On May 11^th, 17 sales and marketing representatives from 7 Charlotte-based companies spent the day getting an in-depth, hands-on introduction to the modern buying process and sales enablement tools. We hosted HubSpot consultant, Tim Dearlove, for the classroom training event at BGW CPA.

Over the course of the day, Tim led us through the modern sales process, HubSpot Sales Free + Professional and the HubSpot CRM.

It was powerful to spend an entire day thinking about sales enablement and automation. We’ve been using the HubSpot CRM for over 2 years and came away from the training with new ideas and immediate actions to take to improve our sales efforts.

Modern Sales & Marketing

Marketing and Sales are noted for the stormy relationship that can exist between these functions. When poorly aligned, businesses suffer from scarce resources, lower prices, slower sales cycles, and decreased customer acquisition which shows up as lower revenue. When they are working together, the marketing team is able to provide highly qualified buyers for sales to nurture into profitable customers.

HubSpot Sales & Marketing Platform

For almost 10 years, HubSpot has offered a methodology and software to help digital marketers be more effective. In 2014, the company released its CRM and Sidekick companion to support sales teams. More recently, these have evolved into the HubSpot Sales Platform which includes HubSpot CRM and HubSpot Sales (Free or Professional). Whether you start with the free sales tools or the marketing tools, the combination creates a highly unified platform for growing your business.

Next Steps

Based on the feedback from the participants at this event and the May 4th Google Partner Connect event, we expect to hold more training events in the future. Let us know if you’d like to participate in one of our upcoming events!

1. Loading Time Speed and Reducing Clutter

Too many visuals can weigh down your page and distract your audience. Visuals should be used to enhance your message in a clean and constructive way. HubSpot A/B testing has shown that an excess of “over-the-top” visuals can hurt both your conversion rates, draw attention away from your message and increase the loading time of a website. The Aberdeen Group reports some significant statistics. How does a one-second delay impact your audience? Statistics show a(n):

• 11% decrease in page views;
• 7% loss in audience conversions; and
• 16% reduction in customer satisfaction.

Those striking visuals can reduce the chances of producing satisfied customers. Check your website’s loading speed today.

2. Better Navigation with Page Layout

Page layout is at the top of elements that impact overall website performance. The page elements chosen can make it easy or hard for visitors to navigate landing pages. Consider the elements that will be located on the top of the fold or present in a page view without the need to scroll down. Internal links and ensuring that all links direct viewers correctly to the expected choice help make the customer journey a seamless process. Continuous improvement is the motto of the day when it comes to modern web design for your industry and audience. Seek to identify elements to improve and perform A/B testing to see changes in customer behavior.

3. Easy to Scan Pages

You need to make your content easy for your audience to see and engage with as part of modern web design. Your website needs to responsively designed, or as Google would put, it mobile-friendly. This makes your content formatted to fit and read well across all devices. Check if your site has what it takes here.

In addition, long-paragraphs are a no-no. Rather, break down content into shorter blocks and add headers, sub-headers, scannable bullets and bolded or otherwise highlighted text to lay out content for easy consumption.

4. Social Proof

Viewers know when they are being sold too. To cut down on the marketing but drive home the value proposition or other desired element, social proof comes into play. Social proof is typically in the form testimonials, videos or even numbers of people that have engaged with or purchased from your company and are happy with their purchase or form of engagement. This type of authentic social persuasion helps convert new prospects faster. Other forms that may appeal to B2B organizations are collections of case studies and data derived from your analytics on how many people have downloaded or opted-in to a special offer.

5. Alignment of Page Content and CTAs

Your CTAs need to draw eyes and be clear to your audience. However, the content that comes prior to your CTAs needs to build awareness, hone in on customer pain points and show how your solution can address their issue. Opt-in buttons and CTAs should not be haphazardly scattered across your website but strategically placed to help your audience learn more or take the next step in the customer journey. HubSpot shows how to create a CTA for your targeted content.

Reach New Heights with Modern Web Design

There is much to do to update and maintain an existing website or create one from scratch. Let the experienced modern web design experts at Knowmad Digital Marketing guide you in attracting and converting your audience. Contact Knowmad with your questions or to schedule a consultation with an experienced associate today.

