Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

The right educational content can do wonders for businesses. How about your business? Do you regularly write and promote helpful content that motivates and educates your prospects?

Corporate blogging not only allow companies to showcase their products and services, but gives them the leverage to inform and engage with their employees, prospects and customers.

The business that educates consumers on how to buy, dominates that marketplace. It is always an advantage for the savvy business to know what it’s targeted audience wants, beginning with the level of service - down to the quality and selection of the products and services offered. Having resourceful blogs on your business’ website provides a common ground for interaction between the company, their employees, their customers and their prospects. This way, everyone concerned will share a voice in the conversation.

By blogging for your business, your employees can contribute their viewpoints - which give them a sense of “ownership” and respect, and that can be a real asset for your company. Your potential and existing customers are able to share their thoughts, comments, questions (and yes, objections) that could help your business improve and grow. Blogs give room for a transparent and honest communication, and a forum to directly communicate and engage with you or parts of your team. These are ingredients you must have in order to increase your sales and making your business a success.

Michael Stelzner published an article on how content can help your business grow. It is a summary of an interview for the Social Media Marketing Podcast. They talked about how you can produce great contents, use it on your blogs and share it through social media outlets like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter. There are many helpful takeaways from this article, so  to learn more about this, read his full article which also includes a video of the interview, entitled “Blogging for Business: How Content Can Improve Your Sales.”

Always keep in mind that blogging boils down to the quality of content you have. It is imperative that you only produce quality content that educates, “resets the buying criteria” and is a resource that’s worth reading and sharing. Your content should embody knowledge, entertainment, creativity and relevance. You should be able to capture the attention of your audience, and influence their minds through your words.

It is also essential that you share your content to all relevant platforms possible. Utilize all resources, such as article directories, social media groups and online forums to spread your contents. Great quality content that’s well administered, can improve your online presence and SEO rankings - which in turn can give you more leads and more sales for your business. By accomplishing successful business blogging, you are demonstrating to your industry and to your marketplace that you are an honest, trusted and reliable brand worthy of their business.

Online marketing doesn’t end with just creating a website alone. You have to exert all kinds of effort to make your website well known and established online.

Every day new technologies are being developed and it’s important that as a business owner, CEO or the person responsible for your company’s marketing, you keep up with the advances and changes. It’s not enough just to build a website that publishes resourceful content. You really have to distribute your helpful content in places where your prospects are located.

The key to this strategy is getting found online where your prospects might be searching. Your potential customers or clients should be able to easily find you because of the placement of your content. But how do you establish a better online presence?

Let’s start with a well-designed and better developed website. Appearance is not everything, but it can be a great contribution to set the professional “tone” for prospects. Your functionally, well-designed website needs to be appealing to keep your visitors interested, engaged, and wanting to come back again for more!

1) Know how you want your business to be known Is your brand recognizable? You should know what your prospective customers or clients want in order for them to choose you among the variety of competitors in your marketplace. It is important that they clearly see your business as the only answer to their needs and wants. Better branding will make your business more identifiable than your competitors in the market, and makes it much easier for them to find and recognize you online.

2) Publish great quality content with targeted keywords and phrases Always keep in mind that the excessive use of keywords is a detriment to you by search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing and others. Be sure that you incorporate your keywords and phrases sensibly without compromising the quality of your content. This will also help improve your search engine (SEO) ranking. A high search engine ranking will certainly improve your chances for getting found online.

3) Drive traffic , generate leads and convert leads to sales Once you have an appealing, relevant and “sticky” website  people can go to for their searching needs, website traffic will come (and stay)! The next step therefore is for you to turn these visitors into customers, and these customers into sales. To do this, make sure that your website has a “call to action” in order for your visitors to move to the next step. Your call to action should be relevant, specific and it must encourage them to respond. It’s also a good idea to reward them for responding. You could reward them with a free download of valuable information, access to a “private” area of your website or something else to thank them for taking action. Once they respond, you’ll likely have sales you never experienced before. When you begin a system of moving prospects smoothly through this process, you’re influencing your industry and beginning to capture a larger segment of the marketplace – for good!

