There’s no debate today about whether blogging works or not. Studies show that inbound marketing can deliver a high volume of leads. However, inbound marketing isn’t exactly a silver bullet. Just because it works well for one type of company with one type of product trying to reach one type of customer, doesn’t mean it will work well for you.
Here’s why problems pop up and what you should do when they happen.
Where Inbound Marketing Commonly Fails
Inbound marketing can work well for most companies in the long run, as long as you plan for:
How long it will take to pay off (years).
Knowing it doesn’t always attract the right type of buyer.
New companies don’t always have the luxury of waiting around for a few years for enough inbound leads to flood their salespeople’s inboxes.
And other content-based campaigns like blogging or webinars almost never get to hard-to-reach people that need to sign off on six or seven-figure deals (think: lawyers, CEOs, etc.). These people barely have enough time to answer an email, let alone attend a webinar for a full hour (or longer).
Blogging acts like a net, helping you to attract and catch people who may one day need what you sell. But like fishing, you’re also going to catch a lot of stuff that will never, ever convert. Instead of tossing out some bait and waiting around for a nibble, you need to go spearfishing.
How You Can Generate High-Ticket Leads (Instead of Inbound Marketing)
In “Predictable Revenue,” Aaron Ross writes about how his team generated over $100 million for Salesforce in new recurring revenue. They did that by first qualifying the types of companies who need what they do, and then conducting outreach to get introductions to the right person inside each large organization. That sounds easy enough on the surface, right?
Call it account-based marketing or just call it good direct sales. The concept is simple: you need to directly get in touch with the right types of buyers through email, phone calls, direct mail or conferences.
The problem is most marketers don’t do enough of these activities quickly enough. High-ticket deals can take months to close. The revenue you’re booking this month actually comes from the work you did over the past three months (or longer).
The reality is you can’t just focus on increasing the top of your funnel like most marketers and advertisers do. Everyone’s familiar with reach and frequency. Reach is the number of new unique people, while frequency is the number of times you reach the same person.
Direct marketing and selling place a greater emphasis on increasing frequency, instead of reach. It transitions you from mass, one-to-many tactics to one-to-one tactics as quickly as possible. Because the data is pretty clear no matter where you look:
Even direct mail, which seems old and tired, converts better than email.
And anyone who’s ever had to sell anything will tell you how much easier it is to close face-to-face than through a digital alternative.
All of these activities are labor intensive. You won’t be able to reach the same number of people, as easily as throwing up a few blog posts. But instead of impressions or eyeballs, you’ll get something much more valuable in return — more sales-ready leads who can turn into new revenue tomorrow.
Neil is the co-founder of Neil Patel Digital. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies.
New expansion is a natural progression from its existing services
The email marketing company Mailchimp has announced that it will soon expand beyond email to offer a full marketing platform aimed at SMBs.
The new platform will feature a number of new products including technology to record and track customer leads, ad retargeting on Facebook and Instagram, social media management and the ability to purchase domains and build websites.
Mailchimp will even provide its users with businesses intelligence that leverages AI to provide recommendations on how and when to market to potential customers.
The company is also changing its pricing by moving from three tiers to four and new customers can sign up for its free plan or pay either $9.99, $14.99 or up to $299 per month with its plans scaling depending on usage and features. If you’re already a Mailchimp customer, don’t worry as existing paid users will be able to continue using their plans with the option to move to the new packages at any time.
From email to marketing
Mailchimp’s expansion is part of a larger effort to widen its scope by building more serviettes for the small-business segment which is typically overlooked by larger firms.
The company’s co-founder and CEO, Ben Chestnut explained how the rise of the internet has empowered small businesses, saying:
“What’s really key is the role digital apps, digital publishing and social media have played. We can have a 10-employee company with a customer base bigger than 1 million. That’s a combination you couldn’t achieve before the growth of online.”
The move from email marketing to offering a full marketing service makes a great deal of sense for Mailchimp as the company already has a big marketing presence. According to Mailchimp, more than 1.25m ecommerce orders are generated through its campaigns daily and last year alone, 450m ecommerce orders were made as a result of its campaigns.
All marketers do it differently. From in-house departments and big-box firms to HubSpot agencies and boutique operations, all marketers have the freedom to enact their own approach and execute their favorite tactics. New trends are constantly emerging in attempt to keep up with changing customer preferences, and as marketers, we have creative freedom to satisfy those demands in our own way.
In this inbound-obsessed era, it can seem like there’s no room for traditional “outbound” marketing. However, focusing all marketing dollars on inbound causes us to miss opportunities to make meaningful connections through traditional tactics. As a result, more marketers are employing an integrated marketing approach that combines inbound, through platforms like HubSpot, with outbound tactics.
Not sold yet? Let’s look at the advantages these tried-and-true outbound tactics bring to modern marketers, as well as how to execute them. Then, we’ll show you how these tactics integrate with inbound strategies to generate a higher return on marketing investment (ROMI).
1. Event Marketing
When it comes to event marketing, it’s a classic case of “you had to be there.” Special events and tradeshows occupy a specific marketing niche that new technologies and internet content simply can’t touch. The live demonstrations and in-person interactions of a tradeshow allow for a special kind of engagement where prospects can really get to know, and understand, what a company has to offer.
