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Can HubSpot Practice What It Preaches Profitably?

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What would you do if someone wrote an unflattering tell-all book about your work place?

This happened to HubSpot in 2016.

HubSpot is a software company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They develop software to help their customers use inbound marketing to build their businesses. HubSpot sells their software as a service, meaning customers pay a monthly fee to use it.

Seasoned tech journalist Dan Lyons worked there from April 2013 to December 2014. It was not a good experience for him so he did what journalists do. He wrote about it.

I recently finished Lyons’ book Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble.

It was an entertaining read. Lyons highlighted the ageism in the tech start-up world and shared his insider’s view of the pressure at HubSpot to grow the business.

His insights dovetailed with my less-than-optimal experience with HubSpot.

In the summer of 2013 I downloaded a free HubSpot e-book. The amount of information requested for the download gave me pause – not just name and email address, but also company name, size, type of business, and phone number. I proceeded anyway.

Within an hour of requesting the download, I began to receive sales calls from HubSpot. One salesperson called several times over a two-week period. Other salespeople called occasionally, all with the same script. I also received sales emails.

The barrage bordered on harassment. I unsubscribed from their emails, ignored their calls and wrote a post about it in October 2013.

To my surprise, HubSpot’s CMO, a guy Lyons dubs “Cranium” in his book, responded to my post.

Cranium’s response defended HubSpot and denied that HubSpot was a brand in adolescence since they had not stopped growing. Revenue had grown 82% the prior year.

But revenue growth was not the whole story. Costs were skyrocketing and HubSpot had yet to show a profit. Brands that have yet to operate profitably are certainly adolescent.

Reading the book made me curious. Had HubSpot proven inbound marketing to be profitable? Was it still a brand in adolescence?

Inbound Inspiration

HubSpot’s entire reason for being centers on inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing is a concept that marketing guru Seth Godin originated in his book Permission Marketing in 1999. Godin’s premise was twofold:

  1. Getting a prospect to give you permission to market to them would be more effective than interrupting them with annoying advertising and sales calls.
  2. The advent of the internet (this was 1999) would mean that the cost of incremental marketing touches like emails and webpages would be zero which would drive the overall customer acquisition cost down.

Godin advocated creating communication suites -things like a series of emails, letters, webpages, or even phone conversation scripts – that would deliver something of value to the prospect for free and allow the seller to learn more about them and tailor future communication based on that learning.

Godin predicted that this slow drip approach would turn prospects into friends and friends into customers. The relationships built would provide the foundation for a healthy business and reduce customer acquisition cost.

HubSpot’s co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah seized on this idea after Shah started a blog in 2005 that attracted traffic quickly. The two noted that people flocked to information they found helpful.

In 2006 Halligan and Shah launched HubSpot, offering software to help businesses attract customers by “inbound marketing,” marketing that offered helpful content to prospects to get their attention.

HubSpot led by example, publishing free e-books and other resources on the topic of inbound marketing to teach people what it was and how to use it. Requestors had to provide their contact information and other company details to receive the free resources.

The Inherent Flaw in the Plan

The inbound marketing approach requires time and patience to build business.

For HubSpot this would have meant letting their prospects digest the first free content it sent, offering them another resource or series of resources informed by their first choice and answering questions. Prospects would become familiar with inbound marketing and HubSpot’s offerings and ultimately many of them would become customers.

But Halligan and Shah were tech industry guys who set their sights on building a tech company to take public.

Their aspirations for the company were at odds with the time and patience inbound marketing requires. Instead they gave their salespeople high quotas to meet which resulted in aggressive sales tactics like the calls and emails I received.

Show Them the Money

Fast growth requires capital. Shah put up $500,000 as HubSpot’s sole seed investor. By 2013, they had raised over $100.5 million in six rounds of funding. They had spent most of it.

Then HubSpot had a successful IPO on October 10, 2014, selling 5 million shares, raising another $125 million in funding, valuing the company at $759 million and enriching Halligan, Shah and their investors.

Since then HubSpot has broadened its product offerings from a single app to a software platform with multiple components. It has grown exponentially, expanding its customer base from 13,607 to 60,814, its work force from 785 to over 2,600 and its annual revenues from $115.9 million to $513 million.

But it’s still not profitable.

HubSpot spent hundreds of millions of dollars to continue fueling growth and sought more funding through another public offering of 1.7 million shares of common stock in February 2019. The offering raised $355 million.

HubSpot’s Identity Crisis

The ability to bring down sales and marketing costs drives the business case for inbound marketing, and it is precisely this struggle that seems to be preventing HubSpot from being profitable.

HubSpot’s first quarter 2019 investor presentation shows that HubSpot has made progress in that struggle, bringing sales and marketing costs down from 55 percent of revenue in 2016 to 44 percent in first quarter 2019.

HubSpot Q1 2019 Investor Presentation

Given that their gross margin, R&D and G&A expenses are already in line with their targets, HubSpot’s ability to be profitable – to get their operating margin to the 20 to 25 percent target – hinges on their ability to reduce sales and marketing costs to 30 to 35 percent of revenues.

As HubSpot’s brand identity is inextricably linked with inbound marketing, proving it works by becoming profitable is crucial.

A key indicator of successful inbound marketing is a reduction in customer acquisition cost (CAC). HubSpot harps on this point.

Yet HubSpot’s success there remains murky. HubSpot’s CAC rose from $6,671 in 2011 to $11,997 in 2014. Then they stopped reporting it. The lack of reporting has raised suspicions and conjectures that their CAC continued to rise despite company statements that it had gone down.

HubSpot remains a brand in adolescence with an identity crisis as it has yet to demonstrate that inbound marketing is profitable and reduces CAC.

HubSpot Needs to Slow Down to Succeed

To address their identity crisis, HubSpot needs to:

  • Become profitable. Focusing on this goal will mean slowing things down to allow customer support and other infrastructure functions to scale to the company’s current size.
  • Show customer acquisition costs. With HubSpot’s focus on this key metric, the lack of transparency on CAC is glaring.
  • Dial down aggressive sales tactics. For research purposes, I signed up for another free download on June 18, 2019. By July 3rd I had received 15 emails from two sales people and “The HubSpot Team.” The daily barrage encourages people to tune out and is contrary to the spirit of inbound marketing.
  • Slow customer acquisition. Improving the experience for the customers HubSpot has would turn more of them into advocates which would also help lower sales and marketing expenses via positive word-of-mouth.
  • Staff and train customer support better. Several 2019 HubSpot entries on employer review website Glassdoor.com indicate customer support workers feel overwhelmed and overworked. Getting customer support caseloads down to a manageable size is key to delivering the great customer experience HubSpot advocates.

The fresh infusion of capital from the latest public offering provides the perfect opening for HubSpot to focus for the long term. If they do, they have a shot at continuing to dominate the inbound marketing space for years to come.

If they don’t, who knows how much more capital the public will lend them before they bail?