4) Use social media to interact and engage with your audience More and more people are engaging in social communities like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter to research, find their needs and connect with other like-minded people. Because of this, social media communities are the best place to position your business while educating, informing and empowering prospects about your business. Become regularly involved in the social media networks where your prospects “hang out”, and take the time necessary to interact and become involved in their questions, comments and discussions. It’s a great way of advertising and presenting your business in a “soft sell” way, while making your products or services more accessible for your audience. It’s also a sure way of getting found online.

Establishing a better online presence can be done by following tried and true steps that take time, effort and patience, but the fruit of your labor will surely be rewarding. An established online presence will position you above your competitors, and make your company a highly recognized and trusted brand that people will want to buy from and share with others.

HubSpot 3 provides some great new features, and HubSync users may want to get a head start. We are considering some HubSync upgrades to better use the new Contacts functions. But, we won't be able to roll these out until HubSpot completes their migration (The latest estimate is February, 2013).

In the meantime, here are some things you can do. HubSync sends relevant data from orders into HubSpot. However, HubSpot won't let you use the data to build Smart Lists unless you do a few more steps.

First, there's a little homework. You need to identify the data you need. You can see the actual form submission data by going to:

https://app.hubspot.com/leads/app/list?portalId={Your Portal ID}

You have to lookup your portal ID and enter it after the "=" sign.

This will bring up the old HubSpot leads screen. Pick one of the leads submitted by HubSync. You can tell because the Event will be set to Completed Purchase, Abandoned Cart, or Admin Purchase.

Then, click View Full Lead Details > on the lower right.

Click the Form Data tab, and you can see all the data the HubSync sent into HubSpot for each Event. You'll see all the data like this:

Notice that for this order, Louise bought some Adult Comfort Tips. Now, here's what you can do to better use this information in the new Contacts area of HubSpot 3.

Go back to the main Contacts screen. Look for Manage Settings on the lower right.

Click the Blue Create Property button. Then copy the name of the data from the old leads form. For example, you might want to make a new property called item1_ProductName to hold the data for the first product purchased.

Normally, you can just leave these in the Contact Information group, and leave the input set to Single Line Text.

An easy way to do this is to have two tabs open in your browser — One for the new Contacts settings and another for the old Leads form data. Then, you can just cut and paste the names.

Now the new property is available to build Smart Lists and for other HubSpot 3 features!

This all works well for a lot of situations. Still, there are some limitations in HubSpot 3, and there's been some discussion about this on the HubSpot developer list lately.

There is currently no way to add multiple orders to HubSpot. So, if you have customers who make second and third purchases, item1_ProductName will contain the first item the customer last purchased. There is no way to have a complete history. We have some ideas for how to address this situation, but it is a difficult problem.

For a given order, we do submit data for multiple items purchased in a single order. You may see item1, item2, item3, etc. It's just that with a repeat order any new data will replace the old.

I hope this helps! If you have ideas or requests, please leave a comment.

HubSpot offers all-in-one marketing software including blogging, marketing analytics, social media, email, automation and more.

HubSpot helps businesses grow.

Marketing strategies are essential for a business’ success. Through the years, HubSpot has worked hand in hand with its customers make marketing easy, enjoyable and profitable. Because of their love for marketing and their dedication to their customers, they've given birth to HubSpot 3.

According to Brian Halligan, HubSpot’s CEO and Co-founder, HubSpot 3 helps marketers reduce the noise that has made marketing increasingly more fragmented and ineffective. Now, we can get back to the strategy and art of communication and make marketing people truly love.

The new features of HubSpot 3 include:

• Smart CTAs: Powered by data from Contacts, Smart CTAs enable you to create images and calls-to-action for your website or emails that dynamically adapt to reflect the viewer’s interests, industry, lifecycle stage, or other areas of segmentation.

