Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

Telephone selling is still very important. Still, calling a totally cold, unqualified list is harder and less effective than ever. 

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Please leave a comment on how you are using Inbound Marketing to create warmer leads for your outbound salespeople.

If you’re not actively using LinkedIn to build relationships, educate your network and generate exposure and leads – you’re missing out on the action. In business, you always want to be where your prospects and clients are, and for the most part, they’re probably in social communities such as LinkedIn.

Business Owners, Marketing Managers and other business professionals are embracing social communities to connect with people who are likely to be good prospects, as well as clients and colleagues. Sites such as LinkedIn, make it simple and easy to keep in touch with people, and check out their “updates” and activities.

Far and away, the best social networking site for professional networking is LinkedIn. This social media forum is perfect for professionals to connect and stay connected with those they need to stay in touch with. LinkedIn offers their members the opportunity to have an online rolodex of contacts which can be accessed from your profile, and on the go with the LinkedIn mobile app.

But if you’re new to LinkedIn and looking for some help, here are some tips for you from Patricia Redsicker based on the book by Brian Carter, LinkedIn for Business:

1. Set Up a Weekly Routine

• Promotion—Post new content to LinkedIn groups, your company page and your profile (minimum 30 minutes, maximum 2 hours).
• Answers—Look for new questions to answer in LinkedIn Answers (minimum 15 minutes, maximum 2 hours).
• Groups—Participate in LinkedIn groups and reply to posts where appropriate (minimum 15 minutes, maximum 2 hours).
• Other content marketing—Produce new content for LinkedIn such as articles, white papers and infographics (minimum 1 hour, maximum 8 hours).
• Networking—Search for journalists, media and industry peers, accept connection requests and initiate connections with others (minimum 1 hour, maximum 3 hours).

2. Generate Leads With LinkedIn Groups

As with all social media activity, remember that it takes multiple “touch points” on LinkedIn to make an impression, so patience is the key. One of the best ways to get leads is to post discussions and comment on other posts in relevant groups. Stand out in the group by positioning yourself as the expert. You can accomplish this by voicing customer needs and challenges more accurately, and then sharing information, tips and news to help them. The key is to remain visible by being a valuable resource.

3. Create and Optimize Great Ads

• Target your audience. Focus like a laser on who they are.
• Choose creative images and ad copy to get the message across to this target. Create 5 to 10 versions of the same ad (each containing different images, text and headline) so that you can find the best ideas and combinations.
• Run and test various ads and analyze the results.
• Once you analyze the data, look at your key metric (e.g., click-through rate) and determine your audiences’ responses. Using this information, decide what you should focus on to duplicate the success of the best ads and what should be eliminated.

4. Find New Customers.

There are additional places you can find potential customers—in the newsfeed and from existing connections. Many people completely ignore the newsfeed, but you can filter it by new connections. If you see that one of your contacts has just connected to someone you’d like to connect with, now is a good time to get that introduction.

If you want to find out more about LinkedIn and Mr. Crater’s book, you can read the full article here: 4 Ways to Profit From LinkedIn.

As you’ve probably begun to find out by now, social media is one of the great ways to promote your business online. Keep in mind to regularly communicate, interact and respond with your audience to help gain prospect’s trust, maintain customer loyalty and encourage brand awareness.

Are you using LinkedIn for your business? Leave a comment and share your best LinkedIn tip with us!

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the smartest and most effective strategies for positive results with your inbound marketing. Having a high, organic SEO ranking will not only demonstrate your trustworthiness and reliability, but it can distinguish you from your competitors. With the possible drawbacks coming from changes by search engines like Google’s Penguin Update, how will this affect your future marketing campaigns?

Link-building is one of the strongest ways you will improve your search engine optimization. When Google recognizes you as highly relevant for a particular search, this is the “secret sauce” you want in your marketing mix to drive ideal buyers to your site – because of your “popularity” with Google.

Courtney Eckerle wrote an article about a recent MarketingSherpa webinar, where Alex Dunks, Manager of Business Development with Webmarketing123, whipped up five link- building steps that can improve your search engine ranking. Some of his concepts are:

1. Lay a strong foundation by setting groundwork and understanding how to properly measure what is and is not when working with keyword selection. He believes that the anchor text of a link is important because Google and other search engines evaluate it when they follow a link.
2. Put tracking in place. Tracking is important in the same way we want to have our keyword rankings benchmarked - we want to know exactly where we’ve come from and where we’ve gone. According to Dunks, you what to figure out which keywords are actually making a difference. What if it’s just two of the 20 keywords that are delivering conversion? Hone your campaign and focus on only the two that are leading to conversions, and find some new variations that are very similar to those words.
3. Make your links as diverse as your keywords. He advices marketers to think of external links as entry points to your website, and especially to those deeper points in your website. He said a good strategy to employ is to make sure that the content on your website is organized into themes. An example would be “silo one” for men’s shoes, “silo two” might be women’s shoes, and by grouping things into silos, Google is better able to understand that theme.

Check out all the steps mentioned by Alex Dunks in the article, “5 Steps for Building Links that Improve Search Results”. Would you add other steps? What link building strategies have you found to work especially well for your business? Please share them here by leaving your comment.

Many business owners and marketing professionals struggle to implement link building, especially with the myriad of consistently changing factors search engines use to rank pages – such as Google's new Penguin update. Use these steps to establish a specific plan for strategically building links that will improve your ranking.

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.

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

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.

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.