B2B Marketing Blog

SEO + PPC: Hand in Hand for Inbound Marketing Success

By |2023-04-05T11:16:51+00:00December 26th, 2017|

topicIcon Inbound Marketing PPC

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

SEO + PPC: Hand in Hand for Inbound Marketing Success header

Many marketers seem to believe that building content, together with accompanying landing pages and calls to action is all they need to do for a solid inbound marketing funnel. Sure, creating a funnel with different journeys based on your buyer persona is definitely the foundational structure of every campaign, but there is often a vital part missing. And without that vital part, chances are nobody will end up going through those carefully constructed funnels of yours.

In case the blog’s title did not give away the secret already, we are talking about the combo of SEO and PPC. Read below to learn how the combined efforts of these two practices serve to strengthen the top of the funnel, and how you can apply it in practice.

SEO

Long gone are the days when simply adding a keyword to the title, and in the body a few times, would suffice. For proper indexing, search engines demand much more, including:

  •         Onsite SEO (Both content-related, and non-content related)
  •         Offsite SEO (link building, content distribution, social discussions, influencers)

Onsite SEO

Onsite SEO, a practice that revolves around optimizing elements within a page or a blog post, can be divided between content-related practices, and non-content-related ones. Content-related ones include making sure the content tackles a specific topic and that it has the keywords and the alt text to show for it. So make sure your content includes keywords (preferably long-tail ones) in the title and the first paragraph, as well as in the blog’s meta description. Keywords need to reflect a certain user intent. Make sure that every piece of content has at least one relevant image, which will also contain the keyword in the alt text. And most importantly, make sure the piece is authoritative, trustworthy, and unique. Duplicated content will not bode well with search engines.

Non-content related SEO means making sure the site works properly from a technical perspective. Is it optimized for mobile? Make sure it is, because Google loves it. Does it load fast? Again, make sure it does, because users loathe slow-loading sites. Make sure the piece has outgoing links (links pointing to other sites, for credibility purposes), that has a proper URL structure, as well as the Schema.org structured data.

All these things combined will ensure that your masterfully crafted content gets the search engine ranking it deserves.

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Offsite SEO

Once you are done optimizing your pages for search engines (both technically and from a content perspective), there are things you can do outside the site with the same goal in mind. Marketers usually think offsite SEO and backlinking are synonymous, which is not exactly true. Backlinking, albeit an important part of offsite SEO, is, at the end of the day, just part of the effort. By having content on other sites and blogs linking back to your content, it is your content that will gain more visibility, credibility and an increased perception of quality. All of these are essential at building trust among your target audience and creating an image of an opinion-maker and a thought leader.

However, do not stop there. Another important part of offsite SEO is content distribution through social media, which also means engaging in meaningful conversations on various platforms such as Quora, LinkedIn or Reddit. Adding guest blogging to the mix is also valuable, and depending on the industry and the niche you are in – you can also consider employing the powers of influencers.

At the end of the day, offsite SEO revolves around improved perception of your content’s quality, both among search engines and your target audience. That is done through links and mentions among other content creators, as well as links and mentions on social media and among influencers.

PPC

While SEO requires investing in resources to rank high in SERPs under specific keywords and inbound efforts focused on converting them into leads and full-blown clients, it is no secret that organic efforts take time, and lots of it. Until search engines index your content for specific keywords or when competing for rankings on super competitive organic terms, PPC can come in very handy.

PPC advertising can be designed to complement the related SEO efforts as well. Paid search allows you to achieve prominence among SERPs, as well as to conduct small experiments in order to find which keywords generate relevant traffic to your content. Exploring which terms make the user reach your content in the fastest possible manner provides inbound marketers and SEO professionals with valuable information about these visitors. They come with sufficient enough insight to tailor their strategies (SEO) and content (inbound) to the audience. All the data on clicks, impressions and conversion rates for specific keywords that are gathered in the process offer wealth of information that can help make smarter strategic SEO and inbound marketing decisions.

Pro tip: Don’t fall for the usual trap of utilizing PPC and SEO just to promote the top of the funnel. Don’t forget – different buyers are at a different stage in the buyer’s journey, so promoting just one stage, or one part of the funnel might not be the ideal thing to do. Smartly utilize your efforts to strengthen the entire funnel.

Closing comments

If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one to hear it, that is one really sad tree. A masterfully crafted inbound campaign, comprising of valuable blog posts, beautiful landing pages and clear calls to action, will be a really sad one – if there is no one consuming it and signing up for walled content. To make sure your buyer personas actually hear your falling tree, you need to drive them to the forest, and that is best done through the combined use of SEO and PPC. By optimizing your content for search engines algorithms and adding solid display ads to the mix, you will see your target audience reaching the top of your funnel – in droves.

 

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Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing: What You Need to Know

By |2023-04-05T11:18:42+00:00November 20th, 2017|

topicIcon Digital Marketing Inbound Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

Inbound Vs Outbound: What You Need to Know header

Is your marketing strategy headed down a dead-end street?

We all have that one friend whose stories never seem to end, that one person that we want to hang out with every once in awhile, but always regret it afterwards. Remember the feeling of being stuck in an infinite loop of their monologues? By the end of the coffee break, you have heard about the greatest thing that has ever happened to them, and the second greatest thing, and the third and the twenty-sixth.

In all honesty, for most of the meetup you are bombarded with the information you might not even be interested in. At one point (probably while drifting off during one of their monologues) you probably realized you should be making new friendships with people who actually listen to your stories, value your opinions and share your interests and ideas, instead of the ones who only use you for your pair of ears.

You see, marketing and friendship have a lot in common. Both are a two-way street. If you are only exposed to content without being given space to utter a thing, what is the point of partaking in the dialogue? Are you being treated respectfully? And should you make new friends/choose a new marketing strategy? Well, according to Barney’s rule – you should, because:

Inbound vs Outbound

New vs Old Approach: Inbound vs Outbound Marketing

Outbound Marketing

Do you use an ad blocker for your browsers? Do you record your favourite shows just to fast-forward through the ads? Are your local telemarketers saved in your contacts list under “DO NOT ANSWER FOR THE LOVE OF GOD”? If so, you are unconsciously blocking out the outbound marketing tactics.

Instead of the boring definitions, allow us to show you a few examples and types of outbound marketing. TV commercials, billboards (those huge smiling faces and cringey messages you used to read while stuck in traffic, before smartphones), telemarketing, direct mail and online advertisements are perfect prototypes of the traditional marketing.

outbound strategies

Businesses that use outbound strategies are “pushing out” their message to promote a product. That may sound smart, but bear in mind that buyers in the outbound marketing process are not targeted with any real precision. Most of the people who see the ad might not even be interested in their product whatsoever.

helping you navigate your startup to marketing stardom

 

Traditional marketing campaigns tend to be interruptive and to the contemporary society – extremely annoying. Did you know that a person is exposed to as much as 2000 ads per day via outbound marketing? Modern-day customers are finding new ways to dodge traditional marketing that infiltrates their lives through mass media and drains time and energy. Just look at the adoption rates of ad blocking software:

Adblock usage

Adblock usage is up worldwide [Image Credit: Business Insider]

Outbound marketing is frequently discredited due to its overall similar marketing patterns that create a gap between business and buyer. Using outbound marketing tactics is like driving down a dead-end street. One-way communication lacks subjective feedback from customers. It alienates an audience from the business and brand itself.

