to your prospects by having unnecessary and irrelevant items on your company’s website. Either take responsibility, (or delegate / outsource the responsibility) to constantly update your business website to make sure that everything is  relevant and useful for your marketing strategies.

In an article written by Randy Milanovic, he mentioned a number of things that shouldn’t be seen on your website anymore. Here are a few examples:

1. Old bios, images and product descriptions
   
   These include everything from executive bios for members of the company who have moved on to product shots from the ’70s. If who you are and what you sell isn't accurately reflected on your website, what does that tell your buyers?
   
   You have to make sure that the data you post on your website is accurate. From the bios of your executives and staff, to the details of each product and every service  your company offers.
   
   
2. Prices that aren’t accurate anymore
   
   Besides the fact that incorrect pricing can lead to all kinds of legal liabilities, lost sales and hits to your profit margin - having the wrong prices for your products or services also put you at a disadvantage with your competitors.
   
   Your customers and clients surely wouldn’t want to think they’ve been fooled with incorrect pricing. The price certainly plays a big part in the whole buying process, so be sure to reflect the correct price of your products and services.
   
   
3. Products or services that are no longer being offered
   
   It's a bad idea to have pages for things you no longer sell, since it inevitably leads to requests that can’t be honored. That in turn, is one of the surest ways to negative reviews and a poor online reputation.
   
   It is a waste of space to have pages dedicated to products and services that you can no longer provide your consumers. Not only will that irritate your prospects, it will also send a signal of being incompetent that you can’t maintain a functional website.

You can find out more about things that shouldn’t be on your business website when you read his full article entitled, “What is on Your Business Website That Shouldn't be?”

Remember, you don’t want to give your prospects the wrong impression, so keep in mind to always update your business website. It should be a continuous process to ensure your website conveys what you intend to reflect and communicate to your prospects and to your customers.

Every day, millions of people surf online to search, research and purchase products and services that fit their wants and needs. Because of this, savvy business owners and online marketers make it a priority to continuously improve the quality of service they can offer to their consumers. To stay competitive, it is vital for online marketers to adapt to the changes and enhancements of the tools and features they use in their marketing strategies.

HubSpot is well-known for helping business owners and online marketers provide their customers and clients with an excellent service they truly deserve. As an advocate of marketing, they have constantly developed tools and strategies that help online marketers and their prospects have the best marketing experience possible.

Recently, HubSpot enhanced their list segmentation tool.  In addition to building segments from form submissions, list memberships and properties, it is now easy to set page views and events as criteria. This feature makes it possible to build a list, trigger an email or internal notification, start a workflow, trigger a web hook, or serve Smart CTAs to contacts that have completed a specific event or viewed a specific page.

It's now possible to do things such as:

• Send an email to a contact (or nurture them) when they view a specific page on your website
• Build a list of everyone who has seen a specific page on your website
• Send a notification email to the lead owner in Salesforce when a contact views your pricing page
• Turn a lead into a marketing qualified lead when they view a product related page
• Show a specific CTA to contacts who have clicked a "buy now" button in the past or completed a transaction on your website
• Send a notification email to an account manager when a contact views a cancellation page
• Trigger a web hook when a custom event is triggered

To find out more about the timeline segmentation, check out the article, “Timeline Segmentation: A New Way to Segment Your Database with HubSpot Enterprise” by Jeffrey Russo.

Use HubSpot’s timeline segmentation tool to build segments off of form submissions, list memberships, and properties, and easily set page views and events as criteria to convey more relevant purposeful messages.

Marketing has become an art form that continues to be perfected over time, and your business’ success depends on how creatively you position yourself in the marketplace. The success of your marketing messages is dependent upon how relevant, interesting and appealing you can make them connect with your audience.

You may know that blogging can be one of the best ways to promote your business, but are you actively and consistently doing so? Business blogs can open doors for communication and interaction between you and your potential customers and/or clients. Though your blogs, you can engage in forums and join community discussions to understand the wants and needs of your prospects and at the same time, offer them knowledge and information regarding your offered products and services. This helps promote brand awareness and will make you a trusted brand by understanding your potential customers and clients’ desires.

More importantly, a relevant, interesting and creative blog can help boost more traffic to your website and help you generate more leads by engaging prospects looking for answers and information.

An established online presence can also be accomplished with the help of blogging. If you post content that is relevant and purposive for your audience, you can capture their interest, which can lead to a considerable amount of followers. The more popular your blogs become, the more they will be shared, and the more they will be “relevant” to Google – thus helping more people to be aware of your business and your brand. This can help you be seen as a trusted brand and a company that can surely address their problems and needs.

