HubSpot is expecting INBOUND 2016 to be the biggest INBOUND yet. With that many people, preparedness is key to making the most of your time in Boston.

After attending the last 3 conferences, we figured it was time to share some of what we’ve learned from those experiences to help make your time at INBOUND more enjoyable. Read on for our 25 tips for a great INBOUND experience.

1. Make your schedule – This year, HubSpot is allowing attendees to pre-register for sessions. You’ll want to make sure you’ve registered or you might not get a seat. Head here to get started.
2. Make your schedule accessible – Either add your schedule to your calendar or print it off and bring it with you, but make sure you have your days mapped out.
3. Divide and conquer – Your time is limited and great sessions will happen during the same time slot. Plan with others from your team – split up and go to different sessions to cover the most ground.
4. Set up a shared folder for notes – Many sessions are recorded, but you learn more when you take notes. Use Evernote or Google Drive to organize those notes ahead of time.
5. Let people know you’re going – Make plans to meet up with your HubSpot Channel Consultant or Account Manager. Use the designated hashtags on twitter to connect with others who will be attending.
6. Make dinner reservations early – There will be 15,000 marketers in Boston that week and we’ll all be hungry. Along with Boston’s famous seafood, the North End has plenty of authentic Italian restaurants – highly recommended.
7. Cast your vote (or fill out your absentee ballot) – INBOUND kicks off on Election Day, so be sure to submit your ballot before the conference begins. #EveryVoteCounts
8. Schedule out any marketing tasks – Use an automated marketing platform (we can recommend a good one) to schedule out any blog posts, social messages, and emails for the week.
9. Turn on your out of office – Keeping up with email is near impossible when your schedule is jam packed with inboundy goodness. Even though wifi is available pretty much everywhere, let people know you’ll be out of reach.
10. Pack your INBOUND bag – You’ll want a bag to carry your computer, notebook, pens, etc, But, don’t make it too heavy – you have a lot of walking to do.
11. Bring a reusable water bottle – You’ll want to stay hydrated and quickly hit the water and coffee stations in between sessions.
12. Pack a jacket – With an average low of 40 and a high of 54, it’ll likely be a bit chilly out. Bring some warm clothes!
13. Bring an extra sweater – The sessions can be chilly.
14. Bring your chargers – It’s a long day, you’ll take plenty of notes and still want a charged phone for the Seaport parties.
15. Don’t forget your business cards! – You have the opportunity to do a ton of networking. Make sure you’re prepared.
16. Pack your comfortable shoes – Casual atmosphere + a conference center that’s over 516,000 square feet + 12 hours on your feet x 4 days = pack comfy shoes. You’ll want to leave the 4-inch heels and wingtips at home.
17. Check in – Head to the BCEC early, get your badge, and check out Club INBOUND – There are booths with integration partners, HubSpot product demos, and it’s a great place to network.
18. Get to lunch early – For lunch last year, you were able to choose from the best food trucks in Boston. With so many attendees though, some food trucks will sell out faster than others and lines can get lengthy. Get there early.
19. Know where to go to find snacks – There are several spots around the BCEC for snacks. If you need a quick bite between sessions, head here: http://www.inbound.com/blog/food-findings-at-inbound-2016
20. Get out of your comfort zone – You have the opportunity to meet thousands of inbound marketers from all over the world. Introduce yourself, and find out what they’re doing and exchange ideas.
21. Get involved – Every year, HubSpot partners with a charity to help raise awareness and funds. This is a great chance to get involved with a worthy cause.
22. Don’t miss happy hour – After sessions wrap up, head to Club Inbound for drinks before dinner or parties.
23. Explore Boston – Last year, we went to Harpoon Brewery and caught a game at Fenway Park. There’s so much to do in Boston, carve out some time to check out this awesome city.
24. Have fun, but get a good night’s sleep – Pace yourself. Don’t party too much the first night. Each day will have lots of learning, avoid missing something important in a session by getting the recommended 7-8 hours of sleep.
25. Don’t miss your flight! This one is self explanatory.

What did we miss?

For those of you who have been to INBOUND before, what are your top tips? Let us know in the comments.

Can’t Make It to Boston?

We’ve got you covered! Join us for our recap of INBOUND 2016 on December, 7 at the Richmond HubSpot User Group. We’ll share the best of what we learned from our time in Boston. Hope you can make it!

The post INBOUND 2016 Crash Course: 25 Tips to Know Before You Go appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

While many companies work with professional content strategists and copywriters to craft landing page copy, everyone involved in your content marketing strategy should have a basic understanding of what to look for in an effective page and how to troubleshoot a page that’s not converting well.

To that end, here’s a look at what three top marketing blogs recommend as best practices for planning and writing landing pages that work:

1. Copyblogger Says Plan Your Content

Compelling landing pages don’t come together by accident. Writing for the award-winning content website Copyblogger, Aaron Orendorff says there are at least three stages to the writing process: the before, during, and after that ensure you’re crafting copy that will actually convert.

Before you even start writing, you need to identify specific goals your landing page will help you achieve. Since the best landing pages focus on one thing, you should invest time in figuring out that one thing, whether it’s downloading information, email newsletter subscriptions, or watching a video.

Then Orendorff emphasizes that you need to pay attention to the different pieces you incorporate “during” the writing, such as your headline, subheadline, body copy, proof, and call to action. Each piece of the page has its own best practices you need to understand in order to make it as effective as possible.

Finally, the “after” of landing pages may surprise you by being just as much work as writing the page itself! Once customers make the decision you hope they’ll make — specifying their name and email address to downloading something or signing up for your newsletter — they need to be guided through “Thanks for signing up!” and “Here’s your next step” sequences that allow your customers to keep that momentum going.

If you want to refine your landing page copy even more, check out Copyblogger’s infographic, ABCs of Landing Pages That Work.

2. Copy Hackers Says Know When to Stop Writing

Copy Hackers founder Joanna Wiebe knows landing pages. So, we have to trust her when she says that two of the most important things to know when writing landing page body copy is to know when to stop writing and know when to keep writing.

Since the most compelling landing pages are concise and to the point and only talk about one thing, you have to balance your effort to give enough information without overwhelming (and boring) your prospective customer.

To keep her landing page copy balanced, Weibe writes to answer two questions for the whole page:

• So what?
• Prove it!

If you’re writing a page from scratch, use these two questions to guide the information you include. If you’re reviewing a page to publish on your website, read it with these two questions in mind and make sure they get answered.

Dive deeper into Weibe’s copywriting advice with the free Conversion Marketer’s Guide to Landing Page Copywriting.

3. Kissmetrics Says Scan for Flaws

Kissmetrics’ blog manager Zach Bulygo takes a defensive approach to landing pages, recommending that you evaluate all your finished pages for flaws that kill conversion rates, especially if your conversion rate is below 13.28% for B2B or 9.87% for B2C.

While Zach shares seven insightful flaws to look out for, we find the following three to be the most common among websites we evaluate:

• You ask for too much information. Standard contact information forms sometimes ask for 7-10 pieces of information, from name and email address to job title, annual revenue, or even a physical address. While it would be convenient to capture all this information before you speak to a lead, having to enter too much information is a turnoff to prospective customers. Figure out the minimum information you need to have a conversation (often name, company, and a way to contact them) and make your forms easy to find and fill in.
• Landing pages take too long to load. Bulygo makes the case that since 40 percent of consumers abandon websites that take longer than 3 seconds to load, it’s vital that you work with your marketing partner to cut the clutter and test your page load time on multiple devices.
• Your site lacks credibility. If customers don’t trust your presentation, they won’t trust you with their contact information. That’s why you need to work with a professional to make sure all of your landing pages meet the current standards for building trust by design.

If you could use more tips, don’t miss Kissmetrics’ Beginner’s Guide to Landing Pages or our list of eight ideas to help you optimize your landing page copy.

Now we’d like to hear from you. What rules do you live by when you write or review landing pages for your company? Does any of this expert advice surprise you?

The post 3 Experts Weigh In on Effective Landing Pages That Work appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

But before you jump in, let’s take a minute to look at the facts. Podcasts have enjoyed a cycle of popularity since its invention in 2001. However, that popularity has gone down, too, most notably with the widespread podfading epidemic of 2009.

Unfortunately, B2C and B2B companies alike sometimes fail to consider how much they’ll need to invest in a recurring podcast program, which explains why so many podcasts start with a bang and fade out with a whimper.

Does that mean podcasting is a bad idea for every business? Definitely not. Even now, many companies are showing us that B2B podcasts can contribute to marketing and customer acquisition efforts.

Here are four questions you can ask to can figure out whether or not your business is well-positioned to get value out of podcasting.

1. Are your customers likely to listen?

According to research from Edison Research, podcast listeners are split between men (50%) and women (50%). Age demographics are also almost evenly split among age 12-17 (15%), age 18-24 (15%), age 25-34 (20%), age 35-44 (17%), and age 45-54 (15%) with slightly fewer users in the age ranges of 55-64 (12%) and 65+ (6%). The median income of podcast listeners is $75,000, and podcast listeners are also more likely to own a smartphone, more active on social media, and more likely to follow brands.

If your customers aren’t likely to listen to a podcast, your efforts might not pay off, so it’s important to consider the demographics for podcast listeners to see whether or not your customer persona aligns with people who are already listening to podcasts.

2. How does your target audience prefer to receive information?

Consult your sales team to find out which education strategies work best with prospective customers. For example, if your team reports that prospects prefer to read reports and brochures quickly and quietly, they might not be a good fit for a B2B podcast. If, on the other hand, prospects tend to enjoy live webinars, or spend a lot of time in their cars or public transit, they might enjoy a podcast that provides a similar audial experience.

3. Can you commit to one year of monthly or weekly episodes?

Unlike videos and blog posts, which provide an educational or SEO benefit by themselves, B2B podcasts exist as a part of a whole to build a long-term relationship with the listener. If a listener gets the sense that the podcast won’t be updated regularly, or worse, that there’s no way to know when new podcasts will be added, it directly impacts their ability to connect with the information.

The top three reasons businesses fade out of podcasting is a lack of time, lack of interest, and lack of materials. If you can’t commit the resources to putting out regularly scheduled B2B podcasts, this medium might not be an asset to your company.

4. Do you have a qualified and willing team member?

A professional podcast requires a professional host. Some companies choose to hire out the production of the podcast, but if you’re trying to keep expenses low and put a personal face on the content, you will want to identify a qualified and willing team member to take the lead.