Inbound Marketing

With the rapid pace of marketing technology, marketers decided to put the focus to focusing on what customers want, rather than deciding for them. Since then, inbound strategies have been changing the world of marketing as we know it, irrevocably.

Inbound marketing is client-oriented businesses that “pull in” potential customers to their doorstep. On one end are buyers that are searching for things they are interested in. On the other end are companies that create relevant content around their customers’ preferences.

Now more than ever customers want to feel like they are in control of their own buyer’s journey. Potential customers are indirectly persuaded into buying your products instead of being “attacked” via ads and salesmen.

All types of inbound marketing use two-way communication. This allows buyers to be heard and additionally engages them into the process of buying, thus creating a solid bond between brand and consumer.

Inbound your business and turn your customers into brand lovers

If you have just started your own business, you are most certainly looking for ways to advertise your brand. One of the first things startup founders dwell on is reach. The thing we cannot stress enough is that reach doesn’t mean much in the buying process – if you’re reaching the wrong audience. The amount of people seeing your brand is not as important as if the people who are seeing it are relevant for your business.

The second thing you think about is obviously the financial side of the story. Everybody wants to make the most out of their monetary investment and with inbound marketing you will get your money’s worth in no time, as inbound strategies will pull your audience to your product.

Blog posts, email newsletters, videos and social media, content in general – those are just few of many examples of inbound marketing which offer your business a boost in the dot com world. But how does it all work?

First of all, you need to research buyer personas. The information you collect from several leads should create an ideal buyer profile. This will help you identify challenges and pain points of your potential consumers and create a proper strategy for your company.

After this step you create content using the above-mentioned findings. The content is the nucleus of inbound marketing and as such it should always captivate buyer’s attention in order to potentially create more leads.

The feedback you receive is always a good thing. Even if you face negative comments, you must accept them for what they are – suggestions to change and improve your approach. With your customers’ feedback, you are able to advance your business and always thrive for more and better.

Since inbound marketing suggests two-way communication, you and your business are not the only ones that prosper in the process. The personal segment of inbound marketing is what creates the love for the brand.

Conclusion

Search engines give buyers so much freedom nowadays. They are given possibility to opt for the best service for their needs. The content you create and the communication with the customers is what gets buyers hooked.

The last time you searched something on your engine was five minutes ago and it led you here. Barney was right. New is always better.

 

 

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Haters gonna hate – how to deal with those who dislike your product

By |2023-04-05T11:19:40+00:00November 12th, 2017|

topicIcon Inbound Marketing Lead Generation Sales

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

Haters gonna hate.png

If there is one thing that all entrepreneurs share in common, it has to be the false belief that all mankind just HAS to like the thing that they invented. Every person who looks like they’re not interested, or even – god forbid – say something negative about their product, company or service, is considered to be the root of evil, or – in the ever so polite corporate jargon – a crisis.

This usually comes from misunderstanding what “target audience” means. Politicians, by the way, understand this term better than anyone else, and usually wouldn’t care about a negative story about them, as long as it’s not published in a media that is read by their voters.

So what does “target audience” means? It means the audience which is highly likely to purchase whatever it is that you’re making, usually because it’s highly relevant to them (based on their location, occupation, habits, areas of interest etc.). I think we can agree that if this definition was to stop here, everyone would embrace it. The problem lies with the part less talked about – the one that deals with those who are NOT part of your target audience, and how they might react to your story. 

 

First of all, news flash – there isn’t even one thing in this world that EVERYBODY likes. Even babies or puppies are hated by some (those bastards!). Your product, your company, your story – are not going to be the one thing that changes that. It’s not “close to being impossible”, it is impossible. So some people are not going to like what you’re doing, that’s a given. And by the way, you are not going to find out about all of them, not now and not ever.

What to do about them? that’s what we’re going to solve today. I even prepared a checklist to make it easier on you. After all, dealing with haters is no pleasure cruise.

 1. Are they in your target audience? 

2. Are they in a position to influence your target audience? (say a reporter that writes about luxury cars, and hates yours. While he probably won’t buy one for himself, his readers are your exact target audience. This is also true for KOL – Key Opinion Leaders – and the likes of them).

 3. How loud are they? 

 4. Is their hate based on personal bias, or actual experience?

 5. (This is the most important one, probably) Do they make a fair point?

 6. Is there a possibility to change their mind?

 7. If the answer to 6 is yes, what will it take, and is it worth it?

helping you navigate your startup to marketing stardom

 

If they are in your target audience, jump immediately to Q4+5 (by the way, if the answer to 1+2 is no, leave it!). Do they make a fair point? if you’re too close to answer this yourself, ask someone you trust and doesn’t work for you to try and answer this. Try to avoid giving them your point of view before they answer, and ask only people who you trust enough to know that they will always be honest with you.

If the answer is yes, thank the hater and learn from it. Maybe even change accordingly. You have a chance at communicating directly with your audience here. Be humble.

If the answer is no, go back to Q2. If they are not in a position to influence others on a massive scale, leave it. No one reaches 100% of their target audience. If the answer is yes, check out Q6- can you change their mind? yes- go to Q7 (what will it take), and if it makes sense, do it. If no – leave it! It would be wiser and better to spend your time on winning others who like you, or are able to learn to like you, and create positive ambassadors there.

The only question I did not address is Q3, how loud are they. I didn’t address it because, to be honest, I don’t like it. In today’s world things can go viral for no apparent reason, and ignoring someone (especially if they do make a fair point) just because they have only 130 friends on Facebook and 43 Twitter followers can prove to be a big mistake. Huge.  But if you have to, add that to the mix in order to asses the risk – it also helps to understand the general loudness of the hater. Are they “professional haters”, the kind that hates everything and anyone? are they usually positive but have a thing with your company specifically?

 Professional haters (and we all know at least one of those) are usually taken by their surroundings with a grain of salt. Positive people who share negative opinion about something are usually trusted more. Which one is yours?

 To sum it up – if you go through the following Q&A with a rational mind, most of the time the answer would be “leave it”. That’s because we can’t win them all. And I’m not saying they should be treated with anything other than respect (not admiration, obviously, but respect for sure). I’m just saying they’re not worth it. Not your time, not your resources, and not the endless fight of trying to win them over, a fight that will never end because there will always be at least one hater you’re aware of, if you’re not lying to yourself.