Tradeshows play an even larger role in B2B marketing, where businesses can connect with companies and establish a personal relationship with the decision-maker before a purchase. In fact, 46% of B2B marketers place tradeshows and events in their top sources of sales and marketing leads.
To be successful with event marketing, companies need:
design and marketing help so that their tradeshow materials (banners, business cards, leave-behinds and promotional items) look attractive, on-brand and cohesive
to frequently refresh their materials so they’re in-step with changes to brand appearance and contain up-to-date information
to develop new, engaging ways of obtaining leads, such as by having QR codes on tradeshow materials that allow prospects to use their own phones or tablets to open a lead-capture form
to follow up quickly with leads, ideally within 24 hours, while event momentum is still buzzing
Tradeshows are an outbound tactic that complements inbound marketing because it allows a sort of “in-person version of the inbound methodology” (attract, engage, delight):
prospects are attracted by a company’s booth because the materials are informative, on-brand and well-designed
prospects engage with the company’s representatives and find that they would like to sign up for an email list and learn more about the company
prospects are delighted when the company promptly reaches out and follows up with them using the contact information they exchanged at the tradeshow
2. Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Digital tactics are so thoroughly engrained in the modern marketing mindset that even the most inbound-obsessed marketers lump online display and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising in with their accepted set of tools, thinking of them as part of inbound.
In fact, because they’re paid advertisements meant to catch the attention of prospects, these ads are actually an outbound method, just with the inbound twist of being targeted towards certain prospects based upon keywords.
For success in pay-per-click and display advertising, companies need to:
bid on the right keywords in search engines so their PPC ads appear in relevant searches
use location, age and interests to target audiences
develop clear, concise copy for text ads so that the clicks they pay for come from interested leads who clicked with intention
Thanks to automated retargeting that finds prospects who didn’t convert to sales upon their last visit to the company’s website, targeting is easy with display ads, but display ads have a design component, which means companies need to get creative. These ads need to be compelling with a clear call-to-action and aesthetically pleasing while aligning with brand image and messaging.
PPC ads in particular tie in with inbound content marketing in a very important way. Promoting gated content through PPC search ads extends the reach of your content and brings form fills (lead conversions) that represent new opportunities to engage and delight.
3. Print Advertisements
Though print advertisements don’t generate a huge number of qualified leads, every lead has the potential to turn into a satisfied customer who then passes on the good word about your company. Print advertisements can be a great opportunity to combine important details with eye-catching design.
Print ads tend to share more detail than PPC or display ads that prospects might encounter and speak to what sets your company apart. That’s why companies need to place print advertisements in specialized publications like trade papers and industry journals. The beauty is, you can repurpose copy and creative from display ads for print advertisements and add more to make your print ads informative and detailed.
4. Outbound Emails
Email marketing tends to fall on both sides of the line between inbound and outbound. Inbound emails are those that are sent to prospects who have already indicated their interest in your company by filling out a form or chatting with a representative or chatbot on your website.
Outbound emails are those sent to contacts that didn’t fill out a form or otherwise directly submit their email address to your company; usually these contacts are obtained by purchasing a contact list.
Outbound email is important because email is the most widely-used and frequently-checked communication channel. Email has the most engagement of any communication channel, with almost all customers checking their inbox at least once per day.
So, whether inbound or outbound, companies need to create emails that:
are conversational and relevant
have compelling subject lines and preview text
create relationships with contacts by providing helpful, human content
introduce the company to the contact in a personal way
are as personalized as possible
Here’s an example email sent to a prospect who’s evaluating your product:
As with PPC ads, outbound emails area great way to share inbound content. They’re also a great way to promote tradeshows and events.
Wrapping Up: Take an Integrated Approach
Inbound may be at the forefront in marketing right now, but that doesn’t mean that outbound can’t play an important role. When you complement inbound content with outbound tactics, you’re leveraging the power of integrated marketing (you can find more on this in the Whitepaper:The Case for Integrated Marketing) and taking advantage of every opportunity available to build meaningful relationships, maximize brand exposure and gain marketing return on investment.
Mark Schmukler, CEO and Co-founder of Sagefrog Marketing Group, LLC, brings more than 30 years of global marketing and consulting experience to the agency, leveraging his B2B background to lead brand strategy and business development.Based in Doylestown, PA and Princeton, NJ, Sagefrog Marketing Group is a full-service B2B marketing agency with specialties in healthcare, technology and business services. Founded by Mark Schmukler and Suzanne Morris in 2002, Sagefrog’s mission is to accelerate client success through integrated marketing including branding, digital, public relations, social media and traditional services. Visit Sagefrog.com
Facts are funny things. Myths go hand in hand with them. It is deciphering what is which that is sometimes the hard part. But, their separation is necessary to understand how to market at an optimal level.
Myth Busting
More content, more traffic! False – Content creation is a requirement for success, but quality outweighs quantity. Speaking in an expert voice is a better draw than words for word’s sake. The inbound framework consists of web design, SEO contextual keywords of value, social media, email marketing, and building trust with an audience.
Thinking the inbound traffic framework is merely a fad.False – Internet fads do exist. However, many people do not like change in marketing and believe inbound strategies will fade away like most Internet trends. Business coaching and mentoring are available for people who find the changes startling.
