Inbound marketing needs educational content to fuel its engine. But how much, how often and what types of content do you need? The answers to these questions are specific to your business. After 10 years of running inbound marketing services for businesses like yours, we have the answers.
First, it might make sense to understand there are two kinds of content: the content that drives website visitor traffic, and the content that turns visitors into leads.
Blog posts, landing pages and other search engine optimized content are the primary sources for driving website traffic. If you take your other educational content like e-books, white papers and tip guides and publish them to the web properties where your target prospects are spending their time, this activity also generates a steady stream of new website visitors.
Blogging on the other hand allows you to add fresh content to your website on a regular basis. Google, Yahoo! and Bing are looking for websites that add fresh content to their sites. The more you blog, the higher you will rank. Do you need to blog every day? Probably not. However, based on our research and real client experiences, you need to consider blogging at least three times a week.
Google is also ranking blog posts in standard search results. Although the actual algorithm that gets your blog post ranked is a secret, there is a strong connection between Google Authorship and Google+. Our research shows that you have to have at least 60 people in your Google+ Circles and you need a Google+ account for your company. You do need to apply for Authorship and have an active blog to show Google.
Now that we have the "get found" part of the process covered, let’s move on to the "get leads" part of the process. Content on your website is what turns anonymous visitors into leads. Why? People visiting your website are not all ready to buy from you today. In fact, most of them (almost 90%) aren’t even close. Most websites ignore these visitors and just focus on the people who are ready to make a purchase, ignoring the majority of their website visitors.
By offering engaging, entertaining and educational content on your website, all those people who are researching your business, your industry and your products or services now have an option to download something from your site and identify themselves to you as a potential customer. The more content you have on your site, the more leads you are going to generate. The more you update your content and add new content to your site, the more leads you are going to generate.
We have seen conversion rates go from 1.2% to up over 3% in a single month just by adding a new e-book to a client’s website. Here's how the numbers play out:
If you get 1,000 visitors a month to your site and you turn 1% into leads, you are getting 10 leads a month or 120 leads a year. This is modest inbound marketing program performance. If you get 1,000 visitors a month and you put new content on your site each month, you now generate a 3% conversion rate and take your 10 leads a month to 30 leads a month or 360 leads a year—a 3x improvement.
The numbers don’t lie.
If you are able to turn just 5% of those leads into clients and your average revenue per client is $10,000, then you went from $60,000 in revenue to $180,000 in revenue just by publishing one white paper per month to your website. Now, what if you could close 10% or your average revenue was $100,000 per new customer? This gets very exciting, very quickly.
Creating content isn’t easy. What you write has to be optimized, socialized and, most importantly, it has to be what your prospects want, what they need and what they find valuable. Once you figure out what to write and how to write it, the rest of the inbound marketing process gets much easier.
Start Today Tip – The biggest obstacle is getting started. Since it's likely you never did anything like this before, it’s going to be hard to figure out how to kick it off. Don’t feel like you have to do it alone. Consider an inbound marketing agency or content marketing firm to help you get started. Make sure they focus on strategy BEFORE they start writing. Once your inbound marketing strategy is complete, keywords are identified and your editorial calendar approved, the process for creating content runs very smoothly. The sooner you start, the sooner you start to see results.
Square 2 Marketing – Leading The Reality Marketing and Inbound Marketing Revolution!
Many inbound marketing agency professionals are extolling the virtues of inbound marketing and content marketing to replace traditional search engine optimization tactics. However, our research and live client program experience has proven that a two-sided SEO effort enhances other inbound marketing tactics to deliver enhanced client results.
While we strongly believe an inbound “get found” approach outperforms the old-school “get on the first page of Google” plan, we have also found on-site and off-site SEO work helps drive leads.
The data is hard to ignore. Google reports that 73% of people click on one of the first three search results. They also report that 96% of people click on page-one results. Ranking for your most important keywords across Google, Yahoo! and Bing drives a significant number of visitors to your website.
One of the two ranking strategies is called on-site SEO. This ensures your website has all the elements to rank highly for your selected keywords. Content is a key element in any on-site SEO approach. Google has altered their search algorithms to deliver search results that have fresh, relevant and highly shared content. It’s because of this change by Google that content marketing is such a hot topic among inbound marketing agencies and marketing professionals.
