Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

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.

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!