Content marketing is becoming more and more relevant as it is the easiest way to publish content that your audience will want to read. But how do you know its working and are their certain KPI’s that you need to identify for measuring content marketing success?

Read on to find 10 metrics that you should be keeping your eye on when you are looking to measure your content marketing’s success.

Views

A part of the deciding factor is the number of views you receive. Nowadays, it’s easy to determine this no matter which platform you use to market because the site or app lets you know how many visitors your blog, video or other copy received. Google Analytics or YouTube Insights act as a counter to help you measure and compare. Once you have this useful information, you can know decide your next course of action.

Lead Generation

One true way to get a sense of how much success you’re earning is to figure out the number of leads generated from your content marketing. This is why it is handy to use a service like, HubSpot, which will keep track of these leads and will even help you segment them in order to map out which types of leads get which content pieces later down the line.

Users

Sometimes, finding out the number of users is a more accurate measurement than looking at the number of page views. When people revisit a page by accident, or other factors that alter the number of page views, you’re not getting an accurate look at how successful particular pieces of content are or the marketing in general.

Average Time on Page

Looking at the average time users spend on the page helps you to know if people are actually looking at the content you’re displaying. You might have a ton of views, but people might not be spending a ton of time on your site because you aren’t producing content that’s engaging to them. If they aren’t reading the content, you wouldn’t consider it successful, would you?

Visitors Viewing Multiple Pages

When a visitor is on your website, they might find one or two of your articles interesting, sometimes more. What this can tell you though, is that your visitors are either looking at additional content on your site or they aren’t. If they are only viewing one page, that means you’re losing the chance to have prospective clients click through multiple pages. If they’re stopping, that means your content isn’t being viewed and you may have missed opportunities to sell your products or services. Not to mention, if you’re using your website views to leverage hosting ads on your website, you’d be missing out there as well.

New and Returning User Count

Its always good to measure how much of your traffic is someone new or if they have already visited and are returning. If all of your traffic is returning visitors, how are you supposed to get new business? This is an area that Knowmad specializes in.

Shares

If people are sharing your content, you know it’s working. This means people like your content so much that they want their friends/families/co-workers to not only know it, but they want them to have the opportunity to read it and become a customer as well. These people are the ones who are your true supporters, and their shares have the ability to draw in many new customers for you. Tracking these shares will allow you to measure how successful the circulation of your content piece was.

Content Length Shares

The views for different content lengths can help you determine if the short posts are working or if your longer posts do better. You may find that your lengthier content pieces just aren’t working for your customers, or you may find that short posts are doing better, and it’s what you need to craft more of.

Number of Comments

If your page allows comments, it’s good to see people are talking about what you posted. It shows that people are interested in your content, and it’s meaningful enough that it warrants them spending some extra time on your page to let you know or to at least discuss the piece.

Brand Lift

Your brand lift has the ability to determine if your brand name is actually being recognized. It informs you if your content marketing is benefiting your brand. Never heard of Brand Lift? Check it out here.

Do you use any other metrics to measure your content marketing success? If so, leave us a comment. We’d love to hear what you think! Click the link for more information about how you can use your content marketing for lead generation!

Inbound is about “Sales”, but…is your sales team ready?

The Inbound methodology has taken the world by storm. Companies across the globe are
embracing Inbound because they realize the ground has shifted. To be successful in sales today, you’ve got to be a go-giver – not just a go-getter – and it’s all about timing. You’ve got to be there when the need is top-of-mind (relevancy) and quickly create credibility.

Inbound, and HubSpot, are designed to be a sales person’s “best friend”. For the sales role, Inbound provides valuable sales content and sales intelligence. Using Inbound, Sales can talk to more prospects when the timing is right and provide value to create the credibility needed to get through the door.

This isn’t news to Sales; they’ve heard about Inbound and realize that Inbound Sales & Marketing holds promise. Yet, a lot of sales departments are still struggling to better understand and use Inbound to realize the promise – meanwhile, creating sales results and making their life easier.

That’s why we designed this workshop specifically for Sales teams looking to understand, implement, and embrace Inbound.

In this workshop, your team will:

• Learn how buying processes have changed and what it means for sales.
• See the power of great content as a sales tool.
• Understand the impact Inbound can have on leads, closing rates, and sales numbers.
• Use HubSpot to better understand, qualify, and assist prospects throughout the entire sales cycle.
• Save time researching and prospecting.
• Learn how to use HubSpot’s CRM.