Blogs, e-books, white papers, tip guides, indexable pages, presentations and videos are key pieces of content that help your site rank on search engines. Make sure your content is written, tagged and described with your search keywords in mind. Timing is also important when it comes to content. What that means is Google is rewarding sites that publish fresh content. The more often you put fresh content on your site, the more likely you’ll rank for those keywords. That’s why a daily blog post is so important to your inbound marketing program.
The last part of on-site SEO is fairly basic. Your site must have the proper descriptive phrases on every page: meta-descriptions, meta-tags and image tags. While not as important as content, this text, which is all over your site, helps Google index your site according to your target keywords and helps people find your site when they are searching.
Off-site SEO is the other side of the puzzle. Most of the time this off-site effort happens when the on-site work is completed. That's because off-site SEO requires the same content we discussed previously. Off-site SEO is sometimes called content sourcing or content publication. It includes using your original content to inform and educate your prospects on other websites or discussion groups.
Here is an example: Last Tuesday, I was fortunate enough to have a guest blog post published on the SmartBlogs website. This blog post doubled referring site traffic and increased lead generation by a 5x factor. One blog post drove 24 leads in two days for our firm.
Regular guest blogging, weekly posting of your content on other sites and daily contribution to discussions on LinkedIn groups all work together to create an active off-site search engine optimization effort, because the search engines are looking for links to your site as a way to validate that your site has important and relevant content. The more links, the more likely you are to rank on the major search engines.
Start Today Tip – We have talked about the importance of keyword selection many times. That will always be your starting point for any inbound marketing or search engine optimization effort. Make sure your selected keywords are the words people are actually using to search for products, services or solutions like yours. Once you have those keywords identified, start creating content, blogging and making sure your site has the right technical descriptors. Last but not least, start partnering with those blogs, discussion boards or LinkedIn groups that will post your content and include a link back to your site. Track and test, eliminating the poor performers while increasing your postings for those sites that drive traffic to your site.
Square 2 Marketing – Leading The Reality Marketing and Inbound Marketing Revolution!
It’s not the sexiest side of inbound marketing, but tracking and testing tactics is a critical component of running an inbound marketing campaign that generates results.
There are two sides to understanding the metrics and analytics part of inbound marketing. The first is what to watch, how often to watch it and what to expect. Let’s start with that.
At the highest level, you want to watch three key metrics related to your inbound marketing program.
1) Website Traffic – I get asked a lot about unique visitors and repeat visitors. Inbound marketing doesn’t distinguish between the two. Why? Think about it: Does it really matter whether a visitor is on your site for the first time or the fifth? Today, people are doing a lot of research on their own before they engage with a firm. So they might come back to your site five or six times before they engage with your company. This means a repeat visitor is just as important, if not more important, than a first time visitor. So, we just look at total visitors.
2) Conversion Rate – This is the percentage of people who convert from a site visitor into a lead. This number should be between 1% and 3%, but we have seen clients as high as 8%. This probably won't increase month over month, but you should be working to keep this number as high as possible.
3) Leads Generated – This is the number of new people who introduce themselves to your company by connecting with you in some way. They download a white paper, attend a webinar or request a time to chat with you.
If you watch these three numbers daily, you will start to get a high-level view of how your website is performing. If you want to drill down even further, here are the five key metrics you need to look at:
1) Where Traffic Is Coming From – This is a simple sources graph reflecting traffic that's organic, direct, from social media and referral sites or from email marketing and pay per click. Organic traffic comes from people who search for your firm via keywords, find you and then click through. Direct traffic comes from people who type in your URL directly. Social media traffic is from people who find you on social networking sites and click through. Referral sites means other sites where people find your information and click back to your website. Email marketing traffic comes from people who get your emails and click through to your site. Pay per click traffic comes from people who see an online ad and click through to your site.
2) Where Leads Are Coming From – This is another simple sources graph that focuses on leads instead of traffic. The sources are the same as above, but here we get to see which sources are contributing leads.
3) Blog Views, Blog Shares And Blog Subscribers – It's important to promote the blog, but the blog data gives you insight on what your prospects want to read about. Keep an eye on which blog topics are the most popular and then try to focus on those topics with future posts. Make sure you are actively sharing your blog with friends, followers and connections. Promote your blog to customers and prospects, and watch your subscriber numbers closely.
4) Keyword Rank – If you are focusing on a few important keywords, then you should be able to see your rankings rise slowly for these special terms and phrases.