Here are four basic points to remember if you want to blog effectively for your business:

1. Be creative. Think of topics that are relatable to your business and make them interesting and entertaining for readers to actually want to read them. When an idea pops into your head, make sure you write it down so you can eventually write about it later. You can use online tools such as Evernote or Google Docs to help you accomplish this. Keep in mind that creativity is the key, and an epiphany can happen when you least expect it, so when you have an idea, make sure to write it down.
2. Be punctual. Always write in a schedule. You don’t have to write a 600 word blog in one sitting, just be certain that you take time for just an hour or two a day. This will help stimulate your mind so that you will feel inspired and ideas will eventually keep flowing.
3. Be open-minded. The best thing about blogs is the interaction you can generate from them. Encourage comments, questions and suggestions so that you’ll have a point of view on what your prospects and clients need, want and desire.
4. Be consistent. Your efforts won’t bear fruits over-night so be patient. Blogging is a continuous effort, so be unrelenting in your strategies for blog topics, and consistent in your campaigns if you want to be successful.

With great content that informs, educates and empowers and with the help of social media and other online tools, your business blogs can reach your targeted buyers across multiple platforms and begin a lead generation process for your business.

Photo Credit: Flickr

As you know, content is an essential part of your inbound marketing strategy, and with great content, you can position your company’s website or blog to success. Fortunately for you, there are many online tools that can help you in your content marketing research.

The quality of your content will determine the success of your marketing campaigns, so to get the attention of your targeted prospects, your content should be useful, relevant, educating and interesting for them.
To achieve this, you’ll need creativity and a little research. You’ll want to utilize the resources you have available online at your disposal to come up with the topics, concepts and intriguing content for your marketing that is appealing for your prospects while maintaining  the brand  your company embodies. There are many online tools that can help with your content marketing research such as Google AdWords, Keyword Tool, LinkedIn, Yahoo Answers and Bottlenose.

Since all searches begin with keywords, Google AdWords is the best tool to help you determine what keywords are more searched than others. Google AdWords can also be useful in the optimization of your content marketing strategies.

With 175 million members, LinkedIn is the largest networking community for business professionals, making it the best place for discussions and forums for people of all industries and all backgrounds. These forums and discussions are very helpful for ideas with your content marketing research.

Yahoo Answers is one of the largest online answer sites with millions of questions and answers from people all over the world. All topics are categorized and ranked according to what’s best for the users.

As you can imagine, social media has had a major impact on today’s content marketing campaigns. If you want to search for trending articles and social commentaries, Bottlenose is the best tool for you. It allows users to view social media information in clearer and simpler ways.

Arnie Kuenn wrote an article, “12 Content Research Tools You Should Be Using”, which contains important tools that can help in your content marketing research. Use them to your advantage and save yourself time by being smarter and not working harder.

Use these research tools as guides to help you get to the right starting point for your content topic or message. Having these tools to immediately find the questions to what your prospects are asking, is an efficient way to build your content marketing strategy.

Email marketing continues to be one of the most cost effective ways to communicate with your audience of clients, prospects, partners and vendors. It continues to be a great medium to help you establish brand awareness for potential customers while encouraging trust and customer loyalty for your current clients. But how do you make your marketing messages stand out amongst your competitors in the market? The answer is to integrate your content with your email strategies.

Resourceful, educational and relevant content is the most vital part of your email marketing. In one way, you can use content to give your prospects an idea of what your business is all about, from the products and services your company offers, to the news and updates regarding the company and the industry it revolves in. You can also use content to educate the consumer about a need they didn’t know they had, or to “reset their buying criteria” to methodically inform and educate your target market on how to make wise purchasing decisions. Of course, these organized messages demonstrate how and why they should buy YOUR products and services, but in an educational and resourceful way. Having relevant content that is helpful is also one of the best ways to nurture leads through a communication process that provides you a sales force that works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Chris Baggott is Chairman and co-founder of Compendium, a content marketing company. He gave some tips about incorporating your email and content strategies for successful email marketing, and perceives email marketing as a three-legged stool comprised of technology, data and content. He understands that sophisticated and easy-to-use software tools create efficiency in email marketing, but in order to take advantage of these tools, marketers need a database of eager prospects to send to, relevant content that will inform and empower them.

Chris believes the greatest marketing tactic in the history of mankind is the ‘similar situation’ story. You can learn more about that and other email marketing tactics in his l article  entitled, “Email Marketing: 6 Tactics on Combining Content and Email Strategies”

Your content marketing and email strategy go hand in hand. For your email marketing to be successful, you will need helpful content that positions you as the market expert and industry resource. They should be able to quickly relate to your information and know that you can help them solve their problem – even the ones they didn’t know they had.