Ready to take your sales team to the next level? Join us for this valuable all-day Inbound Sales workshop in the historic South End in Charlotte, NC. Here are the details.

When: Wednesday May, 11th 2016. 8:30am – 4:30pm. Breakfast and lunch provided.

Where:  BGW CPA, PLLC – 1616 Camden Road, Charlotte, NC 28203

Cost: $600 until April 30th, $750 there-after

Register by April 30th and save $150 

Suburban Chicago senior living community turns to Knowmad to strengthen their digital marketing efforts

Let’s re-do the website.

That is often one of the first reactions businesses have when inbound leads slack off. However, it is also often missing the first and most important step. Though a strong web site is essential to inbound marketing, it requires a lot more than restructuring pages and updating branding to attract internet-generated leads. In fact, a redesign is a waste of money if there is no marketing mechanism in place to funnel prospects to content that informs, engages and leads to one-to-one contact.

Sherry Kizer, senior vice president of Senior Living Services for Lexington Square, knew something big was missing from the Chicago area senior living community‘s inbound marketing program. She knew prospective residents and their families conducted a lot of online research before requesting direct contact from a sales representative. She also knew the sales cycle often had begun well in advance of that contact. However, fewer prospects were contacting Lexington Square, and Sherry did not know why.

Lexington Square’s inbound marketing efforts generated an average of six leads each month. That wasn’t cutting it, because maintaining high occupancy rates for senior living communities is an ongoing challenge, and Lexington Square was losing sales to its competitors. Sherry reached out to Knowmad.

Utilizing Hubspot

Our digital marketing team spent a month learning the ins and outs of Lexington Square’s business model and current marketing efforts. We quickly determined the next step was not to redesign the Lexington Square website, which had recently gone through a makeover as it was. Lexington Square’s budget would not allow both another redesign and revamping their internet marketing program.

We began to strengthen the content on the current site, which we believed would deliver a more immediate payoff. We set up buying personas within Hubspot, such as adult children of aging parents, and built funnels to appropriate content for each prospect group. To increase the site’s conversion rate, we created more helpful content geared to each audience, such as parent care and assisted living guides. Through Hubspot, Sherry could see immediately what worked and what did not.

Quick Results

The new marketing program started in early 2014. Through a mix of social media, organic and pay-per-click marketing, Lexington Square quickly began to see positive results.

In the first six months:

Search traffic increased nearly 200%

Leads increased more than 300%

Client Growth

Now, more than 50 inbounds leads come in each month, compared to an average of six leads before the new marketing program started. We saw sales-ready leads jump up 23%, too. But the real proof is in sales. Within the year, Lexington Square experienced $1.25 million in new revenue via search traffic.

Not only did all the important numbers improve, but Sherry acquired insight she desired before. “I gained the transparency into our online marketing efforts that I needed to see where our dollars are best spent. By focusing our efforts, we have attracted more traffic to the website, ultimately resulting in leads and sales that we could tie back to specific marketing actions.”

And now it is time for the next step. Now that we have built up Lexington Square’s marketing performance, Lexington Square has a strong budget in place. Now, they can turn to rebranding. And, yes, that means it is time to redesign the web site.

With today’s online tools and tactics, small businesses don’t need to give up on online marketing even when short on time or funds. Here are several effective online branding strategies tips to maximize your online results as efficiently as possible!

1. Define Your Goals and Audience

Every good strategy needs this step, but you may be surprised how many small businesses skip it. Online marketing requires a firm direction – not only for good ROI analysis, but to help make all the other little decisions along the way. So create your goals. Do you want to get more leads, improve sales, draw more traffic to your site, increase brand awareness, overtake a competitor, or increase your customer base? Deal with real numbers and percentages when answering these questions. You should also spend at least a little time analyzing your target online audience. Is it different from your offline audience? Who are you trying to reach and why? These questions are the foundation of your online marketing efforts.

2. Find the Right Tools

Sometimes the problem with poor online marketing is not the goals or the content, but the tools that you use. Since there are literally hundreds of options available here, it’s difficult to give many specific suggestions before getting lost. However, we advise you start with Google’s suite of analysis tools, particularly the features of Google Analytics, then build on that with addition plugins and services that you need to reach your goals and study the right data. Scheduling tools for social media and keyword analysis/generation tools are also useful, even for small businesses.

