Digital Marketing Power

Serious inbound marketers are known for their near superhuman abilities to generate leads. But these supermen and women aren’t from another planet, and they don’t have a secret identity. Instead, they utilize modern marketing tools, dig through data and adjust their tactics on a regular basis.

So how can you, too, be an inbound marketing man (or woman) of steel? Well, here are five things that make a super inbound marketer:

 

 

Every day we hear more experts preaching the gospel of podcasting as a content marketing tool. It’s a very enticing sermon. We get to have our own cute little pre-recorded radio show our audience can listen to when they’re working out or driving in the car.

But how is a podcast supposed to help grow our business?

In theory, podcasts create brand fanatics, people who are deeply invested in who we are as people and as business professionals. This is essence of long-form content marketing.

Every minute that a customer or prospect listens to us speak with authority we’re establishing ourselves as a thought-leader. Conceptually the more time our audience spends with our content the more authority we have as content marketers.

According to Google Analytics the average visitor to my website stays for two minutes and seven seconds. According to Stitcher {popular alternative to iTunes} the average podcast listener stays for twenty two minutes.

If you believe the concept that the time our audience spends in front of our content builds authority then by these statistics I would have to produce 11 blog posts to equal just one podcast.

Podcasts place the ideas and expertise that establish us as an authority in front of our audience for a longer period of time per interaction. From a business content marketing strategy, this is why we podcast.

 

Have you ever been at a great party and unable to switch off from work? Did you find yourself comparing it to marketing a business (sad, I know) but true never the less.

Here are some observations on the similarities between throwing a party and promoting a business online.

Word aversion is the feeling of discomfort or even disgust triggered in people by a certain word—not because it was used incorrectly, but because the sound of the word itself is displeasing. What can explain this phenomenon? Jason Riggle, a professor of linguistics at University of Chicago, believes it’s part instinct, part cultural exposure. There are some words that just make us uncomfortable, because they conjure unpleasant associations. Sickness, bodily functions, sexual activity, etc. For others, they see how strongly others react to a word and adopt those reactions themselves. 

What this means for marketers is that there’s a collection of words that should not pop up in your content, unless you absolutely have to use them, or unless you’re using them correctly. This latter point is important, because besides turned off by certain words, some readers may also feel annoyed at seeing a word misused—even if the mistake is a common one.

See if any of the following raises your ire:

The concept of inbound marketing is to provide great content to attract visitors to your site, convert them into leads, create a relationship with them, close them as customers, and then delight those customers. I have seen this methodology provide significant and powerful results across all different industries. Committing to an inbound marketing methodology, however, can require considerable manpower and time. It can also be a slow process in the beginning, which can be frustrating.

It usually takes 3-6 months to start seeing the benefits and results. So when companies are eager to get leads for their sales team during this beginning time period, purchasing email lists starts to look pretty attractive to them. Great idea, right? Think again.

This is all too common of a strategy for companies and unfortunately what tends to happen is that marketing departments waste thousands of dollars on useless leads that are cold and old.

Better…stronger…faster. No, it won’t turn them all into the Six Million Dollar Man but as the character Oscar Goldman said, “We have the technology. We have the capability to make him (or her!) better than he was before.” Inbound Marketing won’t give your sales team bionics but it may seem like it.

We define Inbound Marketing as a strategy and associated tools and processes focused on buyer search behavior, content creation, and social media, engineered to drive awareness and attraction of your business and feed your sales funnel with the best prospects. Those best, most qualified prospects will become the focus of your sales team, ultimately eliminating much of the time they’re currently spending on prospecting, cold calls, educating, guessing and starting over.

How? By simply providing your sales team with better inputs to do their jobs.

 

Inbound marketing is a fast paced field that is always changing and birthing new concepts. It's no wonder buzzwords spark up every second. How you use those buzzwords makes a difference.

Instead of using buzzwords in extreme ways, obsessively with your other marketer friends, or never uttering their name due to pure repulsion, try using them in a way that will benefit your company.

 

In any conversation about the inbound marketing space, forecasting or predicting the future is usually at the forefront. This is largely due to the fact that as inbound marketers we can’t afford to guess. Our marketing campaigns rely on our ability to see what’s around the corner so we can ensure more effective marketing campaigns. Beyond that, forecasting the future of inbound marketing impacts users and customers just as much as the marketer. Savvy customers and users should understand just this is changing and how that affects them. Whether you view yourself as a doomsday marketing prophet, or an eager inbound marketer, here are five major predictions for inbound marketing that you can use to educate both your organization and your future site visitors.

 

Now that email marketing has been around for years, every retailer has an email marketing program. But, each program is at a different level of sophistication.

Do you ever wonder where your program ranks compared to others? Need helping mapping out where to go from where you are?

The crawl, walk, run metaphor and PR can resonate with many marketers. Many times after finishing a race, you will hear a runner say, “I’m never doing that again!” But after just a few days, the runner is already planning her/his next race.

Getting to the finish is hard, and at times may not seem worth it; but in the end, you can recognize your achievements and realize you can push yourself to be better, both as a runner and as an email marketer.

 

 

Inbound marketing is all the rage. Social media has us consumed.  B2B Marketers are creating more content than ever before.  We’re optimizing everything we possibly can all with the intention of driving more people to our sites, engaging with them and offering them opportunities to raise their hand and announce themselves.

For many of us, it’s working!  Visitors are showing up at rates we’ve never seen before. Some are just stopping by to see what we’re offering, some clicking around the site to check us out and of course those that decide to take the bait, oops, I mean fill out the lead form.

Content marketing has been around for well over a hundred years, but is becoming one of the most used tactics to do everything for businesses; from getting more customers, to improving their search engine rankings. Still, many misconceptions about it exist. Susanna Gebauer recently broke down some common content marketing misconceptions. We’ve highlighted the most popular ones have been outlined in this artice.

SEO copywriting might seem boring and uncreative at first, and it can at times be very repetitive. But balancing search engine optimization with content marketing does not limit creativity. In fact, this unique combination often requires and strengthens the writer’s creativity.
Writing content that satisfies both human readers and search engines is not an easy feat because the writer must deliver content that both of them want. This means understanding as much as possible about the human audience.

The World Wide Web and permission based inbound marketing continues to revolutionize the marketplace and you can only ignore it at your own peril. It is pretty obvious that people are more and more averse to being interrupted by some marketing message and this will tend to annoy them rather than put them in the right mood to buy from you.

We know that social signals like a recommendation or mention by someone a customer knows holds more weight than a Google search result.  So, why is link building is important? Getting your business’s name out there among influencers (people who are able to influence purchase decisions of other people) not only will mean benefiting from word of mouth, but if you are able to get links from these influencers, it will help with your inbound marketing and SEO as well.