Should Your Brand Use Inbound Marketing?

If you have the resources to create helpful content for your prospects and to deliver it via email and social media marketing, I recommend that you use inbound marketing as one of your marketing strategies.

Helpful content can take many forms including videos, infographics, articles, podcasts and e-books. It should inform the prospect on a topic of their interest while demonstrating your brand’s understanding of their problems and expertise in solving them.

Inbound marketing can attract prospects your brand might not otherwise reach.

But the approach takes time to work as it is like building friendships. Few acquaintances become immediate best friends. Relationships take time and multiple interactions to build.

Inbound marketing has worked well for me. My email newsletter is my primary marketing vehicle. It has produced prospects and prompted referrals. In 20 years in business I have never run an ad or made a cold call.

One thing you should not do is react the way HubSpot did when word of Lyons’ book got out.

Months before the book was published, Cranium tried to use extortion to get an early manuscript and stop the publication. His actions triggered an FBI investigation and resulted in his abrupt dismissal.

HubSpot’s board sanctioned CEO Halligan for not reporting knowledge of Cranium’s actions earlier. Cranium’s right-hand person, “Wingman” in the book, resigned before he could be fired.

Cranium’s actions ultimately boosted interest in the book when HubSpot issued a press release to explain his dismissal.

About a week after the book was published in April 2016, Shah responded on LinkedIn, copping to some accusations but leaving many questions unanswered. He indicated that HubSpot is on a “path to profitability,” but over three years later they still haven’t gotten there.

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Sourced from E. Starr Associates

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How Marketing Strategy Can Impact Recruitment

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By Paul Talbot

Marketing strategy doesn’t just lay out processes to create new customers and retain existing ones. Directly or indirectly, it can position the organization in the minds of current and future employees.

I asked corporate culture consultant Josh Levine, cofounder of CULTURE LABx, to lend his perspective to the ways that marketing strategy can impact employee recruitment and retention.

Paul Talbot: How is marketing strategy changing and why?

Josh Levine: The most important shift that leading companies are making is away from ‘what you’ll get’ and toward ‘the journey you’ll join.’ Sure, salary is important, and perks are nice, but people get excited about a big problem they get to help solve.

To get attention in a noisy marketplace, leaders need to define and communicate a compelling purpose – why they are in business beyond making money.

Talbot: When you look at a marketing strategy, what do you like to see?

Levine: A highly differentiated employer value proposition. Without that, it doesn’t matter how clever your social media campaign is.

Every potential candidate wants to know why they should join your company over another. If it comes down to merely salary and benefits, you’ve already lost – even if they accept the offer, they are unlikely to stay longer than the nationwide average of 18-24 months.

Talbot: Marketing strategy, brand strategy, media strategy, campaign strategy…we have all these strategies that can easily exist independent of one another, or at least lack desirable synergies. How should the organization pull them together and manage them effectively?

Levine: Communication strategies like these are only as good as the story they are built to tell. The problem is that most organizations don’t take the time or have the internal alignment to start at the beginning.

Each team is given a task ‘get clicks,’ ‘break through the noise,’ or ‘drive ROI.’ But what message are we trying to tell? Sure, we want to make sure everyone knows we are a great place to work, but what is unique about us? Which leads me right back to purpose.

Talbot: Just about every marketing strategy attempts to shed light on the target customer. Where does this task fall short, and how can it be improved to more helpfully illuminate the target?

Levine: We just finished a project with a client challenging exactly this question.

It’s surprising, but most traditional target customer profiles still boil down to who they are today. HR leaders and recruiters need to think about the person over time. Where are they in their career arc, how do they see themselves growing, and what will they need to get there?

Talbot: Any other insights you’d like to share?

Levine: Businesses are beginning to accept that to survive, they need to recruit ‘unconventional’ talent from anywhere they can; it’s the new reality of a market with record low unemployment and skyrocketing costs of salaries of people living in the urban core.

We are going to see extreme distributed work forces, and leaders need to be ready to market to these untapped pools of talent. And don’t forget your current employees – after all, it’s much cheaper to keep an employee then find a new one.

Feature Image Credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS

By Paul Talbot

Minus strategy marketing staggers. I am a somewhat reformed ex-media business executive, with tours of duty at AOL, CBS Radio, and Nationwide Communications. I’m a fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Boston Red Sox, the Principality of Liechtenstein, fried clams, fog, and prices that end in the number 7. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

Sourced from Forbes

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Want Real Content Marketing ROI? Focus on Content for Customer Retention

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Back in 2014 — can you believe it’s been five years already? — the marketing world was having an industry-wide internal debate about inbound versus content marketing, and which practice serves the other.

HubSpot, the company that coined the term “inbound marketing,” publicly claimed content marketing serves inbound. The founder of the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) countered by saying inbound is a subset of content marketing.

Here’s what was missing from the 2014 conversation: an awareness of the pressure we marketers felt to prove content marketing ROI in our own departments by year’s end. Many of us had spent precious time, funds, and energy creating content to build awareness and generate leads, handing responsibility off then to the sales and service departments so we could get back to creating more “interest stimulating” stuff to post. Many marketers had largely missed the customer retention power of content marketing.

Today, the conversation has shifted from whether content or inbound marketing is primary to how the two separate but related disciplines can interact and complement each other to generate ROI. To that end, brands are discovering content marketing’s potential as a powerful customer retention tool. Here are just a few of their strategies.

Live and In-Person Events

In sharing his origin story with LinkedIn, Andy Crestodina, co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media, says he first “needed to learn search, and later, content marketing,” signifying a fundamental difference between the two.

That got me. In a world full of marketers who still use the two terms interchangeably, Andy had something to say about the broader capacities of content marketing. Had he too seen content retain customers as well as it had served the goals of search? If so, in what way?

I pinged him to ask.

“This might surprise you,” he began, “live events are an awesome content format for retention. If a good chunk of your customers are in your geography, try creating a live event.”

Sounded logical, of course, but did he have any examples of in-person events actually working? Turns out, yes: He was very familiar with this marketing medium.

“We’ve done a monthly event for nine years. It’s called Wine & Web, and it combines teaching and networking,” Crestodina continued. “The results for both sales and retention have been huge for us.”

Want to boost content marketing ROI? Consider the power of content to retain — not just attract — customers.

Image attribution: Kelsey Chance

Online Communities

Many content marketers praise the LEGO brand for its feature films and publications, which are indeed powerful content marketing examples. But what jazzes the kids I know is the company’s online ideas hub called, aptly, LEGO Ideas. Here, young innovators can submit their own ideas for LEGO sets and vote on the submissions of others, in the hope of someday seeing their own idea on toy-store shelves. The collaboration combined with competition makes for an emotional hook every parent can confirm.

Communities-as-content isn’t a new idea, but targeting those buyers whose hands are already all over your product is a brilliant way to increase content marketing ROI without chasing another new lead gen tactic.