Take a look at your current team. Does anyone stand out as a good speaker and interviewer who would also be willing to take on the podcast duties? This person should be a committed member of the team with leadership potential so that he or she is invested in delivering the best possible podcast result.

Let’s hear from you! Consider these requirements from the perspective of your company, and let us know in the comments whether or not a B2B podcast would be a valuable tool in your content marketing toolbox.

The post Should You Start a B2B Podcast for Your Business? appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

Savvy small businesses don’t ignore opportunities to drive more traffic and generate more leads for their sales team. So when it’s time to rebuild or redesign your small business website, you’re less focused on award-winning design and more focused on client-winning design. And you want a website that works best for your target audience — not something that’s trendy that would be ineffective at getting more leads and sales.

Considering a website redesign? Read this web design questionnaire to plan your website for success

If you’re in the market for a new or redesigned small business website, here are four things that will make a website for a small business great:

1. The redesign process starts with customer personas

Don’t work through the design process only to end up with a beautiful small business website that doesn’t clearly communicate your value to your potential customers. Just like a larger company, investing time in the planning your website around your customer personas will help you get better results.

Also: How to Solve 3 Annoying B2B Sales Problems Using Buyer Personas

If you haven’t updated your personas in a long time, do so before building your site. Make sure you understand what problem your customers are trying to solve, and then make a clear explanation of how your business solves that problem part of your website requirements.

2.Contact information is obvious

Let’s face it, one reason your small business has a website is to give potential customers a way (or at least the information) to contact the company for new business purposes. Don’t test the patience of site visitors by hiding your contact information on a second page or at the bottom of the screen — make it prominent. List your phone number or contact information at the top left or top right of your company’s homepage, and, if possible, on every page of the site so that there’s never a question of how to get in touch.

Depending on your industry, it may also be appropriate to take it a step further and provide several different contact options — phone, email, contact form, live chat — so that customers will never miss an opportunity to get in touch.

3. Prospective buyers have plenty of content to sink their teeth into

Don’t just take time to make sure the design and the technology behind your website are updated. Effective redesigns also examine content. The way content is organized, the way it’s presented to potential customers, and the way it’s written play a pivotal role in making your small business website a sales tool. As buyers visit your small business website to learn more and consider all their options, your website has an opportunity to be a part of that decision-making process — but only if you build in targeted content opportunities to do so.

Potential customers come to your website to learn more. Let me use our own website as proof. For every person filling out the form to contact us, over 110 people fill out a form to download one of our e-books or other information.

Giving people information they can use – but that require some contact information to get – can help warm up a sales pipeline and generate leads you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten.

Also: Do B2B Buyers Really Fill Out Web Forms to Download Content?

Eighty-eight percent of B2B companies of all sizes used content marketing last year, and they used their company website to distribute that content. Successful websites for small businesses meet high standards of user experience and design, but also high standards for engaging your customer throughout his buyer’s journey with high-quality content on your blog and other resources.

4. Pays attention to the technical details

How your small business website functions online is just as important as how targeted it is to your customer’s needs.

Technical details that should be carefully considered include:

• Making sure your website is built in such a way that it will be optimized for search engines
• Page load time is kept to a minimum for the best user experience and search engine optimization
• Considering how the website will scale to fit mobile device screens, and if you’ll deliberately remove or add information when viewed on a mobile screen
• Building a website to make it incredibly easy to update, even with no code knowledge whatsoever

Websites that don’t show up in Google search results, take too long to load, or don’t appear correctly on mobile or tablet devices won’t help you achieve your business goals.

Don’t let your technical options overwhelm you — work with a partner (in house or outsourced) that will walk you through your SEO and advertising options, as well as maximize your page load speed and website responsiveness.

Weigh the options: Should you outsource your website design?

If your website isn’t performing as well as it could, you’re leaving leads and money on the table that could help your business grow. That’s why so many small businesses are redesigning and rebuilding their websites with these four points in mind.

The post 4 Things That Make Small Business Websites Great appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

Since B2B marketers who use blogs receive 67 percent more leads than those that do not, 76 percent of B2B marketers in 2015 planned to increase their content marketing efforts. And since those marketers want those people finding their blog articles through search engines to eventually become leads, they pair their blogging efforts with must-read lead magnets.

Recommended: Do B2B Buyers Really Fill Out Web Forms to Download Content?

What is a Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet is an attractively designed, free download or authoritative information that entices people to give some basic contact information in exchange for access to the information. Lead magnets help you identify real people that visit your website and confirm that there’s at least some interest in your product or service. Lead magnets also reinforce brand value, establish authority in your industry, position your company as a helpful resource during a buying decision, and more.

There’s just one problem — many companies struggle to identify what kind of B2B lead magnets will be the most effective for their customers and how to create them without an enormous investment of time and money.

If you’re just starting out, here’s your first break: you don’t necessarily have to generate a completely new piece of content for your lead magnet. Many companies already have materials, white papers, collateral, and more that can be used as lead magnets if they’re tweaked a small amount. In fact, if you find that people are clicking and downloading a PDF on your website, that’s a great piece to start with.

Recommended: 5 Ways Gated Content Can Help You Generate Better Leads

But because variety is key, it’s likely that over time you’ll need to develop other kinds of lead magnets so that there are plenty of opportunities for potential customers to show their interest.

Here are five ideas for B2B lead magnets that you can create to entice more clients to get in touch:

1. Downloadable Guides, White Papers, and eBooks

One of the most traditional B2B lead magnets are downloadable PDF guides or white papers with industry insight or original research. This is a low-risk way for a prospective client to get a taste of the content, branding, and value you offer.

Because a PDF is the most effective way to share a lot of content in a relatively small, beautifully-formatted package, this kind of B2B lead magnet is best for customers that want to be educated about a certain topic or service, or who need to have all of the details at once.

For example, one of our clients is a custom die and tool machinery manufacturing company. Since their clients often need highly technical and detailed information in order to make a purchase decision, their most effective lead magnets are the white papers that dive into a topic and share the company’s technical expertise. 40-50% of the people that see the lead magnet download it, helping to produce qualified opportunities for their sales department.

2. Checklist, Template, or Preparation Guide

Another kind of downloadable PDF B2B lead magnet is content in the form of a checklist or preparation guide specific to your industry. For this effort, you’ll want to avoid giving away proprietary information and but still provide insight into what separates you from your competitors. When done carefully, it’s a very effective way to provide a service or value to your customer that also helps them see the value of working with you directly.

For example, the same die and tool company mentioned in the first example often needs to assist its customers in developing a formal “request for proposal” (RFP). Since this is such an important part of the process for getting the best possible customized machine, the company developed a detailed checklist that walks the customer through the best way to craft an RFP.

If your company helps customers with any important, recurring problems, a print-and-use checklist or template that helps them move forward on the issue will make for a very attractive lead magnet.

3. Webinars and Webcasts

Video has been an increasingly popular form of entertainment and information online for a few years now, and even B2B marketers are jumping on the format: last year, 79 percent of content marketers used video as a content marketing tactic.

If you have an interesting blog post, set of research, or concept that you can present on, consider hosting a webinar or recording a video (or both) and presenting it as a B2B lead magnet that customers can access when they provide their information. This format will meet the needs of both visual and audial learners as well as people that prefer to learn via face-to-face communication.

Think your topic’s too technical? Then you might be an even better fit for a video lead magnet than you think. Often technical industries are overrun with text-heavy content downloads, making your video or audio recording stand out against your competitor’s content.

4. LinkedIn Groups

Getting like-minded people in the same “room” is a powerful way to make people feel successful and supported. So why not assist your customers in this way? Another creative B2B lead magnet idea is to start and moderate a member’s only LinkedIn group around a certain topic. Not only will this place your organization in the position of a thought leader and community builder, but even if you never make a sale (which is unlikely), you’ll have access to the questions, comments, and interactions of a group of engaged prospective customers.

A moderated group is a great idea for your company if you have a large customer base, a large number of people interested in your product, and are engaged in social media discussions. This will provide a forum in which participants can offer suggestions, interesting perspectives, and will enjoy participating in those discussions.

For example, Salesforce.com runs a LinkedIn group and invests in carefully moderating the group’s content and members. The result? Over 50,000 marketers, companies, and readers who are in different stages of engaging with the Salesforce product but who all enjoy being a part of that community.

5. Email Courses

Along the same lines as an instructional guide, an email course is an automated series of emails or PDF downloads dedicated to teaching a prospect about a particular tool or problem over a set period of time. And if you already have marketing automation set up, creating a course can be as simple as creating a series of emails on the same topic.

Using an email course as a B2B lead magnet might be right for you if using your product requires a certain level of education or if your sales team tends to answer the same questions over and over again.

For example, an SEO company that keeps getting questions like, “How can your company help me troubleshoot the most recent Google update?” might decide to offer a short course on the update so that clients feel that they have a professional’s insight into the changes. Or an IT company that offers remote services might provide a short educational course for non-techy clients that explains the many different types of managed services a company can deploy. In both cases, the company is demonstrating its value and expertise while forging a relationship with a prospective customer.

Want to get started with premium content and lead magnets? Read our tips here.

Lead magnets are critical to building relationships with prospective customers. Use this list to develop a few different options to increase the likelihood that your customers will find something that resonates with their needs.

The post 5 Types of B2B Lead Magnets That Make for High-Performance Content Marketing appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

So when an opportunity comes along to get out from behind the computer and engage with all of the top marketing minds of the year, it’s no surprise that so many marketers make it a point to attend live conferences whenever possible.

While we didn’t attend #CMWorld2016 in Cleveland this year, we know the value of getting involved in the digital conversation of conferences like this.

So even if you couldn’t set foot on the conference floor, you can still get a lot out of the conference by using it to inform the network of marketers you follow online.

For those of you who couldn’t make it either, here’s a look at some of the top speakers and most insightful attendees from this year’s CMWorld 2016:

Mark Hamill, Keynote Speaker

He’s such a headline grabber that it’s impossible not to mention CMWorld 2016’s keynote speaker, Mark Hamill. And while many marketers wondered what he could possibly contribute to a conversation about content marketing, Hamill retorts, “You don’t get to work in your chosen profession every year since 1970 without knowing how to market yourself.”

Hamill may not have a lot of technical advice to give to those already in the field, but his general encouragement is something that none of us should get tired of hearing: sometimes tenacity is more important than talent, and you have train yourself to recognize and seize opportunities if you want to get a big break in business. Follow Hamill for a quick laugh (especially if you’re a Star Wars fan) but also as an example of how to authentically engage with 1.25 million followers.