Return of Investment, or ROI, cannot be deciphered using the inbound traffic strategy. False – The myth about ROI’s has existed since the beginning of inbound Internet marketing.Automated Marketing Platforms began its existence so that businesses could track the ROI easier than ever.
Digital Media costs too much and get nothing in return.False – The particular myth is entirely backward. Digital Marketing creates revenue, not the other way around. Online digital content has no expiration date. Eyes over a never-ending expanse of time mean more for the buck in the long run.
Having only a website is enough! It does not have to be cellphone accessible. False & False – People are not going to visit a website randomly. Thousands of companies are competing with each other at any given moment, regardless of industry. And without a mobile accessible site, the chances of inbound traffic is even lower.
Word of mouth is magic and will do all the work. False – Entire industries continue to *only* use word of mouth. The old school approach is a habit hard to break because there was a time when it was all a business had to gain new patrons. The method integration into a marketing strategy framework is available, but no one should rely on referrals and word of mouth even if it were the most gainful means. Facebook advertising is proof that word of mouth and social media methods go hand in hand.
In the about section of the website, a simple paragraph and photograph are fine.False – The first giveaway that it is a myth is the fact no SEO exists when throwing a call to action paragraph on a website. The simplicity of the approach does not draw search engine attention through Google, or any other search engine. Quality content is indispensable.
Food for Thought
Over eighty percent of online marketing are small businesses using the Internet Marketing strategies. The decision to change methods of marketing is huge, but the integration is a requirement in the era of online marketing.
Businesses that utilize inbound marketing see their ROI triple compared to outbound marketing. Workshops are available to even those who work from home.
Inbound marketing strategies are here to stay.It is better for consumers and companies alike to deploy a modern marketing plan.
Melissa is a mother of 2, lives in Utah, and writes for a multitude of sites. She is currently the EIC of HarcourtHealth.com and writes about health, wellness, and business topics.
Google Ads Performance Planner, a planning tool that predicts the impact of campaigns on conversions and clicks, is based on billions of search queries and auction data updated every 24 hours. The planner, which Google announced at Marketing Live, became available this week.
The Performance Planner identifies the best budget amount to spend for campaigns to drive incremental conversions. On average, Google has seen advertisers drive 43% more conversions by using the tool, according to Ahmad Ismail, product manager at Google Ads.
“Let’s say you have a $92,000 monthly budget across 100 Search campaigns,” Ismail wrote in a post. “The planner will recommend how to distribute that $92,000 across those Search campaigns to maximize conversions and project results from these changes in your forecast.”
He explains how advertisers can use the planner to try other adjustments such as different spend levels and CPAs by clicking on various spend points to see how results change the conversions.
“For example, you can see the difference in conversion volume you could receive at a $12 CPA against a $20 CPA,” he wrote.
The planning tool allows advertisers to create a plan to see forecasts for campaigns, explore forecasts by adjusting different campaign settings, and quickly implement changes to the plan.
Among the benefits, marketers can identifying the campaign’s projected monthly and quarterly performance, as well as gain suggestions that can help campaigns perform better for the same spend.
Not everyone likes a hard sell, but sometimes it works. It’s blatant and upfront in what it wants you to do. If it catches you in the right moment and offers you the solution you need and the offer is intriguing and reasonable, you might just go for it.
Outbound marketing can depend much on hard selling, as TV and radio ads, fliers, and physical mailings are hitting you right away with what they want you to buy. They’re targeting a mass audience and not you as an individual, so they cut right to the chase.
Some people prefer being courted, though. They like marketers to know their preferences and quirks to design marketing materials based upon them. They also prefer not to always have to deal with a full-on sales approach.
This is where inbound marketing comes in. Inbound marketers design content to build up their brand as a thought leader, knowledge resource, and problem solver in their industry. They post this content where it can be found by their audience, rather than sending it out. Once someone has shown an interest and given you their contact information, then you the marketer can follow up with emails, texts, white papers, and more that offer more specific solutions and answers for their problems and concerns.
Content marketing and inbound marketing come together in producing materials with a soft sell. The more personalized you can make these marketing materials, the better a chance you have of intriguing and interesting your prospects, as you are speaking to them more closely as individuals and at their level.
You do not need to hit them over the head with sales offers and put any undue pressure on them. They already know that you can present solutions for their problems, due to your thought leadership, reputation, and online presence. Your marketing materials engage them by offering further information, educating them, intriguing and interesting them to want to learn more about you and your solutions.
Any selling you do is subtle. It’s more about showing them that you understand their situation, you know how to help, and you can do so in a way that nobody else can. In so doing, you are priming and readying them to make a decision about whether or not they want to go with you. You are nurturing a lead with the right information and taking them to the point when they might want to become a customer. Much of the time, when a prospect is finally turned over to a sales representative to bring it home, they have already decided whether or not to sign on due to the marketing.
If you reach out and connect with a customer, show that you understand their frustrations but can help, as you’ve helped many others with the same problems. You’re letting your brand, your solutions, and your reputation seal the deal, but it is up to marketers to communicate all this information to the right customers at the right time. Knowledge is power. Not only do you need as much data as you can have on a customer to personalize your marketing and better target them, the more information a customer can have how on what you can do and what solutions you can provide will help all the better to make a sale.