Maximization Webinars and Tools

Personal finance brand YNAB (You Need a Budget) invests heavily in motivating customers to get the most out of their product. Every day, they host small, live, personal online classes that allow attendees to interact in real time with the YNAB rep and fellow budgeters.

Want to boost content marketing ROI? Consider the power of content to retain — not just attract — customers.

Image attribution: Wes Hicks

The webinars are short, so you can squeeze a class into your morning commute or workout. They’re also recorded, which means customers who get interrupted mid-class can catch up later. While the brand may be tempted to route funds to more traffic-generating content, focusing on their customers’ financial success more than pays off (pun intended).

Another prime example of a customer retention marketing strategy is the hyper-relevant information mirrored back to all drivers who use the Snapshot device from Progressive Insurance. It’s a program customers appreciate, as safe behavior tracked through this app is rewarded with sizeable discounts on insurance premiums. This technology also helps to inform marketing efforts through its key insights on customer’s driving habits.

Through Snapshot, the brand enjoys:

  • Permission to collect and analyze gobs of data
  • Potential reciprocity of having given a substantial gift ($700 million in discounts to date)
  • Motivated customers — drivers who have another reason to behave safely behind the wheel
  • A creative new revenue center. McKinsey consultants recently observed that marketing tech like this can be monetized into its own business unit to (strategically, of course) serve other insurers.

So yes, content can and does achieve the goals of inbound marketing. But content can do so much more to engage, wow, and eventually multiply the people your funnel brings in.

User-Generated Contributions

Customer loyalty programs (think birthday discounts, referral perks, and gamified spending motivators) are great. But how can content play a role in a customer retention marketing strategy? By turning buyers into co-creators, of course!

Tarte Rewards by Tarte, a cosmetics and skincare brand, incentivizes customers to earn online store credit not just by spending more, but by leveraging selfies and social engagement that feature the products they’ve purchased.

Much like how beauty brands utilize influencers, Tarte has empowered its own customers to act as advocates and provide authentic user-generated content. This content is powerful, in that it:

  • Promotes a product and builds brand awareness when users share their experiences
  • Builds brand confidence when products are shown on real consumers
  • Boosts social engagement, as consumers get competitive and creative in showing how they’re using the products
  • Provides marketing content that’s original, authentic, and visual—often even video-based—which showcases products in the most compelling way
  • Displays brand loyalty, since buyers are unlikely to invest their own time, energy, and creativity into promoting a product on social unless it’s that good

Keep in mind that the smaller, more intimate following each shopper brings can, when combined, be much more powerful than a disengaged or artificial audience.

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Awards for Customer Retention

Competition as content? You bet. Brand-hosted annual awards are one of the most creative, effective content marketing tactics.

One of the best B2B examples of this is the Life Science Industry Awards, originally initiated by industry publication The Scientist and now hosted by BioInformatics Inc.

The sponsor and its divisions provide research and advisory services to support the life science, analytical instrument, and diagnostics industries. But the firm regularly stops to take the pulse of its voting insiders (all scientists) by polling them to celebrate the “rock stars” of life science product manufacturers and suppliers. A top determinant of ranking in the awards? Customer loyalty and satisfaction. Awards become a means of taking already-engaged customers and making them even more invested in the brand.

The Heart of Content Marketing

Content marketing has evolved far beyond a play to increase brand awareness. Today, we coordinate annual industry awards, conduct live interactive webinars, host forums, personalize mobile apps, invite clients over for wine once a month, and even leverage buyers’ selfies. These are all ways content marketing can serve customers from attraction through to loyalty, and even into advocacy.

Robert Rose of Content Marketing World says getting content to spur customer retention is about more than just focusing at the top of the funnel. It’s about meeting consumer needs—not alienating them once you’ve caught their attention.

“The basis of our content marketing strategy once was how much can we create in order to ‘get found.’ But that’s where many businesses sort of stopped. They didn’t really explore any more deeply what content marketing could provide by the way of marketing insight into those personas or into those customers once they get deeper into the funnel,” he explains. “We know a lot of companies that are amazing at inbound marketing, or the top of the funnel stuff, and they are absolutely horrible at customer retention, and they are churning through customers like nobody’s business.”

Today, many marketers still consider the terms “inbound” and “content marketing” interchangeable. But content marketing achieves dozens of business goals, and inbound traffic is only one of them.

“SEO is a subset of content marketing,” Crestodina stressed in our interview. “Organic search is one of the three big promotion channels for content. The other two are social and email.

“The content marketer does three things (to focus on) all day long: create, promote, and measure,” he says. “Not all content strategies have an SEO component, but most do. Why? Because it’s a very durable source of qualified visitors.”

Empowering your customers to support your brand on social is a home run marketing strategy. But by taking the time to meet with them, either in person or through a live web event, and listening to their needs, customer retention gets a whole lot easier because consumers are always more keen to support a brand that gets them and goes the extra mile.

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Bethany Johnson is a multiple award-winning content marketing writer and speaker. Her work empowers marketers to ditch interrupt advertising in favor of original content that converts passive readers into active followers. Thriving brands like Tom’s of Maine, MasterCard, ADP, Fidelity and the Content Marketing Institute currently rely on Bethany’s fresh style to connect with audiences daily. As a consultant, she combines simple change management principles with her insider knowledge of freelancing to show traditional marketing teams how to flourish in today’s gig economy. For more, visit bethanyjohnson.com.

Sourced from Skyword

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9 Ways to Boost Your Marketing Without Overwhelming Your Customers

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By Martin Zwilling

It’s time to make the change from traditional outbound marketing to what customers are demanding today.

More and more customers these days are doing their own marketing research, scanning internet reviews and feedback from friends, rather than trusting messages that you push out through advertising.

This is called inbound marketing, where customers are pulled to you, rather than feeling accosted at every turn by your brand messages via email, newspapers and television.

Inbound marketing is all building two-way virtual relationships, which are the norm for today’s generation via social media, mobile apps, recommendations from “friends” and influencers, modern websites with customer-focused content, friendly forums, and chat bots.

If you have yet to get started, here are some key steps that I recommend to my advisory business clients:

1. Actively engage customers via top social media sites.

Recently I was surprised to find that up to 25 percent of businesses still don’t use social media at all, and many more only monitor it, but rarely engage.

I recommend that you experiment to find the best sites for your business, with the majors including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

2. Update your website to make it totally customer-focused.

A quick scan of the Internet today will convince you that many sites are still product-centric, technology focused, and haven’t been updated for years.

Today people want to see customer needs highlighted, mobile friendly, recommendations from prior customers, and interactive help channels.

3. Provide mobile device apps and interactive support.

As American customers with smartphones now exceed 80 percent, and adults spending more time on mobile than watching TV, the advantages of mobile device support continue to increase.

Inbound marketing requires that you be where your customers are, or they won’t find you or care.

