Inbound - The Blog: The Secrets Behind Click To Close

ABM Is Hot, But It’s Not Right For All Types Of Companies

A lot of people are attracted to the newest shiny object. Account-based marketing (ABM) is one of those for people in marketing and sales. It’s white hot right now. Several successful technology companies are promoting ABM, and a lot of marketing experts are talking about how ABM is the only way to market your company these days.

While we agree that ABM does offer marketing and sales leaders an innovative approach to driving awareness at targeted companies, we also believe it needs to be used strategically and that it’s not right for everyone. In this article today, we’ll look closely at who should be considering ABM as one of the tactics in their marketing portfolio, and who should consider leaving it off their list for now.

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Or Is Google Making It More Difficult To Tell The Difference?

In the world of marketing, the only constant is change. For years, we told clients that most searchers trusted organic search listings more, and the data supported that. Historically, about 70% of searchers preferred the organic listings, and they voted by clicking more on those organic listings.

But now, in an insightful article from Moz.com, we find out that Google has been doing such a good job of camouflaging those paid ads and making them look more like the general organic listings that it’s more like 50/50.

We all know what’s in it for Google. The more people click on ads, the more money Google makes. The more those ads look like regular listings, the more people click on them thinking they’re regular listings.

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Driving Leads And Awareness Requires Innovative Marketing Techniques; Here Are A Few

As I’ve stated many times in this blog and in all of my speaking sessions, marketing, sales and revenue generation in general have become much more complex. Dramatic changes in your prospects’ behavior are primarily driving this complexity. In short, people go about making a purchase decision in a much different way than ever before.

This means that many of the existing marketing and sales playbooks are ready for the fire pit. One of the most dramatic changes taking place is the way companies reach out to people who don’t know them, who are not yet searching and who might be unaware that a solution exists. While inbound marketing has been a hot topic of conversation over the past few years, today we’re blending inbound and demand generation tactics together to produce better results.

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WARNING: It’s a long list if inbound marketing leads, sales opportunities and new customers are on the menu.

In our house, I’m the guy who goes to the supermarket a lot of weeks. I like going and my wife doesn’t, so it’s a match made in heaven. However, for me to return successfully, I need a list of items she needs or wants for her upcoming week.

We collaborate on the list and off I go. It’s a system honed over many years and it works incredibly well. I know it’s not rocket science, but it’s a metaphor, so bear with me.

Today’s marketing is just as complicated as heading to the supermarket. With grocery shopping, numerous options exist for every purchase, items are located all over the store (which is huge), price is always a consideration and people in your household may have different dietary requirements.

Marketing is similar. Do we need to redo our website? How much content do we need? What about technology, email marketing and lead nurturing? What about the people who are not searching for us? You need a complex set of tactics to get marketing right.

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Maybe You Can’t Get Everyone Aligned This Afternoon, But You Can Make The Commitment To Alignment

This question about sales and marketing finally working together has been taxing executives for years. Sales hates marketing and marketing hates sales. This must change, and it has to change for one good reason: The prospect has changed.

Today, your prospects are everything. Their buyer behavior and their buyer journey must be 100% aligned with your marketing and sales execution. If your typical prospect life cycle and buyer journey is two weeks, then you should match that with sales and marketing. If it’s nine months, you should be matching that, too. If they need a ton of education, match it. If they need to be intimate with the creation of your recommendations, give it to them. The only way to truly deliver a remarkable experience to your prospects is to align, combine and completely integrate your sales and marketing effort.

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All Websites Are Not Created Equally; Learn What You Should Be Asking For In Your Next Website Design Project

I love answering common questions with the blog articles we write. This is one of the most common questions and one of the most misunderstood areas of marketing on the planet. How can you get a website proposal for $5,000 from one company and $50,000 from another company for the same website design and development project? The answer is simple when you unpack the project.

It’s rarely an apples-to-apples comparison. I know it seems simple. You need a 20-page website with no fancy features or functionality. Maybe you want your current site migrated to HubSpot, maybe you have 100 blog articles that also need to be moved over to the new site and maybe you have a handful of nice-to-have features that you’ve always wanted, like a site-wide search feature or a new FAQ page. Nothing too complex. Of course, you want the site responsive so it works well and looks great on all mobile devices, but that’s standard these days.

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2 Billion People Can’t Possibly Be Wrong; Here Is How You Get Access To Them

A lot of businesspeople think Facebook is not for B2B marketing. The issue with that blanket statement is the B2B aspect. Marketing is no longer B2 anything. Today, the best marketing is a person-to-person exercise. People do business with other people, and marketing is quickly becoming a one-to-one effort as opposed to what it has been historically, a one-to-many effort.

Marketers have always known that personalization improves lead generation and overall performance of your marketing, but today it’s gone even further. Marketing needs to be personal. It’s not enough to simply send an email that says “Dear Mike.” Today, I want to see content, offers and messages that recognize me as an individual. I want content that aligns with my persona and content that aligns with the fact that I own a business, live in the suburbs, drive a nice car, have two (almost) grown children and love to cook.

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It’s Not About Me, It’s ALL About You And Your Prospects

This might seem self-serving. Our company does provide a wide range of marketing- and sales-related services including technology support, but my comments have little to do with me and everything to do with you, our clients.

You find a few different flavors of agencies today. Some are like us, but more tend to focus their services on a specific aspect of marketing, like social media, search, video or pay-per-click. Others focus on verticals, so for instance, they might be experts at working with manufacturing companies. Finally, some firms practice only one kind of marketing (like inbound) or perhaps only provide marketing, while other firms only help with sales coaching and support for sales teams.

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What Makes This Blog Different Than So Many Other Digital Marketing Agency Blogs

When Eric Keiles and I started Square 2 Marketing almost 15 years ago, it was founded on a few simple pillars: Always give the right advice, even if it was difficult. Share the why behind what we were doing. Strategy before tactics and be remarkable.

Over the years these tenets have evolved, but today they’re still visible when you look at our core values of no fluff, remarkable or nothing, always teaching and always learning, practice what we preach and every client is a raving fan.

I’m sharing this to help you understand why you might not find as many technical marketing tips and techniques in this blog as you find in blogs from other digital marketing agencies. Our vision is to share more about why than what and to provide thought leadership to help you think differently. We want to teach you to fish for yourself, so ultimately, we won’t have to fish for you.

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The Good, The Bad And The Ugly From The Conference

After four full days in Boston interacting with 20,000 attendees at HubSpot’s annual INBOUND event, the team at Square 2 Marketing had some insightful takeaways that I thought I’d share with all of you. There’s a lot more good news than bad news, and honestly the bad news isn’t really that bad, but challenges do exist within the inbound community.

The key to a successful INBOUND experience is to grab ideas and takeaways that help you make your marketing and sales produce better results. While learning how to make a landing page with a template is nice, getting that landing page to produce more leads, more sales opportunities and more new customers is more important.

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