5) Landing Pages – If you set up dedicated landing pages for content and offers, then you are able to track the performance of these pages and the offers they contain. They should be converting visitors into leads at a much higher rate than your overall website. These typically convert in the 30% to 40% range.
Now that you have an idea of what to watch, let’s talk about how often to watch it and what to expect.
Quite simply, you should be watching your high-level numbers daily and your secondary metrics weekly. It’s easy to watch your daily numbers with the smartphone application pictured here. Most marketing software tools provide a nice dashboard view that makes looking at the weekly metrics easy as well.
You should expect things to start slowly. Inbound marketing is about building a sustainable lead generating system for your company that grows steadily month over month. The goal isn’t in the first three months; it’s in month 10, 11 and 12 when you are getting amazing results that gain momentum and continue on year after year.
Website traffic might only go up 10% a month, but if you did that every single month you would go from 500 visitors a month to almost 1,500 by the end of the 12th month – a 3x improvement.
The same would hold true for leads, if you were getting a 1% conversion rate at the outset of the program and generating five leads a month, with no improvement in conversion rate, now you are getting 15 leads a month.
Play this out into year two and the numbers get VERY exciting. Website visitors would be pushing 5,000 a month and leads would be conservative at 50 a month.
You should be able to see how scalable, sustainable and repeatable an inbound marketing machine can be for your business.
Start Today Tip – Start tracking these numbers. You have to have an idea of how your marketing is doing in order to make adjustments that improve performance. Setting expectations and tracking progress towards those goals is a major part of inbound marketing. You don’t have to wait three months for a print campaign to run its cycle. Today you get real-time performance data right from your smartphone. Start by understanding how many visitors you get, how many leads and what sources those leads are coming from.
Square 2 Marketing - Leading The Reality Marketing And Inbound Marketing Revolution!
Inbound marketing takes practice. You won't always get it right the first time. So if you’ve had success getting prospects to your website but now you need help converting them from anonymous visitors into viable leads, we have the answer:
Content. Not just any content, but content that appeals to your visitors at every stage of their buying process. One of the keys to good content is making sure there is something for everyone—the person just starting the process, the person in the middle of the process and the person who is about to make a purchase decision.
A few days ago, in a related post, we discussed how to map your marketing content to your sales process. Click here if you want to revisit that topic. Today’s topic is similar but the conversation applies more to the top of the funnel where our last post applied primarily to prospects who are in the middle of the funnel and engaged in the sales process.
Typically, most websites offer the standard "Contact Us" page. This is for people who are ready to talk to you immediately. However, 90% of the people who visit your website simply aren’t ready or actually don’t want to talk to you yet.
But that doesn’t mean they are any less qualified or any less of a viable lead opportunity for your business. The way to capture those individuals is to have content offers that appeal to everyone.
To increase the number of leads generated from your website, try taking the entire purchasing spectrum into consideration by creating a Trio of Offers. This trio includes the No Risk Offer, the Low Risk Offer and the Direct Business Offer:
No Risk Offer – People are naturally suspicious. They don’t want to sign up for anything, nor do they want to give away any personal information. But if they have a genuine interest and your content is appealing, they will engage.
This educational content is typically a Free Report, Whitepaper, Tip Guide, E-book or Video that provides the visitor with information that helps them make an educated purchase decision or learn something new. In exchange for this information, they simply need to provide an email address. You could ask for additional information, but only the email address should be mandatory.
Low Risk Offer – If your audience is satisfied and intrigued with the content they received in the No Risk Offer, many times they come back for the Low Risk Offer. If they are a bit more trusting, or further along in their purchase process, the Low Risk Offer provides them access to additional, more in-depth information.
This offer requires a bit more engagement on the part of your audience. Those who engage with a Low Risk Offer are ready to move further down the sales funnel. While you are going to ask more from them, you are going to provide them more in return.
Low Risk Offers typically include free webinars/seminars, free assessments or reviews. Free trials or samples are also strong Low Risk Offers. Obviously, visitors need to provide additional contact information if they want to participate in or access these offers. This is typically their name, company name, website and even perhaps address and phone number. After all, if you are inviting them to an event and they are planning on attending, you might need to give them a call to confirm.
Direct Business Offer – Whether or not they have taken advantage of your Low Risk and No Risk Offers, there will be visitors who have already decided that they want to start a more active sales conversation with your company.
