Inbound Marketing Blog

You've pored over buyer personas and invested in understanding your audience. You've concocted a compelling offer, a valuable piece of content, a meaningful event. You've got what they want. You've got what they need. You're a marketing genius. 

The goal of any inbound marketing campaign is to convert your audience, your contacts, your leads, your prospects, into paying customers and raving fans of your business. And when you create an offer or an event, you are engaging that audience and showing them you've got what it takes to earn their business. You are building a relationship and earning trust and proving that your company can best serve their needs or that your product will solve their problems.

The best part is that people will just know you've done all that work and will just find your offer. 

Oh, wait. That's not right.

This is where your campaign collateral comes in. These assets are the big flashing arrows pointing people to your offer. They are placed where your audience already spends time online and create a path to your offer.

Below, we've listed a few of the major assets associated with pretty much every inbound marketing campaign and provided best practices to increase conversions. Keep these in mind when creating collateral for your next campaign. 

Let’s be honest - if you aren’t blogging, then you need to be; and if you are blogging but don’t see the benefit, then it’s time to re-evaluate your blogging strategy.

There are a number of ways to determine the ROI of your blog, and those ultimately depend on your goals. However, we’ve determined one way that may help you in determining if you are getting the ROI you need and what’s included in that calculation.

See, here’s the thing: if you are only blogging for blogging sake, then you are going to see a minimal return on investment. Read on to learn about what it takes to get a maximum ROI for blogging.

It's unfortunate that we continue to see common misconceptions about the merits of blogging. Blogging may have gotten a bad reputation over the years, with (it seems) everyone who has an opinion having a blog, sharing their educated (and sometimes uneducated) opinions to the “blogosphere.”

Although that particular kind of blogging can be unprofessional and (many times) unimportant clutter, company blogs are actually a great way to upload fresh, relevant content to your website.

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Did you know: Search engines like Google LOVE valuable content and reward you for it? Search is not all about keywords anymore; it’s about creatively combining keywords, context, and topic. The more you do this, the more Google will love you and show you through increased rankings and impressions.

Imagine, if you will, an office where everything is gray; the chairs, the walls, the floor. The employees are all similarly dressed in gray tones as well. There are no expressions on their faces and their voices are monotone. It’s cold and robotic. 

Now think about the last time you were on a business’s social media page or reading one of their blogs. Was it fun and personable or was it drab and gray? It is surprising how many businesses are still following this no-personality, all-business persona. Maybe it's because they are afraid they'll be perceived as unprofessional, or maybe they just don't have the right person managing their web marketing and social media accounts, either way, they are failing to engage their audience.

If you are one of these businesses, then it is definitely time to rethink your company’s image.

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Confession: I am obsessed with research. I will spend hours poring over information to ensure that I have all the facts and angles figured out.

I also happen to be very skeptical when doing research, wondering: Who’s credible? Is what I’m reading just a ploy to convince me of something or are there others who agree?

That said, I am a huge believer in reading reviews, Googling additional information, and… checking the comments section.

If your company has been blogging for years, you have likely had many campaigns that have inspired blogs posts. But now that those campaigns have ended, you may be wondering: “What purpose do these posts serve now that my campaigns are over?”

Besides the obvious SEO benefit of blog posts, there is another benefit to keeping them in your repertoire: You can recycle them.

Here are a few ways to repurpose your old content to drive user engagement and traffic to new campaigns.

When people talk about duplicate website content, they're referring to when the same content shows up on more than one page of your website or when you use content on your website that can be found on other sites on the web. This includes, but is not limited to:

• page content
• meta descriptions
• page titles
• blog posts
• when others flat-out plagiarize your content (or vice versa, but I'm sure you'd never do that)

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If you've ever tried talking with someone who doesn't seem to listen to you, you know how annoying it can be. You try to make a point, but they just run over it like a steamroller and talk about something that interests them.

Why is this so frustrating? Because, even if they don't mean to, these people send the message, "I only care about me. I don't care about you. You don't matter."

No one likes hearing this. Especially not potential clients--after all, why give money to someone who doesn't respect you? That's why it's so important to understand buyer personas and the buyer's journey--it helps you create content that tells customers, "We understand you, we value you and we have what you need."

You and Google have something in common: you both love fresh, quality content that is full of substance, easily digestible and relevant. Content that is relatable, thought-provoking and maybe elicits a bit of emotion. Content that speaks to the reader, not at the reader.

Sadly, a majority of the content companies produce on a daily basis is just not the quality content people will engage with. It’s dull, with very little substance and has a very me-me-me focus. It's no wonder fake news sites easily captured the majority of readers' attention. But that issue is another blog altogether.