Jeannine Mulliner, Attendee

Jeannine Mulliner is a B2B marketing writer who attended CMWorld for the first time this year and loved it. Mulliner tweets about content generation, social media engagement, and the important role of failure in business. She also created a popular #CMWorld2016 write-up you can read here. Follow Mulliner if you want to get her insight on how to make B2B content emotive and evocative despite its habit of being boring and dry.

Ann Handley, Keynote Speaker

Ann Handley is best known for her work with the Marketing Prof’s website, but did you also know she’s a Wall Street Journal best-selling author of the book Everybody Writes? That explains why she took to the stage at #CMWorld2016 to explain how marketers can attract attention in a sea of “sore eyes.”

The most important lesson we can all benefit from remembering is that every campaign, update, and article needs to start with “WHY.” Use customer personas to chart a path for your customers that actually leads where you want to go — not simply to sterile shares and likes, but to actual customer action.

Jill Golden, Attendee

The tweet shared above that quotes Ann Handley is just one of hundreds Jill Golden has shared on Twitter over the past few months. If you create content, this strategist and former editor will keep your feed full of relevant and actionable blog posts, quotes, and followable marketers.

Travis Wright, Speaker

Travis Wright is the Chief Marketing Technologist for CCP Global and the Tech Tools for Entrepreneurs columnist at Inc. For his #CMWorld2016 presentation, he spoke on how to develop and execute a social business strategy, highlighting the critical role of customer experience, objectives, and personas in the process.

Travis is an excellent source of technical knowledge for his Twitter followers, commenting on current and emerging software and hardware trends as disparate as Apple and Ford. Follow him for easy-to-understand insights on social metrics, SEO, and more.

Kelly Reising, Attendee

Kelly Reising is a copywriter and project manager who dove head first into #CMWorld2016 Twitterverse, tweeting mostly about the customer journey, content creation strategies, and Major League Baseball. Follow Reising for her re-tweets of a variety of different marketing experts, as well as her detailed write-up of Ann Handley’s workshop that you can read here.

While nothing beats the intense and informative experience of attending a conference live, you don’t have to miss out on everything just because you stayed home. Use this list to fill your online network with talented marketers so that you’re always up to date on what’s new in content marketing.

photo credit

The post 6 Marketers You Need to Follow From #CMWorld2016 appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

Some companies we talk to have WordPress websites and while they have HubSpot or are considering HubSpot, they aren’t quite ready to put their website on the HubSpot COS. Some companies require advanced functionality on their websites that HubSpot COS can’t handle.

For those that use WordPress to power the company website, we wanted to share a few ways that you can use WordPress and HubSpot together. Read on to discover six ways you can use HubSpot and WordPress together to grow your business.

1. Install the HubSpot Tracking Code for WordPress plugin.

Plugins are third-party tools you can use to add functionality to your WordPress website without doing any coding yourself. For example, the “HubSpot Tracking Code for WordPress” plugin allows you to easily add tracking to your WordPress site without getting into HTML or CSS. You can also add HubSpot-recommended plugins to your site that help you manage your RSS feed, blog subscribers, author profiles, social share buttons, and more.

2. Use HubSpot to track the SEO and effectiveness of your WordPress pages.

Many marketers use HubSpot’s Page Performance report to finally see which marketing efforts work and which don’t. Because the Page Performance report tells you how well all of your web pages are optimized (even your web pages on WordPress), you can use the score and actionable advice to optimize core service pages and other WordPress pages, too. All you’ll need to do in order to access this data is have your HubSpot tracking code embedded on your WordPress pages.

When you create calls to action for core website content, service pages, and your blog in HubSpot, integrate them into your WordPress website pages by using the provided embed code. Combining HubSpot and WordPress in this way allows you to use the Page Performance report in HubSpot to measure the effectiveness of the calls to action on your WordPress pages.

3. Embed HubSpot calls to action on your WordPress pages.

Having a website that generates contacts for your business requires getting them to take an action. Placing calls to actions on every page is critical.

Create your calls to action in HubSpot, then embed them on your WordPress web pages so you can measure the click rates of all your pages and send traffic to lead generating landing pages.

In our work with HubSpot and websites, we see a lot companies that have bought HubSpot but haven’t fully integrated its capabilities into their websites. One thing that many companies overlook is replacing existing buttons and key links with HubSpot calls to action. This will let you measure which button or link is being clicked most frequently.

4. Embed your HubSpot email sign-up form on your WordPress site.

Your email sign-up form offers another crossover opportunity. HubSpot users often manage their email list with HubSpot, but this list doesn’t automatically connect with your WordPress website, which is where your subscribers may decide to sign up for your list.

Connect your WordPress website and HubSpot list by embedding your HubSpot email sign-up form into your WordPress template. You might also want to test using your form inside a box that appears after a certain amount of time or a certain amount of scrolling. The free Boxzilla WordPress plugin works well for this.

5. Integrate a HubSpot contact form on your WordPress site.

First-time website users often use a third-party plugin for contact forms such as Gravity Forms or Contact Form 7. While these plugins work just fine as contact forms, HubSpot users can do better. Using an embedded HubSpot contact form will save you a valuable step by sending the customer’s data directly into HubSpot so you can track it and start a contact profile.

To add your HubSpot contact form to your WordPress site, simply create your form in HubSpot and copy the embed code. Then open the page in WordPress you’d like the form on, click the “text” tab, and paste the code in place.

If you still want to use Gravity Forms or Contact Form 7, you can still connect them to HubSpot using add-ons, but we don’t recommend this unless your contact form has complex functionality.

6. Use HubSpot to develop a warm lead list.

If your company has sales reps that need fresh leads on their prospecting list, you can use your WordPress – HubSpot integration to do it. HubSpot’s CRM allows you to get a daily list of companies that visit your company’s website, along with pages they visited and some basic company information.

Armed with this information, your sales reps can find contacts at those companies and reach out.

All you’ll need to get this information is the HubSpot tracking code installed on your WordPress website.

Both HubSpot and WordPress are powerful tools that can be used separately to achieve great results. But we’ve seen time and time again that when you combine a world-class website platform with the number one marketing platform in the world, you can truly maximize growth.

The post How to Use HubSpot and WordPress Together to Grow Your Business appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

Naturally, they had a lot of questions.

They wanted to know about process. They had questions about how to portray their growing company in a more professional light since they just raised their prices and service levels.

We discussed branding and how to make their company’s marketing message resonate with medical practice administrators and other high-level business managers they wanted to reach.

They wanted to know if a website was supposed to be “informative” or whether it should be a lead generation tool.

All wonderful questions.

You might be having the same thoughts. Where should you start? You have a traditional sales organization and while you might be interested in all this inbound marketing stuff — or at least a website redesign — does it really make sense for your company right now?

The truth is there’s a really simple way to make your website a better sales tool that will feed your sales team with a growing lead list daily, and it doesn’t involve redesigning your website.

What’s the simplest way to make your company website a lead generation tool?

The companies we speak with that are thinking about website redesign want to make their website a lead generation tool and use it to sell more products or services. They want to be able to know which companies visit their website so they can build their lead list. They want a website that either puts leads in Salesforce or another CRM.

Here’s one trick that’s so simple, you may not have thought of it.

Don’t redesign your website… yet.

For your company, it might be best to “test the waters” with your existing website to see if they can generate leads and increase sales.

Our advice to the company I spoke with last week was to take “baby steps” by first moving their existing website from the current platform (Wix) to HubSpot.

This first “baby step” will provide 6 benefits to their company:

• HubSpot includes a feature that tracks all companies that visit your website, how many times they’ve visited and what pages they viewed. The sales staff can use this visit list as a lead list for prospecting.
• HubSpot includes a free CRM. The company sales staff uses Excel to manage their lead lists now. The CRM will help them be more organized, track conversations and manage sales documents or email templates so nothing falls between the cracks.
• The HubSpot website manager (called the “COS,” or Content Optimization System”) will be easy for the marketing director to update more frequently.
• The HubSpot website manager also provides a platform that’s easy to develop later when new content is needed.
• The company can add call to action buttons and landing pages for lead generation offers as they write them — even starting with the company brochure, whitepapers and other collateral.
• Moving the website to a platform that gives you lead intelligence requires less investment than a full website redesign.

As the company I spoke with embraces these new tools, they stand a much better chance of identifying and closing new business. As that happens, there’s more money to invest in redesigning the website and adding some lead magnets to significantly increase leads for the sales team.

Did you know that simply putting your website on a different platform can give you insight into what prospects are visiting your website? Do you use your website to build a lead list? Does your sales team prospect companies that visit your website?

If these ideas sound interesting to you, then we should talk. We specialize in websites that produce a return on investment because they generate leads for companies. Once the website is in place, we can help improve brand awareness and get more visitors, resulting in even more leads. If you’d like to learn more, reach out to me here.

The post The Simplest Way to Make Your Website a Lead Generation Tool Is… appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

This week we’d like to introduce you to Katy DeLeon, Vice President of Marketing of Narrative Science.  Narrative Science is a advanced natural language generation company based out of Chicago, Illinois that provides software solutions for data analysis.

Here’s an inside look at how Katy organizes Narrative Science’s digital marketing presence and navigates the challenges that come with the territory:

Q: Could you share a little about your business and your customers?

Katy: We are an enterprise software company based in Chicago, with offices in New York and Washington, D.C.

Our advanced natural language generation (Advanced NLG) platform, Quill, helps companies automatically transform data into narratives, enabling them to improve decision-making, increase employee productivity and provide a better customer experience — all through the power of storytelling.

We have over 70 enterprise customers such as USAA, Deloitte, MasterCard, and the U.S. intelligence community and over 15,000 small-to-mid-sized businesses and marketing agencies using our Google Analytics reporting application, Quill Engage.

Q: What challenges come with marketing to this customer segment?

Katy: Advanced NLG is an emerging technology category that requires us to focus on both brand and category awareness.

This presents a challenge for a start-up company in that a big portion of our marketing must be spent on broader, high-level education. We must first help companies understand what Advanced NLG is and then show how Advanced NLG can deliver value to their organizations.

As Advanced NLG has so many applications, we are communicating to many different customer segments that span across functions (sales, marketing, finance) and industries (financial services, healthcare, software).

Q: What kinds of strategies has your company implemented to overcome these challenges?

Katy: There are three primary strategies we have implemented to overcome these challenges. They include:

• building awareness among industry influencers and the mainstream business audience through PR and thought leadership,
• educating enterprise organizations about our solutions with content and case studies, and
• providing ways for companies to experience our technology via partnerships, like those we have in place with Qlik, Microsoft, and Vermillion.