The Direct Business Offer gives them the opportunity to jump right to this step, or to initiate this step when they are comfortable with your company, products or services. These offers typically look like, "Contact Us Today!" Or "Schedule A Call." Of course, there are a number of ways to make these offers more creative and enticing.
For instance, we provide a 30-Minute Website Review and Website Grader Report. Giving your prospect something of value is important in converting more visitors into leads. If you are interested in some suggestions for your company, click here and one of our Inbound Certified Marketing Specialists will brainstorm with you on your company’s Direct Business Offers.
As we mentioned in the first part of this post, the buyer is in control. The Trio Of Offers gives potential buyers all the information they need to get comfortable with your company on their own terms. This makes them feel safer and more likely to do business with you.
Start Today Tip – Regardless of the number of visitors landing on your website, you probably don’t have enough educational content on your site to really drive leads. Your first step is to see where and what content you need to convert visitors into leads. You can get an idea of how many leads you should be getting by looking at total traffic over a 30-day period and then multiplying that number by .01. So if you have 1,000 visitors, you should be getting 10 leads a month. If you’re not, you need to consider applying content to your site. Once you do, your leads will pick up and so will your sales opportunities. It works every time.
Square 2 Marketing – Leading The Reality Marketing and Inbound Marketing Revolution!
If you want to break down inbound marketing to its core, you have inbound marketing services that drive website visitors and you have another set of inbound marketing services that turn those visitors into leads.
Companies that increase the number of blog posts they publish via their website each month can boost their inbound traffic levels and lead counts, according to a new report by HubSpot.
On average, companies that publish 15 or more blog articles per month generate five times more web traffic than companies that don't blog at all. Those that blog 9-15 times per month generate three times more traffic than companies that don't blog. To read more about it, click here.
Blogging drives website visitors because published content gets indexed in search engines and shared via various channels, including social media. By committing to regularly publishing blog content, you build up a powerful arsenal of content, with each article published creating another inroad to a website.
When companies boost their blogging efforts, web traffic volume increases in varying degrees:
- On average, companies generate a 45% lift in traffic when they increase the number of published blog posts from 11-20 articles to 21-50 articles.
- B2C companies generate a 59% increase in traffic after growing total published blog articles from 100 to 200.
Blogging efforts also appear to impact lead generation:
- Companies that have published more than 200 blog articles generate 5 times more leads than those with 10 or fewer posts.
- B2B companies that blog only 1-2 times per month generate 70% more leads than those that don't blog.
- Surprisingly, B2C companies generate a bigger lift in leads as they grow their arsenal of blog posts.
- Companies that increase the number of blog posts from 3-5 per month to 6-8 per month nearly double their monthly lead count.
Using social media also boosts traffic:
- Companies gain a 185% lift in traffic after achieving 1,000 Facebook likes.
- Companies with 51 to 100 Twitter followers generate 106% more traffic than those with 25 or fewer followers.
The world would be a little easier if it was just about quantity. Unfortunately, it’s not. Quality has to be at least 50% of the equation.
If you want your readers to share your content, it has to be educational, exciting and maybe even controversial. We regularly encourage our clients to take a stand, push a position, be contrarian and be different.
The more interesting your blog post, the more people will read it, share it and comment on it. All of this sharing, commenting and clicking helps you rise up in the search rankings. After all, Google, Yahoo! and Bing are looking for interesting content to present to their customers too.
Once you get the quantity and the quality formula down, it’s just a matter of time before your website traffic increases and you have the ability to turn all those new visitors into leads for your business.
Start Today Tip – Blogging isn’t hard. What’s hard is blogging correctly. One of the best tips we could give you is to plan for it. Start with an editorial calendar of potential blog topics that have your keywords prominently featured in the blog title and in the first few paragraphs of the blog content.
Remember, you’re not blogging for your health. You are blogging to drive search rankings and new visitors to your site. Make sure you blog three to five times a week. You can start more slowly, but the faster you work up to that pace, the more visitors you will attract. Keep track of the stats and make sure total visitors are up month over month.
Square 2 Marketing – Leading The Reality Marketing and Inbound Marketing Revolution!
About the data: Findings are based on the analysis of data collected among 7,000 companies that use HubSpot's Inbound Marketing platform. The data was collected in July and August 2012.
When someone tells you a story about someone else or when you hear a story about you, which do you care about more?
Inbound marketing works the same way. The more personalized the stories, the better chance they have to generate leads for your business. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to market to each of your prospects personally. Or is it?