• Smart Fields: Smart fields are a long-awaited answer to anyone who is sick and tired of filling out yet another website form with the same information. As you collect more information about your leads, Smart Forms remove any field that has been completed in the past, creating shorter and shorter forms for your leads without sacrificing valuable information.

• Email: Target specific segments and personalize your sender, subject, and message body content with any field or custom field from your contact profile.

• Workflows: Workflows enable you to trigger targeted communications based on a lead’s behavior. A divergence from traditional marketing automation, however, Workflows also allows you to update details in a lead's profile based on activity across channels, including social media.

•  Social Contacts: See which of your leads clicked on something you shared in social media, and quickly add them to a list to nurture. In the Contact profile, see how active each lead has been in social media and how recently they've engaged with you.

•  Landing Pages: Run an entire campaign from one view. Create, test and promote landing pages, then see which channels (email, social, search, etc.) are bringing leads to it. 

As Benjamin Franklin said, “Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”

Fortunately, HubSpot really is working hard on continual growth and progress!

The world of online marketing is buzzing over the newest breakthrough release of HubSpot — HubSpot 3. For weeks now, talk of the new and improved HubSpot have been swarming the internet, making online marketers curious and excited about the upcoming features HubSpot 3 will provide.

It's already common knowledge that HubSpot helps businesses grow. 

So who can resist Hubspot 3? As Rachel Ergo cited in her article, HubSpot 3 is quickly blossoming into being a marketer’s one true love.  Read the full article on “HubSpot 3 Workflows – Integrate, Automate and Love!” and discover what HubSpot is all about.

Change is constant in this world for only with change comes growth, especially when it comes to business. Innovation and modification should always be at hand especially if you know that you’re doing it for the love of something you truly believe in, which is your business.

True, iPhone 5 is expected to have a larger screen, work over higher-speed wireless networks, and have other goodies. But, will it help you grow your business so you can afford all those new iPhones for your employees?

At Inbound Team, we are a HubSpot partner, and yes, we love HubSpot. Still, it’s rare to see a new software release that offers as much as HubSpot 3.

Have you ever called a customer “service” number where they ask you to punch in your account number. Then, when you finally get a representative, what do they ask? “Could I have your account number please?” I cringe every time this happens, and it happens almost every time.

Unfortunately, too much online marketing works the same way. Come to our website and download our white paper. Just give us your name, email, company, phone, etc. The only problem is that we may have recently collected all the same information from the same person — Very annoying!

• What if you had a website that knew all about your customers and visitors? 
• What if it only asked for data it didn’t already have? 
• Even better, what if it gave them appropriate content based on who they are and where they are in the buying cycle? 

Finallly, HubSpot 3 solves the problem.

At Inbound Team, we do a lot of integrations between HubSpot and other systems. We know how hard it can be to make everything work well together. 

In HubSpot 3, everything revolves around contacts. The Contacts section has been completely redesigned so that you can associate much more data with a specific contact. This really lets you know who the person is and what interests them. 

Then, you can build dynamic, “smart lists” to focus on a specific group of your customers or prospects. What if a big social media influencer visited your site? Wouldn't you want to treat them with extra care?

In the example list shown below, we’ve found our Influencers by checking their follower count and recent history. Yes, HubSpot actually looks this up for you.

Lists can be used for email marketing, but the same idea is used to create Smart Forms that only collect the data you don’t already have. 

You can even change Calls to Action (CTA) and other elements of your website based on the Contact’s information. You can show a top of the funnel CTA for new visitors and offer a totally different offer to visitors that are ready to buy.

There’s only one downside to all this marketing power — It takes some expertise to use it effectively. HubSpot has made things very usable. Still,you have to know your customers, know their buying process, create  relevant content and design all these interactions. That’s where we can help. Get a free HubSpot 3 marketing review. 

I may never know why phone systems keep asking for account numbers and can’t integrate with customer service software. At least my marketing life just got a lot easier. My customers will love it!