Q: What kinds of strategies has your company implemented specifically to get more website traffic?

Katy: We’ve undertaken a combination of SEO and paid media.

For SEO, our team did a keyword mapping exercise. We developed a keyword strategy aligned to our brand, technology category and business solutions. Then, we set goals to rank high (1 to 10) on all topics, tracked keywords bi-weekly to both identify increases/decreases in page rank and to find trends for keyword values and traffic increases within Google Analytics.

We utilized paid media, retargeting and email campaigns to convert anonymous visitors to prospects and convert prospects to qualified sales leads.

All these efforts increased website traffic.

Q: Which of those strategies were the easiest to implement? Which of those strategies showed the most success?

Katy: The easiest to implement was our retargeting campaigns.

We were seeing a segment of visitors who hit certain pages on our website but did not convert, so we retargeted these specific visitors with relevant CTA’s to bring them back to relevant assets and pages within our site.

The most successful strategy has been our SEO keyword mapping, designed to drive traffic to our solution pages. Our ability to rank high for solution-specific keywords has helped us both increase traffic and the number of qualified leads from these pages.

Q: What processes does your company have in place/ tools do you use to make your marketing more efficient?

Katy: We utilize a mix of programmatic, CRM/MAP and content platforms to make our marketing activities and marketing/sales tech stack more efficient.

This includes a core MAP and CRM software integration to monitor lead lifecycle progress, multi-touch attribution, and pipeline contribution/forecasting. We also integrate a number of best-of-breed solutions into our MAP/CRM core to ensure all data and lead records are flowing to the same data source and can be easily analyzed and mined for progress patterns and efficiencies.

We use this data in frequent discussions to inform decisions on where to quickly pivot toward success and rectify areas of inefficiency.

Q: How do you keep your CEO engaged in the results of your marketing efforts?

Katy: We have a monthly operations meeting with functional leads to share results of agreed-upon metrics and KPIs, also published in a report.

The report includes insights related to lead lifecycle metrics over the past 12 and 18 months and traffic and conversion data for activities and assets (web pages, blog, SEO, content engagement, paid media.)

It also highlights marketing contribution to pipeline and bookings either sourced or influenced by demand generation activities.

By having an integrated view of our sales and marketing efforts, it gives our CEO a comprehensive view of how our strategy is performing towards our broader company goals.

Q: Which blogs and publications do you make time to read to help you keep on top of upcoming marketing trends?

Katy: I have a few – I highly recommend subscribing to Seth Godin’s blog and the Sales Benchmark Index (SBI) blog. Also, Marketo, Moz and HubSpot all have informative, topical blogs with applicable advice.

Thank you for sharing your insights, Katy!

About Katy DeLeon

With over 15 years experience in marketing industry-first technologies, Katy leads the Narrative Science brand strategy and oversees corporate communications, solutions marketing, and demand generation. Previous to Narrative Science, Katy led marketing efforts at Mattersight Corporation along with executing on a full brand launch. From 2000 to 2011, she held a number of marketing management roles at Adobe, including leading the global campaign marketing efforts for the Customer Experience Management and Digital Marketing businesses.

The post Marketing Manager Insider: Katy DeLeon of Narrative Science appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

But here’s an interesting situation that comes up for many niche B2B companies that start blogging regularly. People contact you after identifying with something you wrote. Readers start to leave comments and questions that aren’t direct sales inquiries but represent a certain level of interest and opportunity.

So, what do you do about it? Get a sales rep on the lead ASAP? Thank them for the comment or for connecting and leave it there? Or do you ignore the comment and hope the customer takes the next step and reaches out to your sales rep?

If you’re not sure how to take a lukewarm conversation or sales trigger to the next level, here’s how. Let’s take a look at how to respond to inbound marketing leads that come specifically from the blog on your company’s website.

Be Helpful First

Sales has gone through a critical shift in the last 10 years. Traditional tactics still have their place, but instead of expensive marketing placements and hard-hitting advertisements, niche B2B companies are increasingly using their websites to draw customers in and establish a relationship. That’s why when an inbound marketing lead leaves a comment on your blog, your first priority is not to sell but to help.

Creating relationships with customers requires a give and take of information and support. When you give in the form of advice and insights, your prospects feel like you have invested in them and they are motivated to stay engaged out of a sense of reciprocity.

Avoid the Hard Sell

It may be counterintuitive in your industry, but hand in hand with being helpful first is avoiding the hard sell. When a customer leaves a comment or a question on your blog, just posting, “Great question. Email me at Sales@Company.com if you want to hear more about this product,” it shifts that conversation from being mutual to transactional.

The purpose of your blog is to educate and increase interest, not to close deals. When people leave comments on your blog, make sure you meet the need of the reader (an answer to a question or your advice) rather than your need to sell a product or service. Always work to answer the question in a helpful and educational way, and then provide a follow up address in case the client wants to hear more.

Use the Information

Just because you aren’t jumping on this opportunity to make an immediate sale doesn’t mean an inbound marketing lead is not immediately valuable. When a customer interacts with your content, treat it as a conversation starter. You can also use that feedback to inform the profiles of your ideal customer and other marketing efforts.

For example, a blog post that is read frequently, receives comments from your target audience or has a higher click rate when sent to your email list is a blog post that has resonated with your audience. Take that as an invitation to dive deeper into that topic in a white paper or premium content download, and then follow up with the readers who took action on the blog post. In the same way, you can use a lack of popularity of certain blog post topics to decide to edit, delete, or reposition the post to be more applicable to your audience.

If you want to benefit from inbound marketing leads from your blog, you must change your mindset. While your ultimate goal is to sell a higher volume of products or services, the immediate goal is to create and maintain relationships with your customers and prospects. Use these tips to get into that mindset and make the most of inbound marketing leads that come through your blog.

Are you thinking, “this is all great, but we’re not getting leads from our blog?” If so, our team can help. Let us show you how we’ve done it for companies like yours. Get started here.

The post How Should You Respond to Inbound Marketing Leads From Your Blog? appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

So, how should you proceed when you’ve carefully weighed the pros and cons of working with an agency and decided to hire a digital marketer full time? You can’t just assume that all digital marketers have the same skillsets or that every digital marketer is a good fit for every position.

Your company is unique, so you are going to require different strengths and skills from your full time marketer. It’s important to compare all your candidates by the same standards, and then rank those standards based on your company’s individual needs.

Here are six characteristics that you’ll want to look for when you’re hiring a digital marketing professional:

1. Specialization

One of the dangers of hiring an in-house marketer is that you end up with a generalist: someone who has general knowledge, but no depth in any one particular area. If you end up hiring a generalist that needs specialization, you must be prepared to train them (or pay to have them trained) at your own expense.

If you work for a manufacturer, it’s unlikely that you’ll need a social media specialist. A technical writer with blogging and some search engine optimization experience will be a much better fit. If you’re hiring for a medical practice, that social media experience (and paid advertising experience) will come in handy.

2. Lifelong Learner

A digital marketer should stay informed with the latest headlines in online marketing. That’s a given. But the most qualified digital marketer for your company will also have knowledge of your particular industry, or at least prepare for the interview process by spending hours researching it.

Hiring a digital marketer with experience in your industry can reduce the time it takes for that person to be effective and save training costs.

Aside from experience, we also look for people that are curious – those that have creative ideas and the drive to test them and learn from them.

3. Communication

When you hire a digital marketer, this person must work with a number of stakeholders in order to get her job done, from company leadership and other employees to customers and freelancers. This person may also need to hire subcontractors from time to time, such as designers and writers. All of these interactions will require polished people skills, so make sure you screen for communication habits that suit the needs of your organization during the interview.

4. Efficient Time Manager

This might be true of anyone you hire, but look for an efficient time manager. Seek out candidates that know how to get a lot done in a day. Digital marketing is complicated and can overwhelm someone who doesn’t know how to manage his time effectively.

5. Strategic Thinker

Marketing managers tend to fall into the trap of getting caught up in day to day execution. While tactics are where the “rubber meets the road,” you’ll want to hire someone who doesn’t have a problem coming up with fresh ideas. You’ll need someone with the analytical skills to decide what’s right for the company (and which things aren’t worth trying).

6. DARC-Age Skills

As HubSpot partners, we wouldn’t have a complete list without suggesting HubSpot’s “Hiring in the DARC Ages” download, which identifies four important characteristics for digital marketers: digital citizenship, analytical skills, web reach, and content creation. Check out the download for more information on how to screen digital marketer applicants for these skills.

Once you have the right candidates, here’s a suggestion to find out who really stands apart from the pack:

The best way we’ve found to differentiate strong candidates in the interview process is to have them do an exercise to show you how they think and where they’re strongest skill-wise. For example, you might want to have your finalists write a 2-page summary of marketing activities that they would propose for your company and why based on what they learned about the company in the interview process.

If hiring in-house doesn’t turn out to be the best choice, you might find our article on “6 Traits To Look For When Hiring An Online Marketing Agency” helpful.

If hiring a full-time digital marketer is a good fit for your company, I hope this post has given you some things to look for. What type of marketer is right for your company and why? Do you have tips to share with other companies that are looking to hire a digital marketing professional? Leave them in the comments below.

The post What to Look For When Hiring a Digital Marketer appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

The ideal scenario would be to have all content on a website as web pages. However, there are some instances where this isn’t practical (like large user manuals). So how do you determine what should be a web page vs a PDF?

The simple answer: anything that you intend a user to read on their screen should be turned into a web page, and anything meant for printing would be a PDF.

Before going further it’s important to understand that PDF formats were intended for a standard sheet of paper and to be printed, not to be read in a browser window. Because they don’t have the same navigation as the rest of your website, and because a user has to zoom in and out to be able to digest the content, it’s a less than ideal way of putting content on the web.

Converting PDFs to web pages can be a large undertaking for companies and organizations who house many PDFs on their website, so deciding which PDFs to convert may be your best first step. Below are some recommendations for when to have PDFs vs. web pages, and best practices on how PDFs should act on a website.

When should a PDF be used?

In instances where your content mandates being printed, if it needs to be submitted and it can’t be done digitally, or when the content is lengthy and would be unmanageable to convert to web pages.

When are web pages better?

Having web pages provides the best user experience and can potentially help streamline your business processes, which is why they’re our recommendation. For example, instead of having a PDF form, create a landing page with a form. This can then be coded to track the number of visits and forward the submitted information in an email to the correct representative, cutting down on manual entry or hard-copy storage.

Don’t get locked into keeping things as PDFs only because that’s how they’ve always been done. If you do have PDFs on your website that need to stay, make sure they’re not frustrating your website user’s experience.