Last note,

If you see that too many of your target audience are becoming haters, then the best thing to do would be to quote Ice Cube to yourself – “Check yourself before you wreck yourself”. Something is not working, either your story, your brand promise or the actual experience. Don’t wait until it’s too late – your target audience wants to love you, you invented something that is aimed at making their life easier. If they don’t, learn from it and react before it’s too late.

I’ll close with an example I like to give. There’s a website called “paypalsucks.com“. It’s been around for a while, and I’m sure PayPal HQ are aware of it. Why haven’t they declared war on it? Simply because with over 100M clients, they understand the simple truth I was talking about today:

Haters gonna hate. No worth spending your time and energy on them, when you can win loyal clients somewhere else instead.

 

 

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How to market your SaaS product

By |2023-04-05T11:21:04+00:00October 17th, 2017|

topicIcon B2B Marketing Content Marketing Inbound Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

how to market your saas product header

Update: we just published a new comprehensive guide for marketing your SAAS product, go check it out!

 

I speak with many B2B CMOs who tell me online marketing isn’t relevant when it comes to B2B. Such companies stick to traditional methods such as trade shows, cold calling and god forbid – traditional media such as billboards or even TV. SaaS marketers don’t have the privilege of disregarding online marketing as a core platform for generating customers.

By the inherent online SaaS nature, SaaS marketers are “forced” to hack their way to growth online. So, what do most SaaS CMOs do? They spend money on media, sending traffic to salesly landing pages that rarely convert visitors to leads (and even when converting, those leads almost never become customers). After a while they realize that’s not the way to go and start searching for solutions. The purpose of this post is to help you avoid wasting your investors’ money, and tackle SaaS marketing like a pro.

 

First things first – who are you selling to?

A good starting point to learning your target audience is to learn all you can about your current customers.

Evaluate the following: who are those people whose problem you’re solving? How old are they? What’s their professional background? What challenges are they dealing with and how do you help them solve those challenges?

Understanding your buyer personas is the foundation of an effective SaaS marketing strategy. Without that, you’re working in the dark.

Understand your prospect’s buyers journey

Once you’ve mapped out who your ideal buyers are, it’s time to put yourself in their shoes and understand the journey they go through leading up to a purchase. First, I’ll tell what their journey isn’t (though wouldn’t everyone’s life be easier if it where) :

dream buyer journey.png

a dream buyer’s journey

I’m surprised by the number of B2B marketers who still think that by interrupting their target audience with ads intended to sell them something they’re not ready to buy, from a company they don’t trust – can actually generate positive ROI. The brutal reality is that interrupting will not get you far. Selling to people who don’t trust you and aren’t ready to buy is annoying, spammy and a waste of your money.  Here’s what a realistic buyer’s journey looks like:

buyers-journey.png

A typical buyer’s journey includes 3 stages:

 

  1. Awareness – the prospect realized and expressed symptoms of a potential problem. For example “how do I drive the right kind of traffic to my website”
  2. Consideration – the prospect clearly defined and gave a name to their problem and is now committed to researching and understanding all available approaches to solving their problem. For example, a prospect whose problem is driving the right kind of traffic might research “how to do Inbound Marketing” or “what you should look out for when outsourcing Inbound Marketing”
  3. Decision – the prospect defined their solution strategy and is now comparing vendors.

Many companies are trying to sell to prospects at early stages of the buyer’s journey when in fact what they should be focusing on is adding value and positioning themselves as experts in their fields. The secret lies in distributing valuable content, building trust and creating lasting relationships. Turning visitors to customers will happen on your visitors’ terms. Just as you can’t force a social relationship, you can’t force a business one. The days of salesmen knocking on doors (both online and offline) asking for a glass of water and then pitching to death (or closed deal) are gone. We’re in an era of value. By placing the right content at the right place and the right time, you’ll be amazed at the quality of leads you’ll be generating. Those leads will be called inbound leads and the method – inbound marketing.

helping you navigate your startup to marketing stardom

 

Convinced? Let’s get practical

  1. Make sure you have a company blog, and keep your eye on the goal – adding value, helping and educating. The blog isn’t an extended sales deck, it’s your chance to position your company as professionals.
  2. Align your blog content with the buyer’s journey. Awareness blog posts should be about high level challenges your buyer personas are experiencing. Consideration stage posts should tap into possible solutions, including yours of course. Decision stage content is the time to start selling. This is the time to convince your prospects why you’re the best choice, and it shouldn’t be too difficult since they already trust you and have gained value from your educational content.

applying content to the buyers journey

  1. With respect to awareness stage posts, make sure to conduct a keywords research and to include relevant keywords in your blog post titles and content. This is important – you need to make sure your prospects will find your content when searching for solutions at the awareness stage of their journey. You can learn more about how to optimize your content here.
  2. In order to progress prospects down the buyer’s journey, use calls to action at the end of each blog post inviting them to download gated content that is most relevant to their stage of the journey. Technically speaking, these calls to action should lead to landing pages where they’ll be invited to provide their email and further info in order to receive the content. Once they do that a magic moment occurs – those visitors have now become leads. Don’t make the mistake of transferring those leads to sale just yet. Make sure to nurture them and to keep building their trust. Email them consideration stage content, invite them do download more gated content and nurture the relationship with them all the way down to the decision stage.

Only once you’ve seen the leads have engaged with your content at a suffice level (subjective per company and product), transfer them over to sales. This way, instead of the regular complaints you’re hearing from them, they’ll suddenly thank you as they’ll be receiving leads who actually want to hear from them and don’t experience them as intrusive.

Leverage SaaS directories and review websites

For maximum exposure of your SaaS product, you should consider adding different SaaS directories and review websites to your strategy. You might get some traffic or conversions from the websites you submitted to (someone might stumble across your product) or at the very least, get some quality backlinks that will help down the line.

Be wary, though. Some directories are labeled as spam due to misleading and/or false information – these will get you nowhere. Some websites like Pandia require you to pay for the placement, while others such as SoftwareFindr, Capterra, and Crunchbase are free. In any case, SaaS companies should consider building their presence on these software listing and review sites so buyers looking for products in your category can easily find your solution.

Wrapping up

By adopting a marketing strategy that revolves around adding value instead of interrupting, you can start generating customers from your online marketing efforts. Learn who your buyer personas are, understand their buyers journey and tailor content specifically for them and their challenges. Now you understand inbound marketing in a nutshell. Time to learn more and step up your efforts to market your SaaS product.

Good luck!

 

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Startup Marketing Growth Hacks to Bolster Your Business

By |2023-04-05T11:19:12+00:00October 17th, 2017|

topicIcon B2B Marketing Inbound Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

Startup Marketing Growth Hacks to Bolster Your Business header

You have a great idea for a new startup. You’ve identified a need in your industry, and have a killer product that has the potential to disrupt the market.

