Marketers want to really know buyers so they can help the buyer understand their products and services.
Analytics Software helps you reach out and understand your audience to improve and increase your site traffic.
Google Analytics is free and is said to be the easiest way to help and is more helpful to business neophytes according to
Share with us your experience with Google Analytics and let us know how it worked for you.
Topics: Lead Generation, Small Business Marketing, Inbound Marketing
July 1, 2012
The other day, someone asked:
"You have a team of young potential guys..all good at their basic profiles. How do you pick one amongst them who can take up a new venture on his own? Condition is that all the guys are good at their basic jobs, the daily working results et all."
Here’s the answer... The best way to spot management talent is to:
Even for younger employees, there should be examples where they organized a club, held some kind of elected office, or had another leadership role.
Some people will try to use a behavioral interview question like “Tell me about a time you organized something?” This isn’t usually that effective. It measures how well someone thinks on their feet. What you want to look for is someone who has a pattern or organizing things or ending up in leadership positions, not just someone who is good at telling stories!
I realize these are employees who may are already hired. But, I still recommend a structured interview that focuses on the person’s history. Please see the post on the basics of how to do a structured interview.
People who go through this process are regularly surprised at what they learn about their employees — Even for employees they’ve worked with for years.
Topics: Small Business Marketing
There are a lot of ways to get more leads through your webite. One of the best is to drive more traffic. However, there are many tools and strategies available. You may feel uncertain about what really works.
Elance Alex shares his idea on how to drive more traffic. He cited Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as the most effective.
Read the full article on “5 Ways to Drive…”
The point of SEM is to promote your website through paid advertisement. It may be costly but definitely worth it. It can bring a positive result in your website traffic.
There are many ways for you to increase site traffic. Some are free, and some may cost you money. But then, always keep in mind that sometimes, spending money is a small price to pay to have a more effective and profitable website.
Do you use Pay-per-click advertising? Did it work for you? Please leave a comment and tell us your experiences.
Topics: Lead Generation, Inbound Marketing, SEO
June 11, 2012
Creating a website is a great step to promote your business. It just isn't enough!
You can’t just sit around and wait for people to stumble upon your site. A very effective way to gain customers is by driving traffic to your site.
Clicknewz.com talks about using Social Network Sites to promote your products and services. Doing this will make it easier for people interested in your business to find you.
We've had great success using LinkedIn to drive traffic. Find out more:
An important thing to remember is to constantly improve your site. Develop strategies or tools which you can use to make your site more interesting. Once people are interested, it gives you more traffic, thus, more customers.
Read more on "Driving Traffic To A New Website"...
If you just got started with Inbound Marketing, leave a comment and let us know how you are planning to get more visitors.
Topics: Lead Generation, Inbound Marketing, Social Media
LinkedIn is an amazing resource for B2B lead generation -- If you know how and don't mind doing some work!
Most small business people are on LinkedIn, but many have never gotten any leads. One reason is that people think of LinkedIn like other social networks. They try to amass connections, but nothing happens. It's not about how many connections you have.
There's a better way, and I'm going to share our LinkedIn Lead Generation Formula!
For effective sales or marketing, you need to know who would be a great prospect. This is especially true on LinkedIn. For our clients, we usually create one or two Personas that describe their ideal prospect.
Let's say you have a product that is especially valuable to hotels, but you only serve Dallas, Texas and the surrounding area.
Try this: Log into LinkedIn and click the advanced search button.
Put in the keywords: hotel, hospitality
Put in a Dallas zip code: 75201, and a radius: 75 miles
Click Search. I got over 2,800 results.
Now all of these may not be perfect prospects, but they are all in your target industry and your target geography. And, each of them almost certainly knows several of your perfect prospects.
Your prospects have problems and business challenges, and you have valuable knowledge.
If you were an expert in staffing for hotels, and you knew how to find reliable employees, don't you think most hotel managers would want to hear from you?
So let your prospects know your tricks! Are you worried that you won't be able to sell your services anymore once you tell prospects what you know? Well, don't. It's almost always easier and cheaper to hire an expert. But first, you have to let your prospects know you are an expert!
Content can mean many things. Videos, Blogs, PDFs, eBooks, Info-Graphcs, Photos, MP3s -- Anything that communicates. You know your prospects, so you know what they would appreciate.
Knowing your prospects and creating valuable content -- That's what you do for any Inbound Marketing campaign.
It's a common problem that small businesses have. They put up a website or blog, but nobody comes to see their great content. You can have the best content in the world, but it doesn't matter is nobody sees it.
You also need a content announcement strategy that connects your prospects to your content. This is where LinkedIn shines. Here are some examples of ways to get the word out:
Even though all of these are possible with LinkedIn, many companies don't take advantage. Why? Because it takes time -- Time that small companies don't have. Plus, it does take some specialized knowledge so,
If you've got a modest budget, we'll do it for you. If not, subscribe to our blog because we plan to continue this series and tell you everything. You'll grow some, have a bigger budget, and decide it's better to hire experts like us!
This is all nice, but does it work? I'll share the actual metrics with you from a LinkedIn campaign we did internally in the fall of 2011.