With inbound marketing and a soft sell, you are swaying and influencing a prospect and nurturing them as a lead, but really you are mostly helping them make up their own mind.
Tenor’s chief executive explains why we’re fond of GIFs, how he wants to capitalize on it, and ways visual communication has changed.
What is it about animated GIFs, those image files that oftentimes make it easier to convey what we’re trying to say versus typing it out? They’re everywhere, from being plastered across social networks to our emails and messaging apps like iMessage and WhatsApp. A big part of the proliferation of GIFs is thanks to a company called Tenor, formerly Riffsy. It has helped make embedding GIFs naturally into our conversations. But it’s much more than a form of expression, which Tenor’s chief executive David McIntosh has shared with me in the past.
While some might think that the insert of a GIF into a conversation is funny, it’s usage highlights its sociological impact. Truly a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is something that after more than five years, Tenor wishes to capitalize on. Prior to its acquisition by Google, it made moves into helping brands monetize GIF usage, seeking to establish what McIntosh believed would be the emotional graph.
More than a year under Google ownership, I caught up with McIntosh to find out how things are progressing, whether its new parent has impacted the roadmap, understand why GIFs have taken off, and what’s next for Tenor. Our conversation is this week’s “10 Questions”.
What drew you to focus on GIFs and how has this file type become quite dominant in how we communicate across the web, text, messaging apps, and in the workplace?
When we started Tenor, GIFs had existed on the web for more than 20 years but they were very hard to use in mobile messaging. You had to leave your messenger, open your browser, Google for a GIF, click through a bunch of links and then switch back to your messenger — which often took several minutes!
In the fall of 2014, Tenor launched GIF Keyboard which made it easier to search and share GIFs inside messengers. We then natively integrated Tenor’s GIF search engine into popular messengers and communication apps such as Twitter, Samsung Keyboard, Facebook, Discord, and many more. Fast forward five years later and hundreds of millions of people use Tenor to find the perfect GIF to visually communicate what’s on their mind.
As mobile messaging continues to grow, people are looking for ways to better communicate and express themselves beyond simple text. It’s hard to convey tone over text, and text is cumbersome to input on our phone. Tenor’s key strategy is to make it as easy as possible for people to find the perfect GIF to express exactly what’s on their mind. Communication is a universal human need and my co-founders and I were drawn to building a service that has the potential to help every mobile user around the world better communicate.
In 2017, Tenor debuted its first ad product and real-time analytics tool for brands. Two years later, how has that been going and are there plans for Tenor to release additional offerings for brands to capitalize on GIFs?
We’re seeing growing demand from brands to market their products in the mobile messaging context through GIFs, and we’re continuing to invest in products for our brand and media partners.
How should brands and advertisers be approaching using GIFs to reach their audience? Some have embraced it such as Dominos, but others like the NFL in 2016 came out against GIFs at one point during games. What advice would you give brands considering getting into the GIF game without making it seem like it’s forced and assuages fears that their product will become the next meme?
Tenor works with brands from large media companies such as Fox, NBC, and Paramount to independent creators, providing people with GIFs they’re looking for and helping these brands expand their audiences. The most successful brands on Tenor construct their GIFs to help users communicate. It’s not enough to chop up a trailer or advertisement into dozens of 2–3 seconds GIFs — a GIF must help users express themselves with a specific message or sentiment.
You told me that Tenor’s goal is to own the visual language. Why is this important and in what ways is Tenor going to do so?
Our goal is to help everyone using a mobile device better express themselves visually. Today, people send hundreds of billions of mobile messages daily, and as bandwidth speeds are increasing and bandwidth costs are decreasing, it’s not hard to imagine a future in which 10–20% of messages sent are visual — GIFs, memes, stickers, and other dynamic forms of content.
Our overarching focus is to reduce the friction to express yourself visually by providing the most relevant GIF search results for the billions of distinct queries Tenor receives across dozens of countries — the faster you find the perfect GIF the more likely you are to express yourself visually.
Your company was acquired by Google a year ago — how has this benefited Tenor in growth and are there integrations already taking place? Will we see Tenor’s technology incorporated into Google AdWords, for example, or integrated within the core Google search engine?
It’s been a very busy year! Some highlights include launching an expanded integration in Gboard, releasing an integration with Google Go, and adding a long list of new content partners. We’ve been working on a number of other initiatives that we’ll plan to share more about over the coming months!
How do you see artificial intelligence changing how we react to messages (e.g. surfacing the right GIFs without us needing to query it) or search for things visually (do tools like Google Lens, Pinterest Lens, and Bixby Vision impact how GIFs are discovered)?
Eliminating the need to type out a search query would dramatically reduce the friction in using Tenor to express yourself. We’re looking at a number of ways to make it even faster to find the perfect GIF.
Prior to the acquisition, Tenor was powering more than 12 billion requests every month. How has this changed since then? Any other trends you’re noticing around GIFs?
Tenor has grown significantly since the acquisition and is experiencing fast adoption around the world. For example, at the end of 2018, we shared that Tenor grew 5x in India in the preceding 18 months. As faster bandwidth is becoming more affordable and pervasive, people are looking for richer, more visual forms of expression, and Tenor has been investing in localization and search which improves the experience worldwide.
What were some challenges when you were building Tenor? How was your team able to persuade Apple, Facebook, Google to understand the power of GIFs and why it should be embedded in their conversation tools?