However gone are the days where a great idea will simply attract customers and clients. With all the startups in the world these days, creating a unique, comprehensive startup marketing strategy is critical for success.

But with limited resources and funding, especially in the early days, startup marketing can prove to be a difficult task. Marketing efforts often take a backseat to product, R&D, and development needs.

Thing is, you can have the greatest product in the world, but if you don’t have the tools to market your product, no one will ever get the chance to see it.

This post will give actionable growth hacks to boost your startup marketing strategy and get your awesome product on the eyes of your public.

Startup Marketing Growth Hack #1: Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has changed the way we look at celebrity, social media, and how they intersect with technology. With 70 percent of consumers saying they are influenced by peers in their buying decision, leveraging the power of influencers is a startup marketing strategy that can result in huge returns.

helping you navigate your startup to marketing stardom

 

Look no further than Maybeline, who teamed up with 15 beauty experts during Fashion Week in 2016. By partnering with these influencers, they were able to reach 13.9 million consumers across the world, resulting in almost 4 million “likes” on social media. As growth hacking startup marketing strategies go, influencer marketing should be at the top of your list for 2018.

Startup Marketing Growth Hack #2: Product Hunt Exposure

Product hunt is a priceless tool for early age startups to gain marketing exposure. Widely regarded as one of the best places to launch new products, ensuring you have a prepared strategy for Product Hunt is a great growth hack for high intent traffic and customers.

Konsus, an on-demand outsourcing platform, achieved 500% growth from launching their startup on Product Hunt. They came prepared with both an impressive pre and post launch plan, and were prepared to handle the amount of traffic and buzz that they garnered after launch. By allocating limited, yet important resources to launching your startup on Product Hunt, this startup marketing growth hack strategy is one to have in your arsenal.

Startup Marketing Growth Hack #3: Quora, Quora, Quora

As high-intent social media platforms go, Quora may reign supreme for tech startups. With over 190 million monthly users, Quora has positioned themselves as the place to go for all your Q&A needs. From startup funding, lead generation, and social media advice, Quora has created an amazing community where your in-depth thought leader answers could turn into new customers.

Wishpond, a comprehensive lead generation tool, were able to generate almost 14,000 page views in a month from answering Quora questions. Their Content Marketing Manager offered some interesting insights as to how they accomplished this, such as linking back to posts with in-depth content, as well as trying to answer questions with more than 1,000 views per week for maximum exposure.

Startup Marketing Growth Hack #4: Get Early Users To Become Advocates

There are no better marketers than your own customers We inherently tend to trust more when other people give a positive review of something. In fact, consumer to consumer word of mouth advertising generates more than 2X sales than paid advertising. Having early adopters of your startup become brand advocates creates an air of trust and confidence around your product.

Hubstaff, a time tracker software, shared their story on how they generated the first 25 signups of their business. They found that a combination between word of mouth from friends and family, as well as inbound marketing methods were the key ways they signed up early adopters. It is clear that investing in your early adopters happiness and satisfaction is an important startup marketing strategy for both short and long-term success.

Startup Marketing Growth Hack #5: Consider Co-Marketing Ventures

A startup marketing strategy that is often overlooked in early-age growth are both co-marketing and strategic partnership opportunities. Co-marketing is a great way to collaborate with companies that share a similar audience to yours, but at the same time are not direct competitors. Offers such as eBooks, webinars, and list sharing are just some of the ways to team up with others for growth hacking opportunities.

A great example of a successful co-marketing initiative is between Hubspot and Linkedin. These two B2B behemoths teamed up to create an eBook entitled “How to Use Social Selling Throughout the Seller’s Journey”. By banding together and creating a shared content offer, Hubspot and Linkedin are able to reach a similar audience group, but also tap into each others core user base that they otherwise may not have been able to reach.

Wrapping Up:

Although many startup founders often focus on marketing efforts later in their company growth, certain marketing growth hacks are available early on that are imperative to implement for short and long-term success. Influencer marketing, leveraging Product Hunt and Quora, and participating in co-marketing activities are just some of the startup marketing strategies that can help you generate both early adopters and long-term customers.

What are some of your favorite startup marketing growth hacks? Let us know in the comments below!

 

 

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How to Leverage Amplified Inbound Marketing in your B2B Business

By |2023-04-24T10:44:07+00:00April 2nd, 2017|

topicIcon B2B Marketing Inbound Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

b2b amplified inbound marketing header

Introduction to Amplified Inbound Marketing

All companies who adopt an Inbound Marketing strategy want it to be effective. Not all are willing to undergo the long process of indexing properly on Google before starting to generate ROI. Marketers reluctant to wait sometime make the mistake of spending large amounts of their budget on “money keywords” on Google AdWords at the hope of converting those (high intent) users into customers. At a small volume there’s no problem with that, but at a large volume  this always results in a struggle to maintain and scale online efforts while remaining profitable.

True magic occurs when combining PPC with an Inbound Marketing approach. When done right  you can create an amplified Inbound Marketing strategy that is manageable, scalable and most importantly  – profitable. This post will teach you how to do just that. Make  sure to read it before setting off to prepare your marketing plan.

The challenges search ads pose

Most marketers rush to set up campaigns on Google AdWords, using keywords that are directed to their exact solutions/services/products. Search volumes are a given reality that the advertiser has no direct control over – once maximized, scaling becomes an issue.

It’s then inevitable not  to encounter two substantial realities:

  1. B2B prospects typically don’t search for high relevancy keywords of exact solutions/services: B2B sales require trust and a relationship between two position holders at each company. Such relationships are rarely a result of a prospect searching for a product or service on Google and clicking on an ad.
  2. Extremely pricy keywords – exact solutions/services keywords will usually prove to be highly expensive due to be highly exepensive due to high competition. You are probably not the only marketer out there that thought about targeting those keywords. When many companies compete on a specific keywords two unpleasant results occur:
    • Costs per click raise (supply and demand)
    • Conversion rates drop (more supply = prospects browsing more options before filling out an online form or transaction).

The result: money is being spent → low quality/un-nurtured leads are generated → handed over to sales → sales waste their time on irrelevant leads that never become customers → classic sales and marketing face-off, blames are being thrown around → company business goals never end up being met.

The challenges Display ads pose

Once the search channel has reached its glass ceiling, the typical next step is to turn to display advertising and launch direct response campaigns on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, GDN, etc. But consider this – if search volumes for your exact solution are low and quickly maxed out, obviously, the number of users out there that have a direct interest in your solution is very low. What are the odds of placing yourself in front of them using display channels? You guessed it, low.

The result: people see your ads but don’t click → very low conversion rates (below 1%) → leads that do end up being generated rarely turn into customers. They simply weren’t ready to buy in the first place.