In one day, we got 15 leads. It kept growing, but we neglected to capture the graphs or I'd show you the rest. How many of you wouldn't love to get 15 quality leads a week -- Every week? These are typical results -- Not a special case.
For a large business, that's not enough, but for most smaller businesses, you'll quickly overwhelm your sales team.
Even better, these were very qualified leads. You can visit the Quickly Boost B2B Sales landing page. It's a good landing page, but a 50% conversion rate? The only way you get that high a conversion rate is to have great content and send very qualified traffic!
Here's another thing that happens. Your LinkedIn visitors will vote for your content. Good results confirm that you are solving their problems and delivering valuable content. Who do you think they'll call when they need your products or services?
The example below got 51 LinkedIn "shares" and 6 Re-tweets. The Twitter results came for free as we have our LinkedIn and Twitter accounts connected together. We weren't even focused on Twitter!
Use LinkedIn correctly and you can connect your prospects with your content -- Everybody wins.
Topics: Lead Generation, Inbound Marketing, Conversion
May 23, 2012
Inbound Marketing depends on two things -- Creating valuable content and driving traffic to your site. Great content is useless if nobody sees it!
It's a never-ending process. You have to constantly think of ways to increase traffic. Inc.com's article talks about the many platforms you can use to drive traffic to your site. You can brand your products or services, upload photos, create blogs or use social media.
They believe that social media actually drives more traffic to your site. In today’s modern world, everybody’s engaged with social networking. Promoting your products or services in social networks actually gives you more potential customers.
Another great fact about social media is that, people have the chance to like or even share information, photos or pages with one another. Let's say a customer likes your service and you have a social network page. What will likely happen is, that customer will "like' the page you've created and refer you to her social network friends.
Social networking is used by people to communicate and, what better way to promote your business, than let people talk about it? Just always remember never to take things for granted. Constantly challenge yourself to develop strategies to help you attract more site visitors. After all, more visitors mean more customers.
Read the full article: "How to Drive More Traffic to Your Website"...
Are you already using social networks? LinkedIn? Watch a video on how to get visitors to your site using LinkedIn. Then, when you're really ready to see your traffic grow, join our LinkedIn content promotion program.
Topics: Lead Generation, Inbound Marketing, Social Media
May 22, 2012
If you care about getting traffic to your website, you care about Google's new Penguin update!
The Penguin Update affects the ranking of websites that don't comply with Google's SEO guidelines. It's already impacted the traffic for many sites. What's the quick summary? Google wants sites to create great, relevant content! Over-optimization and SEO tricks get you penalized.
In "How To Survive Google Penguin Update with Content Writing, Amrit Hallan's provides a checklist to use when creating and promoting your content.
If you want good search engine rankings, be sure to create content that deserves reading. See the full article on "How To Survive Google Penguin Update..." for guidelines on creating and promoting your content.
Here's another article on over-optimized marketing and the Google Penguin Update by Clarke Bishop: "Inbound Marketing Trap--Over-optimized Marketing".
Has the Penguin affected you? What did you do about it? Please leave a comment.
Topics: Blogging, Inbound Marketing, SEO
May 18, 2012
Combining inbound and outbound strategies will help your content spread further, a technique we refer to as the Inbound Marketing Multiplier.
Marketing automation enhances and amplifies inbound marketing and leads to shorter sales cycles, increased revenue, and better overall marketing ROI.
As Niel Spencer points out, don't fall into the trap of focusing solely on inbound marketing. All your marketing should work together.
Combine your inbound and outbound resources to create content which is interesting, informative and yes, even entertaining. Buyers are unique. They like and engage with different types of content.
Great content is essential. Use all forms of marketing to generate more subscribers, more shares, and more customers.
Read more on "How To Build A Better Inbound Marketing Machine"...
What's your greatest marketing challenge? Please, leave a comment.
Topics: Lead Generation, Blogging, Inbound Marketing
Our researchers and writers are continuously searching the web for better ways to improve results from Inbound Marketing. Here are some recent articles we've been reading.
One key to Inbound Marketing is measuring your results with web analytics and continuously finding improvements. That's our topic for today. Web Analytics.
John Walker of JPL Creative offers tips on how to learn more about your customers through web analytics. Key points:
By 2017, the chief marketing officer will spend more money on information technology than the chief information officerTopics: Inbound Marketing, SEO, Conversion
Driving traffic is important to get visitors to your site so they can learn about your products and services. But then, it doesn't end there. It's not just about increasing site visitors.
For your business to be effective, what you should do is to convert visitors to leads.
To give you some new ideas, here's an article on 30 ways to convert visitors to leads.
Lead Generation is not just about obtaining data but having permission to talk about your products and services.
It is essential that you give people a reason to talk to you and these reasons will then generate genuine desires to talk about your products and services. One example is making your site interactive and use that interaction to increase relevance. The more relevant you are, the more interested your visitors are.
Always remember that it's important to keep people interested. Once people visit your site and you get their interest, what will most likely happen is, these visitors will become loyal customers!
Read this article on 30 Ways to Convert Visitors into Leads... and your business will surely be more profitable!
Which of these 30 ways did you pick? Have a better idea? Either way, leave a comment.
Topics: Lead Generation, Inbound Marketing, Conversion