3. Create Customer Personas

If your content is feeling unfocused and just isn’t getting the results that you need, we suggest spending some time with customer personas. These personas are culled from your target audience and current customer data, allowing you to create complete profiles of the types of people/leads you want to target and their behaviors. Personas help you answer questions like, “Where does this person go for information?” and “What sort of content would make this person take the step?” Personas are invaluable for developing new, targeted content and focusing your brand.

4. Develop a Content Strategy

If you have been winging it when it comes to content, it’s time to start taking those blogs, posts and landing pages much more seriously. Google looks at content and factors it into page rankings. Customers look at content and make decisions about sharing or conversions. Either way, it needs to be a priority. A few basics of a content strategy include:

• Always include a call to action
• Use templates and guidelines to create a uniform tone
• Use many different kinds of content
• Keep content focused on your industry
• Establish your site as an expert through content

5. Review Design and Performance

If you have been working hard on content but still see a lot of worrying signs, such as high bounce rates and low conversions later on in the sales funnel, then it’s time to look at your design and web performance. When it come to design, make sure your site is easy to understand and quickly navigate – and has strong mobile optimization for those many smartphone users. On the performance side, make sure your site is speedy enough to satisfy today’s impatient customers, and has no broken links or problems with formatting.

6. Use Ongoing Communication

You can’t just leave a marketing campaign alone after producing content. One of the most effective online branding strategies, especially locally, is to foster ongoing communication with viewers and commenters. Include easy options to share and comment for all of your content. Schedule in regular time to review comments or questions and answer them directly. Create new content that specifically addresses customer concerns or confusion. Creating customer conversations is not only great for engagement, but also gives you plenty of data to study regarding social mentions and responses.

7. Study Your Conversions

If all else fails, you may not be paying attention to what you are doing wrong. It is very important for you to study conversion data for social sites, ads, organic searches and every other source of leads – and then follow that by studying conversions through your site. This helps you narrow down just where in the sales funnel you are having trouble.

Have you tried any other successful online branding strategies that you did not find in this article? Leave a comment! We’d love to hear your success stories!

Design for the web is an ever changing practice that has come a long way since the first website was constructed in 1991. Emerging with text-based and table-based design in the 1990’s, the look of the World Wide Web in 2016 has evolved into a sleek, modern look on presenting information. We are going to explore a few emerging website design trends to expect in 2016.

Trendy Topic #1 ~ Typography

In the early 1990’s, when the web was foreign, uncharted territory, websites were entirely text-based, with images and styles nonexistent. Today, text in design has made a comeback, but in a revolutionary way. In 2016, typography and text are taking on a  more central role and main focus in web design. Some trendy developments in text-based web design to expect in 2016 are:

• Custom typeface to be used as a tone-setter for a brand or site
• Typography used with/as imagery
• Big, bold typefaces
• Colossal font-size to proclaim a message
• Typography used as main focus over imagery

Taste Rewind

QED Group

Neopolitan Clothing

Trendy Topic #2 ~ Hamburger Menu

Our next trendy topic to recognize is the hamburger menu. It’s a pretty cool twist on the ordinary, everyday site navigation that normally spans the top of a web page. The hamburger menu started during the “mobilegeddon” phase when the amount of mobile usage took over the amount of desktop usage. On mobile, the hamburger menu made it possible to collapse the navigation menu for better user experience. This approach has now found its way onto desktop websites.

On desktop, this menu makes it possible to hide the navigation away until a visitor wants to expand it to dive deeper into a site. The hamburger menu gives sites a modern, minimal feel without the clutter of the traditional navigation bar that spans across the top of a webpage.

National Geographic Channel

Ball & Claw

Trendy Topic #3 ~ Long Scroll

Another way web design has evolved is how homepages are designed in general. In the early 1990’s users normally wouldn’t scroll past the fold to see what is further down the page (above the fold is the first portion of the homepage that is visible when you land on a site before you start scrolling). In 2016, new studies prove that site visitors now DO scroll down webpages. This shift of user behavior on desktop has mirrored the behavior on mobile, scrolling down a single page.