Tips for using PDFs effectively on web pages

• Always make it clear a link opens/downloads a PDF.
  Designate that a link is a PDF and make it evident to the user that this link is different than a link that is taking them to another page on the site, or to another site altogether. This can be done by incorporating in a PDF icon or even writing “(PDF)” at the end. No one likes it when something unexpectedly downloads to their machine or device—don’t catch your user off guard.
• PDFs should always open in a new tab.
  This can be easily set up in the code of your website. Because the main navigation from your website has gone away, it can often disorient the user. More often than not the user with close the window, the same way they would close a PDF in a reader; only to find out they lost their place on your website.
• Track your PDF downloads.
  What better way to find out how often your users are engaging with your PDF than to track the number of times it’s clicked? This can be done using Google Analytics and gives you a better gage as to whether certain PDFs should stay on your site or not.

In summary, as a general rule, try to convert PDF content whenever possible to a web page. But in the instances where the intention truly is for printing, use the guides provided to determine how to maximize their use on your site.

The post Should You be using PDFs or Web Pages? appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

The fact is that your economic development organization website doesn’t need to win any awards. It simply needs to target the right audiences with the right information, excel at generating leads, then have the technological backbone to help your staff work those prospects more efficiently.

Modern EDO websites are more than pretty brochures. There is significant technology available today that lives behind the scenes, and you probably don’t know about some of that technology.

So if you’re planning to redesign your economic development organization website this year or next, it’s vital that you have at least a basic understanding of these things that your economic development organization website needs to be successful.

Does your website have these?

1. Responsive design for mobile devices

Not only does a responsive website make your website more accessible to the on-the-go business traveler that’s likely researching location alternatives, but a responsive website is easier to read on smartphones and tablets, and search engines value mobile friendly websites more than non-friendly ones.

It’s 2016. Anything less than a fully responsive website is unacceptable.

Related:

2. It’s updated regularly

This one’s not exactly rocket science, but you may be surprised to know how many EDOs have severely outdated information on their websites.

Regular updating means that all content needs to be kept up to date, including:

• Economic development data (needs to be updated as often as once per quarter)
• Company announcements and closings
• EDO staff directory and contact information (including at a minimum what each person handles so a prospect can decide who to contact)
• Photography
• Company profiles/testimonials/videos
• Local government news as it affects economic development policy

3. Information about existing companies and industries

As much as your EDO would like to land that “whale” of a prospect, the reality is that projects that are smaller in scope are more the norm than the huge project. In many cases, it’s executives of small and medium-sized companies that are making location decisions.

These prospects want to see social proof. Don’t just list your target industries — profile companies that are succeeding in those industries and why. Company executives want to hear from their peers, not read your polished marketing collateral that only highlights the positive aspects.

This means that you need a relationship with those existing businesses, and you need to hone in on what’s going on in their industry. What industry trends are happening? How are those trends affecting businesses in your target industries? Your website might be the only chance you’ll get to communicate these to a prospect.

4. Prospect identification

With modern websites, you can track just about anything. Having prospect identification capabilities means that you’re serious about lead generation.

Prospect identification software will give you a daily or weekly snapshot of the companies that visited your website and what pages they each looked at. You can use this information to target those companies with online advertising or organically build a direct mail list for a targeted campaign (without buying the expensive list).

5. Customer relationship management software, or CRM

Having a CRM means that you can keep all of your current, past and future prospect data and history in one place. You can either enter contacts and deal information manually, or your prospect identification software will feed your CRM with fresh leads based on website visits.

Imagine inputting some information about a deal, being able to see the people associated with that deal and their contact information. Imagine being able to track notes of conversations you’ve had on a person-by-person basis, and being able to set reminders or even automate responses. Imagine being able to see when they open your emails and visit your website. That’s the power of a CRM.

6. Sense of place

When a company relocates or expands in your locality or region, they might need to convince at least some employees to move. It’s important that you know what “outsiders” value about your place and highlight those on your website.

Your don’t need a fancy slogan, but you do need to look “lovable.” Good photography and some “social proof” in the form of testimonials helps more than you might think.

7. Lead magnets

Lead magnets might not be something that you’re familiar with, but essentially, the modern website has to attract leads using tactics other than just a “contact us” form. Let’s say, for example, that you are trying to attract foreign companies to Happyville, USA. You might author a guide to expanding your manufacturing operation in America in another language.

To get this guide, someone would need to fill in their name and email address. Then they are able to download some truly useful information, while you now have their name and email address in your CRM and can track that individual’s future activity on your website.

Related:

8. Social media capabilities

Sure, the ability to click over to your LinkedIn page or share your news release on Twitter is important. That’s been important for years, and frankly, it’s a given. But if your focus is on lead generation, you need to be monitoring social media for companies that you’re trying to attract.

The ability to monitor prospect social media feeds quickly and easily will alert you to what’s going on at those prospects and tip you off when there’s a company event that might affect you, such as funding or expansion. This will be a signal to contact them and follow up.

9. Email marketing capabilities

You may already have an account with a third party email provider that you use to blast out a newsletter. But is email capability built into your website? When prospects contact you or download your lead magnets, are you able to automate follow-up by email? Can you set up logic that automates responses when a prospect takes a specific action on your website, like downloading an Excel spreadsheet or a report?

EDOs need to move past blasting newsletters to the masses and tailor specific communications to those that take specific actions on their websites.

Hopefully this article has given you some new ideas and perhaps challenged your thinking about the boring “brochure” website. Use these 9 things to improve the prospect’s experience, improve your lead generation efforts, and make your EDO more efficient at prospect response.

The post 9 Things Modern Economic Development Organization Websites Need To Be Successful appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

For many businesses, website design is a passive task. Your team designs it once and it’s checked off your to-do list. But in a time when customers expect increasingly personalized web experiences, your website’s outdated functionality and lack of helpful information sends prospective customers the signal that you aren’t prepared to do business.

Even worse, it sends the signal that business is stagnant and not prepared to take on new business, which makes it even less appealing to work with you. After all, what thriving, modern business today doesn’t update their website with new information on a regular basis?

What can you do when your website is an embarrassment? Take action. Here are three moves you should make when it’s time to bring your company website design up to par:

1. Test your website with real people.

The best way to find out if your website design meets the needs of potential customers is to test the website with real customers. You can do it manually by identifying 5-10 customers with great working relationships and asking them to participate in a website review, or you can use paid online tools that will organize the review for you (but preferably not a drunk one). Either way, this test will allow you to make informed decisions based on impartial feedback.

Even if testing your website with real people is too technical or involved, you can improve what you say on your website by noting the questions and problems that your customers and prospects are facing. Are you talking more about your company or their issues? Seeking out an unbiased opinion or even a professional opinion can give you ideas you’ve never thought of.

Definitely don’t: Ask your friends to review your company website. Unless your friends happen to be your ideal target customer, the feedback you get may send you off course to meeting the needs of the people who won’t purchase from your business anyway.

2. Budget incremental improvements to your website design.

Very few of us would drive a car that had a flat tire for a day, let alone for a few months. So why would you expect your website to continue to generate new business for you if you invest nothing in maintaining it?

In between complete overhauls, all B2B companies need to invest in the following:

• Updating your content management system
• Testing messaging on your homepage
• Improving click rates from page to page and optimizing the conversion funnel (leading people down the path to becoming a sales opportunity)
• Writing a company blog that answers common customer questions
• Updating product/service information
• Measuring response rates for automated email workflows or lead followups and optimizing them with better messaging

Your website is an ongoing investment. If you’re delaying a major overhaul until a future point in time, that’s fine, but you must invest time and money in incremental improvements as you go. Try a growth driven design approach where you make small changes to your website — sometimes as little as one page at a time — and measure the improvements.

Also: Learn what a “growth driven design” approach is and how working on your website over time can actually make it less painful in the long run.

Definitely don’t: Let your website design grow stale. Your website is not a “set it and forget it” marketing tool. Even the most advanced website design will need to be maintained and tweaked over the years to remain an effective sales tool.

3. Consider planning for a new website design.

The process of redesigning a website can be so painful that we once had a CEO tell us “You can do marketing for us, just don’t redesign our website.” It doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, website redesigns should be a rewarding, positive project. The problem is that many companies try to cut costs by working with less-than-professional providers.

Don’t let your fear of a bad experience keep you from investing in what your business needs. Ask the right questions during your planning to ensure your website will be a business development engine for your business.

Become familiar with the process so you know who needs to be involved when and how much time and effort is required on your team’s part.

Definitely don’t: Ask a neighbor, friend, boss’s kid to redesign the website. If you want a professional website, work with a specialist with experience, like your in-house web designer or a professional website design agency. Anything less will leave you with an embarrassing redesign that will also cost you business.

Your outdated website is pushing away prospects rather than attracting them, and you can’t afford to leave it as it is.

Review these suggestions and ask yourself the tough questions.

“Is our website living up to potential?”

“What don’t I know that I need to know?”

“Are my assumptions about the company website wrong?”

It might be time to turn that embarrassing website into a business development machine. If it’s time to seek some advice from a professional, start here.

The post Embarrassed By Your Company Website Design? Here’s What To Do appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

You floated the idea about starting a content marketing program using your company website and got pushback from the CEO.

As a marketing manager, it’s up to you to show your leadership team that digital marketing is worth it — that budget spent online is going to get a better return than dollars spent elsewhere.

Don’t let the pressure get you down, because you’re not alone. Here are three articles you should share with your CEO to help you make your case and get the support of the C-Suite in your daily marketing operations:

1. Revolution from The Harvard Business Review

The Harvard Business Review is trusted voice for leaders in the C-Suite. Its article, “The Content Marketing Revolution” is a quick but thorough look at the evolving context of content marketing.

This article thoughtfully positions content marketing as a way to empower organizations to leverage their ideas, not a “flash in the pan” marketing strategy that sucks up the budget and may or may not deliver an ROI. After reading this article, your CEO will understand that content marketing is not a fading trend but rather a calculated adaptation to the way today’s consumer wants to learn about companies.

2. A Day In the Life from Marketo

In “A Day In the Life of a Content Marketer,” Marketo details the many competing tasks that make up the responsibilities of a typical marketing manager. This is a great opportunity to show how much strategy, execution, and integration goes into the work you do without asking your CEO to sit for another boring daily update.

3. Storytelling from Copyhacker

Researchers from The Harvard Business Review to Forbes to Fast Company all agree that storytelling is a powerful tool for business growth and customer retention but rarely do they ever address how or why.