Tenor’s integration into messaging partners was driven by a groundswell of user demand. Tenor’s successful launch of GIF Keyboard on iOS and subsequent growth caught the eye of the industry and in the following 24 months many of the largest messengers integrated Tenor. By focusing on improving search relevance we accelerated the phenomenon — the quicker someone finds the perfect GIF, the more likely they are to share it, which then prompts their friends to search for a GIF to reply with, and so on.
As a serial entrepreneur, having started Redux in 2008 and Tenor in 2014, what lessons have you learned about starting a business and finding an idea that resonated with a large audience?
Building and scaling the right team to pursue the opportunity is crucial. As the business scales, hiring talented executives and giving them the responsibility and space to run portions of the business acts as a force multiplier for continued growth.
How has visual communication evolved and what has Tenor done to adapt to these changes?
When Tenor first launched, only a fraction of our users searched for GIFs. The majority of people used categories to browse (eg: “happy”, “nod”, “thumbs up”) because searching for an expression or sentiment was an unfamiliar experience. As users became more accustomed to expressing themselves visually they started searching for more nuanced and specific queries, and today the majority of users find a GIF to share by searching.
As Tenor invested in localization, it grew rapidly around the world and we started to see more GIFs featuring local celebrities or holidays appear in the top 100 most shared GIFs for individual markets.
We’re continuing to invest deeply in Tenor’s search product, and looking ahead we’ll continue working to make it effortless to find the perfect GIF.
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Special thanks go out to David McIntosh for participating in this discussion. “10 Questions” is a project designed to learn more from the people in tech and how it relates to businesses. If you’d like to be interviewed, I’d love to hear from you — send me a note on Twitter (@thekenyeung), Facebook, or here on LinkedIn. You can also find this entire series shared on Flipboard and also on Medium.
Feature Image Credit: Tenor CEO David McIntosh (Photo credit: Google)
At the time, buyer demographic and behavioral data was difficult to find, marketing campaigns were more expensive to launch and harder to track, and market pulse was tougher to discern.
All that has now changed.
Replacing the old world of B2B marketing is a new landscape that is highly favorable to creative and strategic marketers. Instead of creating big and expensive ad campaigns, marketers are creating thoughtful content that attract inbound customers.
Generating quality inbound leads is the key to the success of B2B marketing. Not only does it help accelerate your sales cycle – it also creates happier sales reps, and bolster revenue growth.
We developed this playbook to help you accelerate sales cycle velocity, and retain and expand its existing client base. Let’s dive in.
The Organic Inbound Marketing Playbook for B2B Companies
The thrust of this playbook is simple: launching an inbound B2B marketing strategy does not need to be expensive.
It doesn’t require tons of money for Google AdWords and PPC. Neither does it require that you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on large-scale events and sponsorships.
However, it does require the implementation of thoughtful content that truly engages your buyer. To do this, use the nine techniques we share below to help you build recurring organic inbound traffic.
Technique #1. Dial into your target audience
Every great inbound marketing strategy starts with a perfect understanding of your target audience – your ideal client profile.
If you don’t have a clear picture of your target audience or ideal client profile (ICP), use these two simple tactics to master and understand your ICP:
Make a list of your existing client base, enrich their data, and map their buyer journey.
Interview your best clients and ask them about their specific use cases, needs, and experience with your product.
Phase I. Account-level research
This research starts at the account level, where you need to identify insights about the companies that buy you and start building a list of target accounts. It includes a few steps:
The Basics – Businesses often overlook tremendous value in determining their ideal customer profile by neglecting to dig deeper. Within this space, you’re only discovering topical information such as employee count, revenue, location, or industry. This is just a starting point, not where your research should end.
Account-Based Research – Here is where you determine what are key strategic priorities for the accounts you’re targeting. You’ll also want to ask questions such as: how does your solution help them achieve their goals? What can the technology stack of your target customer tell you? Account-based research gives you an extra level of targeting above and beyond company size, revenue, and industry.
Buying Triggers – Here is where you’ll want to find out about your customers: which activities inside an organization indicate your solution could be a fit for them?
For example; at OutboundView, when organizations are hiring inside salespeople, it typically means our services could be a fit. When a new VP of Sales is hired, that is a good time for our team to reach out and discuss their lead generation strategies, because they’re typically reviewing new sales processes. If we can tell a company isn’t getting any inbound traffic, that tells us that the target needs outbound marketing.
Identifying the triggers that drive organizations to buy is absolutely critical for top of funnel targeting. Finding target accounts that are showing “buying triggers” for your business should be the highest priority for your top of funnel outreach efforts.
Phase II. Buyer research
Who’s your buyer? Not ideal company – we’re talking the customer writing the checks or using your products. We think about buyer personas in two main categories: Decision Makers and Doers.
Decision Makers are the individuals focused on high-level, strategic outcomes, and are usually writing the check for your product or service.
Doers are your users focused on the day to day tactics supporting your product or service.
Why is this an important distinction? Each requires different strategies to spark interest in your product or service; but most importantly, each requires a different messaging to initiate a discussion.
Buyer personas outline the specific value proposition, thought-provoking questions, and resources needed to lead efforts toward an opportunity for each type of Doer or Decision Maker.