The long scroll trend that has taken the web by storm makes readability of information on pages much more clear and easy to read. Web design from the early 1990’s to the early 2000’s focused on a hierarchy of data. Information that was most pertinent would normally be placed above the fold, which made readability and user experience a nightmare.

In modern web design, the homepage of a site tells a story, and the way you tell that story makes a visitor want to keep scrolling. Other trends within this long-scroll trend, such as parallax scrolling and scroll animation make it even more enticing to scroll down a page to see what’s next.

Square Space

Enginstill

Trendy Topic #4 ~ Animations

Animations are another cool, trendy element that has more and more become a staple in web design. These interactive, animated elements keeps site visitors interested and engaged. Animations help brands tell their story on a homepage or webpage, which more likely will cause visitors to keep scrolling and as a result, dig deeper into a sites content. Even the smallest animation can add another dimension to the structure of a webpage.

A few popular types of animations are:

Scroll-triggered animation – animation will begin when a visitor scrolls to a certain point on a webpage. i.e: http://www.fillet.com.br/

Hover animations – animations that activate upon the mouse hovering over an element. i.e: http://www.alectia.com/en/

Video animation – animated video playing as the background. i.e: http://www.aquatilis.tv/

Fillet

Alectia

Aquatilis

A Future Full of Possibilities

It’s safe to say that web design is a craft that is ever changing. The evolution from the first websites in the early 1990’s to 2016 is dramatic to say the least. It exciting to imagine how the future of web design will unfold. Remember, just because these trends are ”trendy” now doesn’t necessarily mean they will work for every demographic or website redesign. Pick the trends that work best for your specific job and audience.

There’s always talk around SEO and what the best or worst tactics are. “X is dead,” “Y is the best ever!”, “If you do this, you’re done for!” The trick is knowing how to navigate through the ever-changing terrain of the Internet.

This list will provide you with all the bad practices that you SHOULD NOT follow and if you ever hear anybody say one of these things in an attempt to implement them, be weary.

Only Need To Do SEO Once

Remember that one time you cleaned your house and it somehow got dirty again after a few days went by? Funny how that works, huh?

SEO is the same way. You can’t just do it once and be done. SEO takes continuous care and work to reach the results you desire. There is always work to be done.

This a perfect segway into the next SEO myth:

Being At The Top Lasts Forever

You are now ranking #1 for your desired keyword. Do you stop? Do you let others continue to close in on your #1 rank? The answer is NO (remember our house cleaning example?). You keep going! Business is a dog-eat-dog world and if your not protecting your territory someone will definitely be looking to infringe upon your real estate at the top of the SERP.

Again, SEO is an on-going process. Don’t get complacent!

Content Is Content, Let’s Get It Pushed Out!

While you do want to produce a steady flow of content so that the search engines recognize your contribution to the interwebs, it is important that you are not just pushing out content for the sake of pushing out content. The content your business publishes is a reflection of your business. Do you want to be seen as a thought-leader or as, “that guy that just posts stuff?”

You will be rewarded for publishing truly great articles because people will really gravitate to good content. If you are just another stick in the mud how are people supposed to see your business’ true value?

Keyword Stuffing

DO NOT KEYWORD STUFF.

This practice was long ago abandoned. Nowadays the search engines are a lot smarter and 1) recognize when you do this but also 2) they penalize you for doing it!

Search engines now look for relevancy so it is actually in your favor to mention other keywords that are also relevant to your content. I would shy away from using a certain keyword more than 3 times in the exact same way.

All Keywords Should Be Exact Matches

This goes along with the keyword stuffing. Your keywords do not have to be repeated verbatim in your headlines or content. It is more beneficial to use natural language. The search engines are smart enough to pick up on what you are trying to throw down.

Think of it this way: If you use your keyword in the exact same way every time that would be considered keyword stuffing.

Images, Shmimages

Thanks to Cable World, we know that putting “shm-” in front of a word makes it seem less important.

This is not the case for optimizing images! Search engines cannot read images, so it is important to optimize the parts that they can read. This includes the alt text and a relevant file name (MyKeyword.jpg vs. 18574.jpg). See the difference?

It might seem like a hassle but take the time to optimize your images. It’s worth it! According to Yoast, “an image that is surrounded by related text, ranks better for the keywords it is optimized for.”

