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Square 2 Marketing has earned a spot on the Inc. 5000 2017, Inc.’s annual ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in America.
This is the third year in a row Square 2 Marketing has earned this prestigious honor. The agency is ranked at #3,487, following a three-year growth rate of over 89%.
The INBOUND conference, HubSpot’s annual user event, is one of the top marketing and sales events in the world. This year’s INBOUND conference is September 25-28 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, and it will bring together more than 19,000 sales and marketing professionals at the epicenter of all things inbound.
A total eclipse of the sun is a rare event. Content that drives traffic by the thousands, endlessly engages users and propels your page to the top of SERPs might be equally rare. Both are beautiful, powerful and something you want to appreciate.
Creating content like this is only slightly easier than seeing a full eclipse. It makes sense, because if creating such compelling content was simple, it wouldn’t be all that special. Some might even consider this to be unicorn content.
Everyone is looking for quick fixes, shortcuts and the easy button to make the execution of inbound marketing tactics simpler. To support that, there’s been an influx of templates, cheat sheets, checklists and pre-formatted assets for download to help you execute your marketing and sales strategies.
This might look like the answer to your “I’m too busy to do this myself” challenge, but I’m here to tell you to proceed with caution.
After implementing hundreds of inbound client programs and hundreds of marketing automation projects, what we learned is what you already know — your business is unique. Your marketing has unique requirements and your sales process is different than every other company on the planet. Generic materials might save you time up front, but they might not produce the results you’re expecting and they’re definitely not going to help you stand out when everyone else is using the same formats.
If you’re a small to medium-sized business with straightforward marketing and sales requirements, HubSpot is an amazing tool, both for marketing automation and for CRM. If you don’t use anything for either part of your business currently, consider looking at HubSpot as your primary source of marketing and sales technology.
However, we still get calls and outreach from companies that have bought it but struggled to get it up and running, have yet to see the true value from its investment and are not taking advantage of all its features. Having come from a software company previously, this is a common story. People buy software thinking it’s going to cure all of their ills, but nothing is further from the truth. You have to know what to do with the software to see the benefits pay off.
From the time I started out in marketing and up until about three years ago, I did everything on a 12-month cycle. The 12-month marketing plan and 12-month editorial calendar were very common in almost every company. Agencies worked in a similar way.
Thinking out the entire year provided some value, but as marketing evolved, so did the planning cycles. Today, we do everything on a 30-day cycle to take advantage of technology, data and our results-driven focus.
If you’re still looking at marketing with a long-term lens, you might be missing out on some opportunities to drive results through adjustments that are easy to deliver in weeks, not months. Here are some tips and techniques from our proven 30-day inbound marketing planning cycle we use with clients.
In six weeks, the annual pilgrimage to Boston will begin for what has become a religious gathering for everything inbound. INBOUND 2017 kicks off on Monday, September 25, and the conference is full of amazing speakers, killer content and almost everything an inbound pro could want from an event.
The event is filled with sessions that will inspire you, educate you and help you get better results. The key is to select the speakers and the sessions that bring the most value. When I started attending INBOUND as a HubSpot partner, there were 300 attendees. This year, they’re expecting more than 20,000 attendees. I’ve seen a lot of wonderful speakers and attended a ton of amazing sessions, but I’ve also spent my share of time in bad sessions, too.
In all transparency, I’m a huge fan of inbound marketing. The idea of earning a prospect’s attention and focusing our precious marketing dollars on people already looking and engaged in their buyer journey makes much more sense to me than attempting to interrupt people who may be qualified through traditional reach and frequency marketing.
However, I know the challenges associated with inbound marketing and why it has changed so much so quickly. It takes patience and it takes time to produce significant results. The methodology is challenging to produce a lot of quality leads as it’s dependent on who is looking, regardless of their quality. It also takes a significant amount of work and investment. The key is that investment does produce assets that continue to produce results long after the creation investment is over. Still, I understand the challenges.
Successful creative work from a digital marketing agency requires more than just beautifully crafted copy, design and digital elements. Digital creative work also needs to drive real business results for your company, like leads, customers and revenue.
Account-based marketing is getting a lot of play in terms of new revenue and new customers.
But what about using it to drive revenue for current clients? Why not? A lot of the techniques are the same. Plus, your clients and customers already know you, so while you might be doing some of this already, a more structured account-based marketing plan targeted at current customers should produce more revenue and produce it faster.
The key to making this work is the same as when deploying account-based marketing for new customer acquisition. But as you’ll see below, some of the execution actually gets easier.
