Inbound Marketing Blog

A delivery - wow I don't often get parcels arriving at my office. I’m excited to see what's in the box.  But before I get a chance to open the well taped box,  my mobile rings - the box will have to wait.

Surely it can’t be that hard? All marketers need to do is hire someone who understands how to create a website or banner image and move our advertisements from print to digital – right?

Do you have a sales team hungry for qualified leads? Or possibly a skilled marketer who does an amazing job with branding and advertising but doesn’t have the time to stay up to date with modern marketing tactics and technology?

This is an all too familiar scenario for many companies.  And in many circumstances the marketing manager or business owner knows they need to get more traffic to their website, improve their presence on social media, publish valuable online content and track and measure their online activity so they can improve results – but how to learn and implement these modern marketing tactics is often the question.

Lack of resources is a common challenge – the marketing team is swamped and doesn’t have time to learn anything new, let alone add any more work to their busy schedules. With the cost per lead high there’s not enough in the budget to employ another marketing person, and without a clear understanding of tactics it difficult to employ a part-time person.

If this sounds like your company – the answer, for which you are searching is Inbound Marketing. Inbound Marketing tactics generate leads at a higher rate than traditional marketing, and they cost 61% less than outbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing is similar to inbound sales, it’s the lead coming to you. Quality, relevant and valuable content your audience will love, like; blogs, email, social media, PR and search marketing – will attract qualified leads into your marketing funnel. The key to success with inbound marketing is to focus on the consumer – understand to whom you are communicating, and publish the information for which they are searching, and avoiding the heavy sales pitch, poorly targeted offer and annoying messages. Us inbound marketers call it “lovable marketing”.

So what are the 10 benefits you ask?

1. Have an entire team of marketing professionals for the cost of one.
2. Learn inbound marketing from a certified professional.
3. Get a head start on the competition.
4. Improve marketing ROI.  Increase quality of leads, increase conversion rates and decrease cost of leads and customers.
5. Stay up to date with the latest marketing tactics and technology with your own marketing consultant.
6. Have your own team of specialists available when you need them: social, search, PR, writing, blog, design and analytics.
7. Get your in house staff trained on marketing practices that work.
8. Improve internal marketing and sales processes and communication.
9. Build your brand and reputation with marketing your audience will love.
10. No more annoying marketing messages that could be damaging your brand.

The 6p call that interrupts your family dinner to sell you a timeshare apartment when your ideal vacation is to pitch a tent, go hiking and catch your dinner in the nearby stream – is equally frustrating and irrelevant.

What about the glossy cardboard mailout you receive in the mail selling carpet steam cleaning when you have timber floorboards? That ends up straight in the trash.

From a marketing perspective both of these old, and interruptive marketing tactics are expensive, poorly targeted with a relatively low return on investment.

Technology; mobile, internet and social media have significantly increased the amount of information we digest on a daily basis. As a result we're evolving from reading to scanning, and filtering out irrelevant messages.  When we need to research a particular product or service we turn to the internet; Google search, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or LinkedIn.

So my question is, as a marketer don’t you want to your company, your product and/or your service to be found, when your target audience is searching?  And not the competition!

As a forward thinking marketer think about what your target market will be doing in 5 or 10 years from now.  People in their thirties don’t know a working life without the internet. Anyone younger probably can’t remember life without the internet and young children who are now say 10 years old will be an adult in another 10 years and won’t know a life without mobile devices and social media.

So what does this mean for the future of marketing – where is it heading?

Given the widespread use of mobile devices and information overload – marketers need to get better at identifying their market, what their market is searching for, and how they help. Marketers need to get a lot better at publishing content that is optimized for mobile devices and of value to their audience, targeted messages that are both relevant and timely.

No longer can marketers expect to achieve their marketing and lead goals based on poorly targeted messages. It’s too expensive. It damages brands. It generates low volume of leads, or poor lead quality. Now is the time for marketers to start publishing content that people love.

We realize the rapid adoption of online, social and mobile technology means companies need to adapt, and quickly. And often this is unrealistic for small to mid size companies – even those that have a marketing or sales manager. It’s a lot for one person to stay up to date with, and employing a team of specialists doesn’t make financial sense. That is where we can help. We’ll become a seamless extension to your marketing or sales team – helping you look good. We'll show you how to, or implement and mange for you, sustainable marketing practices that will build your brand on trust, credibility and thought leadership, helping you to achieve your lead and customer goals.

Photo credit: Hubspot Thank you I love this image, and love your initiative to improve marketing.

To learn more about creating marketing people love - download our latest ebook: Small Buisness Marketing Guide: Introduction to Inbound Marketing

Are you a marketer who views marketing purely as lead generation - a numbers game? 

Knowledge is Power! If you don’t know where your leads and customers are coming from, you can't improve your marketing ROI (return on investment). 

Recently I wrote an article called 5 Steps To Getting Found Online. The purpose of that article was to help business owners and marketers understand that there are specific tactics they 'must' implement if they want their website to work for them. By "work for them" I mean more than just show up on Google's front page, but to actually attract qualified traffic to their website, and keep them on their site. To learn more read the article here: 5 Steps To Getting Found Online: The Inbound Marketing Methodology

As part of your marketing for 2013 showing up in search results, for the keywords your prospects' search is important. Knowing how to do this, is a frustration that many small business owners, and marketers experience.– so they hire an SEO “expert” to help them without really understanding what the SEO “expert” is doing.

The purpose of this article is to help small business owners, and marketers understand enough about SEO so they can implement an effective SEO Strategy as part of their lead generation for 2013. Or at the very least know what their SEO consultant is doing, or should be doing.

Google is still the market leader when it comes to search, with just under 70% market share. So it’s important to follow and understand the changes they make to their algorithm. The purpose behind Google’s continual changes to their algorithm is to make search results more relevant to the searchers, by rewarding websites that publish quality content and penalising websites that are trying to ‘trick’ the search engines with poor quality content and low quality links.

When your target market is looking - make it easy for them to find your company (not the competition), when and where and they are looking.

The purpose of the Small Business Marketing Guide: Introduction to Inbound Marketing is to educate you on inbound marketing strategies that will help your prospects find you, convert prospects into qualified leads and customers, and analyse your results to improve marketing ROI.