First, it’s actually not that hard to talk to your prospects on a very personal level. Typically this is done by creating “personas.” These are profiles or descriptions of your target prospects. Depending on your business, you might have one persona or you might have 12 personas. If you can't clearly describe your target personas, that’s a good indicator that you need to create these profiles as part of your marketing strategy and marketing planning process.
Here is an example of a persona from our business.
David, The CMO –
David, pictured to the right, is a highly educated marketing executive. David has spent most of his career leading the marketing teams at a variety of companies.
David has deep experience with traditional marketing tactics. However, because inbound marketing is so new, he has only heard about it and hasn’t had a chance to implement any inbound marketing tactics at his company.
David manages a team of people. David reports to the CEO. David reads the following blogs: Marketing Profs, HubSpot, Marketo, CMO.com and Salesforce.com and the blog at Forrester.com. David prefers to get his information via email, online search and blog articles.
Knowing this much about David is a great first step in creating his persona. The next step is applying the content mapping exercise we mentioned in last week’s blog post, Inbound Marketing Content Has To Be Delivered In Context. This ensures that we know what questions David needs answered all the way through his personal buying process. Knowing this allows us to create a personal experience for David and all the other CMOs we want to be attracting to our company with our inbound marketing efforts.
Applying this work to your business is critical. It’s one of the first things we do when we start creating marketing strategy and marketing plans for clients. If you don’t have this work done for your business, there is a good chance your marketing is targeted improperly and, in turn, is probably not attracting the right type of visitors to your website. That means you probably aren’t getting good quality leads from your website either.
There is a tactical element to personalizing your marketing, too. This requires a bit of technology to execute elegantly. Today, people visit your website up to three times before they decide if they want to do business with your company. The more personal you can make their website experience, the more likely they will be to hire your firm.
Most of the new marketing automation software tools like HubSpot, Marketo and Eloqua enable you to personalize the offers prospects get when they come to your website. Eventually, they are also going to be able to personalize the pages served up and personalize the messages, copy and pictures your prospects see too.
This personalized website experience is exactly what cutting edge websites like Amazon.com, Netflix and iTunes are already delivering. The good news is that people have responded to these personalized web experiences and they are going to expect our businesses to provide a similar experience. The even better news is that, if you figure out how to do this, you capture the interest of your prospects, increase the traffic to your website, generate more leads for your business and close more sales.
Start Today Tip – First, make sure you have personas for all your target markets. If you need help creating these, there are a lot of blogs that discuss the persona creation process. There are also a number of firms who can help you create detailed personas for your business. Without these, I strongly recommend you hold off on doing any inbound marketing, content marketing or email marketing.
Once you have detailed personas, the next step is to map out their experience with your company, the questions they have all throughout that process and what content you need to answer their questions across the entire experience. This is complicated but something you should be able to do. Finally, you have to create that content. This is where an inbound marketing agency really helps. Consider bringing in a firm to create the content you need to help your company get found, get leads and drive sales.
Square 2 Marketing – Leading The Reality Marketing And Inbound Marketing Revolution!
Our neuromarketing materials had an amazing connection with our audience, so back by popular demand... one never-before-seen post on inbound marketing and neuromarketing.
Neuromarketing is the scientific marketing that leverages the latest neuroscience technologies to assess what really makes your prospects tick: why they like what they like, why they buy what they buy and why they’re really choosing whether (or whether not) to do business with your company.
Inbound marketing applies these concepts to create a series of marketing experiences that trigger your prospects to want to do business with you.
Using cutting-edge brain scanning and 3D imaging, neuromarketing digs below the cortical folds of consumers’ grey matter, beyond their own conscious awareness, to show marketers, business owners and entrepreneurs how to better align sales and marketing techniques with their targets’ buying brains.
Let’s be realistic here.
Your marketing budget most likely doesn’t account for expensive functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalogram (EEG) machines. You can’t afford to conduct high-level brain scans and neural studies on your prospects.
You’re also not a Fortune 500 enterprise with big bucks to throw at neuromarketing research, but the good news is that you don’t have to be. You don’t need access to fMRI and EEG machines to take advantage of neuromarketing. All you need is awareness of the research that’s being done and the common sense to apply it to your own marketing.
“The fact of the matter is anyone can do neuromarketing without ever scanning a single brain.”
-- Douglas Van Praet, author of Unconscious Branding
THE REAL DEAL: Applying neuro know-how to your inbound marketing program.