What would turn things around? Applying the core elements of your Inbound Marketing strategy and aligning your paid advertising efforts with the active research process a potential buyer goes through leading up to a purchase (a.k.a the buyer’s journey).

Top of the funnel (TOFU) amplification

If you have (or at least think you have) an effective Inbound funnel, amplifying the top of the funnel is usually where the most impact can be gained  (the more contacts that will pass through the funnel the more will exit it as customers).

The best way to start amplifying the TOFU is using search advertising.

Assuming you’ve already developed buyer personas, understand their challenges, and have created the best content offers to help them with their challenges, it now comes down to driving relevant traffic to your content offers landing pages.

Awareness stage keywords aren’t as competitive as bottom of the funnel keywords and have higher search volumes. It’s safe to say that when providing prospects with value when they are seeking for help, you can expect conversion rates of 15%-30% from click to content offer download.

Since awareness stage keywords aren’t as competitive, the actual cost per lead will be quite low. Once you generate such leads, please don’t be average and try to sell to them. Remember those leads aren’t qualified or ready to be sold to! Depending on how well you optimize your funnel and campaigns, you should be able to calculate what your cost per customer or cost per MQL should be (depending on your KPIs).

TOFU scaling is quite easy – you can always find another challenge your prospects have, create additional TOFU content offers and drive more traffic from different awareness stage keywords to your landing pages.

Look out for keywords that have high search volumes – their costs per click would be relatively low making them a great opportunity for amplifying your TOFU efforts until the post is properly indexed on google.

The second-best way to amplify the TOFU is via native channels:

Content discovery networks such as Taboola and Outbrain open a door to getting your best performing blog posts discovered. Note that leads generated through native advertising will most likely not be of the same quality as leads generated through search advertising. The reason is pretty straight forward – search leads are actively looking for answers, while native advertising leads may follow up on your suggestion to read a blog post and download a content offer, it may not be relevant to them in any way other than to satisfy their general curiosity. Such leads aren’t your target audience and will not become customers.

Lastly, you can use Display advertising to amplify your TOFU. This should be your last resort. As in native advertising, there is a good chance that these leads are just interested in your content but have no intent on taking any further action and will not progress down the buyer’s journey. This should be a last result because it will prove to be a more expensive method than native advertising, yet the context will be vague and the quality of the leads will drop.

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Middle of the funnel (MOFU)/ Bottom of the funnel (BOFU) amplification

Email marketing is a great way to nurture leads and drive them down the buyer’s journey.

If you want faster results and higher conversion rates you can utilize media in order to amplify your TOFU->MOFU->BOFU progression pace and rate. Create remarketing lists that are based on your leads website behavior or on data that you have at your disposal.

Pro tip: Since user behavior is very dynamic, your remarketing lists are bound to change constantly, making management of data based remarketing campaigns challenging. For example, if a prospect progressed from the middle of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel, you will need to update the remarketing lists they are part of, in order to keep your messaging relevant.  It’s possible to automate this process – some advertising channels have the capability to onboard audience data using API procedures making it close enough to real time. You would need to use a third party solution like LiveRamp or to create your own proprietary solution. Using audience onboarding capabilities, turns your CRM into a first party DMP enabling you to target contacts across various ad networks and placements around the web.

Measuring and Attribution – amplified inbound marketing

Measuring the success of amplified inbound marketing is one of biggest challenges. There is a lot of money invested in creating content, marketing tools and media spend. Longer sales cycles tend to make the calculations even harder.

For general ROI reporting it’s quite simple:

  • sum up all the money invested in all channels (including content creation, media spend, marketing agency ).
  • sum up the revenue derived from campaign
  • divide the two

The actual challenge is to figure out exactly which channel assisted the conversion more than the rest. Multi-channel marketing on different phases of the buyer’s journey poses great attribution challenge.

Attribution modeling is the science of setting rules defining how to attribute revenue to each participating channel in the conversion path. For companies with a short sales cycles (SaaS for example) using Google analytics can suffice. But companies with a long sales cycle and sales that occur offline, encounter difficulties when trying to measure the effectiveness of each channel. The challenge is both technological and logical.

Technologically, this can be solved using a variety of third party marketing tools such as HubSpot and Bizzable.

Logically, this can be solved by trial and error – testing different models to see which model best reflects your business model and sales cycle. One model could be a perfect fit to one company and a misleading report for another.

Conclusion

When done right, inbound marketing can be amplified using paid advertising. In order to scale and generate profit, it’s crucial to align your advertising with your prospect’s buyer’s journey. Don’t waste time generating leads that will never become customers and always measure and make sure you know what channel to attribute your efforts to.

Happy marketing!

If you found this useful, I invite you to download our Digital Marketing MUST Reports and Measures eBook. This is your guide to start measuring what truly matters in your campaigns and take control of your spend. Get your FREE copy now >>

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Selling to Inbound leads: connecting the Inbound way

By |2023-04-24T10:47:29+00:00March 23rd, 2017|

topicIcon Inbound Marketing Sales

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

Initiating outreach to inbound leads.png"

Introduction to inbound leads

When implementing an Inbound Marketing strategy, a dilemma arises when to pick up the phone/keyboard and reach out to an Inbound lead.

A few rules of thumb:

  • Prioritize who you reach out to based on how relevant a prospect they seem (do they fall under any of your ideal buyer personas?), and the actions they took on your website/blog
  • If a prospect downloaded a content offer from your website, that means there’s something they need help with (absolutely regardless to whether or not they actually got around to reading the offer or just “plan to”)
  • Initiating a connect call in order to try and help a prospect based on what you know about the actions they took on your blog/website is always a good idea.

This post will walk you through the best practice of selling to Inbound leads.

Start by conducting a connect call

The goal of a connect call is to uncover your prospect’s pain and find out if your company could potentially be a good fit for curing that pain. Connect calls should take no longer than 10 minutes.

Each B2B company will be looking to uncover a different pain. Let’s take our agency as an example.  In the connect calls we conduct with prospects we try to uncover where in the funnel the prospect may have a problem. We make sure to include positioning statements and educate the prospect on the call.

Here are examples of different positioning statements we use in order to uncover problems on different stages of the funnel:

When trying to identify if the problem is at the top of the funnel i.e. attracting more visitors to the prospect’s website we would say something along the lines of:

“I notice you are doing a great job blogging with frequency. You should try including some keywords in your blog post titles, this will help your posts get properly indexed by search engines and you’ll start showing up in more searches. Is it important for your business to drive more website traffic? Are you driving the right kind of traffic today? Have you discussed trying to ramp up your content creation efforts? What has held you back? What impact would increased traffic have on your business?”

When trying to identify if the problem is at the middle of the funnel i.e.  converting visitors to leads we would say something along the lines of:

“You’re doing a great job blogging, but I’m going to venture a guess that your conversion rates aren’t as high as you’d like. I have a tip for that, you should include a call to action at the end of every blog article. I’m wondering, how are your conversion rates? What does your idea lead look like? Have you discussed some lead goals this year? How is it going?”