Here is a simple list of steps to follow when building your buyer personas:
Start small with a goal of 2-3 buyer personas.
Think pain points – What makes your customer’s job difficult? Keep in mind these pain points need to be related to their overall job, not just pain points your solution solves for.
Perform customer interviews and ask your buyer the tough questions, don’t just make assumptions.
Make them tangible! Create bio pages for “Bill the Buyer”, ”Sally Seller” and have fun with it!
Think “Personally” and “Professionally” – How does your solution help your buyer reach their goals, both personally and professionally?
Create a unique value proposition for each type of persona.
End with messaging – As the last step in the process, build messaging that aligns with the customer’s pain points and helps differentiate your solution.
To see who is engaging with and responding to your content, create an updated database of people who are following you on social media and subscribed to your email list.
This includes adding calls-to-actions for your blog, events, and gated content on your website to passively capture emails over time. Then, use tools like Clearbit or DiscoverOrg to enrich the data you collect with detailed firmographic information about who your audience is and how well they fit your ideal client persona. Or, have someone curate the list for you by hand.
Doing so will enable you to build an audience over time and get maximum return-on-investment for your publishing efforts.
This may take a little bit of work, but it will pay huge dividends in the short-term and long-term. You’ll learn which topics and personas to lock in on and focus your future efforts appropriately.
But your time and resources are precious – so we recommend fixating content on one of two areas: thought leadership on your philosophy and storytelling about client success.
What is thought leadership, you ask? Two things:
An annoyingly-named and often-abused piece of business terminology.
Content that explains the philosophy behind the product or service you offer.
Once you find your target audience, you should use BuzzSumo or Ahrefs to find topics relevant to your buyer that have high Google search volume and a high volume of social media mentions.
Why use thought leadership? Because like Simon (Sinek) says, “The best way to inspire action is to ‘start with ‘why.’’”
Think back to Mitch and Murray’s favorite acronym: AIDA.
Lastly, recall that people buy products and services (especially expensive B2B solutions) from brands they know, like, and trust. Thought leadership builds trust and awareness and table-sets future action from your buyers.
The second type of content you should create is flywheel storytelling: telling client stories in evocative fashion by placing them on the Hero’s Journey.
In these stories, your client (note: not your product) is the hero. They are facing a challenge or obstacle to overcome, and your product aids their success.
Here, it’s important to build up your client as a subject matter expert in their field. This means establishing their credentials, backstory, philosophy, challenges, and how they discovered your product or service.
From there, you can chart their path to success and use their words to describe your product or service’s role in getting themfrom A to B.
Technique #3. Package content for maximum distribution
The idea here is expediency. Rather than churning out a bunch of unique, disjointed pieces of content, you can turn one epic piece of content into a multi-purpose series of articles, videos, and podcasts.
Remember – not everyone consumes content in the same format. The beauty of this method is that you can create content in the format of best-fit for your entire audience.
To gain maximum exposure for your content, focus on the best distribution channels. For B2B, a solid email newsletter featuring valuable thought leadership, industry research, and client-led insights is a great way to connect with buyers and build trust.
We also advise supplementing email with social media posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera, depending on how much time your ICP spends on those networks.
Finally, we recommend uploading video, audio, and presentation content to social media networks like YouTube, SoundCloud, and SlideShare. Optimize the content for SEO so that it can be found via search and gain the maximum visibility over time.
Technique #4. Create trust and credibility with consistent output
We found similar value in the concept of leveraging content to create and enhance authentic relationships with clients and audience.
An important best practice for this method is customer storytelling.
You should foreground your clients in your content as much as possible. Make them the heroes of articles and case studies capturing their success story with your product or service in grand detail. Explain their background, philosophy, challenges, success path, and subsequent gains from choosing you as a vendor.
From there, you should map the distribution of these stories to the audience of best-fit. If the hero in your client success story is a VP of Sales for a SaaS company, then route that story to similarly-situated prospects and clients in your sales, marketing, and client success funnel.
The bottom line is – you should always seek to route content to your audience of the best fit. Use data and well developed personas to make this happen.
Technique #5. Leverage content to build authentic relationships
Once you commit to a content-driven inbound marketing game plan, it’s important to know that you’re playing the long game.
Content publishing pays back exponentially over time. It may take months or years – but you’ll see it. Provided you commit to publishing steadily and consistently.
Let’s say you publish 3 articles per week – and two out of three posts feature a client or a key ally in your industry. You’re setting yourself up for success.
Think of it this way – publishing 2 articles each week that cross-promote a client or peer leads to 104 goodwill relationships over the course of a year, possibly more if you publish content that features multiple clients or peers.
Content creation is a long-term investment with escalating payoffs in the form of heightened SEO, a strong database, referral-minded channel partners, and powerful press relationships.
These, in turn, lead to increased qualified lead velocity from content you’ve already created.
Technique #6. Build your brand on what others say about you
Every brand needs to cultivate reviews and testimonials that describe their value.
Creating a committed campaign that incentivizes happy customers to review your company is an incredibly powerful, worthwhile investment in this day and age. Whether it’s Google Reviews, Yelp!, G2Crowd, or another vendor, it’s important to have your clients affirming your value publicly on the internet.
The second component to building your brand is creating clear statements of philosophy, or why you exist. This can be accomplished through published mission statements and consistent thought leadership output that dials into your purpose as a company, which we covered in Technique One.