Please leave a comment and let me know how you are going to use HubSpot 3 to delight your customers.

Useful analytics are your best friend when it comes to measuring and improving your inbound marketing.

• Who are visiting your site?
• Where they are coming from?
• Where are they going
• What they are viewing on your site.

Confused with how Google Analytics works? Leave a comment and share to us the questions you have and we’ll help you the best way we can.

Writing is self-expression in its simplest form. Still, you may find it hard.

For people to read your article, your content should be creative and relevant. According to Stephanie Mcgrath, anyone who can read can definitely write.

In her article, she tackles strategies and shares tips for web writing. She cited that you just have to remember the mantras of writing, like thinking about who you are writing for. 

Writing gives you the benefit of conveying your message to your readers, and, it's surely the best way to introduce your products and services. Just keep in mind that what you are writing should always be interesting and relevant to your readers.

Are you stuck with your writing? Here is another great article to help you get your thoughts together. Read Clarke Bishop’s Business Blogging: What to do about "Writer's Block.

What stops you from writing more? Leave a comment. Yes, I know that means you have to write a sentence or two!

Getting traffic is a good way to increase revenue but for your business to grow, you must understand the behavioral patterns of your site visitors. 

A great tool for this is Google Analytics. Everything you need to know about your site visitors is shown. You can truely understand your site visitors.

In Melinda’s article, she cited how you can set up Google Analytics on your site and listed her favorite statistical ways to do it.

Google Analytics is definitely a must-have tool for you if you want improvement for your business at its finest.

Read more on “Using Google Analytics to Improve Your Website”…

Are you using Google Analytics for your site? Leave a comment and share to us how Google Analytics improve your site.

After college, you need to find the perfect place for you to grow and become a better person. Lucky for me, I’ve found just that.

It's a competitive world. Finding your niche is very difficult. Having proper education is never enough to land you a job. It takes a great deal of determination and patience to find the right one for you.

Though I have finished College, it wasn't easy to find a job. 

I’ve always had the passion for writing, evident in the fact that I joined campus publications since I was seven. I would’ve taken Journalism, but my parents wanted me to study nursing.

However, after I graduated, I realized that writing is what I want to do for a living.

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity I’ve been long waiting for. I got my first full-time writing job, being a part of Inbound Team. I thought this job will be easy for me, but, I was wrong!

I read somewhere a quote that says: “Find a job that you love and you’ll never work one day in your life.” I finally found the job I’ve always wanted. But, I was feeling uncertain if I’d be able to do it right.

Business Blogging is nothing like I’m used writing. I’ve been writing feature articles for campus publications, but now, I have to write blogs to help people make their business more successful. How can I ever achieve that?

It wasn’t easy at first. I was struggling. But then, I was lucky to get all the help I need from my mentor. With his patience and perseverance, plus my dedication and hard work, I finally learned how the whole process works.

I’ve realized that it’s easy to write about anything, but what’s hard is to write about something! At least something you have to learn about first. Here are a few tips which helped me finally become the Business Blogger I aimed to be:

Discover and Know your Marketing Personas.

Before you start writing, you need to know who you are writing for. You need to discover who your readers are. Once you achieve that, the next step is to empathize. Put yourself in their shoes. Who are they? What are they feeling? What questions do they have? Once you’ve got that figured out, you know you’re on the right track.

Create Great Content.

Always write something worth reading. Create content which is interesting and informative. Your content should answer all the questions your readers have and more importantly, it should keep them reading. Moreover, when you create your content, make sure it will trigger a response from them. What do they need to know? What have they learned? What do you want them to do? Once all these questions are answered, you know you’ve done a good job.

It’s not impossible to find your spot, even in the most unexpected of all places. After all, you can be whoever you want to be.

Who would’ve thought? I became a Business Blogger. All it took is my computer, great ideas, and bit of practice.

How did you start blogging? Leave a comment and tell your story. 

Image Credit:stuck4ideas