Photo Credit: Stock.xchng

A buyer persona is a detailed profile of an example buyer that represents the real audience – an archetype of the target buyer. Marketers can use buyer personas to clarify the goals, concerns, preferences and decision process that are most relevant to their prospective customers. Your buyer persona is the representation of your prospects. Being sensible to the wants and needs of your potential customers and clients will give you the opportunity to give them better service.

By knowing your buyer persona, you can render your prospects with the best marketing experience by offering them the right products and services at the right time. Imagine how effective marketers could be if we would all stop making stuff up and start aligning our messages and programs with the way real buyers think.

In creating your buyer persona, you’ll need to gather the general information of name, age, gender, profession and financial situation that will give you background information to establish which category this persona would fall into. This information will begin to tell you what your buyer persona prioritizes, thus helping you understand what influences their buying decision. Their profession and financial situation will tell you how fast they can decide on buying your products and services and how capable they are of purchasing them.

The next thing you’ll want to do is understand your persona’s demographics and characteristics. The demographics shows your buyer persona’s social standing and the characteristics will tell you what kind of products and services this persona would commonly purchase. With that in mind, you’ll need to gather information on their purpose, education, free time, buying decision and /shopping habits. Knowing how well your buyer persona understands the products and services your company offers, and the purpose of the product to them, will give you the idea on how you can market your products and services effectively.

When you have detailed your buyer personas, you can now use them in your marketing. Here are just a few ways:

1. Address specific people. When you know your buyer, you can talk to him/her directly. You don’t have to say, “you” when you can say, “25-year old man, living in the suburbs”.
2. Address specific problems. Talking about a specific problem is more engaging than a general problem. But it only works if you address a problem your buyers have, so you need to know your buyer personas first.
3. Address specific beliefs. You can create a feeling of being talked directly at with beliefs. For example, “This product is healthy.” is less engaging than, “Your children need more vitamins that the school system doesn’t provide.”
4. Pinpoint accurate placement. Placement is a key to effective marketing. When you understand your buyer personas, you know where they are, and how to reach them at the right time.
5. Showcasing the right price range. If you market a product a buyer cannot afford, they won’t buy it. And they’ll be left with a belief that you’re over priced for them.

Also, by knowing your buyer persona you can address particular people with distinct problems and different beliefs. Most buyers want a more personal relationship with you the company. You have the responsibility to give them that feeling of importance and value as a customer and client, while helping you establish a stronger, trusted and honest relationship with your prospects and buyers.

Your marketing campaigns will be more successful through better buyer personas. Write content that is relatable by understanding the wants and needs of your prospects through your buyer personas. By posting content that is relevant and purposeful for them, you’ll generate loyal customers.

Photo Credit: thisiscris.com

If you’re using education to reach your targeted audience, you know that quality content is vital for online marketing. But your prospects are constantly being bombarded with distracting content that clutters their attention, so what are you doing to make yours relevant and outstanding amongst your competitors online?

You’ve probably heard that “content is king”, yet so few marketing professionals seem to understand how to create useful content that isn’t overly promotional. For your blogs, articles or landing pages to be read and shared, you need to be relevant, informative and entertaining enough to capture the attention of your prospective customers. Your content can be promotional, but in a highly educational way - enough that it is passed on by your readers

Erica Swallow said that most business owners and online marketers find it hard to create useful content that isn’t overly promotional for the brands supporting it. There are seven steps that can be your basic guide to kicking off content creation for any business. She wrote an article entitled, “7 Easy Steps for Creating Buzzworthy Content” that will guide you in creating buzzworthy content.

How has your company gone about the content creation process? Let us know in the comments below.

There are many benefits in producing buzzworthy content: 1) it will drive more traffic to your website 2) it can help you rank higher in search engines results 3) it will get your pages shared more often. It can also be used as a platform to interact and engage with your audience, making you more open to business opportunities.

Are your emails getting the attention of your targeted audience? Let me ask the question another way, do you recognize what emails coming into your inbox get YOUR attention? According to The Radicati Group, a technology market research firm, the typical corporate email user sends and receives about 105 email messages per day. Is your message getting through in this overcrowded and cluttered media space, and how can you make sure your email headline stand out?

There are many inbound marketing strategies you can use to set your company above the rest, but are you working on making your subject lines creative or clear?

Business owners and marketing professionals often find confusion in choosing between clarity and creativity to get their message across. In an article written by Amanda Gagnon, she mentions consumers are most likely to open emails that have a clear subject line than that of the creative ones as proven in a test conducted by The AWeber team. She notes an email’s subject line should have three objectives:

1. To get the brand in front of consumers
2. To get the email opened and
3. To communicate a key message from the brand to the subscribers.

Leave your comment below to let us know your opinion when it comes to clarity vs. creativity in email subject lines.