4. Highlight and practice a commitment to a higher purpose.

Customers are pulled to companies that are role models for saving the environment, fostering social change, and giving back to the less advantaged.

For example, Whole Foods pulls in customers by highlighting their efforts to sustain the environment and ensure humane animal treatment.

5. Become a thought leader and influencer in your domain.

Be creative and add value to what you offer your target audience, without calling it marketing. Adding value builds influence and subsequently can build your business, as well as your Klout score.

Customers love to learn from leaders and innovators, and this pulls them in for sales.

6. Provide memorable total customer experience relationships.

Customers are pulled in by differentiators that go well beyond the product, including ease of shopping, ordering, delivery, customer reviews, and personalization.

Your overall customer experience will trump product features every time, in terms of loyalty, trust, and return visits.

7. Establish partnerships with recognized pull businesses.

Pursue collaborations with local and national organizations and businesses who are good at inbound marketing, to pull in their customers and followers.

Develop and learn from shared marketing efforts, trade-show booths, co-branding promotional products, and referral agreements.

8. Implement marketing metrics based on inbound data.

Inbound marketing data, including site page visits, blog reads, inbound links, and e-commerce orders linked to content are much more relatable to return-on-investment (ROI) than email blasts, banner-ad views, and TV show ratings.

Take advantage of automated tools in this area, such as Google Analytics.

9. Consistently deliver updated and valuable content.

Companies that haven’t updated their website for years, or publish a new blog only sporadically, won’t be followed or pull in new customers.

The key is consistency. In this context, content is like advertising, unless customers want to see you every day, they won’t remember anything about you.

In fact, I believe that inbound or pull marketing is just the first of several waves of change in the world of digital marketing, where customers are in charge. Customers now feel immune to most marketing influences, except the ones they initiate.

Your challenge is to deliver your message in the context of customer value, and build relationships, without anyone feeling a push.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Martin Zwilling

Sourced from Inc.

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Why Really Good Marketing People Can Be Hard To Find — And How To Simplify The Process

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By Gary Nealon

So you’re looking to hire a marketing expert for your team. It should be easy enough, right? You just post the job on Indeed, wait for the resumes to start rolling in and pick from the best of the bunch.

While it’s true that in a perfect world, you’d have no trouble enlisting the help of a seasoned pro — someone who’s able to tackle everything from planning to strategy — in my experience, this type of expert can be difficult to find. Sure, they exist, but they’re also extremely rare.

As a marketing consultant, I’ve seen this issue come up quite a lot. Often, when I’m on consulting calls, I find that people are looking for someone to not only provide advice but also to handle every marketing-related task for them.

It’s not often that you’ll find someone who’s able to do it all — and if you do, they’ll most likely cost a great deal. Of course, you could enlist the help of an agency, but they’re often costly as well.

If you’re looking for a marketing expert and aren’t sure where to start, here’s a look at how you can simplify the process and find the help you need. But first, let’s more deeply examine why good marketing people can be hard to find.

Why Is It So Hard?

In my experience of hiring multiple marketers for the various companies I’ve owned, there are two main reasons why marketing positions can be hard to fill.

First of all, consider the state of marketing today. The field of marketing is as broad as it is deep, and in the digital age, it’s changing at the speed of light. It’s also something that requires a broad range of skills — from strategy to creativity to an in-depth knowledge of different social media platforms, not to mention content marketing, inbound marketing, Google Ads and more. It can be tough to find someone who’s able to do it all. And if they claim that they can, they’re likely either exaggerating, or, as I mentioned previously, they’re going to cost a lot. If someone is that good, they’ll also probably already be working somewhere else and will need a pretty strong incentive if you’re hoping to persuade them to work for you.

Second, the hiring process for marketers is usually extremely flawed and often misses the mark. It’s easy to hire based on resumes alone or to neglect to ask the right questions at the interview. Often marketers will make large, impressive boasts: “I grew X company’s social media following by 700 people” or “I increased inbound leads by 500%.” But it’s rare that the interviewer will call these claims into question. Instead of simply taking these claims at face value, it’s important to delve in and ask how. How did they scale the company’s social media following? What strategies did they implement? Were they working on a team or alone? Having the facts can make the job of vetting qualified candidates easier.

Determine What Level Of Marketer You Need

Instead of simply rushing out and hiring a “marketing expert,” I recommend that companies articulate exactly what they’re looking for. Marketing specialists, in my experience, can be broken down into three main tiers.

1. The 30,000-Foot Strategist

First up, there’s the 30,000-foot strategist. They’ll be an expert in strategy and able to provide direction to you and your team. This expert will often be a consultant — and as such, it may be difficult to hire them in a traditional capacity. A good strategist will delve into the threadwork of your company, not merely suggesting tactics, but also helping you to determine whether you have a viable product and who your target audience is. While often costly, a good strategist is often worth their weight in gold and is probably an ideal candidate if you’d like help with your overall strategy.

2. The 15,000-Foot Conceptualizer

The 15,000-foot conceptualizer is usually a bit more hands-on than a strategist and able to deal with more practical, day-to-day aspects of marketing. They’ll likely be skilled in a few areas, such as setting up campaigns, coordinating teams and delegating necessary tasks. While not usually as skilled as a strategist when it comes to overall direction, they’ll likely be skilled at using a few favored platforms and techniques to produce good results, and they can be tremendously valuable if you already have a target audience and an overall strategy.

3. The 5,000-Foot Implementer

The 5,000-foot implementer is often easier to find and tends to specialize in just one or two areas, such as email, affiliate, search engine or pay-per-click marketing. Usually, they’ll be skilled at implementing strategies on a specific platform, such as Facebook or Google Ads, but they likely won’t be able to do everything or make sure that everything is working together congruently. If you’re looking for help with a specific strategy, then a 5,000-foot implementer might be for you.

Determine What Capacity You’re Hiring For

Next, determine what capacity you’re hiring for. Do you need someone to work for you in-house or as a contractor?

Again, you’ll want to consider exactly what you’re looking for and who can best help you reach your marketing goals. Often you may not need to hire for a full-time position. Sometimes enlisting the services of an individual contractor or agency is the best option. This depends on your goals and budget constraints. Larger companies for whom brand consistency matters a great deal may want to hire exclusively in-house.

Once you’ve determined which type of marketer you need and in what capacity you want to hire them, you’re ready to start looking for the right candidate. Just don’t make the mistake of posting a job ad with a vague description of “marketing professional.” Instead, get extremely detailed with your job description so potential candidates will be on the same page as you and clear about exactly what will be expected of them.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Gary Nealon

Gary Nealon is the Founder of Nealon Solutions, offering strategic marketing consulting services to help you scale your eCommerce business.

Sourced from Forbes

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Going From Impossible to Inevitable: A Case Study on Inbound Marketing

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Startups are hard. In fact, in the beginning, it can seem nearly impossible. But startups are exciting. There’s nothing like the prospect of building something that can change the world. That will keep you going, and when you reach a certain point, your success goes from impossible to inevitable.

Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin know a thing or two about this. They’ve both been successful operators, but both consult countless companies, and they’ve written a book whose title says it all: From Impossible to Inevitable.

Aaron recently swung by the Engagio office, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to do a quick vlog. Aaron and Jason just released a revised and updated version of their book, which contains a lot of new ideas and all new case studies. So, we decided to chat about one of those case studies – how inbound has changed in the last 10 years. Yes, it’s the story of how Jon Miller did inbound in the early days at Marketo versus how we’re doing it at Engagio.

Here’s my conversation with Aaron. Enjoy!

(Watch on YouTube)

TRANSCRIPT:

– Alright, it’s Aaron Ross here, with Brandon Redlinger, who’s Director of Growth at Engagio. Brandon, thanks for hosting me here.

– Absolutely

– I came in off the plane I was like yeah, I’ll come by, let’s do a video.

– Let’s do a video!

– Why not And I couldn’t say no.

– Yeah

– I couldn’t say no.

– Okay

– So, this time for this updated book from Impossible to Inevitable, I can’t even say it sometimes, second edition. There’s a bunch of great new case studies in sections, like it is a pretty massive update. One of them is from my friend Jon Miller founder, CEO of Engagio. And I thought it was really interesting, because he was the original co-founder of Marketo. And so, this section here talks about the difference in 10 years between when Marketo was founded, and today with Engagio. So, I got one of the tips that I liked a lot, and I realize you’re just kind of like a foil for me to hear to talk, So one of the tips I liked, that Jon had to share was 10 years ago, and you can put up a blog post, and he said he could get it on the highly ranked keywords

– Show up on Google

– on page one, you know Jon Miller writes a post and BOOM!

– Boom!

– Then marketing comes flooding in, right.

– Yup

– All the leads come flooding in. So today he’s been working for three years to get on range for Account Based Marketing, he can’t even get on the first three pages or 10 pages. So two things, he said it’s really important to take an accountant-based approach, kinda mixing content marketing, with outbound prospecting, Account Based Marketing. You’re taking ideas, you’re taking to people, and that was much more a spears approach with marketing. And that was, in the book he he goes to these four tiers, so when you have tier one accounts, these big strategic accounts, you know Wales, like the true Wales, how do you treat them, verus tier two where you got the big companies versus tier three which means like mid-market, and tier four which is small business. So, I don’t know if in those different tiers that you guys use and talk about, love to hear maybe like a tip, if I’m trying to target the big enterprise, not like the, lets say the bigger companies.

– What’s a common mistake that you see companies make, whether their customers or not on Engagio? It’s account based marketing

– Yes, absolutely! So I think we run into this all the time.

– I’m putting him on the spot by the way

– Happy to take this on. People choose too many accounts, then when they take on

– That’s a good one

– Too much, and then they don’t have the resources or they don’t have the time, or the budget, or the people, to properly actually go after… ’cause your top tier accounts

– Top, top tiers

– Top, top tier, right

– Yeah

– We don’t have certain budget, we don’t have certain time, certain resources

– Okay, how many accounts, okay pick a number, how many accounts do you think is too many?

– For tier one?

– For tier one, the biggest ones, and then, ’cause you’re gonna guess too many. Like what would you say?

– Don’t go more than five.

– Five, right, five or fewer.

– We do not, I don’t think we have a rep right now that has five. That’s the most we allow, and I don’t think they do it. There are people, they say, I can do five, I can do five, they know what what their resources are, they know the SLAs they have to hit, they know what they need to do. But like a lot of people are like, oh I can easily do five, I can easily do it. And then

– Yup at the end of the day they’re like, you’re like hey, were you able to touch this account? What happened with this account? And like I just didn’t get around to it.

– Yep there’s no shame in saying, ah maybe I’ll do four, maybe I’ll do three.

– Yeah, like it’s not more, is not better.

– Exactly

– So in page 74, they go through the different tiers here, right. Tier one, two, three, or four. And that was something interesting, that at the top level five, and actually per if I remember, per account they might spend $60,000.00 per account, per one company.

– Yep

– Obviously, if you have money to spend.

– Yeah, exactly.

– Yeah, and anyway, tier two you could do more companies if it’s small, that was a really interesting when we talked about it with Jon, and so that was like when I was really excited to get into the book, so.

– A lot of good stuff in there

– Yeah

– So..

– Go pick it up now, it is the Bible in Silicon Valley for growth.

– Yep, it’s on Amazon, or from impossible.com

– Awesome, thanks Aaron!

– Yeah, thanks.

By

Brandon Redlinger is the Director of Growth at Engagio, the Account Based Marketing and Sales platform that enables teams to measure account engagement and orchestrate human connections at scale. He is passionate about the intersection between tech and psychology, especially as it applies to growing businesses. You can follow him on twitter @brandon_lee_09 or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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6 foolproof content creation tips to boost your marketing strategy

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By Dave Brown

Buzzwords like ‘content marketing’, ‘content creation strategy’, and ‘content is king’ mean a lot more to businesses today than they did a few years ago.

In the modern, fast-paced, and highly competitive corporate stratosphere, content marketing has become more than just a technique to gain a competitive edge – it’s become a necessity.

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Today, if you want to gain leads and see those leads converting into

Today, if you want to gain leads and see those leads converting into customers, build a relationship with your audience, and present a consistently good image of your business, you need to put in place the bricks of a strong content marketing strategy.   

With all ventures aiming for the coveted prize, the competition in content marketing is harder now than ever. The only way to stay ahead of the competition is by giving content marketing the attention it deserves and by ensuring that your content remains unparalleled in all aspects.

So how can you leverage your content to tap into authentic growth?    

Let’s dive in to explore a few sure-fire content creation tips and tricks you need to follow.

Stimulate curiosity in the audience

Perhaps the best tip for lead conversions is to combine top-quality content with a premium offer or a bonus that aligns with the topic.

Successful businesses with top-notch content marketing strategy use downloadable checklists and guides, exclusive videos, and detailed analysis reports to push their audience to subscribe to their emails or newsletter. You can use one of two ways to achieve this objective – hire in-house writers or consider a content writing service.

But wait, there’s more!

Ah, caught you!

You can clearly see how powerful this curiosity-piquing trick can be for your content creation strategy.

Well, there’s actually one more crucial point. Make sure that you offer some serious value to your audience before asking them for a favor. Otherwise, you’ll lose their trust!

The safest way to go about this is by splitting your piece of information into half and sharing the first half only, asking the audience to subscribe or click on a link to get access to the remaining half.       

Serialize your content

Lengthy, expansive, and never-ending content isn’t just challenging for you to create but is also hard for your audience to digest.

While it’s true that lengthier pieces of content tend to garner more interest of the audience, there are ways to make them more comprehensible and easily digestible for the readers without compromising on their value.