Be bold and shake things up.
“Nothing changes if nothing changes.” This quote is famous amongst motivational speakers, leadership trainers and business consultants… and even more so amongst those who occupy all three of those categories.
And it’s popular for a reason. Breaking industry standards and shaking up patterns, when you’re basing these changes on calculated strategy, is the only way to survive in this innovation-obsessed marketplace. Doing the same tactic over and over again, especially when it generates less-than-remarkable results, just isn’t smart.
Grey-Matter Mission: Fully commit to delivering an exceptional experience to your prospects, one that gets them gushing about your company to friends, families and strangers online. Fully commit to being remarkable.
Find your foil covering.
Dr. A.K. Pradeep, CEO of leading neuromarketing company NeuroFocus and author of The Buying Brain, conducted a study on the experience of eating yogurt. He asked volunteers to imagine the process of eating yogurt -- starting with seeing the container, picking it up, opening it, inserting the spoon and stirring up the fruit, smelling it, eating the first spoonful, then another, etc. -- and asked which step they thought would be most engaging to their brains.
Most people chose the “insert spoon and stirring” part, with “tasting the first creamy spoonful” being a close runner up. But the EEGs that the volunteers were hooked up to when eating the yogurt told a different tale: The most stimulating part of the process, as far as the volunteers’ emotional brains were concerned, was grasping and removing the foil covering over the top of the container.
Grey-Matter Mission: Don’t assume that the obvious product characteristics or service offerings are the only important ones. Put some thought into the aspects of your products, services and company’s culture and methodologies that have the potential to peel back that “foil covering” and spark your prospects’ emotions.
Remember, your prospects aren’t numbers, demographics or statistics. As inbound marketers, we’re all about quantifiable results, monitoring analytics and marketing with metrics in mind. But you can’t lose sight of the fact that your prospects are people. On a conscious level, they’re grasping at the straws of logic to rationalize their buying behaviors, but it’s their subconscious emotions that are really behind the wheel when it comes to purchasing decisions.
Start Today Tip—To start applying neuromarketing to your business, spend 15 minutes evaluating your sales process. If your sales people are doing anything that might make your prospects feel like they are getting “sold” consider stopping those practices. If your prospects don’t feel safe, they won't buy. For example, long-detailed contracts or proposals with legalese in them make people nervous. If they are nervous, they don’t buy. Look at your processes from your prospect’s perspective and make the necessary changes.
Can’t wait for our next post to soak up more neuro-knowledge nuggets? Click the button below to learn more about how inbound marketing and neuromarketing work together.
Square 2 Marketing - Leading The Reality Marketing Revolution!
You might have heard about the 10,000 hours rule? In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success he states that it takes about 10,000 hours to get good at something. We’re well past that magical mark for our time working on inbound marketing programs.
One of the lessons we learned is that inbound marketing program performance is directly affected by the delivery of content in context. What that means is when we present educational content at the perfect time in a prospect’s buying process, we get rewarded with increased lead generation.
Since the goal for our clients is lead generation, we want to do this as much as possible.
To effectively accomplish that goal, the first step is to map out your client’s buying process. There are a lot of different opinions on what the buying process looks like and, honestly, it’s probably different for every client.
One sample buying process model looks like this:
- Early: looking for education but unaware of a problem
- Early-Mid: looking for education on what needs fixing
- Early-Late: looking for education and aware of solutions
- Mid: looking for demonstration of expertise
- Mid-Late: looking for differentiation of solutions
- Late: looking for validation on service, product and company
Analyst firm SiriusDecisions presents a slightly different framework:
- Stage 1 - Loosening of the Status Quo
- Stage 2 - Committing to Change
- Stage 3 - Exploring Possible Solutions
- Stage 4 - Committing to a Solution
- Stage 5 - Justifying the Decision
- Stage 6 - Making the Selection
When it comes to figuring out what content to deliver at what stage in the buying process, one of the best ways is to get sales people to share the questions prospects typically ask during each stage.
For instance, an easy one is the later stage when prospects are looking for validation or working through a selection process. At this stage most prospects want to check references. The way we handle this is to send along a Reference Reel with short video vignettes from real clients answering the same questions they would likely be asked during a reference check. Click here to see our Reference Reel.