This mystery is finally revealed in Copyhacker’s ”Storyhacking: Cracking the Code Behind the Irresistible Selling Power of Stories,” and it’s a great opportunity to give your leadership team a deeper understanding of how storytelling connects with the bottom line.

For extra study on storytelling, follow this post with a TED Talk from Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, “The Clues to a Great Story.”

These perspectives will help your CEO understand content marketing, why companies do it and how it’s connected to the bottom line. Pair these posts with your own commentary to show your leadership team that the business is on the right track with content marketing.

The post 3 Articles Your CEO Needs to Read About Content Marketing appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

But inbound marketing isn’t a silver bullet, and it can take up to six to eight months to develop web traffic and cultivate it into paying customers.

We’ll occasionally speak with companies that are doing inbound marketing in-house, but aren’t seeing the results they are looking for. If that’s you, then it might be time to tweak your approach.

While we’ve troubleshooted the inbound marketing process in the past, there are essentially two ways to get more results from your inbound marketing:

1. Get more traffic to your website
2. Convert more of the website visitors you already have to leads

It sounds simple in principle, but evaluating these two opportunities in depth will lead you to more detailed actions you can take to get results from your inbound marketing.

Here’s a look at some things our team does (and you can do, too) to drive results from inbound marketing.

If you want to get more inbound marketing leads, you first have to understand the math. Your inbound marketing funnel has its own unique metrics.

You might find that for every 1,000 customers that visit your website, 100 of them contact your sales team and engage in the sales process (a 10% conversion rate).

Therefore, one way to get more inbound marketing leads is to increase the traffic to your website so that your 10% conversion rate yields more leads.

Are You Doing These Things to Get More Website Visitors?

How can you increase the traffic to your website? Here are four top ways:

1. Use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner to identify long tail keyword opportunities. Once you identify the keywords, target these keyword phrases by writing new blog posts focusing on those keywords.
2. Filter the results of the HubSpot Keyword Portfolio to identify which keywords in your keyword portfolio rank just outside the top ten results. A simple Google search will reveal which pages on your website rank for a given keyword. You then have a choice: create new pages/blog posts that would rank better than existing pages or optimize existing blog posts or pages to target these keywords.
3. Find ways to distribute content, such as guest posting and content syndication. Here, you’re promoting content somewhere other than your website.
4. Pay for extra exposure (Facebook and Google Adwords could be good choices). Send those clicks to conversion-focused content offers.

Are You Doing These Things to Convert More Inbound Marketing Leads?

As an alternative to getting more potential customers to your website, you can focus on increasing your conversion rate.

Let’s say that you improve your website conversion rate from 1% to 2%, or 5% to 10%. In either case, you’ve doubled the number of leads that you get from your website.

You can also convert more inbound marketing leads by focusing on improving your lead quality so that your website visitors are more qualified and are more likely to do business with your company.

Here are three things to try that have a track record of converting more website visitors to leads:

• Optimize your highest traffic pages with calls to action. For example, one of our healthcare clients found that web pages about their locations and the doctor’s profiles web pages were their most visited pages. However, they didn’t have any calls to action or engagement opportunities on those pages, so the only conversions they received were from clients who took the time to call during business hours. This is a prime opportunity for inserting lead generation opportunities and capturing leads before, during and after normal business hours.
• Optimize your highest traffic blog posts with calls to action. Remember that calls to action can be text links too. Try embedding them at the beginning, middle and end of web pages.
• Review the most complementary paid advertising efforts such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google Ads. Consider enlisting retargeting ads to convert traffic that came to the site that but didn’t make a decision.
• Use clear customer personas to develop keywords and advertising opportunities, thus increasing the likelihood that the highest quality lead will click through to your website.

If you want to improve your inbound marketing results and get more leads, start with either increasing website visits or optimizing your website for conversion.

The post How to Get Better Results From Your Inbound Marketing appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

Even if your existing website is fantastic, chances are you’ll want to update it someday. While website redesign can be a smart move, it could also cost you between 60-70 percent in potential search traffic if you’re not careful. So now’s the time to plan and make sure you have your ducks in a row.

Most website redesigns for small and medium sized companies will cause a 5% – 15% drop in website traffic in the short term even if done right. Fortunately, you can redesign your website without harming your business long term. Here’s five ways to do it:

1. Collect user feedback.

Before you update your site, it’s important to know which elements benefit most from a redesign. Gathering user feedback is the easiest way to determine this.

• What do your visitors want to see?
• What kinds of information do they expect on the homepage?
• Are there portions of your current website they find difficult to navigate?
• Is there something they need but aren’t getting?
• Is website copy unclear, or does it resonate?

Collecting this information at the beginning and even during the process will ensure your redesign is both efficient and effective. Tip: I’ve used UserTesting.com for this for years. You should also ask some current customers to participate. Use your email list for something other than promotion!

Another idea:

During your redesign, you’ll have differing opinions on design. Don’t let the HIPPo (highest paid person’s opinion) win out — listen to your customers instead. Here’s your chance to say you listen to your customers and actually do it.

2. Include 301 redirects

From a search engine optimization perspective, 301 redirects are a critical component of a website redesign, but they are often forgotten.

301 redirects are permanent redirect signs that transfer up to 90 percent of ranking power from an old web page to a new one. Page redesign typically results in 10-15 percent less traffic due to lost page ranking. However, correct use of 301 redirects can help mitigate this loss. For more information on how to implement 301 redirects, consult this tutorial.

301 redirects are done on the server side, so you’ll need to consult your web developer for this one. Just don’t overlook it!

3. Create and submit a new sitemap

Sitemaps are especially important during website redesign. Anytime you redesign your website, you’ll need to create and submit a new sitemap to Google using Google Search Console.

Even though you’re redirecting old URLs from your old website to new ones on the new website (see #2 above), you still need to submit the sitemap to let Google know about the new pages. This can help ensure any content that moves to a new URL is quickly discoverable by search engines.

If your website has fewer than 500 pages, you can create your sitemap file at xml-sitemaps.com’s Sitemap Generator. It’s free, quick and easy.

4. Include calls to action on every page

If you know ahead of time that you’ll lose 5% – 15% of your search engine traffic in the short term after a redesign, then making sure you have enough lead generation opportunities will offset that loss in traffic.

We’re redesigning a company website right now that previously had no calls to actions or landing pages. After digging, we found several resources that could be used as lead generation components, and the new website will have over 40 calls to action and over 30 landing pages. The leads this company will get after the redesign will surely offset any short term loss in traffic.

 5. Send a post-launch announcement with survey

Once your redesigned website is up and running, you will want to consider sending a post-launch announcement to your email file. This is especially important if your customers need to be able to locate a “login” or “support” link that they use frequently. For example, if a financial institution moves the account login button or form when it redesigns, then it’s imperative to let customers know.

Earlier this year the CEO of UpWork wrote an extensive blog post explaining the rationale behind his company’s decision to change its name and website, and sent it out via email.

At the same time you release your announcement, continue gathering user feedback and making needed changes to further optimize the site’s functionality. You can do this with more user testing, paying careful attention to changes in your web analytics KPIs. You might want to solicit some customer feedback in the email by asking them to visit your website and fill out a very short survey. Offer an open-ended “comments?” question in the survey so they can write what they like or don’t like about the new website. 

While redesigning a site can negatively impact its traffic and sales, it doesn’t have to. These five simple steps can help you avoid disaster and facilitate a smooth site redesign from start to finish.

The post 5 Ways to Redesign Your Website Without Damaging Your Business appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

For many companies, the solution to this problem is to bring employees on board to divide and conquer the editorial calendar. But while this comes with several significant benefits such as an increased diversity of voices and experience, it also comes with some hesitation: you may find yourself trying to recruit shy writers, busy executives, or people who just plain don’t want to write. What should you do?

Why You Need Diverse Subject Matter Expertise on Your Company Blog – A True Client Story

It’s important that subject matter experts in your company have their voices heard on the company blog. This idea became crystal clear as one of our account managers recently did some research for a client. As the account manager interviewed our client’s actual customers, it was clear that when they thought of our client’s company, they thought of one particular person – the CEO of the business.

The CEO was the company spokesman, made sales calls and was the “thought leader.” The problem is that there are other subject matter experts in the company that aren’t as well known because they haven’t had a way to widely distribute their thoughts until now.

Their customers – though completely satisfied with the service they received – wondered what would happen if the CEO left. The CEO clearly has a great reputation, but what about the other employees? Many of them have expert level mastery of the industry, too.

One recommendation we have for this client is getting others in the company involved in thought leadership. Yes, that means contributing to the blog regularly. But it also means sharing information on their social media accounts, writing for the company newsletter and more. Eventually this could lead to speaking engagements and true thought leadership in industries where they are targeting business development efforts.

It will allow the company to develop business and grow at a higher rate because everyone in the company to contribute.

Do These 3 Things To Get More Voices and Perspectives in Your Company Blog

Fortunately, hesitations to blogging and writing other forms of content can be overcome with the following three approaches to get more people involved.

1. Recruit specific voices.

“Everybody write!” is not an effective way to blog. Not everyone has a gift for writing. Not everyone has enough customer interactions to be “in touch” with the customer. Instead, your blog should be curated collections of voices that answer customer questions in their own unique style.

For some companies, this means gathering at least one person from each department and coaching that person to write with a unique voice. For other companies, that means that a writer or editor interviews subject matter experts and writes for them (see #3 below for more information on the interview approach).

2. Create a flexible calendar.

Giving subject matter experts a deadline can make blogging feel like a burden, but assignments without deadlines often disappear in the busyness of everyday tasks. Instead of either of these extremes, meet your team in the middle by adopting a flexible editorial calendar.

When you’re ready to bring in new voices, establish themes for each month or quarter and then ask each team member to deliver one or more blog posts before the month or quarter begins. Then schedule out the blog posts between that date and the next monthly or quarterly deadline.

Planning blog writing with a casual yet structured approach allows your team to contribute frequently without feeling like you’re adding to their job description because they can write on their timeline.

3. Embrace the interview.

The number one complaint most marketing managers get from fellow employees is that they’re simply too busy to contribute. That’s understandable, considering that many employees were brought on for their expertise, not their writing skills. However, the very thing that keeps your coworkers busy is the very reason they need to contribute to the company blog: they have a lot of experience and a lot of information to share.

Rather than asking subject matter experts to compose an article for the blog — which is a time-consuming task for even the most experienced writer — embrace the internal interview. Schedule 10-15 minutes with the coworker you’d like to feature on the blog, ask a few questions, and develop a blog post based on that conversation. That way you can feature your expert’s opinion without asking them to set aside 1-2+ hours to compose their thoughts.