One such trick is to distribute your content into serials. This will additionally allow you to integrate call-to-actions and other conversion points within the content.

To begin with, consider choosing an engaging topic that meets the interest criteria of your target audience, and break it up into a series of content. You may make the most of this technique by offering the serialized content to your email subscribers only.

Do you know what’s the best part of content serialization is? You don’t need to come up with heaps of content in one go – you’ll have at least a week before the next piece of content has to go!

Repackage your content

Immaculate content creation is that which involves thinking outside the box.

One of the biggest reasons why many businesses fall short on the content marketing front is that they see a piece of content as just that. Your content can offer a myriad of opportunities only if you’re smart enough to realize it.

You can repurpose and recycle your ideas to create fresh, valuable, and interesting content each time in so many ways. To put this point across effectively, I’ll present you with some examples:

  • To promote an eBook, you may recreate one of its chapters into a blog post and utilize the but-wait-there’s-more technique
  • You may use your package quotes as tweets
  • You may create a series of blog posts using the content of a webinar

No matter how you decide to recycle your content, just make sure that it doesn’t lose its value and isn’t straightaway plagiarized.  

Go over the top

Hundreds and thousands of people create and publish content but not every piece is of a great standard. In fact, most of it is of bad quality. And you can use this to your advantage. Should you ask how, you must have seen how something that’s of superior quality stands out from the crowd instantly.

Your content should be able to do the same!

Sounds like a great idea, right?

But how does one produce content that surpasses every other piece on the internet?

Here’s a rule of thumb to follow: find content that is worthy to be linked, come up with something better and unique, and present it to the right audience.

Although this type of content involves hard-core research and requires a lot of time, effort, and dedication, it’ll help you yield amazing results for much longer.

Make summary posts of big content pieces

Want to set your existing content up for some brownie points?

Consider making a list of the things that your audience will learn from a longer piece of content and use it to create a summary post for a multi-distribution platform, such as LinkedIn. Content, video, and amount of users are a few reasons why LinkedIn is on the rise. Get in early to take full advantage of this platform.

The digestible shorter piece should offer valuable insights into your main longer post. You’ll be surprised how this simple trick will boost traffic rate for you!

Use your predictive eye

Another way to create quality content is by predicting which topics will be popular amongst and well-received by the audience.

This doesn’t mean you’ll have to sit in front of a crystal ball and try to look into the future but by simply being aware of what your competitors are doing that seems to work wonders for them.

Again, you shouldn’t be aiming to copy exactly what they’re doing rather just to use it to your own advantage.

Look for topics and types of content that have done well in the past for similar businesses in the industry, keep track of the keywords that are working best for your competitors, and use learned knowledge to create kick-ass content for your own business.

If you’re ready to step in the corporate stratosphere, make sure that you create your content with the audience and your company’s growth in mind. The key is to deliver content that provides value to your audience while generating value and saving investment for your business at the same time.

With these content creation tips in mind, there’s no reason why your work won’t stand out from the crowd.

By Dave Brown

Sourced from TNW

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How to Get Executive Buy-In With an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

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By Michael Brenner

As a marketer, you already know that content marketing is well worth your time and effort. What you put in is almost guaranteed to be returned to you many times over, and this attractive ROI combined with low costs and barriers to entry makes content marketing one of the most popular marketing strategies for businesses large and small.

However, it’s not always so easy to convince management and C-suite that content represents a worthy investment. Unlike traditional advertising campaigns and other types of marketing, it can be quite some time before you see the results of your content marketing campaign.

In some cases, it might take years before you build enough momentum from your content marketing activities to see real results. But only 59% of respondents surveyed by the Content Marketing Institute agreed that leadership offered enough time to demonstrate content marketing results. So how can you get executive buy-in if you’ve only got a short timeframe to prove its effectiveness?

Quick Takeaways

  • Executive buy-in is important for content marketing success, but it’s not always easy to achieve.
  • Backing up your case with facts, figures, and a well-considered marketing strategy is essential.
  • Consider running a pilot content marketing scheme to demonstrate short-term success.

Why Getting Executive Buy-In for Content Marketing Can Be Challenging

There are actually several reasons why executives don’t immediately see content marketing as the same amazing opportunity that marketers do.

Remember, the aims of your role in the company are fundamentally different. Marketers want to raise brand visibility and generate leads, while C-suite is concerned with the overall strategic running of the business and generating income. It may not be immediately obvious how content marketing fits into this.

The main challenges or sticking points include:

  • The ROI of content marketing is difficult to measure and prove.
  • Results from content marketing may not be seen until months or years later.
  • Producing enough content to be effective either means investing in more staff or outsourcing costs, or taking employees away from other activities.
  • Content marketing is a fairly new strategy compared to more traditional marketing methods and senior level employees are therefore less likely to understand it fully and be familiar with the techniques involved.

To get executive buy-in, you need to prove the worth of content marketing in facts and figures so it’s not dismissed as just being the latest trendy tactic that doesn’t necessarily produce results.

Content Marketing By the Numbers

While you may not yet have the figures to prove the effectiveness of your own content marketing strategy, thousands of other brands and marketers have done the work for you.

Use published data and research to demonstrate how content marketing has been effective for others. Show how you will replicate this success in your own content marketing strategy.

Image source: https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/2018-b2b-research-final.pdf

After presenting the generic figures and statistics, back up your research with case studies and examples from other companies and brands.

  • Buffer used a content marketing strategy revolving around blogging, guest blogging, and email marketing to build their brand from scratch to a user base of 400,000, and around a million followers on social media.
  • Transferwise uses a content strategy focused on creating great content, which automatically generates links and PR to generate 14 million visits a month. They published 243 articles in one year and 43% of their traffic comes from search to the high-quality content on their blog.
  • Shutterstock attracted 6 billion site visits, 5,300 shares on social media, and mentions in over 100 articles from just one infographic.
  • Demandbase launched a content marketing campaign including a whitepaper, infographic, webinar, and live presentation that generated 1,700 leads, 125 webinar attendees and $1million in new business.

Developing an Effective Marketing Strategy

After demonstrating the effectiveness of content marketing in general, and the success that others have seen, it’s time to set out your own strategy complete with measurable goals and a timeline for achieving them.

Your content marketing strategy is your business case for investment, so it’s vital to put work into it and build a compelling case.

65% of the most successful B2B content marketers have a documented strategy, compared to only 14% of those who are not as successful. If you don’t have a carefully considered strategy, C-suite has little reason to invest in your plans.

image source: https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2019_B2B_Research_Final.pdf

Your content marketing strategy should include:

  • An analysis of your audience, their demographics, behaviors, and how they spend their time online (marketing personas are the most effective way to implement this.)
  • Your content marketing goals and how they align with the overall business goals
  • The content formats you’ll focus on such as blog posts, videos, infographics, whitepapers etc.
  • The channels you’ll use for content promotion
  • Your schedule for content creation and publication
  • How your requested budget will be split and how you plan to stretch your budget further by repurposing content and using free and low-cost marketing techniques (include estimated cost savings).