This content, delivered in context, makes the process simple for our prospects. It makes it remarkable. It limits the interruptions we have to cause our clients and it actually makes it easier on our prospects since they don't have to call the same people asking the same questions. Now there is no scheduling, calling, missed calls, voice mails, call backs—just a 2-minute video.
Content marketing isn’t just about the content you create, but when and how you deliver it. Typically content gets delivered via your website. This is primarily self-service. People visit your site and download what they want, when they want it. Content also gets delivered by the sales team during the sales process. This is where understanding the buying process is extra relevant. The better your sales team is at this, the faster your prospects will close.
Finally, content gets delivered via lead nurturing programs. These are automated and regular content delivery mechanisms like a monthly email marketing campaign or trigger emails which occur after key events in the sales process. For instance, you might run a series of three personal emails delivered every three days after a prospect downloads a Free Report from your website. This type of program keeps you top of mind, keeps them coming back to your website, keeps them reading your stuff and continues to emotionally connect your company to your prospects and their needs.
Start Today Tip – You shouldn’t consider any type of lead nurturing or content marketing program until you understand your own buying cycle. Take 30 minutes and map it out. Get your sales people involved to actually write out the questions prospects ask and when. Map those to your process. Now you are ready for content marketing and lead nurturing. This isn’t easy, so consider bringing in an inbound marketing expert to make sure your content is engaging, metrics are in place and the content creation can be sustained over time.
Square 2 Marketing – Leading The Reality Marketing and Inbound Marketing Revolution!
Ever wonder what to do with social media? Every marketing expert under the sun is talking about it. Everyone says you need it, but does anyone tell you exactly what to do with it? How do you get social media marketing to be part of your overall marketing strategy and drive lead generation for your business?
Isn’t that the $20,000 question?
Here are some ingenious ways to use social media to actually drive prospect traffic to your website, turn traffic into leads and then convert those leads into new clients or customers for your business.
Step 1: Grow your reach and share your content – One of the major benefits of social media marketing is your ability to reach so many perfectly targeted people so easily. The extent of the reach is primarily up to you, your sales people and your employees. You should be proactively working to grow these numbers month over month.
One of the best ways to do that is to post interesting content on your social media sites and then drive people to those sites. Sales people can do this, customer service people can do this and even your current marketing can do this. "Visit us on Facebook to download our latest coupon, free report or watch our fun video" are great calls-to-action that increase social network marketing reach.
Step 2: Engage your fans – Most people just post information to social media marketing sites. This is a mistake. The trick to getting your prospects involved is simple: just ask! Ask them for their opinion. People love telling you what they think. Give them surveys, ask them to find similar articles, ask for their advice or for their experiences on a specific topic. Social networking sites are designed for interaction, so use this to your advantage.
Step 3: Monitor for sales opportunities – There are a number of new tools that allow you to keep track of conversations on social media sites. Simply identify keywords you want to monitor on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Now when those keywords show up in real conversations, you get an alert. The progressive companies are monitoring social sites for these conversations and then they’re alerting their sales people so that they can reach out to clients and prospects.
HubSpot’s new Social InBox feature allows you to set up rules and keep your sales team abreast of any important conversations going on across Twitter. Now they can proactively reach out to clients and prospect to be that much more helpful. The result is a more remarkable sales experience, shorter sales cycles and larger deals. Try it for yourself.
Step 4: Turn prospects into customers by nurturing them – Just because you talk with them on Twitter doesn’t mean they are going to select your company. You have to continue to nurture them and provide them with a remarkable experience all throughout the sales process.
Regular email marketing and more personal lead nurturing emails are important, but social media marketing allows you to do this indirectly. Remember, these people are connected to you and your company now. What you post on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter goes to them directly. Make sure that all that content is rich in education and continues to provide them with a reason to WANT to hire your company instead of your competition.
Step 5: Track, test and double down – Not everything you do is going to work. You might find your business isn’t getting any leads from LinkedIn but Facebook is killing it for you. You have to know this to make informed decisions and to optimize your marketing investment. Tracking, testing and marketing analytics are critical. It’s the only way to learn exactly what works and what doesn’t. The key to this approach is making lots of small changes, watching the results and continuing to tweak what’s not working while adding more energy to what is working well.
Business owners, CEOs and marketing executives have never had so many tools at their disposal. Now you have to figure out how to use them in an integrated and efficient manner. The social media marketing tips above are a great first step.