If you’re blogging, it’s because you know it’s a valuable tool in your content marketing arsenal. However, successful company blogs rarely rely on one lonely marketing manager to keep them updated. Implement these ideas to bring your whole company on board with your blogging effort.

If you don’t already blog, don’t have someone to lead the effort, or if you lack that strong digital presence that makes you a leader in your industry, maybe we should talk and determine next steps for your company. You can schedule a time to talk here.

The post Who At Your Company Should Write Your Company Blog? appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

Whether you’re an experienced digital marketer, or just dipping your toes into the process for the first time, it’s very likely you’ve started to wonder about how you can help your content convert more leads. And while this is a specialized process — in fact, many copywriters and marketing firms specialize in CRO, or conversion rate optimization — there are a few things you can do today to help your company write web content that converts.

Aligning the Moving Parts of Website Content

When we talk about content, it’s important to note that we aren’t simply talking about the words you use as you write your website, blog or whitepapers. We’re talking about how your content marketing blueprint (the big picture plan of the content) and your content marketing assets (the format of the content) combine to create web content that converts.  It’s putting the pieces together that matters.

Each of these moving parts is important to itself and requires thoughtful planning. And while it may seem like the content development process is a large undertaking, investing time and attention in your overall strategy leads directly to higher conversion rates.

Approach Every Content Campaign With These Rules

With a content marketing blueprint in place that identifies the copy titles and formats that will most resonate with your prospective customers, you can bring your focus back to developing web content that converts.

For every asset you develop, make sure you follow the following three conversion-focused content rules:

1. Freely share your knowledge.

Carefully controlling who can learn what about how your company functions is an outdated business practice. While you should still protect proprietary information, just about everything else is fair game for attracting customers.

Collectively, your company has a lot of experience to share. Your people has stories to share. Don’t be afraid to open up and share this experience with customers who are hungry for authentic connection with a prospective partner.

2. Target each asset to a persona.

When you sit down to commission a blog article or white paper to support your content marketing efforts, it can be tempting to focus the project on as many people as possible in order to expand its reach. However, untargeted copy is bad copy, and targeting everyone actually ends up targeting no one.

For every asset you develop, pretend you’re answering a specific question asked by a specific person. Using this focused approach for all of your copy — whether you’re writing blog articles, white papers, case studies, or emails — will allow you to form a personal connection with each reader that your audience would otherwise opt out of.

I occasionally speak at different industry events, and like to put myself on the “hot seat” during Q&A time. That’s the same mindset I have during writing — to answer a direct question in hopes that others will overhear and take something away from the conversation.

3. Be conversational.

Different content formats require different tones of voice. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that formal is always better. For example, consider the impact of a polished article on The Harvard Business Review compared to a new blog post from marketing thought leader Seth Godin. These two types of content couldn’t be more different, and yet they’re equally effective for different people in different ways.

The web content you develop for your company doesn’t need to be scholarly or intricately polished to be effective (unless you’re selling to an academician). For many audiences, it can often be more effective if it is conversational and personal.

Consider each of these three steps and then click over to review your company’s website.

• Are you freely sharing knowledge, or alluding to the secretive benefits that arise from working with you?
• Are your blog posts targeted to one persona and one specific topic, or do they try to please everyone (and appeal to no one in the process)?
• Are you striking an informal and welcoming tone, or are you unconsciously reverting to stiff corporate-speak?
• Conversion copywriting is its own science, but these beginner tips can help you plan a website or marketing content project that delivers web content that converts.

The post 3 Steps to Writing Web Content That Converts Leads appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

There are tons of factors that play into a site’s SEO (search engine optimization). In fact, Google has a whole proprietary algorithm to calculate it. While it’s not imperative that you know every ranking factor, there are some things you should do as you design the company website. These five SEO-focused web design best practices will help your site get the notice it deserves.

1. Design Responsively

You’ve certainly read about how most people are shifting their Internet use from desktop computers to mobile devices (like a tablet or smartphone). Simply put, there are more mobile internet users than desktop internet users:

“52.7% of global internet users access the internet via mobile, and 75.1% of U.S. internet users access the internet via mobile.”
– https://hostingfacts.com/internet-facts-stats-2016/

The way mobile users see your website is so important that Google factors in whether your website is mobile friendly or not in its rankings.

So, if you want all of your potential customers to be able see and use your website no matter what device they’re on, you need to design it responsively. Responsive design uses technology that can detect what size screen and device a page is being viewed on, then present that page in the way that looks and functions best for that specific on-screen environment.

Responsive design can boost SEO because it helps lower your bounce rate and because Google takes into account “mobile-friendliness” when calculating a site’s SEO score.

2. Keep Images as Small as Possible

Images make a website look great, but they can also cause a page to load slowly, which detracts from its SEO score.

Keeping image size to a minimum is a considerate thing to do for your visitors because you don’t want to make them wait.

A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions and can increase your bounce rate. 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.

That’s a lot of pressure on your company to produce a website that loads quickly. So what should you do?

At Whittington Consulting, we’ve had a handful of projects this year where we focused on speeding up load time. During those projects, we learned that reducing image size was the #1 factor in speeding up a website’s load time.

Here are some things that we’ve done to reduce image size, and that you might want to consider, too:

• Resize your images before you put them on your website. If you upload a photo from a camera straight to the web, it may shrink the physical size of the photo but the file size will remain too large for web viewing.
• Bring your website images into Photoshop and save them at a lower quality. Unfortunately, there’s no magic quality setting here. You will have to adjust the quality settings until the image looks good enough.
• Run your images through a compression app like ImageOptim (Mac). We downloaded all images to a computer, batched them all through ImageOptim, re-uploaded them and cut image size as much as 90%.
• Use shaded boxes in place of background images, and use SVG images whenever possible.

3. Enable Caching

Another way to reduce your website’s load time and improve SEO is to enable page caching. When your web pages are cached, the files that make up your website are stored on your visitor’s computer or device. This means that when someone returns to your site, they don’t have to reload your entire page.

When designing your site, you can designate whether the page can be cached and how long it can be stored.

Some content management systems also allow what’s called template caching, meaning that all the parts of a template that renders your website can be pulled once and stored for a certain period of time. This will speed up the browsing experience, too.

4. Integrate Social Media Sharing

Even though Google has said that social media sharing isn’t a significant factor for SEO, we think that a high volume of social shares is a ranking signal.

Having your website shared on social media is a great way to boost its SEO. This is where your blog comes into play. Your blog is more likely to be shared than pages about your company, so checking this item off your list is as easy as including social media sharing buttons on news posts and blog posts.

The more your content is shared and seen, the more potential links can be earned, giving the website more credibility with search engines. If nothing else, this is a great chance for you to take advantage of some free marketing!

5. Usability

Good SEO isn’t just about keywords. You have to provide a good experience to customers who visit your website. All of the things we’ve mentioned above factor into usability. But there’s more…

• Are pages on the website specific enough to be relevant to their web search?
• Does your website content answer questions and anticipate customer needs?
• Is your website easy to navigate, or are the only links up at the top of every screen?

A quick and relatively inexpensive way to measure the usability of the company website is to use UserTesting.com. Here, you can recruit people to complete tasks that you give them. During these sessions, they “think out loud” and you can watch them use the website. This will help you identify things that you think work well, but real visitors may stumble on.

A company website can serve many purposes, but one of the most important is to help develop business opportunities. By designing with SEO in mind, you can help ensure that your site is a tool for generating more traffic and new leads.

The post You Need to Know These 5 Web Design Tips for Better Business Website SEO appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

As many marketing managers scramble to get their work done, many look for shortcuts. Companies are outsourcing writing, or even buying machine-generated content, to meet the demand. But how do you balance the time commitment for creating content and SEO with the need to connect with those reading it? How will you make your marketing more human?

Marketing technology is always on the cutting edge. Every time you login to LinkedIn, you read reports of new services, new products, and even new kinds of intelligence that are changing the world we live in and how we market our businesses.

Think of what’s changed in the last 2 years alone!

One of the latest trends is automating content production, with companies like Persado, Automated Insights, and Narrative Science taking customers and funding and promising that the content is just as good as any human could write.

Are we for automation here at Whittington Consulting? Yes and no. Careful marketing automation can be a huge time-saver and help your customers get the information they need to make purchasing decisions. Automating lead followup — done properly — can save your sales reps time while making sure that every lead gets communication.

Machine-generated content, on the other hand, or even content from content mills, is a whole different beast. In some cases, it can help with SEO, but it can also damage your relationship with customers once they click through to your website and discover content that lacks meaning and substance.

In addition to the risks associated with using automated content to represent your company, it also inspires a question that every company needs to consider regardless of where they source their content: how do we balance the technical needs of content and marketing (such as SEO) with the need to relate to people that you sell to?

Why Balance SEO With Readability?

The purpose of SEO content is to show up for relevant, common searches in hopes that people will visit your website. It signals to search engines that your website is full of rich, informative information for the person searching.

While keywords and context are vital components of the SEO process, they must be balanced with the fact that business does and always will come down to people, not search engines.

The purpose of social media marketing is to reach people where they are. The purpose of email marketing is to reach people in their inbox. The purpose of SEO is to reach people searching for answers.

Do you see where this is going?

All of your marketing should make connections with people that might have a need for what your company sells. The content you create and the marketing strategy you implement needs to be equally human to meet their needs. The technical side of marketing — HTML tags, mobile friendliness, Google algorithms and beyond — are only valuable insofar as they help you achieve the goal of having a human conversation with other humans.

Embracing the Heart of Marketing

Human marketing that meets the Internet’s technical standards for SEO is the ultimate goal. Prioritizing one of these things over the other by focusing only on communication or only on SEO will damage your message and your results.

At the end of the day, the purpose of your online presence is to connect with your customers on a personal level so that they trust that doing business with you is in their best interest. The right copy and the right graphics communicate that unique brand offering and help customers make that decision. If you ignore the human side of marketing communications, your message will fall flat when customers arrive at your website.

Is your marketing relatable? Are you connecting with people who might have a need for what you sell?

The post How (and Why) to Be Human With Your Marketing appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

But once your clients click through to learn more about your blog post, more than half of readers will make a decision to keep reading or click away within 15 seconds, and as few as 20 percent of readers will stick around for the full article. That means if you don’t know how to write a blog introduction that grabs their attention right away, even the most perfect headline will fail to deliver the engagement you’re looking for.