With a detailed strategy, your proposal should be difficult to refuse. However, there is one final step to achieving total executive buy-in.

Launch a Pilot Content Marketing Plan to Demonstrate Short-Term Success

The most significant benefits of content marketing may not be seen for quite some time in the future, but you can still set achievable short-term goals to give a taster of what’s to come.

Kickstart your content marketing strategy with a pilot plan over a limited time period such as six months. Agree on a budget for your pilot, set clear goals, and make sure to measure and analyze your results regularly so you can report back to senior management.

Showing short-term gains such as an increase in website traffic or more mentions on social media can help to give your management team a preview of what may be possible over a longer timescale with more resources.

By Michael Brenner

Michael Brenner is a globally-recognized keynote speaker, author of The Content Formula and the CEO of Marketing Insider Group. He has worked in leadership positions in sales and marketing for global brands like SAP and Nielsen, as well as for thriving startups. Today, Michael shares his passion on leadership and marketing strategies that deliver customer value and business impact. He is recognized by the Huffington Post as a Top Business Keynote Speaker and a top CMO influencer by Forbes. Please follow him on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook and Subscribe here for regular updates.

Sourced from Marketing Insider Group

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10 Marketing Services to Build Your Business

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By Dan Moyle    

From small businesses to solo entrepreneurs to major brands, growth is always a goal. It may be the top goal.

Of course marketing is part of that discussion; it’s a major building block. Whether you call it lead generation, inbound marketing, digital marketing, growth, or some other buzzword, the root of it is marketing.

Marketing is essentially starting a conversation with an ideal prospect, in hopes of turning them over to sales.

While there’s a lot you (or a team) can do on your own, sometimes partnering with an expert in the field can help you put your growth into hypermode.

The question is, where do you concentrate your efforts? Which marketing services will help you truly build your business?

The list is long, but it’s better to start somewhere. Below you’ll find 10 marketing services to help you build your business. Even if you pick one or two, you’re making progress.

What are you waiting for?

10 Marketing Services to Help You Build Your Business

Website Optimization / Design

Not every business needs a new $30,000 website. That shouldn’t automatically be the answer from a marketing agency. Instead, they ought to look at your current website and your business goals, and see if there’s an opportunity for optimize your current site for conversions.

Strategically adding calls to action (CTAs) to your home page or most-visited pages can begin the process of optimizing your website.

Also, making smaller changes to the design like a hero image, cleaner navigation, and new images could go a long way to giving your site a new feel. And you wouldn’t have to blow everything up and start over.

This is why a website assessment is important. You should find out what’s working, where you can make minor adjustments, and where you can really dive in and make bigger changes. It’s time to work smarter, not harder.

Video Marketing

Your customers are human, right? Well, then they’re probably watching videos. And beside face-to-fact interaction, video is one of the most powerful tools to help you to connect with them on a human level.

This appealing and authentic medium gives businesses a longer reach, higher engagement, increased conversion rates and ultimately, more sales than many other marketing tactics.

Like websites, video has quickly become a requirement of doing business in the digital age. In fact, almost 50% of internet users look for videos related to a product or service before making a purchase. Fortunately for businesses like yours, video is more affordable and more accessible than ever before.

When you’re ready to go beyond a cell phone video and make remarkable videos to get remarkable results, finding the right partner for video marketing services is key.

Look for an agency who will teach you, who will work with you collaboratively, who will fit with your culture, and who will bring you the quality you’re looking for in your videos.

Conversational Marketing

Direct, one-on-one messaging is bypassing our clogged inboxes and unanswered phones to become the world’s preferred way to communicate. And better communication means a faster, more efficient buyer’s journey in which you’re uncovering the right questions and tactics to deliver the most relevant message possible to potential customers.

That’s the world of conversational marketing. It includes chatbots and live chat, but goes beyond just the tools. It’s another strategy; it’s a mindset.

When a potential buyer is ready to talk, we have to be ready. When they want to use a social messaging platform, we need to be there. When they’re just browsing, we shouldn’t go in full-force for the close.

Adding conversational marketing to your business growth plan can help set your brand apart from the crowd.

Content Strategy

The magical cornerstone of inbound marketing is this: deliver the right message to the right people at the right time. When it comes to crafting that message, you’ll have to know what to say, and how to say it, for every different buyer persona. The right content creation crew should help you say what you really mean, while sounding like you belong, for maximum impact in every conversation and medium.

The web is full of valuable information. How will yours stand out? Think of a downloadable resource created for your ideal customer. Maybe it’s an eBook about DIY plumbing, a software training video or a mortgage calculator. Premium content is a free, downloadable offer that prospects trade their contact information for. But they have to see value in it.

That’s where content strategy shines. Then, from setting the strategy to executing on the plan, your marketing services partner should be there to ensure the ship is headed in the right direction.

Customer Lifecycle Mapping

Maybe you don’t need new leads. Maybe you need to connect with your most valuable (and often untapped) market. It’s the one you’ve already mastered– your current customers!

Not only is it possible to retarget and sell to your current customers, but it’s also faster, easier and more cost-effective than finding new ones.

They’ve already made a purchase. So what?

It’s time to map your customer lifecycle, and see how you can continue to serve them. It’s for your benefit as well as theirs – after all, they liked you enough to do business with you before! The average customer spends more in their third year than their first. So why are you spending five times more to acquire new customers?

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is complicated, but it doesn’t have to be mysterious.

As a business owner or someone working on a business, SEO can feel overwhelming. Working with the best marketing services partner on SEO could include setting up and maintaining an SEO strategy so that you don’t have to worry about it.

By using the right keywords for your customers and business, you’ll get more exposure, more traffic, more leads and more customers. Keeping a current SEO strategy allows you to maintain an advantage over your competitors.

Sure, it’s tempting to try it yourself, but it really does take an expert. The landscape of SEO changes daily. You need the right tools to analyze it and adjust. That level of hands-on work is an agile SEO strategy that maintains your competitive advantage.

Let our team of SEO experts help you set up and maintain a successful SEO strategy.

Buyer Persona Development

Before you can successfully craft any marketing message, you have to know who you’re talking to.

If you’re getting discouraged by poor response rates, no conversions and few results, it’s because you’re shouting your marketing message out of a megaphone, to no one in particular.

Well-defined buyer personas turn ideal customers into real human beings, making it easier to locate and talk to them effectively. Drive revenue for your business by knowing how to speak to people about what they’re interested in, when they’re interested in it.

Email Marketing

Even today, email is one of the most effective marketing tactics, when it’s done right. Email isn’t dead, just bad email practices. Plus, there’s simply too much of it that it’s hard to be heard through all of that noise. This leads to frustration and lazy practices.