When trying to identify if the problem is at the bottom of the funnel i.e. converting leads to customers we would say something along the lines of:

“If you begin to convert more leads at an earlier point in their buying process and start to nurture them, you can shorten your sales cycle. Were you aware that nurturing leads can also encourage your sales team to become more educational and consultative in nature as they will encounter leads earlier in the buying process. How are you currently nurturing and segmenting leads? Tell me about your sales process? Are you happy with your connect and close rates? How do your reps currently handle Inbound leads?”

Evaluate what pains you need to uncover and create your own positioning statements that apply for different solutions that you provide. Make sure to add value and educate along the way.

Once the pain is uncovered, if you’re under the impression that there’s potential for your company to help, set up a 30 min exploration call and send the prospect more reading material that further educates them on the subject uncovered.

At each stage, make sure to always tie down and assure you are on alignment with the prospect. Always send a recap email with the main highlights you took away from the call.

How To Create An Effective Inbound Marketing Strategy Call to Action

Move onto the exploratory call

An exploratory call will typically have three goals:

  1. Explore the prospect’s current goals
  2. Evaluate if they need help to reach their goals
  3. Qualify for the good old BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline)

Start by exploring the company’s current status, goals and any other company background related questions.

In our case the questions we typically ask are:

  • How many customers do you have?
  • Who are your Biggest customers?
  • What’s your average sales price?
  • what is the lifetime value (LTV) of each customer?
  • What is your LTV goal?
  • What’s the current number of yearly sales/ customers?
  • What does success look like 3 mths/6mths etc?

Next, try to evaluate if they need help to reach their goals

Figure out:

  • What their current plans are
  • Identify outstanding gaps in their plans
  • Dig to find what challenges stand between them and their plans
  • Figure out what the current growth is driven by

In our case we ask questions such as:

  • What are you currently investing in?
  • How is it working/ what are your results?
  • How confident are you that your plans will get you where you need?
  • Do you have a list of contacts?
  • How do you currently find leads?
  • Do you know what your cost per lead is?
  • Do you know what your lead-to-conversion rate is?
  • What ROI have you seen on your current marketing efforts?
  • How much does it cost you to acquire a customer?
  • What are the steps in your sales process?
  • What are the common hesitations clients have?

Qualify for BANT

At this stage of the call qualify the prospect for budget, authority and timing (we’ve already uncovered the Need in BANT at the earlier stages of the call)

We typically ask questions such as:

Budget:

  • “What were you planning on investing in marketing to meet your goals?”
  • “If we came up with a better way to help you reach your goals, would you be able to find the budget to do so?”

Authority:

  • “Who else besides yourself needs to be involved in decisions on services such as ours?”

Timing:

  • “In order to hit your target, what needs to happen in the next 12 months?, what about the next quarter?”
  • “If you like the plan we come up with, what happens next? Would you have us start the next day?”

Summing up and recommending a next step

If the prospect seems like a sales qualified lead, move forward to schedule a call/ meeting where you can discuss your services/products and how you can help them. If not, politely bail out.

Remember that when it comes to Inbound sales, it’s all about the prospect and how you can help them. By staying customer focused sales will become a very natural part of the relationship you nurture.

If you found this useful, and you’re curious to learn more and find out how to create a long lasting Inbound Marketing strategy, we invite you to download our How-To guide for creating an Inbound Marketing strategy.

 

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Stay on track: How to Report and Measure Inbound Marketing ROI

By |2023-04-24T11:08:44+00:00November 29th, 2016|

topicIcon Inbound Marketing Reporting

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

measuring inbound marketing header

Introduction – Measure Inbound Marketing ROI

“A recent survey of 1,200 CEO’s indicated that nearly 70% had lost trust in their marketers’ ability to deliver growth, in part because of the inability to show ROI on campaigns.”  Don’t be that kind of CMO!

Inbound Marketing is one of the most important, yet underrated and misunderstood sections of business, particularly this ever so mentioned key performance indicator “ROI”.

So what does this section contain? The lovable, useful and job-saving ROI (Return on Investment). In layman’s terms, ROI means how much money you brought in for the cost of your campaign. In this post, I’ll break down how to calculate Inbound Marketing ROI, and what metrics to take into account. I’ll also throw in some of the proven and most efficient ways to track your Inbound Marketing for that exact purpose.

Why keeping track of those numbers is so important

The average CEO often sees the marketing sector as nothing more than a costly hassle with little to no reward. Without proof or numeric data to show exactly how an Inbound Marketing campaign can be significantly useful, the title CMO can be nothing but a “glorified role without any purposeful impact on the bottom line.”

Without a measured ROI, you as CMO have no possible way to quantify what your business gets in return for its possibly costly campaign. B2B Marketing budgets can, have, and will be slashed without evidence of effect. Why spend all that money on something that MIGHT improve sales? The CEO ponders, but cutting marketing’s budget could be a choice that results in the slow death of business.

More so, with a calculated ROI a failed campaign doesn’t mean a scolding or vacant position for said CMO. The issue a lot of B2B marketers have is the simple lack of analytic ability in its marketing team, e.g. they don’t know what metrics or parameters they should be documenting. When marketing leaders were asked to name the factors that their department was weakest in, 49% stated: “Use of analytics to guide marketing decisions.” If a CMO is keeping track of the right metrics, a failed, or not totally successful marketing campaign can become nothing more than a learning experience, or even beneficial to the marketing team in the future.

How to calculate ROI

On paper, ROI couldn’t be any easier to explain. You take the revenue derived from the investment, subtract the total cost of the investment and divide the total by the expense of the investment:

(revenue-cost)/cost

Sounds simple, right? It’s a trap. It’s never that easy.

“Hard” and “Soft” metrics

Hard metrics are things that can be easily quantified, for example, if you sold a product for $ 350 and the overall cost of advertising was $ 100 your ROI rate would be = 2.5

Soft metrics, on the other hand, are harder to define, and are not concrete. For example, you can’t easily quantify social media attention or buzz, but it is a very affecting factor to your bottom line. You could count every Facebook like as monetary value and treat it like a hard metric, but this is incredibly unreliable, unrealistic and amounts to wishful thinking.

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How to calculate ROI for Inbound Marketing

Now that you got your head around the basic formula, and are certainly excited about the return, you will face one dilemma: the investment.

Simply said: profitability depends on numerous things that requires you to look beyond simple sales figures.

Some companies subtract the overall cost of the marketing campaign from how much the customer paid, but what they fail to do is to factor in the ‘true’ budget for marketing and it’s totally and completely wrong. CMO’s often fail to take into account other costs for Inbound Marketing, while this creates more work, it creates a more realistic ROI measurement.

