Inbound Marketing Blog

I don’t know about you, but I like to check out several companies (online and in person) when searching for a particular product or service. If time permits, I could be searching for several hours. Researching is always my go-to when I'm on the hunt for something specific. You wouldn't believe the time my husband and I recently put into finding a new mattress. In our search, there were a few factors that really swayed us in our decision. Quality of the product and how it solved our needs were obviously the top two. But the third factor had to do with the companies themselves. Our online experience with each company played a huge part in  determining which stores we actually wanted to take time to go to in order to try the mattresses. Let me tell you, there were a lot of brands we dismissed right away. Maybe their product WAS as great as they tried to market it to be, but the experience we had on their websites and the reviews they had floating around swayed our minds away from doing business with them.  Why was that?

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the more times you connect with your customers, the more likely they are to remember you and choose your company's product and/or services over a competitor.

In marketing, the official term is called ‘touches’ – an instance where your customers see or interact with your company. 

When it comes to customer delight [see the Four Actions of Inbound], 'touches' can go a long way. According to Stacy Willis on iMPACT, "When expectations are met, you have customer satisfaction. When expectations are exceeded, you achieve customer delight. How do you get there? By being human. Listen to your customer and their needs." 

Studies have shown that it takes at least 7 or more touches to generate a person’s interest. 

So, how do you make sure you interact with customers in an engaging way and often enough so that your company becomes memorable without you spending a fortune trying to do so? 

Regardless of which mass media routes you're using to market your business, it is vital that you take the time to have a comprehensive plan in place. Without a thoughtful plan, you risk wasting valuable time and money on unfruitful marketing efforts. 

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In the Elements of an Inbound Marketing Campaign, we covered:

• A checklist for the technical aspects of an inbound marketing campaign, including landing pages, thank you pages, follow-up emails and workflows.
• Ways to drive traffic to your offers via additional types of content such as blog and social media posts, as well as emails.
• And the kind of skill sets you’ll need to make it all happen, including a designer, web developer, writer and a Google SEO specialist.

With all of those basics laid out, we wanted to delve deeper into the email marketing portion. Although many businesses (maybe even yours) may dismiss email as simple one-on-one digital communication that doesn't require strategy, it is actually a powerful tool that too many businesses miss out on because they don't understand how it can be used for so much more.

There is no single business that doesn't require a bit of understanding of technology in this day and age. Even the least technical professionals are sporting smartphones or alternate mobile devices to check email, talk to staff and connect with clients.

The challenge is that technology can be a bit unnerving for some business owners. It’s not unnerving because it’s technology, per se. It’s unnerving because of the need to understand, yet again, something new.

When there is so much technology to keep up with, how do we keep it all straight?

Think of it this way- Technology helps us solve problems and improve our processes the same way any other tool would. Until we understand that the technology we use is meant to solve problems, we’ll continue to focus on how hard it is to integrate technology into our business and marketing efforts.

A trending term right now in the business world is "martech." Maybe you've heard of it, but for the sake of those who haven't, martech is the blending of marketing and technology. Every company has at least a smidge of this happening within their walls, whether they realize it or not. It's a thing of beauty. Let's explore a few examples of martech to give you a clearer idea of it in action. 

We get questions from people all of the time looking for the best way to market themselves. They want to know the right strategy and tactics to developing great sales and marketing funnels, going viral, getting a higher ROI... the list goes on. Well, there is, in fact, a root ideology that we believe strongly impacts all of these things:

Be uniquely YOU and the rest will follow. 

Mobile commerce is an important aspect of sales, and consumers utilize it constantly (peep the rise of Amazon and other big online retailers).

Let’s talk reputation management. Did you know that:

1. 86% of consumers read reviews for local businesses (including 95% of people between the ages of 18-34)
2. Consumers read an average of 10 online reviews before feeling able to trust a local business
3. 40% of consumers only take into account reviews written within the last two weeks
4. 57% of consumers will only go with a business if it has 4 or more stars
5. 91% of 18-34 year old consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations
6. 89% of consumers read businesses’ responses to reviews

Let that information all sink in. Reread it if you have to. Those are real stats from BrightLocal’s 2018 Local Consumer Review Survey. These statistics were specifically compiled to help local businesses develop their online reputation management strategy for 2019.

If you’re a small business, negative reviews on Google can be especially devastating, and you can’t afford to ignore a bad Google review. If you haven’t been paying attention to your Google reviews, it’s time to wake up and take the wheel. If you don’t have time for reputation management, well, that’s what we are here for. But assuming you do, here are some tips to ensure your Google reviews are a more accurate representation of your business.

We'll give it to you straight- the success of a website development strategy meeting depends mostly on YOU. How you respond to and work alongside teams will greatly affect the tone, efficiency, productivity and overall results that come from the meeting. However, there are some other aspects to take into account as well, which we'll cover in this blog.

There has been a dramatic uptick in turmoil at Facebook in 2018 and the couple years previous, thanks to coordinated misinformation campaigns by foreign and domestic players alike, misuse of improperly collected information through Facebook’s third-party apps, and now the mass data breach that has affected over 50 million users.

You would think that Facebook accounts would be closing left and right, but that’s not the case.