Thanks to the Internet, your ideal customers are looking for you and researching your products online. So how do you get their attention over the competition? Inbound marketing, of course. While you can use traditional marketing and advertising to find customers, the new style of marketing online is more efficient, more cost-effective, and customers actually like it.
So what is inbound marketing?
Email should be the power player of your inbound marketing strategy.
In case you haven’t heard, it’s still an incredibly effective method of connecting with consumers. The Direct Marketing Association reports that email drives more ROI than any other form of outreach for 67% of companies, and it’s the top source for new sales for 30% of marketers.
It’s so easy to get caught up in content envy. Big companies worldwide are gaining attention, fans and customers for quality content efforts. Remember when Oreo tweeted a humorous custom image during the Super Bowl blackout in January, revealing they had a Photoshop-savvy employee armed and waiting?
It’s no secret that content marketers don’t always get the best rap.
In a recent satire on Huffington Post, marketer Keith Blanchard stated their “writing is exclusively consumed by other content marketers.” While his comment was in jest, there was some truth behind his words.
Writing effective sales copy is like holding the reader’s hand and leading them gently and firmly to the solution to their problem. Along the way, a professional copywriter will paint a picture of how awesome life will be without it. Here are the seven steps to writing a copy that sells.
Have you heard that 90% of companies are using custom content for marketing? Or that consumers believe that blogs are the most useful form of content? There’s a lot of compelling reasons to blog starting yesterday, not the least of which is that it’s no longer a differentiating factor. There are now nearly 7 million blogs on the internet, a meteoric increase over the 100,000 that existed a decade ago. From increased brand awareness to thought leadership to positive SEO, the reasons to blog are nearly endless. We’ve highlighted 25 of our favorites below:
Great SEO isn’t really a standalone practice anymore. In fact, it’s really difficult to seperate search engine optimization from social media and content marketing, because these three factors form the pillar of a modern inbound marketing strategy. Keyword research and optimization can improve the performance of your SEO blog posts in search, while social media shares send a clear message to Google that your content is quality. You won’t get far without the putting effort into all three legs of the contemporary marketing triad!
Not convinced you need to optimize your blog for SEO?
89% of modern consumers use search engines to make purchase decisions, and 75% of search users never click beyond the first page of search results. Your website needs to rank well in Google, Bing, and Yahoo to capture the attention of your future customers. Fortunately, publishing fresh content regularly is one of the best ways to build positive SEO for your business.
One of the biggest concerns businesses have about their websites–other than generating leads and making sales–is traffic. The more traffic you get, the more leads and sales you’ll eventually get. So the question is, how do you increase website traffic?
There are a lot of tactics and methods you can explore, but experts like Marketing Sherpa and HubSpot agree that content marketing gives you the most bang for your buck.
Mobile isn’t just a trend, it’s a total revolution in the way consumers interface with technology and businesses. It’s no exaggeration to say that smartphones and tablets are the biggest thing to hit marketing since the internet appeared. In fact, experts estimate that mobile usage will overtake desktop and laptop usage by the end of this year. Mark Donovan, SVP of Marketing at ComScore recently stated “this pronounced shift in consumer behavior is simply too large for [companies] to ignore.”