The 4 Up-front costs to consider when measuring inbound ROI:

1. Employees costs

An example of a seemingly obvious but often neglected metric is the cost of employees. Working with an in-house marketing team, or hiring freelancers can be costly, and depending on the experience of said employee(s) you could end up paying lots for little.

2. Agency costs

Short term-wise, it’s usually cost effective to work with an expert agency. Agency teams work together providing only the skills and expertise needed at the given point of your campaign, meaning you pay for those skills and expertise when they are of use. Long term-wise, it’s smart to calculate the ROI of training your in-house team and to gradually shift to that, hence keeping the know-how under your wing.

3. Marketing automation tools

Unfortunately for B2B marketers, bombarding a potential lead with advertising, while simpler than Inbound Marketing, is interruptive and doesn’t prove effective. The most effective way to implement an Inbound Marketing strategy is to use marketing automation tools. Factor the cost of the latter when calculating ROI. Yearly costs vary between $2,000 to $60,000. There are “best of breed” solutions as well as “all in one”.

These tools provide closed loop solutions that will make a CMO’s life a breeze. The challenge of working without these is titanic. Marketing automation tools have been proven to create marketing improvement, because more feedback for every sector is provided and a potential lead’s behaviour can be monitored and tracked from the source.

Tools that enable you to keep track of the traffic, or the click to your website don’t show you what influences leads to become MQLs, SQLs and eventually customers. You may have methods to receive the numbers but no real information on precisely how a sale was created. Without marketing automation tools, you’re almost playing a guessing game.

Marketing automated tools create feedback that is not only useful for marketing, but allows for every section of the business to know what methods result in sales and should be included.

4. Asset creation costs

So you have a stunning blog, you have in-house/ outsourced experts working on your strategy, and you’ve implemented automated marketing tools. What’s missing? Oh, that’s right, the core. You will need to create assets for your Inbound Marketing, i.e blog posts, ebooks, infographics, landing pages, CTAs and more).

Inbound Marketing agencies will have tier 1 writers and designers ready on demand. Freelancers can also result in a cheap and effective option for ‘one off’ content. Just remember that your inbound assets are probably the most important factor in your Inbound Marketing strategy, this is not the place to cut costs. If you decide to get your in-house team to create the assets, make sure to follow the following editing checklist. Factor asset creation costs into effect.

Where CMO’s handle metrics wrong

 1. “I know, I know, I should measure Inbound Marketing results, but I just don’t know how.”

A primal reason that CMO’s fail to use their analytic data in a beneficial way is that most of them don’t know what metrics are of value. It’s all well and good having a warehouse full of data, but utterly pointless if you don’t know what data is relevant or how to process it.

“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is better than two doubles.”
Steve Jobs

Marketers tend to track the large, great looking data that simulates results. As a CMO, it’s your job to keep track and monitor the most important metrics when it comes to generating leads. By now, you are certainly familiar on how to optimise your website or blog in order to create a long-lasting marketing strategy. If not, we strongly advise you to read our detailed guide.

Next to keyword rankings and conversion rates, it is important to understand the lifecycle stages for successful inbound sales. Simply said, you must know the steps to turn a stranger into a customer.

MQL (marketing qualified leads) and SQL’s (sales qualified leads) are as well key metrics you should know by heart, as they are the basis to improve your marketing and sales approach to incoming deals. If you just thought about SQL being a database, then we advise you to read our detailed article on the importance of MQLs and SQLs when it comes to generating leads.

But big numbers don’t confirm the generation of leads or conversions. While social media plays an essential part of Inbound Marketing and may lead to numerous results, it is important to track and monitor the quality of leads generated. Otherwise, you will end up asking yourself why you’re not getting high-quality B2B leads.

2. “I just measure what is easy!”

CMO’s love to collect the easy data, and often only focus on singular metrics, how many visits to a website, email systems to track how frequent emails are opened or how many attendees at events. The problem with prioritizing metrics like this is no promise of lead or conversion, and no variation in its methods. These metrics show interaction, yes, and generate potential leads too, but this data doesn’t show in concrete what influence was successful and the most efficient at gravitating leads and securing conversions. This metric alone isn’t enough to result in marketing improvement. To put into other words, there’s no easy way out.

Finding your way out of the maze

Good news: the hard part is over, so make yourself a nice cup of coffee and let the information sink in. Now that you understand the whole process of calculating and measuring the ROI, there are two recommended methods by marketing experts you should consider:

1. Closed-Loop-Marketing

The method of Closed-Loop-Marketing is recommended by HubSpot. This process makes sure that every step of measuring your ROI is documented and shared between departments.

 

 

Source: HubSpot

With this method, you have to focus on the right channels and offers that are the most powerful ones, help you to get clearer results, and gain insights into your target audience (as discussed here, defining the ideal customer persona is important to target your marketing strategy). It can also shorten your sales cycle and help you save overall investment costs.

In other words: The Closed-Loop-Marketing reporting helps you to quickly identify if something is broken or not. If it’s broken, fix it. If not, make it shine!

2. Attribution Modeling

A second, important method of reporting the ROI is tracking results of marketing programs to assign the value to the first (or last) program that has touched the deal. Since it is quite a complex method, it’s best to read through our overview of the attribution Modeling.

Conclusion

Reflect on past metrics that show Improvement.

“Study the past if you would define the future.”

― Confucius

No matter how big a number is, or the effort took, the primal thing to think upon is which metrics advance your marketing effectiveness. Data that proves one particular marketing method is working, will let the CMO know where to focus their time and resources, leading to less waste of financial investment. A market leader who doesn’t keep track of practical results and data creates no progression and leads to financial loss. So, if you want to keep your title of a CMO, better stay on track.

If you found this useful, I invite you to download our FREE Digital Marketing MUST Reports and Measures eBook. This is your guide to start measuring what truly matters in your campaigns and take control of your spend. Get your FREE copy now >>

Schedule a FREE consultation

 

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10 Ways to Nail Inbound Link Building

By |2023-04-24T11:09:55+00:00November 24th, 2016|

topicIcon Inbound Marketing SEM

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

10 Ways to Nail Inbound Link Building header

Introduction to Inbound Link Building

Building inbound links, aka backlinks, represents the process through which another website links to your website or blog. Literally, they are the links on other websites that lead and direct users to your own blog. The amount of inbound links to a website has a significant influence on the website’s SEO ranking. However, we’re playing a game of quality here, so the links you generate need to be from relevant, high authoritative websites with natural and reasonable anchor texts (the text that is being hyperlinked).

Any company, striving to generate relevant inbound traffic should spend time link building. This post will walk you through 10 pro ways to tackle this.

 

1. Write for people, not search engines

Successful Inbound Marketing is about educating and providing value to your prospective target audience. Make sure your content strategy doesn’t revolve around trying to rank on SERPS with no regard to your readers. Publish remarkable content that people will want to share and link to.