Last and not least, always be aware of what is being said about your brand across the web and social media. This means using a powerful media monitoring tool to help you stay on top of real-time mentions.
Technique #7. Serve the entire customer lifecycle
Content should serve the entire customer lifecycle – from first touch to renewal.
This ensures maximum value from your publishing efforts and total artillery coverage for sales development, account executives, and customer support.
Again, we look back to Technique One. The goal is to provide content with the breadth and depth to add value across as much of your audience as possible. This includes:
Cold prospects
Warm prospects
Lost prospects
New clients
Long-term clients
Lost clients
The broader the scope of impact a piece of content has, the better it serves your bottom-line. If you are only creating content designed to impact the top-of-funnel, you are vastly under-serving your audience, your company, and yourself.
Technique #8. Track and analyze the entire funnel
This technique is a critical component that should be applied to everything you do.
To get the most benefit from your content-driven inbound marketing efforts, you should use a tool to analyze what content and channels drive results.
Invest in a marketing automation system – HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot (especially if you use Salesforce) are all great options.
Devote a few dollars to a content tracking tool like Guru to build your internal knowledge base.
Use Outreach, Cirrus Insight, or SalesLoft to send trackable content at scale and give your sales reps the ability to see what messaging, links, and attachments get prospects to respond.
Keep track of the data-driven insights these tools give you. Then triple down on what is working and fix areas that need improvement.
Technique #9. Emphasize process, details, and fundamentals
The final technique is also a ‘must apply’ for all aspects of the content-driven inbound marketing playbook.
The key mantras here are to:
Create transparent, consistent workflows.
Strike balance between speed and quality control.
To accomplish the former, use a project management tool like Asana or Trello to keep your team on the same page. These tools will also help you strike the balance between speed and quality control.
Being detail oriented when is comes to content means doing every little action that will help you maximize SEO.
This includes adding alt titles to your images, using the proper text formatting with headers, et cetera, and using an SEO tool (we love Ahrefs) to discover the best keyword opportunities for high Google rank.
Here’s a high-performing blog post whose title was chosen specifically for its high search volume (400 per month) and low keyword difficulty (less than 5 backlinks were needed for a top search ranking).
Going the extra mile is as simple as emailing a partner or client you feature prominently in a piece of content to:
Give them a heads up they are being recognized.
Gently ask if they can share it across their channels.
The biggest driver of content is the willingness to do these two things. Once you do, you can guarantee a sound return-on-investment in your content marketing efforts to drive inbound leads
You don’t need a massive marketing budget to rank higher on Google. The best free SEO tools help you boost traffic and analyze the competition.
You don’t have to pay to boost your website’s Google rankings with these free SEO tools. Whether you want to see who’s backlinking to your site or dive deep into keyword research, these are the best free SEO tools for the thrifty, digital entrepreneur.
Yoast SEO
Yoast is a popular WordPress plugin that gives you all the basic information you need when optimizing on-page SEO. The free version of Yoast has the following important capabilities.
Choose One Keyword per Piece of Content: Yoast will tell you your keyword density, distribution, and whether or not you’re conflicting with preexisting content. This is crucial for virtually anyone with a website.
Check Readability: Though most search engine optimization discussions involve ranking for Google, it’s important to remember that how your viewers engage with your content will ultimately decide where search engines rank it.
That’s why Yoast integrated the Flesch Reading Ease Score to determine how easy is it to read your content. This goes along with the top SEO marketing trends in 2019: Content quality, not just quantity, matters for Google and readers.
Avoid Duplicate Content: Creating duplicate content is a sure way to confuse Google’s algorithms. That’s why Yoast creates canonical URLs in its free plugin.
A Favorite Plugin Among Paid and Free SEO Tools: Though the free version of Yoast offers some incredible capabilities, Yoast Premium has several features for added optimization. These include:
A Redirect Manager to avoid 404s
Internal Linking suggestions to boost your internal optimization
Keyword optimization for multiple keywords
However, a recent update tells you less, not more, about your keyword optimization. For instance, instead of listing exactly what percentage of your text contains the keyword, it only lets you know whether that percentage is too high, or too low.
Google Analytics
Applicable to WordPress, Shopify, or even Tumblr blogs, Google Analytics is one of the best free SEO tools due to its versatility. Once you’ve hooked your free account up to your websites, you can do the following:
Set Goals: These can be how many people sign up for your newsletter, track your product or any metric you think would benefit your website.
View Live Site Traffic: How many people are on your site right now? Are they on a desktop or mobile? Where are they coming from? Google Analytics will tell you all this in real time.
Create Audience Overview Reports:Google Analytics will create free reports for you on data including:
Sessions
Pageviews
Users
Bounce rates
Average session duration
Want to know the nitty-gritty, like which states your users are coming from, which browsers they use, their screen resolutions and their operating systems? This is one of the best free SEO tools for accessing everything you need to know about your traffic.
Paid Google Analytics for 10 Million+ Hits
If you get more than 10 million hits per month, you’re required to pay for Google Analytics 360, which costs $150,000 per year. On the upside, this comes with additional services like Google Drive Integration and 24/7 support.