More Inbound Links = Higher SERP Ranking

Wrong. More inbound links does not equal a higher SERP ranking. If you have 50 sites like www.spammycontent.org, that contain a lot of spammy content, pointing to your site do you think that would help or hurt your SERP position?

Hint: It’ll hurt it.

However, having more inbound links pointing to your site that are actually useful and relevant to your industry will help raise your SERP position. So make sure the backlinks you are getting are worth it!

Optimizing For Mobile Can Wait

We all know the stats: 80% of internet users own a smartphone, when users engage with digital media, 51% of the time it is through mobile technology, etc.

All those stats can be boiled down to one sentence: If your site isn’t optimized for mobile you are doing something wrong.

White Hat Only!

Sometimes you have to break from the mold. Be different. Try something new. I’m not condoning black hat SEO tactics, but there is a middle ground.

By only using white hat SEO tactics you miss out on huge grey hat opportunities that could lead to a lot of traffic with very low risk of penalization from Google and other search engines.

Fortune favors the bold.

Social Media doesn’t affect SEO

Two words: Content Distribution.

While its true Google doesn’t use metrics such as shares or retweets in their algorithms, this doesn’t mean social media cannot help your SEO efforts.

Think about the action of sharing or retweeting. It’s someone in your audience saying, “Wow, this is really neat. I want others to see this too.”

Sounds like free advertising to me. And not only is it free, it can be great for brand awareness too.

Good UX Isn’t Required

Have you ever heard a successful businessperson say, “We like to frustrate our customers. They love it!”

The answer is probably “No, never” and if it isn’t, whoever said that found themself one hell-of-a niche market. Most customers like a pain-free user experience.

User experience is key to all online businesses. If a page doesn’t load fast enough, users will leave. If a page doesn’t work the way it’s intended to work (e.g. broken links) users will leave. If the navigation is too difficult to use—you guessed it—users will leave.

Remember your website is supposed to cater to your visitors. If it fails to do so, you might want to rethink your website strategy/design.

Local SEO Isn’t As Important

As the Internet becomes evermore prevalent, the importance of local SEO grows with it.

In July 2014, Google released the Pigeon algorithm specifically to enhance local search. The aim of this algorithm was to provide a more useful and relevant experience for searchers seeking local results.

If you need more proof than Google releasing an algorithm aimed specifically at local search then type in “pizza” into your search engine right now, chances are a map with the nearest pizza place to you shows up.

All Google, All The Time

I’ve alluded to this throughout the blog post, but it’s been subtle so you might not have noticed it.

GOOGLE IS NOT THE ONLY SEARCH ENGINE!!

While Google is the 800-pound gorilla in the room, it would be wise to direct some of your efforts to the likes of Bing and Yahoo.

Conclusion

Once again, be weary if you hear someone trying to implement one of these SEO myths. Not only would they be not helping your SEO efforts, there is also a good chance they will actually hurt the work you’ve done so far!

Feel free to take a look at Knowmad’s SEO process and how clients have benefited from our work.

Last Fall, Larry Kim explored “3 Times When Inbound Marketing  Really Sucks” in the Marketing column at Inc.com. As an Inbound Marketer, you may think that I would disagree with his premise. I actually agree with most of the points he makes. And, I even have a few to add.

When Inbound Marketing Works

First, let’s take a look at times when Inbound Marketing is right for a business. The following list includes some of the reasons why you may be considering an Inbound Marketing strategy:

1. You need to grow revenues and/or retain customers.
2. You want more sales leads.
3. Your competition is ahead of you in search results.
4. Your sales team is not using digital sales enablement tools to win business.
5. You see opportunities to automate parts of your sales process.
6. You want to establish yourself as an industry expert.
7. You want to expand your market.

Leave a comment if you think I’ve missed any.

Challenging Assumptions

One common assumption I hear from clients is their customers or prospects don’t look for them online. Larry falls into this assumption in his article. Inbound Marketing is not just a lead generation tool. The Inbound Marketing Methodology describes a strategy, which focuses on the entire lifecycle of a customer, from a stranger to a promoter.

While the CMO may never become a lead, he or she works on a team. As you can read in my conversion story, Inbound Marketing can support all stages of the sales process, not just lead generation.