2. Give to receive

The message behind this method is literally giving to receive back. As in, giving outbound links on your website or blog to others, preferably popular and authoritative websites, in order to get noticed by them and, accordingly, get an inbound link back from them (shoutout to Moz, cough…). Now is the time to mention that websites with a higher authority than yours will have less of an incentive to link back to your content. That’s where the quality of your content steps into place. Be valuable and the web will acknowledge it. You can find out which websites are already linking to your blog using the Ahrefs tool.

3. Guest blogging

Cooperate with other blogs and write guest posts. Seek blogs where your buyer personas “hang out” and always keep context in mind. Websites such as MyBlogGuest are a great way to find websites who are actively seeking for guest bloggers.

4. Case studies

Write case studies about other businesses, your clients, or volunteer to have a case study conducted on you. This is a helpful strategy towards gaining inbound links in an easy and legit manner. If you make others look good in your blog, a clickbait is promised to come from their websites (this probably goes without saying, yet when publishing a case study about one of your clients, make sure they approve of it first and don’t mess up your most important relationships in the sake of link building).

5. Contribue to discussions

Participate in discussions in forums, Facebook groups and Q&A sites such as Quora. This is both an opportunity to show expertise to your buyer personas, as well as to trigger their curiousity and encourage them to visit your blog and learn more on the subject at hand. Note that with respect to SEO, placing a link on some websites (Quora for example) will not count as a point in your website’s favor and will not help your placement in SERPS. While such links (called no follow) might seem useless from an SEO perspective, their value in generating contextual and relevant inbound links is golden.

6. Visual content

Visual Content Importance for Inbound Link Building

Source: seopressor

Quality visual content such as infographics or charts tends to get a credit back as an inbound link. Their usage is increasing daily, and not everyone can or wants to get in the fuzz of making them. So consider this a small hack to getting linked back to (the above visual defenitely got us to link back to Seopressor – case in point).

7. Slideshows and presentations

Lots of people hate to make presentations themselves and just wish for someone else to have already made a slideshow they could use for their own needs in their blogs or on their websites. Take advantage of this loophole and put together relevant slideshows and presentations, so that others will be able to easily backlink to you.

8. Newsjacks and press releases

Say a new company is launching a product or a new business and wants to make a bold statement about themselves. Catch the rope and write about it, then try to showcase it and hook on to newswires that would be willing to share it, with backlinks of course.

9. Ask for help

No need to go around begging others to backlink to you. Just make sure you have relevant content that you are confident is good enough and look around for websites that would want to share it. Ask around to see if they’d like to collaborate. This is both for getting you more inbound links, and is also great for getting feedback.

10. Learn from others

If you feel like your blog is lacking what it needs to be more shareable and get higher SEO rankings, a good idea would be to search around the net, take a look at websites you look up to and see who they are being backlinked by and what type of content is generating those links. Then return to your website, apply what you’ve learned and see if it works for you as well.

Summing things up…

The inbound link building tower is steep. Applying the above 10 tips should help you climb it faster. Sparing you the rest of the literary description, just remember that inbound links are essential in getting relevant traffic and attention to your blog and helping you in gaining noticed. Don’t hesitate to use them to their absolute, maximum extent, because you’re going to benefit from them, once you learn how to use them to your advantage.

If you found this useful, and you’re curious to learn more and find out how to create a long lasting Inbound Marketing strategy, we invite you to download our How-To guide for creating an Inbound Marketing strategy

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9 Truths That Will Save Your Company From Dying In 2018

By |2023-04-24T11:12:04+00:00November 15th, 2016|

topicIcon Inbound Marketing

John Doe

Architect & Engineer

We love that guy

9 Truths That Will Save Your Company From Dying header

Introduction

Inspired by Inbound 2016, I’ve prepared this list of truths that all companies need to accept in order to stick around in the years to follow.

1. The cold call is dead

Stop harassing people, nobody like to get a call from a stranger trying to sell them stuff they don’t care about. Relationships don’t work that way. Companies who rely on cold calling as their growth strategy, and hope to generate meaningful cooperation’s, will not be around for long (if you’re trying to steal people’s money by calling them and misleading them – cold calling is not dead. But who are you and how do you sleep at night?).

mobile-phone

2. Email is alive

Email open rates have dropped dramatically during the past few years. Unicorns such as 90% open rates don’t happen anymore. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be using emails for your sales and marketing. It means you need to craft personal and relevant emails. It’s all about the context. And no, adding a personalized name token to your emails is not what this is about. People aren’t idiots. Here are 6 pro tips for creating an email marketing strategy.

3. Enough with the ABC

Always Be Closing is a state of mind you can’t afford. You should Always Be Helping. You need to add value to your prospects and to keep adding value to them once they are customers. If you ignore that you’ll be disrupted.

Understand who your buyer personas are and start adding value to them, gently pushing them down the buyer’s journey and helping them to choose you when they are interested to come back for more value.

4. A taste is more

As we’ve established, people expect to get value from you. They expect to get this value before they decide to purchase from you. Let them. Provide them with a taste of your offering, be it a free trial, a freemium or any other model that will show them the real deal. If you’re afraid people will not want to buy from you after getting a taste – you have bigger problems on your plate. Go fix your product or service and come back when you’re ready to play.

5. SEO = HEO

In order to win at SEO, you need to master HEO – Human Enjoyment Optimization. It’s not enough to get people to visit your site. You need to want them to engage with your website, view pages, and stick around long enough to get excited. Make every interaction with your company an enjoyable one.

think different

6. Prospects talk with your customers

Like it or not, your prospects are speaking with your customers and making decisions based on those conversations. 74% of prospects decide based on word of mouth and 46% decide based on customer references. Make sure they’re acquiring praises and not in a race to close customers and ditch them. Retention is key.

7. It’s a terrible time to be a huge company

Huge companies have a hard time adapting to trends. Change is their enemy. The fortune 500 list is constantly changing. This means:

8. It’s a terrific time to grow

If you company befriends change, identifies trends and stays ahead of the game, hey, you just might end up on the list yourself. Find out where your target audience is, and make sure to be there. I hope this list will inspire you:

gartner october 16.png

Source: Gartner

9. Inbound is mandatory

It’s time to stop interrupting and start attracting prospects by offering them value. Inbound is not longer that vague term marketers like to use to sound smart. It’s a necessity. Create content, match it with your customers’ needs and preferences and naturally start attracting inbound traffic that can be converted, closed and delighted over time.

Summing things up

Stop interrupting, befriend changes, provide value, and nurture relationships. It’s about quality not quantity, and it’s up to you to shine. No excuses.

If you found this useful, and you’re curious to learn more and find out how to create a long lasting Inbound Marketing strategy, we invite you to download our How-To guide for creating an Inbound Marketing strategy.

Schedule a FREE consultation

 

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