It’s important for any marketing email to have an appealing subject line. Since the subject line acts as the email’s introduction, if it deflects attention, the rest of the message may never get seen.

Since the announcement of the all new HubSpot 3 in late August, there has been a lot of buzz about the enhancements of this marketing tool. If you’re looking to increase your online leads and sales, you’ll be excited for what HubSpot 3 has to offer your company.

HubSpot 3 is the next phase of HubSpot marketing software, and makes the difficult easy, and the impossible possible. It's the only marketing system you'll ever want or need. With this new enhancement, HubSpot continues in their mission to help businesses grow and give marketers a better marketing experience more than ever.

It’s very common today for a business to use FIVE to TEN tools to manage their online marketing - just to communicate with their prospects and customers. Even with these disjoined tools, most companies aren’t getting any closer to the kind of relevant and personalized communication leads and customers need. So now, there is another opportunity, a chance to help business owners and marketing professionals in companies of every size and industry reduce the noise that has made marketing increasingly more fragmented, and get back to the strategy and art that  marketing professionals can truly appreciate.

So what is in store for you with the new HubSpot 3? Let’s find out what HubSpot has to say:

Contacts Database with Dynamic Lists: The completely rebuilt contacts database (prospects, leads, customers) is really the brain of the new platform, and provides a 360 degree view into your leads and customers.

Social Segmentation:  For each social share in HubSpot, you can see which of your leads and customers clicked on it and then add those contacts to a social media segment and follow-up with an email or smart CTA on a similar topic. You can also pull a smart list of all of your contacts with a large social following and a history of clicking on your lists.

Landing Pages with A/B Testing: Landing pages have been rebuilt to be closely integrated with the Contacts database, CRM systems, email, dynamic components and social media.  Using the new landing pages marketers can build, implement and measure a full campaign in one place.

Intelligent Email System: The email system is closely integrated with the contacts database, workflows social media, smart content and landing pages. It includes hand crafted templates that have been tested across browsers and platforms, personalization using any detail from the contact database and robust analytics.

Workflows: They leverage the enormous amount of data in the Contacts database and a series of rules (triggers) set by the marketer to create dynamically evolving segments and automate marketing actions.

The best part of all is that HubSpot 3 is now mobile and available for you on the go. HubSpot 3 has released their first ever mobile app so you can manage those leads even when you’re not in front of your computer.

This is just the beginning of the many attributes HubSpot 3 has to offer. As a leader in the marketing profession, HubSpot 3 will continue to develop and improve tools that help their customers become more efficient, while helping their business grows.

Content marketing (or education-based marketing) is essential for your business if you want to be found in your crowded field. Not only is it one of the best ways to promote your business, it is also a strong strategy to draw in your audience. With the help of social media, you can now spread your content across all platforms.

If you’re a savvy business owner, C-level executive or marketing professional, you need to be taking strong advantage of the benefits of social media. Since both the young and old are actively using and communicating with social networking, it is the best place for your business to be to educate your prospects about the advantages of your businesses.

Through social media, you can interact and engage with your potential customers. This is a tremendous platform to find out what your prospects and customers like and don’t like about your industry’s products and services. You’re also given the opportunity to educate and inform people about your business as they search for answers and engage in discussions. With your content’s availability to be easily shared by the click of a button to their entire network - you increase your exposure online, giving you chance to be “endorsed”, recommended and introduced to a new base of prospects.

Social media is also a way of advertisement – if done correctly. It can help increase brand awareness for your company, help build a stronger relationship with your loyal customers and can improve your ranking with search engines. Your business blogs help boost your company’s integrity and reputation, making it more visible and trusted. A good social media strategy will definitely help level the playing field for you amongst all the larger “bigger budgets” you may have to compete with.

Be aware that each social media platform has different rules and traits. Don’t make the mistake that you can generalize, or consider Facebook to be the same as LinkedIn, for example. Familiarize yourself first with each of the social networking sites you plan to engage in. Spend some time researching on these sites – ask questions, post comments, invite to connect with others first. Become part of the community before you decide to just “figure it out as you go”!

Janet Aronica wrote an article entitled, “How to Make B2B Content More Shareable”, which will give you an idea of what you can do to make your content more “sharable” to each social media platform. She included five social media sites namely, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn. So if you are using (or plan to use) any of these social media sites to share your website’s content, I recommend reading her full article to learn how to use these sites to their fullest potential for your business.

Social media is the best way to champion your business. Keep in mind that whether or not you use social media for your business, achieving success boils down to the quality your website’s content. Always make sure that your content is relevant, informative and entertaining. Business blogs reflect the products or services your company offers, so it is imperative that you produce helpful quality content.  Most importantly, make sure that it is easily accessible so that your information can be read and shared by your targeted audiences.