Your Guide to Inbound Marketing Success

With inbound marketing, your website is your hub and you want your audience to not just visit, but stay and interact. To do this, you need to make sure that you are providing a wealth of information (without giving away the proverbial milk for free) and keeping your brand consistent. Hopefully, while you do this, you are displaying your ultra-cool company persona as well.

By sharing your expertise through blog posts, white papers, and more, you will attract and encourage your audience to pass the information along to their colleagues and acquaintances. In essence, you are inviting your audience to share your materials so you reach an even larger number of people over time.

But you can’t just throw things up on your website and assume they will be shared. You can’t just upload or post items and think that they will be received well and be the next viral email or Facebook post. Here are some tips to make sharing easy and encourage your audience to share your content over and over again:

  1. Don’t assume that your viewers are already connected with you. Many will not be. So make sure that visible buttons and links are available on your website for the audience to hop on over to your various social media profiles and connect with you via
    hot button issue. Also, take a look at your headlines…are they eye-catching? You have a second or two to grab your audience’s attention. Make your headline work for you.
  2. Talk to your audience. This is not monologue time. Think and post with a dialogue in mind, every single time. You are inviting interaction. You are nurturing a budding relationship. You want your audience to speak back to you, to pass along your amazing materials and spread the word about you. So don’t toot your own horn with every upload and offering. Ask for feedback. Ask for comments. Pose questions and start that conversation up.

Over time, you will come to see what types of items are passed along via social media platforms and what topics receive more interest and dialogue. As this happens, you should evolve your materials to fit that “need.” Remember, sharing is caring. So be a giver!

Content Marketing Checklist

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Content marketing is becoming a big player in the marketing world. It is the act of indirectly selling your products and services through educational and informative materials, such as blogs. Blogging is a great first step for those who want to take advantage of the benefits of content marketing. Whether you are new to this strategy or you want to make sure you’re covering all of your bases, take a look at our checklist!

  1. Make sure you have the right tools in place. Your blog should live directly on your website and your website should be on a search engine-optimized platform, such as WordPress!
  2. Determine who will write your posts. This can include you, employees, colleagues, or ghost writers.
  3. Decide how often you will publish a new blog. Consistency is important, whether it is daily, weekly, or even every two weeks.
  4. List out all of the topics you want to write about. Each blog doesn’t have to be high-level and generic, they can be customized to each of your targeted audiences and can
    highlight how your products and services can be used in different ways. Also, see what current news is happening in your audience’s industries, you may be able to use current events to spark interest from your prospects.
  5. Distribute your blog posts through multiple marketing channels. You can share your blog posts through social media, email, or highlight them on your website’s homepage.
  6. Create content in various media forms, it doesn’t always have to be copy-driven. Audio clips, videos, and images can all be great ways to mix up your blog posts and keep everything fresh.

Once you accumulate a number of blog posts, remember that you can repurpose them! Combine a few related posts together to make an eBook, or reformat the content in a different media type.

Blog posts can easily be the fuel to your content marketing strategy, so give it a try today!

3 Ways to Personalize Your Marketing Efforts

Maybe your mother told you when you were growing up that you should treat everyone the same. Well, your mother was wrong…at least when it comes to the world of 1-to-1, or personalized, marketing. No longer are you encouraged to place prospects upon the same level playing field. In fact, with 1-to-1 marketing, you want to embrace the diversity of your prospects and customers. You want to play to those exact differences and incorporate them into your marketing messages in order to get their attention and make them want to work with you!

  1. Identify Your Audience: As with any marketing strategy, you start off by identifying your target market – the people who need your product or service. So you sit down and imagine a target. You imagine finding those people with laser point focus. You know who they are and now you have to get your message across to them. You have to tell them who you are, what you do and how you can help them. Using the 1-to-1 marketing approach, you toss aside the marketing shotgun; this is no time to “pray and spray” your message, hoping that it will be heard and acted upon.
  2. Add Personalization: The idea is that by personalizing your marketing message, you are showing the customer that you know how to serve their specific needs. No customer wants you coming at them with a cookie-cutter approach and a “one-size-fits-all” solution. They want to feel like you know exactly what they need, and that you are the business that can provide it. Thus, your message needs to be current and relevant to that customer.
  3. Stand Out: Your target market receives marketing messages on a daily basis. We all do, in both our personal and professional lives. It becomes second nature to ignore the messages that have little to do with our own needs. The same is true of any business. They all receive mailers, texts, and emails from other businesses, who are using the the same pitches and benefits to make the sale.

In the end, a customer will equate your marketing messages with the type of service they will receive when working with you. If your message is personalized and meets their needs, the prospect will anticipate that working with you will be a breeze. Everyone likes to work with the expectation of receiving terrific customer service and specific solutions.