When Inbound Marketing Really Sucks

Nonetheless, there are times when Inbound Marketing is not the right solution. In addition to the reasons Larry listed in his article, here are my top 3 times when Inbound Marketing sucks:

1. Lack of Internal Champion – Inbound Marketing requires a company to change how business is done. Without an internal champion, an Inbound Marketing program will, at best, not achieve its full potential. In most cases, it will be considered a failure and abandoned.
2. Lack of Sales & Marketing Alignment – Inbound Marketing works best when sales & marketing teams are closely aligned (“3 Steps to Aligning Sales & Marketing”). Inbound can’t happen in a vacuum; it requires a company to already have a sales and marketing program in place.
3. Lack of Budget – While elements of Inbound marketing can be done inexpensively, putting together an Inbound Marketing program is similar to putting on a 12-month event. You need a good plan and a team dedicated to making an impact. If you don’t believe spending money on advertising is necessary to grow or don’t have a healthy budget, Inbound is a bad choice.

Will an Inbound Marketing Strategy Work for You?

That’s a great question to be asking yourself. It’s also why we take the time in our sales process to fully understand your business before we commit to become your partner in building an Inbound Marketing program. If you’d like to explore this question further, contact us for a no-obligation Inbound Marketing Assessment. And while you’re at it, download our ebook, Going Inbound With Knowmad. 

Email marketing is a core practice integral for any business. Once a lead or a customer opts in, email is a communication opportunity rife with potential that can create a new relationship or enhance an old one. When integrated with social media and blogging platforms, email becomes an invaluable tool in your marketing toolbox.

Why, then, do most companies struggle to receive average clickthrough rates north of three percent? It’s always easiest to point a finger first at content, but it’s really not that simple. When plotting your email marketing campaigns, your modus operandi should start—like most marketing efforts—by knowing your audience.

Know your personas

When aiming to create a marketing strategy, persona development should be the first bulls-eye you aim for.  It’s unreasonable to consider talking about “how” to market before you know “who” to market to. Taking the care and time to develop personalities for your ideal customers is an effort that will reward your marketing efforts tenfold. Personas should be as detailed as possible, going far beyond just a name and demographics; create goals, quotes, and common objections, too. The more detail, the better.

How does this relate to email marketing? It goes right back to “who” over “how.” If you’re sending out emails, it can’t just be a blanket effort. Different messaging impacts each persona differently.

The case for segmentation

Since each persona is motivated by different marketing messages, you simply must segment them into groups for your email marketing campaigns. In simpler terms, think of this concept in terms of your own customer service experiences. What has more impact, a form letter, or a personal note? That’s the way you have to think of email marketing. The more personalized the content, the more likely the clickthrough.

When communicating directly with customers and leads through email, success relies on speaking the language of your customers. If you are not speaking their, they are simply not going to understand your message. If they don’t understand it, they’re going to delete your email without ever opening it, and there’s little hope for them clicking through to your website. For email marketing, segmenting really means customizing the perfect message for a particular persona.

Content is king—but only in the correct context

Of course, content matters. While speaking the right language gets you in the door, engaging content is what gets you invited to dinner. Once again, personas should play a pivotal role in determining what kind of content lands in our audience’s inbox. That’s why the context of your content matters just as much.

As an example, manufacturers might send an email to a product end user that includes a promotional sample offer, or an exclusive shopper guide. On the other hand, if an email is being sent to R&D departments, something more technical would be in order, such as a process video or a white paper. Potential distributors might be invited to upcoming trade shows.

Obviously, these are three wildly different approaches. While there are always anomalies, it’s easy to see that if a blanket approach was utilized across all three manufacturing personas, you’d lose two-thirds of your intended audience immediately.

The beauty of email marketing campaigns is that they can be used across the spectrum of the lead generation process, for attracting, converting, and closing leads, and then for delighting those leads that have become loyal customers. With “closing the sale” as the ultimate marketing goal, identifying your perfect customer has to be the starting point, and then creating a tailor-made message for them has to be the approach. Like most marketing efforts, it often boils down to a numbers game: more clickthroughs can ultimately lead to closing more sales.

Marketing would be easy if you only had to target one bulls-eye. Unfortunately, we often have multiple bulls-eyes to hit. By establishing strong personas and segmenting your email messaging to speak their language, your quiver will have the arrows needed to hit those multiple targets.

Do you feel like you have a strategy in place to segment your email marketing efforts?