Instead, crafting an email strategy that serves prospects and customers well can set you apart and help you grow your business.

The strategy behind successful email campaigns isn’t always apparent, but a precise and strategic message is vital for cutting through inbox clutter. It’s your most important tool to nurture prospects into customers with both intent-based and time-based marketing.

Landing Page Creation

Landing pages can be powerful in helping you grow your business. Even in the anti-form era, landing pages can be one of the most important marketing tools in the digital world.

A well-optimized landing page can have conversion rates of 25 – 50%, compared to the .5 – 3% conversion of most web pages.

These conversion powerhouses have a single purpose: to convert site visitors into leads by exchanging personal information for valuable content. Although they seem simple, with streamlined copy and a simple contact form, these pages require experience and strategy to succeed.

Harness the power of landing pages that convert to make them work for your business.

Pay Per Click Marketing

Find your tribe. Faster.

When pay-per-click ads make sense for your goals, they hypertarget the exact customers you’re searching for.

Want to advertise only to 30 year old stay-at-home moms in rural Oklahoma that have recently purchased a new car? You can do that.

Pay-per-click marketing on Facebook, Google and even Bing can deliver fast results and instant traffic to your site. It’s the perfect way to boost promotion or market a product launch with incredibly trackable results.

Unfortunately, you can waste a lot of money if you’re not considering your whole conversion strategy, or constantly testing and adjusting your campaign.

Working with an experienced, creative marketing services partner can help you supercharge your growth strategy when it comes to pay per click marketing.

Building Your Business with the Right Marketing Services

You need to build your business. And you need to do it without the budget of McDonalds or Bud Light.

Choosing the right marketing services to build that business is critical. These 10 services above are a great place to start.An even better place to start is to see how your current marketing – and your website – stack up. Run your numbers through our conversion report calculator below. Let’s see how you’re doing, and how you begin to improve.

Building blocks photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Camel conversation photo by Kawtar CHERKAOUI on Unsplash

By Dan Moyle    

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Read more at https://www.business2community.com/marketing/10-marketing-services-to-build-your-business-02211250

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Draw Your Prospects To Your Brand By Improving Your Inbound Marketing

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By Karina Tama – Rutigliano

The central question about inbound marketing isn’t about whether you’re doing it. Just by virtue of having a website, you’re inherently soliciting some amount of inbound marketing. The crucial question about inbound marketing is how to maximize its potential.

One of the great things about inbound marketing is that it’s a perfect marketing strategy for companies of every size and in every stage of development. Unlike outbound marketing, where you’re creating ads and trying to capture your audience’s attention, inbound marketing is a strategy that identifies customers who are noodling around the internet in search of what your company offers and highlighting a visible path right to the doorstep of your website. The idea behind inbound marketing is to draw your prospects into your brand experience by creating content that they just don’t want to miss.

By implementing a few new tools and watching your analytics carefully, you’ll learn quickly how to generate qualified leads and convert them to customers, which is the goal of successful inbound marketing.

A successful inbound marketing strategy requires narrowing your target customer profile.

I’m sometimes surprised about how little marketers know about their target customers. I advise marketers to narrow down the demographics of their target customer as closely as possible. Ask yourself the following:

• Are they primarily male or female?

• What age bracket do they fall into?

• What is the average income level of your customer?

• What are their general occupations?

• Is your target customer likely to be married or single?

• Are they a homeowner or more likely to rent?

• How do they spend their leisure time?

• What specific problem can you solve for them?

Keep brainstorming and ask as many questions about your customer as possible. By narrowly defining your target customer, it will be easier to develop content that will draw them to you organically.

Be aware of your buyers and how they search.

Not too long ago, I’d get frustrated if I went to a store and couldn’t find a salesperson to help me quickly. Today, I know that I can get what I need online, without anyone’s help. There are times when I need the assistance of a knowledgeable salesperson. For most purchases, I prefer to do my own research without the influence of a salesperson who’s looking to make a commission based on my purchase.

I find that online buyers shop in much the same way as brick-and-mortar retail shoppers. And there are four stages in every buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, decision, experience.

Use your target customer’s profile as a basis to create various inbound marketing strategies that will keep them tuned in at every stage of the buying experience. Inbound marketing gives your customers the right content at the right time to take them to the next step in the sales funnel.

Awareness: Create content for the awareness stage that outlines the problem in a straightforward way and leads customers to additional content that offers intriguing solutions. Tip sheets, blogs, overviews and other short, factual content drive this stage.

Consideration: This stage calls for explanatory pieces that line up sensical solutions, such as e-books, whitepapers and informative videos.

Decision: Focus on value when customers enter the decision stage. This is the time to present case studies, offer free assessments, highlight features and show your product or service in the best possible light.

Experience: Deliver content in the final stage that helps customers have a good experience with your product or service. I find that this is a good place to post how-to formatted articles, briefs and guides.

A great inbound marketing strategy answers the clients’ questions in every stage.

Consider using various elements of inbound marketing.

In creating content, think about the types of inbound marketing that will generate qualified leads which you can convert into customers. Successful inbound marketing requires you to manage your data well, accurately analyze your return on investment and implement the best tools.

Here are some elements of inbound marketing to get you thinking of how to create conversions:

• Media and public relations

• Building an online community

• Utilizing influencers

• Blogging

• Thought leadership

• Public speaking

• Social media

• Video content

• Word of mouth

Inbound marketing can get Google’s attention, too.

Time and again, Google calls for quality content, but what does that really mean? Quality content is not just what you know about a topic, but how well you write about it. For example, if you’re selling plant seeds, you can certainly write about topics for beginning gardeners. But think beyond the basic soil, sun and water topics to other things gardeners want to know, such as:

• How do I start container gardening?

• Tips on preventing garden pests.

• Which plants require little watering?

• Which plants attract butterflies?

• Which plants are safe around pets?

• Which plants are edible?

• Which plants are easy to grow in certain climates?

• What are the gardening tools every gardener should own?

Quality content means that you’re sharing your expertise on not only the plant seeds that your company sells but on all things gardening and plants. When you blog, produce videos or present other such content on a regular basis, your audience can begin to trust you as an expert in your field. Google recognizes that visitors are flocking to your site on a regular basis because they can’t wait to get the next valuable nugget of information, and this boosts your site ranking.

In my opinion, inbound marketing should be an essential component of every marketing plan. According to HubSpot’s 2018 “State of Inbound” report, which surveyed more than 6,200 respondents from a mix of industries, 55% of marketers consider creating quality content as one of their top inbound marketing priorities. To improve your inbound marketing strategy, narrow your target customer even more, add a few more outlets for content and demonstrate that you’re an industry expert in every aspect of your product or service.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Karina Tama – Rutigliano

Karina Tama-Rutigliano is a Digital Marketing Strategist. She shares her skills in karinatama.com. She works at Thomas in NYC.

Sourced from Forbes

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