Ahrefs Backlink Checker
Ahrefs, which focuses on paid software, also has a free backlink checker tool. In a matter of seconds, this software can tell you the following about any domain on the internet.
URL Rating and Domain Rating: Though Ahrefs Backlink Checker does not explain how it calculates a website’s URL Rating and Domain Rating, these figures still give you a good idea of website authority.
URL Rating: This number (out of 100) tells you how strong a website’s backlink profile is. It takes internal and external links into account. Generally, it correlates with a website’s Google rankings.
Domain Rating: This figure will tell you where a website stands in terms of link popularity.
Backlinks: Not only does it list how many sites are linking back to your domain, but it provides you with a list of the top 100 backlinks, the percentage of dofollow links and the top five anchor text used to link to the website.
The Paid Version of Ahrefs Is Comprehensive: Only in the paid version of Ahrefs can you audit your site, track keywords, generate reports, and fully understand the direction of your website’s search engine optimization. We included the paid version in our list of best SEO tools to help you rank higher in Google.
MozBar
Also on our list of best free SEO tools is the MozBar: a free extension that can give you a good idea of the site structure of any website you visit. It provides information on five main categories: on-page elements, general attributes, link metrics, markup, and HTTP status.
On-Page Elements: In the first category, the MozBar can tell you:
Page title
Meta description
Meta keywords
The H1 and H2
Alt-text
It provides the character count for each, as well.
Link Metrics and Other Information: The other three categories in the MozBar provide more information about how the site you’re visiting is structured, including:
Page load time
Page and domain authorities
Total links
External followed links
Much of this information requires creating a Moz account, which is also free.
Use the MozBar to Understand Other Sites: If you’re just getting started with search engine optimization, the MozBar is a great way to glimpse the back end of any website.
It does not, however, provide actionable information for your own website.
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is one of the best free SEO tools, though you need to have a Google AdWords account to use it. Once you have your account set up, you can log in to Keyword Planner to access a few key functions:
Find New Keywords: This part of the tool helps you accomplish exactly that: find new keywords. Google lets you enter a URL, phrase, or keyword, for which it will generate a new list of possible keywords.
Compare Keywords: Here, you can enter a list of keywords to generate metrics about each. This part of Google’s free SEO tool generates predictions for specific keywords based on:
Impressions
Clicks
Monthly search volume
Ranking competition
Cost per click
Google Keyword Planner Now Provides Less Information: The latest update to Google Keyword Planner restricted some of its capabilities. For one, you now need an AdWords account to use it. You can no longer distinguish between your desktop and mobile audience, either.
Additionally, keep in mind that though Google Keyword Planner is among the most useful free SEO tools, it was designed for use in AdWords campaigns.
Wayback Machine
Though it may not seem it at first glance, the Wayback Machine is among the most interesting free SEO tools to use. For starters, the Wayback Machine is an archive of the internet. This means that you can see what a website looked like five, 10, 15 years ago, or more and chart how it has evolved every month since then.
Using the Wayback Machine for SEO: There are a few ways to use the Wayback Machine for optimization, especially if you’re a professional.
Track how a website has changed, giving you insight into why traffic is fluctuating
Archive what your website used to look like if you ever want to return to an earlier version after altering your site
Understand whether links have disappeared
In simple terms, the Wayback Machine is an impartial way to keep track of how your (or a client’s) site has evolved over time.
Screaming Frog Spider
The Screaming Frog Spider is free software that mimics how a search engine would crawl your website. Keep in mind that this process takes longer than other software on our best free SEO tools list. For beginners, Screaming Frog seems to give you an overwhelming amount of information. Here are a few things you should note first.
Redirects: This software will find every broken link within your website. Of course, it’ll be up to you to go back in and fix them.
Page Titles: Screaming Frog will list every URL with its page title. You want to make sure there aren’t any duplicate page titles and that you’re correctly optimizing your keywords.
Content Report: This program will give you information on your meta descriptions, titles, and the amount of content on each page. It will also create a content report for you, which you can export.
One of the Best Free SEO Tools for an Entire Website Overview
Screaming Frog creates a massive spreadsheet that lays out your entire site. If you know where to look, this information is actionable, but it can be overwhelming for some who could benefit from a professional service. Additionally, Screaming Frog has to be downloaded to your computer, and it is on the large side.
Optimizing your website doesn’t have to be expensive. There are free SEO tools that you can use to understand other websites’ optimization, perform keyword research, and even chart a campaign.
Whether you want to keep track of your progress after choosing your next SEO firm or start optimizing your content yourself, there are more free options than ever to increase your rankings today.
Because is a global creative experiences agency. We help brands realize their marketing ambitions through meaningful, memorable and magical live, digital and virtual experiences.
We work with a wide range of top brands across multiple sectors from around the globe.
We are expanding our Because brand ambassador team in Galway.
Who you are?
To deliver an unforgettable brand experience you need unforgettably good promotional staff. A great brand ambassador should be capable of representing exactly what a brand stands for.
You will be working on a wide range of exciting campaigns, events, festivals and much more! If you are out-going, punctual, friendly, enthusiastic, well-presented and looking for part-time work we would love to hear from you. Day, evening & weekend hours available.
Requirements
Full driving license with access to a car is a bonus
Bubbly personality, ability to approach people
Extremely organized
Punctual
A friendly individual who isn’t afraid to go the extra mile