Start Today Tip – First, you need a pulse on your current social networking marketing. How many fans, followers and connections do you have? Set some goals and drive your team to increase those numbers this month and every month after for the rest of the year. Next, start planning on how to engage those people and create a schedule of posts for all your social media marketing sites. Keep tabs on what works and what doesn’t work. Set up landing pages, so you can track traffic from each site. Measure how many leads you get from social media and start making small adjustments monthly to improve performance. Before you know it, you will be a social network marketing maven.
Square 2 Marketing – Leading The Reality Marketing and Inbound Marketing Revolution!
There is a perfectly good reason why inbound marketing and social media marketing work well together as part of your overall marketing strategy. In fact, there are a number of very basic marketing building blocks that should go into the way you connect inbound marketing and social media marketing for your business.
If you are practicing inbound marketing, then you know that creating educational content that people want to download is a core part of inbound marketing. What comes next should be obvious. If one person loves your e-book then there is a very high likelihood that they are going to want to share it with other people like them. This is why you need a social media marketing plan for your business.
Your role as the owner, CEO or head of marketing at your business is to make sharing easy. This means active social network marketing.
Here are the top five building blocks for social network marketing that fuel inbound marketing.
Connect everything – Stop thinking about your website, your social sites and your sales effort as separate, disconnected and unrelated parts of your business. Today, you are delivering an experience to a new prospect. They see you on LinkedIn, click through and view your website, then they call you and speak with a sales person. Two days later, they see what you are doing on Facebook and look for videos on YouTube. It’s all connected. You have to remember that, leverage it and make sure that your prospect gets treated to a remarkable experience all the way through each and every one of these properties. A well thought-out marketing strategy and social media marketing plan helps you make all the connections and allows you to deliver the experience your prospects are looking for.
Be consistent – Your company’s brand and overall marketing strategy has to be consistent and obvious across all these sites. The offers on your website should be similar to those on your LinkedIn profile. Create dedicated landing pages for each social media site so you know which site is delivering the best prospects. Make sure the words you use on your social media sites match those used on your website and is consistent with the voice and tone created in your company's marketing strategy. Inconsistency here creates concern in the minds of your prospects. That concern causes prospects to pause, slow down the sales process and question your ability to execute. Consistency delivers the experience that makes them feel safe and that gets them ready to buy. A social media marketing plan makes it easier to deliver that experience.
Drive them to share – Think about social media as a highway. It connects everyone and allows you the ability to move your message to many people with a single click. Each of your connections, friends and followers also has a collection of connections, friends and followers. While most people want to share, others need to be reminded. The best way to leverage your network's network and drive shares is to create compelling, unique and insightful content. The better your content the more people will share it. A social media marketing plan that's part of an overall marketing strategy helps you map out exactly where and how to apply that content so that your fans will share it with other people just like them.
Start a conversation – This is where most of us go wrong. We consider social media a place to post our content. Instead, we should be asking people to get involved, questioning them, challenging them and asking for their opinion. People on social media want to get involved. That’s why they are there. The more you can get them talking, the more people you will get following you and the easier it will be to use your network as a venue to distribute content. Some strategic thought and planning, as part of a broader social network marketing effort, helps you figure out exactly what they want to talk about and how to facilitate those conversations online.
Track, test and adjust – As with all inbound marketing services, you have to track, test and adjust your approach. It’s going to take time to tweak what you are doing to fit perfectly in your business and in your industry. Every business is different. You need to watch which social sites are driving more traffic and which ones are driving better traffic (more leads). Which sites drive leads that close or close faster? It’s all there for you to learn from and make adjustments to improve inbound marketing results.
A few years ago, most of the business owners we worked with actually felt like social network marketing was for their kids and not for businesses. Today, most of our clients see as much traffic from their social media pages as they do from organic search engine traffic. This means what you do to drive traffic from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is just as important as what you do to drive traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Start Today Tip – Evaluate your social network marketing. What condition is your Facebook page in? What about your LinkedIn profile? Not your personal profile, but your corporate profile? What are you doing with Twitter? Don’t ignore it. Even the other social media sites like Pinterest, Stumbleupon, Tumblr, Instagram and YouTube provide most businesses a tremendous opportunity to capture a prospect’s interest and drive them to your website. Don’t ignore these opportunities anymore. Sit down today and create a social media marketing plan to upgrade your accounts and start executing some of the building blocks above.
Square 2 Marketing – Leading The Reality Marketing and Inbound Marketing Revolution!