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Want to write a blog introduction that will inspire your clients to spend time on your website? Here are three things you need to do:

1. Understand Your Data

First, make it a priority to understand your website’s unique analytics. Look into your website visitors average time on page to get a sense of how much time your readers spend on your blog before navigating off page.

Google Analytics Time On Page/Engagement Example

Then consider your website’s users flow, which will show you where most visitors drop off of your website. Use this information and make decisions about which blog posts to edit, delete, or rewrite, or to reevaluate how you guide website visitors to different pages on your site.

Google Analytics Users Flow Example

2. Use the Introduction to Solve a Problem

You didn’t click through to read this post because you read everything we write. You clicked through because you are writing blog posts for your company and you want to learn how to write a blog introduction that your clients will read. If the introduction of this article didn’t clearly identify this need, it’s very likely you would have closed the browser or clicked over to another website.

When you’re writing for your clients, everything you write should begin and end with your customer personas. Refer to customer data when you brainstorm your keywords and blog topics. Write your headlines with your customer’s goals in mind. And make sure every blog introduction clearly identifies the problem they have and how the blog post will address it.

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3. Use the Introduction to Explain the Consequences

In addition to identifying a very clear problem, the best introductions also explain the consequences of not addressing that problem. In the case of how to write a blog introduction, this means pointing out the fact that readers drop off when they’re not engaged and if you don’t write a good introduction you’re wasting your time on the rest of the article.

As you pull together your blog post introduction, gently outline the risks associated with not reading the article or following your instructions. Be clear about the value that reading the post will bring your customer and they’ll be more likely to follow through.

If you’re writing or editing your own blog content, you need to know how to write compelling headlines and how to write a blog introduction that keeps readers hooked. Sign up for email alerts from our blog to stay in the know, or contact us today for an inbound marketing consultation.

The post How to Write a Blog Introduction That Hooks Your Reader appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

If you’re like me, you might find yourself too wrapped up in other things to regularly make improvements to your website.

Luckily, those changes don’t need to be terribly time consuming, and you don’t have to improve too much at once.

Regularly working to improve the number of website visitors that become leads is something you should make a couple hours a week for if you haven’t already.

Writing blogs and creating content can help a company get more website traffic, but getting more leads from this traffic as possible should also be a part of your plan.

Understanding the conversion rate optimization (CRO) cycle clarifies the process. Continual examination, implementation, testing and verification of changes you make to your website helps you get the most out of your inbound marketing efforts.

Here are the steps of the CRO process at a high level:

Step One: Examine

Develop insights based on business goals and market research.

You might be tempted to think that the initial step of conversion rate optimization focuses completely on discovering the desires of your customers. That’s really important. First, though, you should consider the steps your want a website visitor to take.

Knowing what you want to achieve in advance helps put context around what you’ll need to optimize.

For example, your company sales rep needs to sell $20,000 per month more. If you have a blog that’s attracting thousands of visitors per month, you have a potential of getting many more leads for the sales process if you optimize your blog.

This context gives you a way to focus your efforts.

After determining your goals, pursue knowledge pertaining to your customers. Refer back to your target customer personas. If your customer personas aren’t detailed enough, have your sales rep pick a few people from your database of contacts and reflect on their conversations. What are their greatest challenges?

You might even be able to glean information from your customer relationship management (CRM) software. What have you learned about your customers?

Step Two: Implement

Don’t hesitate to implement data-driven CRO strategy.

Using what you uncovered about your customers, try making some small changes to high impact pages on your website – those that are viewed the most.

Some changes you may consider:

• Break up long paragraphs of text with a Q&A style format
• Instead of long pages of text, try demonstrating it in a video
• Add a visual call to action button as a next step at the bottom of a page
• Add text links in web pages that lead to the next step or related information
• Edit a web page and use more customer-focused language

What works for another company may not work for yours, so be adventurous and test! What you find may go against perceived wisdom or “best practices.” Keep in mind that when it comes to reaching your customer in a compelling way, the data doesn’t lie.

Remember that the conversion rate optimization process never ends. Improve over time, often a little at a time. You don’t need to implement sweeping changes to improve your conversion rate. Making small changes and learning from them is your best bet.

Step Three: Test

Testing improves implementation while providing valuable data.

After you implement changes, you have an opportunity to test the success of your efforts. One method involves A/B testing, which compares two different versions of your marketing content to your customers. Variations might include website layout, content and even subtle alterations like the color of an individual button.

As you test these variations, you gather data on the effectiveness of different aspects of your marketing campaign. You might even learn something that you can add to your customer personas.

Without real, measurable data, conversion rate optimization is meaningless. Make sure you have a plan to measure your changes so you can figure out if the changes actually helped.

Step Four: Verify

Trust, but verify results – numbers may deceive at first glance.

After you make some optimizations, there’s a good chance you will find that some changes worked. Instead of trusting a small increase in one metric, verify that your efforts are specifically linked to an increased conversion rate.

I like to do this by continuing to run a test until there’s statistically significant data. Then you know it’s not a coincidence.

Your changes may increase sales for unintended reasons. You might see a spike in traffic from a trade show that generates a greater number of leads rather than success due to a jump in conversion rate.

Once you’ve gone through the process, form your next hypothesis and tackle your next high impact web page. The idea here is to be scientific, document your results, but make small changes so they can be made quickly. You’ll learn more about your website and customers, and you’ll generate more leads for your sales process.

The post The Four Steps of the Conversion Rate Optimization Process appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

This process is a good one. It represents marketing automation at its finest and allows your team to reach out to customers who have already shown interest.

But did you know that your lead generation form could be even more helpful to you? All you have to do is add one more thing: a conversation starter that allows your customer to give more information and provides more information to your sales team.

What Do We Mean By “Conversation Starters?”

Like a good networking opportunity, conversation starters are the part of your lead generation intake form that encourages the person submitting the form to share more details about their situation.

Your website and your lead generation forms are important parts of a marketing and lead generation strategy. In fact, 56 percent of marketers think optimizing lead generation form logic (including the process of adding a conversation starter) have a significant impact on website performance. Forty-six percent think the layout has a significant impact, too.

The goal of the conversation starter is to get more information about your customer’s needs, budget allocations, or buying process. It gives you the basic information you need to see whether or not your company’s solution would be a good fit. Not only will this help your sales team save time in deciding which customers to pursue, but it will give you context for that first call so that you can be as helpful as possible from the start.

How to Figure Out Which Conversation Starters To Use In Your Website Lead Generation Forms

The art of lead generation conversation starters is just as important as the art of conversation during a sales call. It’s important to pick a question or a comment that will encourage discussion with your customer rather than come off as interrogative. You also want to avoid asking questions that might appear to ask for too much information too soon, or adding so many questions that your customer is turned off from filling out the form.

When you’re brainstorming a conversation starter for your lead generation form, consider whether or not some of the following ideas will be appropriate for your audience:

• What is your biggest business challenge?
• Why are you looking for [product]?
• Do you sell to other businesses (B2B) or consumers (B2C)?
• What is your role within the company?
• What kind of project are you looking to complete?
• What do you think we should know about this project before reaching out to you?

You can also cater these questions to your client’s industry. Many of the lead forms on our website ask, “What’s your biggest marketing challenge?”  This helps give us some context about why someone might download something, and we can tailor our conversation to this need.

Specifically, a CPA firm might ask the question, “What’s your company’s biggest tax hurdle?” or “How would you rate your past experience with CPA firms?” A human resources consulting firm might ask, “What’s your company’s biggest challenge recruiting new talent?” or “Does your company have a college recruitment plan?”

Which questions are best for your customers? It will depend on who you are trying to reach. The best conversation starter will strike a balance between informative and low-pressure and allow the sales team to make the call with as much context as possible.

Do you have a conversation starter on your lead generation form? If you don’t, which question do you think you’ll add?

The post The Importance of Placing a Conversation Starter on Your Website Lead Generation Forms appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.

As an inbound marketing agency, we manage online content initiatives for several clients at a time, and we often field questions about how to produce quality content on so many different topics. The secret, of course, is a passion to get it “right,” careful organization, and talent. But there are also practical steps that any company could deploy to increase the quality of their online content output. These hold true if you’re doing it in-house or even using freelance writers.

Here are our best recommendations for working with writers and editors to improve the quality of your online content.

Start With a Manifesto

When we work with a client, the first thing we do is create a buyer persona and identify the most appropriate voice and messaging for the brand. This profile informs all of the other choices we make about the blog, including the style, voice, and tone of each article.

When you’re getting started with online content, use your buyer personas to map out a clear guide for the style of the posts you plan to write. Dig into the details of what your clients want and outline how your blog will meet those needs. You’ll be able to use this manifesto to inform every content project you take on and every writer you work with. You’ll write content as if you’re talking to that buyer persona.

Give Clear Instructions

One of the challenges of working with freelance writers is that there are many different approaches to writing. While some brands prefer a more journalistic style with less structure, others prefer more authoritative and educational style that is more factual and to the point. The odds of finding a writer who approaches a project exactly how you’d like them to is very low. That’s why the second most important thing to do when you develop online content is to carefully outline your expectations for each blog post.

Clearly define the purpose and vision of every blog article. What should be in each section? How should the writer approach the introduction, the tone, and the audience for the post? With each assignment, outline the key points that must be mentioned in the blog post as well as any style or formatting details you prefer such as the post structure, subheadings, quotes, and lists.

Simplify

When it comes to the quality of the writing, creating content for the Internet is all about simplicity. When sentences are short and the subheaders and formatting are clear, it’s easier for your customer to understand what you are trying to say.

While writing, make sure that your sentences are concise. Avoid using compound sentences or sentences joined by semicolons. Paragraphs should be no longer than three sentences, and each sentence should have a transitional element so that the piece flows as a whole.

In fact, the shorter and more concise the sentence, the better. All writing for the Internet should aim for a 7th- or 8th-grade reading level, even for highly specialized niches. You should show authority through the information you present and the words you use, not through the complexity of the writing.

Take a Break and Use Tools

When you write a post in one sitting, you can accidentally write in an informal stream-of-consciousness style. While this works for some brands, it’s not typically a good thing. Instead, write your content and then allow time for it to sit for a day or two before you give it a final edit.

When you’ve edited your blog article, run it through a free online editing tool like Grammarly or HemingwayApp. These tools will allow you to catch grammatical and structural errors that applications like Microsoft Word and Google Docs often miss.

If you’re going to create online content for your customers, make it great. Use these tips to improve the quality of your blog posts, white papers, and website content, which will in turn improve the quality of your inbound marketing strategy.

The post How to Improve the Writing Quality of Your Online Content appeared first on Whittington Consulting's Online Results Blog.